Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Literature / Writers-Poets Datebook: February 27.

 

 

 

 

 

Brief biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and one of the fireside poets from New England. His original works include the poems "Paul Revere's Ride", "The Song of Hiawatha", and Evangeline".    

 

American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (b. February 27, 1807, Portland, Maine, USA - d. March 24, 1882, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA), wrote some of the famous poems in American literature.He was the first American to be honoured with a bust in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Early Years

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow traced his family back to the Plymouth Pilgrims.He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825, where Nathaniel Hawthorne, famous writer of novels and short stories, had been his classmate.

Career

Longfellow spent his early career teaching foreign languages, first at Bowdoin College and later at Harvard University. He then concentrated on poetry.

Longfellow was one of the few American poets who was so popular in his day that he could support himself by writing. His private life was filled with sadness. His first wife died shortly after they were married, and his second wife was killed in a fire. It is no surprise that this sadness is reflected in many of his poems.

The famous poet  

Aged 32, Longfellow published his first book of verse, Voices of the Night. The book brought him wide public recognition. He published Ballads two years later. Ballads contains some of his famous poems, including 'The Village Blacksmith'.

Famous for his romantic storytelling, he became known for his long poems that use simple ideas telling stories based on American history and mythology. These include the well-known The Song of Hiawatha, a tale from Native-American legends; Evangeline, the story of the French exiles of France's colonies in North America; and The Courtship of Miles Standish, a romance set during the Pilgrim Father's early days.

Works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Voices of the Night, 1839

Ballads, 1841

Evangeline, 1847

The Seaside and the Fireside, 1849

The Song of Hiawatha, 1855

The Courtship of Miles Standish, 1858

Tales of a Wayside Inn (including 'Paul Revere's Ride'), 1863

Ultima Thule, 1880

 

Photo Credit:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Wikipedia Commons / Public Domain. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1868.

Resources:

Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, by Ian Ousby (1993)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. en.wikipedia.org 

Larousse Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring (1994)

 

(c) February 2009. Updated February 27, 2024. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.  

Edgar Allan Poe

Literature / Writers Datebook: January 19

 

Brief biography of American horror writer Edgar Allan Poe, best known for his eerie poems and The Murders in the Rue Morgue story.He's also famous for his short poes "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee".

 

A pioneer of crime and mystery writing, Edgar Allan Poe was an influential 19^th-century American horror writer. He is famous for his spooky stories including his famous tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and poetry, including the best known “The Raven”.  

Early Turbulent Life of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. Both of his  parents died before he was three years old, and he was adopted by a wealthy tobacco merchant from Richmond, Virginia.  Poe never felt settled in his new family, and his bad behavior brought him conflict with his adopted father, who also disapproved of him spending more time writing poetry than studying.

In 1827 Poe left the Univeristy of Virginia, where he had got into gambling debts. Four years later, he was expelled from West Point Military Academy. His adopted father had enough and disowned him. Poe had to live with an aunt in Baltimore.

Poe’s Literary Success

Venturing as a poet, short story writer and as literary critic, at the age of 24, Poe experienced his first literary success when his short story “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” won a cash prize. He began working for magazines, but his unpredictable behavior and heavy drinking often got him into trouble. He was fired from work. The stories and poem he produced, however, began to make him famous and were published in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque when he was 31 years old.

In the same year, Poe went to work for Graham’s Magazine, which published his famous story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It became so popular that many scholars called it the world’s first modern detective story. About this time, he also got married to Virginia Clemm, a 13 year old cousin, and wrote prolifically. 

Poe’s Obsession with the Supernatural and Death

Edgar Allan Poe was obsessed with the elements of fear and death, and the supernatural. His works depicted much of these elements, and Poe became the pioneer of the modern genre of horror, crime and mystery writing.  His poem “The Raven” became very popular.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Last Years and Literary Legacy

After his wife died of tuberculosis, Poe’s depression got worse and he drank heavily. He died at the young age of 40, on October 7, 1849.  His poetry and short stories have influenced many future crime and horror writers.Poe was influenced by: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Thomas De Quincey. Dostoevsky acknowledged his own debt to Poe and Baudelaire produced French translations of Poe’s works. Although he became famous for stories of bleakness, he also wrote of poetry’s purity in such famous poems as “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee.”         

