Reconsidering Longfellow

Christoph Irmscher is provost professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington.Robert Arbouris a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Indiana University Bloomington.

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.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsNote on QuotationsIntroductionChristoph Irmscher1. Longfellow’s Conversations: Weltliteratur as Aesthetic in the Early PoetryAndrew C. Higgins2. Feeling, Controlling, and Transcending: The Negotiation of Sentiment in Longfellow, Poe, and Whitman Lloyd Willis3. “A Love of Heaven and Virtue”: Why Longfellow Sentimentalizes DeathMonica Pelaez4. The Song of Hiawatha and the Ruins of American LiteratureJames McDougall5. The Sounds of Narrative in Longfellow’s EvangelineLauren Simek6. Westwärts! Westwärts!Christoph Irmscher7. The Cultural Career of Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride”Matthew Gartner8. Figures Other Than Figures of Speech: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Pursuit of Financial SuccessRob Velella9. “Not from the Grand Old Masters”: The Art of Henry and Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Robert Arbour10. Conversing with Longfellow: Democratizing the American Literature CurriculumLauren GattiSelect BibliographyContributors Index