Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Research Paper

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an influential literary figure during the nineteenth century; his works inspired people to think about the world and their own lives differently, but what prompted him to write his poems? How does his life reflect off of his poems? Longfellow’s philosophy begs the question how and why he wrote what he did and what deeper meanings lie behind his poems. His interest to pursue writing, had been encouraged by various events and led to the publishing of numerous essays, poems, novels and dramas, receiving great success. One of his more famous poems, entitled “A Psalm of Life,” had been influenced by the romanticism period and was known for its inspirational message to live life to the fullest. As Longfellow’s work

First published in The Knickerbocker, in 1838, Longfellow challenged traditional wisdom by explaining that human life is a meaningless “dream” if people do not live their lives to the fullest. Pleasure and misery, he stated, is not the purpose of life, but rather to prepare oneself for the next day, and the day after that. There is no certain way to foresee the future, which is why Longfellow stressed the importance “to act” in present for future generations to look upon and follow the footsteps of those who changed the world (Gale 1). He incorporated elements of Romanticism in order to explain his beliefs, such as that everyone has a role to fill in the world, referring to those who value feeling and intuition over reason (Keenan 1) . In essence, Longfellow urged nonconformity in this poem to people who lived austerely, but later receiving harsh

Stanza four contains an allusion to a line from Seneca’s work De Brevitate vitae, which states “Life is brief, art long.” (Longfellow 13). The speaker suggests that we should live as productive a life as possible. Longfellow also uses a simile in line fifteen to compare the human heart beat to the “muffled drums”. He implies that each beat of our hearts, carries us closer to death, and that our own hearts are measuring out the backbeat of a steady and irreversible journey to death. He transforms the march to the grave to a march to battle in the fifth stanza, with the use of war imagery. Longfellow also compares life to a “bivouac” in line eighteen and implies that the reader is a soldier that has to become a hero in this battle. He then goes on to explain in detail how the reader can become a hero and urges the reader to live actively. He does so with the use of repetition of the word “act” to emphasize his imperative instructions (Longfellow 23). Longfellow ends the sixth stanza by leaving the reader with the knowledge to live actively in the