Evangeline

Overview

Full title

Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie

Author

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), then Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard

Published

Boston: William D. Ticknor & Co., 30 October 1847; written between late 1845 and February 1847

Form

A narrative poem of about 1,400 unrhymed lines in English dactylic hexameter

Structure

A Prelude, then two Parts of five cantos each; the last canto closes with an epilogue that answers the Prelude

Historical event

The deportation of the Acadians from Nova Scotia by British colonial authorities, beginning in 1755 (Le Grand Dérangement); at Grand-Pré the order was read in the parish church on 5 September 1755

Settings

Grand-Pré on the Minas Basin; the Mississippi, the Atchafalaya and Bayou Teche in Louisiana; the Ozark Mountains and the western prairies; the Michigan forests; Philadelphia

Source story

An anecdote of a separated Acadian bride, told to Nathaniel Hawthorne by the Rev. H. L. Conolly and passed on to Longfellow

Main characters

Evangeline Bellefontaine; Gabriel Lajeunesse; Benedict Bellefontaine; Basil the blacksmith; Father Felician; René Leblanc the notary

Afterlife

One of the most widely read American poems of the nineteenth century, translated into French in 1865 and adopted as a founding story by Acadians in Canada and Cajuns in Louisiana

Context

By the middle of the 1840s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the best-known poet in the United States. He taught modern languages at Harvard, lived in Craigie House in Cambridge, and had made his name with Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). He had translated widely from Spanish, German and Scandinavian poetry, and he wanted to write a long poem on an American subject in a European form. His journal shows him beginning the poem, at first called 'Gabrielle', late in 1845, and finishing it in February 1847; it was published by Ticknor in Boston on 30 October 1847 and sold quickly (Longfellow 1886) (Calhoun 2004).

The story came to him second-hand. The Rev. Horace Lorenzo Conolly, an acquaintance of Nathaniel Hawthorne, had heard of an Acadian couple separated on their wedding day at the time of the deportation, and of the bride's lifelong search for her husband, whom she found again only when he was dying. Hawthorne noted the anecdote in his notebook but did not use it. When Conolly told it at dinner at Craigie House, Longfellow asked whether Hawthorne meant to write it; Hawthorne gave it up to him, and later praised the finished poem in print (Hawthorne 1972) (Arvin 1963).

The history behind the tale is the expulsion of the Acadians. Acadia, the French colony around the Bay of Fundy, passed to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, but its French-speaking Catholic farmers for decades refused an unconditional oath of allegiance, wishing to remain neutral between Britain and France. In 1755, with war approaching, the governor of Nova Scotia, Charles Lawrence, and his council resolved to remove them. At Grand-Pré Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow summoned the men and boys to the church of Saint-Charles, read them the order of deportation, and held them prisoner until the transports sailed; the villages were then burned. Several thousand Acadians were scattered among the Anglo-American colonies, and over the following years many made their way to France, Quebec and, from 1765, Louisiana (Faragher 2005) (Griffiths 2005) (Plank 2001).

Longfellow never visited Nova Scotia or Louisiana. For Acadia he relied chiefly on Thomas Chandler Haliburton's An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova-Scotia (1829), which idealised the Acadians as a pastoral people and printed Winslow's address, the model for the commander's speech in Part I, canto 4 (Haliburton 1829). For the Mississippi he drew on travellers' accounts and on John Banvard's moving panorama of the river, a painted canvas hundreds of yards long that he saw in Boston in December 1846 (McDermott 1958); the Shawnee woman's tales of Mowis and Lilinau come from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's collections of Ojibwe legend (Schoolcraft 1839).

The poem's metre was its boldest choice. Longfellow wrote in the dactylic hexameter of Homer and Virgil, adapted to English stress rather than syllable length, following the German example of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. The experiment was argued over at once, but it did not slow the poem's success. Evangeline was reprinted constantly, illustrated, taught in schools and translated; in French Canada and Louisiana it became, within a few generations, something close to a national myth, commemorated by the statue and memorial church at Grand-Pré and by the Evangeline statue at St Martinville (Griffiths 1982) (Le Blanc 2003) (Brasseaux 1988).

Plot overview

A Prelude sets the scene in the dark coastal forest of Nova Scotia and asks where the Acadian farmers of Grand-Pré have gone. Part the First then describes the village in its last peaceful autumn. Evangeline, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the rich farmer Benedict Bellefontaine, is betrothed to Gabriel Lajeunesse, son of Benedict's friend Basil the blacksmith. On the evening of their marriage contract English ships lie in the river mouth, and Basil fears the worst; the notary René Leblanc answers with a parable that heaven's justice prevails.

