Whitman and Longfellow

Summary

The video contrasts Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with earlier writers Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. While Douglass and Stowe exposed failures in American society, Whitman and Longfellow celebrated the nation’s promise and character.

Walt Whitman

Whitman believed the United States could foster goodwill and solidarity among all people. Born in New York in 1819, he embraced the era’s democratic spirit and was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism, particularly its respect for nature and spiritual life.

Because publishers rejected his unconventional poetry, Whitman published Leaves of Grass himself in 1855. The video presents the work as innovative and describes a transformative experience that led Whitman to be regarded as a mystic. Through poetry, he celebrated life’s vitality and variety, including subjects many writers avoided.

Whitman also came to view death as a kind of transformation, an idea reflected in a poem excerpted in the video. President Abraham Lincoln read Leaves of Grass and recited it to others. Whitman’s poetic style later influenced writers such as William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, Longfellow was a college classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He chose writing as a young man and drew on American life and history to create narrative poems about distinctly American subjects, including “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “Excelsior.”

His best-known long narrative poem, The Song of Hiawatha, portrayed Native Americans as noble and closely connected to nature. The video quotes its description of Gichi Manitou and the peace pipe. Lines from Longfellow’s poems remained familiar to Americans, including the opening of “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Longfellow was popular in both the United States and Europe. He became the first American writer honored in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey and died in 1882.

Next Episode

The episode closes by previewing the next installment, which will explore post–Civil War American authors writing across a nation extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Jane Kazmarek — narrator and presenter
• Walt Whitman — quoted from Leaves of Grass and a poem about death
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — quoted from The Song of Hiawatha and “Paul Revere’s Ride”; other named poems include “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “Excelsior”
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — identified as an influence on Whitman
• Abraham Lincoln — mentioned as a reader and reciter of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass