Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, United States National Literature, and the Canonical Erasure of Material Nature.

LONGFELLOW, Henry Wadsworth, 1807-1882; SANTAYANA, George, 1863-1952; BROOKS, Van Wyck, 1886-1963

This article discusses the views of authors and literary critics George Santayana and Van Wyck Brooks on the works and literary manifestoes of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the impact of Longfellow's removal from the U.S. literary canon on the U.S. literature. Longfellow had envisioned an environmentally determined national literature. He believed that any national literature would have to base its claims of vitality and originality on the qualities of its natural environment. For Santayana and Brooks, Longfellow's literary manifestoes were unimportant and his vision of trans-Atlantic literary unity seemed weak-minded and unimaginative.