Evangeline
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a poem by Longfellow published in 1847. This was Longfellow's first long narrative poem, and he was exceptionally fortunate in the theme, the beauty and pathos of the story in its idyllic setting being peculiarly suited to his tastes. It is a story of the expulsion from Nova Scotia of the Acadians which occurred in 1786, by order of George III. In Longfellow's story the event takes place on Evangeline's wedding day. She is separated from Gabriel, and the two spend their lives in searching for each other. Evangeline was always the author's favorite among his own poems. The material for the poem was furnished by Hawthorne and his friend, Rev. H. L. Conolly. Hawthorne had considered it for a novel, but gladly gave up the subject to Longfellow and took great delight in the finished poem, rejoicing in the fame it won. It is interesting to note that Whittier had also planned to write a poem on this subject. Evangeline is written in blank verse,--the form employed in the classical poems, The Iliad and the Aeneid, and which Goethe had made use of in his Hermann and Dorothea . To use such a meter for a long poem in English was considered a bold innovation. There is no question but that the meter is a difficult one. Prosaic lines, if not awkward ones, are sure to appear in a long poem in this form; but it is equally certain that no other meter could have been found so well suited to the relation of this "mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest." Evangeline has been called the "flower of American idylls," and it is said that persons have been known to study the English language that they might read this poem in the original. See Longfellow ; Henry Wadsworth
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The poem itself is exactly as Longfellow left it in 1847, but two details in Aiton's 1910 account should be corrected: the expulsion of the Acadians began in 1755, in the reign of George II, not in 1786 under George III; and Evangeline is not in blank verse but in unrhymed dactylic hexameter, the classical measure Goethe used in Hermann und Dorothea. The larger change is in standing. Where Aiton could call it the "flower of American idylls" and report foreigners learning English to read it, the poem has since dropped out of the school canon and off most reading lists, while critics have grown wary of its sentimentality and of a New Englander's imagining of Acadian suffering. Yet Acadians themselves adopted Longfellow's invented heroine as a national symbol: statues of Evangeline stand at Grand-Pré in Nova Scotia and at St. Martinville, Louisiana, and in 2003 the Crown issued a royal proclamation acknowledging the deportation, now marked each 28 July.
Written for this edition, 2026.