Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807. He was a widely read and highly regarded poet of the nineteenth century. Longfellow was successful in both lyric and narrative poetry and later wrote incredible sonnets. He was not a poet of extremes, intense passion, or tragedy. He was gentle and optimistic and felt the purpose of poetry was to “embellish and sweeten life,” He generally wrote of normal life, and attempted to show the beauty of it, that seems to escape us. In the early part of the twentieth century, Longfellow’s work fell into disfavor with the academic crowd because it was an age when everything traditional was held