Reconsidering Longfellow

Contributions by Matthew Gartner, Lauren Gatti, Andrew C. Higgins, James I. McDougall, Monica Pelaez, Lauren Simek, Rob Velella, Lloyd Willis Edited by Christoph Irmscher, Robert Arbour

Publication date:

19 February 2014

Length of book:

220 pages

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611476736

Reconsidering Longfellow is the first collection of scholarly essays in several decades devoted entirely to the work and afterlife of the most popular and widely read writer in American literature. The essays, written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars, cover the entire range of Longfellow’s work, from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha) to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War, Tales of a Wayside Inn. Separate contributions discuss Longfellow’s financial dealings, his preoccupation with his children, and his interest in the visual arts, as well as the tremendous role his poetry did and will once again play in American literature classrooms in the U.S. All essays were written specifically for the volume. Many of them rely on unpublished archival sources from the Longfellow collections at the Longfellow House-George Washington National Historic Site and at Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Quotations
Introduction
Christoph Irmscher
1. Longfellow’s Conversations: Weltliteratur as Aesthetic in the Early Poetry
Andrew C. Higgins
2. Feeling, Controlling, and Transcending: The Negotiation of Sentiment
in Longfellow, Poe, and Whitman
Lloyd Willis
3. “A Love of Heaven and Virtue”: Why Longfellow Sentimentalizes Death
Monica Pelaez4. The Song of Hiawatha and the Ruins of American LiteratureJames McDougall
5. The Sounds of Narrative in Longfellow’s Evangeline
Lauren Simek
6. Westwärts! Westwärts!
Christoph Irmscher7. The Cultural Career of Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride”

Matthew Gartner
8. Figures Other Than Figures of Speech:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Pursuit of Financial Success
Rob Velella9. “Not from the Grand Old Masters”:
The Art of Henry and Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow
Robert Arbour
10. Conversing with Longfellow: Democratizing the American Literature Curriculum
Lauren GattiSelect BibliographyContributors Index

Once the US's schoolroom poet–he lost favor when modernism deemed him insipid–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) now has fresh appraisals sympathetic to his milieu, his poems' structural properties, and his underestimated advocacy of American historical truths. Irmscher's previous work includes Longfellow Redux and Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200. He and Arbour lead eight other critics in a restoration of the poet's reputation, sympathetically re-presenting him as deserving cultural respectability. Andrew Higgins succinctly examines Longfellow's 1833 translation of Jorge Manrique's Coplas; Lloyd Willis finds in Longfellow sentimentalism affinities that run counter to the tradition of contemporaneous male poets. Other essays look at Evangeline (1847), Paul Revere's Ride (1861), and Longfellow's finances. James McDougall scrutinizes The Song of Hiawatha (1855) for its challenges then and still today, and uses Heidegger to probe both the famous poem and the vanishing Indian belief that helped create it. Arbour's essay includes little-viewed pencil sketches by the poet and his son Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow. With its vigorous cultural studies, new historicist, and transnational approaches to Longfellow–who was overshadowed by Poe and Whitman–this collection should be saluted for its cutting-edge absolution of Longfellow. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.