On Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Some Tower of Song With Lofty Parapet": H.W. Longfellow and the Creation of a National Literary Culture"
Although there were dozens of American writing poetry in the mid-nineteenth century, it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) who came to be known as the nation's first public poet. By achieving national popularity, Longfellow became one of the first individuals who was able to make a living as a poet, a sign which in itself indicates the cultural progress of the young nation. As we will see in this essay, the work of Longfellow was a key contribution to the development of a national literary culture. This task was not an easy one, it demanded a poet of great vision. It is not surprising, then, that this task fell to Longfellow, an ambitious poet whose desire to create some great poetic work can be traced back to the early stages of his career. Reading an early sonnet like "Mezzo Cammin" one can see how, even before he had started to write the poems that would accomplish this task, Longfellow could not avoid being overcome by the enormous implications such developments would have for him as a poet.
In "Mezzo Cammin" Longfellow self-pityingly decries his lack of poetic achievement and then defines his ultimate poetic goal to be the creation of "Some tower of song with lofty parapet." This lofty tower would eventually become a concept he would return to again and again, a sign of his unwavering ambition to fully realize his poetic potential, without regard for "pleasure, nor the fret of restless passions," as these distractions would keep him "from what I may accomplish yet." In the poem Longfellow, at the mid-point of his life, pauses "halfway up a hill" to reflect on the years which are behind him, at which point he spies the city of memory receding into the distance. Entranced by this mystical city in the twilight, Longfellow falls into a reverie which is broker up by the encroaching spectre of Death, whose hovering visage reminds him of the duties which he has yet to complete, the poetic promise he has yet to fulfill. One can imagine that Longfellow was haunted by this task which as yet lay unfulfilled: the development of a national historical consciousness through the development of the poetic arts in the new America.
One can understand Longfellow's hesitancy to actualize his full poetic potential for, as Lawrence Buell tells us, in the mid-nineteenth century the manner in which the American people should preserve their history was a subject of great debate. In 1857 George E. Ellis proclaimed that the history of the Union ought not to be told through organized, ceremonious spectacles but instead, our national history should take on a form that resembled the spontaneous expressions of pride that solidified the nation as a whole at the time of the Revolution. This paradox of mid-nineteenth century America, the desire to possess an authentic history and, simultaneously, wanting to acquire this history without recourse to any specific religious ceremony finds its analogue in the literary culture of the country and specifically in the double-bind of the American poet. Concerned that the preservation of history through any overt ritual would ruin the secular national culture envisioned by the founding fathers, people such as Ellis were possessed by a cultural fear that kept the historical consciousness of the American people in its earliest stage of development.
The American poet was in a similarly constricted state. One the one hand, the idea of writing poetry was disparaged as useless, especially in a country which prided itself on its pragmatic, utilitarian standards and, on the other hand, the radical notion of a truly American poet was idealized as a symbol of cultural authenticity and a key component in demonstrating to those back on the Continent that we Americans had an independent culture.
These historical facts indicate the arduous task that posed itself before the would-be American poet, shackling him with the responsibility of founding a discursive national poetics in a still-developing culture. To make matters worse, this culture was not one that usually found significance in projects of this sort, so we can imagine the intensely oppressive social role which greeted the American poet of this era. Longfellow faced this challenge and successfully contributed to the development of the historical consciousness of the less-than-a-century old American republic. This was accomplished through the composition of poems which mythologized America's past, both before and after the age of European colonization.
The poem which most obviously turns colonial history into a mythology is "Paul Revere's Ride" (1863), a composition that re-works the story of Paul Revere, the brave patriot whose signal told of the immanent arrival of British troops, into a tale which resembles a mythological narrative. Literary critics characterize this poem as a ballad, although technically it does not satisfy the requirements of the genre, as it is not written in ballad meter and does not incorporate superstition or dialogue. Just as "Paul Revere's Ride" contributes to the making of American history through re-historicizing or mythologizing the events and circumstances of the Revolution, the success of an earlier poem, "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), demonstrates the American people's appetite for works that mythologized the origins of the New World.
