Paul Revere’s Ride (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

“Paul Revere’s Ride” has generally been recognized as one of Longfellow’s most popular poems, although not all critics have necessarily regarded it as a great work. One of the earliest reviews of The Wayside Inn (the larger work in which “Paul Revere’s Ride” first appeared) was at best lukewarm: “This is not a very powerful species of poetry,” The Living Age reported in 1864, “and yet it is very pleasant.” George Saintsbury, in his Prefaces and Essays, faulted the poem for its lack of narrative tension: “Paul Revere’s Ride,” he observed, has the drawback that the excellent Paul does not seem to have run the slightest danger, though, if his friend in the belfry had been observed and caught (as he ought to have been), and hanged ... it would have given some point.” Dana Gioia, however, in an essay in The Columbia History of American Poetry, praises “Paul Revere’s Ride” as one of “the best short American narrative poems ever written.” And more than one critic has observed that Longfellow’s purpose in writing this poem was to create an American legend. Norman Holmes Pearson sums this idea up in an essay published in The University of Kansas City Review: “Paul Revere is, as he was intended to be, a national hero. The poem is, as it was intended to be, a popular ballad.”