The Poet's Pose

Abstract

Abstract In July of 1868, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was on his fourth and final tour of Europe. He had become a literary lion in the grand tradition of the 19th century and enjoyed the kind of reverential celebrity that is now nearly out of style. It was obligatory that he visit with Dickens and Tennyson, and he duly did so. On the 17th or 18th of July 1868, during one of his several visits to Tennyson's house at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, he was taken by Tennyson to be photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. Tennyson, along with others among his contemporaries, was aware that the strange woman who took such pains with her photographs and who tyrannized her sitters might be something of a genius. Longfellow was probably just mystified. In a famous quotation, Tennyson abandoned Longfellow to her tender mercies: ‘I will leave you now, Longfellow. You will have to do whatever she tells you. I will come back soon and see what is left of you’1. Of what was left we cannot be sure, but the photograph that was taken was of an angry old man, with a head resembling the crest of a stormy wave; emotional, strong, raw, and indisputably great. A later critic speculated on a century that could allow men to grow into that special mould of greatness so evident in their very look, and we may also speculate on how they found the photographers who could mirror them so well.