"Hiawatha" begun in Longfellow's mind as a plan for a work which would we the historical consciousness of the old world with the experiences of the new world. Taking as his model poets who wrote in the epic tradition - Dante, Cervantes, Goethe and especially Milton - he contemplated writing a religious epic for the new country, a work which would blend the country's past with the European cultural values that the colonist brought with them to this new land - an Edenic paradise regained. At some point Longfellow changed his plans and re-focused the poem onto a type of subject matter that is unique to the American experience, the history of the native Americans. When it was complete, "Hiawatha" was indeed an epic narrative, although the story it tells in eight syllable trochaic meter said much more about the early American tendency to romanticize Native American culture than it did about religion.
A third poem that mythologized the American way of life is contain in the poem "The Village Blacksmith." Like "Paul Revere's Ride" this poem does not observe the traditional ballad meter; however, it may grouped as such based on the strength of its six-line stanza, a variant on the ballad quatrain. In this poem Longfellow describes the daily life of a blacksmith, who is meant to be taken as the representative embodiment of the American worker:
As a model of the American worker, the village blacksmith stands as a Herculean ideal of the laborer who is religiously devoted to his job and his work, whose body itself stands as an emblem of the rigorous alliance between his physical power and the importance of his labors. It is a source of great pride for the blacksmith that here in America, one can work freely without becoming indebted to anyone. The religiosity implied in the blacksmith's devotion to his job is carried over into the third stanza. The dedication with which the blacksmith swings his hammer is compared to a sexton who rings a church bell, as both actions may be interpreted as ways of preserving the divine order of the world. Longfellow shows us how, for the American laborer, religion exists as a sublimated presence in the work-ethic, for here labor is a form of religious activity, realizing itself in a work-day of piety. In Longfellow's mythological world of pre-Marxist labor, there are no bosses, nor is there a proletariat; indeed, there are no class distinctions whatsoever. There is only a man and his tools, the strength of his back and the hours of the day. In the third stanza, the reader comes to feel a sense of comfort about the description of the laborer and his labors, for this picture of the working man is something which we rely on in order to insure the continual prosperity of our nation. In addition, it confers an air of certainty, this image of a man engaged in his solitary labors, in that it recalls a mythical time when there was an explicable and definable horizon to one's activity, "Week in, week out, from morn till night."
When his children race home from school, which is another institution of socially prescribed labor, they look into the workplace and glimpse at their father engaged in a performance which knows no other goals other than the goals of production. When the children "catch the burning sparks that fly like chaff from a threshing-door" they are excited and thrilled by the spectacle of labor. They obtain a vicarious thrill, peering in on the historical moment when labor is in transition from a system where men worked for their own livelihoods to a centralized system in which the machinery of production was collected into the hands of a few. The children are enraptured watching the man operate as an automaton, mechanically straining in an intense effort to the point that he comes to resemble a machine, estranged from the human world and alienated from himself and his family. The only other activity we see him engaged in is on Sunday, when he takes his sons to Church and "sits among the boys." After the preaching of the parson, which he sits through with a stoic disposition, the choir begins to sing; this gets his full attention, for he can see his daughter among the singers. Longfellow tells us that "It sounds to him like his mother's voice, / Singing in Paradise !" Indeed, he slips into a fantasy of his mother who, even though she is lying in her grave, commands his thoughts and brings tears to his eyes, which he wipes away with a rough hand, blackened from his long hours in the smithy.
