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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - College Essay

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

was born on February 27, 1807. He was a widely read and highly regarded poet of the nineteenth century. Longfellow was successful in both lyric and narrative poetry and later wrote incredible sonnets. He was not a poet of extremes, intense passion, or tragedy. He was gentle and optimistic and felt the purpose of poetry was to “embellish and sweeten life,” He generally wrote of normal life, and attempted to show the beauty of it, that seems to escape us.
In the early part of the twentieth century, Longfellow’s work fell into disfavor with the academic crowd because it was an age when everything traditional was held in low regard. Longfellow’s works were often criticized for being ...

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and Puritan New England in “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” These three poems mentioned above are his most famous long poems.
Longfellow received wide public recognition with his volume of verse “Voices of the Night” (1839), which contained the poem “A Psalm of Life,” which was written in quatrain stanza format.

"Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem."

This poem revolves around the idea of life’s pursuits. It is an optimistic view toward dealing with life’s purpose. Longfellow suggests a major purpose of life is learning more and advancing yourself through time, and that life is not to enjoy yourself, or to feel remorse, pain or sorrow, but to keep getting further with that knowledge you have obtained through life. He also stresses individuality, that we should strive to be different, to be our own person, and to not follow the crowd, or as he says, “Be not like dumb ...

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (2006, November 16). Retrieved July 12, 2025, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Henry-Wadsworth-Longfellow/55683

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 11/16/2006 08:37:29 PM
Category: Biographies
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 665
Pages: 3

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