SOURCE: “Mars in Petticoats: Longfellow and Sentimental Masculinity,” in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 51, No. 3, December, 1996, pp. 327-55.

[In the following excerpt, Haralson examines Longfellow's initial popularity and subsequent fall from the literary canon, suggesting that both are due to his “sentimental” masculinity. He also shows that Evangeline broadened Longfellow's scope as a writer.]

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

—“A Psalm of Life” (1838)

It seems strange to have to insist, but Longfellow—not Whitman or Dickinson—was the premier poet of the American nineteenth century. As contemporary notices put it, his verse “set itself to music in the memory of thousands” and became—in a telling trope of domesticity—“thoroughly domiciliated in the national heart.”¹ Even avant-garde reviewers, like the one writing in The Galaxy (1876) who swooned to Whitman's “magnetism” and felt the “real vital throb” of Sarah Piatt's protomodernism, returned to poets such as Longfellow for their touchstone: the best poems are “not recondite, or far-fetched, or difficult … [but] cleave to us … root themselves in our affections.”² Longfellow rooted so deeply that allusions to his work cropped up in authors from Frederick Douglass and Mary Chestnut to Sarah Orne Jewett and the Jameses, to Wharton, Cather, and Frost. Even the many parodic spin-offs—by the likes of Phoebe Cary, Bret Harte, Lewis Carroll, and Wyndham Lewis—testified to his centrality in Anglo-American letters.³ And yet where is he today? With Longfellow (as with his “fireside” peers) we have witnessed a special case of what Cary Nelson calls the “process of literary forgetfulness”:⁴ the long slow slide from canonical shrine to antiquary shop. On the verge of a new century, Longfellow's reputation seems to be the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die—or, as Dana Gioia has said, “a subject less suited to a critic than an elegist.”⁵

My purpose here is neither to praise nor to bury Longfellow, but to probe the cultural logic of his popularity, from Voices of the Night (1839), the best-selling volume that contained “A Psalm of Life”; through Evangeline (1847), that Ur-fable of saintly female fortitude under duress; to The Song of Hiawatha (1855), perhaps the quintessential record of middle-class norms, ideals, and anxieties in our antebellum literature. I will suggest that a key source of Longfellow's appeal eventually became the grounds for divesting him of literary “value”: his advocacy of a cross-gendered sensibility—and, crucially, of a “sentimental” masculinity—that answered to the experiential trials and affective needs of his audience.

Owing to the way in which anthologies often represent his work, mention of Longfellow usually conjures up such bland and nominally upbeat chestnuts as the “Psalm,” “Excelsior,” and “The Village Blacksmith.” Yet as the broader selection in the recent Library of America anthology makes clear, the poems we regard as “typical Longfellow” were surrounded by others that confess to a deep world-weariness; that employ an obsessive diction of “labor,” “toil,” “restlessness,” “care,” “burden,” and “sorrow”; and that yearn for “Sleep and oblivion,”⁶ expressing what Newton Arvin—one of the poet's most alert auditors—described as “a longing for unconsciousness” (p. 65). Although these poems range in tone from the tender melancholy of “The Day Is Done” to the skepticism of “The Bridge” (which finds heaven to be a “wavering image” on earth) to the Teutonic gloom of “Curfew” and “Afternoon in February,” they are all surprisingly mournful numbers, figuring life as nearly an empty dream (American Poetry, pp. 383-90). It was excusable hyperbole, in other words, when Hyatt H. Waggoner nominated Longfellow as the saddest of American poets, with the fewest “resources of spirit” for coping with sadness.⁷

But unlike Arvin, who found the darker strains in the verse “strangely counter” to the lighter (p. 65), and unlike Waggoner, who validated only the lugubrious Longfellow and dismissed the cheerful one as “wholly bogus” (p. 50), I view these contrary moods as bound up in a productive tension that was the very mechanism of the poet's success. The rousing summons to “Act,—act in the living Present!” fed on the recurrent feeling of fatigue and despondency; the almost desperate desire to be “up and doing” needed the modulation of a quietistic “patience” (the leading virtue not only of Evangeline but of that archetypal blacksmith); and the insistence on the mind's power to realize sublimity worked only because it presupposed, somewhat paradoxically, the mind's endless suffering—endless, that is, until one melted in the embrace of what Evangeline calls “Death, the consoler.”⁸ These mixed impulses revealed a resonant neurosis in Longfellow, even as they set up an emotional rhythm in his poetry that was congenial to the inner needs of the American public during the urbanizing-industrializing surge of the mid nineteenth century.

