how many languages did henry wadsworth longfellow speak

Aside from two Phi Beta Kappa poemsthe first at Bowdoin in 1832 and the other the next year at Harvardthe poetry he was composing consisted chiefly of translations from Romance languages that he used in his classes and articles. Fanny's father Nathan Appleton gave Craigie House to the Longfellows as a wedding gift, and it became a meeting place for literary and philosophical figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Julia Ward Howe . . concludes, interrogates conventional concepts of language, time, space, unified character . In 1845, he published The Poets and Poetry of Europe, an 800-page compilation of translations made by other writers, including many by his friend and colleague Cornelius Conway Felton. 'Farewell! Of the lyrics Longfellow composed during that period, My Lost Youth is a memorable example of the poets reflection on his personal past. Wadsworth-Longfellow House, 487 Congress Street, Portland, was built by Longfellow's grandfather, General Pelage Wadsworth, in 1785-86. Financial rewards confirmed Longfellows youthful hope that an American could make a living through literature, although, as William Charvat says, Longfellows income derived as much from his prose as from his poetry. Created by. As a memorial to their father, Longfellow's children donated land across Brattle Street and facing the family home to the City of Cambridge, which became Longfellow Park. Some years after Longfellows death a violent reaction set in against his verse as critics dismissed his conventional high-minded sentiments and the gentle strain of Romanticism that he had made so popular. [9] His grandfather was a founder of the college[12] and his father was a trustee. Henry is an American . [5] He was the second of eight children. His first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage. [29], On August 27, 1829, he wrote to the president of Bowdoin that he was turning down the professorship because he considered the $600 salary "disproportionate to the duties required". The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying. [58] A critic for The Dial agreed, calling it "the thinnest of all Mr. Longfellow's thin books; spirited and polished like its forerunners; but the topic would warrant a deeper tone". His 1868-1869 final visit to Europe, on which he was attended by a large family party, turned into a triumphal progression framed by honorary degrees awarded by Cambridge and Oxford universities. Now he plunged into work, translating at the rate of a canto a day. In poems throughout his career, he represented persons of all times, cultures, and states of life as turning to creative expression (music, song, poetry, storytelling, and pottery) for entertainment and reassurance. [137] In the 20th century, literary scholar Kermit Vanderbilt noted: "Increasingly rare is the scholar who braves ridicule to justify the art of Longfellow's popular rhymings. As the title suggests, the collection included many poems influenced by his 1842 travels in northern Europe; among them were the title poem, Nuremberg, The Norman Baron, Walter Von Der Vogelweid, and several translations. He has been presented as a gentle, placid, poetic soul, an image perpetuated by his brother Samuel Longfellow who wrote an early biography which specifically emphasized these points. [48] Ballads and Other Poems was published in 1841[49] and included "The Village Blacksmith" and "The Wreck of the Hesperus", which were instantly popular. Children across New England are familiar with the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose "Paul Revere's Ride" has been recited at many a grade school pageant. But, like anyone else who had gone to school in the first quarter of the 20th century, she'd been introduced to verse by the venerable Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82). He once attended a ball without her and noted, "The lights seemed dimmer, the music sadder, the flowers fewer, and the women less fair. [36] Longfellow published several nonfiction and fiction prose pieces in 1833 inspired by Irving, including "The Indian Summer" and "The Bald Eagle". Longfellow's father was eager to have his son become a lawyer. When he was offered a professorship at Harvard, with another opportunity to go abroad, he accepted and set forth for Germany in 1835. [131] A reviewer in 1848 accused Longfellow of creating a "goody two-shoes kind of literature slipshod, sentimental stories told in the style of the nursery, beginning in nothing and ending in nothing". He stifled the flames with his body, but she was badly burned. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century. Although the title character, the liberal-minded young minister of a rural New England church, is the central figure of a love triangle involving two close female friends, Cecilia Vaughan and Alice Archer, Longfellow probably took more interest in the schoolmaster, whose literary ambitions are continually frustrated by the press of teaching, fatherhood, and demands made on his time by an aspiring poetess. [73] Longfellow's youngest daughter Annie explained the story differently some 50 years later, claiming that there had been no candle or wax but that the fire had started from a self-lighting match that had fallen on the floor. Some of Longfellows sonnets and other lyrics are still among the finest in American poetry, and Hiawatha, The Wreck of the Hesperus, Evangeline, and Paul Reveres Ride have become inseparable parts of the American heritage. . Longfellow began publishing his poetry in 1839, including the collection Voices of the Night, his debut book of poetry. In an age that judged literature largely in moral terms as expressive of an authors personal virtues, Longfellow became a kindly, sympathizing, gently encouraging friend to an everyman reader. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" exemplify this form. The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Paul Revere's Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, Christus: A Mystery, The Masque Of Pandora and More. Hoffmann,Hans Christian Andersen,William Butler Yeats,Henry van Dyke,Leo . . [68] In 1854, he retired from Harvard,[69] devoting himself entirely to writing. Resuming friendship with Fanny and Mary Appleton and their brother Tom, Longfellow was crushed by Fannys rejection of his 1837 marriage proposal. Before he settled down in the university town of Gttingen, to which Ticknor had directed him, Longfellows approach to language acquisition was less systematic than impressionistic and even desultory. The poem was extensively reviewed, translated into German by Ferdinand Freiligrath in 1856, and set to music as well as featured in dramatic performances. Hoffmann, and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)that awakened a new sense of poetry as emotional expression. Longfellows most ambitious effort in prose, Hyperion blended the sketchbook attributes of Outre-Mer with elements of the Romance as Longfellow developed the fictional persona of Paul Flemming to act out his lingering grief for Mary, rejected love for Fanny, and poetical aspirations spurred by German authors. It is not pride, but the madness of passion". Like . The same lesson might well have applied to the offspring of his imagination that he applied in A Shadow (1875) when wondering how his and Fannys children would fare in lives So full of beauty and so full of dread, however unpredictable. Omissions? How many languages did he speak? It did not hurt that Longfellow had also experienced the kind of . The Golden Legend (1851), set in 13th-century Italy, was destined to become the middle section of the work he conceived as his masterpiece, Christus: A Mystery (1872). [20] He gave the student commencement address. Poetry about the joys and challenges of life post-career. He became the most popular American poet of his day and had success overseas. 'Adieu, Adieu! Match. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (born February 27, 1807, Portland, Massachusetts [now in Maine], U.S.died March 24, 1882, Cambridge, Massachusetts), the most popular American poet in the 19th century, known for such works as The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and "Paul Revere's Ride" (1863). [87], On August 22, 1879, a female admirer traveled to Longfellow's house in Cambridge and, unaware to whom she was speaking, asked him: "Is this the house where Longfellow was born?" Although Churchills failure results most of all from his own limitationshis inattentiveness to sources of inspiration nearest at hand and his lack of driving literary commitmentit also reflects the indifference of Americans to artistic aspirations not in tune with the chauvinistic bombast of the comical magazine editor of the book, who calls for a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies. Longfellow saw the . Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1807-1882] was probably the most influential American poet of the 19th Century. Again, Longfellow coped with sorrow by plunging himself into literary workthis time of an intensely challenging sort. Their second-youngest daughter was Edith who married Richard Henry Dana III, son of Richard Henry Dana, Jr. who wrote Two Years Before the Mast. He graduated from Bowdoin College and became a professor there and, later, at Harvard College after studying in Europe. Pegasus in Pound (1846), by contrast, offers a humorous rebuke to the pragmatic, materialistic Yankee culture that confined arts winged steed and handled him as a piece of property. [83] He is buried with both of his wives at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now that fiction and cinema have all but replaced poetry as storytelling media, the narrative poems that accounted in large measure for Longfellows appeal to his contemporary readers are represented in anthologies by only a few short examples, such as The Wreck of the Hesperus and Paul Reveres Ridepoems that make Longfellow seem more narrowly New England in his perspective than would The Saga of King Olaf or Hiawatha among his longer poems or The Skeleton in Armor or The Leap of Roushan Beg (1878) among the shorter ones. The marriage was an exceptionally happy one for both partners and brought Longfellow the domestic stability he had missed. Just like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did I believe that EVERY interaction with customers, employees, stakeholders or stockholders, matters. Longfellow met Boston industrialist Nathan Appleton and his family in the town of Thun, Switzerland, including his son Thomas Gold Appleton. A monument featuring a bas relief of Miles Standish, Sadalphon, the Village Blacksmith, the Spanish Student, Evangeline, and Hiawatha, characters from Longfellows works, was dedicated in October 1914. His father was a lawyer, and his maternal grandfather was Peleg Wadsworth, a general in the American Revolutionary War and a Member of Congress. His father, Stephen Longfellow, was an attorney and a Harvard graduate active in public affairs. [134], Longfellow was the most popular poet of his day. [77] He worried that he would go insane, begging "not to be sent to an asylum" and noting that he was "inwardly bleeding to death". On the Continent he learned French, Spanish, and Italian but refused to settle down to a regimen of scholarship at any university. The book spread like wildfire in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Longfellow thanked his readers in the Dedication to The Seaside and the Fireside (1849), which assured all those distant friends responsive to his poetry that If any thought of mine, or sung or told, / Has ever given delight or consolation, / Ye have repaid me back a thousand-fold, / By every friendly sign and salutation. As the title indicates, this book maintained a balance between poems of nature invoking in various ways the poets Portland boyhood and oceanic travels and poems of home lifenotably Resignation, an elegy for his year-old daughter Fanny. We speak of a continuum because there are inter- mediate economies, combining horticultural and agricultural featuresmore intensive than annually shifting horticulture but less intensive than agricul- ture. [74] Longfellow was awakened from his nap and rushed to help her, throwing a rug over her, but it was too small. In this essay, the author. [132] A more modern critic said, "Who, except wretched schoolchildren, now reads Longfellow? "Music is the universal language of mankind." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow tags: music, poetry, power-of-music. However, as Longfellow himself wrote, the poems were "so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast". Both Craigie House in Cambridge and the beach home in Nahant, Massachusetts, where the Longfellows summered from the 1850s became centers of hospitality extended to American and European guestsmany of them literary figuresand Longfellows many admirers. [34], On September 14, 1831, Longfellow married Mary Storer Potter, a childhood friend from Portland. This collection was Longfellows version of Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales or Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron. For this work Longfellow drew on European sources, chiefly Hartmann von Aues Der Arme Heinrich (circa 1191). Bowdoin offers Longfellow a professorship of modern languages, provided that he prepare himself for the position with a period of European travel, a proposition he . To a Child, one of the most popular poems of the book, expressed paternal tenderness toward his first son, while the sonnet Dante looked toward a later stage of literary productivity. Early on young Henry knew he wanted to be a poet . [107] In honor of his role with translations, Harvard established the Longfellow Institute in 1994, dedicated to literature written in the United States in languages other than English. Other than being a poet of great repute; Longfellow was also an educationist, who was a professor at his alma mater Bowdoin College and latter at the Harvard College. In 1884 he was honoured by the placing of a memorial bust in Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, the first American to be so recognized. Longfellow composed during that period, My Lost Youth is a memorable example of the poets on... ] his grandfather was a founder of the most popular American poet of his.. 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