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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow," readers are invited to explore a compendium of the celebrated poet's oeuvre, which encapsulates themes of love, nature, history, and personal reflection. Longfellow's writing is characterized by its melodic verse, vivid imagery, and profound lyricism. This collection serves not only as a testament to his formal craftsmanship but also illustrates his engagement with American romanticism and transcendentalism, revealing the deep cultural currents of 19th-century America amidst an evolving literary landscape. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was not just a poet; he was a cultural ambassador, absorbing influences from European literature and indigenous American traditions. His experiences'Äîranging from his studies at Harvard to his time living in Europe'Äîinfused his work with a cosmopolitan perspective, while his role as a translator and educator broadened his literary lens. His commitment to portraying the American experience and his innovative approach to verse echo the transformations of a nation grappling with its identity. This comprehensive collection is essential for readers who wish to delve into Longfellow's rich legacy. Whether you are a longtime admirer of his work or a newcomer seeking to appreciate the depth of 19th-century American poetry, this anthology provides an invaluable resource that celebrates the timeless beauty and poignant insights of one of America's most beloved poets.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents the complete poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, gathering in one place the full range of his verse: intimate lyrics, narrative poems, ballads, dramatic poems in verse, sonnet sequences, occasional pieces, and translations, together with fragments preserved from his papers. Organized to reflect the author’s own groupings and book-length projects, it enables readers to follow his development across the nineteenth century, from early meditations to the reflective maturity of his final years. The purpose is both archival and interpretive: to offer a trustworthy text while revealing the coherence of a career that joined storytelling, song, and scholarship in a single sustained endeavor.
The collection traces Longfellow’s progress through the volumes by which he first reached his audience and shaped his reputation. Early lyrics and ballads yield to the public and humanitarian verses, then to substantial narratives set in distinct historical and cultural horizons. Dramatic poems and cycles expand his canvas, while later sequences consolidate a quieter, epigrammatic mode. The arrangement preserves the architecture of books such as the ballad collections, the long narrative poems, the framed tales, and the late sonnets and occasional pieces, allowing each gathering to retain its internal balance and voice while contributing to the larger portrait of an evolving poetic imagination.
A concise account of genres shows the unusual breadth of Longfellow’s practice. The reader will find hymns, odes, and meditative lyrics; ballads and sea narratives; long narrative poems that function as verse romances and national idylls; framed tales told by multiple speakers; dramatic poems shaped in acts and scenes; sonnet cycles and individual sonnets; elegies and commemorative poems; seasonal and calendrical pieces; and a substantial body of translations. Each mode is not isolated but often converses with the others, as when lyrical interludes are embedded in dramas, or when a narrative adopts ballad structure, demonstrating his versatility across forms and occasions.
The translations form a crucial dimension of the whole. Selections here render poetry from Spanish, Swedish, Danish, German, Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, Portuguese, Eastern sources as presented in the period, and Latin. These versions range from medieval ballads and national songs to excerpts from epics and devotional lyrics. They document Longfellow’s engagement with earlier literatures and languages, and his effort to mediate them for Anglophone readers with clarity and musical cadence. The presence of these pieces beside his original work illuminates reciprocal influences: images, meters, and narrative types that moved across boundaries into his own poems, and, in turn, shaped how readers encountered world traditions.
Across volumes and decades, unifying themes recur with striking consistency. Memory and the passage of time, the solace of faith and conscience, grief and consolation, and the moral drama of choice inform even the most domestic scenes. Nature and the sea serve as both setting and emblem, from coastal storms and lighthouses to quiet woods and seasonal change. Work and craftsmanship—of the artisan, the sailor, the builder, and the poet—carry ethical weight. These abiding concerns are presented in accessible language and firm rhythms, aiming at a wide public while inviting closer scrutiny of symbol, metaphor, and the persistent interplay of shadow and light.
The American imagination of place and history courses through the narratives and ballads. New England landscapes, colonial episodes, and revolutionary moments are rendered in verse memorable for clear incident and strong cadence, while other poems revisit the Acadian story or shape Indigenous legend into a sustained epic measure. Such works neither exclude nor replace broader horizons: European settings, biblical narratives, and Norse and medieval materials form parallel strands. The result is a poetry that builds cultural bridges, situating American subjects within larger currents of legend and history, and inviting readers to consider how local experience and inherited story inform one another.
Stylistically, Longfellow’s hallmarks include lucidity of diction, regular yet varied meters, and an ear for refrain and memorable stanza. He experiments with form where the subject demands it: dactylic hexameter lends breadth to expansive narratives; trochaic tetrameter sustains a chant-like epic line; ballad measures sharpen incident and momentum; the sonnet condenses meditation into a poised volta. He values narrative clarity and melodic phrasing, favoring transparent syntax that supports image and motive. Allusion is precise and functional, drawing on classical, medieval, and scriptural sources to deepen resonance without impeding pace. The cumulative effect is a voice hospitable to general readers and attentive to craft.
His storytelling methods are equally distinctive. Framed narration gives multiple vantage points to shared themes, as a group of speakers turns a common hearth into a theater of voices. Ballads concentrate action in vivid scenes and recurring motifs, while longer poems follow characters across distance and hardship without sacrificing lyrical interludes. Even in dramatic poems, where dialogue carries thought, descriptive set pieces and embedded songs contribute texture. The narratives favor moral testing, steadfast affection, patience under trial, and the hope of homecoming. They balance incident with reflection, keeping pathos and restraint in measure, and aiming for closure that feels ethically earned.
Moral and civic imagination inform many occasional and public poems. A notable cluster addresses slavery directly, adopting a forthright ethical register. Other pieces contemplate the machinery of war and the longing for peace, commemorate civic places and events, and bear witness to acts of care and sacrifice. Elegies mark private and historical loss, while inscriptions and dedications honor learning and community. Without turning to polemic, these poems attend to conscience and solidarity, trusting that cadence and image can carry persuasion. Read together, they reveal a poet attentive to the demands of his moment and to the responsibilities of public utterance.
The dramatic poems extend his range from lyric reflection to staged inquiry, though designed for the page. One strand gathers biblical and ecclesiastical materials within a tripartite project, interleaving scriptural scenes, medieval legend, and New England history. Other dramas engage classical and Renaissance subjects, or reimagine mythic narratives to probe temptation, invention, and the cost of knowledge. Structured in acts and scenes, often interspersed with choruses and songs, these works pair narrative drive with meditative cadence. They place figures at moral and historical crossroads, using dialogue to test conviction and doubt, and to illuminate the tension between private conscience and public fate.
The later books show a marked turn to concise reflection and sequence. The flights gathered under a migratory banner intermix travel, recollection, and meditative vignette. The sonnets refine his compactness, addressing fellow poets, places, and abstract themes with disciplined architecture. A calendrical cycle moves month by month, pairing season and mood. Valedictory gatherings and final fragments register an elegiac clarity: memory is precise but unadorned, technical means are sure but unobtrusive, and the thematic compass narrows toward time, loyalty, and the work of words themselves. These closing chapters answer the spacious narratives with intimate measure and tempered light.
As a whole, this collection endures for the steadiness of its craft, the generosity of its feeling, and the breadth of its cultural conversation. It preserves narratives that helped articulate a shared past, lyrics that entered common memory, and translations that widened the horizon of English-language readers. The arrangement lets one trace continuities—song and story, faith and fortitude—alongside experiment and renewal. Scholars will find a coherent record of form and influence; general readers will find clear pathways into long and short forms alike. Taken together, these poems show how a life in verse can be both hospitable and exacting, public and deeply personal.
Author Biography
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was among the most widely read American poets of the 19th century, a central figure of the so‑called Fireside Poets whose verse shaped public taste in the United States and abroad. Known for narrative poems, lyrical meditations, and translations, he blended European forms with American subjects, offering accessible rhythms and moral clarity that made his work a staple of recitation and schoolroom anthologies. His poems engaged history, legend, and domestic life, aiming for consolation as well as uplift. Longfellow’s cultural authority in his lifetime was exceptional, and his popularity helped legitimize poetry as a civic and educational medium in America.
Born in Portland, Maine, Longfellow studied at Bowdoin College, where he developed proficiency in classical and modern languages and began publishing juvenilia in regional periodicals. After graduation he pursued extended study in Europe, immersing himself in French, Spanish, Italian, and German literatures and absorbing Romantic aesthetics then flourishing on the Continent. Returning to the United States, he taught modern languages at Bowdoin, helping to introduce systematic language instruction and comparative literary study. His early critical and editorial work, alongside travel writing and translations, signaled a lifelong commitment to mediating between European traditions and an emerging American literary identity grounded in history and vernacular speech.
In the mid‑1830s Longfellow accepted a professorship at Harvard, settled in Cambridge, and embarked on a sustained period of publication. Voices of the Night (1839) brought him broad attention through poems such as A Psalm of Life, whose optimistic stoicism resonated widely. The same year he issued the prose romance Hyperion, followed by Ballads and Other Poems (1841), which included The Wreck of the Hesperus. Responding to intensifying national debates, he published Poems on Slavery (1842), aligning his moral sympathies against the institution. He also edited The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845), an anthology reflecting his belief that American letters benefited from informed engagement with continental models.
Longfellow’s middle period produced the long narratives that secured his mass readership. Evangeline (1847) employed dactylic hexameter to recount the Acadian exile, marrying classical cadence to North American history. The Building of the Ship (1849) offered a civic allegory of national endurance. The Golden Legend (1851) reimagined medieval story within a modern framework. The Song of Hiawatha (1855), written in trochaic tetrameter and drawing on Indigenous lore largely mediated through published ethnographic sources, attempted an American mythic epic. The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) and Paul Revere’s Ride (1860) further mined colonial and Revolutionary episodes, combining narrative clarity, memorable phrasing, and musical regularity.
Personal loss deeply marked Longfellow’s later writing. His first marriage ended in bereavement, and his second wife died after a tragic household accident that also injured him. Retreating from public life for a time, he continued to craft reflective, elegiac verse that balanced private grief with public address. Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) framed diverse narratives within a convivial storytelling setting and later housed Paul Revere’s Ride for many readers. He wrote sonnets of restrained emotion, and, years afterward, composed The Cross of Snow, a meditation on enduring mourning published posthumously. During the Civil War era, his poems offered solace amid national upheaval.
Alongside original poetry, Longfellow pursued rigorous translation and editorial work that broadened American literary horizons. He led a collaborative effort in Cambridge to translate Dante’s Divine Comedy, issuing a complete version in the late 1860s that favored literal fidelity accompanied by extensive notes. He continued to compile and translate from Spanish, German, and Scandinavian sources, strengthening the infrastructure for comparative literature in the United States. As a teacher and public intellectual, he helped normalize the idea that American poetry could converse with global traditions while remaining rooted in local voices. His metrics, didactic clarity, and humane tone made him a household name.
Longfellow resigned his Harvard chair in the 1850s to devote himself to writing, and he remained a figure of international renown into his final years. Memorialized by public statues and commemorations, he became emblematic of a cultivated, civic role for poetry. Early 20th‑century critics often dismissed him as sentimental or conventional, yet later reassessments have highlighted his craftsmanship, technical experiment within received forms, and success at creating a shared cultural repertoire. Contemporary readers weigh that achievement alongside debates about representation in works like The Song of Hiawatha. His poems continue to circulate in anthologies, classrooms, and public memory, sustaining a durable legacy.
