SOURCE: “The Fireside Poets: Hearthside Values and the Language of Care,” in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, edited by A. Robert Lee, Vision Press, 1985, pp. 146-65.

In the following essay, Justus places Longfellow in context with other Fireside Poets such as William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

When Robert Frost appeared at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the spectacle of poet and president together on the same platform was an anomaly widely remarked. The poet as public institution was such a rarity in the United States that the occasion stimulated a few expressions of hope that, among all the other good augured by the new administration, the general elevation of the artist might actually usher in a new era in which the republic would sanction the official veneration of the poet. A few years earlier that kind of recognition might have gone...