Chapter 11 - Longfellow in His Time

Summary

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most influential American poet of the nineteenth century. More than a century after Longfellow's death and Whitman's idiosyncratic evaluation, Angus Fletcher compared the two and lamented that as a poet, competing for attention in the modern age of anxiety and irony, Longfellow has fallen from his great height. Longfellow remains one of the very few American poets to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey. A Psalm of Life was included in Longfellow's first book of poetry in 1839, and its generic success accounts for the generic title of his second book of poetry Ballads and Other Poems. The classical literacy that Longfellow's poetry made available at a discount became the subject of his two best-selling narrative poems, Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha. Longfellow's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy was the product of his collaboration with other members of the famous Dante Club.