SOURCE: “Indian Edda and Puritan Pastoral,” in Longfellow: His Life and Work, Little, Brown and Co., 1962, pp. 154-80.

In the following excerpt, Arvin defends Longfellow's poem, valuing, if not its literary prowess, its ability to convey the simple truths of American Indian culture without degrading it in any way, and the poet's ability to convey heartfelt emotions.

Remarking once, many years ago, that “immortality often attaches itself to the bad as firmly as to the good,” I. A. Richards went on to say that “Few things are worse than Hiawatha or The Black Cat, Lorna Doone or Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard”; and yet, he implied, each of them has achieved immortality. Whether or not all these works have in fact proved to be undying, The Song of Hiawatha has survived at least as a byword, and in the mind of criticism Richards's judgment of it is probably...