Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  Add to these official and unofficial tributes the extraordinary amount of Longfellow material and memorabilia made available to the public between the poet’s death and the Second World War—ranging from his childhood home in Portland, deeded by Anne Longfellow Pierce to the Maine Historical Society in 1902, to cigar wrappers, Staffordshire plates, brass buttons, a 1940 commemorative postage stamp, and many other consumables. It would seem that Longfellow had been enshrined not only in Westminster Abbey but at every level of American culture, to a degree surpassed by no other American writer.

  How quickly it all evaporated.

  Longfellow had never lacked critics—no one has ever done so thorough a job on him as Margaret Fuller did in the 1840s—but on the whole, and considering the range of his work and his willingness to experiment with meter, he had been respectfully treated in the literary and popular journals here and abroad. This friendly tone lingered well after his death, but with a growing note of reservation, even on the part of sympathetic critics. A good example is George Saintsbury, a man who certainly would have found Longfellow good company (Saintsbury is best remembered now for his famous Notes on a Cellar-Book, the first serious attempt in English to write knowledgeably about the experience of enjoying vintage wine.) In a thoughtful 1907 essay, Saintsbury dismisses many of the better-known poems but could still praise Longfellow for his sureness of touch in “adorning and exalting the familiar” rather than “seizing and making familiar the strange.” It was an uncommon gift, he added—“this unpretentious and apparently easy gift of communicating something of poetical treatment, something of poetical effect, to everything, or almost everything, that is touched.”

  Yet the mere mention of “poetical effect” soon was enough to tarnish the brightest reputation. As Carol Christ has suggested, the invention of something called Modernism required the invention of something called Victorianism, which it “defeats, displaces, overcomes.” In attacking the weaknesses of the latter—its tired rhetoric, its blatant appeal to sentimentality, its lack of irony, its deflation of lyric intensity, its sheer literal-mindedness, not to mention its preachiness and religiosity—the early Modernists were confirming their own aesthetic of the spare, the fragmented, the ambiguous, the ironic.

  Yet from the vantage point of our own time, the Modernists’ agenda seems not only dated, and on occasion self-deluding, but more closely linked to High Victorianism than anyone in 1910 would have thought possible. Whose twentieth-century poetic practice more closely resembles Longfellow’s than Ezra Pound’s? The didacticism, the ransacking of European and other cultures, the penchant for quotations in the original languages—allowing for the substantial difference of idiom and tone, the practice is similar. By a nice irony, Pound was teased in England in the 1920s for being “Longfellow’s great-nephew.” He was in fact a distant relation; his mother back in Idaho was a Wadsworth from New England and quite proud of it. (Her parents thought she had married beneath her.) Likewise, whose attempt in the twentieth century to assume the mantle of Goethe, as the exemplar of an entire culture, surpassed that of T. S. Eliot?—an act of cultural bravado virtually unchallenged for a generation, and one that linked him with Carlyle, Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, and even Longfellow. Moreover, can the Harvard-educated Eliot’s lifelong fascination with Dante be divorced totally from Longfellow’s championing of the poet and the Medieval Revivalism from which this fascination emerged? (Charles Eliot Norton forms the link between the two poets.) And was not Wallace Stevens’s ability to balance a successful business career and a high literary one a recapitulation, in some sense, of Longfellow’s eagerness to prove that a poet could be a respectable citizen? Alan Tate’s self-conscious mythologizing, Hart Crane’s search for an epic vision, James Merrill’s virtuosity with meter, Billy Collins’s ability to illumine the everyday—to take a selection of very different poets—do these not reflect something of Longfellow’s poetic practice? And it is difficult to imagine Robert Frost’s career—not as a poet so much as an icon of New England—without Longfellow’s example.

