The Poetical Works of Longfellow

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive, ordered, and beautiful
Review: This book is part of the Cambridge series of poets and is certainly well worth the money. Longfellow's poems are nicely grouped, with introductory comments to set the background of each. There are also notes back near the index that further explain some of the passages. Longfellow was an extremely successful poet in his lifetime, but his popularity fell in the century following his death in 1882; considering the 20th century's penchant for the abstruse, there is both humor and truth in Canadian novelist Robertson Davies' wry remark, that Longfellow's dimming popularity is owing to his being wholly comprehensible. Many of Longfellow's poems are familiar for the stories they tell (e.g. The Courtship of Miles Standish, Evangeline, Paul Revere's Ride, Hiawatha), but there are many little known specimens which are moving in their own right. This is a wonderful volume of poetry, highly readable, and worth the effort to obtain for yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive, ordered, and beautiful
Review: This book is part of the Cambridge series of poets and is certainly well worth the money. Longfellow's poems are nicely grouped, with introductory comments to set the background of each. There are also notes back near the index that further explain some of the passages. Longfellow was an extremely successful poet in his lifetime, but his popularity fell in the century following his death in 1882; considering the 20th century's penchant for the abstruse, there is both humor and truth in Canadian novelist Robertson Davies' wry remark, that Longfellow's dimming popularity is owing to his being wholly comprehensible. Many of Longfellow's poems are familiar for the stories they tell (e.g. The Courtship of Miles Standish, Evangeline, Paul Revere's Ride, Hiawatha), but there are many little known specimens which are moving in their own right. This is a wonderful volume of poetry, highly readable, and worth the effort to obtain for yourself.