Strolling in the American Literature Garden [Part 9]

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was a 19th-century Romantic poet. Very famous in America, he was a professor of languages ​​at Harvard University, and was always successful in writing poetry and translating.

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (Source: Getty Images)

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

His poetry is pure, simple, with gentle emotions, graceful images and melodious rhythms, denouncing some injustices in American society, loving nature, country, and life. He is most successful in short poems.

Among his major works are: The Voices of the Night (1839), which made him a popular poet among all levels of society; The Village Blacksmith (1839), a narrative poem about an American legend; Evangeline (1847); The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Longfellow's translation of Dante's Divine Commedia (1867) is considered the best of many English translations.

The story of Evangeline tells the story of two lovers, Gabriel and Evangeline, who were separated during the war, each in a different direction. They spent many years looking for each other. When there was an epidemic in Philadelphia, Evangeline, while caring for the sick, realized that a dying person was her lover. Now she was old. She died and the two friends were buried in the same grave.

Hiawatha was a Native American prophet raised by his grandmother, a child of the Moon. The hero went through a process of learning and training. He fought against his father, the West Wind, to avenge his mother. Eventually, he became the leader of his tribe and taught his people, making peace with the white people. When his wife fell ill, he and she traveled to the land of the Northwest Wind.

Longfellow was not a transcendent or original poet like Whalt Whitman or Edgar Poe. Poe, a contemporary poet and literary critic, assessed Longfellow: “While we admire Mr. Longfellow’s genius, we still feel that his weakness is pretense and imitation. His artistic ingenuity is great, his ideals are noble. But his conception of the poet’s purposes is utterly wrong.”

Is it true that Longfellow's poetry is not profound because his life was easy, flat, and more happy than sad? If it does not require deep psychology and thinking, one can find in Longfellow's poetry clarity, simplicity, gentle emotions, wistfulness, graceful images and melodious rhythms. He wrote poems about history and legends, about the country and nature, he praised love, kindness, and endurance in life. In any case, he was a very popular English poet, and when he died, the whole of America mourned him. He was the first American poet to have the honor of having a monument erected at Westminster Abbey.

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a European-American writer, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She was educated in a strict Puritan moral sense. At the age of 25, she married a missionary and theology professor. During her 18 years in the American South, she learned much about the plight of black slaves. As the mother of seven children, she had little time to write.

She finally 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 published the novel in two volumes, selling 300,000 copies in the first year. The novel was adapted into a play, staged, and became a powerful weapon for the anti-slavery movement. The work was translated into many languages.

Beecher Stowe wrote extensively, mainly against social injustices, affecting all classes, from government officials, aristocrats to common people. But the most famous work is still Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in the 1950s, in the very decade when American literature affirmed its uniqueness with a series of authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Longfellow. Beecher Stowe used the humanitarian perspective of Christianity to oppose slavery; the work also respected the kind white masters in the South. But later, the dominant white people (especially in the South) distorted the character of Uncle Tom, presenting a typical black person who endured and served his master, thus creating the bad idiom "Uncle Tomism" meaning the unconditional service of black people to white people.

In terms of literary value, Uncle Tom's Cabin is not necessarily a masterpiece, because at times, it hovers between documentary novel and heroic appeal. But it has appeal due to the timeliness of the issue raised and the author's noble ideals, a typical example of the power of literature to mobilize conscience and the masses.

Many historians believe that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a key factor in the Civil War, which helped abolish slavery in the United States. When President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1886) met Stowe in 1862, he greeted her with the famous words: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

Source: https://baoquocte.vn/dao-choi-vuon-van-my-ky-9-273263.html