Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an intensely public poet and an intensely private man. His own griefs, and they were considerable, barely make an appearance in all the large body of his verse. The 1848 death of his daughter Fanny, for example, resulted in a poem, “Resignation,” which deals with mourning, that enduring Victorian theme — but in Longfellow’s poem, as a collective experience, not a personal one.