The Song of Hiawatha

The Song of Hiawatha is an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow based on the legends of the Ojibway Indians. Longfellow credited as his source the work of pioneering ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, specifically Schoolcraft's Algic Researches and History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States.

Early reception

The Song of Hiawatha was news even before it was published.

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In August of 1855, The New York Times carried an item on "Longfellow's New Poem," quoting an article from another periodical which said that it "is very original, and has the simplicity and charm of a Saga... it is the very antipodes of Tennyson's Maud, which is...morbid, irreligious, and painful." In October, it noted that "Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha is nearly printed, and will soon appear."

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By November its column, "Gossip: What has been most Talked About during the Week," observed that

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:The madness of the hour takes the metrical shape of trochees, everybody writes trochaics, talks trochaics, and think in trochees: ...

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:"By the way, the rise in Erie

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:Makes the bears as cross as thunder."

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:"Yes sir-ree! And Jacob's losses,

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:I've been told, are quite enormous..."

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:You see how easy it is to talk in trochees, but nobody thought of doing such a thing until MR. LONGFELLOW, who is a sort of COLUMBUS in metres, showed the way.

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Parodies emerged instantly. In fact, the New York Times reviewed a parody of Hiawatha four days before reviewing Hiawatha itself. Pocahontas: or the Gentle Savage was a comic extravaganza which included extracts from an imaginary Viking poem, "burlesquing the recent parodies, good, bad, and indifferent, on The Song of Hiawatha." The Times quoted:

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:Whence this song of Pocahontas,

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:With its flavor of tobacco,

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:And the stincweed Old Mundungus,

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:With the ocho of the Breakdown,

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:With its smack of Bourbonwhiskey,

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:With the twangle of the Banjo,

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:Of the Banjo—the Goatskinner,

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:And the Fiddle—the Catgutto...

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When the New York Times finally published a review of The Song of Hiawatha, it was scathing. The reviewer's judgement, however, seems based as much on the subject matter as on the poem. He allows that the poem "is entitled to commendation" for "embalming pleasantly enough the monstrous traditions of an uninteresting, and, one may almost say, a justly exterminated race." However, "As a poem, it deserves no place" because there "is no romance about the Indian." He complains that Hiawatha's deeds of magical strength pall by comparison to the feats of Hercules and even to those of "Fin Mac Cool, that big stupid Celtic monarch."

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The reviewer writes that "Grotesque, absurd, and savage as the groundwork is, Mr. LONGFELLOW has woven over it a profuse wreath of his own poetic elegancies." But, he concludes, Hiawatha "will never add to Mr. LONGFELLOW's reputation as a poet."

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