Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (18071882). Complete Poetical Works.
1893. The Courtship of Miles Standish IT is possible that the
unmistakable success of Hiawatha made Mr. Longfellow more ready
to occupy himself with another subject of American life. At any
rate, a few weeks after the publication of that poem one of his
friends urged him to write a poem on the Puritans and Quakers. A
good subject for a tragedy, he remarks, and began looking over
books which would give him incidents. The first outcome was the
beginning of The New England Tragedies. Then he appears to have
begun as an alternative, lighter work a drama, The Courtship of
Miles Standish. This was December 2, 1856. Exactly a year later
he writes in his diary: Soft as spring. I begin a new poem,
Priscilla, to be a kind of Puritan pastoral; the subject, the
courtship of Miles Standish. This, I think, will be a better
treatment of the subject than the dramatic one I wrote some time
ago; and the next day: My poem is in hexameters; an idyl of the
Old Colony