Poet Professor and the Arts of Erudition: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Popularity and Unique Voice

Abstract

In his posthumous The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (1968), William Charvat identifies three types of poets: private poets, public poets, and mass poets. According to Charvat, “mass” poets like the Midwestern “Hoosier” poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), are not worthy of literary study because they are “not artists but manufacturers—impersonal producers of a commodity.” Charvat turns to private and public poets who share a similar purpose, “primarily to meet a need within themselves, whether that need is for fame, or to teach and lead, or simply to discover and explore themselves,” but who differ in publication aims. According to Charvat, private poets like Emily Dickinson make “little or no attempt to reach a public through print,” whereas public poets make “a prolonged endeavor to reach a general audience rather than a coterie.” In terms of nineteenth-century America, Charvat notes, “Very few public poets were financially successful.” Charvat singles out Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose impressive sales allowed the forty-six-year-old poet to retire from his Harvard professorship mid-career in 1853, not only as “the first American professional poet” but an international paragon of public esteem, “the world’s most successful poet” in the nineteenth century.

A singular feature of Longfellow’s prosody is its unmistakable erudition. His verse deploys a vast allusive vocabulary encompassing American, European, and world sources. Longfellow’s points of reference, with recondite gleanings from his capacious reading, remain fascinatingly ductile, blending obscure and well-known materials. With allusions that would be unknown to many of his readers, Longfellow achieved a unique accessibility yet subtlety, coupling mastery of verse forms with elemental imagery. Twenty-first century biographer, Charles Calhoun notes Longfellow’s “enormous cultural” power and his “imprint on three generations of Americans,” an accomplishment defined by erudition within a purposely understated ars poetica.