“I think I am growing a little web-footed; which is not wonderful, as I take four cold baths a day; beside an occasional swim in the Rhine,” Longfellow wrote to his Cambridge friend Catherine Eliot Norton.
If there was anything physically wrong with Longfellow, he had long since gotten over it. On his twentieth day of treatment, he wrote to Sumner:
The water begins to work upon my nerves. I had a dream last night, in which I saw you. You mentioned a certain person’s name, whereupon, like the Patriarchs in the Old Testament, I fell on your neck and wept, exclaiming “I am very unhappy.” The most amusing part of the dream was that we were in bed together, and you were buried up to your neck in tar [?], which absorbed my tears.
There were some sixty patients at the Kurort Marienberg, a few of them seriously ill, a good number of them recovering from an excess of food and drink, and some there simply to be fussed over. As the weeks passed, Longfellow regarded them with growing amusement. They were a cross section of the European minor aristocracy and upper gentry, some from as far away as Russia. He also made friends in the neighborhood and only occasionally lapsed in his faithfulness to the regimen; he could not resist his favorite Rhine wines, especially the nearby Johannisberger.
One major sonnet emerged from his summer at Boppard, although he considered it too personal to publish in his lifetime. “Mezzo Cammin” was written on August 25, 1842, shortly before he began his return home. It is one of the most masterful examples of the form in nineteenth-century American poetry.
Half of my life is gone, and I have let
The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth to build
Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
Of restless passions that would not be stilled,
But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;
Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past
Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,—
A city in the twilight dim and vast,
With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,—
And hear above me on the autumnal blast
The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.
Its Dantesque title, its employment of Puritan self-scrutiny, its cautious acceptance of middle age, its oblique reference to both Mary and Fanny, its belated recognition that poetry is in fact his gift, however little he has yet done with it—all these things give “Mezzo Cammin” a weight that surpasses anything in his work to that point. The poem even reflects, with some pardonable license, the topography of Marienberg. The Kloster still stands there, on a hillside overlooking Boppard’s smoking roofs and bell towers; behind it, a stream rushes down from the heights.
He wanted to extend his stay, pleading only a partial “cure,” but the Harvard Corporation declined to continue his salary beyond the agreed upon term of six months, and he turned homeward in the fall of 1842, by way of London. Two great and unanticipated boons had come from this third European sojourn. At Boppard, he had befriended the radical German poet and translator Ferdinand Freiligrath, who was an important link in introducing Germans to English and American literature; they were to remain lifelong friends. And in London he renewed his friendship with Dickens, who introduced him to his friend (and future biographer) John Forster, who became one of Longfellow’s regular correspondents. Dickens escorted him one night on a tour of the bleakest and most dangerous of the East End slums. Both writers made a deep impression on him: Freiligrath for his personal courage in opposing the Prussian authorities (he would soon be exiled), and Dickens for the kind of social conscience that struck a sympathetic chord in a New England Unitarian.
In London he read the just-published American Notes of Dickens, based on his travels earlier that year. Dickens was kind to Boston and his hosts there, but scathing about much of the rest of what he saw of the United States, especially its toleration of slavery. Longfellow had the opportunity to hear at first hand the abolitionist views of Dickens and his circle—a position still considered dangerously radical in much of proper Boston—and he determined on the voyage home to express his own feelings on the subject at last. Sumner for some time had urged him to take up the topic. In a letter to Marienberg, he had asked:
What red-hot staves has your mind thrown up? What ideas have been started by the voyage? A poem on the sea? Oh! I long for those verses on slavery. Write some stirring words that shall move the whole land. Send them home and we’ll publish them. Let us know how you occupy yourself with that heavenly gift of invention.
As Longfellow later wrote to Freiligrath from America, it had been a boisterous passage. “I was not out of my berth more than twelve hours for the first twelve days. I was in the forward part of the vessel, where all the great waves struck and broke with voices of thunder.” Confined to his cabin, he wrote seven poems on slavery. “I meditated upon them in the stormy, sleepless nights, and wrote them down with a pencil in the morning.” They are the most overtly political of his writings, on the part of a poet who has been seen by many of his critics—and admirers—as staying “above” politics. Poems on Slavery quickly appeared in December of 1842, in a volume whose slight thirty-one pages betrayed its radical message. It included the shipboard poems and an eighth, previously written one, “The Warning.” He had not realized that the Reverend William Ellery Channing—the most famous of New England’s Unitarian preachers—had died, but decided to leave in the ode addressed to him as a memorial to a “great and good man.” He wrote to his father:
How do you like the Slavery Poems? I think they make an impression; I have received many letters about them, which I will send to you by the first good opportunity. Some persons regret that I should have written them, but for my own part I am glad of what I have done. My feelings prompted me, and my judgment approved. . . .
He knew he was taking some risk to his reputation, personal as well as literary, since so many of the Beacon Hill families he frequented—including the Appletons—depended for their fortunes on the textile industry, which needed a guaranteed supply of Southern cotton.
