Longfellow Days returns to the Brunswick area Sunday, kicking off a month-long celebration of poetry in honor of 19th century poet and Bowdoin College alum, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
This will be the 13th annual Longfellow Days, and organizer Amy Waterman said “it’s going to be a good one.”
Longfellow Days are an opportunity to discover talent from around the state, she said.
“I think there’s been such a long history in Brunswick of literary talent, beginning with Longfellow and Hawthorne,” Waterman said. “We have a community of writers, and this is a chance to showcase them and get people out of their homes and into the same space. I think we lose our public sphere the more we are mediated with our phones and out TVs.”
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW COLLECTION, GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES, BOWDOIN COLLEGE LIBRARY
The theme was inspired by Longfellow’s “Morituri Salutamus,” composed for the 50th reunion of his Bowdoin College graduating class. A read-in of “Morituri Salutamus” will take place 7 p.m. Feb. 21 at The Brunswick Inn.
“The poet was fascinated with heroic figures of antiquity, and he wrote sensitively, emotionally about his own life experiences and the aging process,” states Longfellow Days organizers. “We will also look back at Longfellow’s reputation, the ways in which his talents have been viewed through the decades.”
Longfellow spent a good chunk of his formative years in Brunswick, first as Bowdoin College student and then as a teacher at the college.
Bowdoin Associate Professor of Africana Studies and English Tess Chakkalakal described Longfellow as a young man with a precocious, curious disposition, while being “committed to the writing and reading of literature.”
Longfellow was very studious, Chakkalakal said, having published a poem at the age of 13 in a Portland newspaper, enrolling at Bowdoin at 15 and graduating at 18. In a poem titled “My Lost Youth,” Longfellow wrote about this period of his life with a some nostalgia.
Chakkalakal said Longfellow’s father, a Bowdoin trustee, may have pressured him to be a lawyer while at the college. Longfellow continued to pursue literature instead. Otherwise, Chakkalakal said Longfellow’s experience at Bowdoin was likely no different than any other student’s.
“In my opinion … I think his time at Bowdoin as a student and as a teacher was absolutely formative to how he became a writer,” Chakkalakal said, referencing his friendship with writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he met at the college. “Longfellow’s friendship with Hawthorne was one of the great literary American friendships, in my view.”
In Longfellow’s 1825 commencement speech, the poet put forth a call for literature to be written in the United States to help establish an American literary identity. The speech, “Our Native Writers,” envisioned the still-fledgling nation to be one day “associated with the sweet magic of Poetry,” whose literature would be tied to the country’s natural beauty.
Eventually, Longfellow left to take on a professorship at Harvard University. He would go on to find success in literature but also tragedy, becoming a widower twice.
There are a number of visible signs as to Longfellow’s impact on the Brunswick and Portland areas — many institutions bear his namesake. More intangible may be Longfellow’s impact on the literary culture of the region.
“It’s sort of unusual, don’t you think, that a small town like Brunswick, small cities like Bath and Portland, have so many bookstores,” Chakkalakal said. “Bookstores are closing down across the country. Not even these huge bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble can stay open, and yet these tiny independent book stores like Print and The Mustard Seed and Gulf of Maine Books are able to draw customers who buy books and give readings.
“We have Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house on Federal Street and Harriet’s Writing Room where people still gather to write and read together,” Chakkalakal continued. “There is a literary culture in Maine that is very local that might draw its inspiration from Longfellow, whose mission while at Bowdoin and after, was to popularize American writers — to make literature a part of people’s every day lives.”
Longfellow Days is a program of the Brunswick Downtown Association, with support from Bowdoin College, The Brunswick Inn, Hannaford, and the Nathaniel Davis Fund. All programs are free.
A PORTRAIT of Henr y Wadswor th Longfellow, for whom Longfellow Days is named.
jswinconeck@timesrecord.com
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