SOURCE: “Attic Shape: Dusting off Evangeline,” in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 60, No. 1, Winter, 1984, pp. 21-44.

In the following essay, Seelye asserts that, despite its metric simplicity, Evangeline stands out as exemplary of its age.

Longfellow survives largely as a bad example, not a poète maudit but a maudlin poet, afloat on the lachrymose seas of a sentimental age. Still, he does prevail even if his poetry has not endured, and few critics who even now discuss his work are able to dismiss him out of hand. He is, for one thing, so much a part of the 19th-century literary scene, reaching out of the American Renaissance an index finger pointing toward the Genteel Age and beyond, his verse providing the text, his life the example of what poetry and the poet were in America during a time when both had a popular reach. Through parody and persistence...