Author
American poet and educator (1807–1882)
Their life
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an American poet and educator. His original works include "Paul Revere's Ride," *The Song of Hiawatha*, and *Evangeline*. He was the first American to translate Dante's *Divine Comedy* in its entirety, and he is counted among the fireside poets associated with New England.
He was born in Portland, in what was then the District of Maine, Massachusetts, and is now Portland, Maine. He graduated from Bowdoin College and taught there as a professor before going to Europe to study. He later became a professor at Harvard College. His first major poetry collections were *Voices of the Night* (1839) and *Ballads and Other Poems* (1841). In 1854 he retired from teaching to devote himself to writing, and he spent the rest of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a house that George Washington had used as headquarters during the Revolutionary War.
Longfellow suffered two great personal losses. His first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage. His second wife, Frances Appleton, died in 1861 after her dress caught fire and she sustained burns. For a time afterward he had difficulty writing poetry and turned largely to translating works from other languages. His lyric poems, which often drew on myth and legend, were known for their musical quality and made him the most popular American poet of his day, with success overseas as well. After his death, his reputation declined, and critics came to describe his work as overly sentimental and too closely derived from European poetic styles
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