As a young professor at Bowdoin College Longfellow was already gesturing toward the concept of comparative literature that he later espoused in his lectures at Harvard and, after his resignation, as the editor of such ventures as the multivolume anthology, Poems of Places (1876-1879). At Harvard, he taught Dante, Molière, and Goethe, a writer whose encyclopedic interests in world literature-he had in fact coined the very term ("Weltliteratur," in German)-resembled his own.
In this section
Items Not Pictured In This Exhibit
HWL. The Poets and Poetry of Europe (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1845).
Inscribed by Longfellow to John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893), a music critic, translator, and proponent of the music of Bach, Handel, and Beethoven (he opposed to the "new music" of Berlioz, Rubinstein, and Wagner, which Longfellow actually liked).
Longfellow felt Dwight's translations were not "literal" enough (to Samuel Ward, 5 January 1839), but he nevertheless ended up using several of them (such as Goethe's "To the Moon") in his anthology. Displayed here is Longfellow's own translation of the German poet Gustav Pfizer's ballad "Der Junggesell" ("The Two Locks of Hair"), along with the introduction to the entry featuring poems by Longfellow's friend Ferdinand Freiligrath (pages 358-59).
Harry Elkins Widener Collection 7.3.3