Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

Our century has forgotten many writers, and ambushed a few as well. Take Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for instance. The 11 volumes of his “Collected Works,” published in 1886 and read devotedly through the early decades of this century, were a monument to an extraordinary career. At the time of his death, he was the most widely read and beloved poet in the world. His 75th birthday was a national holiday. Lincoln’s eyes welled with tears when a Longfellow poem was recited. Queen Victoria invited him to tea. His dates (1807-1882) virtually span the 19th century. His father had been a friend of George Washington; one of the last visitors to Craigie House--Longfellow’s home in Cambridge, long since a pilgrimage site--was Oscar Wilde. But for all his fame, the Modernist braves shot him down like a dazed buffalo. They despised his moralizing sentimentality and smooth, hearthside authority. Their triumph was our loss. No, he was not a great poet--not a Whitman or Dickinson. But more often than you’d think, he can be an astonishing one. He made American poetry less naive and local by incorporating European models. His prosodic innovations were virtuosic. And he created a kind of American mythology--Evangeline in the forest primeval, Hiawatha by the shores of Gitchee Gumee, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the wreck of the Hesperus, the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree, the strange courtship of Miles Standish, the maiden Priscilla and the hesitant John Alden. Was my generation of schoolchildren the last who memorized these poems? They had--like poems by Robert Frost in his day--sunk deep into the national subconscious. Though today his name goes unmentioned and his poems unread, I suspect they are still there, on a back shelf of every reader’s memory. Dusted off, they would surprise you: Their images can still startle, their narratives still enthrall.