Historical Context
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) came of age as the United States sought a literature equal to its nationhood. Born in Portland, Maine, when it was still part of Massachusetts, he matured within the transatlantic ferment of Romanticism that prized memory, nature, medievalism, and the expressive individual. Yet his career unfolded amid the pragmatic energies of a commercial republic, where coastal trade, shipyards, and workshops shaped daily life. Across five decades he married Old World erudition to New World subjects, addressing a mass readership in schools and parlors while cultivating learned forms—ballads, epics, dramatic verse, sonnets, and translations—that anchored American letters in European traditions without surrendering national distinctiveness.
Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where Longfellow graduated in 1825 with Nathaniel Hawthorne as a classmate, launched him into philology and teaching. A three-year European tour (1826–1829) through France, Spain, Italy, and Germany made him an American pioneer of modern languages. He read Dante, Goethe, and Spanish ballads, listened to street songs and church music, and absorbed the antiquarian spirit sweeping museums and universities. Appointed to Bowdoin’s new chair of Modern Languages, he began translating and editing, conviction growing that a national poetry required cosmopolitan resources. Spain’s theaters, Italy’s galleries, and Germany’s scholarship would continue to inflect his themes, meters, and dramatic ambitions.
Personal loss drove his lyric gravity. During a second European sojourn (1835), his first wife, Mary Storer Potter, died in Rotterdam, a tragedy that darkened his early Cambridge years after he accepted Harvard’s Smith Professorship of Modern Languages in 1836. Settling at Craigie House in Cambridge—George Washington’s former headquarters—he became a central figure in Boston’s liberal, largely Unitarian, intellectual world. The university post, coupled with editorial work and lectures, provided the stability to shape a public voice. Out of grief, scholarship, and the moralizing temper of New England reform emerged the reflective meditations and nocturnes that introduced him to a national audience at decade’s end.
The 1840s crystallized Longfellow’s popular appeal through ballads that dramatized New England’s maritime and artisan economy. Shipwrecks, workshops, and village greens offered scenes of labor, hazard, and communal resilience as the region industrialized. The wider republic was feeling the aftershocks of the Panic of 1837, while ports from Portland to Boston tied families to the capricious Atlantic. Ballad measures, oral storytelling, and proverbial cadence aligned his poems with schoolroom recitation and parlor song. Local subjects subtly registered larger forces—market expansion, factory discipline, and technological change—while their moral clarity, sympathetic portraits of workers, and consolatory endings met a mass readership’s appetite for usable wisdom.
Abolition transformed the moral climate of Massachusetts in the 1830s and 1840s. Longfellow, aligned with antislavery Whigs and friends such as Charles Sumner, addressed slavery directly after an 1842 trip to Europe. He crafted poems meant for broad circulation rather than for radical platforms, emphasizing conscience, domestic ties, and scriptural cadence. The national crisis deepened with the Mexican-American War and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, sharpening the ethical stakes for writers in Boston and Cambridge. His approach—temperate in tone but unequivocal in sympathy—reveals how the Fireside Poets sought to steady the civic heart by moral suasion, amplifying reform without abandoning inclusive readerships.
The Spanish Student (1843) embodied his cosmopolitan theater, drawing on Golden Age dramatists, Cervantine romance, and the lyricism of the romance tradition he had studied in Madrid and Salamanca libraries. America’s stages and readers were fascinated by gypsy lore, dances like the cachucha, and the color of Old World streets—exotic yet ethically legible. This dramatic poem also reflects the 1840s American quest to reconcile republican virtue with European aesthetic prestige. Longfellow’s dramaturgy privileges music, masks, and misrecognition, but its deeper interest lies in cultural translation: how a young nation might appropriate European forms of passion and honor without forfeiting clarity, restraint, and civic sentiment.
