At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the medieval Florentine poet Dante Alighieri was an almost completely unknown figure in the United States. Yet, by mid-century, he was considered by many Americans to be one of the world's greatest poets and his major epic, the Divine Comedy, was translated during the Civil War by the most popular American poet at the time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This dissertation examines Dante's nineteenth-century emergence in the United States and the historical and cultural reasons why Dante, for many nineteenth-century Americans, became a highly-regarded literary figure and an unexpectedly popular poet during the Civil War. Using new historicist and book studies methodologies, it argues that Dante was widely viewed as an important theological-political poet, a cultural representative of Italy and nineteenth-century Italian nationalism and liberalism, one who spoke powerfully to antebellum and wartime issues of national disunity, states' rights, the nature of empire, and the justice and injustice of civil war. American periodicals and English-language translations of the Comedy touted Dante as a great national poet--a model who might inspire any would-be national poet of the United States--while interpreting his biography and the Comedy in terms of American and transatlantic political events, ideologies, and discourses. Aware of such promotion, many American writers, including Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, read and interpreted the Comedy in terms of national politics and, by the early 1860s, the Civil War. Given its relevance and popularity during the 1860s--numerous books by or about Dante were published in the United States during this decade--the Divine Comedy thus became an important epic poem of the Civil War, a poem that Longfellow and Walt Whitman turned to while constructing their wartime and Reconstruction-era poetry.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-154).

At the height of their popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, a vast transatlantic readership conferred on Longfellow and Tennyson the title "The People's Poet." This examination of Anglo-American Victorian poetry attempts to account for that phenomenon. A poetic work is first defined as an aesthetic experience that occurs within a triangular matrix of text, author, and reader. As reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss contends, both the creator's and the receptor's aesthetic experiences are filtered through a historically determined "horizon of expectations" that governs popular appeal. A historical account of the publication and promotion of Longfellow's and Tennyson's poetry provides empirical evidence for how and why their poetic texts appealed to a widespread readership. This account is followed by an analysis of the class and gender of Victorian readers of poetry that considers the role of "consumers" in the production of both poetry and poetic personae as commodities for public consumption. The development of each poet's voice is then examined in a context of a gendered "separate-sphere" ideology to explain how both Longfellow's and Tennyson's adoption of "feminine" cadences in their respective voices influenced the nineteenth-century reception of their work. The final two chapters analyze select texts—lyric and narrative—to determine reasons for their popular appeal in relation to the level of active reader engagement in the poetic experience. Through affective lyricism, as in Longfellow's "Psalm of Life" and Tennyson's "Break, break, break," these poets demanded that their readers listen; through sentiment transformed into domestic allegory, as in Miles Standish and Enoch Arden, these poets demanded further that they feel. While both Victorian poets were later decanonized by their modern successors, contemporary critics, mainly academic, have restored Tennyson to the literary canon while relegating Longfellow to a second-rate schoolroom status. The conclusion speculates on the possible reasons underlying the disparate reputations assigned to the two poets, both of whom, during their lifetimes, shared equally the fame and fortune that attended their role as "The People's Voice." / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis presents a brief biography of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, then follows with a discussion of the influence of the Bible in Longfellow's poetry.

In this thesis I endeavor to discover and show the Unitarian and Patristic theological influences on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's long narrative poem Evangeline, with special focus on the poem's theological teachings concerning deification and descriptions of the spiritual experience of shining with divine light. In chapter one, I explore the theological climate of early nineteenth-century New England, focusing on the Unitarian and Transcendental movements and Longfellow's familiarity with both. In chapter two, I present an overview of the critical literature concerning the religious elements of Evangeline, beginning with reviews by Longfellow's contemporaries and ending with recent scholarship that calls for a new investigation of Unitarian influences on Evangeline. In chapters three and four, I look back to those Church Fathers who articulated the doctrines of deification and divine light in the second through fourth centuries. Through looking at the presence of the Church Fathers in Longfellow's writings, especially in the unexplored “Christian Fathers” manuscript lectures from the early 1830s, I show how the Patristic writers proved interesting and inspiring to Longfellow in the years leading up to the publication of Evangeline. Finally, in chapters five and six, I investigate in depth the religious elements of Evangeline, giving special attention to the keynote passages of 2.1 and 2.5, which include, respectively, theological teaching concerning deification and a description of the spiritual experience of shining with divine light. I conclude that though in 2.1 Longfellow articulates theological teachings that possess strong affinities with Unitarian doctrine, in 2.5 Longfellow concludes the poem with a characteristically Patristic vision of the deified heroine shining with divine light.

The purpose of this project has been to develop a neighborhood plan for the Longfellow Neighborhood in Iowa City, Iowa using the "bottoms up" approach. Once adopted and incorporated in the City's Comprehensive Plan, it will be the first neighborhood plan in Iowa City. My official role was to serve as one of the members of the City staff. This creative project is a documentation of the process involved in preparing the plan, and a reflection as to lessons learned from it both for Iowa City and for neighborhood planning generally. The preliminary plan draft was developed based upon goals, objectives, and an implementation strategy created and endorsed by the residents. A second draft was written in accordance with the residents' responses to the original content. Pending neighborhood approval and adoption of the draft, the final document will be developed and voted upon by the Planning and Zoning Commission and City Council. The project, to date, has proven to be a successful endeavor that will serve as a precedent for other neighborhoods in Iowa City wishing to pursue the creation of their own neighborhood plans. / Department of Urban Planning

The Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts is one of America’s best known historic homes. Built in 1759 by Major John Vassall, the grand house exemplified Colonial English tastes and was at the center of a cycle of Colonial Royalist mansions. After the American Revolution, however, the house quickly became a symbol of American patriotism. Occupants ranging from General George Washington and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow each added to the legacy of the house. Early in the nineteenth century, the Longfellow House’s distyle portico- pavilion traveled to Canterbury, Connecticut, becoming a colloquial house-type. Aided by its connection to General Washington and its appearance in two World’s Fairs, the house gained further popularity around the American Centennial. This thesis provides the most expansive history of the house’s impact on American architecture to date and is the first to connect the house to both the Greenhouse at Mount Vernon and Connecticut’s “Canterbury Style.”

viii, 233 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" I mean extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry. Through case studies, I examine longstanding assumptions about these poets and the literary histories and myths surrounding their legendary texts. In carefully historicized readings of these and other iconic poems, I elucidate the pressure a single poem can exert on a poet's reputation and on American poetry broadly. I study the iconic poem in the context of the poet's corpus to demonstrate its role within the poet's oeuvre and the role assigned to it by canon makers. By tracing a poem's reception, I aim to identify the national, periodic, political, and formal boundaries these poems enforce and the distortions they create. Because iconic poems often direct and justify our inclusions and exclusions, they are of particular use in clarifying persistent obstacles to the canon reformation work of the last thirty years. While anthologies have become more inclusive in their selections and self-conscious about their ideological motives, many of the practices regarding individual poets and poems have remained unchanged over the last fifty years. Even as we include more poets in the canon, we often ironically do so by isolating a particular portion of the career, impulse in the work, or even a single poem, narrowing rather than expanding the horizon of our national literature. Through close readings situated in historical and cultural contexts, I illustrate the varying effects of iconic poems on the poet, other poems, and literary history. / Committee in charge: Dr. Karen J. Ford, Chair; Dr. John T. Gage, Member; Dr. Ernesto J. Martinez, Member; Dr. Leah W. Middlebrook, Outside Member

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