Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an American poet, the most popular of his century. Born in Portland, Maine, he graduated from Bowdoin, studied in Europe and taught modern languages at Bowdoin and then Harvard. Voices of the Night and Ballads and Other Poems, with A Psalm of Life, The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Village Blacksmith, made him famous; the long narrative poems Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish and Tales of a Wayside Inn followed. After his second wife's death by fire in 1861 he turned to translating Dante. He is the only American poet with a bust in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.