Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Longfellow was the most widely read poet in the English-speaking world in his own century and close to unread in the next, a fall worth explaining rather than simply repeating. He taught modern languages at Harvard, made the first American translation of Dante's Commedia, and wrote for a public that memorised verse as a matter of course. The Song of Hiawatha borrowed a Finnish metre for an American subject and has been argued over ever since, both for its ethnography and for its music. Tales of a Wayside Inn contains Paul Revere's Ride, which did more to shape American memory of that night than the night itself did. His second wife Frances died after her dress caught fire in 1861, and he wrote almost nothing personal about it for eighteen years.