Blog #7 Author Comparison

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in 1807 in Portland, Oregon. Henry was a traveler, linguist and romantic. At just age thirteen, Longfellow published his first poem in the "Portland Gazette." Longfellow began teaching French, Spanish, and Italian at Bowdoin in 1829. He married Mary Potter, began to write critical essays, and published six foreign language textbooks. It was enough to earn him the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard College, which he accepted in 1834, beginning a long association with the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Longfellow, however, always retained his ties to family and home in Maine. In 1861, his wife Fanny died. Henry died in 1882. In his best known poems, Longfellow created myths and classic epics from American historical events and materials — Native American oral history ("The Song of Hiawatha"), the diaspora of Acadians (Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie), and the first battle of the Revolutionary War ("Paul Revere's Ride"). He reminded Americans of their roots and in the process became an American icon himself. Even though He was a man of the 19th century, most of his works take place in the past.

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in the West Hills.Whitman’s writings are treasured for capturing the nation’s spirit during the nineteenth century and examining some of the era’s most significant events including westward expansion, immigration, slavery, and the Civil War.  He is regarded as one of America's best poets.  According to The Longman Anthology of Poetry, “Whitman received little public acclaim for his poems during his lifetime for several reasons:  this openness regarding sex, his self-presentation as a rough working man, and his stylistic innovations.”  Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are similar poets of the nineteenth century.