Symbols “Mystical and Awful”: Emerson’s and Longfellow’s Primitive Poetics

Symbols HMystical and Awful" : Emerson's and Longfellow's Primitive Poetics LESLIE E. ECKEL When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow began injune of I854 to ponder the "beautiful traditions" ofthe Native Am.ericans with an eye to composing The Song ofHiawatha, he turned to the many textual sources available to him at the time.I On the bookshelf in his study at Craigie House stood the works of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnographer based in the Upper Great Lakes region who had studied the history, culture, and, most importantly for Longfellow, the literary and linguistic life of the Ojibway people. P\.S Longfellow admitted, Schoolcraft's broadranging and "ill-digested" treatment of his material made his observations difficult to absorb fully (Life, ~48), so the poet supplemented this reading with other accounts of Native Am.erican life, primarily by George Catlin, john Heckewelder, john Tanner, and Mary Eastman. In his authorial endnotes to the published poem, Longfellow mentions all of these writers and acknowledges his indebtedness to them for the details and patterns of "legendary lore" out ofwhich he created the poem's narrative.~ Longfellow's notes, however, are not thorough, as one critic has observed, nor do they provide an accurate picture of the texts that contributed to his conception of an "Am.erican Prometheus."3 What Longfellow fails to mention, and what scholars therefore have overlooked for decades, is the imposing presence in his study of another literary figure even more familiar to us. On the wall above his desk hung a portrait of ESQ !11. 52 !lST-2ND QUARTERS! 2006 45 Henry I4&dsworth Longfi~llow. Photograph ofapainting at the Museum ofFine Arts, Boston, ca. 191O-HZ, b George HeaJy. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-D416-237. Ralph I4&ldo Emerson in 184:6, b EastmanJohnson. Crl!Jon and chalk on palJer. Courtesy of the National Park Service, Longfellow National Historic Site, LONG 541. SYMBOLS "MYSTICAL AND AWFUL" Ralph Waldo Emerson, his contemporary in the world of New England letters and his close personal friend. 4 The works of Schoolcraft and others shared a bookshelfwith copies ofNature and Emerson's Esssborn and Stellanova Osborn note that, from Schoolcraft's History, Longfellow knew Hiawatha as a leader of his community and a ~'patron" of his people. 26 He does indeed depict this figure as a builder of social consensus , but perhaps his most significant contribution to the Hiawatha myth is his decision to refashion him as a poet, or a "Language-maker," who fulfills many of the requirements that Emerson sets forth in his outline of the vocation and practice of poetry (CW, 3:13). From his birth, Longfellow's Hiawatha proves himself extraordinarily attuned to natural phenomena. The poem's narrator recounts that, as a child, I-liawatha sat "at the door on summer evenings" and 58 Heard the whispering of the pine-trees, Heard the lapping of the waters, Sounds of music, words of wonder; SYMBOLS "MYSTICAL AND AWFUL" "Minne-wawa!" said the pine-trees, "Mudway-aushka!" said the water. (Poems, 158) The young Hiawatha appears to be both immersed in the outward forms of nature and cognizant of their linguistic qualities . He hears the characteristic sounds of the pine trees and the lake water, provided by the poem's narrator in their "original " version (albeit in written form). As Hiawatha grows, he moves among the creatures of the forest, all the while "Learn[ing] ofevery bird its language, / Learn[ing] their names and all their secrets," and communicating directly with the animals he encounters (Poems, 159). In Longfellow's vision of a Native American's relationship to the land, nothing separates human beings frorn the elements of nature, for all of creation is unified in the rnanner of a paradise. At this point in the poem, Hiawatha has the advantage of being both a child and a "savage," a position that in Emersonian terms would confirm the purity ofhis intellectual relation to nature. Knowing nothing but what is present before him in the landscape, Hiawatha spontaneously builds his thought on natural foundations and "converse[s]" in organic "figures." As a young boy, Hiawatha is a passive receiver of natural impressions, but as he matures...