Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance, a blossoming (c. 191837) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and the
most influential movement in African American literary history. Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts,
participants sought to reconceptualize the Negro apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced black peoples
relationship to their heritage and to each other. They also sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois
shame about aspects of their lives that might, as seen by whites, reinforce racist beliefs. Never dominated by a particular
school of thought but rather characterized by intense debate, the movement laid the groundwork for all later African
American literature and had an enormous impact on subsequent black literature and consciousness worldwide. While the
renaissance was not confined to the Harlem district of New York City, Harlem attracted a remarkable concentration of
intellect and talent and served as the symbolic capital of this cultural awakening.

The Background

The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in
some ways ushered in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The social foundations of this
movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North;
dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil
rights, uplifting the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African
sensibilities and programs. Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropoles such
as New York City and Paris after World War I and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader
Negro renaissance (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast.
The Harlem Renaissance is unusual among literary and artistic movements for its close relationship to civil rights and
reform organizations. Crucial to the movement were magazines such as The Crisis, published by the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; and The
Messenger, a socialist journal eventually connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black labour
union. Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garveys Universal Negro Improvement Association, also played a role,
but few of the major authors or artists identified with Garveys Back to Africa movement, even if they contributed to the
paper.

The renaissance had many sources in black culture, primarily of the United Statesand the Caribbean, and manifested itself
well beyond Harlem. As its symbolic capital, Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular
nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North Americahelped give the New Negroes
visibility and opportunities for publication not evident elsewhere. Located just north of Central Park, Harlem was a
formerly white residential district that by the early 1920s was becoming virtually a black city within the borough
of Manhattan. Other boroughs of New York City were also home to people now identified with the renaissance, but they
often crossed paths in Harlem or went to special events at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library.
Black intellectuals from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities (where they had their
own intellectual circles, theatres, and reading groups) also met in Harlem or settled there. New York City had an
extraordinarily diverse and decentred black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority. As a
result, it was a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation.

While the renaissance built on earlier traditions of African American culture, it was profoundly affected by trendssuch
as primitivismin European and white American artistic circles. Modernist primitivism was inspired partly by Freudian
psychology, but it tended to extol primitive peoples as enjoying a more direct relationship to the natural world and to
elemental human desires than overcivilized whites. The keys to artistic revolution and authentic expression, some
intellectuals felt, would be found in the cultures of primitive races, and preeminent among these, in the stereotypical
thinking of the day, were the cultures of sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants. Early in the 20th century, European
avant-garde artists had drawn inspiration from African masks as they broke from realistic representational styles toward
abstraction in painting and sculpture. The prestige of such experiments caused African American intellectuals to look on
their African heritage with new eyes and in many cases with a desire to reconnect with a heritage long despised or
misunderstood by both whites and blacks.

Black Heritage And American Culture

This interest in black heritage coincided with efforts to define an American culture distinct from that of Europe, one that
would be characterized by ethnic pluralismas well as a democratic ethos. The concept of cultural pluralism (a term coined
by the philosopher Horace Kallen in 1915) inspired notions of the United States as a new kind of nation in which diverse
cultures should develop side by side in harmony rather than be melted together or ranked on a scale of evolving
civilization. W.E.B. Du Bois had advocated something like this position in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a
defining text of the New Negro movement because of its profound effect on an entire generation that formed the core of
the Harlem Renaissance. As various forms of cultural-pluralist thought took hold, a fertile environment for the blossoming
of African American arts developed. Moreover, the effort on the part of some American intellectuals to
distinguish American literature and culture from European cultural forms dovetailed with African American intellectuals
beliefs about their relationship to American national identity.
Du Bois and his NAACP colleague James Weldon Johnson asserted that the only uniquely American expressive
traditions in the United States had been developed by African Americans. They, more than any other group, had been
forced to remake themselves in the New World, Du Bois and Johnson argued, while whites continued to look to Europe or
sacrificed artistic values to commercial ones. (Native American cultures, on the other hand, seemed to be dying out,
they claimed.) African Americans centuries-long struggle for freedom had made them the prophets of democracy and the
artistic vanguard of American culture.

This judgment began unexpectedly to spread as African American music, especially the blues and jazz, became a
worldwide sensation. Black music provided the pulse of the Harlem Renaissance and of the Jazz Age more generally. The
rise of the race records industry, beginning with OKehs recording of Mamie Smiths Crazy Blues in 1920, spread the
blues to audiences previously unfamiliar with the form. Smith, Alberta Hunter, Clara Smith, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey
who had been performing for years in circuses, clubs, and tent showsfound themselves famous. Frequently ironic and
often bawdy, the music expressed the longings and philosophical perspectives of the black working class. Black writers
such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Jean Toomer valued the blues as an indigenous art form of the countrys
most oppressed people, a secular equivalent of the spirituals, and an antidote to bourgeois black assimilationism.

Out of the blues came jazz, migrating to Northern urban centres such as Chicagoand New York City during and after
World War I. In the 1920s jazz orchestras grew in size and incorporated new instruments as well as methods of
performance. Louis Armstrong became the first great jazz soloist when he moved from King Olivers Creole Jazz Band in
Chicago to Fletcher Hendersons band in New York City in 1924. Hendersons band soon had competitors in big bands
led by the likes of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, and Jimmie Luncefordnot to mention such white
bands as Paul Whitemans. Once associated with brothels and traveling circuses, jazz gained respectability as a form of
high art. Moreover, dance forms associated with jazz, most famously the Charleston (also a product of the 1920s) and tap
dance, became international fads as a result of hugely popular all-black musical revues.

The popularity of jazz among whites helped spark a Negro Vogue in cities such as New York and Paris in the mid- to
late 1920s. Simultaneously, European dramatists extolled the body language of African American dance and stage humour
(descended from the blackface minstrel show, the most popular and original form of American theatrical comedy). The
best-known white man to bring attention to the Harlem Renaissance was undoubtedly Carl Van Vechten, whose music
criticism trumpeted the significance of jazz and blues and whose provocatively titled novel Nigger Heaven (1926) helped
spread the Negro Vogue. It served virtually as a tourist guide to Harlem, capitalizing on the supposed exotic aspects of
black urban life even while focusing, primarily, on the frustrations of black urban professionals and aspiring writers.
Although vilified by some, Van Vechten became a key contact for several black artists and authors because of his
interracial parties and publishing connections. Nowhere was the Negro Vogue more evident than in nightclubs such as
the Cotton Club and Connies Inn, which became especially popular with whites in the late 1920s. Both of these
nightclubs excluded blacks from the audience; others, called black and tans, catered to mixed audiences, while still
others excluded whites so as to avoid the police raids to which black and tans were often subjected.

The Question Of Negro Art

The international appeal of jazz and its connection to common black life, accompanied by the sheer virtuosity of its
musicians, encouraged black intellectuals in other fields to turn increasingly to specifically Negro aestheticforms as a
basis for innovation and self-expression. The tendency appeared in concert music, choral programs, and Broadway
musicals as well as literature. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissles musical revue Shuffle Along opened on Broadway in 1921
and established a model that would shape black musicals for 60 years. Florence Mills, a sprightly dancer and phenomenal
singer, achieved enormous fame across racial lines in the United States and Europe before suddenly succumbing to
appendicitis in 1927. Josephine Baker, who began as a chorus girl in a popular revue, became an international star
when La Revue ngre opened in 1925 in Paris, where she ultimately settled as a celebrity and played a variety of exotic
roles exploiting the glamour of the primitive. Popular revues and vaudeville acts drew all-black audiences throughout
the United States in cities on the Theatre Owners Booking Association circuit. In the 1920s, black-produced shows came
to Broadway again and again, and many white-produced shows featured black casts. The success of such shows helped
fuel the optimism of the Harlem Renaissance. Amid worsening socioeconomic conditions in Harlem itself and political
setbacks in what was a very conservative and racist erait was during the 1920s that the Ku Klux Klan reached its peak
in membership and political influence in the South and the Midwestsome black leaders hoped that achievement in the
arts would help revolutionize race relations while enhancing blacks understanding of themselves as a people.

Important new publishing houses opened their doors to black authors. These publishersparticularly Alfred A. Knopf,
Harcourt Brace, and Boni & Liverightwere breaking away from an earlier emphasis on British literary tradition. They
were publishing translated Modernist works from a variety of nationalities previously unread in the United States except
by immigrants in their native languages. Interested too in the notions of American cultural pluralismin some cases
influenced by left-wing thought, in others involved in the drive for black civil rightsand aware of the vogue of
primitivism, they saw a market for black-authored books on Negro topics. Their interest was accelerated by the efforts
of African American magazine editors who organized literary prize contests and other events showcasing black literary
talent. The most often cited event of this sort was a banquet at the liberal Civic Club in downtown New York organized
by Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, in 1924. The event had the effect of announcing what had come to resemble
a movementa cohort of talented African American writers ready to be noticed. In 1925 appeared the ultimate
result: The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke, which sold well and garnered positive critical attention
in addition to inspiring black readers and would-be authors.

Cover of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, June 1925.
Photographs and Prints Division; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; The New York Public Library; Astor,
Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Locke attempted to direct the movement he announced in The New Negro, stressing a turn away from social protest
or propaganda toward self-expression built on what he termed folk valuesa movement, in other words, akin to
the Irish literary renaissance that had slightly preceded it. Yet the writers of the Harlem Renaissance were not unified in
artistic aims or methods. Disagreement helps account for the renaissances importance. Locke believed that black authors
and artists should develop distinct aesthetic tendencies inspired by African American folk sources and African traditions.
The satirist George Schuyler lampooned the very idea of Negro art in America as hokum artificially stimulated by
white decadents.
 Mother to Son
Langstone Hughes

Well, son, I'll tell you:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So, boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps.
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
POET INTRODUCTION: Langston Hughes (1902-67) was an African American poet. He was born in Joplin,
Mississippi. He lived in Mexico for a period of time during his youth and spent a year at Columbia University. He
spent his career serving as a merchant seaman and working in a Paris nightclub where he showed some of his poems
to Dr. Alan Locke, a strong supporter of African American Literature.

