Greetings from Longfellow
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- English-language readers new to nineteenth-century American poetry
- People who need short poems for reading aloud, gift exchange, or classroom sharing
- Readers who like lyric poetry with regular metre and clear themes
- English learners who want to build language sense through short poems
Not a good fit for
- Researchers who need Longfellow's complete works or detailed scholarly annotation
- Poetry readers who prefer modernism, free verse, and complex metaphor
- Readers expecting long narrative poems or a systematic literary history
Reading tips
- Choose one or two poems a day to read aloud, paying attention to rhyme and rhythm; do not try to cover too much.
- Read the title and the first and last two lines first, judge the theme, then decide whether to read the whole poem closely.
- Copy out or share poems about friendship and family to appreciate their function as greetings and gifts.
- Skip allusions at first; look up the background after finishing the poem so as not to interrupt the feel of the language.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
FAQ
Does this book contain all of Longfellow's poems?
Can readers with average English read this poetry collection?
On what occasions is this book suitable?
Comments
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About the author
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–1882) was a nineteenth-century American poet; his name and dates are as recorded in the library, while other biographical details are limited in publicly available sources and are not speculated upon here. The library holds twenty of his works, spanning long narrative poems, short lyrics, and verse drama. Evangeline, set against the dispersal of the Acadians, is a sustained and sympathetic narrative; The Courtship of Miles Standish draws on legends of the colonial period; Tales of a Wayside Inn uses a frame narrative in which travelers tell stories from many lands; and The Wreck of the Hesperus is a ballad-like treatment of a maritime disaster. His verse attends to rhyme and rhythm and to folk and legendary material, and its plain language, addressed to ordinary readers, helped it circulate widely in the English-speaking world.
