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    A Study Guide for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"
    A Study Guide for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"
    A Study Guide for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"
    Ebook30 pages14 minutes

    A Study Guide for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535817097
    A Study Guide for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"

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      A Study Guide for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" - Gale

      6

      A Psalm of Life

      Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

      1838

      Introduction

      Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life was first published in The Knickerbocker, a New York magazine, in 1838. A year later, the poem was included in Voices of the Night, the first major collection of Longfellow’s poetry. Readers were immediately drawn to the poem’s inspirational message, and A Psalm of Life contributed to Longfellow’s rapidly growing popularity. Between 1848 and 1882, the poem was translated into various languages, including French, German, Dutch, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, and Russian. By the late-twentieth century, however, A Psalm of Life was less highly regarded, being simply considered a historical document that represents a certain mood of nineteenth-century America.

      Some of the reasons that A Psalm of Life fell out of critical favor are its simplicity, straightforwardness, and its rather outdated mind-set that characterizes a young and ambitious nation. The Psalm, as the epigraph says, is the words issuing from the heart of a young man. The identity of the psalmist is not revealed, but it could be Longfellow himself, who struggled to come to terms with the death of his wife in 1835. Longfellow had written that he had kept [the poem] some time in manuscript, unwilling to show it to any one, it being a voice from my inmost heart, at a time when I was rallying from depression. While Old Testament psalms are often prayers or laments to God, Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life is curiously addressed to another psalmist, one whose grave character is foreign to the Biblical examples.

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