More to the point, despite what reviewers cited as the “manly fervor” of his verse, and despite Whittier's salute to “A Psalm of Life” as “the moral steam enginery of an age of action,”⁹ the psychological posture of selfless working and waiting recommended by Longfellow conformed more to period stereotypes of femininity and owed more to domestic ideology than to the rugged-male discourse of steam power, commercial enterprise, and “action.” Indeed, it is here that we locate both the motive of Longfellow's rise to authority in a “feminizing” age and the reason for his subsequent fall from grace. For if in antebellum America—as Henry James, Sr., fretted—“the old virile sense” of Puritanism was being emasculated “by a feeble Unitarian sentimentality,” then Longfellow's was the most seductive voice of the new dispensation.¹⁰ As Margaret Fuller perceived (in what the poet bemoaned as “a bilious attack”), Longfellow had “a fancy for what is large and manly, if not a full sympathy with it.”¹¹ Whitman registered the same reservation, both in faulting Longfellow for “not deal[ing] hard blows” and in venerating him for being “all sympathetic gentleness,” the “universal poet of women and young people.”¹² And Mark Twain, too, in the ill-fated Whittier birthday speech, cast doubt on the poet's masculine credentials: though “built like a prize-fighter,” the Longfellow-figure in Twain's comic fantasia turns out to be a pusillanimous sneak-thief.¹³

It is no accident, then, that Longfellow's stock began to plunge with the first stirrings of modernism, which only intensified Huckleberry Finn's aversion to the “humbug talky-talk” of women and the “cases of patient suffering” memorialized in their verse.¹⁴ “Embarrassed by excesses of textual sentiment,” as Lauren Berlant argues, the arbiters of modernist taste “pathologiz[ed] and belittl[ed] women's culture as bad, irrational writing about banality”; and, according to Suzanne Clark, this “systematic misreading” of domestic fiction and the poetry of feeling as “emotional fakery” has “covered over the transgressive content of the sentimental.”¹⁵ The major male casualty of this recalibration of values was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

.....

I heard about a lady who said to Wallace Stevens
once, “Oh but Mr. Stevens, you can always fall back
on the insurance business!”

—Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being

To appreciate the delicate subversiveness of Longfellow's cultural work, it helps to recall the conception of the poet's office he inherited. From the start the refrain about America had been that nation building must precede and prepare the ground for belletristic accomplishment, and that great poetry—as distinguished from more pedestrian excursions of patriotic, pious, or polite verse—would have to wait its turn. As Barbara Packer observes, “foreign critics loved to sneer that the mercantile spirit of the Americans was hostile to the production of poetry,”¹⁶ provoking, for instance, Thomas Jefferson's touchy rejoinder (if also de facto concession) in Notes on the State of Virginia (1784-85): “When we shall have existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will enquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded … [Meanwhile we must] suppose, that this reproach is as unjust as it is unkind.”¹⁷

One unfriendly cause, of course, was the meager compensation afforded a poetic career, especially when compared with lawyering, manufacturing, or finance. As Benjamin Franklin remembered in his Autobiography (composed 1771): “my Father discourag'd me [from pursuing poetry], by ridiculing my Performances, and telling me Verse-makers were generally Beggars.”¹⁸ As late as 1823, when Longfellow was bidding farewell to his boy's will, Freneau could be heard jeering—with the European contrast in mind—the “Bank Directors of the town, / The home-made nobles of our times, / Who hate the bard, and spurn his rhymes.”¹⁹ Even at the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois could still premise his case for the sorrow songs as “the sole American music” upon the inhospitality of hurly-burly commercial culture to aesthetic achievement: “the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.”²⁰

Yet in 1829, the same year in which Bowdoin College created a chair in modern languages for Longfellow, Samuel Kettell's ground-breaking verse anthology appeared, and the North American Review announced that the long wait for a genuine American tradition might be coming to an end: “The reputation of having written poetry is one which [our forefathers] can well spare … [They] have given the world valuable lessons in more important arts”; however, now that the basic structures of economy and polity had been erected, the American poet could finally be allowed to superadd “those lighter embellishments of the edifice.”²¹ In fact, the poet was expected to give guided tours of the “edifice,” celebrating the riot of productivity within, as the same journal preached two years later: “The Genius of Poetry … forgets not to visit the abodes of active life. Politics,—commerce and manufactures,—the bustle of business,—the din of crowded cities,—the clang of the forge and the shipyard,—the angry contests of the bar and the senate, present no obstacles to the successful cultivation of the elegant arts.” After such a catalog it is hardly a surprise when the reviewer frames his challenge to the American Bard in masculinist terms: “The Muses are not a set of sentimental fine ladies who are frightened at the free and open face of real life.”²² In short, the poet must confront “active” “real” life, so that he could then rally other men—whether merchants, shipwrights, or attorneys—to do likewise, and to keep doing likewise. His poetry must aim, as Bryant said, at “the incitement to vigorous toils endured for the welfare of communities.”²³

