This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, America’s most popular poet ever and one of world literature’s great religious poets.

Generations of poetry lovers were enraptured by “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “A Psalm of Life,” “The Song of Hiawatha’’ – perhaps the most widely parodied poem – and so many other lovingly crafted rhymes.

My Irish-born and educated wife can recite reams of Longfellow. So could a Green Beret captain I met during the Vietnam War in a lonely Special Forces camp monitoring enemy supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail out of Laos.

Taught by Dominican nuns in Boston, he said it was Longfellow’s beautiful translation from Spanish of St. Teresa of Avila’s prayer that kept him calm when North Vietnamese regulars twice attempted to overrun his outpost.

“Let nothing disturb thee, nothing affright thee;
All things are passing, God never changeth;
Patient endurance attaineth to all things;
Who God possesseth in nothing is wanting;
Alone God sufficeth.’’

Decades ago at Cathedral Prep in Brooklyn, Father John Fee made us aware of Longfellow’s religious poems: “The Sermon of St. Francis,” “Blind Bartimus,” “The Ladder of St. Augustine,” “The Hymn of the Moravian Nuns at Bethlehem,” “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We learned that “Evangeline’’ evoked the tragedy of French Catholics exiled from Nova Scotia by the British during the French and Indian War and the hardships they endured reaching Louisiana’s bayous.

We were taught tolerance by memorizing “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” with its accusing lines:

“How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o’er the sea – that desert desolate –
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?’’

Descended from Mayflower passengers John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, Longfellow was born Feb. 27, 1807 in Portland, Maine, the son of a lawyer. A classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he entered Bowdoin College at 14, graduating at an age when kids today are primping for the high school prom.

After several years abroad studying European languages, including Finnish, Longfellow came to Harvard as Smith professor of belle lettres. First he boarded at Craigie House, a handsome homestead near Harvard Yard that had been George Washington’s headquarters. His wife’s father bought the house for the young couple. It is now the Longfellow National Historic Site.

Most mornings the poet rode horseback along the Charles, then over a cup of strong coffee translated some lines from Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” I interviewed Robert Pinsky, America’s poet laureate, when he published an acclaimed new translation of “The Inferno.” I asked who was his favorite Dante scholar? “Longfellow,” he replied, and quoted from a favorite canto of that 1867 classic.
Longfellow’s innovative meters and lucid lines, full of charming melody and dreamy languor, captivated ordinary readers everywhere. His celebrity reception in England rivaled Dickens in America.

“The Courtship of Miles Standish,” based on a family legend, sold 10,000 copies in a single day in London. He was the first American enshrined in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s (cq) Corner. “Hiawatha,” set to the drumbeat meter of a Finnish folk epic, appeared in many languages.

On the poet’s 75th birthday, the children of Cambridge presented him with an armchair carved from the spreading chestnut tree where “The Village Blacksmith” sent sparks flying.

When I took a master’s in literature at Harvard under the G.I. Bill in the 1950s, I was shocked to find Longfellow’s reputation in sad decline among the big-name professors. The pompous Howard Mumford Jones deplored “his lack of intellectual depth.” Trendy critic Perry Miller called this polyglot poet who composed sonnets in French, Italian, Latin and Greek “a simple-minded chap.”

New Wave critics found him sentimental, platitudinous, too musical in his meters, too facile in his rhymes, overly moralistic (religious?) and, his gravest sin, far too popular. Poems were no longer written for people. The poetry my profs praised was dark, moody, obscure, a private preserve of pedants noted for fathoming its complexity. Recommended reading often resonated like psychobabble from an analyst’s couch.

Only Harvard dropout Robert Frost enchanted ordinary readers as colleges everywhere ridiculed poetry that could be enjoyed and understood. The four-time Pulitzer winner named a collection of his poems “A Boy’s Will,” a line from Longfellow. Scoffed Frost, “I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.”

I often steered visitors to Longfellow’s home, then went to nearby Bickford’s cafeteria. One day a banner with a device stranger than “Excelsior” appeared under a portrait of the flowing-haired poet.

“IF DOUSING BUTTS IN YOUR COFFEE CUP BE THE HARVARD WAY,
PLEASE HAVE THE WAITRESS SERVE YOUR COFFEE IN THE ASHTRAY.”

Last summer I happened on an open microphone poetry night at a student hangout near the Yard. The mod muses, mostly feminine, now sang blatant pornography.

The encouraging news is that Harvard is busy celebrating the Longfellow bicentennial. Events include readings and seminars, concerts of his many poems set to music, exhibits of rare manuscripts and the stubby pencils he favored. Here and abroad other universities are observing the anniversary.

My hope is that if the academics cannot forgive Longfellow’s popularity, they may at least recognize his foremost place in American letters.