Poetry was an immensely popular and prevalent literary form throughout nineteenth- century America, and there was no more popular or widely read poet than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, and attended Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 1825 in the same class as Nathaniel Hawthorne. Although Longfellow was originally intent on pursuing a law career, Bowdoin offered him a job as a professor of modern languages, which required him to study in Europe before assuming his teaching position at the college. He studied successfully in Germany, France, Spain and Italy and then took up his duties at Bowdoin only to transfer to a similar teaching position at Harvard a few years later. He taught at Harvard until 1854, when he retired to pursue his literary career full time.

Longfellow began to publish poetry while still teaching, and the popularity of his poetry in the ensuing decades eventually earned him national and international acclaim. He was granted honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge in England. The genesis of his national reputation is found in the publication of what would become his most popular poem, Evangeline (1847). The concept of the poem germinated in Longfellow's mind after hearing a tale of lost love in Acadia (a region that included Nova Scotia, Canada, inhabited by settlers of French descent) from his friend Hawthorne.

Longfellow wrote Evangeline in dactylic hexameter, a poetic style used by Homer in his Iliad and Virgil in his Aeneid, and one that thus invoked the great classical epic. The poem tells the story of Evangeline, a girl exiled from her Acadian home, who spends her life searching for her lost love, Gabriel. It is a poem ultimately about a love that can never be realized, and thus it becomes a meditation on a range of themes, including: sacrifice, longing, ethnicity, hope, religious and romantic devotion and the nature of true happiness.