Evangeline and the Weight of a Poem

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow never set foot in Louisiana. Yet he wrote the poem that gave the Acadians of south Louisiana their defining myth.

Published on November first, eighteen forty-seven, by William D. Ticknor and Company, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie told the story of a young woman named Evangeline Bellefontaine separated from her beloved Gabriel on the night of the deportation. She spends decades searching for him across the American continent, through the bayous of Louisiana, across the western prairies, and finds him finally in a Philadelphia hospital where she has been working as a nurse among the poor. He dies as she reaches him. The poem ends in grief and grace.

Longfellow researched using historical sources; he never saw the cypress-lined bayous he described. But the poem arrived at a moment when Acadian identity in Louisiana had no national voice, no document that named what had been lost. Evangeline became that document.

About sixteen miles south of Lafayette, the town of St. Martinville holds an Evangeline Oak beside Bayou Teche, the site where, by local legend, the real woman behind the character is said to have learned that her intended had married someone else. St. Martinville, once called Petit Paris for its theaters and fine dining, had been one of the first Acadian settlements, the earliest group arriving in seventeen sixty-five.

Whether or not the oak witnessed any such reunion, the legend fused with the landscape and would not let go. The poem profoundly shaped how Acadians thought about themselves, introducing a hundred and fifty years of suppressed history into American literary culture with a single elegiac verse.

Some myths earn their permanence.