Paul Revere's Ride

Among the most widely published and most respected poets of the first generation of Americans not born British subjects, Longfellow wrote copiously and passionately about the need for the new nation to find its voice in the poetic arts. Unlike his more radical contemporaries, most notably Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Longfellow did not see American poetry as a defiant rejection of poetic forms and poetic subjects defined by British models but rather as a learned homage to the poetry of the nation his fledgling country had defeated militarily, twice.

“Paul Revere’s Ride” exemplifies Longfellow’s perception of the role of a national poet. He treats an American subject with the gravitas that defined national epics since Antiquity. Denying the introspective imperative, Longfellow’s poetry is stately and impersonal. The Poet (the capital letter is inevitable) speaks about great matters in an elevated style that reflects respect for the inherited protocols of prosody. Longfellow regarded poetry as an opportunity to speak to his nation, to offer wisdom designed to elevate lives and gift them with the reassurance that moral certainties still operated.

Unlike Dickinson or Whitman, Longfellow found a secure place within his era’s culture. He emerged as the most successful of the so-called Fireside Poets—along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and William Cullen Bryan—so named because their poetry was shared in parlors across New England. Later generations of poets, daring in their reimagining of poetic forms and radical in their investigation into poetic subjects, demoted Longfellow’s stature as America’s poet, dismissing Longfellow’s work as derivative and bland. Nevertheless, Longfellow was exactly the poet postbellum America, emerging from the ruins of the Civil War, needed.