The next day, during the betrothal feast, the men are summoned to the church, where an English commander tells them that their lands and goods are forfeit to the Crown and that they are to be transported. Basil's protest is struck down; Father Felician calms his people with Christ's prayer of forgiveness. Days later the people are herded to the shore. In the confusion of embarking Gabriel and Basil are carried to one ship while Evangeline stays on the beach with her father. That night the village is set on fire, and Benedict dies of grief by the sea; he is buried on the shore, and the ships sail.

Part the Second follows Evangeline through years of exile. Hearing that Gabriel may be in Louisiana, she travels down the Mississippi with Father Felician and a boatload of Acadians. In the bayous of the Atchafalaya Gabriel's boat, heading north, passes theirs unseen while she sleeps. On Bayou Teche they find Basil, now a prosperous herdsman, who tells them Gabriel left that very day. Evangeline and Basil follow him to Adayes and into the Ozark Mountains, where a Shawnee woman tells her stories of phantom lovers; at a Jesuit mission she learns that Gabriel passed through six days earlier. She waits there in vain, follows a rumour to Michigan, and finds his lodge abandoned.

Grown old in the search, Evangeline settles in Philadelphia and becomes a Sister of Mercy, nursing the poor. When a pestilence strikes the city she tends the dying in the almshouse, and there one Sabbath morning she finds Gabriel, an old man in the last stage of the fever. He recognises her, and dies in her arms; she thanks God that the long trial is over. An epilogue tells that the lovers lie side by side in a Catholic churchyard in the city, while in the old forest of Acadie another people now lives, and only a few returned Acadians still tell Evangeline's story.

Part by part

Characters

Acadians

Evangeline Bellefontaine

Daughter of Benedict and betrothed of Gabriel; seventeen when the poem begins. She is presented as an ideal of Catholic piety, domestic skill and constancy, and her search for Gabriel turns over the years from a lover's quest into a life of patient service. Her refusal to marry anyone else, and her final work as a Sister of Mercy among the dying, make her a figure of devotion that readers have found either deeply moving or too passive; her name, with its echo of the Gospel ('evangel'), suits a heroine whose story becomes a parable.

Gabriel Lajeunesse

Son of Basil the blacksmith, Evangeline's childhood companion and promised husband; his surname means 'youth'. Separated from her on the shore, he becomes a restless hunter and trapper, always moving on just before she arrives. He is seen directly only twice in Part the Second: careworn at the helm of a boat in the bayous, and dying of the fever in the Philadelphia almshouse.

Benedict Bellefontaine

Evangeline's father, the wealthiest farmer of Grand-Pré, seventy years old, cheerful, hospitable and trusting. He is sure the English ships mean no harm. The expulsion breaks him: on the shore he sits unspeaking by the fire and dies on the night the village burns, and he is buried by the sea 'without bell or book'.

Basil the blacksmith

Basil Lajeunesse, Gabriel's father and Benedict's friend: hot-tempered, suspicious of the English and the only Acadian who resists, crying out in the church before a soldier strikes him down. In Louisiana he reappears as a prosperous cattle-herdsman on Bayou Teche who denounces King George, and he leads Evangeline on the first stage of the search.

René Leblanc

The old notary of Grand-Pré, father of twenty children, who draws up the marriage contract. Once imprisoned by the French as a friend of the English, he trusts in providence and tells the parable of the statue of Justice and the magpie's nest. He dies in Philadelphia with only one of his hundred descendants beside him.

Baptiste Leblanc

The notary's son, who has long loved Evangeline. In exile her friends urge her to marry him; her refusal shows that her love for Gabriel is not to be transferred.

Michael the fiddler

The musician of Grand-Pré who plays French songs at the betrothal feast; he turns up again in Basil's house in Louisiana, where his fiddle sets the exiles dancing, a sign that something of the old community survives.

Clergy

Father Felician

Priest and schoolmaster of Grand-Pré, who taught Evangeline and Gabriel their letters. In the church he quiets his people's anger with Christ's prayer of forgiveness; on the shore he consoles the exiles and buries Benedict. He accompanies Evangeline down the Mississippi and stays as pastor to the Acadians of the Teche. He is the poem's voice of providential patience.