The new day finds him returning to his work and so on his life proceed, "Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing," through the week's labors to a day of worship wherein he succumbs to a fantasy. As Longfellow defines it, there is any true pleasure in the life of the laborer, only the ascetic work-life of "Each morning sees some task begin, / Each evening sees it close." In this fantastic poetic sketch of the truly self-employed man, there is a equal balance between labor-cost and economic reward; there is no such thing as surplus-value and there are no capital expenses or hierarchies that allow one person an unfair advantage over the masses. For this idealized American worker, a promise made equals a promise fulfilled, a contract formed equals a job performed and a job completed, of course, equals a job performed with integrity, honesty and physical if not intellectual stamina. The society of "The Village Blacksmith" is a society that educates and trains the self, a society governed by a political and commercial framework that ensures the maintenance and preservation of the work-life, in the body of the Union and for the bodies of American citizens. These hypotheses are made even more plausible when one considers that Longfellow does not refer even one to the blacksmith enjoying the fruits of his labors; it seems as though his work has no other goal other than to see the dimming of the day, till one has "earned a night's repose."
This circular system that Longfellow has poeticized depicts a cycle that passes from the exertion of the will in the activity of labor to a stoic catharsis in religious indoctrination. When the blacksmith attends the church ceremonies he regresses from the man who is confident in his work to an earlier psychic stage where he is a child whose being is contingent on his feelings toward his mother. As we see him weeping in the pews, preparing for the week ahead, we can see that the American people of the mid-nineteenth century had constructed around them a mythological framework whose purpose was to reinforce the male desire to continually re-experience the mother-child relationship ad infinitum. When Longfellow brings this poem before the American public, he has already conceptualized the framework in which the institution of the American labor system will be codified. As seen here, the codification of American social norms incorporates the development of a dual history, constituting the institutions of both labor and freedom from labor, both leisure and pleasure expressed only in the form of religious worship. All of this is accomplished through Longfellow's mythologizing of the social structure which promoted such activities: working, eating and resting, all organized by a machine-like desire that governed the social world, setting limits to the range and forms of social expression and interaction available to the populace.
Each of these poems -- "Paul Revere's Ride," "The Song of Hiawatha," and "The Village Blacksmith" -- take up the question of the relationship between the American people and the history of the country. Regardless of the fact that these projected histories are given in mythological forms, it is the process of posing these questions before the public that gives definition to the American historical identity. Clearly, in "The Village Blacksmith," we can see the archetypal American constitution under construction, coalescing under the forces of Longfellow's poetics. While fundamentally of a historically fictitious nature, these poems allow the Puritan community to become imbued with a sense of its own self-worth, a developing which in the long run allows America to take its first tiny steps onto the world stage of history. The uncertainty of the community is also reflected in the poet himself, most acutely in "Mezzo Cammin," a poem which reveals Longfellow's inability to avoid feelings of self-doubt, as well as the feelings he faced when he considered the profundity of the poetic tasks which lay ahead of him.
If Longfellow eventually succeeded in constructing a historical literary consciousness by mythologizing American society - and it is my thesis that he did, in fact, succeed in doing so - then "Mezzo Cammin" must be seen as the poem in which Longfellow came to set his poetic horizons and the goals of his art. It was his despair that he would ever realize his goals that allowed him to make the first movements towards allowing them to be realized; it is in this poem that we see Longfellow directly confronting the poetic tasks that lay ahead for him. In the history of American poetry, Longfellow's work was a key contribution in the creation of a national literary culture. This was accomplished by creating a fundamentally mythological set of poetic narratives, such as "Paul Revere's Ride" and "The Song of Hiawatha," which established the historical-consciousness of America by re-making history into a poetic narrative. Others, like "The Village Blacksmith," worked by standing for a set of sociological, psychological and cultural values and thereby establishing the formative structure of American life. Only from the vantage point of history can we see that, upon the completion of these poems, the intangible goals which had so tormented him in "Mezzo Cammin" had solidified into realities. One sees that, finally, Longfellow succeeded in building a 'tower of song' for the new American nation.
