SOURCE: “‘A Psalm of Life’ Reconsidered: The Dialogue of Western Literature and Monologue of Young America,” in ATQ, Vol. 1, No. 1, March, 1987, pp. 3-19.

In the following essay, Hovey assesses the importance and influence of Longfellow's “A Psalm of Life.”

Following publication in the Knickbocker Magazine of October 1838, “A Psalm of Life” brought rapid national acclaim to its author, the new Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. Spread abroad through translations into French (1848), German (1856), Dutch (1861), Chinese (1865), Italian (1866), Portuguese (ca. 1870), Danish (1874), Marathi (1878), Sanskrit (by 1879), Russian (by 1882), and no doubt other languages,¹ the poem brought fame not only to Longfellow but to the fledgling literature of the United States, which it seemed to represent. By the twentieth century it had become what William Charvat described as “perhaps the most universally known poem in all history” (Charvat, “Longfellow” 111).

Although written after Longfellow had come under the influence of a variety of...