Evangeline and Selected Tales and Poems

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; Cifelli, Edward M.; Gregory, Horace

• ISBN13: 9780451529657
• ISBN10: 0451529650
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-01-04
• Publisher: Signet Classics

Summary

Distinguished poet Horace Gregory has selected thirty-seven of Longfellow's most enduring poems for this edition, the only paperback of Longfellow's poetry in print.

Author Biography

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was the most popular and admired American poet of the nineteenth century. Born in Portland, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin College, Longfellow’s ambition was always to become a writer; but until mid-life his first profession was the teaching rather than the production of literature, at his alma mater (1829-35) and then at Harvard (1836-54). His teaching career was punctuated by two extended study-tours of Europe, during which Longfellow made himself fluent in all the major Romance and Germanic languages. Thanks to a fortunate marriage and the growing popularity of his work, from his mid-thirties onwards Longfellow, ensconced in a comfortable Cambridge mansion, was able to devote an increasingly large fraction of his energies to the long narrative historical and mythic poems that made him a household word, especially Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863, 1872, 1873). Versatile as well as prolific, Longfellow also won fame as a writer of short ballads and lyrics, and experimented in the essay, the short story, the novel, and the verse drama. Taken as a whole, Longfellow’s writings show a breadth of literary learning, an understanding of western languages and cultures, unmatched by any American writer of his time.

Table of Contents

Evangeline & Selected Tales and Poems Preface: Longfellow in the Twenty-First Century
Introduction
Selected Bibliography
A Note on This Book
A Longfellow Chronology

Mezzo Cammin
Aftermath
A Psalm of Life
Hymn to the Night
Burial of the Minnisink
The Skeleton in Armor
The Wreck of the Hesperus
The Village Blacksmith
The Witnesses
the Belfry of Bruges
The Day is Done
The Old Clock on the Stairs
Evangeline
The Building of the Ship
Tegner's Drapa
From The Song of Hiawatha
The Four Winds
Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast
The Son of the Evening Star
Pisture-Writing
The Ghosts
Hiawatha's Departure
The Celestial Pilot
The Bells of Lynn
Sandalphon
Vittoria Colonna
Helen of Tyre
The Warden of the Cinque Ports
Haunted Houses
In the Churchyard at Cambridge
My Lost Youth
The Children's Hour
Paul Revere's Ride
From The Saga of King Olaf
The Challenge of Thor
The Wraith of Odin
The Birds of Killingworth
The Spanish Jew's Tale
Azrael
Charlemagne
Hawthorne
the Cross of Snow
Amalfi
A Dutch Picture
The White Czar
Jugurtha
the Bells of San Blas
To-Morrow
Santa Teresa's Book-Mark
The Return of Spring
The Courtship of Miles Standish

Appendix:
Martin Franc and the Monk of Saint Anthony

Commentaries:
Van Wyck Brooks Schoolcraft on the Hiawatha Myth
Norman Holmes Pearson Both Longfellows
Lewis Carrol Hiawatha's Photographing