A Psalm of Life (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born into very fortunate circumstances on February 27,1807, in what is now Portland, Maine, then part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He was the second child and son among eight children. His mother, Zilpah Wadsworth, was religious and bookish and his father, Stephen Longfellow, was a prominent lawyer who served in the Massachusetts state legislature and in Congress. The boy was named after a heroic uncle who, with his naval companions, blew themselves up along with their ship, the Intrepid, to avoid falling into enemy hands in Tripoli in the early years of the nineteenth century. Henry grew up with the books of William Cowper, Thomas Gray, and Sir Walter Scott, and he learned to play flute and piano. Longfellow’s father had been a Harvard man, but decided to send Henry to the newer and nearer Bowdoin College, where Stephen Longfellow was a trustee. Henry was a good student and graduated in the same class as one of the most important figures of early American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64). While at college, the young Longfellow expressed the desire to become a writer, but his father wanted him to study for the bar exam. Stephen Longfellow did, however, allow his son latitude to decide for himself. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was offered the new chair of modern languages at Bowdoin after another trustee was impressed by his translation of one of Horace’s odes. To prepare for the position, Longfellow was required to travel in Europe to gain expertise in German, French, Italian, and Spanish.

The nineteen-year-old Longfellow landed at Le Havre in June of 1826. His three-year journey through France, Spain, Italy, and Germany was more one of a restless youth than a serious scholar, but it enabled Longfellow to soak up the sense of Europe’s long-established cultural heritage. Back at Bowdoin from 1829 to 1835, Longfellow, dissatisfied with the available textbooks, wrote five of his own, including Elements of French Grammar (1830) and Syllabus de la Grammaire Italienne (1832). This appears to be the only time Longfellow was interested in academic work, publishing not only textbooks, but also articles on linguistics and literary subjects for The North American Review, and also doing occasional translations. His only so-called creative writing of the time appeared in the travel sketches Outre Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea (1835), an imitation of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819-20). During the Bowdoin years, Longfellow married his first wife, in 1831. In 1834, Harvard College offered Longfellow the position of department head of French and Spanish, but, as was the case at Bowdoin, recommended a sojourn in Europe to prepare himself. With his wife and two of her friends, Longfellow went to Europe in April of 1835. In Holland, he suffered two losses: the miscarriage of his first child and, shortly thereafter, the death of his wife. To escape the trauma, Longfellow spent the rest of his trip immersed in study in northern Europe — Germany, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden — but he also travelled to Switzerland, where he met the woman who would be his second wife, Fannie Appleton. At the end of 1836, after nearly two years in Europe, the twenty-nine-year old Longfellow reestablished himself in the United States at Cambridge, where he lived until the end of his life. In 1839, Longfellow published the very successful Hyperion, a prose romance based on German influences that contained a veiled confession of his longing for Fannie Appleton. Also in 1839, Longfellow published Voices of the Night, a book of verse containing “A Psalm of Life,” which had previously appeared in the Knickerbocker Magazine in October of 1838. Longfellow followed up his first book of verse with Ballads and Other Poems (1841) and his small, antislavery volume, Poems on Slavery (1842). In 1843, Longfellow married Fannie Appleton, whose father purchased for the couple the historic mansion Craigie House, where Longfellow had been a mere lodger since his arrival at Cambridge. Six children and numerous publications would fill up Longfellow’s life during his years at the Craigie House. One of the most important of Longfellow’s publications was Evange-line (1847), the first important long poem in American literature. In 1854, after increasing bitterness at academic duties, Longfellow resigned from Harvard and became America’s first professional poet. While Longfellow seemed to have it all — respect, fame, money, and family — the death by fire of his wife in 1861, the same year as the beginning of the Civil War, tore him apart. Longfellow too was burned on his face, and thereafter grew out his beard. Despite the loss, Longfellow continued his prolific publishing career, which, in 1868, earned him a private audience with Queen Victoria and honorary degrees at both Oxford and Cambridge. With only Tennyson as a possible rival, Longfellow was the most popular poet in the world. Longfellow’s verse continued to be published even after his death from peritonitis on March 24, 1882. His uncollected poems came out as In the Harbor (1882) and the immense unpublished fragment Michael Angelo appeared in 1882-83. Longfellow is now rarely included in what has become considered America’s first literary pantheon — Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. Nonetheless, America’s first professional, and most popular, poet helped put worldly wings on America’s fledgling literature.