But clearly there were unresolved issues here. On the one hand poets were assigned their topic and told to proceed in workmanlike fashion, as if theirs, too, were a worthy type of labor; on the other hand they continued beggarly, or as Bryant wrote to Richard Henry Dana: “no man makes money by [writing verse] … the march of the age is in another direction.”²⁴ Further, as indicated by the invidious distinction between their “lighter embellishments” and the “important arts” of statecraft and industry, poets were understood as virtually disqualified from “active life”—as the seamstresses of democracy's window-dressing. To adapt Lawrence Buell's argument, antebellum poets found themselves “both marginalized and pedestalized,”²⁵ caught in the double bind that the more their verse aspired to moral and stylistic finesse (that is, to capital-P Poetry), the more it presumably beat an unmanly retreat from the theater of public action. Upon the appearance of Philip Pendleton Cooke's popular Froissart Ballads (1847), for instance, a reviewer for the Southern Literary Messenger pronounced the work “at once refined and manly,” suggesting a tension in that combination, while a friend of the poet's, referring to Cooke's sanctioned career in the law, advised him: “I wouldn't waste time on a damned thing like poetry; you might make yourself … a useful man in settling neighborhood disputes.”²⁶ In such a contested environment, and with such mixed signals, how were poets to reverberate with the heartiness of real-life engagement and yet adhere to the “elegant art” of Poetry? How could they—as another reviewer for the Southern Literary Messenger put it—speak animatingly to “the current feelings and habits of the masses” and yet avoid “stoop[ing] to cater to the vulgar appetite”?²⁷ Enter Longfellow.

In an 1832 number of the North American Review Longfellow took the occasion of a new edition of Sidney to offer his own apology for poetry, objecting heatedly to the notion that poems were “baubles of effeminate minds” and that literature begets “an effeminate … spirit.”²⁸ Strong words, to be sure, and yet the bulk of the essay bears out Fuller's manlier-than-thou jibe. For what Longfellow sought to create was a middle space, resisting gender polarization, where poetry could utter “Household words” of solace, introspection, and self-renunciatory endurance without being accused of effeminacy or inutility (American Poetry, p. 385). The antebellum period, as David Leverenz has shown, saw American manhood consolidated as a workplace-defined vulnerability complex underwritten by class antagonisms and heightened “fears of being humiliated, usually by other men”—“a battlefield code” so entrenched as to make one's masculinity “feel like one's whole self.”²⁹ That these men carried the armor home with them Dickinson would attest in describing her father, the Amherst lawyer Edward Dickinson, in the mid-1860s: rare were the “fugitive moments when he [forgot] the barrister & lapse[d] into the man.”³⁰ By then—with the nation chastened by war yet bracing for expansion and greater market intensity—a poet like Edward Rowland Sill might well wonder why the American consciousness could not “cease from its male madness, its desire / To radiate outward.”³¹

As if foreseeing these developments, Longfellow's “Defence” of 1832 warns against those “barbarians”—read go-ahead Jacksonian men—who asked only that literature “display a rough and natural energy” and who ignored humanity's need to get off “the beaten, dusty thoroughfare of business” in order to learn pathos, an aesthetic nicety, a “Heaven-directed mind” (“Defence,” pp. 62-64). To put this another way, the “Defence” announced the poet's plan to foster a process (dating from before the Revolution) in which the arena of civic virtue slowly shifted from male preserves of power such as the military and the government to female spheres of influence such as the church, school, and home. In the nineteenth century, Ruth H. Bloch states, “[public] virtue … became ever more difficult to distinguish from private benevolence, personal manners, and female sexual propriety.”³² Longfellow's poetry of the 1840s and 1850s both enacted and encouraged this transition, taking its metaphors for exemplary conduct from the discourse of masculine exertion—“hero[es] in the strife,” sailors on “life's solemn main” (“A Psalm of Life,” American Poetry, p. 371), pounders at the “sounding anvil” of fate (“The Village Blacksmith,” American Poetry, p. 377)—but pressing them into the service of what was, by prevailing norms, a more feminine mode of self-carriage: chaste, patient, endlessly laboring and waiting.

The point is well illustrated by “The Light of Stars” (Complete Poetical Works, p. 4), also from Voices of the Night. The “red planet Mars,” the poem's tutelary presence, is no “tender star of love”—not at all similar, ostensibly, to the “fair lady at her casement” to which Longfellow compares “The Evening Star” (American Poetry, p. 390). In “The Light of Stars,” rather, Mars is the “star of strength [and] unconquered will,” replete with weapon, shield, and “mailèd hand.” Yet for all this bristling gear he never sees combat, as the poem veers off to praise his capacity for passive, inner resolve—for remaining “serene, and resolute, and still, / And calm, and self-possessed” (note the retarding commas and conjunctions, the redundant diction, all contributing to the “message”). But the real tip-off that Mars may be in the wrong uniform comes at the conclusion, which stresses the beauty of abject persistence: by emulating Mars, readers will discover “how sublime a thing it is / To suffer and be strong” (emphasis added). As we know from contemporary tracts on “true womanhood,” these lines capture the supposed essence of the female character: “unyielding patience” and “a peculiar power of endurance” (quoted in Reynolds, p. 344); or again, “sublime fortitude—the more sublime because shown in secret and all-enduring patience.”³³ By attributing this less-than-martial attitude to his belligerent myth-hero, Longfellow urged it upon male as much as upon female readers.