After returning to the United States, Hughes went on to publish fiction, plays, essays and biographies. He also
founded theatres and gave public readings. He became an important force in the Harlem Renaissance of 1920 to
1940. The Harlem Renaissance drew new attention to and redefined the unique African American culture of art,
music and dance.

Hughes poem Mother to Son was first published in Crisis magazine in December 1922. It reappeared in The
Weary Blues, Hughes first collection of poetry, in 1926. The poem is addressed from a mother to a son warning
him about lifes obstacles.

SUMMARY OF POEM

In Hughes poem Mother to Son, a mother advises her son that he will face many adversities in life, and yet
he must overcome them and keep going. The mother compares the journey through life to ascending a staircase.
She says that for her life has not been a staircase made of crystal. Rather it has been quite rough with protruding
nails and pieces of wood jutting out, boards torn up and places where the carpet was missing. However, she has
kept climbing, through landings, corners and darkness in spite of such discomforts. She then asks the boy to
walk in her footsteps and keep moving forward without turning back or giving up because he finds the journey
arduous. She wants him to take inspiration from the fact that she is still going steady despite lifes hardships.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

The anonymous mother in the poem may be suggestive of the African American women of predepression
America encouraging their sons to strive for success. The poem is written in the form of a dramatic monolgue in
black dialect. The idiomatic style of the speech is invoked in the context of the courage, endurance and sense of
duty of the African American race. The language also imparts a charged colloquial element to the poem. The
theme of the poem is perseverence.

As the poem opens with Well, son, Ill tell you, it is possible that the son has asked or said something before
to which she is responding. In the next line, she says that her life aint been a crystal stair. The use of the
word aint indicates that the mother is not a learned person and crystal stair is symbolic of smoothness,
beauty and luster.

Tacks, splinters, boards torn up suggests hurdles of life. Tacks are nails and splinters are small fragments
of wood which make it hard for the person to step. Boards torn up may symbolise unsteady or rough grounds
leading to uncertainty in the persons mind. Bare suggests scant furnishings.

Ise been a-climbin on , reachin landins, turnin corners suggests movement and therefore signifies an
ascent that is inspiring. And sometimes goin in the dark / Where there aint been no light makes this poem a
story of dark times. The dilapidated staircase is also representative of the poor living conditions of the Black
Americans under the tyranny of the Whites.

The poem is suggestive of the effect of racism and oppression on the lives and experiences of the black
Americans. However, this piece of advice from mother to son has an universal quality as it can be read as an
advice from any mother to any son, anywhere in the world, without keeping the historical background in mind.

In the next five lines the mother urges her son not to turn back or set down on the steps of fall when he
recognises life for the never-ending drudgery that it truly is. She does not want him to lose courage and start
descending, or get tired, sit down to rest and not resume climbing. She also does not want him to fall which
may mean literally tumbling down the steps unable to take the pressure, or it may be associated with the
Biblical Fall, which in this context may mean resorting to criminal activities and unfair means to accomplish
his ends.
In the last three lines, she reveals her own strength and perseverence as she says Ise still goin, honey,/ Ise
still climbing/ And life for me aint been no crystal stair. She tries to pose as a role model for the boy and instil
strength and courage into his mind that will help him undertake lifes tedious journey in the best possible way.

POETIC DEVICES

The poem is written in free verse and has a lyrical quality due the idiomatic language used by the poet.

The poetic devices involved in the poem is the extended metaphor of life being a staircase. The central image of
the poem is the crystal stair. It echoes the Biblical story of Jacobs Ladder. The stairway may be seen as a path
to freedom and liberation which was the goal of the African Americans.

To represent the struggle of the mother Hughes uses images of tack, splinter, boards and carpet.

The mothers drive and persistence is expressed through the images a-climbin on, reachin landins,
turnin corners, and And sometimes goin in the dark / Where there aint been no light.

The mother teaches the that he should never collapse under the pressures that life puts him through. Hughes
uses repitition in dont you turn back./Dont you set down on the steps./Cause you finds its kinder
hard./Dont you fall now to emphasize the mothers anxious expectation of her son. She wants him to be
tenacious like herself.

He uses repitition in Ise still goin, Ise still climbing, once again putting stress on the mothers struggles
and weariness.

The image of the crystal stair is repeated in the last line to accentuate again the perpetual toil to achieve goals
and fulfillment.
 Langstone Hughes
Langston Hughes, in full James Mercer Langston Hughes (born February 1, 1902, Joplin, Missouri, U.S.died May
22, 1967, New York, New York), American writer who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and made
the African American experience the subject of his writings, which ranged from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper
columns.X

Hughess parents separated soon after his birth, and he was raised by his mother and grandmother. After his grandmothers
death, he and his mother moved to half a dozen cities before reaching Cleveland, where they settled. He wrote the
poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers the summer after his graduation from high school in Cleveland; it was published
in The Crisis in 1921 and brought him considerable attention. After attending Columbia University in New York City in
192122, he explored Harlem, forming a permanent attachment to what he called the great dark city, and worked as
a steward on a freighter bound for Africa. Back in New York City from seafaring and sojourning in Europe, he met in
1924 the writers Arna Bontemps and Carl Van Vechten, with whom he would have lifelong influential friendships. Hughes
won an Opportunity magazine poetry prize in 1925. That same year, Van Vechten introduced Hughess poetry to the
publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who accepted the collection that Knopf would publish as The Weary Blues in 1926.X

Listen: Hughes, Langston: influence of the blues on Hughess poetry

George B. Hutchinson, author of Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, speaking about
While working as a busboy in a hotel in Washington, D.C., in late 1925, Hughes put three of his own poems beside the
plate of Vachel Lindsay in the dining room. The next day, newspapers around the country reported that Lindsay, among
the most popular white poets of the day, had discovered an African American busboy poet, which earned Hughes
broader notice. Hughes received a scholarship to, and began attending, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in early 1926.
That same year, he received the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Award, and he published The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountainin The Nation, a manifesto in which he called for a confident, uniquely black literature:X

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If
white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesnt matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-
tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesnt
matter either.

Dust jacket of The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, illustration by Miguel
James S. Jaffe Rare Books, Haverford, PA
By the time Hughes received his degree in 1929, he had helped launch the influential magazine Fire!!, in 1926, and he had
also published a second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), which was criticized by some for its title and
for its frankness, though Hughes himself felt that it represented another step forward in his writing.X

A few months after Hughess graduation, Not Without Laughter (1930), his first prose volume, had a cordial reception. In
the 1930s he turned his poetry more forcefully toward racial justice and political radicalism. He traveled in the American
South in 1931 and decried the Scottsboro case; he then traveled widely in the Soviet Union, Haiti, Japan, and elsewhere
and served as a newspaper correspondent (1937) during the Spanish Civil War. He published a collection of short
stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934), and became deeply involved in theatre. His play Mulatto, adapted from one of
his short stories, premiered on Broadway in 1935, and productions of several other plays followed in the late 1930s. He
also founded theatre companies in Harlem (1937) and Los Angeles (1939). In 1940 Hughes published The Big Sea,
his autobiography up to age 28. A second volume of autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander, was published in 1956.X

Langston Hughes, photograph by Gordon Parks, 1943.

Among his other writings, Hughes translated the poetry of Federico Garca Lorca and Gabriela Mistral. He was also
widely known for his comic character Jesse B. Semple, familiarly called Simple, who appeared in Hughess columns in
the Chicago Defender and the New York Post and later in book form and on the stage. The Collected Poems of Langston
Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, appeared in 1994. Some of his political exchanges were
collected as Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond (2016).X
 American Romantic Period
Early 19th-century literature
After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were
exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. As if in response, four authors of very
respectable stature appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper,
and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary development. X

Bryant, a New Englander by birth, attracted attention in his 23rd year when the first version of his
poem Thanatopsis (1817) appeared. This, as well as some later poems, was written under the
influence of English 18th-century poets. Still later, however, under the influence of Wordsworth
and other Romantics, he wrote nature lyrics that vividly represented the New England scene.
Turning to journalism, he had a long career as a fighting liberal editor of The Evening Post. He
himself was overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington Irving.X
Irving, the youngest member of a prosperous merchant family, joined with ebullient young men of
the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (180708), which satirized the foibles of Manhattans
citizenry. This was followed by A History of New York (1809), by Diedrich Knickerbocker, a
burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and sniped at the old Dutch families. Irvings
models in these works were obviously Neoclassical English satirists, from whom he had learned to
write in a polished, bright style. Later, having met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted
with imaginative German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The Sketch
Book (181920), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works. He was the first American writer to
win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect of British critics. X

Washington Irving, 19th-century print.

Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

 Learn about Washington Irving, who is credited with being the first American man of letters.

Encyclopdia Britannica, Inc.

