SOURCE: “Longfellow's ‘A Psalm of Life’: A Relation of Method to Popularity,” in The Markham Review, Vol. VII, Spring, 1978, pp. 49-51.

In the following essay, Littlefield justifies the popularity of Longfellow's “A Psalm of Life” in light of critical derision and compares the poem to Benjamin Franklin's “The Way to Wealth.”

Since the publication of Longfellow's “A Psalm of Life” in 1838, critics have attacked the poem for its didacticism or have felt the need to apologize for its triteness. Samuel Longfellow, the poet's brother, said that the poem had “perhaps grown too familiar for us to read it as it was first read” and that if the ideas had become commonplace, it was the poem that had made them so.¹ According to Edward Wagenknecht, “any purely aesthetic evaluation” of the poem now would be “an impertinence” in light of its popularity.² In his more recent study, Newton Arvin...