Thus Longfellow's proposal for “mak[ing] our lives sublime” (in the words of the “Psalm”) gave an important twist to the adjective. Anticipating the psychological sense of sublimating spasms of desire or emotional pain, his usage blurred the gendering as well as the social valences of a Romantic “sublimity” centered on the male isolato. According to Thomas Weiskel, “the essential claim of the sublime is that man can … transcend the human. … A humanistic sublime is an oxymoron”;³⁴ but it was just such a mingled and demasculinized grounding of the sublime in the human that Longfellow promoted. No matter that Emerson proclaimed Nature “no sentimentalist” but a “rough and surly” customer to be met with “savage … resistance”;³⁵ Longfellow would maintain, to the end, that Nature's “majestic loveliness” could be “chastened and softened and subdued / Into a more attractive grace, / And with a human sense imbued” (“Kéramos,” American Poetry, p. 439). No matter that a sardonic Henry James, in The Golden Bowl, would link Longfellow with American commercial aggressiveness, as millionaire Adam Verver likens the “Psalm of Life” to “the police breaking … into our opium den—to give us a shake.”³⁶ No matter, even, that the “Psalm” itself is spoken by “the Heart of the Young Man,” that it is concerned only with “great men” and “ship-wrecked brother[s],” or that it beats the drum for strenuous “act[ion] in the living Present” (emphasis added). The stance Longfellow fundamentally endorses is more properly associated with a young woman praying for the return of her lost lover: “Cheered by [Father Felician's] words, Evangeline labored and waited” (Evangeline, p. 85).³⁷

.....

                    … that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral
          Evangeline[,]
That's not ancient nor modern, its place is apart
Where Time has no sway, in the realm of pure Art,
'Tis a shrine of retreat from Earth's hubbub and strife
As quiet and chaste as the author's own life.

—J. R. Lowell, A Fable for Critics

Although Evangeline added little that was new to Longfellow's program, its greater scope enabled him to usher readers through a more leisurely therapeutic sequence, from yearning for lost youth to a sense of sturdiness “in the hour of affliction” to contemplation of the reward for “patiently suffering all things” in “abnegation of self” (Evangeline, pp. 82, 84, 96). Like other verse of the period, from Lydia Sigourney's “To a Shred of Linen” (1834) to Whittier's “The Barefoot Boy” (1856), Evangeline mourned a loss of innocence in both the culture and the individual life. Like Sigourney, who honored the days “of home-born, heart-felt comfort, rooted strong / In [domestic] industry, and bearing such rare fruit, / As wealth might never purchase,”³⁸ Longfellow invited readers to bathe the sores of social and economic frictions in an Acadia of the mind—a place of “delight and abundance” lying “as if new-created in all the freshness of childhood” where “the richest was poor, and the poorest lived in abundance” (Evangeline, pp. 74, 72). Like Whittier, who warned his blithe farmbody-hero not to forfeit “the freedom of the sod” for a treacherous maturity (“Prince thou art—the grown-up man / Only is republican” [“The Barefoot Boy,” American Poetry, pp. 465, 463]), Longfellow encouraged suspicion of any political organization more complex than parish communalism: “Alike were [the Acadians] free from / Fear, that reigns with the tyrant, and envy, the vice of republics” (Evangeline, p. 72).

Evangeline, it might be said, hit the American populace where it lived. Contextualizing the early years of William Dean Howells—who both honed his poetic skills by imitating Longfellow and exemplified the rigorous transitions involved in nineteenth-century “success”—Rodney D. Olsen tallies the events that inspired the “undeterred faith in the autonomous individual” that became the ensign of post-Jacksonian America: westward expansion and Indian removal; an evolving infrastructure of roads, railways, and canals; technological advances in steam and hydraulic power, telegraphy, and farm machinery; a newly sophisticated framework of finance capital:

Accelerating during the 1830s, [these] converging developments provided the basis for an integrated national market stretching from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi River. Augmented by increased immigration, population began to concentrate in commercial cities, creating an urban demand for extensive cash-crop agriculture and expanded services … [Yet] everyday realities often denied the belief that force of will was all-sufficient. Merchant capitalists, substantial farmers, and land speculators garnered the greatest returns. … Arduous labor, hazardous risks, and small economic gains were the common experiences of many antebellum Americans.³⁹

If this brave new world of chance and mischance were not in itself a cause of exhilaration and aggravation, the local mainstays of psychological steadiness seemed to be eroding, making citizens feel “caught between the world of their immediate experience—the world of ‘home'—and the ‘greater world' of the emerging national market … families of the ‘middling sort' … felt especially vulnerable in the shifting economic circumstances” (Olsen, p. 14).

