Public obligation and poetic vocation in the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Item
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Title
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Public obligation and poetic vocation in the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
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Identifier
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AAI9917650
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identifier
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9917650
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Creator
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Gartner, Matthew.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Angus Fletcher
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Date
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1999
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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Longfellow was for his contemporaries a figure of immense reputation, a living icon who filled a central niche on the American scene. Best known today for having once been famous, he remains an epitome of the public poet in nineteenth-century America and of the literary artist of any epoch whose distinctive gifts have abruptly lost their currency. In my four chapters I develop four perspectives from which to view Longfellow's cultivation of his reading public. I explore the special place of the patrician poet in a nation founded on an egalitarian ideal, paying particular attention to the literary sleights by which Longfellow was able to vivify in his poetry his personal authority and dispense that authority toward social ends.;The dissertation's Introduction proposes that Longfellow be seen as an innovative poet, a major figure of American cultural history, and a challenge to contemporary criticism. Chapter One explores how Longfellow attained national eminence as author of such poems as "A Psalm of Life" and "The Village Blacksmith" by figuring himself as a populist poet but encoding his poems with a patrician subtext. Chapter Two shows how through "The Children's Hour" and other domestic poems of weariness and powerlessness Longfellow associated himself in the public mind with his famous Cambridge residence, Craigie House, a former headquarters of George Washington, in order to establish himself as a new kind of unintimidating patriarch. William Charvat's remark that Longfellow's poetry often amounts to so many advertisements for poets and poetry prompts Chapter Three, a contextualizing of Longfellow's many poems about "song" within the nineteenth-century bifurcation of high and popular culture. Looming sectional crisis provides the background for my final chapter, in which the marriage theme in the epithalamial "The Building of the Ship" (the ship is named the "Union") leads to a discussion of the metaphorical link between marital union and national union in Longfellow's historical romance Evangeline. Longfellow's poetry shines forth in my readings not by virtue of its brilliant originality but, more mutedly, by its paternal solicitude and conservative restraint---qualities rarely valued by twentieth-century critics.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
