Revisiting Longfellow with a Memory from Zimbabwe

I employed the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) as a kind of refrain in my novel Brookhaven. A main character is well known in his family for his lifelong love of Longfellow’s poetry and his ability to recite it from memory.  

What I didn’t realize or remember was just how long I’d been reading Longfellow’s poetry myself. That is, until a recent comment on a post at Tweetspeak Poetry popped up.

 

The comment first arrived as an email. It’s a standard notification that Tweetspeak writers get when someone comments on a post they’ve written. I read it and looked at the date of the post – Oct. 3, 2017, almost nine years ago. Had I actually resumed reading Longfellow that long ago?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Neglected Genius of Hilaire Belloc – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Tools of the Trade – Kelly Belmonte on writing.

 

What-ifs and he Price of Beauty – Elliott Drago at Front Porch Republic.

 

Writer Reads: Jan Carson’s Few and Far Between – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Why you must know your book’s genre – Nathan Bransford.

 

The Beautiful Ordinary – Kelly Keller at Story Warren on Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry.

The Mythic and Heroic: "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I’ve been reading the epic poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poems I read as a child and in junior high and high school English classes. These are poems like Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Tales of the Wayside Inn, which includes what is still one of the best-known poems in America, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

Longfellow in 1855

The epic Longfellow poem I hadn’t read was The Song of Hiawatha. And I was drawn to it not because I hadn’t read it, but because of an insulting comment aimed in its and Longfellow’s direction. I read an interview with two poets who have both written non-fiction works about the value of poetry. One of them mentioned The Song of Hiawatha as having something that appealed to her, even though it was “to say the least, racially insensitive.”

My first reaction was a question. Why do we feel compelled to politicize everything? My second reaction was to seek out the poem and read it for myself. Having already read three of Longfellow’s epic poems, and discovering that in one of them – Evangeline – he had done something no one in America had previously done – find the heroic in Catholics – and knowing that the poet had also written poems against slavery which cost him sales of his books in the South, I wondered if the poem was as “racially insensitive” as the writer seemed to think.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Painting: Hiawatha, oil on canvas by Thomas Eakin (1874); Hirschhorn Museum.