Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) stands as among the most celebrated poets in American literary history, a figure whose verses shaped national identity and whose personal and professional life remained deeply intertwined with the city of Boston and the broader landscape of Massachusetts. Born in Portland, Maine, Longfellow spent the most productive decades of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from Boston, and his influence on the region's cultural and intellectual life proved enduring long after his death. His poems, including "Paul Revere's Ride," "The Song of Hiawatha," and "Evangeline," entered the American canon and cemented his reputation as a defining voice of the nineteenth century.
History
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807, in Portland, Maine, to Stephen Longfellow, a lawyer, and Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow, whose own family had deep roots in New England history. From an early age, Longfellow demonstrated a facility for language and literature unusual for his years. He enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he graduated in 1825 alongside future president Franklin Pierce. His talent was recognized quickly, and Bowdoin offered him a professorship in modern languages on the condition that he study in Europe first. Longfellow accepted and spent several years in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, developing a command of European languages and literatures that would inform his later translations and original compositions.
After returning to the United States, Longfellow taught at Bowdoin before accepting a prestigious appointment at Harvard University in 1836 as the Smith Professor of Modern Languages. This position brought him definitively into the orbit of Boston and Cambridge, two cities that were then the intellectual and cultural center of American life. He took up residence at Craigie House on Brattle Street in Cambridge, a property that had served as George Washington's headquarters during the American Revolutionary War. This home, now preserved as the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, became the center of his social and creative world for the rest of his life.[1]
Longfellow's early years in Cambridge were marked by personal tragedy. His first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 following a miscarriage during their travels in Europe. He channeled his grief into his writing, producing some of the more emotionally resonant poetry of his early career. In 1843, he married Frances Appleton, the daughter of a wealthy Boston textile merchant, and the couple settled permanently at Craigie House, which Frances's father purchased as a wedding gift. The marriage brought Longfellow happiness, social stability, and connection to Boston's Brahmin elite. Tragedy struck again in 1861 when Frances died from burns sustained when her dress caught fire at home. Longfellow was himself badly burned trying to save her and was unable to attend her funeral. He grew the distinctive beard that marked his later portraits partly to conceal the scars left by this catastrophe.
Culture
Longfellow occupied a central place in the cultural life of Boston and Cambridge during the mid-nineteenth century. He was a member of the Saturday Club, a gathering of distinguished intellectuals and writers that met monthly at the Parker House hotel in Boston. His fellow members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell, figures who collectively shaped what later generations would call the Boston Brahmin literary tradition. These associations placed Longfellow at the heart of a network of ideas, publications, and institutions that made Boston among the most important literary cities in the English-speaking world during that era.[2]
Longfellow's work as a translator also carried significant cultural weight. He produced a celebrated translation of Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy," a monumental undertaking that he worked on in part as a way of coping with his grief following Frances's death. His translation introduced many American readers to Dante for the first time and demonstrated that American literary culture was capable of engaging seriously with the great works of European civilization. He organized a group of friends and scholars who met regularly at Craigie House to critique drafts of the translation, a gathering known informally as the Dante Club. This intellectual circle reflected the cosmopolitan aspirations of Boston's cultural elite during the post-Civil War period.
Beyond his personal associations, Longfellow's poems contributed directly to the mythologies and self-understanding of Boston and Massachusetts. "Paul Revere's Ride," published in 1861 as part of his collection "Tales of a Wayside Inn," dramatized the midnight journey of Boston silversmith and patriot Paul Revere on the eve of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The poem, though not strictly accurate as a historical account, fixed Revere's story in the popular imagination and gave the people of Boston and Massachusetts a vivid narrative of revolutionary courage. It remains among the most recited poems in American history and contributed to the ongoing cultural significance of sites such as the Old North Church and Lexington Green.[3]
Attractions
The physical legacy of Longfellow's life in the Boston area is preserved at several sites accessible to visitors today. The most significant is the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site at 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, administered by the National Park Service. The property preserves the Federal-style mansion where Longfellow lived from 1837 until his death in 1882, and it contains an extraordinary collection of his personal library, manuscripts, artwork, and furnishings. The house offers guided tours and public programming that explore both Longfellow's literary life and the earlier history of the structure during the Revolutionary War period.
Another major site connected to Longfellow's legacy is the Cambridge Cemetery, where he is buried alongside his wife Frances and other family members. The cemetery, located on Coolidge Avenue in Cambridge, is a quiet and reflective space that attracts visitors interested in the history of New England intellectual life. In addition, the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, one of the first garden cemeteries in the United States, contains the graves of many of Longfellow's contemporaries from the Boston literary world, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and James Russell Lowell, and serves as an important site of historical and horticultural interest in its own right. Longfellow's presence in Cambridge transformed Brattle Street into what some came to call "Tory Row," a stretch of grand homes whose associations with major historical figures make it among the most historically layered streets in the region.[4]
Notable Residents
While Longfellow himself is the central figure of this article, his story cannot be fully understood apart from the community of notable individuals who surrounded him in Boston and Cambridge. His colleague and friend Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was a physician, poet, and essayist who coined the very term "Boston Brahmin" to describe the city's hereditary intellectual aristocracy. Holmes lived on Beacon Street in Boston and maintained a close friendship with Longfellow that lasted for decades. Their correspondence and mutual support illustrate the collegial nature of Boston's literary culture during the nineteenth century.
James Russell Lowell, another member of Longfellow's immediate circle, succeeded him as Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard and later served as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the literary magazine founded in Boston in 1857. Lowell's career illustrates the way in which the networks centered on Longfellow extended outward into institutions that shaped American letters for generations. The Atlantic Monthly itself, founded in part through the efforts of Longfellow's associates, remains among the most significant publications in American cultural history and continues to operate today as a major journal of ideas and culture. These overlapping connections between Longfellow, his contemporaries, and the institutions of Boston's intellectual life constitute among the most remarkable clusters of literary talent in American history.[5]