UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Christoph Irmscher

A portrait of Longfellow as professional author, devoted friend, and family man

The most popular American poet of his day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was a multiculturalist before the term was invented. He passionately believed in the value of foreign travel and conceived of American literature as deeply “transatlantic.” A polyglot poet-scholar, the first American to translate Dante’s entire Divine Comedy, he was also a hands-on, unconventional father who produced numerous Edward Lear–like drawings for the entertainment of his children.

Based on an exhibition at Harvard’s Houghton Library and originally published as a special issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin, this volume offers an innovative view of the poet’s personal life, his connection with his audience, and his efforts to add an international dimension to American literature. Profusely illustrated with manuscripts, drawings, and photographs from the extensive collections of Houghton Library and the Longfellow National Historic Site, it demonstrates how intensely involved Longfellow was in family, fatherhood, and friendship. It also shows how these supposedly “private” aspects of his life constantly intersected with the more public aspects of his understanding of authorship, his collaborative projects, and his commitment to his readers. The result is a vivid introduction to Longfellow’s world.

“Christoph Irmscher demonstrates the enviable ability to select a dazzling array of material objects from another century, and use them to give shape and substance to the life and times of a most appealing subject. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was America's first celebrity poet—a superstar of his day, we realize here in a very immediate way—but he was also a devoted family man and a model of professionalism to an adoring public. The great Bard of Brattle Street could not have wished for a more suitable Boswell on the occasion of his two hundredth birthday.”

Nicholas Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

"Lovers of literature...will enjoy Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200 by Christoph Irmscher. . . . This book combines both excellent scholarship and a valuable look at the whole man in terms of his family, his friends, and his life in the spotlight."

Alan Caruba, Bookviews

Christoph Irmscher is professor of English at Indiana University and author of Longfellow Redux and The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James.

Published in cooperation with Houghton Library, Harvard University.

New England Studies
236 pp., 67 illus.
$24.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-584-5
June 2009

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