Hiawatha

he-a-wa'tha, The Song of, a narrative poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published in 1855. The poem is based upon the legends of the North American Indians and was the first successful poem making use of this material. Hiawatha is a mythical character, known by that name among the Iroquois and by other names among other Indian tribes. He is believed to have been of miraculous birth, and to have been sent to clear the rivers and lakes, open up the forests, and to teach his people the arts of peace. In the Indian legends he displays certain capricious characteristics which are wholly lacking in Longfellow's conception, which idealizes the hero in a way to remind one of Tennyson's King Arthur. The poem consists of an introduction and twenty-two sections or chapters recounting the story of Hiawatha--whom Longfellow makes an Ojibway-from the incidents connected with his birth, through his life, to the coming of the white man and the departure of

Many beautiful legends and fanciful customs of the Indians are here brought together in an attractive and lasting form. The meter of the poem, called trochaic tetrameter is adapted from that of the Finnish Kalevala, of which Longfellow had made a study. It is without rhyme or stanza, containing four accented syllables to a line, and is characterized by short phrases, simple sentences, and frequent parallelism; that is, the partial repetition of lines. This form of poetry was entirely new in America, and, although immediately popular, Hiawatha called forth a great deal of ridicule and some even bitter criticism. The numberless parodies, however, which were written on it have long since died natural deaths, while Hiawatha lives and will live to open up a new world of enjoyment to every reader of American literature. Longfellow never visited the region on the southern shore of Lake Superior, where the scenes of the poem are laid; he never saw Minnehaha Falls; his material was obtained from the writings of Henry Rowe School-craft; the form of his poem was borrowed from the Finns; and yet this poem is his most distinctively original work, and has been said to be "more redolent of the primitive soil of America than anything else in our literature."

Ten thousand copies of the poem were sold during the first four weeks after its appearance. It has been translated into nearly all modern languages, and into Latin. It has been called "America's national epic poem," and ranked with the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the French Chanson de Roland. Edmund Clarence Stedman says of it:

Hiawatha is the one poem that beguiles the reader to see the birch and ash, the heron and eagle and deer, as they seem to the red man himself, and to join for the moment in his simple creed and wonderment.

See Longfellow; Schoolcraft