Originally intended for a broad, popular audience, The Song of Hiawatha was standard school fare for generations of adolescents who could recite such familiar unrhymed trochaic tetrameter lines as “By the shores of Gitche Gumee,/ By the shining Big-Sea-Water. . . .” It soon became the most popular book-length poem ever written, selling forty-five thousand copies within five years. With Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ebb in popularity, however, the poem has become increasingly obscure, although its value for young readers could be rediscovered in the wake of a revival of interest in American Indian oral literature in literature classes. In this regard, Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass (1855) was published the same year as The Song of Hiawatha, praised Longfellow as the “universal poet of . . . young people.” His poetry in general is accessible to young readers and has proven a reliable resource for teaching prosody.

Longfellow’s interest in American Indians seems to have at least two known sources. First, he personally witnessed a delegation from the Sauk and Fox tribes, which included chief Black Hawk, on Boston Common in 1837. In addition, Longfellow was influenced by ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft, whose many works on American Indian life and legend fascinated a generation and created a new field of study. Longfellow was much impressed with the picturesque quality of the American Indians’ “beautiful traditions” and ignored the harsher realities of their life. While he bases the legends of the poem on the work of Schoolcraft, he purges them of their more cruel and grotesque aspects. Even Hiawatha becomes a gentler hero than Manabozho, the hero on whom he is modeled. Like other legendary folk heroes, Manabozho has a dark side to his character, occasionally as destructive as he is constructive of tribal welfare.

Modeled on the Finnish epic the Kalevala, The Song of Hiawatha is as famous for its sometimes tedious versification as for its American Indian lore. Although it was a popular success, with its picturesque and imaginative tales, some reviewers panned the book’s monotonous verse and its idealized characters. Even Longfellow himself admitted that while writing his American Indian epic he was not entirely sure of its value, worrying that he was too close to the subject to see it clearly. In time, he would have to suffer the myriad parodies that the poem spawned among humorists. Despite its flaws, The Song of Hiawatha remains a fascinating source of American Indian mythology and virtually the only memorable American Indian epic written in the nineteenth century.