Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was one of the great
American poets of the 19th century. He was born at Portland, a
seaport town in Maine, U.S.A. on 27 February, 1807. His father Stephen
Longfellow was a lawyer and was originally from Yorkshire, England. H. W.
Longfellow was the second one of eight children of his parents. He was
friendly, sensitive and meritorious from his childhood. He had his early
education at Portland Academy. Then he was admitted in Bowdoin College in
Brunswick, Maine in 1822. At Bowdoin, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne who became his
lifelong friend. After graduating from there in 1825, he made a long European
tour.
He returned home in
1830 and became the first Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. In
1831, he married Mary Storer Potter, an intelligent and beautiful girl of
Portland. But his 22 year old wife died during their trip in Rotterdam after
suffering a miscarriage in 1835. When he returned to the United States in 1836,
he became the Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University. Then he
settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lived for the rest of his life
although he liked to spend summers at his home Nahant.
After seven years of
courtship he married Miss Frances ‘Fanny’ Appleton, the daughter of a wealthy
Boston industrialist, Nathal Appleton in 1843, eight years after the death of
his first wife. He resigned his professorship in 1854 to devote all his time to
poetry. He was also a devoted husband. But his marriage ended in sadness. After
eighteen years of happy married life, Fanny was accidentally burnt to death in
1861. Longfellow was devastated by her death and never fully recovered. He died
on 24 March in 1882, after suffering from peritonitis for five years. He was
buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He became one of the most popular poets of his day in
America and England. He began to write and publish poetry at the age of
thirteen. His first notable publication Voices
of Night (1839) was a collection of poems including The Psalm of Life, The
Beleaguered City and The Midnight
Mass of the Dying Year. His other major collection of poems are Evangeline (1847), The Golden Legend (1851), The
Song of Hiawatha (1855), The
Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), Tales
of a Wayside Inn (1863), Birds of
Passage, etc. His poetry is based on common and easily understood themes
with simple, clean and lucid language.
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