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 1855, "The New York Times " carried an item on "Longfellow's New Poem", quoting an article from another periodical which said that it "is very original, and has the simplicity and charm of a Saga... it is the very antipodes [sic] of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Maud," which is... morbid, irreligious, and painful." In October of that year, the "New York Times" noted that "Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" is nearly printed, and will soon appear." By November its column, "Gossip: What has been most Talked About during the Week," observed that "The madness of the hour takes the metrical shape of