Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

LONGFELLOW, Henry Wadsworth. b. Portland, Maine, 27 February 1807; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 24 March 1882. He was educated at Bowdoin College (graduated 1825), where he taught as Professor of Modern Languages (1829-35). He became Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard in 1835, where he devoted at least some of his considerable literary energy to translation. The Poets and Poetry of Europe appeared in 1835 (it included a translation of ‘Nada te turbe’* by St Teresa of Avila*), and his translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia was published in 1865-67. He made his mark as a poet with Voices of the Night (1839), but became much more famous with The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship...