Reconsidering Longfellow

Ten essays provide a new approach to the work of the most popular American poet of all time. The essays, written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars, cover the entire range of Longfellow’s work, from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha) to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War, Tales of a Wayside Inn. Many of the essays rely on unpublished archival sources from the Longfellow collections at the Longfellow House-George Washington National Historic Site and at the Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.