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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Fireside Poets We watched the first red blaze appear,Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleamOn whitewashed wall and sagging beam,Until the old, rude-furnished roomBurst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;While radiant with a mimic flameOutside the sparkling drift became,And through the bare-boughed lilac-treeOur own warm hearth seemed blazing free. --from Snow-bound, James Greenleaf Whittier The Fireside poets (also called the schoolroom or household poets) were the first group of American poets to rival British poets in popularity in either country. Today their verse may seem more Victorian in sensibility than romantic, perhaps overly sentimental or moralizing in tone, but as a group they are notable for their scholarship, political sensibilities, and the resilience of their lines and themes. (Most schoolchildren can recite a line or two from Paul Reveres Ride or The Song of Hiawatha.) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and William Cullen Bryant are the poets most commonly grouped together under this heading. In general, these poets preferred conventional forms over experimentation, and this attention to rhyme and strict metrical cadences made their work popular for memorization and recitation in classrooms and homes. They are most remembered for their longer narrative poems (Longfellows Evangeline and Hiawatha, Whittiers Snow-bound) that frequently used American legends and scenes of American home life and contemporary politics (as in Holmess Old Ironsides and Lowells anti-slavery poems) as their subject matter. At the peak of his career, Longfellows popularity rivaled Tennysons in England as well as in America, and he was a noted translator and scholar in several languages--in fact, he was the first American poet to be honored with a bust in Westminster Abbeys Poets Corner. Hiawatha itself draws not only on Native American languages for its rhythmic underpinning, b