LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH. - North American poet, b. 27 Feb. 1807 at Portland (Maine), d. at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 14 March 1882. He pursued his studies at Bowdoin College and held there a chair of modern languages; after a three-year journey in France, Spain, and Italy, he returned to work and, at the end of 1883, was sent to Harvard.
In 1838, two years after his return from a second journey to Europe, he published Voices of the night, a collection of poems of which the Psalm of life was to be one of his most popular lyrics. His dramatic works (The Spanish student [1843], etc.) and his subsequent volumes of verse (especially well known is the narrative poem Evangeline) won him wide renown and the means to become independent (1851). Among his mature works should be mentioned: the trilogy Christus (1851-72); Hiawatha (1855), The courtship of Miles Stand (1858), and a translation of the Divina Commedia. L.'s popularity was immense, although his poetry does not reveal great imaginative power or intense feeling.