A Brief for Longfellow

...Within the limits of his romantic interests, Longfellow is among the most learned and most "literary" of American poets...

...Arvin may well be correct when he deplores the current "bias toward elimination" among presentday literary critics, the "passion for proscription" of all but a small canon of acceptable writers...

...If it is unlikely that many will be persuaded to accept his judgments, it is also unlikely that a more satisfactory book on Longfellow will ever be written...

...Most of his works are either based directly on, or contain allusions to...

...And if there is "a certain ingenuousness" in the rhythms of the following examples, it is of a kind about which one finds it difficult to comment: Faith alone can interpret life, and the heart that aches and bleeds with the stigma Of pain, alone bears the likeness of Christ, and can comprehend its dark enigma...

...Among the languages Arvin mentions as more-or-less mastered by Longfellow are French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Italian, and Classical Latin and Greek...

...In other words, given the inadequacy of the grounds on which Longfellow's popularity was based, the collapse was inevitable...

...the scholar's life "was temperamentally congenial to him...

...In this case, it is an apt method, because to a very great extent Longfellow's life was his poetry, or, at least, poetry in general...

...But it is not the popularly didactic Longfellow, the author of "A Psalm of Life," "The Village Blacksmith" and "Excelsior," whom Arvin is concerned to resurrect...

...But in all conscience, it is simply impossible to see the demise of Longfellow's reputation as the ominous warning for English and American literature which he would make of it...

...the years from 47 to 54 were a kind of genial late summer for him...

...Continental sources—most frequently German, Italian, or Scandinavian—and Arvin performs the arduous scholarly task of comparison and contrast with these sources...

...The pointlessly inverted syntax of these lines from "The Saga of King Olaf," a work esteemed by Arvin, fails to illustrate the "virtues of directness, of simplicity of statement" in any obvious way: Strode he red and wrathful With his stately air...

...Nor are these virtues any easier to detect in this swell of characteristically thumping bombast: These and many more like these, With King Olaf sailed the seas, Till the waters vast Filled them with a vague devotion, With the freedom and the motion, With the roll and roar of ocean And the sounding blast...

...in Hiawatha, the pervading mood of "drowsiness" is invoked in order to rescue sleepy writing...

...Yet one cannot help but wonder whether the poetry of Longfellow is really an adequate excuse for raising such large issues...

...it has an ancient and august derivation, and freely enough understood, it is a powerful element in much of our contemporary verse...

...At this point, however, the accidental death by fire of his second wife unalterably shattered this serenity, though his congenital cheerfulness preserved him to the last from total despondency...

...There is iconoclastic good sense, for example, in the way Arvin dispatches a current superstition about the didactic in poetry: "There is no reason whatever why the didactic should be ruled out of serious poetry...

...For another, Arvin's claims for that style are often difficult to accept...

...Current taste, however, obsessed with such qualities as ambiguity, tension and irony, and drawn to "a poetry of a certain difficulty—emotionally perplexed, intellectually hard-earned, stylistically dense"—is unwilling to recognize the charm of effects so simple and innocent...

...Although Arvin emphasizes that distress and insecurity were by no means absent from Longfellow's life, the popular notion of that life as undisturbedly placid does not seem completely groundless...

...Yet we frequently find Arvin defending passages of awkward and invertebrate style as "appropriate" to poetic effects which are by no means interesting...

...The stylistic limpness of Evangeline, for instance, is praised as appropriate to the "moonlit mysteriousness" of the poem...

...Longfellow's gifts, according to Arvin, are best seen not in the poetry of "banal reassurance" which most often finds its way into the anthologies, but rather in another kind of poetry more characteristic of him—a poetry of the minor romantic attitude, aiming at the evocation of the fleeting mood, the fragile and delicate suggestion of nostalgia, the simple statement of vaguely apprehended melancholy or of domestic felicity...

...In too many instances, where we are asked to respond to poetic virtues which we had presumably ignored or forgotten, we are only reminded that Longfellow is capable of only the crudest effects...

...His childhood was a prevailingly happy one," Arvin tells us...

...Certainly, it is tempting to suppose that a poet who has been dismissed by both Cleanth Brooks and Kenneth Rexroth can't be all bad...

...Such critical sleight-of-hand is far from convincing...

...Pretentiousness and affectation of this sort are by no means uncommon in the examples Arvin offers...

...indeed, the once prevalent over-admiration for the turgid and humorless moralizing of these poems helped contribute to the present misunderstanding of the true character of Longfellow's talent...

...And since few writers have ever been out of fashion with so ponderous a finality as has Longfellow, Newton Arvin's biography claims a double interest, offering a fresh look at the poet's work and throwing down, as it necessarily does, a challenge to current critical orthodoxy...

...The longer narrative and dramatic works, especially, are given full treatment...

...Like his earlier studies of Hawthorne, Whitman and Melville, Arvin's Longfellow is a "critical" biography, concerned more with his subject's poetry than with his life, or, more accurately, dealing with the life chiefly in relation to the poetry...

...The following lines about the sea, for example, might carry a certain solemn dignity were they not written to the tune of "Reuben, Reuben, I've Been Thinking": Only those who brave its dangers Comprehend its mystery...

...In short, Newton Arvin has provided a comprehensive account of Longfellow's poetry: its themes, attitudes, characteristic forms and styles...

...For one thing, the numerous examples of Longfellow's style quoted throughout his book do not, to say the least, tend to strike us with any very deep regret at what has been lost...

...there was nothing of the rebel in Longfellow as a college student...

...His profession afforded ample opportunity for travel, and he made several trips to the Continent, where he immersed himself in European literature...

...For Arvin believes the problem of evaluating Longfellow raises "a much broader question: How much in general of the writing of the past is worth preserving...

...It is the sea, it is the sea, In all its dark immensity . . . The obvious clumsiness of such writing is hardly difficult to criticize, and it is only fair to note that Arvin's generosity is not unmixed with a sense of his subject's limitations and weaknesses...

...Longfellow was of course a professor, having been appointed to the chair of modern languages at Bowdoin at the age of 18, and later, at 27, to the Smith Professorship of modern languages at Harvard, a position he held until his resignation, at 47, in 1854...

...Arvin thus calls for a "rehabilitation, in the scale of critical values, of the poetic virtues of directness, of simplicity in statement, of the incomplex, of 'easiness' on a certain level—of what Marcel Raymond has called 'a certain ingenuousness.' " There is an undeniable cogency in the author's argument...

...Reviewed by GERALD GRAFF Department of English, Stanford University When criticism attempts to reawaken interest in a writer long out of fashion, the result is likely to be a spectacle worth watching...

...If very little seemed to happen in Longfellow's life, one suspects that it may have been because he was always studying languages...