  At the time, however, rebellion against the genteel tradition allowed no quarter. Longfellow, if anything, was too weak a target for the big guns to be wasted upon, and the mopping-up operation was left to the foot soldiers of Modernism. One of the most vociferous of these was Ludwig Lewisohn. “Who, except wretched schoolchildren, now reads Longfellow?” he asked in 1932. His attack is worth examining in detail because it spells out so plainly the opinion of a literary generation:

  The thing to establish in America is not that Longfellow was a very small poet, but that he did not partake of the poetic character at all. . . . Twice he came near poetic speech, once in the pathetic sonnet on his dead wife, once in “The Warning”—“There is a poor blind Sampson in this land”—when the antislavery struggle aroused even him. The ballads and the moralizing lyrics are all written from without, are all lacking the organic connection with one shaken soul and are therefore outside of the soul of the world. He can fall as low as Ella Wheeler Wilcox in “The Rainy Day”; he can rise as high as Webster in the final lines of “The Building of the Ship.” He never touches poetry. He borrows forms and accepts content from without. The longer works are all strictly patterned upon the works of others. The plays are weary imitation of the Elizabethans; “The Building of the Ship” and “Keramós” lean almost slavishly on Schiller’s “Lied von der Glocke,” itself hardly a poetic masterpiece, nor has it been sufficiently observed how almost to the point of the popular and of course absurd notion of plagiarism “The Golden Legend” copies “Faust.” . . . He was really not unlike those minstrel artificers of the middle ages who borrowed freely from each other methods of dressing up a common substance and had not yet risen to the notion of expression as an individual act and therefore of literature as individual property. Doubtless this large body of narrative verse as well as certain lyrics of pleasant sentiment and easy rhythm still give pleasure to a subliterary public. But men are not contemporaries though the same decades embrace their lives. To minds concerned with the imaginative interpretation of man, of nature and of human life, Longfellow has nothing left to say.

  It would perhaps be unkind to ask who now reads the once prolific Ludwig Lewisohn. Yet his diatribe, however unfair at many points, suggests how wide was the gulf that separated Longfellow and serious poetry for much of the twentieth century—whatever the preferences of the “subliterary public.” There were occasional rumors of a revival. None proved true. The one development that did preserve some degree of literary respectability for the poet was Newton Arvin’s reassessment, Longfellow: His Life and Work, in 1963. For a major Americanist to write on the subject was remarkable enough, and throughout the book Arvin can be seen struggling with his own devotion to New Criticism and his respect for the richness and variety of Longfellow’s oeuvre. Moreover, his motivation for taking on such a project may have been more personal than strictly literary: he was trying to pull his life back together after the homophobic witch hunt that had cost him his professorship at Smith College. Attention to Longfellow was perhaps a bid to link his own name with someone irreproachably “normal.” Whatever Arvin’s motive, his book remains the most significant critical treatment of the poet’s work to date.

  Other cautious admirers from time to time appeared. For example, the poet Howard Nemerov, introducing a collection in the Laurel Poetry Series in 1959, saw Longfellow as “stretching a relatively small gift over a very large frame.” But he spoke warmly of “The Fire of Driftwood” and “Aftermath,” helping to initiate the late-twentieth-century view that even if Longfellow was hopelessly old fashioned, several of his short lyrics were still worth reading. (An allied line of thought praised his skill as a writer of sonnets, perhaps the greatest of any nineteenth-century American poet.) “Aftermath” in particular drew the close attention of Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination (1995)—a glimpse of Longfellow as “greener” than we had thought—just as The New England Tragedies had been treated with an
unprecedented degree of analytical seriousness in Buell’s New England Literary Culture (1986). The exuberant and influential essay “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism” by the poet Dana Gioia in The Columbia History of American Poetry (1993) offered a rallying cry for a revisionist campaign. But it is significant that the Library of America’s ample selection in 2000 of Longfellow’s poetry and prose, edited by the poet J. D. McClatchy, got more intelligent critical attention in Britain than in the United States, perhaps evidence of the different reverberations the word “Victorian” produces on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

  When Victor Gulotta, the leading contemporary collector of Longfelloviana, sold his collection to Harvard’s Houghton Library in 2001, he admitted that he had been able to acquire the materials over the past fifteen years because lack of interest in the poet had kept prices down. Yet, as Gulotta explained to Nicholas A. Basbanes in Among the Gently Mad (a guide to modern book-collecting), what particularly interested Harvard was his treasure-trove of realia—photographs, souvenirs, lithographs, portrait busts, advertising ephemera—amid the first editions and autograph letters. Similarly, when the Maine Historical Society in 2002 organized the first museum exhibit ever devoted to telling the whole story of Longfellow’s life and career, a large portion of the exhibit space was occupied by extraliterary cultural artifacts, from Colonial Revival chairs made of spinning wheels to the Kennebunk Brewing Company’s recent Longfellow Ale.

