The Song of Hiawatha The Song of Hiawatha The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. Events in the story are set in the Pictured Rocks area on the south shore of Lake Superior. Longfellow's poem, though based on native oral traditions surrounding the figure of Manabozho, represents not a work of transmission but an original work of American Romantic literature. Longfellow's sources for the legends and ethnography
The Song of Hiawatha house, was also epic. The monumental quality survives into the 20th century in Frances Foy's "Hiawatha returning with Minnehaha" (1937), a mural sponsored during the Depression for the Gibson City Post Office, Illinois. Parodies of the "Song of Hiawatha" emerged immediately on its publication. "The New York Times" even reviewed one such parody four days before reviewing Longfellow's original poem. This was "Pocahontas: or the Gentle Savage", a comic extravaganza which included extracts from an imaginary Viking poem, "burlesquing the recent parodies, good, bad, and indifferent, on "The Song of Hiawatha."" The "Times" quoted: In 1856 there appeared a 94-page