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"The Village Blacksmith," poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ca. 1840, published 1841 in Ballads and Other Poems
"The Village Blacksmith," poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ca. 1840, published 1841 in Ballads and Other Poems
"The Village Blacksmith," poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ca. 1840, published 1841 in Ballads and Other Poems
The poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The Village Blacksmith," poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ca. 1840, published 1841 in Ballads and Other Poems
Summary
Reproduction number: A109 (color slide; page 1); LC-MSS-92775-1 (B&W negative; page 1)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), college professor and one of America's most famous poets, enjoyed wide acceptance of his writings during his lifetime. He taught first at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, where he had been a classmate of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and later at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both institutions now hold major Longfellow collections. He publicized his interest in abolitionist ideas in his Poems on Slavery (1842) and penned such grammar school favorites as "Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie" (1847) and "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855).
His poem "The Village Blacksmith," with the famous opening lines, "Under a spreading chestnut tree, The village smithy stands" was also required reading for several generations of American school children. Shown here is Longfellow's original draft of that poem, for which he reportedly was paid fifteen dollars when he submitted it to Knickerbocker magazine in November 1840. Although he enjoyed immediate popularity, Longfellow later commanded several thousand dollars for his poems once he had established more of a name for himself.
This manuscript was donated to the Library of Congress in 1942 by collector Francis Joseph Hogan (1877-1944), a Washington, D.C., attorney. It is written in ink on two sides of one sheet, with the last stanza appearing on a segment of an additional sheet which had been lengthened to match the first, probably before donation. A Library of Congress conservator has identified the paper as wove cotton or linen, machine-made, by Ames Paper Company, Springfield, Massachusetts, whose embossing appears in the upper-left corner of both sheets.