Works by Edgar Allan Poe

Tamerlane and Other Poems, 1827

Poems, 1831

“Manuscript Found in a Bottle”, 1833

“The Fall of the House of User”, 1839

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 1841

“The Gold Bug”, 1843

The Raven and Other Poems, 1845

“The Pit and the Pendulum”, 1845

Tales, 1845

Eureka, 1848

Annabel Lee, 1849

 

Photo Credit:

Edgar Allan Poe. en.wikipedia.org / Public Domain. 

 

Resources:

Goring, Rosemary, Ed. Larousse Dictionary of Writers. New York: Larousse, 1994

McGovern, Una, Ed. Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers, 2002

Ousby, Ian.  The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Payne, Tom. The A-Z of Great Writers. London: Carlton, 1997

 

(c) January 2009. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.

Emily Dickinson

Literature / Writers Datebook: December 10

 

Brief biography and a list of poems of famous poet Emily Dickinson, one of the finest.

 

Emily Dickinson was an American poet, considered one of the greatest poets in the English language.

Though virtually unknown in her lifetime, along with Walt Whitman, she has been regarded as one of the two quintessential American poets of the 19th century. Dickinson lived a hermetic life. Although she wrote numerous poems, only a handful of them were published during her lifetime, anonymously or probably without her knowledge. 

 

Early Life of Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent family well-known for their political and educational influence. Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst College. Her father, Edward Dickinson, politically well-placed, was a lawyer and treasurer for the college. He also served on the Massachusetts General Court, the Massachusetts Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives, to which in 1852 he was elected as a Whig candidate. Emily's mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, was chronically ill.   

Siblings

Her older brother, William Austin Dickinson, was usually known by his middle name. In 1856, he married Emily's best friend, Susan Gilbert, and made his home next door to the house in which Emily lived most of her life. Their younger sister, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, called "Vinnie," encouraged the posthumous editing and publishing of her sister's poetry.

Education

In 1840, Emily was educated at the nearby Amherst Academy, a former boys' school which opened to female students just two years earlier. She studied English and classical literature, learned Latin and read the Aeneid over several years. She also learned other subjects including religion, history, mathematics, geology and biology.

At 17, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary which  later become Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley. In less than a year at the seminary, she went back home and did not return to school. There is a speculation that she was homesick or that she refused to sign an oath stating she would devote her life to Jesus Christ.

Later Years

After that, Dickinson left home only for short trips to visit relatives in Boston, Cambridge, and Connecticut. For decades, popular wisdom portrayed Dickinson as an agoraphobic recluse. She lived most of her life in the family's houses in Amherst, which have been preserved as the Emily Dickinson Museum.

Emily Dickinson asked Susan, her best friend and sister-in-law to critique her poems. She died on May 15, 1886, from nephritis, reported as Bright's disease. After her death, her family found some 40 hand-bound volumes of more than 1700 of her poems.

Here's Dickinson's quotation about pain, its timelessness and dominance:

"Pain has an Element of Blank;

It cannot recollect

When it begun, or if there was

A time when it was not."

 

"It has no future but itself;

Its infinite realms contain

Its past, enlightened to perceive

New periods of pain."

(From Pain)

 

Poems by Emily Dickinson

(Published after she died) 

Poems by Emily Dickinson, 1890

Poems: Second Series

Poems: Third Series, 1896

Then Single Hound, 1914

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols.), 1955

The Letters of Emily, 3 vols, 1958

Final Harvest, 1961

 

Image Credit:

Emily Dickinson. Wikipedia / Public Domain

 

Resources:

1. Goring, Rosemary, editor. Larousse Dictionary of Writers. New York: Larousse, 1994

2. McGovern, Una, editor. Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap, 2002 

3. Emily Dickinson. Poetry Dickinson. Accessed December 10, 2022 

4. Emily Dickinson. en.wikipedia.org.  Accessed December 10 2008

(c) December 10, 2008. Updated December 10, 2022. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.