biography
| name: |
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1807–82)
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| biography:
| Poet, born in Portland, Maine, USA. After graduation from Bowdoin College (1825), he studied languages in Europe (1826–9) and became professor and librarian at Bowdoin (1829–35). After further study in Europe, he was appointed Smith Professor of French and Spanish at Harvard (1836–54). A collection of poetry, Voices in the Night (1839), contained the poems ‘A Psalm Life’, ‘Hymn to the Night’, and ‘The Light of the Stars’, which soon became widely known. Ballads and Other Poems (1841), including such immensely popular works as ‘The Village Blacksmith’, ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’, and ‘Excelsior’, and his longer narrative poems, Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), further served to make him the best-known American poet of the century. His Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) opens with ‘Paul Revere's Ride’, which has ever since been a national favourite. The widespread knowledge of these works and their inclusion in school curricula throughout the country did much to establish the popular notion of poetry in the USA well into the 20th-c. For spiritual solace after the accidental death of his second wife (1861), he translated The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1865–7) and produced a series of six sonnets, ‘Divina Commedia’, which are among his finest poems. Although his work later came to be regarded as saccharine and didactic, there is no denying that he long played one of the traditional roles of a poet. |
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