The Grooming of a Harvard Hispanist: George Ticknor’s Mentorship of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This essay examines the role that George Ticknor (1791-1891), a pioneer in American Hispanism and author of the classic work History of Spanish Literature (1849), played as mentor and intellectual guide to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), the person selected in 1836 to succeed him as Smith Professor of European Languages and Literatures at Harvard. Longfellow’s greatest eminence ultimately came as a poet of international renown whose works would be widely translated and admired through most of the nineteenth century, but before achieving stature as the author of such classics as Evangeline, a tale of Acadie and The Song of Hiawatha, he devoted twenty-five years to teaching and translating European works into English, with Spanish—“the language of Cervantes,” as he put it—being one of his specialties. The time Longfellow spent in Europe as a young scholar learning the subjects he was appointed to teach, including, in particular, an extended, transitional interlude in Spain, was key to the person he became, and the values he embraced.