Longfellow was a companionable American poet and deserves to be honored as one at this time, almost two hundred years after his birth. In his heyday, readers hung breathless in anticipation of his latest work. After he became incredibly famous, his birthday was nationally celebrated. Persons whom Longfellow amiably dubbed "entire strangers" wrote to him for professional and personal advice, for his autograph, and even for copies of his books and for money. Other admirers reversed matters and showered him with gifts ranging from books and poems (sometimes mediocre ones they had written) to homemade jelly. He often had fifty letters at a time to be answered, and he tried to answer every one of them; when ill, he dictated his replies. He outsold in England publications by Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Longfellow had a private audience with Queen Victoria, who obviously was the one to initiate the meeting (and who then, unlike his British friends, attempted to demean him). He received many honorary degrees in America and abroad. Late in his life, illustrious visitors beat a path to his door to call upon him personally. His "Excelsior" and "A Psalm of Life" sent readers into ecstasies and rank as two of the most popular poems ever written in any language. "Thanatopsis" by Longfellow's friend William Cullen Bryant and "The Raven" by Longfellow's would-be nemesis Edgar Allan Poe trail considerably. Dozens of Longfellow's poems were set to music. Only Emily Dickinson's brief, intriguing, and often short lyrics have proved more popular with composers.

Longfellow's response to the ever-increasing groundswell of his popularity is a bracing model for lesser mortals. He was appreciative, generous, and usually modest, even humble  - and this in spite of his having rubbed elbows with presidents, other significant national leaders, high-ranking foreign dignitaries, and fellow writers in America and abroad (for example, John Greenleaf Whittier and Charles Dickens) almost as revered as he. Yet, august though he was in his day, Longfellow had more than a touch of Yankee shrewdness. When offered $3,000 for first-publication rights to a short poem ("The Hanging of the Crane"), he asserted to friends that he had not sought the sum but sure enough would accept it on the spot. Although he traveled broadly - and often dangerously, given the circumstances - he was happiest at home, but saddest there too. His first wife, Mary Potter Longfellow, died abroad when she was hardly more than a child; his second wife, Fanny Appleton Longfellow, a bright, beautiful, and devoted mother, suffered fatal burns before his very eyes. Longfellow responded stoically but was rarely altogether happy thereafter, although he wrote on and on, and splendidly to the very end; he also relished a few harmless May-December flirtations, details of which will never be fully documented. His children gave him love, joy, but also sometimes no little trouble; other relatives delighted him, while still others bothered him dreadfully; yet he remained with them, as with his friends and even strangers in need, loyal and generous to a fault.

Longfellow the author was at his most endearing when he penned short poems and long letters. Any devotee of Longfellow can name a dozen favorites, including several ones so lovingly handled that they are now sometimes irrationally demeaned. Many are too good to be forgotten, and yet too well remembered to be fresh. His Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha, more popular for decades after they first appeared than they are now, seem prolix to readers with short attention spans; but they still have electricity enough to thrill many a present-date reader. The story of Evangeline is profoundly poignant—and contains a political warning of validity today. And Hiawatha is recognized as a pioneering treatment of Native Americans, if too bookish by half. Conscientious devotees of Longfellow should regard as ample my handling of long works by Longfellow less studied these days; they include Christus, The Courtship of Miles Standish, Hyperion, Judas Maccabaeus, Kavanagh, Michael Angelo, and Outre-Mer. And especially Tales of a Wayside Inn, Longfellow's entry as the best-ever American competitor to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Many of Longfellow's poems have been the object of parodies, partly because of the sing-song meters of some of them but often because of their very popularity. All the same, innumerable Longfellow poems, long and short, have been translated and widely revered; without a doubt, some are being read somewhere in this troubled world this very minute, by those in need of pleasure, relaxation, or inspiration. Longfellow did more than his share of translating also. It is well known that he was a conscientious professor of foreign languages at Bowdoin College and then at Harvard; less well known, perhaps, is the fact that he skillfully translated poems originally published in at least 11 of the 15 or so foreign languages he knew.

Of critics discussing Longfellow's works in general, the best are Wagenknecht, again, and Arvin Newton. George Monteiro warrants more than casual mention for his short but superb introduction to the popular 1975 republication of the long-revered "Cambridge Edition" of Longfellow's poetry. I cite, with implicit gratitude, the legions of critics concentrating on specific productions by Longfellow in end-of-entry notes and the general bibliography.

It must be emphasized that there is no real substitute for turning and returning to Longfellow's words themselves. His skill as a prosodist is almost unmatched among American writers; his sonnets, in fact, have no American rivals. His achievement as a prose writer may not match that of his poetry; however, his shrewdness as a travel writer is perhaps still insufficiently recognized. His few efforts at fiction are also noteworthy for being almost inchoate precursors of the local-color movement he did not live to see. His best prose, in my view, is to be found in his letters. They have been informative and joyful for me to read, and something akin to an inspiration as well. Like Willa Cather's well-known Archbishop, Longfellow rhetorically positioned himself eye to eye toward everyone. His letters abundantly prove that he was, among great American writers, uniquely kind, sympathetic, patient, long-suffering, generous, surprisingly jocose and unbuttoned at times, and rarely judgmental. Taken together, they reveal to the discerning that he responded, decade after decade, to every challenge he encountered - and there were many - with dignity, forbearance, and nothing less than a spiritual radiance. Would that more of us could be like him today.

A reviewer recently sought to put down a critic who dared to praise Longfellow and his friend James Russell Lowell, and in the bargain, sought to downgrade that poetic duo as well, by defining them as "genteel versifiers upholding a moribund tradition" (David Mura, Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Moto [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003]; his title implies his slant). Longfellow and many of his friends who were "genteel" (i.e., decent, intelligent, gracious, and, alas, conservative) sent out their bracing messages to untold millions, and people today could do worse than give their writings a fair shake. . .

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