Longfellow’s Serenity and Poe’s Prediction: An Antebellum Turning Point

In 1839, Edgar Allan Poe insisted that, though Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had “high qualities,” his reputation would not survive into the future. Poe's seemingly prescient prediction reveals a good deal about Longfellow's practice as a poet as well as Poe's contribution to the development of both modernism and popular culture.