By mid-decade, travel writing, antiquarian curiosity, and a taste for medieval civic spaces converged in poems set among belfries, bridges, and guildhalls. Bruges and Nuremberg supplied emblematic architecture that permitted reflections on time, labor, and art. At Springfield, Massachusetts, the national armory inspired a pacific counterimage: arsenals of peace rather than war amid the age of interchangeable parts. Contemporary science and astronomy, channeled through popular lectures and journals, lent celestial scope to otherwise homely meditations. The blend of Gothic nostalgia and technological wonder mirrors a republic balancing steam power and sentiment, mass production and craftsmanship, all refracted through Longfellow’s decorous, musical English.
In 1847 Longfellow attempted a classical epic measure—dactylic hexameter—in a North American story centered on the 1755 Expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia. The tale, relayed to him through New England acquaintances and pastoral gossip networks, resonated with refugee experience, faith under duress, and continental mobility along the Mississippi Valley. Choosing a classical meter Americanized through English accent stressed his belief that the New World could be sung in Old World forms. This marriage of ethnographic sympathy, historical research, and metrical experiment made the long narrative poem a national vehicle, extending the ballad’s reach from cottage and coastline to diaspora and destiny.
The 1850 volume The Seaside and the Fireside frames a Victorian polarity dear to Longfellow: global commerce and the domestic hearth. Poems of shipyards, lighthouses, and exploratory courage stand beside benedictions for home, marriage, and mourning. The Compromise of 1850 exposed sectional rifts even as northern prosperity swelled; he responded with a civic allegory of national unity in the figure of a ship. Engineering triumphs and maritime tragedies alike provided modern parables. New England’s coasts and rivers—Nahant, Marblehead, the Charles—became moralized landscapes, places where industrial skill courted danger, and where the family, imagined as sanctuary, absorbed the shocks of a restless nation.
Published in 1855, The Song of Hiawatha drew on ethnographic compilations by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and earlier missionary accounts, adopting the trochaic tetrameter associated with the Finnish Kalevala. The poem sought an American epic in indigenous materials at a time when the republic was arguing its destiny and debating Native sovereignty. Reception mixed enthusiasm with parody and critique, presaging today’s discussions of cultural appropriation and representation. Yet the work’s attention to rivers, forests, craft, and council longhouses registered a mid-century desire to locate national origins in continent-spanning traditions, even as removal policies and frontier violence contradicted the poem’s conciliatory, idealizing temper.
The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) revisited Plymouth Colony, tapping a flourishing colonial revival in New England. Historical societies, antiquarian presses, and public commemorations fashioned a civic lineage from Puritan fortitude and domestic piety. Longfellow, a descendant of early settlers, used familiar names and objects—spinning wheels, muskets, psalters—to turn courtship into communal myth. The poem’s humor and tenderness counterbalanced nativist anxieties and immigrant influx in Boston of the 1850s, when Know-Nothing politics surged and Catholic parishes multiplied. By softening sternness with neighborly feeling, he offered a memory culture that could welcome newcomers into a narrative of trials, pluck, and providence.
Across the Birds of Passage sequences (1858–1880), Longfellow folded travel, scientific respect, and civic homage into a portable album. He saluted figures like Louis Agassiz, recorded the fate of warships such as the Cumberland, and lingered in cemeteries, ropewalks, and classrooms where modern life braided skill, mortality, and play. Immigration through Atlantic ports colored these poems with departures and arrivals, while telegraphs, railroads, and illustrated journals accelerated their circulation. Children’s pieces shared space with epitaphs and national toasts. When Cambridge schoolchildren presented him a chair carved from the old village chestnut, he returned the gesture in verse, emblem of reciprocal civic affection.
Tales of a Wayside Inn (Parts I–III, 1863, 1870, 1873) staged a New England Decameron in Sudbury’s Red Horse Inn, where a Yankee landlord, a Sicilian, a Spanish Jew, a musician, and others trade stories. The framing celebrates multivocal America, while the tales range from colonial alarm rides to Norse conversions and Italian exempla, reflecting his comparative taste. The first part appeared during the Civil War, when regional memory and national mythmaking were urgent. By scattering European and American narratives through a convivial circle, Longfellow implied that the United States might integrate disparate origins into social harmony without erasing the accents of history.
