Poems

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a powerful figure in the culture of XIX-th century of America. Born in 1807, he had become a national literary figure by the 1850-ies and a worldfamous personality by the time of his death in 1882.
One of Longfellow's favorite metaphors is the backward glance. People in the present look back into their distant pasts and make a discovery. What had once been history - political, conflicted, sad, and bloody — could now be seen as imaginative myth: ordered, noble, and a source of strength. Longfellow wrote for a young nation ready to make this backward glance.