"The Importance of Being Earnest" by Rochelle Gurstein, in The New Republic (Mar. 12, 2001), 1220 19th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Once deemed America’s greatest poet by critics and public alike, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) has long since been relegated to the literary shadows. He deserves better, argues Gurstein, the author of The Repeal of Reticence (1996).

Longfellow’s poetry was so popular during his career that he was able to quit his job as a professor of modern languages at Harvard University. He established his reputation with his first book of poetry, Voices of the Night (1839). "Nothing equal to some of [the poems] was ever written," novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne said. Longfellow became "a literary sensation," Gurstein notes, and 50 years later—after 12 volumes of poetry, five booklength poems (including Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish), and many other works—his bust was placed in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, to this day a unique honor for an American poet.

"Life is real! Life is earnest!" Longfellow proclaimed in "A Psalm of Life," one of his earliest poems. For Victorians, writes Gurstein, "to be in earnest meant recognizing that life was more elevated and more serious than money-making and sensual gratification. And this recognition entailed the assertion of a transcendent moral and spiritual order."

By the time of Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest (1895), however, earnestness had become a term of derision, Gurstein observes. "And by the time of the centenary celebration of Longfellow’s birth in 1907, the revolt against gentility and classicism was in full bloom." Longfellow and his age came to be accused of "shallowness, conventionality, sentimentality, moralism, and willingness to sacrifice art to didactic purposes." Modernists, favoring free verse, disdained Longfellow’s long, rhyming, storybook poems. His "extraordinary prosodic virtuosity" now went largely unappreciated, says Gurstein. "What could be said for a poet who was not exercised by irony, tension, and paradox, whose utterance was distinguished by unaffected simplicity and clarity?" By the early 1930s, his reputation was shattered.

Longfellow’s legacy has been almost reduced to the astonishing number of his lines that have come into common use: "Ships that pass in the night," "The patter of little feet," "Into each life some rain must fall," "Footprints on the sands of time," "When she was good, she was very, very good."

If his poetic achievement, judged on aesthetic grounds, is not first rank, Gurstein says, there is no denying his historical importance. And while complex and profound meanings usually are absent from his poetry, this is not always so. To his great translation of The Divine Comedy he affixed some of his own sonnets. One of them pays tribute to Dante, poetry, prayer, and the memory of his beloved wife, recently dead. "With this beautiful sonnet," Gurstein says, "Longfellow reminds us that the great poetry of the past was great not least because it transcended the confines of subjectivity and turned personal, unbearable, and ineffable experiences into a public expression of humility."