When it was published, in 1855, “The Song of Hiawatha” quickly outstripped “Evangeline” in its success, selling four thousand copies on its first day alone. There was a wealth of parodies, “made tempting,” as Basbanes notes, “by the tom-tom tempo of the meter.” But these, too, were a tribute to the poem’s pervasive presence in American popular culture, which eventually spawned not only related works of art but Hiawatha-branded tobacco, bicycles, dishes, Christmas stockings, soap, potato sacks, thermometers, and biscuit tins. Truly, Longfellow was everywhere. By the end of his life, as the scholar Bliss Perry pointed out, carping about this beloved icon was no more acceptable than “carrying a rifle into a national park.”
Then the worm turned. Not surprisingly, it was the modernists who ejected Longfellow from the pantheon, viewing his metrical sleekness and front-parlor gentility as the worst kind of Victorian dross. The critic Van Wyck Brooks delivered the death blow in 1915. “Longfellow is to poetry,” he declared, “what the barrel-organ is to music.” Reputations rise and fall and rise again, and many writers retreat into a kind of hibernation when they die, waiting for the warmth of renewed acclaim to bring them back to life. Yet Basbanes seems to take Longfellow’s banishment rather personally. In fact, he alleges a hit job. Longfellow, he insists, “was the victim of an orchestrated dismissal that may well be unique in American literary history—widely revered in one century, methodically excommunicated from the ranks of the worthy in the next.”
Come now. Many revered writers have dropped down the memory hole, including Longfellow’s peers William Cullen Bryant and James Russell Lowell. For that matter, the passing decades have yielded additional reasons for Longfellow’s critical antagonists to beat him over the head. There is, for example, the matter of cultural appropriation and the big fat target that is “Hiawatha.” The poet would probably play the Weltliteratur card and move on. And, indeed, his multiculturalism now looks admirably prescient. So does his social conscience, which led him to publish “Poems on Slavery,” in 1842—a daring move at the time, and the object of a vicious review by Edgar Allan Poe. (The collection, Poe sneered, was “intended for the especial use of those negrophilic old ladies of the north, who form so large a part of Mr. LONGFELLOW’s friends.”) The poet also backed up his words with deeds, using some of his profits from “Hiawatha” to secretly buy slaves out of bondage. If any writer of his era is able to survive the obstacle course of cancel culture, it is likely to be Longfellow.
The ultimate litmus test, however, is the poetry. I snapped up the Library of America edition of “Poems and Other Writings” with a thrill of anticipation, fully hoping to encounter the Promethean figure of Basbanes’s biography. Reader, I tried. I thumbed through several hundred tissue-thin pages, added my wobbly midrash in mechanical pencil, chanted long passages aloud. I encountered the gems I have mentioned above, and many more. I was also won over by the sheer decency of the man, which seems somehow inextricable from his creations. As Oscar Wilde noted, perhaps with double-edged irony, “Longfellow was himself a beautiful poem, more beautiful than anything he ever wrote.”