Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life - Hardcover

Calhoun, Charles C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807070262 ISBN 13: 9780807070260

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2004

Synopsis

Charles C. Calhoun's Longfellow gives life, at last, to the most popular American poet who ever lived, a nineteenth-century cultural institution of extraordinary influence and the"one poet average, nonbookish Americans still know by heart" (Dana Gioia).

Calhoun's Longfellow emerges as one of America's first powerful cultural makers: a poet and teacher who helped define Victorian culture; a major conduit for European culture coming into America; a catalyst for the Colonial Revival movement in architecture and interior design; and a critic of both Puritanism and the American obsession with material success. Longfellow is also a portrait of a man in advance of his time in championing multiculturalism: He popularized Native American folklore; revived the Evangeline story (the foundational myth of modern Acadian and Cajun identity in the U.S. and Canada); wrote powerful poems against slavery; and introduced Americans to the languages and literatures of other lands.

Calhoun's portrait of post-Revolutionary Portland, Maine, where Longfellow was born, and of his time at Bowdoin and Harvard Colleges, show a deep and imaginative grasp of New England cultural history. Longfellow's tragic romantic life-his first wife dies tragically early, after a miscarriage, and his second wife, Fannie Appleton, dies after accidentally setting herself on fire-is illuminated, and his intense friendship with abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner is given as a striking example of mid-nineteenth-century romantic friendship between men. Finally, Calhoun paints in vivid detail Longfellow's family life at Craigie House, including stories of the poet's friends-Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickens, Fanny Kemble, Julia Ward Howe, and Oscar Wilde among them.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Louisiana, Charles C. Calhoun studied history at the University of Virginia and law at Christ Church, Oxford. He divides his time between Boston and Portland, where he is on the staff of the Maine Humanities Council.

Reviews

In his lifetime, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) was the most popular English-language poet. Well into the twentieth century, his lyrics were popular recitation pieces, and his long narratives The Courtship of Miles Standish and Evangeline remained junior-high staples beyond mid-century. But now he needs the recent revival of interest of which Calhoun's wonderfully readable, sympathetic biography is one expression. As Calhoun grants, rehabilitating Longfellow's former literary reputation is almost certainly a lost cause. Yet much else about him merits greater attention. Having repaired to Europe in 1826 to prepare to teach modern languages at fitfully innovative Bowdoin College, his alma mater, Longfellow pioneered comparative literary studies there and later at Harvard. He favored female protagonists of great intelligence and strength of character in his narrative poems, and his biggest success, The Song of Hiawatha, was a milestone in developing interest in Native American culture. Unitarian, antislavery, genuinely interested in and friendly toward other cultures, he lacked bad habits and was a good family man--in short, the very best kind of Victorian liberal. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807070262
• ISBN 13: 9780807070260
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352