Now available as an illustrated book: Dana Gioia's "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism"

Dana Gioia's seminal essay, "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism" has just been published as a pocket-sized book liberally illustrated with period engravings.

Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism.  By Dana Gioia. (Monongahela Books, 2023).  Illustrated, 107 pp.  $15.

Excerpt: 

"Modern literary criticism on Longfellow hardly exists in the sense that it does for more overtly difficult poets like Dickinson, Stevens, or Pound. There is no substantial body of commentary on specific poems, no vital tradition of critical discourse that collectively sharpens our reading and challenges our preconceptions. The unspoken assumption, even among his advocates, has been that Longfellow's poetry requires no gloss. Consequently, many central aspects of his work have never been examined in any detail (the linguistic stylization and rhetoric of Hiawatha, for example) and misconceptions about his work abound. The best Longfellow scholarship often has a decidedly old-fashioned feel; it traces historical sources, clarifies textual problems, and connects biographical data to the poems. Such criticism addresses a small group of nineteenth-century specialists rather than the general readership for American poetry; it implicitly ducks the issue of Longfellow's relevance to contemporary letters. On the rare occasions Longfellow criticism has spoken eloquently to a broader audiences as in essays by Horace Gregory, Howard Nemerov, and Leslie Fiedler, his champions have usually been more concerned with the general mission of keeping him, however marginally, in the canon than with examining specific features of his work. Since Longfellow's work now largely exists in a critical vacuum, one must begin any serious examination of his work with a few basic observations about the unusual nature of his poetic development and the strange combination of circumstances that brought this multi-talented literary man into poetry."