The poet and the junior high struggle

Here’s to an American winner:

If Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were alive today, he’d be 201 years old and on his 13th knee replacement. He isn’t, having died in 1882 at 75, young by today’s standards. His bust was placed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey after his death. It’s the only American bust there.

“Like T. S. Eliot after him, he spoke with authority on the whole of European literature. He wrote six language textbooks, and was fluent in German, French, Italian and Spanish,” said reviewer Jay Parini in 2001. Translator of Dante, Ovid, Virgil, Goethe, and Heine among others, if there had been Nobel prizes, he would have gotten one.

In addition, he had an Oak Park school named after him, posthumously. 

 There’s more more more . . . .