page_title: The Song of Hiawatha
section_title: Reception and influence
hierarchical_section_title: The Song of Hiawatha / Cultural response / Reception and influence
caption_attribution_description: English: One of a series of 22 grisailes in oil made by Frederic Remington for the photogravure edition of "The Song if Hiawatha" published in 1890. This has been titled "Hiawatha's Friends", Metropolitan Museum of Art
context_page_description: The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. Events in the story are set in the Pictured Rocks area of Michigan on the south shore of Lake Superior. Longfellow's poem is based on oral traditions surrounding the figure of Manabozho, but it also contains his own innovations.
  Longfellow drew some of his material from his friendship with Ojibwe Chief Kahge-ga-gah-bowh, who would visit at Longfellow's home. He also had frequent encounters with Black Hawk and other Sauk people on Boston Common, and he drew from Algic Researches and other writings by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnographer and United States Indian agent, and from Heckewelder's Narratives. In sentiment, scope, overall conception, and many particulars, Longfellow insisted, "I can give chapter and verse for these legends. Their chief value is that they are Indian legends."
context_section_description: In August 1855, The New York Times  carried an item on "Longfellow's New Poem", quoting an article from another periodical which said that it "is very original, and has the simplicity and charm of a Saga... it is the very antipodes [sic] of Alfred Lord Tennyson's Maud, which is... morbid, irreligious, and painful." In October of that year, the New York Times noted that "Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha is nearly printed, and will soon appear."
  By November its column, "Gossip: What has been most Talked About during the Week," observed that "The madness of the hour takes the metrical shape of trochees, everybody writes trochaics, talks trochaics, and think [sic] in trochees: ...
  "By the way, the rise in Erie
  Makes the bears as cross as thunder."
  "Yes sir-ree! And Jacob's losses,
  I've been told, are quite enormous..."
  The New York Times review of The Song of Hiawatha was scathing. The anonymous reviewer judged that the poem "is entitled to commendation" for "embalming pleasantly enough the monstrous traditions of an uninteresting, and, one may almost say, a justly exterminated race. As a poem, it deserves no place" because there "is no romance about the Indian." He complains that Hiawatha's deeds of magical strength pale by comparison to the feats of Hercules and to "Finn Mac Cool, that big stupid Celtic mammoth." The reviewer writes that "Grotesque, absurd, and savage as the groundwork is, Mr. LONGFELLOW has woven over it a profuse wreath of his own poetic elegancies." But, he concludes, Hiawatha "will never add to Mr. LONGFELLOW's reputation as a poet."
  Thomas Conrad Porter, a professor at Franklin and Marshall College, believed that Longfellow had been inspired by more than the metrics of the Kalevala. He claimed The Song of Hiawatha was "Plagiarism" in the Washington National Intelligencer of November 27, 1855. Longfellow wrote to his friend Charles Sumner a few days later: "As to having 'taken many of the most striking incidents of the Finnish Epic and transferred them to the American Indians'—it is absurd". Longfellow also insisted in his letter to Sumner that, "I know the Kalevala very well, and that some of its legends resemble the Indian stories preserved by Schoolcraft is very true. But the idea of making me responsible for that is too ludicrous." Later scholars continued to debate the extent to which The Song of Hiawatha borrowed its themes, episodes, and outline from the Kalevala.
  Despite the critics, the poem was immediately popular with readers and continued so for many decades. The Grolier Club named The Song of Hiawatha the most influential book of 1855. Lydia Sigourney was inspired by the book to write a similar epic poem on Pocahontas, though she never completed it. English writer George Eliot called The Song of Hiawatha, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 book The Scarlet Letter, the "two most indigenous and masterly productions in American literature".
caption: Hiawatha's Friends, an illustration by Frederick Remington for the poem, 1889
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image ExifOffset": "2134", "Image XPAuthor": "PHOTO", "Image XPSubject": "[82, 0, 101, 0, 109, 0, 105, 0, 110, 0, 103, 0, 116, 0, 111, 0, 110, 0, 10, 0, ... ]", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF ExposureTime": "4294967/536870912", "EXIF FNumber": "22", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2010:05:11 21:24:36", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "233732935/33554432", "EXIF ApertureValue": "149633695/16777216", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "120", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}