Harry West

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Harry West

(First American poet to translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a celebrated nineteenth century American poet, remembered for such works as The Song of Hiawatha and Paul Revere's Ride. From his early childhood, he showed an interest in literature and although his father wanted him to become a lawyer, by the time he was in college he knew that if he ever succeeded in life, it would be only in that field. Eventually, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow joined his alma mater as a professor of French, Spanish and Italian, before being appointed to the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard College. Although by then he had started publishing his works, his actual creative life began in Cambridge and for next fifteen years, he wrote all the works on which his extraordinary fame came to rest. However, after the accidental death of his second wife, he produced few original works and instead concentrated on translation; Dante's Divine Comedy being one of them.
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