The Black Robe chief

The Jesuit missionary in the Ozarks who welcomes the travellers in French and tells Evangeline that Gabriel sat in his wigwam six days before. His lesson of the compass-flower, which points always north, teaches her that faith, not passion, must guide her.

Others

The English commander

The unnamed officer who reads the royal commission in the church of Grand-Pré, modelled on John Winslow's address as printed by Haliburton. He professes that his task is painful to him while declaring the Acadians prisoners.

The Shawnee woman

A widow returning to her people after her Canadian husband was killed on the southern plains. She shares Evangeline's tent and tells her the stories of Mowis, the bridegroom of snow, and of Lilinau, who followed a phantom lover into the forest; the tales make Evangeline fear that she too is pursuing a phantom.

Mowis and Lilinau

Figures in the Shawnee woman's tales, taken from Schoolcraft's collections: Mowis is a bridegroom made of snow who melts away after his wedding night, and Lilinau a maiden lured away by a spirit. Both mirror Evangeline's fear that Gabriel has become a figure she can follow but never reach.

Themes

Constancy and patience

The Prelude addresses readers who 'believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient', echoing St Paul's praise of charity, and the poem is built to test that belief. Evangeline's virtue is not action but endurance: she waits, follows, refuses other suitors and keeps faith. Father Felician turns her loss into a spiritual discipline, insisting that 'affection never was wasted', and the word 'Patience!' is spoken by the priest, by the oaks and finally by the narrator, who names her pain 'constant anguish of patience'.

By the last canto the love that began as a betrothal has been 'diffused' into care for strangers. The poem presents this as a purification. Whether that resolution transfigures the heroine or simply consoles readers for a life spent waiting is one of the questions the poem leaves open.

Exile and the loss of home

Evangeline is a poem of displacement. The first Part lingers lovingly over a home: the house, barns, dikes, orchards and customs of Grand-Pré. The second Part scatters that home across a continent, 'Exile without an end'. The Acadians are compared to dust, snowflakes and leaves, and Evangeline herself to a phantom who comes and goes 'unremembered'.

Yet the poem also shows exiles rebuilding: Basil's ranch on the Teche, where Acadians and Creoles gather and Michael's fiddle plays again, is a second Grand-Pré, 'better perchance than the old one'. The epilogue returns to the original forest to find 'another race' living there and only a few Acadians who came back, so that the question of home is never quite settled.

Providence and justice

The villagers argue over justice in Part the First. Basil believes that 'might is the right of the strongest'; the notary answers with his parable of the statue of Justice, in which heaven clears an innocent girl too late to save her. The parable is double-edged: it promises that justice triumphs, but only after the innocent has died.

The rest of the poem works on the same pattern. No earthly power undoes the expulsion; consolation comes through faith, through prayers of forgiveness and through a reunion granted only at the edge of death. Evangeline's last words, 'Father, I thank thee!', accept that providential order, while the thunder and fire of the earlier cantos keep the memory of injustice alive.

The American landscape

Longfellow wanted an American subject, and the second Part becomes a tour of the continent: the Mississippi, the cypress swamps and lakes of Louisiana, the prairies of the Teche, the Ozarks, the Rocky Mountain rivers, the Michigan woods and the streets of Philadelphia. Much of this is painted from books and from Banvard's panorama, and the descriptions often read like a sequence of brilliant scenes passing before a stationary viewer.

The landscape is not neutral. The South is an Eden of warmth and plenty; the West is sublime but violent; the northern forest of the Prelude is ancient and mournful. The journey across these spaces gives the private search a national scale, and links the poem to the westward movement of the United States in the 1840s.

Memory, tradition and storytelling

The poem presents itself as a 'tradition still sung by the pines of the forest', and it is full of stories within the story: the notary's tales of the Loup-garou and the Letiche, the parable of Justice, the Shawnee woman's legends, Basil's tall tales of the prairie. The epilogue ends with Acadian women repeating 'Evangeline's story' by the fire.

This frame matters. Longfellow claims to be recording a folk memory, but his poem in fact helped to create one: later Acadian and Cajun communities took Evangeline into their own sense of the past. The poem thus dramatises the way a story, retold, becomes history for those who hear it.

Faith and the Catholic community

A New England Protestant wrote this poem about a Catholic people, and its religious life is treated with sympathy: the Angelus, the priest's blessing, confession, the Ave Maria, the hymn to the Sacred Heart, the mission chapel under an oak. The Acadians' piety is part of their innocence, and their Catholicism marks them off from their English captors.

