On Fellow Ous Ulletin
on fellow ous L g ulletinH e Volume No. A Newsletter of the Friends of the Longfellow House and the National Park Service June New Study ExaminesThe Song of HiawathaB as Controversial Bestseller atthew Gartner’s recent work on noted in his journal: “Some of the MH.W. Longfellow’s most popular newspapers are fierce and furious about poem asserts that The Song of Hiawatha was Hiawatha,” and a few weeks later, he both a bestseller and a subject of contro- wrote, “There is the greatest pother versy as soon as it was published, and about Hiawatha. It is violently assailed, quickly became a cultural phenomenon. and warmly defended.” The historian Gartner, who is writing a book called The William Prescott, a friend of Longfel- Poet Longfellow: A Cultural Interpretation, will low’s, wrote the poet from New York of present his findings and analysis this July “the hubbub that Hiawatha has kicked up at the Society for the History of Author- in the literary community.” ship, Reading, and Publishing. At the heart of the controversy lay When Hiawatha was first published in Longfellow’s decision to use a poetic it sold rapidly. With an initial print- meter called “trochaic dimeter.” The ing of five thousand volumes, four thou- George H. Thomas illustration, The Song of Hiawatha, London, nineteenth century was an age of great sand were already sold as of its November nationwide by , making it not only sensitivity to the art of prosody, or poetic publication date. By mid-December Longfellow’s best-selling poem ever, but, meter, and Longfellow surely knew Hiawa- eleven thousand volumes were in print.
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