Tales of a Wayside Inn
Tales of a Wayside Inn is a collection of poems by American
Overview
The poems in the collection are told by a group of adults in the tavern of the
"One Autumn night, in Sudbury town,
Across the meadows bare and brown,
The windows of the wayside inn
Gleamed red with fire-light..."
Composition and publication history
Longfellow undertook the large-scale project in part to combat grief over the death of his wife Fanny in 1861.[2] While writing it, he also dealt with his personal struggles during the American Civil War, including his oldest son's illnesses and injuries while serving in the Army of the Potomac. As he wrote to a friend in England, "I have been through a great deal of trouble and anxiety... However, I have managed to get a volume of poems through the press".[3] Longfellow originally intended to call the collection The Sudbury Tales, but was worried it sounded too similar to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.[4] As early as October 11, 1862, however, he considered the alternative title Tales of a Wayside Inn. He wrote in his journal that day: "Write a little on the Wayside Inn. A beginning only."[5]
Longfellow visited the real-life
Most of the stories were derived by Longfellow from his wide reading — many of them from the legends of continental Europe, a few from American sources.
The collection was first published on November 23, 1863,
Analysis
Many of the characters in Tales of a Wayside Inn were inspired by real people: Luigi Maria Monti (the Sicilian), Daniel Treadwell (the theologian), Thomas William Parsons (the poet), Henry Wales (the student), Isaac Edrehi (the Spanish Jew), Ole Bull (the musician), and Lyman Howe (the landlord).[15]
Modern scholar Robert Gale praises the book for showing Longfellow's wide interests and knowledge of other cultures and its use of a wide variety of poetic formulas and styles such as blank verse, ballads, dactylic hexameter, octosyllabic lines, ottava rima, and iambic pentameter, including heroic couplets. He says the book "remains the best combination of narrative poems ever written by an American".[16]
Adaptations
In 1920, the
References
- ^ a b Cairns, William B. (1920). Encyclopedia Americana. . In Rines, George Edwin (ed.).
- ISBN 978-0-313-32140-5
- ^ a b c Garfield, Curtis F. and Alison R. Ridley. As Ancient Is This Hostelry: The Story of The Wayside Inn. Sudbury, Massachusetts: Porcupine Enterprises, 1988: 165.
- ^ Wagenknecht, Edward. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966: 143.
- ^ Garfield, Curtis F. and Alison R. Ridley. As Ancient Is This Hostelry: The Story of The Wayside Inn. Sudbury, Massachusetts: Porcupine Enterprises, 1988: 164
- ^ ISBN 0-313-32350-X
- ISBN 978-1-60949-396-7
- ^ Wayside Inn History. Retrieved May 2008.
- ISBN 0-8070-7026-2.
- ^ Allaback, Steven. "Longfellow's 'Galgano'", American Literature. Duke University Press, Vol. 46, No. 2, (May 1974): 210–211.
- ^ Austin, James C. "J. T. Fields and the Revision of Longfellow's Poems: Unpublished Correspondence", from The New England Quarterly. Vol. 24, No. 2 (June 1951): 244–247.
- ^ Austin, James C. "J. T. Fields and the Revision of Longfellow's Poems: Unpublished Correspondence", from The New England Quarterly. Vol. 24, No. 2 (June 1951): 247.
- ISBN 0-8070-7026-2.
- ISBN 0-313-32350-X
- ISBN 978-1-60949-396-7
- ISBN 0-313-32350-X
- ISBN 978-1-59629-750-0.
- ^ a b Parr 2009, p. 80.
External links
- Tales of a Wayside Inn - complete text (Project Gutenberg)
- Tales of a Wayside Inn - complete text (scan of 1864 edition)
- Official site of historical Wayside Inn
- Tales of a Wayside Inn public domain audiobook at LibriVox