In Philadelphia the poem broadens that faith into something ecumenical. Evangeline is pleased by the 'Thee and Thou of the Quakers', which recalls the equality of Grand-Pré, and the almshouse scene joins Catholic devotion to the Quaker city's charity. The religious vision is finally less sectarian than consoling.

Motifs

The forest primeval

The opening line returns at the start of both paragraphs of the epilogue. The forest is the poem's frame and chorus: it is older than the Acadians, outlasts them, and 'answers' the ocean's grief. Its repetition gives the whole tale the shape of a song with a refrain.

The sea and the tides

The sea surrounds Grand-Pré, held back by dikes and let in 'at stated seasons'. It carries the people away, answers the priest at Benedict's burial 'like the voice of a vast congregation', and becomes the image of the plague that floods 'the silver stream of existence'. Evangeline hears 'the funeral dirge of the ocean' throughout her wandering.

Near-meetings and missed chances

The second Part is built on near-meetings: the boats that pass in the bayou, the arrival at Basil's on the day Gabriel left, the camp-fires found cold, the mission he left six days before, the lodge in Michigan fallen to ruin. Each brings the lovers closer in space and pushes the reunion further away in time.

Biblical comparison

Longfellow's similes constantly reach for Scripture: Jacob wrestling the angel, Hagar and Ishmael, Elijah ascending, Moses descending Sinai, Paul shipwrecked on Melita, the writing on the wall, the Passover blood, the Prodigal Son and the Foolish Virgin. They lend a simple story the dignity of sacred history and tie the Acadians' exile to the wanderings of the Bible.

Symbols

The statue of Justice

In the notary's parable a bronze Justice holds scales in which birds nest; when an orphan girl is executed for a theft, lightning strikes the scales and reveals the stolen necklace in a magpie's nest. The statue stands for the hope that heaven corrects human wrong, but also for the delay of that correction. Evangeline remembers the tale on the night of her people's arrest.

The compass-flower

The Jesuit shows Evangeline a prairie plant whose leaves point north 'as true as the magnet'. He makes it a symbol of faith, humble and steady, against the bright but deadly 'blossoms of passion'. The image recasts her search as a spiritual pilgrimage rather than a romance.

Light, lamp and taper

Evangeline is repeatedly associated with light: the 'celestial brightness' after confession, the 'luminous space' she carries up the stairs, the heart that goes before 'like a lamp', the taper in her window in Philadelphia and the halo the dying see around her. Gabriel's death is compared to a lamp blown out. Light marks her as a saintly figure.

The burning of Grand-Pré

The fire seen from the shore, with its 'Titan-like' hundred hands, is the poem's image of destruction: it ends the pastoral world of Part the First, serves as 'funeral torches' for Benedict and becomes the memory by which Basil later measures his new home. The cattle that run wild and the cocks that crow at the false dawn show a whole order of life thrown into confusion.

Critical debates

The English hexameter

Longfellow's metre was controversial from the start. Classical hexameter is quantitative, built from long and short syllables; Longfellow's is accentual, a line of six stresses with mostly dactylic feet ending in a trochee, as in 'This is the forest primeval'. Admirers found it flowing and musical, well suited to long description, and the poem did much to make the measure familiar to English-speaking readers; Matthew Arnold, arguing in 1861 that the hexameter was the right metre for translating Homer, could point to the popularity of Evangeline (Arnold 1861).

Critics objected that English, with its many monosyllables and heavy stresses, cannot sustain the hexameter without monotony or forced accents, and that Longfellow's falling rhythm becomes a sing-song. Edgar Allan Poe, long hostile to Longfellow, ridiculed English hexameters in 'The Rationale of Verse' (1848), and the poem's lilting lines were easy to parody. Prosodists such as George Saintsbury remained sceptical of the whole enterprise (Saintsbury 1910). Modern critics tend to judge the metre by its effects: the long line gives the poem its slow, elegiac pace, its catalogues and its similes, but can blur emotion into uniform smoothness (Arvin 1963) (Williams 1964).

Sentimentality and the 'national poet'

Evangeline made Longfellow the American poet whom ordinary readers loved best, and its heroine became an icon of feminine devotion, reproduced in paintings, prints, schoolbooks and later films. For nineteenth-century readers its moral seriousness and tender feeling were virtues; it gave a young nation a domestic epic of faith and endurance (Calhoun 2004).

