Longfellow and the Italian Risorgimento

Abstract

Professor R. M. Peterson in his admirable article on the “Echoes of the Italian Risorgimento in Contemporaneous American Writers” might well have added to his list of poems illustrating Longfellow's interest in the movement the final sonnet of the Divina Commedia group. At odd moments in his life Longfellow had occupied his time in translating portions of the Divina Commedia. But with the death of his second wife in 1861, largely as an escape from his grief, he applied himself more systematically to the work, until the entire epic was at length translated, probably at the close of 1866. During the last few years of concentration on his task, he produced six sonnets, inspired by the Commedia, which, so far as his purely lyrical work is concerned, undoubtedly represent Longfellow's crowning achievement. Although, as Professor Peterson correctly points out (p. 240), Longfellow's interest in Italy “centered chiefly in the literature and culture of past ages rather than contemporaneous conditions,” the sixth and last of the Divina Commedia sonnets is of special significance in that it combines the poet's artistic and scholarly enthusiasm for Italy's great epic with his interest in “Italian aspirations.” In the octet of the sonnet Longfellow uses the Divina Commedia as a symbol of the liberty and glory which he believed would eventually come to Italy; and in the sestet he extends his symbolism to include other lands.