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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, United States national literature, and the canonical erasure of material nature.(Biography)

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From: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly)
Date: 20061201
Author:Willis, Lloyd

When George Santayana and Van Wyck Brooks began constructing an American canon around Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman during the early decades of the twentieth century, they initiated a long fade into obscurity for a range of authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Irving's popularity had always been tenuous, though, and Cooper had damaged his own reputation so badly with his libel suits that the new generation of critics simply finished a critical dismantlement that was already ...