Longfellow had had no personal exposure to Southern plantation life, and he relied, especially in the poem “The Quadroon Girl,” on some of the abolitionists’ favorite tropes of rape and interracial slave families. “The Slave’s Dream” presents the pathos of an African king sold into bondage, thinking of his homeland as he lies dying. “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” tells of a runaway on the Virginia-Carolina border:
In the dark fens of the Dismal Swamp
The hunted Negro lay;
He saw the fire of the midnight camp,
And heard at times a horse’s tramp
And a bloodhound’s distant bay.
“The Slave Singing at Midnight” compellingly links the psalmist David, the Hebrews of the Exodus, and Paul and Silas in prison with the hopeless slave who sings of Zion. “The Witnesses” offers a chilling image of the bones of the slaves who drowned in the Middle Passage.
Longfellow ended his volume with the strongest of these poems, “The Warning,” which closes with prophetic lines, written some two decades before the Civil War:
There is a poor, blind Sampson in this land,
Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
Til the vast Temple of our liberties
A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.
Poems on Slavery immensely pleased the abolitionists, still regarded as a radical fringe by most upright Bostonians; John Greenleaf Whittier even invited Longfellow to run for Congress on the new antislavery Liberty Party ticket. He politely declined, perhaps remembering his father’s unhappy congressional experience and content enough for the moment with the mainstream Whig Party. Moreover, he was temperamentally u
nsuited for electoral politics, which in antebellum America could prove almost a contact sport. He shunned confrontation and public controversy in every circumstance. But his growing fame—and possibly his public stance against the slaveholders—soon made him the target of a master of invective.
In 1845, in the pages of a new (and short-lived) New York monthly, The Aristidean, Edgar Allan Poe launched the most bitter in a series of attacks he had been directing over the past six years against Longfellow and what he considered the New Englander’s exaggerated reputation. Reviewing Poems on Slavery, Poe dismissed the work as “intended for the especial use of those negrophilic old ladies of the north, who form so large a part of Mr. LONGFELLOW’s friends.” While admitting there were fine passages in the poems, Poe commented:
No doubt, it is a very commendable and very comfortable thing, in the Professor, to sit at ease in his library chair, and write verses instructing the southerners how to give up their all with good grace, and abusing them if they will not; but we have a singular curiosity to know how much of his own, under a change of circumstances, the Professor himself would be willing to surrender.
“The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” was “a shameless medley of the grossest misrepresentation”—Poe denied bloodhounds had ever been used to chase runaways in the South—and “The Quadroon Girl” a tired piece of abolitionist propaganda. Longfellow had written “incendiary doggrel” [sic], and Poe dismissed the volume “with no more profound feeling than that of contempt.”
That Poe—irritated by the relentless moralizing of the New England “clique”—was offended by Longfellow’s critique of his slave-owning fellow citizens is not surprising. But the depth of his “contempt” was profound indeed, possibly pathological, and it clearly stung Longfellow. He kept above the fray, but several of his friends—including Hillard and Sumner—fired back at Poe in what came to be known as “the Longfellow War.”
It had begun in October 1839 with a short review of Hyperion in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, a respectable monthly to which Poe regularly contributed. Longfellow’s unshapely romance was a “farrago,” evincing a lack of “the great labor requisite for the stern demands of high art.” In the same columns, in February 1840, Poe took on Voices of the Night. He admitted he had admired “Hymn to the Night” upon first reading it in a newspaper and had even concluded that “a poet of high genius had at length risen amongst us.” Yet he had had second thoughts upon reading the new collection. “[H]e appears to us singularly deficient in all those important faculties which give artistical power. . . . He has no combining or binding force. He has absolutely nothing of unity.” Some of Poe’s criticism hit the mark: he found Longfellow’s archaizing inversions of normal word order (“Spake full well . . .”) “preposterous” for a nineteenth-century poet. But he went on to make a much more serious charge. Longfellow’s “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year” had been plagiarized from Tennyson’s “The Death of the Old Year.” The similarity of metaphor and rhythmical structure in the two poems was no mere coincidence, but an example of “the most barbarous class of literary robbery.”
In truth the two poems have little in common other than the familiar poetic conceit of personifying the outgoing year as an old man. But it became clear over the next five years that the vehemence of Poe’s attacks on Longfellow’s reputation were often in reverse proportion to evidentiary truth. Amid the transatlantic adulation that Longfellow had received by the early 1840s, Poe had managed to find a weak spot: Longfellow was a chronic borrower—of European themes, of traditional European meters, of a poetic diction in which echoes of a hundred other poets sounded. But this was not plagiarism. The previous century would have praised this practice as imitation, in the long-established Renaissance sense of the term. Yet Poe was living at a time when literature was becoming commodified, when the market economy was transforming writers from gentlemen-amateurs into producers who had a right to the products of their own labors. In Poe’s day, the issue of international copyright was being debated, and Romanticism too condemned the absence of originality.
