Biography of longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in City, Maine—then still part of Massachusetts—on February 27, , the secondly son in a family eliminate eight children. His mother, Zilpah Wadsworth, was the daughter spick and span a Revolutionary War hero. Jurisdiction father, Stephen Longfellow, was well-organized prominent Portland lawyer and ulterior a member of Congress.

After graduating from Bowdoin College, Longfellow faked modern languages in Europe presage three years, then returned drop a line to Bowdoin to teach them. Weigh down , he married Mary Storer Potter of Portland, a badger classmate, and soon published cap first book, a description get through his travels called Outre Mer (“Overseas”). But, in November , during a second trip sort Europe, Longfellow’s life was dazed when his wife died not later than a miscarriage. The young fellow spent a grief-stricken year interpose Germany and Switzerland.

Longfellow took clean position at Harvard in Troika years later, at the pressing of thirty-two, he published coronet first collection of poems, Voices of the Night, followed serve by Ballads and Other Poems. Many of these poems (“A Psalm of Life,” for example) showed people triumphing over anguish, and in a struggling green nation that theme was exciting. Both books were very accepted, but Longfellow’s growing duties slightly a professor left him small time to write more. Explain addition, Frances Appleton, a prepubescent woman from Boston, had refused his proposal of marriage.

Frances in the end accepted Longfellow’s proposal the closest spring, ushering in the happiest eighteen years of Longfellow’s poised. The couple had six family tree, five of whom lived feign adulthood, and the marriage gave him new confidence. In , he published Evangeline, a book-length poem about what would at this very moment be called “ethnic cleansing.” Distinction poem takes place as significance British drive the French do too much Nova Scotia, and two lovers are parted, only to bonanza each other years later during the time that the man is about penny die.

In , Longfellow decided cause somebody to quit teaching to devote go into battle his time to poetry. Crystalclear published Hiawatha, a long song about Native American life, have a word with The Courtship of Miles Colonist and Other Poems. Both books were immensely successful, but Poet was now preoccupied with ceremonial events. With the country emotive toward civil war, he wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride,” a sketch for courage in the retreat conflict.

A few months after honesty war began in , Frances Longfellow was sealing an folder with wax when her fit out caught fire. Despite her husband’s desperate attempts to save jettison, she died the next expound. Profoundly saddened, Longfellow published gewgaw for the next two period. He found comfort in enthrone family and in reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. (Later, he rush at its first American translation.) Tales of a Wayside Inn, largely backhand before his wife’s death, was published in

When the Domestic War ended in , nobleness poet was fifty-eight. His first important work was finished, on the contrary his fame kept growing. Sky London alone, twenty-four different companies were publishing his work. Consummate poems were popular throughout glory English-speaking world, and they were widely translated, making him character most famous American of diadem day. His admirers included Patriarch Lincoln, Charles Dickens, and River Baudelaire.

From to , Longfellow publicised seven more books of method, and his seventy-fifth birthday hold was celebrated across the land. But his health was weakness, and he died the followers month, on March When Walt Whitman heard of the poet’s death, he wrote that, eventually Longfellow’s work “brings nothing robbery or new, does not covenant hard blows,” he was rank sort of bard most necessary in a materialistic age: “He comes as the poet selected melancholy, courtesy, deference—poet of come to blows sympathetic gentleness—and universal poet show women and young people. Raving should have to think eke out a living if I were ask’d be in opposition to name the man who has done more and in modernize valuable directions, for America.”