James Fenimore Cooper won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Sir Walter Scotts
Waverley novels, he did his best work in the Leatherstocking tales (182341), a five-volume
series celebrating the career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His skill in weaving
history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought him acclaim not only in
America and England but on the continent of Europe as well. X

Edgar Allan Poe, reared in the South, lived and worked as an author and editor in Baltimore,
Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City. His work was shaped largely by analytical skill that
showed clearly in his role as an editor: time after time he gauged the taste of readers so accurately
that circulation figures of magazines under his direction soared impressively. It showed itself in his
critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained and logically applied his criteria. His gothic tales of
terror were written in accordance with his findings when he studied the most popular magazines of
the day. His masterpieces of terrorThe Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Masque of the
Red Death (1842), The Cask of Amontillado (1846), and otherswere written according to a
carefully worked out psychological method. So were his detective stories, such as The Murders in
the Rue Morgue (1841), which historians credited as the first of the genre. As a poet, he achieved
fame with The Raven (1845). His work, especially his critical writings and carefully crafted
poems, had perhaps a greater influence in France, where they were translated by Charles
Baudelaire, than in his own country.X

Science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury discussing Edgar Allan Poes The Fall of the

Two Southern novelists were also outstanding in the earlier part of the century: John Pendleton
Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms. In Swallow Barn (1832), Kennedy wrote delightfully of life
on the plantations. Simmss forte was the writing of historical novels like those of Scott and
Cooper, which treated the history of the frontier and his native South Carolina. The
Yemassee (1835) and Revolutionary romances show him at his best. X

American Renaissance
The authors who began to come to prominence in the 1830s and were active until about the end of
the Civil Warthe humorists, the classic New Englanders, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and
othersdid their work in a new spirit, and their achievements were of a new sort. In part this was
because they were in some way influenced by the broadening democratic concepts that in 1829
triumphed in Andrew Jacksons inauguration as president. In part it was because, in this Romantic
period of emphasis upon native scenes and characters in many literatures, they put much of
America into their books.X
Particularly full of vivid touches were the writings of two groups of American humorists whose
works appeared between 1830 and 1867. One group created several down-east Yankee characters
who used commonsense arguments to comment upon the political and social scene. The most
important of this group were Seba Smith, James Russell Lowell, and Benjamin P. Shillaber. These
authors caught the talk and character of New England at that time as no one else had done. In the
old Southwest, meanwhile, such writers as Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson
J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Joseph G. Baldwin, and George Washington Harris drew lively
pictures of the ebullient frontier and showed the interest in the common man that was a part of
Jacksonian democracy.X

New England Brahmins

Although Lowell for a time was one of these writers of rather earthy humour, his lifelong ties were
to a group of New England writers associated with Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts
the Brahmins, as they came to be calledat an opposite extreme. Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Lowell were all aristocrats, all steeped in foreign culture,
all professors at Harvard. Longfellow adapted European methods of storytelling and versifying to
narrative poems dealing with American history, and a few of his less didactic lyrics perfectly
married technique and subject matter. Holmes, in occasional poems and his Breakfast Table
series (185891), brought touches of urbanity and jocosity to a perhaps oversober polite literature.
Lowell, in poems descriptive of the out-of-doors in America, put much of his homeland into verse.
His odesparticularly the Harvard Commemoration Ode (1865)gave fine expression to
noble sentiments.X

Oliver Wendell Holmes.)

The Transcendentalists

Concord, Massachusetts, a village not far from Cambridge, was the home of leaders of another
important New England group. The way for this group had been prepared by the rise of a
theological system, Unitarianism, which early in the 19th century had replaced Calvinism as the
faith of a large share of the New Englanders. Ralph Waldo Emerson, most famous of the Concord
philosophers, started as a Unitarian minister but found even that liberal doctrine too confining for
his broad beliefs. He became a Transcendentalist who, like other ancient and modern Platonists,
trusted to insights transcending logic and experience for revelations of the deepest truths. His
scheme of things ranged from the lowest objects and most practical chores to soaring flights of
imagination and inspired beliefs. His Essays (184144), Representative Men (1850), and English
Traits (1856) were thoughtful and poetic explanations of his beliefs; and his rough-hewn lyrics,
packed with thought and feeling, were as close to 17th-century Metaphysical poems as any
produced in his own time.X
An associate of Emerson with a salty personality of his own and an individual way of
thinking, Henry David Thoreau, a sometime surveyor, labourer, and naturalist, was closer to the
earthy and the practical than even Emerson was. He also was more of a humorista dry Yankee
commentator with a flair for paradoxical phrases and sentences. Finally, he was a learned man,
widely read in Western classics and books of the Orient. These qualities gave distinction to A Week
on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and to Walden (1854). The latter was a record of his
experiences and ponderings during the time he lived in a hut by Walden Ponda defense of his
belief that modern man should simplify his demands if need be to suck out all the marrow of life.
In his essay Civil Disobedience (1849; originally titled Resistance to Civil Government),
Thoreau expounded his anarchistic views of government, insisting that if an injustice of
government is of such a nature that it requires injustice to another [you should] break the law
[and] let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. X

Henry David Thoreaus hut, illustration from the title page of an edition of his

Associated with these two major figures were such minor Transcendentalists as Bronson
Alcott, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Jones Very. Fuller edited The Dial,
the chief Transcendental magazine, and was important in the feminist movement. X

New England reformers and historians

A worldwide movement for change that exploded in the revolutions of 1848 naturally attracted
numerous Americans. Reform was in the air, particularly in New England. At times even Brahmins
and Transcendentalists took part. William Lloyd Garrison, ascetic and fanatical, was a moving
spirit in the fight against slavery; his weekly newspaper, The Liberator(183165), despite a small
circulation, was its most influential organ. A contributor to the newspaperprobably the greatest
writer associated with the movementwas John Greenleaf Whittier. His simple but emotional
poems on behalf of abolition were collected in such volumes as Poems Written During the Progress
of the Abolition Question(1837), Voices of Freedom (1846), and Songs of Labor, and Other
Poems (1850). The outstanding novelist of the movementso far as effect was concerned
was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) combined the elements of
contemporary humour and sentimental fiction in such a powerful manner that it, according to some,
helped to precipitate the Civil War.

 Harriet Beecher Stowe, c. 1880.

One other group of writersand a great novelistcontributed to the literature of New England in
this period of its greatest glory. The group consisted of several historians who combined scholarly
methods learned abroad with vivid and dramatic narration. These included George Bancroft, author
of History of the United States (completed in 12 volumes in 1882), and John Lothrop Motley, who
traced the history of the Dutch Republic and the United Netherlands in nine fascinating volumes
(185674). The leading member of the group was Francis Parkman, who, in a series of books
(185192), wrote as a historian of the fierce contests between France and England that marked the
advance of the American frontier and vividly recorded his own Western travels in The Oregon
Trail (1849).X

Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman

History also figured in tales and romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the leading New England
fictionist of the period. Many tales and longer worksfor example, his masterpiece, The Scarlet
Letter (1850)were set against a background of colonial America with emphasis upon its distance
in time from 19th-century New England. Others, such as The House of the Seven Gables (1851),
dealt with the past as well as the present. Still others, such as The Marble Faun (1860), were set in
distant countries. Remote though they were at times from what Hawthorne called the light of
common day, they showed deep psychological insight and probed into complex ethical problems.X
Another great American fiction writer, for a time a neighbour and associate of Hawthorne,
was Herman Melville. After relatively little schooling, Melville went to sea; a whaling ship, as he
put it, was his Yale College and his Harvard. His first books were fiction in the guise of factual
writing based upon experiences as a sailorTypee (1846) and Omoo (1847); so were such later
works as Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850). Between 1846 and 1851, however, Melvilles
reading in philosophy and literary classics, as well as in Hawthornes allegorical and symbolic
writings, gave him new interests and aims. The first sign of this interest was Mardi(1849), an
uneven and disjointed transitional book that used allegory after the model of Rabelais to comment
upon ideas afloat in the periodabout nations, politics, institutions, literature, and religion. The
new techniques came to fruition in Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a richly symbolic work,
complex but brilliantly integrated. Only in short stories, Benito Cerenoa masterpiece of its genre
and others, in the psychological novel Pierre (1852), and in the novelette Billy Budd(written
1890?) was Melville later to show sporadic flashes of the genius that created Moby Dick.X
An ardent singer of the praise of Manhattan, Walt Whitman saw less of the dark side of life than
Melville did. He was a believer in Jacksonian democracy, in the splendour of the common man.
Inspired by the Romantic concept of a poet as prophet and also by the Transcendental philosophy of
Emerson, Whitman in 1855 published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. As years passed, nine
revised and expanded editions of this work were published. This autobiography in verse was
intended to show the ideas, beliefs, emotions, and experiences of the common man in a great period
of American individualism. Whitman had a hard time winning a following because he was frank
and unconventional in his Transcendental thinking, because he used free verse rather than rhymed
or regularly metred verse, and because his poems were not conventionally organized. Nevertheless,
he steadily gained the approval of critics and in time came to be recognized as one of the great
poets of America.X

Walt Whitman, c. 1870.

From the Civil War to 1914

Like the Revolution and the election of Andrew Jackson, the Civil War was a turning point in U.S.
history and a beginning of new ways of living. Industry became increasingly important, factories
rose and cities grew, and agrarian preeminence declined. The frontier, which before had always
been an important factor in the economic scheme, moved steadily westward and, toward the end of
the 19th century, vanished. The rise of modern America was accompanied, naturally, by important
mutations in literature.X

Literary comedians
Although they continued to employ some devices of the older American humorists, a group of
comic writers that rose to prominence was different in important ways from the older group.
Charles Farrar Browne, David Ross Locke, Charles Henry Smith, Henry Wheeler Shaw, and Edgar
Wilson Nye wrote, respectively, as Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. (for Vesuvius) Nasby, Bill
Arp, Josh Billings, and Bill Nye. Appealing to a national audience, these authors forsook the
sectional characterizations of earlier humorists and assumed the roles of less individualized literary
comedians. The nature of the humour thus shifted from character portrayal to verbal devices such
as poor grammar, bad spelling, and slang, incongruously combined with Latinate words and
learned allusions. Most that they wrote wore badly, but thousands of Americans in their time and
some in later times found these authors vastly amusing. X

(From left) Josh Billings, Mark Twain, and Petroleum V. Nasby, 1868.

