SOURCE: “On Longfellow,” in Poetry and Fiction: Essays, Rutgers University Press, 1963, pp. 143-58.

In the following essay, Nemerov discusses Longfellow's reputation as an unfashionable poet and urges a reassessment of his verse.

Great reputation is perhaps the most curious as well as the most volatile product of civilized society; lives of great men very often remind us, Longfellow's celebrated “Psalm” to the contrary, what a vast deal of illusion their energy sustains around them while they live, and how perishable a commodity it proves to be after they die. William Blake put the matter with characteristic clarity:

When Sir Joshua Reynolds died All Nature was degraded: The King drop'd a tear into the Queen's ear, And all his pictures faded. 

But the fame of a great poet in the nineteenth century seems to us, a hundred years after, peculiarly productive of the grotesque and absurd, and of a...