After Frances Appleton, whom he married in 1843, died in 1861 from a fire at Craigie House, Longfellow’s poetry deepened in elegy. The war years brought Christmas Bells and other meditations on loss and hope. Meanwhile, the Dante Club met at his Cambridge home (1865–1867), with James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, and others aiding his American translation of the Divine Comedy (1867). Related sonnets and essays enrolled him in the era’s Italianate enthusiasms for Giotto, Florence, and the Risorgimento. These labors reaffirmed his conviction that American culture would mature by assimilating the highest European art through scrupulous scholarship and lucid diction.
In the 1870s Longfellow pursued myth and domestic ceremony in new forms. The Masque of Pandora (1875) recast a Greek origin story for an industrial, museum-going public fascinated by science and progress. The Hanging of the Crane (1874) sanctified the modern parlor in a narrative suited to gift-book illustration. Morituri Salutamus (1875), read at Bowdoin’s semicentennial for his class, offered an elder’s humanist counsel. Keramos (1878) surveyed global ceramic arts, turning craft history into cosmopolitan meditation. Late volumes—Ultima Thule (1880) and In the Harbor (1882)—gathered valedictions, elegies for friends like Bayard Taylor and Charles Sumner, and travel recollections from his 1868–1869 European tour.
His grandest synthetic venture, Christus: A Mystery (issued in 1872), stitched together New Testament scenes (The Divine Tragedy), medieval piety (The Golden Legend, first published 1851), and Puritan severity (The New England Tragedies, 1868) into a panoramic sacramental of Western conscience. Judas Maccabaeus (1872) added Hebraic heroism; Michael Angelo, published posthumously in 1883, explored Renaissance artistic vocation and spiritual yearning. These dramatic and quasi-dramatic works reflect Boston’s broad-church Protestantism, the century’s fascination with pageantry and historical criticism, and Longfellow’s lifelong effort to reconcile faith, art, and civic ethics under a capacious, humane, and historically informed poetics.
Longfellow’s reception was shaped by the Fireside Poets—Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell—whose verses entered schools, lyceums, and parlors via publishers like Ticknor and Fields and magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly. Engravings, school readers, and recitations disseminated his images of blacksmiths, belfries, pilgrims, sagas, and seas. He retired from Harvard in 1854 but remained Cambridge’s genial laureate until his death on 24 March 1882. In 1884 a bust in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner honored him as a transatlantic classic. His oeuvre, spanning translation and popular song, domesticated erudition without diluting it, giving the United States a durable grammar for memory, work, sorrow, and hope.
Synopsis (Selection)
Voices of the Night (Hymn to the Night; A Psalm of Life; and companion poems)
Reflective lyrics on night, faith, grief, and moral purpose, exemplified by A Psalm of Life. They seek spiritual solace and exhort resilience in the face of mortality.
Earlier Poems
Early Romantic pieces centered on seasons, landscape, and youthful contemplation. They sketch natural scenes and the awakening of poetic vocation.
Ballads and Other Poems
Narrative ballads and lyrics portraying maritime peril, artisan virtue, aspiration, and everyday heroism. Notable pieces like The Wreck of the Hesperus, The Village Blacksmith, and Excelsior blend story with moral sentiment.
Poems on Slavery
A sequence condemning American slavery through portraits of the enslaved, witnesses, and complicit society. It appeals to conscience and human dignity with direct moral urgency.
The Spanish Student
A verse drama about a noble student’s love for the gypsy dancer Preciosa, entangling disguise, jealousy, and honor in old Castile. Serenades and stage scenes lead to recognition and reconciliation.
