The divina commedia5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Although hardly an iconoclast, he was no less concerned than later American poets with the project of forging a national literary identity. He wrote prose as well as poetry, epics as well as lyrics, was a master of metre, and fluent in many languages. Longfellow's verse was swept long ago from the school curriculum, but he was once, after Tennyson, the most popular poet in the English-speaking world. As for me, I loved the swashbuckling sound of "Wreck of the Hesperus", but years passed before I met the poem. But, like anyone else who had gone to school in the first quarter of the 20th century, she'd been introduced to verse by the venerable Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82). No, she wasn't a literary lady: she enjoyed "the flicks" rather more than books, and preferred knitting patterns to poetry. "You look like the Wreck of the Hesperus," my mother used to exclaim irritably, when I came in from play looking particularly dishevelled. ![]()
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