Although there were dozens of American writing poetry in the mid-nineteenth century, it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) who came to be known as the nation's first public poet. By achieving national popularity, Longfellow became one of the first individuals who was able to make a living as a poet, a sign which in itself indicates the cultural progress of the young nation. As we will see in this essay, the work of Longfellow was a key contribution to the development of a national literary culture. This task was not an easy one, it demanded a poet of great vision. It is not surprising, then, that this task fell to Longfellow, an ambitious poet whose desire to create some great poetic work can be traced back to the early stages of his career. Reading an early sonnet like "Mezzo Cammin" one can see how, even before he had started to write the poems that would accomplish this task, Longfellow could not avoid being overcome by the enormous implications such developments would have for him as a poet.
In "Mezzo Cammin" Longfellow self-pityingly decries his lack of poetic achievement and then defines his ultimate poetic goal to be the creation of "Some tower of song with lofty parapet." This lofty tower would eventually become a concept he would return to again and again, a sign of his unwavering ambition to fully realize his poetic potential, without regard for "pleasure, nor the fret of restless passions," as these distractions would keep him "from what I may accomplish yet." In the poem Longfellow, at the mid-point of his life, pauses "halfway up a hill" to reflect on the years which are behind him, at which point he spies the city of memory receding into the distance. Entranced by this mystical city in the twilight, Longfellow falls into a reverie which is broker up by the encroaching spectre of Death, whose hovering visage reminds him of the duties which he has yet to complete, the poetic promise he has yet to fulfill. One can imagine that Longfellow was haunted by this task which as yet lay unfulfilled: the development of a national historical consciousness through the development of the poetic arts in the new America.
One can understand Longfellow's hesitancy to actualize his full poetic potential for, as Lawrence Buell tells us, in the mid-nineteenth century the manner in which the American people should preserve their history was a subject of great debate. In 1857 George E. Ellis proclaimed that the history of the Union ought not to be told through organized, ceremonious spectacles but instead, our national history should take on a form that resembled the spontaneous expressions of pride that solidified the nation as a whole at the time of the Revolution. This paradox of mid-nineteenth century America, the desire to possess an authentic history and, simultaneously, wanting to acquire this history without recourse to any specific religious ceremony finds its analogue in the literary culture of the country and specifically in the double-bind of the American poet. Concerned that the preservation of history through any overt ritual would ruin the secular national culture envisioned by the founding fathers, people such as Ellis were possessed by a cultural fear that kept the historical consciousness of the American people in its earliest stage of development.
The American poet was in a similarly constricted state. One the one hand, the idea of writing poetry was disparaged as useless, especially in a country which prided itself on its pragmatic, utilitarian standards and, on the other hand, the radical notion of a truly American poet was idealized as a symbol of cultural authenticity and a key component in demonstrating to those back on the Continent that we Americans had an independent culture.
These historical facts indicate the arduous task that posed itself before the would-be American poet, shackling him with the responsibility of founding a discursive national poetics in a still-developing culture. To make matters worse, this culture was not one that usually found significance in projects of this sort, so we can imagine the intensely oppressive social role which greeted the American poet of this era. Longfellow faced this challenge and successfully contributed to the development of the historical consciousness of the less-than-a-century old American republic. This was accomplished through the composition of poems which mythologized America's past, both before and after the age of European colonization.
The poem which most obviously turns colonial history into a mythology is "Paul Revere's Ride" (1863), a composition that re-works the story of Paul Revere, the brave patriot whose signal told of the immanent arrival of British troops, into a tale which resembles a mythological narrative. Literary critics characterize this poem as a ballad, although technically it does not satisfy the requirements of the genre, as it is not written in ballad meter and does not incorporate superstition or dialogue. Just as "Paul Revere's Ride" contributes to the making of American history through re-historicizing or mythologizing the events and circumstances of the Revolution, the success of an earlier poem, "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), demonstrates the American people's appetite for works that mythologized the origins of the New World.
