Longfellow's Mythmaking

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in this Portland house in eighteen oh seven, the second of eight children in a family with enough status that the house on Congress Street was spacious and well-furnished. He left for Bowdoin College at fifteen, published his first poem at thirteen, and spent the rest of his life becoming the most widely read American poet of the nineteenth century. At his peak, his books sold in numbers that no American poet before or since has matched.

He also built the mythology of the new nation, track by track. Paul Revere's Ride, published in eighteen sixty-one, gave Americans an indelible image of a lone rider shouting warnings through sleeping towns that would awaken to revolution. Several details were wrong. Revere did not complete his ride to Concord; he was captured by a British patrol. The signal lanterns in the Old North Church steeple were a signal to people in Charlestown, not to Revere himself, who already knew the British were coming. Longfellow got the geography and the dramaturgy right and the history approximate. The version in the poem is the version in the public memory.

The Song of Hiawatha, published in eighteen fifty-five, drew on the Ojibwe oral traditions documented by the ethnographer Henry Schoolcraft, but filtered them through a European romantic tradition that found in Indigenous culture a noble simplicity that existed more in the imagination of nineteenth-century readers than in the documented reality of Ojibwe life. Generations of Indigenous writers and scholars have described the damage done by that romantic construction.

Longfellow knew he was building national mythology. He was not confused about the difference between history and poetry. He made choices about which myths the country needed, and those choices shaped what Americans knew and believed about their past for generations. The house is worth visiting if you want to think about what a poet can do to a country's memory.