Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie” is an epic poem published in 1847. The poem follows an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel, set against the backdrop of the Expulsion of the Acadians. The idea for the poem came from Longfellow’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Longfellow used dactylic hexameter, a form imitating Greek and Latin classics, though this choice was criticized. It became Longfellow’s most famous work during his lifetime and remains one of his most popular and enduring works.
The poem had a powerful effect in defining both Acadian history and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, more recent scholarship has revealed the historical inaccuracies in the poem and the complexity of the Expulsion and those involved, which the poem overlooks.
The poem is written in unrhymed dactylic hexameter, possibly inspired by Greek and Latin classics, including Homer, whose work Longfellow was reading at the time he was writing “Evangeline.” He also had recently translated “The Children of the Lord’s Supper,” a poem by Swedish writer Esaias Tegnér, which also used this meter. “Evangeline” is one of the few nineteenth-century compositions in that meter which is still read today.