The first group of fiction writers to become popularthe local colouriststook over to some
extent the task of portraying sectional groups that had been abandoned by writers of the new
humour. Bret Harte, first of these writers to achieve wide success, admitted an indebtedness to
prewar sectional humorists, as did some others; and all showed resemblances to the earlier group.
Within a brief period, books by pioneers in the movement appeared: Harriet Beecher
Stowes Oldtown Folks (1869) and Sam Lawsons Oldtown Fireside Stories (1871),
delightful vignettesof New England; Hartes Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (1870),
humorous and sentimental tales of California mining camp life; and Edward Egglestons Hoosier
Schoolmaster (1871), a novel of the early days of the settlement of Indiana. Down into the 20th
century, short stories (and a relatively small number of novels) in patterns set by these three
continued to appear. In time, practically every corner of the country had been portrayed in local-
colour fiction. Additional writings were the depictions of Louisiana Creoles by George W. Cable, of
Virginia blacks by Thomas Nelson Page, of Georgia blacks by Joel Chandler Harris, of Tennessee
mountaineers by Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock), of tight-lipped folk of New
England by Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, of people of New York City
by Henry Cuyler Bunner and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry). The avowed aim of some of
these writers was to portray realistically the lives of various sections and thus to promote
understanding in a united nation. The stories as a rule were only partially realistic, however, since
the authors tended nostalgically to revisit the past instead of portraying their own time, to winnow
out less glamorous aspects of life, or to develop their stories with sentiment or humour. Touched
by romance though they were, these fictional works were transitional to realism, for they did
portray common folk sympathetically; they did concern themselves with dialect and mores; and
some at least avoided older sentimental or romantic formulas. X
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was allied with literary comedians and local colourists.
As a printers apprentice, he knew and emulated the prewar sectional humorists. He rose to
prominence in days when Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, and their followers were idols of the public.
His first books, The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), like several of later periods,
were travel books in which affiliations with postwar professional humorists were clearest. The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884), his best works, which re-created the life of the Mississippi valley in the
past, were closest to the work of older humorists and local colourists. Despite his flaws, he was one
of Americas greatest writers. He was a very funny man. He had more skill than his teachers in
selecting evocative details, and he had a genius for characterization. X

Title page from the 1885 edition of Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry

Born and raised in Ohio, William Dean Howells was an effective advocate of a new realistic mode
of fiction writing. At the start, Howells conceived of realism as a truthful portrayal of ordinary
facets of lifewith some limitations; he preferred comedy to tragedy, and he tended to
be reticent to the point of prudishness. The formula was displayed at its best in Their Wedding
Journey (1872), A Modern Instance (1882), and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Howells
preferred novels he wrote after he encountered Tolstoys writings and was persuaded by them, as he
said, to set art forever below humanity. In such later novels as Annie Kilburn(1888) and A
Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), he chose characters not only because they were commonplace but
also because the stories he told about them were commentaries upon society, government, and
economics.X

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator whose works
include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was also the first American to translate Dante
Alighieri's Divine Comedy, and was one of the five Fireside Poets from New England.X

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, which was then still part of Massachusetts. He studied at Bowdoin College. After
spending time in Europe, he became a professor at Bowdoin and, later, at Harvard College. His first major poetry collections
were Voices of the Night(1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). Longfellow retired from teaching in 1854, to focus on his
writing. He lived the remainder of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a former Revolutionary War headquarters of George
Washington. His first wife Mary Potter died in 1835, after a miscarriage. His second wife Frances Appleton died in 1861, after
sustaining burns when her dress caught fire. After her death, Longfellow had difficulty writing poetry for a time and focused on
translating works from foreign languages. He died in 1882.X

Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. He
became the most popular American poet of his day and also had success overseas. He has been criticized, however, for imitating
European styles and writing specifically for the masses. X

Born February 27, 1807

Portland, Maine, U.S.

Died March 24, 1882 (aged 75)

Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.

Occupation Poet
Professor
 Alma mater Bowdoin College

Spouses Mary Storer Potter

Frances Elizabeth Appleton

Children Charles Appleton Longfellow

Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow
Fanny Longfellow
Alice Mary Longfellow
Edith Longfellow
Anne Allegra Longfellow

Early life and education

Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807 to Stephen Longfellow and Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow in Portland, Maine,
[1]
then a district of Massachusetts,[2] and he grew up in what is now known as the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. His father was
a lawyer, and his maternal grandfather was Peleg Wadsworth, a general in the American Revolutionary War and a Member of
Congress.[3] He was named after his mother's brother Henry Wadsworth, a Navy lieutenant who had died three years earlier at
the Battle of Tripoli.[4] He was the second of eight children;[5] his siblings were Stephen (1805), Elizabeth (1808), Anne (1810),
Alexander (1814), Mary (1816), Ellen (1818), and Samuel(1819).X

Longfellow was of entirely English heritage, with ancestors who had settled in New England since the early 1600s.[6] Those
ancestors included Mayflower Pilgrims Richard Warren, William Brewster, and John and Priscilla Alden, including the first
child born in Plymouth Colony, Elizabeth Alden Peabody.[7]X

Longfellow attended a dame school at the age of three and was enrolled by age six at the private Portland Academy. In his years
there, he earned a reputation as being very studious and became fluent in Latin.[8] His mother encouraged his enthusiasm for
reading and learning, introducing him to Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote.[9] He published his first poem in the
Portland Gazette on November 17, 1820, a patriotic and historical four-stanza poem called "The Battle of Lovell's Pond". [10] He
studied at the Portland Academy until the age of fourteen. He spent much of his summers as a child at his grandfather Peleg's
farm in the western Maine town of Hiram.X

In the fall of 1822, the 15-year-old Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, along with his brother
Stephen.[8] His grandfather was a founder of the college[11] and his father was a trustee.[8] There Longfellow met Nathaniel
Hawthorne who became his lifelong friend.[12] He boarded with a clergyman for a time before rooming on the third floor[13]in
1823 of what is now known as Winthrop Hall.[14] He joined the Peucinian Society, a group of students with Federalist leanings.
[15]
In his senior year, Longfellow wrote to his father about his aspirations:X

I will not disguise it in the least... the fact is, I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns most
ardently after it, and every earthly thought centres in it... I am almost confident in believing, that if I can ever rise in the world it
must be by the exercise of my talents in the wide field of literature. [16]X

He pursued his literary goals by submitting poetry and prose to various newspapers and magazines, partly due to encouragement
from Professor Thomas Cogswell Upham.[17] He published nearly 40 minor poems between January 1824 and his graduation in
1825.[18] About 24 of them were published in the short-lived Boston periodical The United States Literary Gazette.[15] When
Longfellow graduated from Bowdoin, he was ranked fourth in the class and had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa.[19] He gave the
student commencement address.[17]X

European tours and professorships[edit]

After graduating in 1825, Longfellow was offered a job as professor of modern languages at his alma mater.
An apocryphal story claims that college trustee Benjamin Orr had been impressed by Longfellow's translation of Horace and
hired him under the condition that he travel to Europe to study French, Spanish, and Italian. [20]X

Whatever the catalyst, Longfellow began his tour of Europe in May 1826 aboard the ship Cadmus.[21] His time abroad lasted
three years and cost his father $2,604.24.[22] He traveled to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, back to France, then to England before
returning to the United States in mid-August 1829.[23] While overseas, he learned French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German,
mostly without formal instruction.[24] In Madrid, he spent time with Washington Irving and was particularly impressed by the
author's work ethic.[25] Irving encouraged the young Longfellow to pursue writing.[26] While in Spain, Longfellow was saddened
to learn that his favorite sister Elizabeth had died of tuberculosis at the age of 20 that May.[27]X

On August 27, 1829, he wrote to the president of Bowdoin that he was turning down the professorship because he considered
the $600 salary "disproportionate to the duties required". The trustees raised his salary to $800 with an additional $100 to serve
as the college's librarian, a post which required one hour of work per day.[28] During his years teaching at the college, he
translated textbooks from French, Italian, and Spanish;[29] his first published book was a translation of the poetry of medieval
Spanish poet Jorge Manrique in 1833.[30]X

He published the travel book Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea in serial form before a book edition was released in
1835.[29] Shortly after the book's publication, Longfellow attempted to join the literary circle in New York and asked George
Pope Morris for an editorial role at one of Morris's publications. He considered moving to New York after New York
University proposed offering him a newly created professorship of modern languages, though there would be no salary. The
professorship was not created and Longfellow agreed to continue teaching at Bowdoin.[31] It may have been joyless work. He
wrote, "I hate the sight of pen, ink, and paper... I do not believe that I was born for such a lot. I have aimed higher than this". [32]X

On September 14, 1831, Longfellow married Mary Storer Potter, a childhood friend from Portland. [33] The couple settled in
Brunswick, though the two were not happy there.[34] Longfellow published several nonfiction and fiction prose pieces in 1833
inspired by Irving, including "The Indian Summer" and "The Bald Eagle".[35]X

In December 1834, Longfellow received a letter from Josiah Quincy III, president of Harvard College, offering him the Smith
Professorship of Modern Languages with the stipulation that he spend a year or so abroad. [36] There, he further studied German
as well as Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Icelandic.[37] In October 1835, his wife Mary had a miscarriage during the trip,
about six months into her pregnancy.[38]She did not recover and died after several weeks of illness at the age of 22 on November
29, 1835. Longfellow had her body embalmedimmediately and placed in a lead coffin inside an oak coffin, which was shipped
to Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston.[39] He was deeply saddened by her death and wrote: "One thought occupies me night
and day... She is dead She is dead! All day I am weary and sad". [40]Three years later, he was inspired to write the poem
"Footsteps of Angels" about her. Several years later, he wrote the poem "Mezzo Cammin," which expressed his personal
struggles in his middle years.[41]X

Longfellow returned to the United States in 1836 and took up the professorship at Harvard. He was required to live in
Cambridge to be close to the campus and, therefore, rented rooms at the Craigie House in the spring of 1837. [42] The home was
built in 1759 and was the headquarters of George Washington during the Siege of Boston beginning in July 1775.[43] Elizabeth
Craigie owned the home, the widow of Andrew Craigie, and she rented rooms on the second floor. Previous boarders
included Jared Sparks, Edward Everett, and Joseph Emerson Worcester.[44] It is preserved today as the Longfellow House
Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site.X

