William Basse
Basse's most famous poem is his "enormously popular sixteen-line elegy on Shakespeare":
Evangeline
"Evangeline" became Longfellow's most famous work in his lifetime and was widely read. Contemporary reviews were very positive. A reviewer for "The Metropolitan Magazine" said, "No one with any pretensions to poetic feeling can read its delicious portraiture of rustic scenery and of a mode of life long since defunct, without the most intense delight". Longfellow's friend Charles Sumner said he had met a woman who "has read 'Evangeline' some twenty times and thinks it the most perfect poem in the language". Other admirers of the poem included King Leopold I of Belgium. It has been called the first important long poem in American literature.