Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life

Charles C. Calhoun

ISBN 10: 0807070262 / ISBN 13: 9780807070260

Published by Beacon Press, 2004

Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0807070262I3N00

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 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.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication Date: 2004
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket