Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry
An American Master
Longfellow deserves no less than to be remembered as the native bard who gave mythic dimension to the country’s historical imagination, a national poet of epic sweep and solemn feeling who came along right at the moment when the emerging nation had the most need for one. The forest primeval, the village smithy under the spreading chestnut tree, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the Indian princeling Hiawatha in his birch canoe—such were the iconic images Longfellow forged out of the American collective consciousness in volume after lionized volume. The enduring artistry of his ceremonious and at times overly starchy verse can be debated, but not the potency of its ennobling sentiments or the resounding strains it struck from what Lincoln famously invoked as “the mystic chords of memory.”
These links are to versions of the poems with notes provided by the Department of English at the University of Toronto
The Arrow and the Song
The Arsenal at Springfield
The Children’s Hour
The Cross of Snow
The Day is Done background
The Fire of Drift-wood
The Landlord’s Tale. Paul Revere’s Ride
The Village Blacksmith
My Lost Youth
Nature
A Psalm of Life
There was a little girl
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
The Witnesses
The Wreck of the Hesperus
A printer-friendly version of all 15 poems in one text