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The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, With Bibliographical and Critical Notes, in Six Volumes
The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow With Bibliographical and Critical Notes in Six Volumes Author:Henry Wadsworth Longfellow General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1886 Original Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin and Company Subjects: Humor / General Juvenile Nonfiction / Poetry / General Literary Criticism / American / General Literary Criticism / Poetry Poetry / General Poetry / American / General Social Science / Slavery Not... more »es: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: TRANSLATIONS INTRODUCTORY NOTE. In accordance with the plan determined upon for this edition, the Translations are collected from the separate volumes put forth by Mr. Longfellow and re-arranged here. As shown in the introductory note to Voices of the Night, translating played an important part in the development of Mr. Longfellow's powers. Before he had begun to write those poems which at once attested his poetic calling, and while he was busying himself with study and prose expression, he was finding an outlet for his metrical thought and emotion in the translation of lyrics and pastoral verse and occasionally of epic and dramatic fragments. Tasks thus early begun passed easily into pleasant avocations, and to the end of his life he found an ever grateful occupation in recasting the foreign thought of other men in moulds of his own. The great work of translating Dante is noticed elsewhere, and the dominance which it had in his life, but it illustrates only on a large scale the relation which the poet held to modern continental literature. As his first great discovery of himself was in the loss of himself in large study and observation in Europe, so his appropriation of European literary art was theoccasion for a fineness of literary expression quite beyond his earlier independent poetic trials. The lyrics scattered through Hyperion and his pros...« less