Quixotic – like or befitting Don Quixote; extravagantly chivalrous or romantically idealistic; visionary; impractical or impracticable

“On a more earthy and immediate level, [Longfellow] was shattered by his first wife’s death after miscarriage during his second European trip (1835); he endured years of frustration (1836-42) before his second wife-to-be consented to return his quixotic passion with anything more than friendship; and after nearly twenty years of happily married life thereafter, he was devastated again by her death in a freak accident in their home, when her gown caught fire.”

Lawrence Buell, in the introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems

Munificence – very generous in giving; lavish; characterized by great generosity

“[Longfellow] could not, he wrote his father, argue well enough to be a successful lawyer; he was not good enough to be a minister; and as to medicine, “I utterly and absolutely detest it.” He pleaded instead to be allowed to take a postgraduate year at Harvard to study literature – and write.

This vocational crisis was luckily resolved by the munificence of another Bowdoin trustee, who had been so impressed with young Longfellow’s translation of Horace’s odes that he proposed that the professorship of foreign languages he was donating to Bowdoin be offered to Longfellow.”

Lawrence Buell, in the introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems

Obloquy – verbal abuse of a person or thing, censure or vituperation*, especially when wide-spread or general

Purveyor – one who purveys (to purchase and supply provisions, especially for a number of people)

Verity – truthfulness

” “With me,” Longfellow once noted, “all deep impressions are silent ones. I like to live on, and enjoy them, without telling those around me that I do enjoy them.” Remarks like these suggest that the image of Longfellow as a comfortable, reassuring white-bearded purveyor of the accepted verities – the basis of both his late-Victorian fame and his mid-twentieth-century obloquy – has mistaken the surface for the totality of his mind.”

Lawrence Buell, in the introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems

*Vituperate – to speak abusively to to or about; to berate; to revile

(Wow, that was a lot of new words at once!)

Urbane – courteous in manners; polite; suave; elegant or refined

“It is true that Longfellow strove to present an unruffled, humane, urbane face to the world. The motto on his personal bookplate was non clamor, sed armor: not clamor, but love.”

Lawrence Buell, in the introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems

Taciturnity – the quality or state of being taciturn (habitually silent; not apt to talk)

“When Longfellow wrote a grief-stricken acquaintance that “there are natures whose native strength and elasticity enable them to endure the worst, and yet live,” he was stating from experience a principle to which he clung in his own way as tenaciously as Hemingway did to his code of masculine taciturnity or Emerson to his self-imposed emotional detachment from all but his immediate family and sometimes even them.”

Lawrence Buell, in the introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems

Palatial – of, like, or suitable for a palace; hence, large and ornate; stately; magnificent

“Throughout [Longfellow’s] life, he attached an extremely high value to politeness, common courtesy, dignity, and good citizenship, as well as to domestic comforts of a level of elegance that Ralph Waldo Emerson, on his visits to Cambridge from small-town Concord, found disorientingly palatial.”

Lawrence Buell, in the introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems