The Song of HiawathaHenry Wadsworth LongfellowOmniClassics · Literature
The Song of Hiawatha
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowA legendary hero's life becomes a sequence of encounters with the powers, needs, and losses of his community.
Progress is saved in this browser
About the book
Longfellow follows Hiawatha through childhood, relationships, trials, teaching, and the changing fortunes of the people around him. Episodes involving his companions, his marriage to Minnehaha, the cultivation of corn, and encounters with supernatural powers give the poem the range of a legendary life. Its strongly repeated rhythms and parallel phrasing make the narrative especially recognizable when read aloud. The material draws on Indigenous stories mediated through nineteenth-century sources and reshaped by a non-Indigenous American poet, rather than preserving one community's tradition unchanged. That literary perspective matters to the poem's presentation of the past and its imagined historical movement. Readers can attend both to its narrative music and to the choices through which diverse inherited stories become a unified account of a single hero.
- Legendary community
- Nature and survival
- Cultural retelling
Why read it
For a distinctive poetic retelling whose memorable rhythms invite attention alongside the cultural mediation shaping its legendary world.
Narrative poem · English text