Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl

"The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1855)

Like Snow-Bound, Longfellow draws on materials of American cultural history to produce an ambitious elegiac look at the Native culture that once flourished around the Great Lakes. As with Whittier, Longfellow infuses the story with the melancholy feeling of lost greatness. In relating the entirely fictional tragedy of a star-crossed love between a warrior of one nation and a woman from another, Longfellow elevated American subject matter using the tight formal structures of British epic poetry.

"Evangeline" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1847)

In drawing on the real-time historic event of the expulsion in the 1750s by the British of settlers in Acadia, modern-day Nova Scotia and Maine, Longfellow creates the heartbreaking story of two lovers separated by the diaspora and desperate to find each other across decades. The poem, epic in scope and moral in intent, was an expression of the Fireside Poets’s determination to earn the respect of the European literary establishment by elevating American subjects to highly serious poetic treatment.

"Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant (1817)

Less a narrative and more a meditation, “Thanatopsis” embodies the moral intent and broad philosophical interests of the Fireside Poets.