SOURCE: “The Poetry of Longfellow,” in The Hudson Review, Vol. SVI, No. 2, Summer, 1963, pp. 297-304.

In the following negative review of Newton Arvin's critical biography of Longfellow, Bewley asserts that “there is no important nineteenth century American poet who has written so little of what is unmistakable poetry as opposed to the mere competence of verse.”

It is unfortunate that the late Newton Arvin should have chosen Longfellow as the subject of his last book. Mr. Arvin's three critical studies of Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville were valuable additions to literary biography. The Hawthorne in particular, which appeared in 1929, was as judicious an assessment of its subject as one could find before Matthiessen's The American Renaissance. The critical judgments in Melville are sometimes more debatable, but it is one of the most useful and stimulating brief general studies of him that we have. Mr. Arvin was lucky three times...