Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator. His original poetry include "Paul Revere's Ride," "The Song of Hiawatha," and "Evangeline." He was the first American to thoroughly translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and one of New England's fireside poets. Longfellow was born in Portland, District of Maine, Massachusetts (now Portland, Maine). He graduated from Bowdoin College and went on to teach at Harvard College after studying in Europe. His first two major poetry books were Ballads and Other Poems (1841) and Voices of the Night (1839). He withdrew from teaching in 1854 to focus on his writing and spent the rest of his life at George Washington's Revolutionary War headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mary Potter, his first wife, died in 1835 from a miscarriage. His second wife, Frances Appleton, died in 1861 from burns sustained when her garment caught fire. Longfellow struggled to write poetry after her death and shifted his concentration to translating works from other languages. Longfellow died in 1882. Longfellow authored many lyric poems, which are recognized for their musicality and frequently tell stories of mythology and folklore. He became the most popular American poet of his day and had international recognition.