The Works Of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Prose Works

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dante Alighieri

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386 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2015

About the author

An extremely popular American poet in his own lifetime, Longfellow's best-known works include The Song of Hiawatha (1855), a translation of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, done in 1864-67, Paul Revere's Ride and Evangeline. He's one of the New England poets now typically referred to as the Fireside Poets.

Longfellow graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825, and after studying in Europe for several years subsequently became Bowdoin's professor of modern languages and librarian. After further study in Europe, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to become professor of modern languages at Harvard in 1836. Meanwhile, Mary Potter Longfellow, his first wife, had died in 1835, following a miscarriage.

His first published collections of poetry were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). In 1854, he retired from teaching to focus on his writing. His second wife, Frances Appleton Longfellow, died in 1861 of burns sustained when her dress caught fire. After her death, for some time Longfellow had difficulty writing original poetry, and focused on translations from foreign languages.

Longfellow wrote lyric poetry noted for its musicality, and often presented stories of mythology and legend. He frequently imitated European poetic styles (and his work was popular in Europe in his day, as well as in the U.S.). As a Romantic poet, he seeks primarily to express and to evoke emotion in his poetry.