Longfellow began publishing his poetry in 1839, including the collection Voices of the Night, his debut book of poetry.[45] The
bulk of Voices of the Night was translations, though he also included nine original poems and seven poems that he had written as
a teenager.[46] Ballads and Other Poems was published in 1841[47] and included "The Village Blacksmith" and "The Wreck of the
Hesperus", which were instantly popular.[48] He became part of the local social scene, creating a group of friends who called
themselves the Five of Clubs. Members included Cornelius Conway Felton, George Stillman Hillard, and Charles Sumner;
Sumner became Longfellow's closest friend over the next 30 years.[49] Longfellow was well liked as a professor, though he
disliked being "constantly a playmate for boys" rather than "stretching out and grappling with men's minds."[50]X

Courtship of Frances Appleton

Longfellow met Boston industrialist Nathan Appleton and his family in the town of Thun, Switzerland, including his
son Thomas Gold Appleton. There he began courting Appleton's daughter Frances "Fanny" Appleton. The independent-minded
Fanny was not interested in marriage, but Longfellow was determined.[51] In July 1839, he wrote to a friend: "Victory hangs
doubtful. The lady says she will not! I say she shall! It is not pride, but the madness of passion".[52] His friend George Stillman
Hillard encouraged him in the pursuit: "I delight to see you keeping up so stout a heart for the resolve to conquer is half the
battle in love as well as war".[53] During the courtship, Longfellow frequently walked from Cambridge to the Appleton home
in Beacon Hill in Boston by crossing the Boston Bridge. That bridge was replaced in 1906 by a new bridge which was later
renamed the Longfellow Bridge.X

In late 1839, Longfellow published Hyperion, inspired by his trips abroad[52] and his unsuccessful courtship of Fanny Appleton.
[54]
Amidst this, he fell into "periods of neurotic depression with moments of panic" and took a six-month leave of absence from
Harvard to attend a health spa in the former Marienberg Benedictine Convent at Boppard in Germany.[54] After returning, he
published the play The Spanish Student in 1842, reflecting his memories from his time in Spain in the 1820s. [55]X

The small collection Poems on Slavery was published in 1842 as Longfellow's first public support of abolitionism. However, as
Longfellow himself wrote, the poems were "so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for
breakfast".[56] A critic for The Dial agreed, calling it "the thinnest of all Mr. Longfellow's thin books; spirited and polished like
its forerunners; but the topic would warrant a deeper tone". [57] The New England Anti-Slavery Association, however, was
satisfied enough with the collection to reprint it for further distribution.[58]X
On May 10, 1843, after seven years, Longfellow received a letter from Fanny Appleton agreeing to marry him. He was too
restless to take a carriage and walked 90 minutes to meet her at her house.[59] They were soon married; Nathan Appleton bought
the Craigie House as a wedding present, and Longfellow lived there for the rest of his life. [60] His love for Fanny is evident in the
following lines from his only love poem, the sonnet "The Evening Star"[61] which he wrote in October 1845: "O my beloved, my
sweet Hesperus! My morning and my evening star of love!" He once attended a ball without her and noted, "The lights seemed
dimmer, the music sadder, the flowers fewer, and the women less fair." [62]X

He and Fanny had six children: Charles Appleton (18441893), Ernest Wadsworth (18451921), Fanny (18471848), Alice
Mary (18501928), Edith (18531915), and Anne Allegra (18551934). Their second-youngest daughter was Edith who
married Richard Henry Dana III, son of Richard Henry Dana, Jr. who wrote Two Years Before the Mast.[63] Their daughter Fanny
was born on April 7, 1847, and Dr. Nathan Cooley Keep administered ether to the mother as the first obstetric anesthetic in the
United States.[64] Longfellow published his epic poem Evangeline for the first time a few months later on November 1, 1847.
[64]
His literary income was increasing considerably; in 1840, he had made $219 from his work, but 1850 brought him $1,900. [65]X

On June 14, 1853, Longfellow held a farewell dinner party at his Cambridge home for his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was
preparing to move overseas.[66] In 1854, he retired from Harvard,[67] devoting himself entirely to writing. He was awarded an
honorary doctorate of laws from Harvard in 1859.[68]X

Death of Frances

July 9, 1861[69] was a hot day, and Fanny was putting locks of her children's hair into an envelope and attempting to seal it with
hot sealing wax while Longfellow took a nap.[70] Her dress suddenly caught fire, though it is unclear exactly how;[71] burning wax
or a lighted candle may have fallen onto it.[72] Longfellow was awakened from his nap and rushed to help her, throwing a rug
over her, though it was too small. He stifled the flames with his body as best he could, but she was already badly burned. [71] Over
half a century later, Longfellow's youngest daughter Annie explained the story differently, claiming that there had been no
candle or wax but that the fire had started from a self-lighting match that had fallen on the floor.[63] Both accounts state that
Fanny was taken to her room to recover and a doctor was called. She was in and out of consciousness throughout the night and
was administered ether. She died shortly after 10:00 the next morning, July 10, after requesting a cup of coffee. [73] Longfellow,
in trying to save her, had burned himself badly enough so that he was unable to attend her funeral. [74] His facial injuries led him
to stop shaving, and he wore a beard from then on that became his trademark.[73]X

Longfellow was devastated by her death and never fully recovered; he occasionally resorted to laudanum and ether to deal with
his grief.[75] He worried that he would go insane, begging "not to be sent to an asylum" and noting that he was "inwardly
bleeding to death".[76] He expressed his grief in the sonnet "The Cross of Snow" (1879) which he wrote 18 years later to
commemorate her death:[41]X

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast

These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.[76]

Later life and death

Longfellow spent several years translating Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. To aid him in perfecting the translation and
reviewing proofs, he invited friends to meetings every Wednesday starting in 1864. [78] The "Dante Club", as it was called,
regularly included William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, as well as other occasional guests.
[79]
The full three-volume translation was published in the spring of 1867, though Longfellow continued to revise it. [80] It went
through four printings in its first year.[81] By 1868, Longfellow's annual income was over $48,000.[82] In 1874, Samuel Cutler
Ward helped him sell the poem "The Hanging of the Crane" to the New York Ledger for $3,000; it was the highest price ever
paid for a poem.[83]X

During the 1860s, Longfellow supported abolitionism and especially hoped for reconciliation between the northern and
southern states after the American Civil War. His son was injured during the war, and he wrote the poem "Christmas Bells",
later the basis of the carol I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. He wrote in his journal in 1878: "I have only one desire; and that
is for harmony, and a frank and honest understanding between North and South".[84] Longfellow accepted an offer from Joshua
Chamberlain to speak at his fiftieth reunion at Bowdoin College, despite his aversion to public speaking; he read the poem
"Morituri Salutamus" so quietly that few could hear him.[85] The next year, he declined an offer to be nominated for the Board of
Overseers at Harvard "for reasons very conclusive to my own mind". [86]X

On August 22, 1879, a female admirer traveled to Longfellow's house in Cambridge and, unaware to whom she was speaking,
asked him: "Is this the house where Longfellow was born?" He told her that it was not. The visitor then asked if he had died
 here. "Not yet", he replied.[87] In March 1882, Longfellow went to bed with severe stomach pain. He endured the pain for several
days with the help of opium before he died surrounded by family on Friday, March 24.[88] He had been suffering from peritonitis.
[89]
At the time of his death, his estate was worth an estimated $356,320. [82] He is buried with both of his wives at Mount Auburn
Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His last few years were spent translating the poetry of Michelangelo. Longfellow never
considered it complete enough to be published during his lifetime, but a posthumous edition was collected in 1883. Scholars
generally regard the work as autobiographical, reflecting the translator as an aging artist facing his impending death. [90]X

A Psalm of Life
BY H EN RY WA DS WO RTH LO NG FE LL OW

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Trust no Future, howeer pleasant!

Life is but an empty dream! Let the dead Past bury its dead!
For the soul is dead that slumbers, Act, act in the living Present!
And things are not what they seem. Heart within, and God oerhead!

Life is real! Life is earnest! Lives of great men all remind us

And the grave is not its goal; We can make our lives sublime,
Dust thou art, to dust returnest, And, departing, leave behind us
 Was not spoken of the soul. Footprints on the sands of time;

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Footprints, that perhaps another,

Is our destined end or way; Sailing oer lifes solemn main,
But to act, that each to-morrow A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Find us farther than to-day. Seeing, shall take heart again

Art is long, and Time is fleeting, Let us, then, be up and doing,
And our hearts, though stout and brave, With a heart for any fate;
Still, like muffled drums, are beating Still achieving, still pursuing,
Funeral marches to the grave. Learn to labor and to wait.

In the worlds broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

A Psalm of Life: About the Poem

A Psalm of Life is an inspiring poem written by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem was first
published in the October 1838 issue of The Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine, a magazine published in the
New York City.
A psalm is a religious or sacred song or hymn, in particular any of those contained in the biblical Book of Psalms and used
in Christian and Jewish worship. But here the meaningof a psalm of life is a song of life, where the poet glorifies life
and its possibilities. It is an invocation to mankind to follow the path of righteousness, the right way to live this life. The
poem is didactic in tone.
The poem A Psalm of Life often takes the subtitle What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist. This is very
important in suggesting the context of writing this poem. Here, the speaker (a young man) responds to the Biblical
teachings that this human life is not important and that we are made of dust and eventually return to dust. So, we may take
it as a psalm in response to a psalm.
In the poem, A Psalm of Life, the poet sees life from an optimistic outlook. To him this life is full of possibilities, as we
can achieve higher goals by making the full use of our time and by working hard, and of course, by keeping faith in the
power and potential of life. He does not have faith in those who hold the pessimistic view of life. Throughout the entire
poem, the poet Longfellow conveys his view of life, instructs the readers to make the most out of this life, and inspires us
to participate in the work and activity of life.
The poem consists of nine stanzas of four lines. The poem is also lyrical in nature. Therhyme scheme followed is A B A B,
where the last words of the first line and the third line rhyme, and alternatively the second and the fourth line rhyme in
each stanza.