  FIGURE 12: First-floor plan of the Craigie House, showing the location of portions of Longfellow’s library, 1948. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow National Historic Site.

  Today, there is also evidence that Longfellow is being treated with greater academic respect, even if he is not likely to regain a place in anybody’s canon, much less be taught in any serious and consistent fashion. At least he is no longer a joke. Historicist trends, the new scholarship on sentimentality, the suspicion that some veins of the American Renaissance have long since been exhausted—all these may contribute to more attention being paid in the years ahead to a cultural producer as fecund as Longfellow. Moreover, in an academic culture that privileges the work of Benedict Anderson, there is something to be said for anyone so skilled at imagining communities and producing so abundantly the literary artifacts that help construct nations. And in a country beginning to discover that “English-speaker” and “American” are not necessarily synonymous, it is significant that Harvard chose to give the evocative name of Longfellow to its new institute devoted to literatures written in this country in languages other than English. Meanwhile, a new generation of scholars—Christoph Irmscher, Matthew Gartner, Mary Louise Kete, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Eric Haralson—are keeping Longfellow’s name in the academic discourse of the twenty-first century. And in the field of popular culture, the young Danteist and novelist Matthew Pearl drew considerable attention in 2003 to Longfellow’s Craigie House circle of the late 1860s with his ingenious literary detective story, The Dante Club.

  It is among Lewisohn’s “subliterary”—extraliterary is a more polite way of putting it—audiences that Longfellow seems to endure. Granted, the last generation of wretched school children to have been required to memorize “The Wreck of the Hesperus” or “The Village Blacksmith” has now reached retirement age. But Longfellow keeps popping up in popular culture, from “A Psalm of Life” on the Celestial Seasonings tea packages to the recent version of Hiawatha filmed by Native Americans (and starring activist Russell Means) who figured out they could do better by appropriating the poem as their own than by following the usual academic path of trashing it. As Gioia notes, “Longfellow remains the one poet the average, nonbookish American still knows by heart—not whole poems but memorable snatches.” Everyday language is rich with his legacy—from “ships that pass in the night” (from Tales of a Wayside Inn) to “footprints on the sands of time” (“A Psalm of Life”).

  It is with two manifestations of this survivance—as Evangeline’s people call it—that Longfellow’s story for now can end.

  Auden famously said that poetry makes nothing happen. With Evangeline, Longfellow proved—unwittingly—that it can. The uprooting of the Nova Scotian Acadians by the British and the New Englanders in 1755 could have been a minor incident in the complex story of the struggle between Britain and France for North America. The Acadians themselves might have retained some tribal memory of their origins and their dispersal, but the ones who returned to Canada could easily have been swallowed up, culturally speaking, by the far more numerous Québecois French or the English speakers of New Brunswick. Those who settled elsewhere might have survived in the anthropological sense that the Amish have survived. But it was Longfellow’s world-famous, much translated, hugely selling poem that put the Acadians, and the plight of the Acadians, on the map. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as Acadians in Canada and northern Maine began to assert a distinct ethnic identity, the by-then mythical figure of Evangeline became the focus of popular attention. Many younger Acadians today have mixed feelings about a foundational myth created by a Protestant, English-speaking poet and based so inexorably on a sense of loss, but in the early stages of the construction of Acadian identity, Evangeline herself proved a powerful and effective symbol. The site of her Grand Pré, on the Basin of Minas in Nova Scotia, is commemorated today as a shrine to her memory, visited on pilgrimage by Acadians from all parts of the Atlantic world.

