Strolling in the American Literature Garden [Part 9]

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was a 19th-century Romantic poet. Highly renowned in America, he was a professor of foreign languages ​​at Harvard University and a successful writer and translator.

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (Source: Getty Images)

He traveled to Europe many times, thus contributing to the dissemination of European literature in America. For 18 years, he taught European literature in America. At the age of 28, after the death of his first wife, he was given the daughter of a wealthy and renowned merchant in marriage, with a dowry of a castle in Cambridge, where he lived until his death.

His poetry is clear, simple, with gentle emotions, graceful imagery, and melodious rhythm, denouncing some injustices in American society, and expressing love for nature, his country, and life. He was most successful in his short poems.

Among his major works are: The Voices of the Night (1839), which made him a renowned poet across all social classes; The Village Blacksmith (1839), a narrative poem recounting American legends; Evangeline (1847); and The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Longfellow's translation of Dante's Divine Commedia (1867) is considered the best of many translations into English.

The story of Evangeline tells of two lovers, Gabriel and Evangeline, separated during a time of turmoil, each going their own way. They search for each other for many years. When a plague strikes Philadelphia, Evangeline, while caring for the sick, recognizes a dying person as her lover. She is now old. She dies, and the two friends are buried together.

Hiawatha was a Native American prophet raised by his grandmother, the daughter of the Moon. This hero underwent a rigorous training and education. He rebelled against his father, the West Wind, to avenge his mother. Ultimately, he became the leader of his tribe, educated his people, and reconciled with the white people. When his wife fell ill, he and she traveled to the land of the Northwest Wind.

Longfellow was not a poetic genius or as unique as Whalt Whitman or Edgar Poe. Poe, a contemporary poet and literary critic, assessed Longfellow as follows: “While admiring Longfellow’s genius, we still feel his weakness was his affectation and imitation. His artistic skill was great, his ideals lofty. But his conception of the poet’s purposes was completely wrong.”

Could it be that Longfellow's poetry lacks depth because his life was easy, uneventful, and filled with more happiness than sorrow? Without demanding profound psychological depth, one can find in Longfellow's poetry clarity, simplicity, gentle, wistful emotions, graceful imagery, and melodious rhythm. He wrote poems about history and legend, about his country and nature; he celebrated love, kindness, and the endurance of life. Nevertheless, he was a very popular English-language poet, mourned throughout America upon his death. He was the first American poet to have a memorial erected in his honor at Westminster Abbey.

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was an American writer of European descent, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She received a very strict Puritan education . At age 25, she married a missionary and theology professor. During her 18 years in the American South, she learned much about the harsh lives of Black slaves. As the mother of seven children, she had little time to write.

Finally, she completed Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, which was serialized from June 1851 to April 1852 in the anti-slavery newspaper National Era.

In 1852, a Boston publisher printed the novel in two volumes, selling 300,000 copies in the first year. The story was adapted into a play, staged, and became a powerful weapon for the anti-slavery movement. The work has been translated into many languages.

Beecher Stowe wrote extensively, his works primarily opposing social injustices, impacting all social classes, from government officials and the aristocracy to the common people. However, his most famous work remains *Uncle Tom's Cabin*, published in the 1850s, the very decade when American literature asserted its unique character with a host of authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Longfellow. Beecher Stowe used the humanitarian perspective of Christianity to oppose slavery; the work also celebrated the kind white masters of the South. Later, however, the white ruling class (especially in the South) distorted the character of Uncle Tom, presenting him as a model of a Black person who endured hardship and served their masters, thus giving rise to the negative idiom "Uncle Tomism," meaning the unconditional service of Black people to white people.

From a literary standpoint, Uncle Tom's Cabin is not necessarily a masterpiece, as it often hovers between documentary fiction and a call to heroism. However, its appeal stems from the timeliness of the issues it addresses and the author's lofty ideals, a prime example of the power of literature to mobilize conscience and the masses.

Many historians consider Uncle Tom's Cabin to be a crucial factor in the American Civil War, a war that ultimately abolished slavery. When President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1986) met Stowe in 1862, he greeted her with the famous words: "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that sparked this great war."

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