Reviews in 1842 of Ballads and Other Poems and in 1845 of Longfellow’s anthology The Waif and of public lectures in New York on American poetry gave Poe the occasion for further critique, much of it delivered with a harshness of phrase that was exceptional even in the rough-and-tumble literary life of New York. Poe not only attacked Longfellow’s style and choice of subjects but declared that his very conception of what it is to be a poet was wrongheaded. Poetry, said Poe, was the rhythmical creation of beauty. “Beyond the limits of Beauty its province does not extend,” he wrote in Graham’s Magazine (which he was then editing). Longfellow’s insistent didacticism violated this principle. Of course, added Poe, Longfellow would find his defenders “so long as the world is full to overflowing with cant and conventicles”—a trenchant attempt to capture New England intellectual life in a phrase.
In 1844 Poe had joined the staff of the New York Weekly Mirror, owned by Longfellow’s old acquaintance Willis. A long letter appeared there on March 1, 1845, defending Longfellow against charges of plagiarism, and signed “Outis,” classical Greek for “nobody.” Poets often draw on the same images, even use the same phrases, Outis wrote, and gave as examples fifteen places where Poe’s own “The Raven”—which had been an instant popular sensation that year—could be said to imitate an earlier poem. Between March 8 and April 5, Poe—who had moved on to another paper, the Broadway Journal—published five extensive replies to Outis, further detailing Longfellow’s alleged plagiarisms. The charges grew more outrageous (at one point Poe accused Longfellow of stealing parts of The Spanish Student from his own unfinished play Politian), but the unrelenting attack on a popular literary figure and his Boston “clique” boosted sales of the newspaper.
That was the purpose, some have argued—a publicity stunt to put the Broadway Journal (of which Poe had become editor) on the literary map. While earlier students of Poe took the letters at face value, Poe’s recent biographer Kenneth Silverman concluded that, probably with Willis’s aid, “Poe himself concocted the entire exchange,” even to the point of accusing himself anonymously of plagiarism. But there is reason to believe that the “Longfellow War” (Poe’s phrase, not Longfellow’s) went beyond being a literary hoax. Poe was growing increasingly irrational in this period, and within the year would have a complete nervous collapse. Aware of his own genius yet buffeted by circumstance and a pattern of self-destructive behavior, he had reason to envy the placid life of the well-to-do Cambridge professor, surrounded by a crowd of uncritical admirers and able to give the public the moralizing verse that Poe himself scorned. Growing sectional antagonism added to the mix. That the prestigious North American Review would publish only New England writers, as Poe and others charged, was cited as evidence of that breach. That Longfellow did not respond to the attacks surely added to the insult. Moreover, as Silverman notes, Poe himself had a long history of plagiarism and of reprinting his own earlier work as new. The Outis letters were in that sense a projection of Poe’s own creative anxieties onto a well-established literary figure.
Poe was not the only critic to attempt to deflate Longfellow’s reputation as the leading American poet of the mid-1840s. The South Carolinian William Gilmore Simms, for example, repeated Poe’s charges of plagiarism, adding of Longfellow:
It is the grace and sweetness of his verse, and that extreme simplicity of thought which taxes no intellect to scan—which we read as we run—that constitutes his claim upon the reader.
But it was a fellow New Englander, a writer from Longfellow’s own social and intellectual milieu, who took up this theme of the poet’s shallowness with a chill and deadly touch. Longfellow complained of Margaret Fuller’s “bilious attack,” which wounded him in a way that the distant and unstable Poe could not. Reviewing his collection Poems in 1845, and acquitting him of any charge of copying, she wrote:
We must confess a coolness toward Mr. Longfellow, in consequence of the exaggerated
praises that have been bestowed upon him. When we see a person of moderate powers receive honors which should be reserved for the highest, we feel somewhat like assailing him and taking from him the crown which should be reserved for grander brows. . . .
The reason of his being overrated here, is because through his works breathes the air of other lands with whose products the public at large is but little acquainted. . . . Twenty years hence when he stands upon his own merits, he will rank as a writer of elegant, if not always accurate taste, of great imitative power, and occasional felicity in an original way, where his feelings are stirred.
In fairness to Longfellow, we should remember that both Poe and Fuller were judging him on the basis of a few dozen poems, albeit some of them his most popular short lyrics. Had Poe lived beyond 1849, he would have been unlikely to join the ranks of Longfellow’s admirers, for their concepts of poetry’s true nature were too contradictory. Book-length works such as Hiawatha or Tales of a Wayside Inn might well have confirmed Poe’s detestation of the long poem. But it was a loss to Longfellow—to America—that Fuller (by then the Marchesa Ossoli) died at sea in 1850, depriving him of a supremely intelligent critical voice he would have had to take seriously.
Poe’s “Longfellow War” had one touching sequel. After learning of Poe’s death from a brain fever, Longfellow wrote in the Southern Literary Messenger: “The harshness of his criticisms I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.” Perhaps on the basis of this generous testimonial, Poe’s aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, living in reduced circumstances in Lowell, Massachusetts, wrote to him in 1850 requesting a copy of The Seaside and the Fireside. Over the following sixteen years, they corresponded, Longfellow sending her money and books and doing her other small favors. In her dotage Mrs. Clemm claimed she had stayed in Longfellow’s house, but there is no evidence this happened; still, he was genuinely solicitous of her welfare. In 1859 she entreated him: “Please speak kindly of my darling Eddie.”
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