Here, then, was an American society dogged by the memory of what Emerson called the “screwing panic” of 1837, which had left parts of the land “stink[ing] with suicide.”⁴⁰ Here was a more self-conscious and self-demarcating middle class showing renewed “vitality and zest” but also feeling “unstable in membership, starkly insecure in prospects” (Leverenz, pp. 86, 78). And here were poetry readers, as Buell says apropos of their warm reception of the “Psalm,” who evinced a “widespread malaise … in a rapidly secularizing country” (p. 116). Studying how American literature expressed and managed such hopes and fears, recent commentators have been drawn to the Hawthornes, with T. Walter Herbert explicating their cultural service as “shamans of domesticity”; and Gillian Brown situating Nathaniel's work within “domestic individualism,” which lubricated societal change by means of self-referential nostalgia and imaginative recyclings of the past.⁴¹ Yet it was the shamans' friend Longfellow—and recall that Hawthorne declined the Evangeline story, leaving it to the poet—who furnished the most popular and fostering incantation, at once invigorating and soothing.

Longfellow's “Acadia” functioned not only to remind readers of the presumptive charms of childhood (whether their own or American society's) but to underscore the point that childhood does not last. The poem's readers, that is, knew their pastoral fantasy for fantasy even as they indulged in it; even in Acadia, Longfellow admonished, “numberless noisy weathercocks rattled and sang of mutation” (Evangeline, p. 73). In fact, the middle of the poem—which traces the sorry fate of Evangeline, her lost beloved Gabriel, and their “shipwrecked / Nation” (p. 86) as they wander the expanse of colonial America—merely elaborates what the opening stanzas had forecast: that Eden was foredoomed to fall into Time. Cast off like “waifs of the tide” and “scattered … like flakes of snow” by arbitrary, unpredictable forces (pp. 82, 84), Longfellow's abused Acadians served as a mirror of sorts in which mid-nineteenth-century Americans could recognize their own moods and experiences; and the places these Americans visited in reading—notwithstanding James Russell Lowell's graceful tribute—evoked anything but a sanctuary from “Earth's hubbub and strife.”

The combined pressures of “modern” life so emblematized, I would contend, pushed particularly acutely on the male mind, creating a receptivity to Longfellow's distinctive mediations and gender-tinkerings. In the chapter of his survey American Manhood entitled “Work and Identity”—terms growingly synonymous for antebellum middle-class men—E. Anthony Rotundo cites letters and diaries that index the changing norms of masculine formation during Longfellow's ascendancy: “Certain phrases recurred when men set forth their goals: ‘arrive at eminence and fame'; ‘rise to wealth and honor'; ‘[get] on in the world'; ‘prepare myself for some station of respectability and usefulness.'”⁴² This collective—and collectively reinforced—sense that men were (according to other stock phrases) “made for action, and the bustling scenes of moving life,” and that it was “so unmanly, so unnatural” to avoid such activism, often brought with it wicked mood swings, “wild oscillations between ‘black discouragement' and ‘the most ardent hopes, the most glowing ambitions: “‘Embarrassment,' ‘burden,' ‘crushing,' ‘terrible'—these strong words suggest the dark underside to the hope of success” (Rotundo, pp. 168-69, 184).

Rotundo's study encompasses men from entrepreneurial and professional cliques, extending all the way up to such power brokers as Daniel Webster and Rutherford B. Hayes; but as with these figures, so with Longfellow we lose sight of the untried germ in the ample mass that grew from it, to become ensconced and—to Emerson's taste—unapproachable in the bürgerlich confines of Craigie House in Cambridge: “If Socrates were here, we could go & talk with him; but Longfellow, we cannot go & talk with; there is a palace, & servants, & a row of bottles of different coloured wines, & wine glasses, & fine coats” (Emerson in His Journals, p. 447 [1853]). Like the trademark beard adorning his portrait on schoolroom walls, which covered scars acquired in the fire that claimed his second wife's life in 1861, Longfellow's mellow fame came to obscure his own early episodes of masculine performance anxiety. From our vantage point, when he is no longer biographically “interesting” and seems accounted for by Robert Lowell's puckish label “Tennyson without gin,”⁴³ it is startling to note that Longfellow suffered from a host of physical and neurasthenic ailments well into the 1850s, including bouts of “dismal lethargy” and a “darkness which … at times usurps the empire of my thoughts.”⁴⁴

