Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.
Driven by the need for spiritual relief, he translated The Divine Comedy by Dante, producing one of the most notable translations to that time, and wrote six sonnets on Dante that are among his finest poems. But the death in 1861 of his second wife, after she accidentally set her dress on fire, plunged him into melancholy.
Longfellow’s long poem The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) was another great popular success. Both the poem and its singsong metre have been frequent objects of parody. Hiawatha is an Ojibwa Indian who, after various mythic feats, becomes his people’s leader and marries Minnehaha before departing for the Isles of the Blessed. In 1855, using Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s two books on the Indian tribes of North America as the base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his medium, he fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Longfellow presided over Harvard’s modern-language program for 18 years and then left teaching in 1854. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying. It is a sentimental tale of two lovers separated when British soldiers expel the Acadians (French colonists) from what is now Nova Scotia. Longfellow was more at home in Evangeline (1847), a narrative poem that reached almost every literate home in the United States. The antislavery sentiments he expressed in Poems on Slavery that same year, however, lacked the humanity and power of John Greenleaf Whittier’s denunciations on the same theme. In 1842 his Ballads and Other Poems, containing such favourites as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith,” swept the nation. That same year Longfellow published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his European travels. In 1839 he published Voices of the Night, which contained the poems “Hymn to the Night,” “The Psalm of Life,” and “The Light of the Stars” and achieved immediate popularity. His travel sketches, Outre-Mer (1835), did not succeed. In 1836 Longfellow returned to Harvard and settled in the famous Craigie House, which was later given to him as a wedding present when he remarried in 1843. The Song of Hiawatha, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and other poetry In 1835, saddened by the death of his first wife, whom he had married in 1831, he settled at Heidelberg, where he fell under the influence of German Romanticism. On this trip he visited England, Sweden, and the Netherlands. When he was offered a professorship at Harvard, with another opportunity to go abroad, he accepted and set forth for Germany in 1835. He wrote and edited textbooks, translated poetry and prose, and wrote essays on French, Spanish, and Italian literature, but he felt isolated. In 1829 he returned to the United States to be a professor and librarian at Bowdoin. On the Continent he learned French, Spanish, and Italian but refused to settle down to a regimen of scholarship at any university. Love literature? This quiz sorts out the truth about beloved authors and stories, old and new.
Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them!
#Longfellow sail forth how to#
COVID-19 Portal While this global health crisis continues to evolve, it can be useful to look to past pandemics to better understand how to respond today.Student Portal Britannica is the ultimate student resource for key school subjects like history, government, literature, and more.From tech to household and wellness products. Britannica Explains In these videos, Britannica explains a variety of topics and answers frequently asked questions.This Time in History In these videos, find out what happened this month (or any month!) in history.#WTFact Videos In #WTFact Britannica shares some of the most bizarre facts we can find.Demystified Videos In Demystified, Britannica has all the answers to your burning questions.Britannica Classics Check out these retro videos from Encyclopedia Britannica’s archives.
0 kommentar(er)
