Longfellow
(Longfellow) Henry Wadsworth (27/2.1807, Portland, Maine, 24.3.1882, Cambridge, Massachusetts), American poet. Son of a lawyer. After graduating from Bowdoyne College, he completed his education in Europe (1826-29); professor of literature at Harvard University (1836-54). The first poems were published in 1820. Collections of poems by L. – “Night Voices” (1839), “Poems about slavery” (1842, Russian translation by ML Mikhailov, 1861), “Migratory birds” (1858) and others. His translations of works by European poets (1846) played a major role in American cultural life. He also wrote novels Hyperion (1839), Kavanagh (1849), a book of travel notes “Over the Ocean” (1835). L. opposed the limited practicality of the bourgeoisie world of nature, sang patriarchal manners, idealizing the past of America and the life of its indigenous population – the Indians. Already his early poems are devoted to the struggle of the
Indians for independence. In their legends and legends, L. saw the origins of the American national culture. As a humanist, L. resented the extermination of the Indians, the slavery of the Negroes. In the 1940s, he approached the movement of the abolitionists, but he does not have a direct appeal to fight. Turning to the past of his country, L. tried to create epic works about the life of the first settlers in America, legitimized in American poetry a hexameter (the poems “Evangeline”, 1847, “Matchmaking Miles Standish”, 1858). Based on the tales of the Indian people and taking the Finnish epic of Kalevala as a literary specimen, L. created the “Song of Hiawatha” (1855, Russian translation by DL Mikhailovsky, 1868-69, and IA Bunin, 1896), which brought him world fame. In the “Song” merge into one poetic whole of the legend of the gods and others? mythological faces with real historical events. The scattered tales are connected with the personality of the hero. The image of Hiawatha embodied the best features of the Indian – courage, incorruptibility, fortitude. However,
not free from the puritanical moralizing, L. at times replaced the poetry and naive severity of ancient Indian legends with sentimentality. In “The Tales of a Roadside Hotel” (1863), L., referring to the novelistic cycles in the manner of J. Boccaccio and J. Chaucer, leads the narrative in a relaxed and crafty manner. A scientist-philologist, a connoisseur of literature and folklore, an interpreter, L. undertook a 31-volume edition of Poems on Localities (1876-79), devoted to depicting nature in world poetry. In the democratic circles of Russia, especially in the 1960s. 19th century, were very popular “Poems of slavery.” Russian translators often turned to L.’s lyrics, to his ballads