Small wonder, then, that his verse strove to counsel and commiserate with others—and perhaps with male readers especially—in the midst of their own trials and role renegotiations; or that a poem like “The Bridge” (1846) uncannily prefigures T. S. Eliot's London of The Waste Land (echoing the same Dantean canto) by imaging “thousands / Of care-encumbered men, / Each bearing his burden of sorrow” (American Poetry, p. 388). To the extent Evangeline instructed readers how to tote their heavy bundles, it might be ranged with the “homilies about adversity” proffered by Henry Ward Beecher and Wendell Phillips, who told unlucky men who had hit the wall of disaster to get up, brush themselves off, and take another run at it—to deny that they had ever been “down”: “As a way to describe defeat, the formulaic language of resilience and denial was inadequate, but, as a way to rationalize the ‘contempt, disgrace … and misery' of failure, this formula clearly had usefulness … that made it popular” (Rotundo, pp. 181, 183). But if it is true that Evangeline constituted a kind of melodic advice-literature, it substantially replaced the “language of resilience and denial” with that of resilience and acceptance: don't take arms against a sea of troubles because you cannot, by opposing, end them.

In other words, while I would not dispute John Seelye's fine reading of Evangeline as “whitely and quietly, serv[ing] as a vicarious vehicle for emotions aroused by the plight of enslaved black people,”⁴⁵ it seems more likely (charity beginning at home) that she conveyed the self-solicitude of middle-class readers—including, centrally, men—who found themselves beset not only by the shame of slavery or creeping secularism (as in Buell's analysis) but also by geographic dislocation, urban growth, social-class slipperiness, and sharpened market competition. Wasn't there, finally, something familiar about those Acadians who struggled forward, “bleeding, barefooted, over the shards and thorns of existence,” drifting in a landscape “dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with its pathway / Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and suffered before [them]” (Evangeline, pp. 85, 84)?

One can understand Waggoner's remark that, at some point in Evangeline, “the reader … is tempted to skip to the end to get the suffering over with” (p. 49); and as today's legions of non-readers confirm, there is some justice to Buell's description of the poem's “competent if soporific hexameters” (p. 254). And yet to concede this response presentizes the text in a way that misconstrues the motives and reading practice of its original audience, which snapped up six editions within three months and studied poignant engravings of the heroine (by Howells's recollection) in “a million shop windows.”⁴⁶ If for Longfellow's contemporaries Acadia represented a state of innocence spoiled, then surely they attended minutely to the suspenseful episodes of the Acadians' “exile without … end” and Evangeline's “endless search and endeavor” (Evangeline, pp. 84, 85). Surely they also noticed that Evangeline's search is not endless and that her “endeavor” does not go unrewarded; instead her quest figures a finite term of travail, the successful prosecution of which enables her to recuperate innocence in a more exalted form. Evangeline's laboring and waiting, her dutiful pursuit of Gabriel, her eschewal of “the blossoms of passion” (Evangeline, p. 94)—these spiritual and behavioral strengths bring her at last among the Quakers of Pennsylvania, whose ways “recalled the past, the old Acadian country, / Where all men were equal, and all were brothers and sisters” (p. 95). Coming full circle, the narrative reunites Evangeline—now a cholera-ward nun—with the aged, stricken Gabriel, whereupon “Death, the consoler” (p. 97) settles them into adjoining graves (in the same year, by an odd coincidence, as Wuthering Heights).

The two lovers' prospect of eternally tranquil community is counterpointed by “thousands” of Philadelphians who shuffle past with “aching brains,” “toiling hands,” and “weary feet” (Evangeline, p. 98). At poem's end, that is, the reader's identification is fractured between an uncomfortably familiar-looking army of the living dead and a heroine with “gleams of celestial light encircl[ing] her forehead” who illuminated a stairway to heaven (p. 96). You can go home again, Longfellow assured his readers, provided that you carry yourself with true-womanly steadfastness and humility. Stoically lugging the cross of American life, you can wind your way back out of history and into the only sure Acadia, which is death; and for any male reader who cannot connect with Evangeline, here are yeomen farmers who beseech God for “strength and submission” and who “in singing forget they are weary and wayworn” (p. 82); here, too, are men of the cloth who intone that “sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike” (p. 85). Coaxing, empathizing, regendering (if not degendering) the codes of moral hardihood, Longfellow shaped a mini-epic that accomplished the main objective that antebellum Americans required of their literature: to show life, as one reviewer put it, as “a serious and toilsome march from one duty performed to another yet to be done; and not a fierce battle with fate” (quoted in Baym, p. 169)—as an affair of meek but firm persistence, or “female” virtue, rather than one of masculine combativeness and delusions of mastery.

