American Romanticism
Online resources
American Romanticism: good overview of the major writers: http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/lit3.htm
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Hawthorne • Longfellow •
Reading Longfellow
Background and Context
CHILDREN
Come to me, O ye children!
For I hear you at your play,
And the questions that perplexed me
Have vanished quite away.
Ye open the eastern windows,
That look towards the sun,
Where thoughts are singing swallows
And the brooks of morning run.
In your hearts are the birds and the sunshine,
In your thoughts the brooklet’s flow,
But in mine is the wind of Autumn
And the first fall of the snow.
Ah! what would the world be to us
If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
Worse than the dark before.
What the leaves are to the forest,
With light and air for food,
Ere their sweet and tender juices
Have been hardened into wood,--
That to the world are children;
Through them it feels the glow
Of a brighter and sunnier climate
Than reaches the trunks below.
Come to me, O ye children!
And whisper in my ear
What the birds and the winds are singing
In your sunny atmosphere.
For what are all our contrivings,
And the wisdom of our books,
When compared with your caresses,
And the gladness of your looks?
Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead.
Longfellow believed that the purpose of the imagination was not “to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, not creation but insight.” A Christian humanist, he generally avoided the sentimental nature pantheism popular in his time, and his essay The Defence of Poetry, published in the North American Review (1832), anticipated much of what Ralph Waldo Emerson would say, five years later, in his address “The American Scholar” to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Longfellow & the fate of modern poetry: an essay by John Derbyshire published in the New Criterion. Derbyshire considers the mystery of why we no longer enjoy poetry as Longfellow’s audience did and of why modern critics do not think he matters: “We do not read as our grandfathers read, we do not hear as they heard.”
Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life:
“By ignoring Longfellow, or by mystifying or satirizing his poetry when we do not ignore it, we refuse to look nineteenth-century America full in the face. Longfellows critical twilight is at root historical avoidance.”
Stream audio (RAM) All things considered, November 3, 2000 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most famous Americans of his day. His influence on American mythology, through poems like The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, was profound. Poet J.D. McClatchy has edited a new compilation of the Longfellow’s work. McClatchy talks to host Linda Wertheimer about Longfellow’s prolific writing, and his sway on how American’s view themselves and their history.
Although there have been several movements to debunk “Paul Revere’s Ride,” due to its lack of historical accuracy, the poem has remained very much alive in our national consciousness. Warren Harding, president during the fashionable reign of debunk criticism, perhaps said it best when he remarked, “An iconoclastic American said there never was a ride by Paul Revere. Somebody made the ride, and stirred the minutemen in the colonies to fight the battle of Lexington, which was the beginning of independence in the new Republic of America. I love the story of Paul Revere, whether he rode or not” (Fischer 337). Thus, “despite every well-intentioned effort to correct it historically, Revere’s story is for all practical purposes the one Longfellow created for him,” (Calhoun 261). It was what Paul Revere’s Ride came to symbolize that was important, not the actual details of the ride itself.
Traditionally the Petrarchan sonnet as used by Francesco Petrarch was a 14 line lyric poem using a pattern of hendecasyllables and a strict end-line rhyme scheme; the first twelve lines followed one pattern and the last two lines another. The last two lines were the voltaғ or turnԓ in the poem. When the sonnet came to the United States sometime after 1775, through the work of Colonel David Humphreys, Longfellow was one of the first to write widely in this form, which he adapted to suit his tone.
Hendecasyllable verse (in Italian endecasillabo) is a kind of verse used mostly in Italian poetry, defined by its having the last stress on the tenth syllable. When, as often happens, this stress falls on the penultimate syllable, the line has exactly eleven syllables (and the literal meaning of the word is just “of eleven syllables").
Since 1900 poets have modified and experimented with the traditional traits of the sonnet form. The form Longfellow frequently used was a 14 line lyric poem written in iambic pentameter and divided into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The rhyme scheme for the octave was abbaabbaԓ and for the sestet was cdecde.ԓ
The voltaԓ Longfellow and the American Sonnet usually occurred between the octave and the sestet. In most sonnets that follow this form, the octave describes an image/setting and the sestet describes a concept/feeling. Longfellows sonnet ԒThe Cross of Snow was inspired by two images familiar to Longfellow. One was FannyӔs portrait by Samuel Worcester Rowse (1859) and the other was an engraving of Jacksons photograph of the ҒMountain of the Holy Cross (1875). This engraving showed a striking natural phenomenon in the Rocky Mountains; snowfilled crevices on the side of a mountain in the Rockies projected the image of a cross which could be seen from many miles away. Because the crevices were so high on the mountain, the crevices remained snow-filled year around.
In the mid 1800Ӕs few Easterners, including Longfellow, had visited the Rocky Mountains, and such an image created much interest back East.
Also of interest back East was the rather old-fashioned practice of sealing a lock of a childs hair into a paper packet. While doing so, FannyҒs dress caught fire. She ran to Henrys study where he put out the flames. However, her lower body and torso were badly burned, and she died the following morning, July 10, 1861. Eighteen years after FannyҒs tragic death, Longfellow uses the image on the mountain to describe his feelings about her and her death.
The octave locates her portrait in their bedroom where she died. He agonizes over her physical pain and extols the virtue of her soul. The voltaғ is after the eighth line and turns the readers focus to the first three lines of the sestet, which describe the cross-shaped, snow-filled crevices on the side of the mountain Ԓin the distant West. The last three lines of the sestet metaphorically describe the cross of sorrow Henry has worn for eighteen years. Just as the snow in the crevices remains an entire season and season after season, his love for Fanny remains Ӕchangeless since the day she died.
My Lost Youth
A slide show of Longfellow’s Portland, Maine boyhood home, prepared by the Maine Historical Society
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Longfellow •