Hiawatha (sculpture) Hiawatha (sculpture) Hiawath is a 19th century sculpture executed in marble by American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The work, which depicts the Iroquois leader Hiawatha, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpted his interpretation of the famed Iroquois leader between 1872 and 1874. He was inspired to create the work by "The Song of Hiawatha", an 1855 epic poem by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow's poem was well received by American audiences, and the epic work resulted in a rekindling of interest in Hiawatha and the waxing days of the Iroquois Confederacy. The poem is
The Song of Hiawatha trochees, everybody writes trochaics, talks trochaics, and think [sic] in trochees: ... The "New York Times" review of "The Song of Hiawatha" was scathing. The anonymous reviewer judged that the poem "is entitled to commendation" for "embalming pleasantly enough the monstrous traditions of an uninteresting, and, one may almost say, a justly exterminated race. As a poem, it deserves no place" because there "is no romance about the Indian." He complains that Hiawatha's deeds of magical strength pall by comparison to the feats of Hercules and to "Finn Mac Cool, that big stupid Celtic mammoth." The reviewer writes that "Grotesque,