A Psalm of life: Summary and Line-by-Line Analysis

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
The poem begins with a verb Tell in an imperative manner. And the very first sentence strikes the positive keynote of the
poem. It also indicates that the poet is going to give us some instructions on what this life actually is and how we should
take it. The poet asks us not to tell him in sorrowful verses that life is a hollow and meaningless dream. Here Longfellow
slams the pessimists who sing melancholy songs, write sad poems, or thinks that nothing can be achieved in this life.
According to the poet, a person who spends all his time sleeping is already dead. Such worthless examples of life often
misguide others. And he assures that life is not so shady or worthless as it looks like, and it has much more potential than
we think of.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
The second stanza begins with the line, Life is real! Life is earnest! This also conveys the poets positive attitude towards
life. According to him life is real and serious, not baseless or useless. So we should not take this life lightly. To him, grave
is not the ultimate goal of life; life does not end with death. He wants to indicate that our works remain in this world even
after our death. He thinks, Dust thou art, to dust thou returnest (You are made of dust, and you will go back to dust after
death) is only spoken of the body and it is not applicable to the soul. So the poet makes it clear that he believes in the
existence of the soul after our death.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
The third stanza of A Psalm of Life is about the ideal way of living. The poet suggests that neither enjoyment, nor sorrow
should be our ultimate aim or way of life. He means to say that in an ideal life there should be both enjoyment and sorrow
in a balanced way. But that is not crucial. The most important thing is to work, and work diligently so that we can always
be a better-learned, better-skilled and better-mannered human being with every passing day. The poet in The Psalm of Life
doesnt want us to waste even a single day. We should crave for going forward farther each day in our journey of life.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
The fourth stanza of the poem A Psalm of Life is about our responsibilities in this life, about the work assigned to us. Art
is long, and Time is fleeting means that the work given to us is vast and time consuming, but the time is running away
fast with every moment. The poet then says that though our hearts are brave and stout at other times, we fear death and
our heart beats when we realize that Death is certainly coming our way bit by bit. Longfellow compares this situation of
our heart to the beating of the clothed drums at the funeral marches to the grave. Here he means to say that we should
utilize our limited time span to the fullest instead of wasting it in the thought of death or other such thing.
In the worlds broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
In the above stanza of A Psalm of Life, the poet compares this world to a vast battlefield where we, the human beings
come temporarily in the camps to fight the battle of our life. So the human beings are compared with troops. The poet
urges us to be a hero in this battle of life, to fight this out bravely and finally win it. In other words, he wishes us to be
successful in life by following the right way of life. He doesnt like to see us like the dumb cattle driven by others, with no
particular goal or direction.
Trust no Future, howeer pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God oerhead!
In the sixth stanza of the poem A Psalm of life, the poet reminds us of a very popular quote: Learn from the past, live in
the present, and hope for the future. But here the poet instructs us not to trust the future, however pleasant it may seem,
because we often get carried away by the happy dreams about our future and forget to act in the present. He also tells us to
forget the past events, as they are dead, and they should not haunt us anymore and affect our present action. And what is
crucial is to act in the present, in the living Present! We have to follow our heart, and keep faith in the God overhead.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
In the seventh stanza of the poem, the poet says that the lives of so many great and successful men remind us that we can
also achieve those heights if we wish and strive for that. And if we can do that, we would be living forever in our works,
in the hearts of people. Longfellow compares this immortality to leaving footprints on the sands of time. In other words,
we will not be living forever here, but we can leave our marks on the infinite flow of time through our good work. That
would inspire later generations to follow our way.
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing oer lifes solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
In the penultimate stanza of A Psalm of life, the poet continues the same theme of leaving a footprint to inspire others to
follow. He compares a dejected or wretched person with a hopeless shipwrecked man sailing over the large sea of life
(lifes solemn main). That person can find the examples set by us, and can gain courage and hope to move forward.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
In the final four lines of A Psalm of Life, the poet Longfellow asks us to be up at once and start working. However, the
poet here urges us not to mind the consequences, or, to make our mind prepared for any fate. We must carry on, reaching
great heights, still not leaving. We must learn to labour, to work hard, to act wisely, and wait for the rewards patiently.

Victorian Literature
Victorian literature is the body of poetry, fiction, essays, and letters produced during the reign of Queen
Victoria (18371901) and during the era which bears her name. It forms a link and transition between the
writers of the romantic period and the modernist literature of the twentieth century.
During the nineteenth century the novel become the leading form of literature in English. The works by pre-
Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott had perfected both closely observed social satire and
historical fiction. Serialized popular novels won unprecedented readership and led to increasing artistic
sophistication. The nineteenth century is often regarded as a high point in European literature and Victorian
literature, including the works of Emily and Charlotte Bront), Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, A. E.
Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Makepeace
Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Oscar Wilde remain widely popular and part of the core curricula in most
universities and secondary schools.
Novelists
Charles Dickens exemplifies the Victorian novelist better than any other writer. Extraordinarily popular in his
day with his characters taking on a life of their own beyond the page, Dickens is still the most popular and read
author of the time. The nineteenth century saw the rise of numerous literary journals that carried serial
installments that were eagerly anticipated and widely read. His first real novel, The Pickwick Papers, written
when he was only 25, was an overnight success, and all his subsequent works sold extremely well. He was in
effect a self-made man who worked diligently and prolifically to produce exactly what the public wanted; often
reacting to the public taste and changing the plot direction of his stories between monthly installments. The
comedy of his first novel has a satirical edge which pervades his writings. These deal with the plight of the poor
and oppressed and end with a ghost story cut short by his death. The slow trend in his fiction towards darker
themes is mirrored in much of the writing of the century, and literature after his death in 1870 is notably
different from that at the start of the era.
William Makepeace Thackeray was Dickens' great rival at the time. With a similar style but a slightly more
detached, acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended to depict situations of a more
middle class flavor than Dickens. He is best known for his novel Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel without a Hero,
which is also an example of a form popular in Victorian literature: the historical novel, in which very recent
history is depicted. Anthony Trollope tended to write about a slightly different part of the structure, namely the
landowning and professional classes.

Away from the big cities and the literary society, Haworth in West Yorkshire was the site of some of the era's
most important novel writing: the home of the Bront family. Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bront had time in
their short lives to produce masterpieces of fiction although these were not immediately appreciated by
Victorian critics. Wuthering Heights, Emily's only work, in particular has violence, passion, the supernatural,
heightened emotion, and emotional distance, an unusual mix for any novel but particularly at this time. It is a
prime example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view during this period of time, examining
class, myth, and gender. Another important writer of the period was George Eliot, a pseudonym which
concealed a woman, Mary Ann Evans, who wished to write novels which would be taken seriously rather than
the silly romances which all women of the time were supposed to write.

The style of the Victorian novel

Virginia Woolf in her series of essays The Common Reader called George Eliot's Middlemarch "one of the few
English novels written for grown-up people." This criticism, although rather broadly covering as it does all
English literature, is rather a fair comment on much of the fiction of the Victorian Era. Influenced as they were
by the large sprawling novels of sensibility of the preceding age they tended to be idealized portraits of difficult
lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrong-
doers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart,
informing the reader how to be a good Victorian. This formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian
fiction but as the century progressed the tone grew darker.
Eliot in particular strove for realism in her fiction and tried to banish the picturesque and the burlesque from her
work. Another woman writer Elizabeth Gaskell wrote even grimmer, grittier books about the poor in the north
of England but even these usually had happy endings. After the death of Dickens in 1870 happy endings became
less common. Such a major literary figure as Charles Dickens tended to dictate the direction of all literature of
the era, not least because he edited All the Year Round a literary journal of the time. His fondness for a happy
ending with all the loose ends neatly tied up is clear and although he is well known for writing about the lives of
the poor they are sentimentalized portraits, made acceptable for people of character to read; to be shocked but
not disgusted. The more unpleasant underworld of Victorian city life was revealed by Henry Mayhew in his
articles and book London Labour and the London Poor.
This change in style in Victorian fiction was slow coming but clear by the end of the century, with the books in
the 1880s and 1890s having a more realistic and often grimmer cast. Even writers of the high Victorian age
were censured for their plots attacking the conventions of the day; Adam Bede was called "the vile outpourings
of a lewd woman's mind" and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall "utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls." The
disgust of the reading audience perhaps reached a peak with Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure which was
reportedly burnt by an outraged Bishop of Wakefield. The cause of such fury was Hardy's frank treatment of
sex, religion and his disregard for the subject of marriage; a subject close to the Victorians' heart. The prevailing
plot of the Victorian novel is sometimes described as a search for a correct marriage.
Hardy had started his career as seemingly a rather safe novelist writing bucolic scenes of rural life but his
disaffection with some of the institutions of Victorian Britain was present as well as an underlying sorrow for
the changing nature of the English countryside. He responded to the hostile reception to Jude in 1895 by giving
up his novel writing, but he continued writing poetry into the mid 1920s. Other authors such as Samuel
Butler and George Gissing confronted their antipathies to certain aspects of marriage, religion or Victorian
morality and peppered their fiction with controversial anti-heros. Butler's Erewhon, for one, is a utopian novel
satirizing many aspects of Victorian society with Butler's particular dislike of the religious hypocrisy the focus
of his greatest scorn in the depiction of "Musical Banks."
While many great writers were at work at the time, the large numbers of voracious but uncritical readers meant
that poor writers, producing salacious and lurid novels or accounts, found eager audiences. Many of the faults
common to much better writers were used abundantly by writers now mostly forgotten: over-sentimentality,
unrealistic plots and moralizing that obscured the story. Although immensely popular in his day, Edward
Bulwer-Lytton is now held up as an example of the very worst of Victorian literature with his sensationalist
story-lines and his over-boiled style of prose. Other writers popular at the time but largely forgotten now are:
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Kingsley, R. D. Blackmore, and even Benjamin
Disraeli, a future Prime Minister.

