Longfellow’s Hiawatha, Carroll’s Hiawatha: The Name and Nature of Parody

Longfellow was one of the great literary men of his day. Modest, widely if not wisely adored (the poets loved by one generation are most at risk when the next scorns its elders), he was visited by the small and great (from neighborhood children to the emperor of Brazil), burdened with honors (receiving a chair carved from the remains of the famous spreading chestnut-tree), and made an object of public sympathy when his second wife died in an accidental fire. Longfellow was so well known that his birthday was marked in public schools, and after his death his face was pasted on a brand of cigars. His admirers built replicas of his house in Detroit, Minneapolis, Great Barrington, and Evanston—late into the 1920s, Sears, Roebuck still sold plans for a version of the Cambridge house. Though it had been Washington’s headquarters during the siege of Boston, Craigie House was ever after remembered as the home of Longfellow.

Yet the chill of the future was felt as early as 1856, when a London reviewer asked of Whitman, “Is this man with the ‘barbaric yawp’ to push Longfellow into the shade, and he meanwhile to stand and ‘make mouths’ at the sun? The chance of this might be formidable were it not ridiculous.” The fatal question had been posed. By 1868, a reviewer for Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art could tout Whitman as the “first characteristic poetical writer that the United States have produced. Longfellow is but Tennyson and water.”

When we think of Longfellow now, he seems little better than a city-bred Whittier, a Norman Rockwell avant la lettre, always ready to take some homebound scene, lay on a few schmaltzy touches, and varnish it up. When Frost is weak, he sounds most like Longfellow (the ending of “’Out, Out—’” does not quite salvage the poem from Longfellowish melodrama). It’s fortunate that Frost only occasionally falls victim to the tear-stained side of Yankee wisdom, and unfortunate that he’s often represented in anthologies by just those poems where he succumbs.

Longfellow was the poet of the age, so long as it was the age. Yet no man can be all good who writes little but sentimental tosh:

I hear in the chamber above me   The patter of little feet, The sound of a door that is opened,   And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,   Descending the broad hall stair, Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,   And Edith with golden hair.

Longfellow excelled at slick-tongued bathos that embodied the sentimental impulses of popular journalism—but his audience was surprisingly broad. Presented to Queen Victoria in 1869, he made a self-deprecating remark about his fame. Her majesty replied, “Oh, I assure you, Mr. Longfellow, you are very well known. All my servants read you.”

However revered he was below stairs at Windsor Castle, there were readers of more captious temper. The characteristics that once made Longfellow cherished make him look fatuous now, but they already looked fatuous to those who parodied him with malicious glee. (It’s a mistake to condemn a time for its best sellers, or think it redeemed by its iconoclasts—yet both reveal something of the age.)

Take Longfellow’s solemn bucket of maple sap, “A Psalm of Life”:

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.

Life is real! Life is earnest!   And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest,   Was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow had many parodists, good, bad, and indifferent; but only a malevolent genius could have turned this into a poem about life insurance:

Tell me not in mournful numbers,   Life Assurance is a dream, And that while the public slumbers,   Figures are not what they seem.

When parody applies the outer shell to a subject wholly unsuitable to the gravitas of the model, it turns topsy-turvy every verity the original...