Historical Foundations In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Poetry

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an iconic American poet who reached into the very nature of the American people. He brought to life a history that might have been forgotten if it was not for the literary adventurers of the early years of America. Longfellow did not write of things that were exotic or of ancient history. He pulled from the familiar for his readers. In fact, many of Longfellow’s poems were lessons in American history and American culture.

It does not take much to see the pictures painted by Longfellow’s poem. In “My Lost Youth”, he describes a familiar scene in New England of “the beautiful town / That is seated by the sea” and “the black wharves and the slips” with the “Spanish sailors”. He describes a culture that can only be found in the New England area of America as it is only there that “In their graves, o’erlooking the tranquil bay / Where they in battle died”. The beginnings of America can be found in the history and myth of New England. Why? Because the new country was widely “considered to possess no national literature of its own” per Matthew Pearl as most of the Western world saw the new country as without literary and cultural foundations. It would take many writers and poets, such as Longfellow, to show the world that America did have a culture that was unique and could produce literature that would live through…