Other Literature
Children's literature
The Victorians are sometimes credited with 'inventing childhood', partly via their efforts to stop child labor and
the introduction of compulsory education. As children began to be able to read, literature for young people
became a growth industry with, not only, adult novelists producing works for children such as Dickens' A
Child's History of England but also dedicated children's authors. Writers like Lewis Carroll, R. M. Ballantyne,
and Anna Sewell wrote mainly for children, although they had an adult following, and nonsense
verse, poetry which required a child-like interest, was produced by Edward Lear among others. The subject of
school also became a rich area for books with Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays just one of the most
popular examples.

Poetry
Poetry in a sense settled down from the upheavals of the romantic era and much of the work of the time is seen
as a bridge between this earlier era and the modernist poetry of the next century. Alfred Lord Tennysonheld the
poet laureateship for over 40 years and his verse became rather stale by the end but his early work is rightly
praised. Some of the poetry highly regarded at the time such as Invictus and If are now seen as jingoistic and
bombastic but Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade was a fierce criticism of a famous military blunder; a
pillar of the establishment not failing to attack the establishment.
It seems wrong to classify Oscar Wilde as a Victorian writer as his plays and poems seem to belong to the later
age of Edwardian literature, but as he died in 1900, he was most definitely Victorian. His plays stand apart from
the many now forgotten plays of Victorian times and have a much closer relationship to those of George
Bernard Shaw's, many of whose most important works were written in the twentieth century.
The husband and wife poetry team of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning conducted their love
affair through verse and produced many tender and passionate poems. Both Matthew Arnold and Gerard
Manley Hopkins wrote poems which sit somewhere in between the exultation of nature of the romantic Poetry
and the Georgian Poetry of the early twentieth century. Arnold's works harks forward to some of the themes of
these later poets while Hopkins drew for inspiration on verse forms from Old English poetry such as Beowulf.
The reclaiming of the past was a major part of Victorian literature with an interest in both classical literature but
also the medieval literature of England. The Victorians loved the heroic, chivalrous stories of knights of old and
they hoped to regain some of that noble, courtly behavior and impress it upon the people both at home and in
the wider empire. The best example of this is Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King which blended the stories
of King Arthur, particularly those by Thomas Malory, with contemporary concerns and ideas. The Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood also drew on myth and folklore for their art with Dante Gabriel
Rossetti contemperaneously regarded as the chief poet amongst them, although his sister Christina is now held
by scholars to be a stronger poet.

The influence of Empire

The interest in older works of literature led the Victorians much further afield to find new old works with a great
interest in translating of literature from the farthest flung corners of their new empire and
beyond. Arabic and Sanskrit literature were some of the richest bodies of work to be discovered and translated
for popular consumption. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of the best of these works, translated by
Edward FitzGerald who introduced much of his own poetic skill into a rather free adaptation of the eleventh
century work. The explorer Richard Francis Burton also translated many exotic works from beyond Europe
including The Perfumed Garden, The Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra.

Science, philosophy and discovery

The Victorian era was an important time for the development of science and the Victorians had a mission to
describe and classify the entire natural world. Much of this writing does not rise to the level of being regarded
as literature but one book in particular, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, remains famous. The theory
of evolution contained within the work shook many of the ideas the Victorians had about themselves and their
place in the world and although it took a long time to be widely accepted it would change, dramatically,
subsequent thought and literature.
Other important non-fiction works of the time are the philosophical writings of John Stuart Mill covering logic,
economics, liberty, and utilitarianism. The large and influential histories of Thomas Carlyle: The French
Revolution, A History, On Heroes and Hero Worship and Thomas Babington Macaulay: The History of England
from the Accession of James II. The greater number of novels that contained overt criticism of religion did not
stifle a vigorous list of publications on the subject of religion. Two of the most important of these are John
Henry Newman and Henry Edward Cardinal Manning who both wished to revitalize Anglicanism with a return
to the Roman Catholic Church. In a somewhat opposite direction, the ideas of socialism were permeating
political thought at the time with Friedrich Engels writing his Condition of the Working Classes in
England and William Morriswriting the early socialist utopian novel News from Nowhere. One other important
and monumental work begun in this era was the Oxford English Dictionary which would eventually become the
most important historical dictionary of the English language.

Supernatural and fantastic literature

A new form of supernatural, mystery and fantastic literature during this period, often centered on larger-than-
life characters such as Sherlock Holmes famous detective of the times, Barry Lee big time gang leader of the
Victorian Times, Sexton Blakes, Phileas Foggs, Frankenstein fictional characters of the era, Dracula, Edward
Hyde, The Invisible Man, and many other fictional characters who often had exotic enemies to foil.

The influence of Victorian literature

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Victorian fiction outside of Victoria's domains.

Writers from the former colony of The United States of America and the remaining colonies of Australia, New
Zealand, and Canada could not avoid being influenced by the literature of Britain and they are often classed as a
part of Victorian literature although they were gradually developing their own distinctive voices. Victorian
writers of Canadian literature include Grant Allen, Susanna Moodie, and Catherine Parr Traill. Australian
literature has the poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson, who wrote Waltzing Matilda and New
Zealand literature includes Thomas Bracken and Frederick Edward Maning From the sphere of literature of the
United States during this time are some of the country's greats including: Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry James, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David
Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.
The problem with the classification of Victorian literature is great difference between the early works of the
period and the later works which had more in common with the writers of the Edwardian period and many
writers straddle this divide. People such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H.
Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome, and Joseph Conrad all wrote some of their important works during Victoria's
reign but the sensibility of their writing is frequently regarded as Edwardian.
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling, in full Joseph Rudyard Kipling (born December 30, 1865, Bombay [now
Mumbai], Indiadied January 18, 1936, London, England), English short-story writer, poet,
and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and
poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1907.

Life
Kiplings father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and scholar who had considerable
influence on his sons work, became curator of the Lahore Museum, and is described
presiding over this wonder house in the first chapter of Kim, Rudyards most
famous novel. His mother was Alice Macdonald, two of whose sisters married the highly
successful 19th-century painters Sir Edward Burne-Jonesand Sir Edward Poynter, while a
third married Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of Stanley Baldwin, later prime
minister. These connections were of lifelong importance to Kipling.
Much of his childhood was unhappy. Kipling was taken to England by his parents at the
age of six and was left for five years at a foster home at Southsea, the horrors of which he
described in the story Baa Baa, Black Sheep (1888). He then went on to the United
Services College at Westward Ho, north Devon, a new, inexpensive, and inferior boarding
school. It haunted Kipling for the rest of his lifebut always as the glorious place
celebrated in Stalky & Co. (1899) and related stories: an unruly paradise in which the
highest goals of English education are met amid a tumult of teasing, bullying, and beating.
The Stalky saga is one of Kiplings great imaginative achievements. Readers repelled by a
strain of brutalityeven of crueltyin his writings should remember the sensitive and
shortsighted boy who was brought to terms with the ethos of this deplorable establishment
through the demands of self-preservation.
Kipling returned to India in 1882 and worked for seven years as a journalist. His parents,
although not officially important, belonged to the highest Anglo-Indian society, and
Rudyard thus had opportunities for exploring the whole range of that life. All the while he
had remained keenly observant of the thronging spectacle of native India, which had
engaged his interest and affection from earliest childhood. He was quickly filling the
journals he worked for with prose sketches and light verse. He published the verse
collection Departmental Ditties in 1886, the short-story collection Plain Tales from the
Hills in 1888, and between 1887 and 1889 he brought out six paper-covered volumes of
short stories. Among the latter were Soldiers Three, The Phantom Rickshaw (containing
the story The Man Who Would Be King), and Wee Willie Winkie (containing Baa Baa,
Black Sheep). When Kipling returned to England in 1889, his reputation had preceded
him, and within a year he was acclaimed as one of the most brilliant prose writers of his
time. His fame was redoubled upon the publication in 1892 of the verse
collection Barrack-Room Ballads, which contained such popular poems as Mandalay,
Gunga Din, and Danny Deever. Not since the English poet Lord Byron had such a
reputation been achieved so rapidly. When the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, died
in 1892, it may be said that Kipling took his place in popular estimation.

In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of Wolcott Balestier, an American
publisher and writer with whom he had collaborated in The Naulahka(1892), a facile and
unsuccessful romance. That year the young couple moved to the United States and
settled on Mrs. Kiplings property in Vermont, but their manners and attitudes were
considered objectionable by their neighbours. Unable or unwilling to adjust to life in
America, the Kiplings returned to England in 1896. Ever after Kipling remained very aware
that Americans were foreigners, and he extended to them, as to the French, no more
than a semi-exemption from his proposition that only lesser breeds are born beyond
the English Channel.

Besides numerous short-story collections and poetry collections such as The Seven
Seas (1896), Kipling published his best-known novels in the 1890s and immediately
thereafter. His novel The Light That Failed (1890) is the story of a painter going blind and
spurned by the woman he loves. Captains Courageous (1897), in spite of its sense of
adventure, is burdened by excessive descriptive writing. Kim (1901), about an Irish orphan
in India, is a classic. The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) are
stylistically superb collections of stories. These books give further proof that Kipling
excelled at telling a story but was inconsistent in producing balanced, cohesive novels.

In 1902 Kipling bought a house at Burwash, Sussex, which remained his home until his
death. Sussex was the background of much of his later writingespecially in Puck of
Pooks Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), two volumes that, although devoted to
simple dramatic presentations of English history, embodied some of his deepest intuitions.
In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Englishman to be so honoured.
In South Africa, where he spent much time, he was given a house by Cecil Rhodes, the
diamond magnate and South African statesman. This association fostered Kiplings
imperialist persuasions, which were to grow stronger with the years. These convictions are
not to be dismissed in a word: they were bound up with a genuine sense of a civilizing
mission that required every Englishman, or, more broadly, every white man, to bring
European culture to those he considered the heathen natives of the uncivilized world.
Kiplings ideas were not in accord with much that was liberal in the thought of the age,
and, as he became older, he was an increasingly isolated figure. When he died, two days
before King George V, he must have seemed to many a far less representative
Englishman than his sovereign.

