It may be the surest sign of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s genius as a poet that so much of his work lends itself, almost eagerly, to parody. Sometimes he seems to have written to be ridiculed. “The Song of Hiawatha” is the star exhibit. In the splendid Library of America edition of his “Poems and Other Writings” (854 pages, $35), edited by J.D. McClatchy, “Hiawatha” runs to 138 pages. There Longfellow’s remorseless use of trochaic meter hovers close to auditory abuse. The stress on the first syllable of every foot is at once narcotic and maddening:

Take your bow, O Hiawatha,
Take your arrows, jasper-headed,
Take your war-club, Puggawaugun,
And your mittens, Minjekahwun,
And your birch-canoe for sailing,
And the oil of Mishe-Nahma,
So to smear its sides, that swiftly
You may pass the black pitch-water.

The thudding beat accentuates Longfellow’s stylistic quirks: his addiction to lists, his love of repetition, the exotic names whose comical solemnity only he failed to notice. But it’s the poem’s meticulous sluggishness that makes parody irresistible — even “the squirrel Adjidaumo” moves in slow motion. Lewis Carroll turned Hiawatha into a plodding photographer with a “camera of rosewood / Made of sliding, folding rosewood.” When the family whose group portrait he’s taking fidgets, Carroll’s Hiawatha leaves in a huff:

Neither did he leave them slowly,
With the calm deliberation,
The intense deliberation
Of a photographic artist:
But he left them in a hurry,
Left them in a mighty hurry.

According to Mr. McClatchy’s excellent chronology, by 1857, two years after publication, “Hiawatha” had sold 50,000 copies. Such sales figures, unimaginable for a poet today, were usual for Longfellow. He was not merely a “popular poet,” but a best-selling one. And yet, 200 years after his birth on February 27, 1807, Longfellow has become, by the oddest of transformations, a poet’s poet. His superb craftsmanship, his versatility, his cosmopolitan outlook, now outshine his rather obvious faults.

Longfellow’s finest lyrics display a rhythmic loveliness far subtler than Hiawatha’s trochaic tomtom, as the opening lines of “Elegiac” show:

Dark is the morning with mist; in the narrow mouth of the harbor
Motionless lies the sea, under its curtain of cloud;
Dreamily glimmer the sails of ships on the distant horizon,
Like to the towers of a town, built on the verge of the sea.

Even his best-known poems, when scraped free of the barnacles of familiarity, stand revealed as strikingly beautiful, like the wellworn “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls,” whose second stanza runs:

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Those “soft, white hands” look pretty but their gentleness of effacement appalls. And in fact, Longfellow was a poet much “acquainted with the night,” as Robert Frost, another New Englander, would put it. He considered himself, for all his popularity, a tragic poet. After he had completed his monumental translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” — still the finest English version, in my view — he published his own “The Divine Tragedy” in 1871. In it Lucifer proclaims:

Not as a terror and a desolation,
Not in my natural shape, inspiring fear
And dread, will I appear;
But in soft tones of sweetness and persuasion.

Ten years before, on July 9, 1861, not long after the outbreak of the Civil War, Longfellow’s beloved wife, Fanny, accidentally set fire to herself while melting wax to seal a parcel of their daughters’ curls as keepsakes. Longfellow tried to beat out the flames with his hands. Fanny died the next day. Longfellow was too burned to attend the funeral. He grew a beard to hide his scarred face, but the beard hid more than the face.

Eighteen years later, around the time he received a “Village Blacksmith” chair carved from the famous “spreading chestnut tree” of that poem’s opening line, Longfellow commemorated his dead wife in a sonnet called “The Cross of Snow,” which ends:

There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

The man behind the majestic beard wasn’t the serene Victorian sage he appeared to be to his adoring public. Longfellow sensed what his readers wanted and gave it without stint; the gift brought him acclaim, but it came at a price. Now, more than a century after his death in 1882, we can sense other echoes in his verse. Even the village blacksmith, who at first suggests a Norman Rockwell portrait, has another side. To do his work he must “catch the burning sparks that fly / Like chaff from a threshing-floor.” The blacksmith seems emblematic of honest toil, but beneath those “brawny arms” he is the poet too, hammering his verses from “the flaming forge of life.” In his “Table Talk,” Longfellow wrote, “A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.” Beneath the shaggy mask, Longfellow knew what he was saying. But only a cross made of the cold snow of grief could answer that flame.

eormsby@nysun.com