SOURCE: “Mars in Petticoats: Longfellow and Sentimental Masculinity,” in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 51, No. 3, December, 1996, pp. 327-55.

In the following excerpt, Haralson examines Longfellow's initial popularity and subsequent fall from the literary canon, suggesting that both are due to his “sentimental” masculinity. He also shows that Evangeline broadened Longfellow's scope as a writer.

Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait. 

—“A Psalm of Life” (1838)

It seems strange to have to insist, but Longfellow—not Whitman or Dickinson—was the premier poet of the American nineteenth century. As contemporary notices put it, his verse “set itself to music in the memory of thousands” and became—in a telling trope of domesticity—“thoroughly domiciliated in the national heart.”¹ Even avant-garde reviewers, like the one writing in The Galaxy (1876) who swooned to Whitman's “magnetism” and...