Assessment
Kiplings poems and stories were extraordinarily popular in the late 19th and early 20th
century, but after World War I his reputation as a serious writer suffered through his being
widely viewed as a jingoistic imperialist. (His rehabilitation was attempted, however,
by T.S. Eliot.) His verse is indeed vigorous, and in dealing with the lives
and colloquial speech of common soldiers and sailors it broke new ground. Balladry,
music hall song, and popular hymnology provide its unassuming basis; even at its most
seriousas in Recessional (1897) and similar pieces in which Kipling addressed himself
to his fellow countrymen in times of crisisthe effect is rhetorical rather than imaginative.

But it is otherwise with Kiplings prose. In the whole sweep of his adult storytelling, he
displays a steadily developing art, from the early volumes of short stories set in India
through the collections Lifes Handicap (1891), Many Inventions (1893), The Days
Work (1898), Traffics and Discoveries (1904), Actions and Reactions (1909), Debits and
Credits (1926), and Limits and Renewals (1932). While his later stories cannot exactly be
called better than the earlier ones, they are as goodand they bring a subtler if less
dazzling technical proficiency to the exploration of deeper though sometimes more
perplexing themes. It is a far cry from the broadly effective eruption of the supernatural
in The Phantom Rickshaw (1888) to its subtle exploitation in The Wish House or A
Madonna of the Trenches (1924), or from the innocent chauvinism of the bravura The
Man Who Was (1890) to the depth of implication beneath the seemingly
insensate xenophobia of Mary Postgate (1915). There is much in Kiplings later art to
curtail its popular appeal. It is compressed and elliptical in manner and sombre in many of
its themes. The authors critical reputation declined steadily during his lifetimea decline
that can scarcely be accounted for except in terms of political prejudice. Paradoxically,
postcolonial critics later rekindled an intense interest in his work, viewing it as both
symptomatic and critical of imperialist attitudes.
Kipling, it should be noted, wrote much and successfully for childrenfor the very young
in Just So Stories (1902) and for others in The Jungle Book and its sequel and in Puck of
Pooks Hill and Rewards and Fairies. Of his miscellaneous works, the more notable are a
number of early travel sketches collected in two volumes in From Sea to Sea (1899) and
the unfinished Something of Myself, posthumously published in 1941, a reticent essay
in autobiography.
 If
BY R UDYAR D KI PL IN G

(Brother Square-ToesRewards and Fairies)

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, dont deal in lies,
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kingsnor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
 Or being hated, dont give way to hating, Yours is the Earth and everything thats in it,
And yet dont look too good, nor talk too wise: Andwhich is moreyoull be a Man, my son!

If you can dreamand not make dreams your master;

If you can thinkand not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth youve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: Hold on!

If by Rudyard Kipling: About the poem

The poem If by the India-born British Nobel laureate poet Rudyard Kipling is a poem of ultimate inspiration
that tells us how to deal with different situations in life. The poet conveys his ideas about how to win this life,
and after all, how to be a good human being.
The poem, written in 1895 and first published in Rewards and Fairies, 1910 is 32 lines long with four stanzas
of eight lines each. It is a tribute to Leander Starr Jameson. The poem is written in the form of paternal advice to
the poets son, John. You may read more about the poem at Wikipedia.
For the theme, as already told, the poem basically tells us the conditions that we should meet to succeed in life
and make this life happy and a beautiful one. The whole poem is written in a single complex sentence. So all
the subordinate clauses begin with if and the main clause concluding the entire theme comes at the end, and
the poem ends with a full stop.
This structure of the poem was important to achieve the conditional goal. The poet speaks of the achievement
at the end, after discussing all the requirements to reach there. This structure is actually symbolic in suggesting
that you can get the rewards only after you have fulfilled the preconditions. Moreover, this makes the readers
eager to know what would happen when we meet all these conditions, thus retaining the curiosity and interest
till the end.
And, as the main theme of the poem is a combination of so many ifs, the title If is an apt one for the poem.
Now its time to go for an analysis of the poem.
Summary & line by line explanation of If

First Stanza

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
To be a good human being and to succeed in life, we should keep calm when other people around us are losing
their cool. We should not lose our temperament even if others are blaming us for their fault.

Losing the temper does not solve a problem, rather intensifies that. Keeping the head cool makes us think
wisely to face those tough situations, and ultimately a solution comes out.

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;
We should have the faith in ourselves, even when others doubt us. But after that, we should give some
importance to their doubt too and try to find out what may be the reason for their suspicion. After all, To err is
human.

So, By keeping faith in ourselves we make sure that we dont get demoralized or disheartened. And, by allowing
others doubt a little space of thought, we ensure that we are not doing something wrong knowingly or
unknowingly.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

We should work hard and wait for the result patiently. We should not get tired by waiting.

There are a number of real life examples where people missed big opportunities only by losing their patience.
Moreover, there goes a number of proverbs. Hurry will bury you. Haste makes waste. Patience pays off.
So, its quite understandable why the poet makes a point for patience here.

Or being lied about, dont deal in lies,

People may lie about us to others, but we should not indulge ourselves in lies. In other words, we should always
remain truthful.

If we are misled or tempted to lie, people would ultimately discover the truth and wont believe us anymore.
Thats why its important to speak the truth even if that hurts us.

Or being hated, dont give way to hating,

People may show their hatred towards us, yet we should not hate them. We should show our love and respect to
others.

No man or woman is perfect in this world. Everyone has his strengths and weaknesses. We have to accept that
and respect them for the good qualities in them.

And yet dont look too good, nor talk too wise:
We should not show us as too good a person or talk too wisely with common people, even after possessing such
qualities.

Having acquired all these good qualities mentioned above, people generally feel proud and tend to show off
how good they are. But, the poet warns us not to go that way. In that case, others would feel uncomfortable in
our company and avoid us. Even others may try to prove us wrong at any cost, leading to an unhealthy
competition.

Second stanza

If you can dreamand not make dreams your master;

To do something bigger, we should dream first. But the poet also reminds us not to be guided by unrealistic
dreams. If dreams take the drivers seat, we would get detached from reality and eventually fail.
There goes a saying You have to dream first before your dream can come true. So we should dream to reach
great heights in life, but keeping the reality in mind.

If you can thinkand not make thoughts your aim;

We should be able to think over a matter, but should not make the thoughts our aim. That is to say that we often
lose our radar and get detached from the main point. So our thinking should not be scattered misleading us away
from the target.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;
Life is a combination of success and failure, joy and sorrow, good times and bad times. We should accept both
and face both situations with similar treatment.

Here the poet personifies Triumph and Disaster, capitalizing and calling them two impostors (pretenders or
cheaters). People becomes too happy in success and forgets their duty at hand. We may also get too complacent
or proud at a small success, reducing our chances to reach higher goals. Again, at bad times, if we are too
grieved, we may lose our faith and confidence. In both cases, our regular course of work is hampered. That is
why the poet calls triumph and disaster two impostors. He asks us to treat those deceivers similarly, with a
smiling face. In short, dont be too happy or too sad under any circumstances.

If you can bear to hear the truth youve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
We have to bear the tough situations where we see that our speech or statement is distorted by someone to
befool others.

Very often we see that people misinterpret or even deliberately distort our words to use it in their favour. We
should not lose our temper hearing that. Rather we should tolerate that, ensuring we have spoken the truth.

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build em up with worn-out tools:
We have to hold our nerves even after seeing that our favourite thing that we built with all our effort and time is
broken. Then we have to pick up the scattered parts and build it all over again. This is another key to getting to
the top of the world, according to the poet.

To keep our cool is not easy in such a situation. But patience and the mental toughness would help us build
them again. Indeed, there is a story about Newton that the papers containing his theories were destroyed in fire,
and he wrote them again from the beginning.

Third Stanza

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
We should be able to accumulate all we have and take a risk in one turn of the game of pitch-and-toss. We may
lose the game and all our possessions. But we have to stay calm without uttering a word about that loss and
rebuild it from the beginning.

Here the poet talks about the capability of taking big risks to achieve much greater success and keeping quiet
even if we lose the bet. This is yet another aspect of our mental toughness that we need to possess.

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: Hold on!
In the four lines above the poet continues the same theme of mental strength and the power of Will. We have to
force our body (heart and nerve and sinew) to serve us even after it has lost the strength due to old age or
illness. Thus we should keep on working driven by the power of Will which would ask them (heart and nerve
and sinew) to hold on compelling them to do their job.
If we want to do something great from our heart, the Will inside us would prevent the body from getting tired.
Indeed, there goes a proverb: When going gets tough, the tough gets going.

Fourth stanza

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kingsnor lose the common touch,
We should stay in touch with people from every class of the society. We should be able to talk with common
mass without losing our virtue or moral values. Again, we should be able to walk with kings without going
beyond the reach of the common people.

The common touch would help us realize the reality and feel the needs of the society. On the other hand, the
noble touch would give us the power and opportunity to reach higher goals.

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;
We should build ourselves strong enough, mentally and physically, so that neither enemies nor loving friends
can hurt us. Moreover, we should develop healthy relationship with everyone around us, and should not allow
anyone to harm us.

We have to develop our personality the right way, so that everyone supports us and gives us importance (count
with you), but none too much. If we allow someone to give us too much importance, we may be emotionally
bound. That may restrict our freedom and prevent us from doing our duty. Or, we may get complacent thinking
that we are so much liked by people, thus reducing our effort.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Time is precious. A minute is filled with sixty seconds. Time (minute) is here called unforgiving , as it waits for
none and doesnt forgive him who wastes it. We should utilize every minute of our life in productive work.
Wasting time is not something we can afford in our short lifespan.

Yours is the Earth and everything thats in it,

Andwhich is moreyoull be a Man, my son.
Finally comes the achievement that we can get if we fulfill all the conditions mentioned so far. We can win this
earth and everything in it. We can go to top of the world and rule over everything. And what is more, We would
be a complete and perfect human being.

We should not forget that Kipling wrote this poem for his son, as it is addressed in the very last line. The poet
wanted to show his son the right way to be a future leader. But it has inspired many a man in their journey of
life on earth so far.