Not just the distaff side of humanity but the new American man could learn something from Evangeline, Longfellow suggested. But then, he had been suggesting it all along: as far back as 1839, the skipper of “The Wreck of the Hesperus” had “scornful[ly] laugh[ed]” at prudence—“I can weather the roughest gale, / That ever wind did blow”—only to destroy himself and the blue-eyed daughter who had counted on his paternal protection (American Poetry, p. 373). Not that it was a bad thing, according to “Seaweed” (1845), to demonstrate “the strong Will, and the Endeavour / That for ever / Wrestles with the tides of Fate,” but “the wreck of Hopes”—so common in Longfellow's nautical universe—taught that men should seek fulfillment on shore, in the “repose” of hearthside meditation and the commerce in “Household words” (American Poetry, p. 385). By the same token, the lineage of “gentle Evangeline” traces back not to a female forerunner but to that famous blacksmith of 1842: though his arms bulge with “muscles … strong as iron bands” and “honest sweat” glistens on his manly brow, he is not ashamed to be seen crying in his churchpew. Not unlike Evangeline, “Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, / Onward through life he goes” (American Poetry, pp. 375-76). […]

Notes

1. See Richard Henry Stoddard, “Longfellow,” Scribner's Monthly, 17 (1878), p. 42; and Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 60.

2. Anonymous, “What Makes the Poet?” The Galaxy, 22 (1876), 57. On Piatt's salience, see Paula Bennett, “‘The Descent of the Angel': Interrogating Domestic Ideology in American Women's Poetry, 1858-1890,” American Literary History, 7 (1995), 591-610.

3. These parodic treatments often hitchhiked on Longfellow's popularity as a vehicle for social critique. Cary's poem indicts economic inequities that forced women to marry: “Tell me not, in idle jingle / Marriage is an empty dream, / For the girl is dead that's single …” (The Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary, ed. Katherine Lee Bates [New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1903]; thanks to Jonathan Hall for bringing this poem to my attention). Carroll's “Hiawatha's Photographing” subverts categories of “civilized” and “savage” by presenting the Indian as a tactful photographer confronted with the vain, deluded members of an aristocratic “tribe” (Complete Works [New York: Vintage, 1976], pp. 856-60). Regarding “Excelsior” and consumer goods of this brand-name, Wyndham Lewis cites “a school which insists that the banner with a strange device … [was] deliberately designed by Longfellow, the seer, to foreshadow the more striking developments of American Publicity, and that ‘Excelsior!' therefore is to be regarded as perfectly good Big Business Latin” (The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, ed. D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee [London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930], p. 189).

4. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 4.

5. “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism,” in The Columbia History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), p. 69. While I agree that Longfellow “can be ignored only at the cost of misreading his century,” Gioia seems to overstate the poet's “continuing popularity” (p. 95), especially among younger readers; I also doubt whether arraigning the “shallow sophistication” (p. 85) of our literary culture will go very far toward prompting renewed attention to the poet: anyone upon whom the emotional and formal strength of, say, “The Fire of Drift-Wood” (American Poetry, p. 391) or “Aftermath” (American Poetry, p. 426) is lost is not likely to be shamed into appreciation. Perhaps the place to look for Longfellow's survival is (fittingly) in popular commerce: Celestial Seasonings tea-boxes now carry the text of “A Psalm of Life,” under the sanitized title “Life's Purpose.”

6. See American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Volume One: Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman, ed. John Hollander (New York: Library of America, 1993), pp. 369-449. Unless otherwise indicated, all of Longfellow's poems quoted in this essay are from this edition and are cited in the text as American Poetry.

7. American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), p. 42. A Wordsworthian nuance informs such melancholy, which “is not akin to pain, / And resembles sorrow only / As the mist resembles the rain” (“The Day Is Done,” American Poetry, p. 383). Bolstering my general argument, this poem valorizes “heartfelt lay[s]” and “humbler poet[s]” over “bards sublime” with their songs of “endless toil and endeavour.” Though much of Longfellow's sadness originated in his wife's death in 1835, his poetry diffuses this loss of a “Being Beauteous” as a “burden” that “seemed greater than I could bear” (“Footsteps of Angels,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Cambridge Edition [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975], p. 5; and “The Bridge,” in American Poetry, p. 387). Even “Mezzo Cammin” (1842), evidently too personal to be published during his lifetime, refers to Mary Longfellow's death obliquely, as “a care that almost killed” (American Poetry, p. 382).

8. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, in Complete Poetical Works, p. 97.

9. Oliver W. B. Peabody, quoted in Loring E. Hart, “The Beginnings of Longfellow's Fame,” New England Quarterly, 36 (1963), 74; Whittier quoted in Robert Penn Warren, “John Greenleaf Whittier: Poetry as Experience,” in John Greenleaf Whittier's Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 5.