"Hiawatha" begun in Longfellow's mind as a plan for a work which would we the historical consciousness of the old world with the experiences of the new world. Taking as his model poets who wrote in the epic tradition - Dante, Cervantes, Goethe and especially Milton - he contemplated writing a religious epic for the new country, a work which would blend the country's past with the European cultural values that the colonist brought with them to this new land - an Edenic paradise regained. At some point Longfellow changed his plans and re-focused the poem onto a type of subject matter that is unique to the American experience, the history of the native Americans. When it was complete, "Hiawatha" was indeed an epic narrative, although the story it tells in eight syllable trochaic meter said much more about the early American tendency to romanticize Native American culture than it did about religion.
A third poem that mythologized the American way of life is contain in the poem "The Village Blacksmith." Like "Paul Revere's Ride" this poem does not observe the traditional ballad meter; however, it may grouped as such based on the strength of its six-line stanza, a variant on the ballad quatrain. In this poem Longfellow describes the daily life of a blacksmith, who is meant to be taken as the representative embodiment of the American worker:
Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate'er he can
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellow blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
As a model of the American worker, the village blacksmith stands as a Herculean ideal of the laborer who is religiously devoted to his job and his work, whose body itself stands as an emblem of the rigorous alliance between his physical power and the importance of his labors. It is a source of great pride for the blacksmith that here in America, one can work freely without becoming indebted to anyone. The religiosity implied in the blacksmith's devotion to his job is carried over into the third stanza. The dedication with which the blacksmith swings his hammer is compared to a sexton who rings a church bell, as both actions may be interpreted as ways of preserving the divine order of the world. Longfellow shows us how, for the American laborer, religion exists as a sublimated presence in the work-ethic, for here labor is a form of religious activity, realizing itself in a work-day of piety. In Longfellow's mythological world of pre-Marxist labor, there are no bosses, nor is there a proletariat; indeed, there are no class distinctions whatsoever. There is only a man and his tools, the strength of his back and the hours of the day. In the third stanza, the reader comes to feel a sense of comfort about the description of the laborer and his labors, for this picture of the working man is something which we rely on in order to insure the continual prosperity of our nation. In addition, it confers an air of certainty, this image of a man engaged in his solitary labors, in that it recalls a mythical time when there was an explicable and definable horizon to one's activity, "Week in, week out, from morn till night."
When his children race home from school, which is another institution of socially prescribed labor, they look into the workplace and glimpse at their father engaged in a performance which knows no other goals other than the goals of production. When the children "catch the burning sparks that fly like chaff from a threshing-door" they are excited and thrilled by the spectacle of labor. They obtain a vicarious thrill, peering in on the historical moment when labor is in transition from a system where men worked for their own livelihoods to a centralized system in which the machinery of production was collected into the hands of a few. The children are enraptured watching the man operate as an automaton, mechanically straining in an intense effort to the point that he comes to resemble a machine, estranged from the human world and alienated from himself and his family. The only other activity we see him engaged in is on Sunday, when he takes his sons to Church and "sits among the boys." After the preaching of the parson, which he sits through with a stoic disposition, the choir begins to sing; this gets his full attention, for he can see his daughter among the singers. Longfellow tells us that "It sounds to him like his mother's voice, / Singing in Paradise !" Indeed, he slips into a fantasy of his mother who, even though she is lying in her grave, commands his thoughts and brings tears to his eyes, which he wipes away with a rough hand, blackened from his long hours in the smithy.
The new day finds him returning to his work and so on his life proceed, "Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing," through the week's labors to a day of worship wherein he succumbs to a fantasy. As Longfellow defines it, there is any true pleasure in the life of the laborer, only the ascetic work-life of "Each morning sees some task begin, / Each evening sees it close." In this fantastic poetic sketch of the truly self-employed man, there is a equal balance between labor-cost and economic reward; there is no such thing as surplus-value and there are no capital expenses or hierarchies that allow one person an unfair advantage over the masses. For this idealized American worker, a promise made equals a promise fulfilled, a contract formed equals a job performed and a job completed, of course, equals a job performed with integrity, honesty and physical if not intellectual stamina. The society of "The Village Blacksmith" is a society that educates and trains the self, a society governed by a political and commercial framework that ensures the maintenance and preservation of the work-life, in the body of the Union and for the bodies of American citizens. These hypotheses are made even more plausible when one considers that Longfellow does not refer even one to the blacksmith enjoying the fruits of his labors; it seems as though his work has no other goal other than to see the dimming of the day, till one has "earned a night's repose."
This circular system that Longfellow has poeticized depicts a cycle that passes from the exertion of the will in the activity of labor to a stoic catharsis in religious indoctrination. When the blacksmith attends the church ceremonies he regresses from the man who is confident in his work to an earlier psychic stage where he is a child whose being is contingent on his feelings toward his mother. As we see him weeping in the pews, preparing for the week ahead, we can see that the American people of the mid-nineteenth century had constructed around them a mythological framework whose purpose was to reinforce the male desire to continually re-experience the mother-child relationship ad infinitum. When Longfellow brings this poem before the American public, he has already conceptualized the framework in which the institution of the American labor system will be codified. As seen here, the codification of American social norms incorporates the development of a dual history, constituting the institutions of both labor and freedom from labor, both leisure and pleasure expressed only in the form of religious worship. All of this is accomplished through Longfellow's mythologizing of the social structure which promoted such activities: working, eating and resting, all organized by a machine-like desire that governed the social world, setting limits to the range and forms of social expression and interaction available to the populace.
Each of these poems -- "Paul Revere's Ride," "The Song of Hiawatha," and "The Village Blacksmith" -- take up the question of the relationship between the American people and the history of the country. Regardless of the fact that these projected histories are given in mythological forms, it is the process of posing these questions before the public that gives definition to the American historical identity. Clearly, in "The Village Blacksmith," we can see the archetypal American constitution under construction, coalescing under the forces of Longfellow's poetics. While fundamentally of a historically fictitious nature, these poems allow the Puritan community to become imbued with a sense of its own self-worth, a developing which in the long run allows America to take its first tiny steps onto the world stage of history. The uncertainty of the community is also reflected in the poet himself, most acutely in "Mezzo Cammin," a poem which reveals Longfellow's inability to avoid feelings of self-doubt, as well as the feelings he faced when he considered the profundity of the poetic tasks which lay ahead of him.
If Longfellow eventually succeeded in constructing a historical literary consciousness by mythologizing American society - and it is my thesis that he did, in fact, succeed in doing so - then "Mezzo Cammin" must be seen as the poem in which Longfellow came to set his poetic horizons and the goals of his art. It was his despair that he would ever realize his goals that allowed him to make the first movements towards allowing them to be realized; it is in this poem that we see Longfellow directly confronting the poetic tasks that lay ahead for him. In the history of American poetry, Longfellow's work was a key contribution in the creation of a national literary culture. This was accomplished by creating a fundamentally mythological set of poetic narratives, such as "Paul Revere's Ride" and "The Song of Hiawatha," which established the historical-consciousness of America by re-making history into a poetic narrative. Others, like "The Village Blacksmith," worked by standing for a set of sociological, psychological and cultural values and thereby establishing the formative structure of American life. Only from the vantage point of history can we see that, upon the completion of these poems, the intangible goals which had so tormented him in "Mezzo Cammin" had solidified into realities. One sees that, finally, Longfellow succeeded in building a 'tower of song' for the new American nation.
posted by Andrew B. Noselli at 10:50 AM
1 Comments:
Longfellow's epic poem, "The Song of Hiawatha," was written 152 years ago, but Michael Maglaras thinks the story can be as appealing to modern-day audiences as Superman or Star Wars.
Like Clark Kent and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Indian hero Hiawatha has human traits and super powers, while battling evil and doing right. Maglaras, the owner of a record company, is now producing a six-CD audio recording of the poem due for completion in late summer.
It's fitting that the CDs are being recorded in a studio in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's hometown of Portland, Maine, in the year of the 200th anniversary of his birth. Maglaras hopes the project will stimulate interest in both Longfellow and the art of storytelling.
Hiawatha, Maglaras said, is a saga with enough incredible stories - with giants, magicians, talking animals, Indian gods, fierce battles and a giant sturgeon that swallows Hiawatha whole - to captivate today's audiences.
"We're convinced this story was intended to come alive," Maglaras said.
The production should appeal to people who want to be entertained in a "literate, intelligent, sensitive way," he said. "There is a silent majority out there of people who are hungering after entertainment of a different form."
Maglaras, 57, is a former opera singer who founded 217 Records in Stamford, Conn. He has produced recordings of alternative rock and jazz music as well as poetry.
He began working on the Hiawatha project last year after reading the poem in its entirety and coming away impressed. The work, 22 chapters in all, is based on stories and legends of various North American Indian tribes.
When Longfellow published Hiawatha in 1855, it was an immediate success. Some 50,000 copies were sold, and it was translated into French, Italian, German and other languages.
In time it became one of the best-known American poems. Who doesn't know these lines: "On the shores of Gitche Gumee, Of the shining Big-Sea-Water."
Inside a small recording studio, Maglaras recorded - performed is a more apt description - the final eight chapters of the poem. As he recited Hiawatha's eight-syllable lines, his hands gestured left and right and above while his voice changed pace and pitch and volume as he transformed from character to character.
Maglaras's opera training has come in handy in acting out more than 45 voices, ranging from the narrator to Hiawatha to seven varieties of birds, gods, old men and women, animals, monsters and magicians. Sound effects and music - with Indian drums, flutes and shaker instruments - will be added later.
"He brings a drama to the poem," said Michael McInnis, who is recording the production at his studio. "Older works are easily dismissed because they fall into the realm of slightly archaic language. He's bringing a drama to it that has brought the story and the beauty of the poem alive."
Although "The Song of Hiawatha" was a commercial success, it was criticized for being overly sentimental and parodied for its monotonous meter.
Among Indians, it has been criticized for perpetuating Indian stereotypes but also praised for showing Indian culture - even a romanticized version - to whites at a time when wars with Indians were still being fought.
"There is evidence certainly that a good many Indians accepted the poem," said Alan Trachtenberg, a retired Yale University professor and the author of Shades of Hiawatha.
Maglaras maintains that the poem is a "great national epic" worthy of a dramatic performance - not just a reading.
"Hiawatha in its entirety has not been recited aloud in over 120 years anywhere we can find," he said. "And certainly never with sound effects and Native American music and all the things we're doing."
Steve Bromage, assistant director of the Maine Historical Society, said he thinks there's a market for a CD set of the poem. More than 15,000 people each year visit the Wadsworth-Longfellow House, the home where Longfellow spent his youth that is now owned by the society.
"You'd be amazed at the people who come through here and feel a connection to Longfellow," Bromage said.
Maglaras plans an initial run of 5,000 or so boxed CD sets with a cover photo of Longfellow in his older years, a bushy beard and flowing white hair and a cape about his shoulders. The CD sets will sell in the $30 range.
He is also planning a live performance in December where he will read "The Song of Hiawatha" from cover to cover in an auditorium in Portland. The performance is expected to take up to five hours with four intermissions.
Maglaras finds inspiration in the city where Longfellow grew up and is now the home to Longfellow Square, Longfellow Statue, Longfellow Books and the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. Not far from the recording studio is a brewery that makes Longfellow Ale.
"We're delighted to be recording this in Portland," he said, "because this is Longfellow country."
by Clark Canfield, The Associated Press, June 10, 2007
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