The same qualities later counted against it. Critics have called the poem sentimental, finding its heroine passive, its sorrows soothing rather than searching, and its consolations too easy. Defenders reply that sentiment was a deliberate public mode, that the poem's pathos rests on a real atrocity, and that its popularity tells us how a democratic readership used poetry to share feeling. Christoph Irmscher's study of Longfellow's readers and their letters shows how personally that audience engaged with poems such as this one (Irmscher 2006) (Gale 2003).

History and myth: the poem and the Expulsion

Longfellow's account of the deportation follows Haliburton closely: the summons to the church, the commander's speech, the imprisonment, the embarkation, the burning. But it simplifies the politics. The Acadians appear as innocent peasants with no part in imperial conflict, the English as faceless soldiers, and the decision to remove them as a royal mandate. Historians have shown that the deportation was planned and carried out by the colonial government of Nova Scotia under Charles Lawrence, with New England troops and ships, without explicit orders from London (Haliburton 1829) (Plank 2001).

John Mack Faragher's A Great and Noble Scheme (2005) describes the expulsion as an act of ethnic cleansing driven largely by New England interests in Acadian land, a reading that sharpens the poem's sense of wrong while correcting its picture of a distant King George (Faragher 2005). Naomi Griffiths, by contrast, stresses the long history of Acadian neutrality and their growth as a distinct border people before 1755, so that the poem's idyll of timeless peasants hides a society with its own politics and its own strategies of survival (Griffiths 2005). The poem's history, in short, is mythic; its power has sometimes stood in for the historical record.

Acadian identity and the poem's reception

The poem was written by an outsider in English, but it was rapidly taken up by the people it describes. Pamphile Le May's French translation appeared in 1865, and as Acadians in the Maritime provinces built a national identity in the later nineteenth century, Evangeline became a symbol of their suffering and survival. Naomi Griffiths traced how this happened, arguing that the poem's acceptance rested on its sympathy for the exiles at a time when they had few other public champions (Griffiths 1982).

At Grand-Pré the Dominion Atlantic Railway marketed 'the Land of Evangeline' to tourists; a statue of the heroine was unveiled there in 1920 and a memorial church on the site of the old parish church was built in the 1920s. Barbara LeBlanc has shown how these sites, postcards and ceremonies turned a fictional heroine into a focus of Acadian memory (Le Blanc 2003). In Louisiana a parallel legend grew up around St Martinville, where Evangeline was identified with a supposed real woman, Emmeline Labiche, and a statue was placed in the churchyard in 1931; Carl Brasseaux has examined how the myth shaped and sometimes distorted Cajun history (Brasseaux 1988) (Brasseaux 1987).

Longfellow's reputation after modernism

Longfellow's standing fell further than that of almost any major poet in the twentieth century. Modernist poets and New Critics prized difficulty, irony and compression, and dismissed narrative, didactic and popular verse; Evangeline, once a school classic, came to stand for everything modern poetry rejected. Even sympathetic critics such as Newton Arvin wrote of it with reservations (Arvin 1963).

Dana Gioia argued in 1993 that this eclipse said as much about modernist taste as about Longfellow, and that a poet who shaped the American imagination deserved to be read on his own terms, as a master of narrative, metre and public speech (Gioia 1993). Since then Charles Calhoun's biography and Christoph Irmscher's Longfellow Redux have presented him as a learned, cosmopolitan writer whose popularity is itself a historical fact worth explaining (Calhoun 2004) (Irmscher 2006). Evangeline has benefited from that re-reading, especially in studies of reception and cultural memory.

The landscape and the westward journey

Critics have long noted that the second Part is a tour of American scenery written by a poet who had not seen it. Longfellow's journal records his debt to Banvard's panorama of the Mississippi, and the canto on the bayous reads like a series of painted views unrolling before the reader (McDermott 1958) (Longfellow 1886). John Seelye's essay 'Attic Shape' returned to the poem's design, reading its pictorial set-pieces and its shape as a deliberate art rather than a mere sequence of pretty scenes (Seelye 1984).

The westward journey also places the poem in the age of Manifest Destiny. Published at the time of the Mexican War and the great migrations to Oregon, it imagines a continent of open land, 'lands may be had for the asking', while depicting the Plains peoples as 'Ishmael's children, / Staining the desert with blood'. Modern readers have questioned how a poem that mourns one dispossessed people treats others, and how its sympathy for the Acadians coexists with the expansion it celebrates (Calhoun 2004) (Irmscher 2006).

