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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 's Poetry Of The Nineteenth Century

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow epitomized poetry of the nineteenth century, yet remained living, breathing figure through the aisles of history with his work.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine—then still part of
Massachusetts—on February 27, 1807, the second son in a family of eight children. His mother,
Zilpah Wadsworth, found herself the daughter of a Revolutionary War hero. His father, Stephen
Longfellow, served a prominent Portland lawyer and later a member of Congress.Henry assumed the role of a dreamy boy who loved to read. He heard sailors speaking many a language including Spanish,
French and German in the Portland streets and liked stories set in foreign places: The Arabian
Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and the plays …show more content…

Such poems find themselves to invigorate the nineteenth century, according to hwlongfellow.org. Both books were very popular, but
Longfellow’s growing duties as a professor left him little time to write more. In addition, Frances
Appleton, a young woman from Boston he was courting, had refused his proposal of marriage.
Frances finally accepted his proposal the following spring, bringing in the best eighteen years of
Longfellow’s life.The couple had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood, and the marriage gave him a fighting spirit. In 1847, he published Evangeline, a book-length poem about Evangeline, which describes the betrothal of a fictional Acadian girl named Evangeline Bellefontaine to her beloved, Gabriel
Lajeunesse, and their separation as the British deport the Acadians from Acadie in the Great
Upheaval. The poem then follows Evangeline across the landscapes of America as she spends years in a search for him, at some times being near to Gabriel without realizing he was near.
Finally, she settles in Philadelphia and, as an old woman, works as a Sister of Mercy among the poor. While tending the dying during an epidemic, she finds Gabriel among the sick, and he sadly dies in her arms .The poem had a powerful effect in defining both Acadian history and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even to the point of inspiring similar stories, Louisiana Judge Felix Voorhies published Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline, in

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