10. Henry James, Sr., quoted in Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 17.

11. Fuller, “American Literature: Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future,” in The Harper American Literature, vol. 1, ed. Donald McQuade, et al. (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 1217. Longfellow's reaction is in Samuel Longfellow, ed., Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence, 3 vols., vols. 12-14 of The Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), III, 27. For an excellent discussion of Fuller's comments on Longfellow (and others' gender-fixated comments on Fuller), see Barbara L. Packer, “The Transcendentalists,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 2, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).

12. Whitman, “Death of Longfellow,” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 918.

13. See Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), pp. 209-10. What “Longfellow” steals, naturally, is a pair of boots, thus leaving behind him “Footprints on the sands of time.”

14. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer, vol. 8 of The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 221, 139.

15. Berlant, “The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), p. 337, n. 16; and Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 7, 8.

16. Barbara L. Packer, in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming).

17. Notes on the State of Virginia, in Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 190-91.

18. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 10.

19. Philip Freneau, “To a New-England Poet,” in The Last Poems of Philip Freneau, ed. Lewis Leary (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1945), p. 112.

20. The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Donald B. Gibson and Monica M. Elbert (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 205.

21. Anonymous, Rev. of Samuel Kettell's Specimens of American Poetry, North American Review, 29 (1829), 487-95.

22. Anonymous, “American Poets,” North American Review, 33 (1831), 298-99. Women poets were expected to avoid exactly these topics, as Rufus Griswold, anthologizer of “poetesses,” made clear in 1851: “We turn [in reading, e.g., Fanny Osgood] from the jar of senates, from politics, theologies, philosophies, and all forms of intellectual trial and conflict” (quoted in Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982], p. 24).

23. Quoted in Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), p. 209.

24. The Letters of William Cullen Bryant, ed. William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss, 6 vols. (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1975-92), I, 380.

25. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 117.

26. Quoted in Welford Dunaway Taylor, “Philip Pendleton Cooke,” in The Garland Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, ed. Eric L. Haralson (New York: Garland, forthcoming). For indispensable background on such vocational issues, see Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), esp. ch. 7, “William Cullen Bryant: The Creative Context of the Poet.”

27. Anonymous, “Longfellow as a Poet,” Southern Literary Messenger, 17 (1851), 664.

28. “Defence of Poetry,” North American Review, 34 (1832), 69, 62.

29. Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), p. 73.

30. Dickinson, quoted in Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974, 1987), I, 66.

31. “Man, the Spirit,” in The Poetical Works of Edward Rowland Sill, ed. William Belmont Parker (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), p. 65 (thanks to Susan Johnston Graf for calling my attention to this poem).

32. “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs, 13 (1987), 56.

33. Anonymous reviewer quoted in Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), p. 189.

34. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976, 1986), p. 3.

35. Emerson, “Fate,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), pp. 945, 954.

36. The Golden Bowl, 2 vols., vols. 23 and 24 of The New York Edition of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), II, 92.

37. Generic features enhanced the norm-setting impact of lyric verse: “A Psalm of Life” and “The Village Blacksmith” were compact, portable, memorable; one could enjoy their tonic effects even while laboring and waiting. Not only did the schoolroom or recitation poem avoid the novel's tendency to disturb domestic ideology by “encourag[ing] a dangerous privatism,” but as a commodity that accrued value through repetition, it also avoided the lust-for-novelty syndrome plaguing the novel—“a form whose individual examples … had to expect to be quickly ‘used up’” by readers eager for the next new work (Baym, pp. 50, 48). Nor should we discount what William Charvat called Longfellow's “shrewd, aggressive” self-promotion, as when, in a 4 February 1846 letter to a publisher, he pushed for more “vigorously done” distribution and for cheap editions that could be “sent into every nook and corner of the country” (see Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli [Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968], pp. 155-67; and The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen, 6 vols. [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1972], III, 99).

38. “To a Shred of Linen,” in American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, ed. Cheryl Walker (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992), p. 22.

39. Rodney D. Olsen, Dancing in Chains: The Youth of William Dean Howells (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 12-13.

40. Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 163-64.

41. See Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1993), p. xvi; and Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1990), chaps. 3 and 4.

42. Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 168.

43. See Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), p. 196.

44. See Arvin, pp. 48-51, and compare even the very late poem “Moods,” which wishes for a song “With just enough of bitterness” to “impart / Healing and help in this dull lethargy!” (Complete Poetical Works, p. 322).

45. “Attic Shape: Dusting Off Evangeline,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 60 (1984), 43.

46. W. D. Howells, Selected Letters, Volume 1: 1852-1872, ed. George Arms, et al. (Boston: Twayne, 1979), p. 73.