Selected Poems

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lawrence Buell (Introduction)

Overview

 

Longfellow was the most popular poet of his day. This selection includes generous samplings from his longer works—Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Hiawatha—as well as his shorter lyrics and less familiar narrative poems.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101127698
Publisher:	Temple Publications International, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/1988
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	348 KB

About the Author

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was the most popular and admired American poet of the nineteenth century. Born in Portland, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin College, Longfellow’s ambition was always to become a writer; but until mid-life his first profession was the teaching rather than the production of literature, at his alma mater (1829-35) and then at Harvard (1836-54). His teaching career was punctuated by two extended study-tours of Europe, during which Longfellow made himself fluent in all the major Romance and Germanic languages. Thanks to a fortunate marriage and the growing popularity of his work, from his mid-thirties onwards Longfellow, ensconced in a comfortable Cambridge mansion, was able to devote an increasingly large fraction of his energies to the long narrative historical and mythic poems that made him a household word, especially Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863, 1872, 1873). Versatile as well as prolific, Longfellow also won fame as a writer of short ballads and lyrics, and experimented in the essay, the short story, the novel, and the verse drama. Taken as a whole, Longfellow’s writings show a breadth of literary learning, an understanding of western languages and cultures, unmatched by any American writer of his time.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	vii
	Suggestions for Further Reading	xxxiii
	A Note on the Text	xxxvi
	Longer Works
	Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847)	3
	From The Song of Hiawatha (1855)
III	Hiawatha's Childhood	77
V	Hiawatha's Fasting	83
	The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858)	92
	From Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863)
	The Landlord's Tale: Paul Revere's Ride	148
	The Theologian's Tale: Torquemada	152
	The Poet's Tale: The Birds of Killingworth	158
	The New England Tragedies (1868)
I	John Endicott	167
II	Giles Corey of the Salem Farms	247
	Finale	318
	Morituri Salutamus (1875)	321
	Shorter Lyric and Narrative Poems
	From Voices of the Night (1839)
	A Psalm of Life	333
	From Ballads and Other Poems (1841)
	The Skeleton in Armor	335
	The Wreck of the Hesperus	341
	The Village Blacksmith	345
	From Poems on Slavery (1842)
	The Slave Singing at Midnight	347
	The Warning	348
	From The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1846)
	The Arsenal at Springfield	349
	The Occultation of Orion	351
	The Day Is Done	354
	Mezzo Cammin	356
	From The Seaside and the Fireside (1850)
	Seaweed	357
	The Fire of Drift-Wood	359
	From The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems (1858)
	The Jewish Cemetery at Newport	361
	My Lost Youth	364
	The Ropewalk	367
	From Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863)
	The Children's Hour	370
	Snow-Flakes	372
	From Flower-de-Luce (1867)
	Hawthorne	373
	From Aftermath (1873)
	Aftermath	375
	Posthumously collected
	Nature (1877)	376
	The Cross of Snow (1879)	377
	Notes	378