A Misplaced Critical Attack

The Acadians were French settlers of what are now Canada's Maritime Provinces who were expelled by their British rulers in the mid 18th Century, many of them fleeing to southern Louisiana, where they eventually thrived as Cajuns. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow based one of his most well-known poems, "Evangeline", on the Acadian experience. Thus, in discussing the Acadian expulsion, one would think that the experience was only tenuously related to Longfellow, and completely unrelated to the quality of Longfellow's poetry as well as that of more contemporary American poets.

Well, one scholar thinks otherwise.

In his review of John Mack Faragher's A Great and Noble Scheme: The Expulsion of the French Acadians in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, Peter A. Coclanis (a history scholar and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) presents the following as his two opening paragraphs:

One of the positive developments arising from the reform of the literary canon over the past few decades has been a much-needed weeding out of second-raters--James Whitcomb Riley, James Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the like. Take Longfellow, for example. No matter how bad the hitherto unappreciated, if not unknown author who replaces him in the canon, can his or her work really be worse than the stilted poem "Hiawatha" or, egad, the mawkish "Evangeline"? Many Americans over 50 still cringe at the memory of reciting parts of the latter ("This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green") in their youths, which memory makes mediocrities such as Sylvia Plath seem canonical, and even contemporary hacks like Alice Walker (but not Maya Angelou) marginally preferable.

Such cringing notwithstanding, the historical episode upon which "Evangeline" is more or less based--the British expulsion of the Acadians from the area now comprising Canada's Maritime Provinces from 1755 to 1763--is an important one. Few Americans today know much about this episode, however, which makes Yale University historian John Mack Faragher's new book, "A Great and Nobel Scheme," especially welcome. Although Faragher's study is uneven in quality and prolix in a way someone like Longfellow himself would appreciate--its 480 pages of text read even longer--the expulsion of the Acadians, le grand derangement (the great upheaval), merits our attention for purely historical reasons and because it sheds light on a number of similar enormities in the last century.

What, exactly, does bashing the poetry of Longfellow have to do with evaluating Faragher's book? Not to mention the poetry of Plath, Walker and Angelou? Leaving aside the question of Coclanis' qualifications, as a history professor, for critiquing poetry, what purpose is served here by raking Longfellow over the critical coals? (Further, it's clear that anyone who wrote that awkward, cringe-inducing first paragraph should be one of the last people to be criticize Longfellow's or Faragher's writing ability.)

Okay, so maybe Coclanis hated reading Longfellow back in high school. Which is fine--he's entitled to his opinion. But he should save it for a ranting monologue at the next faculty cocktail hour instead of inflicting it upon book review readers who are presumably more interested in learning about the plight of the Acadians than his thoughts about American poetry.