Longfellow Redux (review)

One of the more satiric barbs in E. E. Cummings's sonnet "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls" is "they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead." To make sure that nobody misses the point, Christopher Beach in his Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2003) informs us: "These 'ladies' still inhabit the nineteenth-century mindset represented by the church and the poetry of Longfellow (the epitome of comfortable literary conventionality); . . . they are not capable of making a distinction between their unthinking religious belief in Christ and their equally unthinking acceptance of inherited literary taste" (104). Student readers of Beach's book, designed primarily for beginners in literary studies, are unlikely ever to have read a line of Longfellow's poetry, but now, thanks to Cummings and Beach, they will be able to acquire their own "unthinking acceptance of inherited literary taste." Christoph Irmscher does not attempt to heave Longfellow back into the canon from which he was expelled by the modernists and critics writing in their wake. The Longfellow whom he reconstructs in Longfellow Redux was, however, "a highly self-conscious writer with a clear and coherent understanding of what he was doing, a writer who apart from being more cosmopolitan, was in some ways even more American than Whitman" (5). Irmscher succeeds splendidly in giving us appreciatory access to Longfellow's clear and coherent understanding of himself as a poet, and provides illuminating readings of numerous poems. His skillful restoration of a poet's work much damaged by the whirligigs of time will not make of Longfellow a "major" poet for our times, but part of his case for taking a fresh look at Longfellow two centuries after his birth in 1807 is that customary assumptions affecting our ways of bestowing "major" and "minor" labels simply do not apply in his case.

Longfellow's readership spanned social classes, generations, and continents as no other American poet's has before or since. In "Strangers as Friends: Longfellow and His Readers," the first of four chapters, Irmscher writes of how strangers would approach Longfellow on the street and come calling unannounced at his house on Cambridge's Brattle Street, where he kept a box of autographed photos on the mantelpiece for such occasions. He also received a daily avalanche of letters from readers who sought to strike up a correspondence with him. Over the course of a long literary lifetime, he received more than twenty thousand letters from admirers, who often included generous samples of their own work, thirteen hundred requests for autographs, and hundreds of birthday letters. Longfellow spent hours writing as many as twenty replies per day, a regimen which led John Greenleaf Whittier to remark: "My friend Longfellow was driven to death by these incessant demands."

Why did so many utter strangers when writing to him readily address Longfellow as their friend? What was the nature of the appeal of his poetry to them, and how did it foster an author-reader relationship quite unlike that between Whitman and his readers (projected or actual), or between the immensely popular Lydia Sigourney and her readers? How did Longfellow's conception of himself as a poet, of the poetic process, and of the function of poetry contribute to his being mocked by Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Fuller? At stake in such questions is the matter of originality in poetry. In the course of his career as a professional poet Longfellow came to see himself "less and less as an 'original' creator than as the competent redistributor of common cultural goods, whose relationship with his audience was based on a system of exchange, both monetary and emotional, governed by civility and mutual respect" (67). The persona he fashioned was, unlike Whitman's buttonholing prophet, that of "a contemplative friend, close to his readers but far enough away to respect their privacy, their separateness" (60). At the same time, he broke down barriers between poet and reader by encouraging his readers "to share in the 'mystique' of literary production, to take his images...