The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Published 2012 · 419,925 words · about 24 hours at an average pace · Poetry, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to read?
The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow scores 35 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
- A large verse collection from the nineteenth century carries some archaic and poetic diction, but the language stays mostly plain and singable. It sits well below Eugene Onegin's dense poetic register and near the accessible end of the scale.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Metered, rhymed verse of this period favors regular lines and inverted but readable syntax. It is far simpler than the fragmented syntax of The Waste Land and closer to the balanced rhythm of The Great Gatsby.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Popular lyric and narrative verse of this kind leans on concrete images, landscapes and stories, with moral and reflective passages woven in. It is more concrete than The Great Gatsby's social observation.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- At about 420,000 words, the collection spreads its content across many short and long poems with a comfortable pace per page. Density is light to moderate, comparable to the compressed but clear Great Gatsby.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- Verse for a broad public mostly states its feeling and moral outright, leaving little to infer. It is closer to the directness of To Kill a Mockingbird than to Pedro Paramo's assembled meaning.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Nature imagery and moral emblems recur across a poetry collection of this size, but they are signposted rather than buried. The symbolic layer is comparable to the obvious allegory of 1984.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- Earnest, sentimental and didactic verse leaves little gap between what the poems say and what they mean. It sits near the sincere end, like Flights' earnest fascination.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- Individual poems typically close on a resolved image or moral, and a collected edition has no overarching plot to leave open. Closure is the norm, as in Crime and Punishment's epilogue.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- A collected poems volume is organized by book, period or genre, with each poem standing on its own. The structure is simple, closer to a linear diary than to the formal experiments of Flights.
How The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is regarded
The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow holds a literary regard score of 60 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.