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William Cullen Bryant
In 1819 William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) published “On Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Measure,” a technical essay on prosody in which the young poet argued that American poets needed a greater freedom than that allowed by the practice of the 18th-century Neoclassical English poet Alexander Pope. Bryant had himself already demonstrated his mastery of iambic pentameter, the meter of Shakespeare and Milton as well as of Pope, in his poem “Thanatopsis” (1817). Both essay and poem demonstrate Bryant’s mastery of the English poetic tradition as well as his interest in extending its range in America, not by rejection of that tradition but, like Wordsworth in England, by utilizing pre-18th-century freedoms to write verse closer to “the language of men,” or in Bryant’s case, closer to American language and experience.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In contrast to Bryant, who wrote some of his best poetry as well as his theories of poetry while still in his teens, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was slow in developing his poetic career. His first book of poems, Voices of the Night (1839), did not appear until he was in his thirties; Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), the poem that made him a figure in world literature, was published when he was forty. Life in his twenties, however, provided the foundation for his long career. After graduating from Bowdoin College, where he was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Longfellow travelled to Europe. There he spent three years studying and traveling before returning to Bowdoin as a professor of modern languages. His studies expanded to include the literature of the Middle Ages while his craft developed through extensive work translating European poetry. After accepting a position at Harvard, he travelled again to Europe, focusing on northern languages and writers. When at last he settled down to writing his own poetry, he was thoroughly versed in the full European heritage, both technically and culturally.
Like Bryant, Longfellow rejected the Augustan heroic couplet of Pope, although not, like Bryant, in favor of blank verse. Instead he turned to a remarkable variety of verse forms, the result of his experience translating a wide range of European poets. Thus he has no characteristic verse form of his own, as almost all subsequent American poets have had. So successful was he at some of the forms he practiced that he is identified with them—most notably the long hexameter lines of Evangeline and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1863) and the short trochaic lines of The Song of Hiawatha (1855)—but he sought no form expressive of himself. Nor did he write songs of himself, as did Whitman and, in her very different way, Dickinson, but songs of other people, creating a poetic world peopled, like Shakespeare’s and Chaucer’s, with deftly sketched individuals.
Longfellow’s sensibility though does come through in his choice of characters and stories and the moral universe they inhabit. He often creates, as in “The Village Blacksmith” (1841) and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1863), admirable individuals presented in a common, direct language that immediately makes the language of Bryant or even Wordsworth seem old-fashioned and artificial. That the presentation of these characters is sometimes accompanied by sententious moral didacticism reflects a stage in American culture when the literary form most familiar to readers was the Protestant sermon.
Longfellow’s poetry, however, goes beyond Protestant moralizing to present the fuller sense of life that Longfellow found not in Puritan New England but in his travels in Europe. Evangeline, Longfellow’s quintessential American story, is not a story of Puritan New Englanders but of the French Acadians displaced by English tyranny from their communal world of farming and fiddle music and nut-brown ale. The America in which Evangeline travels in search of her lover is the rich world of Louisiana bayous and Michigan forests and western plains. Even Priscilla in “The Courtship of Miles Standish” rejects the stern Puritan demeanor of Miles Standish in favor of a suitor more open to her outspoken femininity.
The darker aspects of life are also present, if not dominant, in Longfellow’s poetry. The charm and vigor of Native American traditions are captured in The Song of Hiawatha, but so too are the famine and sickness that enter the poem in the form of two silent visitors to Hiawatha’s wigwam, who presage the death of Minnehaha even as Hiawatha searches desperately but fruitlessly for game in the exhausted forest. The two plays that comprise The New England Tragedies (1868), Longfellow’s most successful dramatic verse, present the Puritan persecution of the Quakers and the Salem witch trials in uncompromising if melodramatic form as the forest leaves drip blood and the fields of New England are made a vast potter’s field of death. In “The Broken Oar,” the poet walking on Iceland’s ocean shore finds carved the words “Oft was I weary, when I toiled at thee,” and in recognition of his own weary toils throws his pen into the sea.