In contrast to these scenes one also glimpses the rush of flowing waters in moonlight. However one reads it, it shows an American delight in the brilliance and facility of its technical achievements: the unryhmed trochees of “Hiawatha,” the hexameters of “Evange line,” the clever use of Drayton’s “Battle of Agincourt” stanzas—also echoed in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”—in the writing of “The Skeleton in Armor.” One of the signs of Longfellow’s genius was his brilliance in writing the skilled tour de force—an American skill carried forward by active phrasing in which one thinks of his “Let us then be up and doing.” This kind of brightness has been characteristic of American verse from Longfellow’s youth to the present day.

But before we continue to discuss Longfellow’s place in the tradition of American poetry, it is best to look briefly at the list of charges that have been brought against his name. The contra-Longfellow charges came as early as 1840, when an anonymous reviewer of his Voices of the Night accused him of plagiarism. This was reiterated five years later by Edgar Allan Poe, who, in reviewing Longfellow’s anthology The Waif, wrote, “Somebody’s a thief.” With an air of kindly dignity, Longfellow refused to be drawn into a public quarrel, first of all because his so-called “plagiarisms” were no more than distant echoes of their sources, and secondly, because the very nature (so often misunderstood) of his poetic gifts was transforming, and frequently translating, feelings, observations, and perceptions from one environment—or language—to another. To adverse critics, his withdrawals from direct controversy may well have seemed a sign of snobbery, effeminacy, or dandyism—or an unattractive combination of all three. Behind his well-bred manners and gaily colored waistcoats, he was far more eccentric, more candid, more naïve, more “the real thing” than he seemed—but more of this later. Through the 1840s, he was the highly valued contributor of verse to the Knickerbocker Magazine, which was to its many readers what the New Yorker is to the American public of today.

In these distant subcurrents of critical disfavor one can now see the beginnings of uneasiness, annoyance, or ridicule that greeted the mention of Longfellow’s name fifty years ago. The charges of plagiarism were, of course, long since washed away, but in their stead, something, ever so remotely like them, came in view. From childhood onward his writing of poems demanded a literary precedent. With his mother, the romantic and handsome Zilpah Wadsworth, at the piano, he learned to sing the songs of Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell, and the Anglo-Irish poet Tom Moore. In America generally, Moore was easily the favorite of these three. Moore’s singing of his “Irish Melodies” was edged by sighs and whispers that hinted of melancholy smiles; Moore’s visit to the United States had been a great success. He sang his way through one fashionable drawing room to the next. The very language of Moore’s melodies was soon accepted as a criterion of poetic diction in America, and it was this criterion that provided a precedent for the language and musical ingenuity of nine-tenths of the verse that Longfellow was to write.

During the period (the Napoleonic Wars) out of which Moore’s melodies grew, the English language was at its weakest, invaded, as it were, by the hastily scrawled beginnings of popular journalism, words written at “a penny-a-line.” The formal distinction and the sharp-edged vigor of Doctor Johnsonian rhetoric were falling away—nor had the richer phrasing and imagery of the romantics had time to establish themselves. The language of the period was not a good precedent to follow: it was feeble in wit, weak in expressing its sentiments—and therefore sentimental. All too frequently readers were asked to share scenes of “human interest” in which middle-class domestic woes and tears were plentiful. “Little Nell,” Charles Dickens’s try at pathos at his worst, was of this unhappy origin. The language of Moore’s melodies, and later, Longfellow’s tales, translations, and lyrics, was a refinement of a fashionable poetic speech and sentiment that quickly crossed and recrossed the Atlantic.

Illustrating a refinement of the weakness Longfellow was to make his own are these lines from “Maiden hood”:

Oh, thou child of many prayers!
Life hath quicksands,—Life hath snares!
Care and age come unawares!

Longfellow’s habit of writing all-too-easily worded sermons into verse came from sources that were also pre-Victorian.

One was in the Protestant ardors of his charming mother, but the others were literary. Longfellow’s moralizings were readily accepted both in England and America by a generation whose fathers eagerly bought and read books of sermons—and the fact that sermons then (1790-1845) seemed to overflow into verse only served to make the verse that contained them more popular. The present century’s discontent with Longfellow’s homilies is that they sound sententious, platitudinous, superficial. They seem tacked on to or artificially built in to the poems in which they appear. Certainly they add nothing to the pictorial perspective and lyrical charm of his verse. It was not so much that Longfellow was insincere—he probably felt that what he preached was true—but that his everyday thinking was of a conservative cast—and consistent with his need to follow literary precedents.

No less annoying to contemporary readers of Longfellow’s verse is the spirit—which often threatens to become a little bit too cozy—of domesticity that hovers over many of his lines. It was Thomas Bailly Aldrich who suggested that Longfellow write one of his “fireside poems,” “The Hanging of the Crane,” which contains the facile picture of:

A little angel unaware,
With face as round as is the moon,
A royal guest with flaxen hair,
Who, throned upon his lofty chair,
Drums on the table with his spoon, . . .

Longfellow’s “easy writing” never made “hard reading,” but the passage of time made some of it look indecently respectable and coy. Longfellow’s failings were never petty flaws, but were commensurate with his large intentions and the enduring total of his accomplishments—which were not small. With a few of the twentieth-century contra-Longfellow prejudices out of the way, we can then advance toward the strange, less well-known aspects of his life and writings.

II

The best of Longfellow as well as his worst may be traced back to his adolescence and early manhood. Intimations of the kind of poet he was to become have their sources in the Wadsworth-Longfellow heritage. In 1807 in Portland, Maine, a brisk, colorful seaport town, he was born into the upper gentry of two New England families: his Wadsworth grandfather was a general; his Longfellow grandfather, a judge.