Harvard University

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on February 27, 1807, and was educated at Portland Academy and alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin College and then at Harvard University. He taught at Bowdoin from 1829 to 1835 as a professor of foreign languages after travelling widely in Europe 1826-29, and he joined Harvard as Smith Professor of French and Spanish in 1836 (replacing George Ticknor) and taught there until 1854, when the professorship went to James Russell Lowell. He was married twice, his first wife dying in Holland in 1835, and his second, Frances Appleton (whom he married in 1843), dying in a burning accident at home in 1861 when Longfellow himself was injured. While at Harvard, the Longfellows lived at Craigie House, a gift of his father-in-law. He had three daughters and two sons. Longfellow's first book of poems, Voices of the Night, was published in 1839, and his last, In the Harbor, in 1882. Between those two dates, Longfellow published more than 20 books:

• Hyperion, a prose romance (1839)
• Ballads and Other Poems (1842)
• Poems on Slavery (1842)
• The Spanish Student (1843)
• The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1846)
• Evangeline (1847)
• Kavagh, a story in prose (1849)
• The Seaside and the Fireside (1850)
• The Golden Legend (1851)
• The Song of Hiawatha (1855)
• The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858)
• Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863)
• Dante's Divine Comedy, a translation (1865-67)
• Flower-de-Luce (1867)
• The Divine Tragedy (1871)
• Christus, a Mystery (1872)
• Three Books of Song (1872)
• Aftermath (1873)
• The Masque of Pandora (1875)
• Kéamos and Other Poems (1878)
• Ultima Thule (1880)

In 1842 Longfellow visited Dickens in London, and his 1868-69 tour of Europe included honorary degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, by which time he had become as universally popular a poet as Tennyson. A bust was placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey after his death, the only American to be afforded this honour. For two good lives, see Newton Arvin's Longfellow: His Life and Work (1963) and Edward Wagenknecht's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966; PS 2281 W34 Robarts Library).

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1809, Oliver Wendell Holmes proceeded to Phillips Academy and Harvard, from which he graduated in 1829. His first, most popular poem, written at 21, was "Old Ironsides." Like most of Holmes' poems, this was an occasional piece, prompted by some incident. After his degree, he studied in Boston, Harvard, and Paris medical schools before graduating with a Harvard M.D. in 1835. He published Poems the next year. His career then turned to medical writing and teaching with his appointment as a professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College in 1838, and firmed up when he became Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, and Dean, at Harvard Medical School in 1847. Holmes kept up his old love of literature, serializing his The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table in the Atlantic Monthly and then bringing it out as a book in 1858. This included what Holmes reasonably believed to be his best poems, "The Chambered Nautilus" and "The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the Wonderful `One-Hoss-Shay.'" Composition never prevented Holmes from literary criticism. In 1853 he delivered a dozen lectures on the English poets at the Lovell Institute in Boston, and in 1872 the third of his "Breakfast-Table" books was published, The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. Besides issuing enlarged editions of his 1836 Poems, he published four subsequent volumes, Songs in Many Keys (1862), Songs of Many Seasons (1875), The Iron Gate, and Other Poems (1880), and Before the Curfew and Other Poems (1887). He wrote three novels that took advantage of his medical knowledge. His collected poems came out from Cambridge in 1895. Holmes died in Boston on October 7, 1894. His marriage to Amelia Lee Jackson in 1840 produced three children, one of whom (his namesake) became a justice of the Supreme Court. See also

• Currier, Thomas Franklin. A Bibliography of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ed. Eleanor M. Tilton. New York: University Press, for the Bibliographical Society of America, 1953. Z 8414.3 .C8 Robarts Library.
• Eleanor M. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Henry Schuman, 1947). PS 1981 T5 Robarts Library

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1809, Oliver Wendell Holmes proceeded to Phillips Academy and Harvard, from which he graduated in 1829. His first, most popular poem, written at 21, was "Old Ironsides." Like most of Holmes' poems, this was an occasional piece, prompted by some incident. After his degree, he studied in Boston, Harvard, and Paris medical schools before graduating with a Harvard M.D. in 1835. He published Poems the next year. His career then turned to medical writing and teaching with his appointment as a professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College in 1838, and firmed up when he became Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, and Dean, at Harvard Medical School in 1847. Holmes kept up his old love of literature, serializing his The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table in the Atlantic Monthly and then bringing it out as a book in 1858. This included what Holmes reasonably believed to be his best poems, "The Chambered Nautilus" and "The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the Wonderful `One-Hoss-Shay.'" Composition never prevented Holmes from literary criticism. In 1853 he delivered a dozen lectures on the English poets at the Lovell Institute in Boston, and in 1872 the third of his "Breakfast-Table" books was published, The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. Besides issuing enlarged editions of his 1836 Poems, he published four subsequent volumes, Songs in Many Keys (1862), Songs of Many Seasons (1875), The Iron Gate, and Other Poems (1880), and Before the Curfew and Other Poems (1887). He wrote three novels that took advantage of his medical knowledge. His collected poems came out from Cambridge in 1895. Holmes died in Boston on October 7, 1894. His marriage to Amelia Lee Jackson in 1840 produced three children, one of whom (his namesake) became a justice of the Supreme Court. See also

• Currier, Thomas Franklin. A Bibliography of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ed. Eleanor M. Tilton. New York: University Press, for the Bibliographical Society of America, 1953. Z 8414.3 .C8 Robarts Library.
• Eleanor M. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Henry Schuman, 1947). PS 1981 T5 Robarts Library