FREE ESSAY ON LONGFELLOW

LONGFELLOW

Longfellow and his Poetry
These are many great poets. Longfellow is one of the few poets that put together novel
type works. He created some of the best poetry ever written. Longfellow's narrative
poems, such as Evangeline, The song of Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish,
gave a romanticized view of America's early history and democratic ideals.
Evangeline is one of the best long poems ever written by any author. It's popularity at
through all class distinctions. It was read and loved and pondered over in humble
cottages (Wagonknecht P.85). Evangeline was the first long poem in America literature to
live beyond its own time, and it would be impossible to exaggerate its vogue, either at
home or abroad (Wagonknecht P.85).
The historical basis of the story was supplied in 1755 by the expulsion of the French
settlers from the vicinity of the boy of Minas in Acadie as an incident of the conflict
between France and England for possession of the North American continent (Wagonknecht
P.86).
In the poem Evangeline they are unable to find Gabriel. Evangelines party arrives at a
village and finds Gabriel's father Basil, who tells Evangeline that Gabriel had left only
the day before with a party going to the Ozark Mountains to trade for moles with the
Spaniards. The priest assures her, however, that the party will return to the mission in
autumn when the hunting season is over. Evangeline decides to accept the priest's advice
to await her lover at the mission. But the autumn comes and passes, with no Gabriel, so
she again resumes her pursuit (Williams P.153 &154).
Gabriel Lajeunesse, in his passiuity and elusiveness, is unconsciously fleeing from
Evangeline rather than seeking her out. Certainly he is no dominating and aggressive
Odysseus, anymore than Evangeline is a merely stead fast and long-waiting Penelope; and
the poem, in itself and in the popular imagination, is hers, not Gabriels (Arvin
P.100-101).
Evangeline is nothing if not persistent. It apparently never occurred to the Victorian
Longfellow that anyone would question the virtue of a maiden who would voyage for years
unchaperoned with the rough men of the frontier and even spend a summer and autumn as the
only women in a mission full of men (Williams P.154). It is what imparts to Evagneline
its particular Longfellow character of delicate and rather teminine pathos, and deprives
it of the true heroic strain. But pathos of this sort is a genuine poetic effect, and it
is felt and expressed so purely, so appropriately, here as to escape the charge of
sentimentality (Arvin P.101-102). 
The Song of Hiawatha is one of the few great long poems by Longfellow. Longfellow, in the
eyes of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793 - 1864), ethnologist, explorer, and Indian Agent,
who had married a half - Ojibway woman, and who would give credit to Longfellow with
having, for the time, portrayed the Indian correctly in the literature. Longfellow
combined the mythical with the historical and undercut the heroic stature of his
characters by presenting them as "child - like and immature," not universally human.
Sometimes he presented nature as in different to human wants and sometimes as sympathetic
(Wagenknecht p. 102 and 96).
Hiawatha is a long and many - sided poem, in which readers mat be trusted to fin their
own tastes and interests, but one can hardly believe that many would fail to respond to
the famous passages from "Hiawath'a childhood" in canto 3 (Wagenknecht p. 99). Hiawatha
is not born by immaculate conception nor does he spring full-grown from the brow of a
god, but he does have a supernatural origin. The "beautiful Nokomis," who is "a wife, but
not a mother," through the act of a jealous rival falls from the moon to a beautiful
meadow on earth, where she gives birth to a winsome daughter, Wenonah. Nokomis warned
Wenonah against the west - wind, but vainly so she " Bore a son of love and sorrow." Thus
was born my Hiawatha. Hiawatha's mother dies deserted by the faithless west - wind, and
the "child of wonder" is reared by his grandmother Nokomis until he finds out about his
mother and his fickle father. Despites Nokomis attempt to dissuade him, as he sets out to
find his father, and he does. Mudjekeewis welcomes him because he brings back memories of
"the beautiful Wenonah." After they have talked for days, Hiawatha remembers his quarrel
with his father, and they have a prodigious battle, resulting, in a draw, since neither
can be killed. Hiawatha then returns to his people with his father's injunction. He
pauses only once on the way home, to purchase arrow from the ancient arrowmaker at the
Falls of Minnehaha in the land of the Dacotahs. Here he becomes enamored of the arrow
maker's dark-eyed daughter, for whom the falls are named. Thus from this you can see
Hiawatha has a supernatural origin (Williams P.160-161).
The Courtship of Miles Standish is third of four poems in a set. The characterization in
The Courtship of Miles Standish is more detailed than in either Evangeline or Hiawatha,
and the characters are presented more realistically and with greater sophistication.
Humor appears notably for the first time and the balance is held nicely even between
comedy and drama. Standish's problem is that he himself loves Priscilla though he has
never told her friends, Though he recognizes, that the impossible has been asked of him,
he knows too that "the name of friendship is sacred," and he has no power to deny what is
asked of him in that name. For what came to be called "The New England conscience" is
already well developed in him, and he tries not only to face up to his or deal but to
regard is as God's command and sorrow that he has brought upon himself through his own
wickedness (Wagonknecht P.108-109).
Longfellow was not done with the Indian's they reappear in the Courtship of Miles
Standish, only now they are not legendary prophets and singers, boosters and tricksters,
but historical Wampunoag Indians, such as the settlers of Plymouth had encountered in all
their solid actuality on the shores and in the woods of Massachusetts. The young woman he
is in love with is an appreciably stronger character, as Elsie and Evangeline had been.
It is true Alder compares Priscilla sentimentally to a Mayflowers, ' Modestand simple and
sweet". The Puritan color of the poem is kept up not only by the austuyre landscape and
seascape, but by the constant and always natural recurrence. Longfellow's resolution at a
triangular romantic situation in the early days of little pilgrim colony of Plymouth is
one of his most perfectly realized poems. (Arvin P.161-170).
Longfellow wrote many great poems. The three stated here are probably the best ever wrote
by this legendary poet. All three poems are well known and read to the day. That makes
them great.