Longfellow

Charles C. Calhoun''s Longfellow gives life at last to the most popular American poet who ever lived a nineteenth-century cultural institution of extraordinary influence and theone poet average nonbookish Americans still know by heart (Dana Gioia).. Calhoun''s Longfellow emerges as one of America''s first powerful cultural makers: a poet and teacher who helped define Victorian culture; a major conduit for European culture coming into America; a catalyst for the Colonial Revival movement in architecture and interior design; and a critic of both Puritanism and the American obsession with material success. Longfellow is also a portrait of a man in advance of his time in championing multiculturalism: He popularized Native American folklore; revived the Evangeline story (the foundational myth of modern Acadian and Cajun identity in the U.S. and Canada); wrote powerful poems against slavery; and introduced Americans to the languages and literatures of other lands.. Calhoun''s portrait of post-Revolutionary Portland Maine where Longfellow was born and of his time at Bowdoin and Harvard Colleges show a deep and imaginative grasp of New England cultural history. Longfellow''s tragic romantic life-his first wife dies tragically early after a miscarriage and his second wife Fannie Appleton dies after accidentally setting herself on fire-is illuminated and his intense friendship with abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner is given as a striking example of mid-nineteenth-century romantic friendship between men. Finally Calhoun paints in vivid detail Longfellow''s family life at Craigie House including stories of the poet''s friends-Hawthorne Emerson Dickens Fanny Kemble Julia Ward Howe and Oscar Wilde among them.