Author
American · 1807-1882 · 41 quotes
American · 1807–1882
41 quotes in our collection
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the American poet who, in the mid-nineteenth century, became the most popular in the English-speaking world — a distinction he holds still in terms of lines remembered by people who cannot name the source. Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, Paul Revere's Ride, and The Village Blacksmith entered the American imagination at its formation and stayed. Born in Portland, Maine in 1807, he spent most of his professional life at Harvard, translating Dante and teaching modern languages while producing the verse that made him famous. He lost his wife to a fire in 1861 and converted the grief into the Divina Commedia translations and the Tales of a Wayside Inn. His prose sense was as reliable as his verse: let us be what we are, and speak what we think, and keep ourselves loyal to truth.
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