  A parallel phenomenon took place on the bayous and prairies of southern and southwestern Louisiana, a region that attracted hundreds of Acadian exiles in the eighteenth century. In the course of contact with their Creole and Anglo neighbors, “Acadian” eventually became “Cajun.” When this community’s desire to solidify its ethnic identity took shape around 1900, its intellectual elite also took up the name of Evangeline (a name Longfellow had invented) as a rallying cry. Theirs was a slightly different Evangeline—she returns to Louisiana in one version and drops dead when she discovers that Gabriel has married another woman; in another version, they marry and live happily ever afterward—but her usefulness in presenting Acadian culture to the world proved itself again and again. There were even exchanges of visits between Nova Scotia and the bayou country. Today, the Lafayette, Louisiana, yellow pages list some two dozen entities named for Evangeline, from a Boy Scout troop to a laundromat. Today, Cajun culture—not too long ago held in friendly contempt by its English-speaking, Protestant neighbors—has been highly successfully commodified and exported internationally. Every time you laissez les bons temps rouler, you have—somewhere in the cultural studies penumbra—Longfellow to thank for it.

  Longfellow’s power to endure is very much rooted in place—not only the imagined New England and Acadia of his poetry, but an actual landscape, stretching loosely from Casco Bay in Maine and the sandy plains of Brunswick to Plymouth and Newport and Cape Cod. The success of the two Longfellow historic sites—in Portland and in Cambridge—as tourist attractions (as well centers for scholarly research) attests to the way we link the poet and the world most familiar to him.

  And in Boston, we can literally follow in the footsteps he laid out for us.

  “The Freedom Trail”—one of the most popular tourist experiences in New England—is not exactly chronological, for it incorporates later buildings (Bulfinch’s gold-domed State House, for one) and presents no logical sequence of historical events. But as a physical experience it is powerfully informative. It starts on a great public space on the slope of a hill—the Common, where British troops once encamped—and takes you into a lowland (at the moment much chewed up by the pharaonic “Big Dig” highway and tunnel project) and up another hill before thrusting you across the river, by way of the Charlestown Bridge, to that stark but triumphant symbol of the Early Republic, the Bunker Hill Monument. On the way, you pass through Longfellow Country—the ghosts of the Tremont House and the Albion Hotel, the successor of the Saturday Club’s Parker House; that seedbed of Boston Unitarianism, King’s Chapel; the Old South
Church, which the poet helped save; the Old Corner Book Store, from which his fame once radiated throughout the world; Court Street, where his friends Sumner and Hillard practiced law. The Old State House and Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market and Father Taylor’s Seaman’s Bethel—all evoke the human-scaled, waterfront Boston of brick and granite now overshadowed by the office towers. At the top of Salem Street you reach the handsome Georgian facade of Christ Church, the Old North Church of Paul Revere fame.

  In crossing the river you reenact the events of the night of April 18, 1775. According to Longfellow’s crafting of the legend, Revere himself rowed across with muffled oar, beneath the nose of a Royal Navy frigate, to await the signal from the church tower that would give birth to a new nation. His adventure is at the heart of the Freedom Trail lesson and, despite every well-intentioned effort to correct it historically, Revere’s story is for all practical purposes the one Longfellow created for him.

  As they come down Hull Street from the church to the Copps Hill Burying Ground (where the British placed their artillery), the crowds rush, stumble, straggle, trip over each other taking photos, speak in a dozen languages, ask how much farther “it” is (whatever it may be: lunch, a bathroom, the car), stand in awe, breathe deeply, sweat, shiver, laugh, occasionally cry—a pure democracy of motion. It was no accident that Longfellow and Sumner brought Dickens there to Copps Hill, too, when the North End still looked like an eighteenth-century port (though one beginning to fill with Irish immigrants, who would be followed before the end of the century by East European Jews and southern Italians). Beneath the noise of the modern traffic “a hurry of hoofs in a village street” still makes itself heard.