Episode 00: Welcome
Hello, and welcome to Fireside Poems. I’m Paul Johnston. My students call me Dr. J. I’ve taught American literature for over thirty years. Among the writers I’ve regularly taught is a small group known as the Fireside Poets. Prominent among them is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poems my students very much enjoy, so much so that I’ve decided to share them with a larger audience. In the episodes of this podcast, I’ll chiefly be reading and discussing Longfellow’s poems; occasionally I’ll turn to a poem by one of the others.
Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine in 1807 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1882. For much of his life he was a professor of foreign languages, first at Bowdoin College in Maine and then at Harvard. His career as a poet began as a translator of poems in other languages. Americans came to know him, though, not in these perhaps aloof roles, but as the poet of everyday people and things—the poet of “The Village Blacksmith” and “Evangeline” and “The Children’s Hour.” The door of his home in Cambridge was open to all, to neighborhood children and to fans who travelled from far and wide to meet him, as well as to his prominent friends and colleagues. An admirer in Ohio sent him a case of his own wine as a gift, for which Longfellow wrote a poem in return. For his seventy-second birthday, the schoolchildren of Cambridge presented him with a chair made from the wood of the spreading chestnut tree he’d made famous in the opening line of “The Village Blacksmith” forty years earlier.
These children had no doubt become acquainted with “The Village Blacksmith” in school. Longfellow and his fellow Fireside Poets—William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell (middle names were apparently a thing in 19th-century America)—were also known as the Schoolroom Poets. They were thought of as a group not because they wrote similar poems—they didn’t—but because their poetry was both accessible and morally sound and thus suitable for students of any age, from grade school through college. They were a part of the curriculum for American students well into the twentieth century, though they have now largely disappeared, and with them any meaningful study of poetry for most students in American schools and colleges. That I’ve taken them up again and hope to see them restored to their rightful places may seem to suggest that I’m of a socially conservative mind, but that’s far from the case. These poets were socially progressive, far more so in most cases than the modern poets who took their places. To take but one example, when the escaped slave Frederick Douglass wrote his famous autobiography “Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, Written by Himself,” he called Whittier “the slave’s poet.”
When I think of Longfellow and his fellow poets and what is now missing in American education, I think of the Latin phase mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body—coined by the first-century Roman poet Juvenal. I learned this phrase as a schoolboy myself, in the Latin class my mother taught. This was the goal of a human life, she explained, and thus the goal of a sound education. America has long abandoned this ideal of education—a sound mind in a sound body—replacing it with the goal of preparing young people not for a life but for a job. Longfellow’s poetry can’t necessarily help us toward a sound body—though it might—but it can help us toward a sounder mind and, in addition, a sounder society—toward mens sana in societate sana. As I comment on the poems I’ll be sharing with you, I’ll talk about just how poetry helps us have sounder, stronger, minds—minds more thoughtful and open to feeling—and a sounder society, a society less vulgar, less violent, and more just.
The first goal of this podcast, though, will simply be to enjoy poetry. One passage my students have enjoyed—one of many, many poems and passages they enjoy—is this one from “The Village Blacksmith. They enjoy its beauty and its emotion, as well as its different take on masculinity.
He goes on Sunday to the church
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter’s voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother’s voice,
Singing in paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.
Longfellow and his compatriots were known as the fireside poets because it was a common practice before the days of radio and television for families to gather around the fireside after supper to listen to poems and stories, whether from volumes of poems or from the Bible or Greek myth or Treasure Island. I hope to recreate this experience for you once a week. These episodes won’t be long—from under ten minutes to at most twenty or so when Longfellow has a longer story to tell. You might listen to them as a break from studying if you’re a student, or while making dinner after a day at work, or while relaxing after the dishes are done or after the kids are in bed or even as you go to sleep yourself.
In whatever setting you choose, I hope you enjoy them. You can look forward to a new episode every Wednesday. If you do find you enjoy this podcast, please tell your friends, either in person or on your social media. And go to the website—firesidepoems.com—where you’ll find information about subscribing. You’ll also find the text of each poem in the show note accompanying each episode. Also there is the email address for this podcast. I’d love to hear from you, to know a little bit about who you are and what you like as you join me each week by the fireside.
