Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was professor of modern languages at Harvard and the most popular poet in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, the first American poet given a bust in Poets’ Corner. Evangeline of 1847, the story of an Acadian girl searching for the lover she lost in the expulsion of 1755, told in hexameters, sold sixty thousand copies; Hiawatha and Paul Revere’s Ride are the others everyone knew. His second wife died in a fire in his study. He translated Dante, and the Harvard Classics assign him as the American poet the age most loved.