Lays of the Land: Germany in Longfellows Poems of Places

Abstract

In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow s novel Hyperion (1839), the enthusiastic hero, Paul Flemming, declares German literature a “glorious world of poetry, romance, and dreams”. Flemming s passion for that literature reflects Longfellow s own knowledge of it, which he gained not least on four separate trips to Germany and which lends structure and substance to many of his poems. These facts have long been established, as has Longfellow s significance for the study of German literature in New England. Practically no attention, though, has been paid to the further tour of German sites that Longfellow took – and gave his readers – in Poems of Places, an anthology that he edited late in his career. Two of its thirtyone volumes contain poems about German locations, and those poems suggest a world different from the kind that Paul Flemming seems to mean. This other world is still poetic, insofar as poems evoke it. There is much more in it, though, than romance and dreams. It is not a world of literature read by one fictional person, but the world in literature written by many actual men and women. The anthology thus affords a lyric travelogue and traces a German geography that has various and diverse features. This essay looks at those features and at what kind of place Germany is in Longfellow s Poems of Places. It thereby complements recent