Evangeline's patience: heroism or resignation?

The heroine's defining virtue is endurance, and readers have disagreed about what it means. For Victorian readers she was a model of constancy and Christian self-denial, and her change from a bride into a Sister of Mercy was the poem's spiritual climax. Longfellow's own letters show how seriously he took the poem's moral design and how warmly he received readers' responses to it (Hilen 1982).

Later readers, especially feminist critics, have asked whether the poem idealises female passivity: Evangeline never chooses a life of her own, and her fulfilment comes in the moment of Gabriel's death. Others argue that the search is itself an act of will across a continent, and that her work among the poor of Philadelphia gives her a vocation independent of marriage. The poem allows both readings, and the tension between them is part of its continuing interest (Wagenknecht 1986) (Gale 2003).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does the poem open and close with the 'forest primeval' rather than with Evangeline herself?

   Compare the Prelude with the two paragraphs of the epilogue: what has changed, what remains, and who is now telling the story?

2. How does Part the First make Grand-Pré seem an ideal community, and what does the poem gain or lose by this idealisation?

   Look at the open doors, the shared property, the absence of fear and envy, and set them against what historians say about Acadian society.

3. What is the point of the notary's parable of the statue of Justice?

   Notice that the innocent girl is vindicated only after her death, and that Evangeline remembers the tale on the night of the arrest.

4. Compare the responses of Basil and Father Felician in the church. Which does the poem endorse?

   Consider Basil's cry against 'the tyrants of England', the priest's prayer of forgiveness, and Basil's later speech against King George on the Teche.

5. What effect does Longfellow's hexameter have on the way the story is told?

   Read some lines aloud. Think about the long similes, the catalogues of landscape and the pace of the narrative, and about the charge of monotony.

6. Why do Gabriel and Evangeline keep just missing each other?

   List the near-meetings in Part the Second and consider what they do to the plot, to suspense, and to the meaning of the search.

7. How does the Shawnee woman's story change Evangeline's understanding of her quest?

   Think about Mowis and Lilinau and the line in which Evangeline fears she is 'pursuing a phantom'.

8. How does the poem present the peoples and landscapes of the American West?

   Look at the opening of Part II, canto 4, the Jesuit mission and the Shawnee woman, and think about the poem's date of 1847.

9. Is the ending of the poem happy, tragic or something else?

   Weigh the reunion, Gabriel's death, Evangeline's 'Father, I thank thee!' and the description of the lovers' nameless graves.

10. How did a poem by a New England Protestant become a founding story for Acadians and Cajuns?

    Think about the poem's sympathy for its subjects, its Catholic piety, the French translation, and the monuments at Grand-Pré and St Martinville.

Further reading

• Arnold, Matthew. On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861.
• Arvin, Newton. Longfellow: His Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.
• Brasseaux, Carl A. The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
• Brasseaux, Carl A. In Search of Evangeline: Birth and Evolution of the Evangeline Myth. Thibodaux, LA: Blue Heron Press, 1988.
• Calhoun, Charles C. Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
• Faragher, John Mack. A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
• Gale, Robert L. A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003.
• Gioia, Dana. "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism." In The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini, 64–96. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
• Griffiths, Naomi. "Longfellow's Evangeline: The Birth and Acceptance of a Legend." Acadiensis 11.2 (1982): 28–41.
• Griffiths, N. E. S. From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1604–1755. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005.
• Haliburton, Thomas Chandler. An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova-Scotia. 2 vols. Halifax: Joseph Howe, 1829.
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The American Notebooks. Edited by Claude M. Simpson. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne 8. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972.
• Hilen, Andrew, ed. The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966–1982.
• Irmscher, Christoph. Longfellow Redux. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
• Le Blanc, Barbara. Postcards from Acadie: Grand-Pré, Evangeline and the Acadian Identity. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2003.
• Longfellow, Samuel. Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1886.
• McDermott, John Francis. The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
• Plank, Geoffrey. An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the Peoples of Acadia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
• Saintsbury, George. A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1906–1910.
• Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe. Algic Researches, Comprising Inquiries Respecting the Mental Characteristics of the North American Indians. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1839.
• Seelye, John. "Attic Shape: Dusting Off Evangeline." Virginia Quarterly Review 60 (1984): 21–44.
• Wagenknecht, Edward. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: His Poetry and Prose. New York: Ungar, 1986.
• Williams, Cecil B. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Twayne's United States Authors Series 68. New York: Twayne, 1964.