Longfellow lives

Another sign that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is being noticed again is the publication of Christoph Irmscher’s Longfellow Redux , reviewed in the January 5 TLS. Several things about Longfellow are striking: First, what Irmscher calls his “relentless availability” to readers, not only in the “undemanding nature of his published work” but also in his willingness to receive strangers to his home and his diliegence in answering mail; second, his unsentimental acceptance of the transitory character of art, including his own poetry; finally, Longfellow’s role in introducing European literature to America – the first to teach a class on Faust at an American university, translator of the Divine Comedy , editor of anthologies of world poetry.

Longfellow is the most parodied of poets, and the TLS reviewer includes this charming quotation from Lewis Carroll’s parody of Hiawatha:

From his should Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing . . . .