Evangeline Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Critical Essay by Kirsten Silva Gruesz

SOURCE: “El Gran Poeta Longfellow and a Psalm of Exile,” in American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3, Fall, 1998, pp. 395-427.

In the following essay, Gruesz explores the politics of translation and literary canonicity in Evangeline.

The exile given to me I have received as an honor.

Attributed to Dante

I have also been trying to follow Dante in his exile—a hopeless task.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his Journal, 17 March 1870

Amid a sea of celebratory rhetoric surrounding the impending war against Mexico, there came before the reading public late in 1847 a long narrative poem describing the tragic consequences of another nation's imperial designs. The unlawful British invasion that spurs into motion the plot of Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie resonates—dimly but suggestively—with what Longfellow and his circle found most distasteful about the Mexican war: that in violating the territorial integrity of a sovereign neighbor, the US...
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