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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

© Linda Sue Grimes

And his lifeless body lay
A worn-out fetter, that the soul
Had broken and thrown away! This volume includes some samples of Longfellow's translations. He translated Dante's The Divine Comedy, and this volume offers "The Celestial Pilot," "Terrestrial Paradise," and "Beatrice" from the Purgatorio. Other translations include "The Good Shepherd" by Lope de Vega, "Santa Teresa's Book-Mark" by Saint Teresa of Ávila, "The Sea Hath Its Pearls" by Heinrich Heine, and several selections by Michelangelo. McClatchy says that Longfellow was "fluent in many languages," and these selections attest to that fact.

Not only poems and other verse forms are selected, but also the novel Kavanaugh: A Tale has been rescued for future generations. This novel was recommended by Ralph Waldo Emerson for its contribution to the development of the American novel. The opening paragraph of this important novel is worth quotation in its entirety:

Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God, and secret passages running deep beneath external nature give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligences, which strengthens and consoles them and of which the laborers on the surface do not even dream!

Longfellow, like Emerson, was concerned with the creation of a distinctly American literary tradition, and McClatchy has included three essays that reflect that concern: "The Literary Spirit of Our Country," "Table Talk," and "Address on the Death of Washington Irving."

The Library of America continues to rescue great literary works, preserving them in handsome volumes that are just the right size for easy reading. Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings is a useful and welcome addition to poetry lovers' bookshelves.