The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems
Meditative and occasional poems inspired by European travel and American life, reflecting on history, craft, peace, and time. Includes The Arsenal at Springfield, The Bridge, and The Old Clock on the Stairs.
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
A narrative poem tracing lovers separated by the Acadian expulsion and Evangeline’s lifelong quest to find Gabriel. It explores exile, steadfast love, and Providence across the American landscape.
The Seaside and the Fireside
Complementary cycles balancing maritime themes with domestic reflection, from shipbuilding and lighthouses to resignation and craft. The collection contemplates work, faith, and the moral task of the builder.
The Song of Hiawatha
An epic recounting the legendary life of Hiawatha—his birth, deeds, friendships, wooing, trials, and the coming of the white man. Drawing on Native traditions, it weaves myths of nature, magic, and cultural change.
The Courtship of Miles Standish
A New England narrative set in Plymouth colony about a triangular courtship among Miles Standish, John Alden, and Priscilla. It mingles martial duty with domestic sentiment and communal harmony.
Birds of Passage (Flights I–V)
Five sequences of lyrics and ballads on travel, memory, history, and occasional subjects. They range from legends and sea tales to tributes, nature pieces, and civic meditations.
Tales of a Wayside Inn (Parts I–III)
A framed collection in which guests at a Massachusetts inn share stories from American lore, medieval legend, scripture, and Norse saga. From Paul Revere’s Ride to The Saga of King Olaf, the tales juxtapose humor, piety, and heroism.
Flower-de-Luce
Later lyrics marked by elegy, artistic homage, and the aftershocks of war, including tributes to Hawthorne and meditations on Dante. The imagery of towers, bells, and wind underscores time and memory.
The Masque of Pandora
A mythic verse drama reimagining Pandora and Prometheus to examine curiosity, creation, and unintended consequences. Choruses and episodic scenes contrast divine artifice with human fallibility.
The Hanging of the Crane
A domestic poem using the kitchen crane as a symbol to chart a family's life from marriage through parenthood and loss. It celebrates hearth, continuity, and the passage of time.
Morituri Salutamus
An occasional poem for a college anniversary addressing aging, perseverance, and the dignity of continued endeavor. It urges steadfast work and courage in life’s late years.
A Book of Sonnets
A sequence on poets, places, and moral themes, including portraits of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats. The sonnets frame concise meditations on art, history, and memory.
Keramos
A meditative narrative sparked by a potter’s kiln, tracing the art of ceramics across cultures and ages. It reflects on craft, beauty, and the fires that temper human work.
Ultima Thule
Late-career poems blending elegy, historical ballad, travel sketch, and personal tribute. The mood is retrospective, attentive to friendship, loss, and life’s far frontiers.
In the Harbor (including The Poet’s Calendar)
Final lyrics offering calm retrospection, with month-by-month vignettes and meditations on time and memory. The tone is a gentle valediction after long voyaging.
Fragments
Unfinished pieces and drafts that reveal themes and images Longfellow was shaping late in life. They suggest projects and moods without full closure.
Christus: A Mystery (The Divine Tragedy; The Golden Legend; The New England Tragedies)
A triptych tracing Christianity’s course from Gospel episodes through a medieval miracle tale to Puritan New England. Interludes link eras while exploring faith, persecution, and moral choice.
Judas Maccabaeus
A dramatic poem depicting the Jewish revolt against Seleucid oppression and the rededication of the Temple. It emphasizes steadfastness, sacrifice, and national deliverance.
Michael Angelo
A verse drama in scenes following the artist’s later life, his patrons, and his spiritual friendship with Vittoria Colonna. It contemplates artistic calling, piety, and the burdens of genius.
Translations (Spanish; Scandinavian; German; Anglo-Saxon; French; Italian; Portuguese; Eastern; Latin)
Longfellow’s renderings of ballads, lyrics, epics, and aphorisms from many languages. The selections illuminate themes of love, legend, faith, and nature while showcasing his scholarly range.
