There are many Henrys in the American biography – Henry Hudson, Henry David Thoreau, Richard Henry Dana, Henry Ford, Benjamin Henry (Winchester rifles), Buck Henry, Patrick Henry, O’Henry, Henry Aaron; another was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882).
In poetry circles it is said Henry Longfellow was a poet of affirmation rather than rejection. By the act of poetry, he was the morning light not midnight dark, Longfellow was no melancholy Poe, not a brooding Melville, not even that caustic Twain.
Henry Longfellow was one of the poets that poets like to disparage because Henry was a cheerful sort. To my knowledge he never attempted suicide despite he had as good cause as any poet, both his wives died young leaving him deeply grieved all his life.
Longfellow as born in Portland, Maine, then a district of Massachusetts, of crisp New England stock, his father a lawyer and politician. As a child he took early to reading and graduated from Bowdoin College at 19 years.
Like others of his age and circumstance, Longfellow went to Europe to study languages in preparation for a professorship at Bowdoin, later a position at Harvard.
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