what does the poem hiawatha speak of??

Question

give me the gist of this extremely long long poem by longfellow in short.please help..........................

Answer 1

Basically, its about a Native American (Hiawatha). It charts hi life from being a small boy, growing up, learning woodland lore,becoming chief of his tribe,getting married (Minnehaha) rearing children and finally passing to the Happy Hunting Grounds. This very short, but I hope it helps.

Answer 2

The Song Of Hiawatha Movie

Answer 3

May 26, 2007

Hiawatha to Be Released on 6-CD Set
By CLARKE CANFIELD
Associated Press Writer

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) -

Longfellow's epic poem, "The Song of Hiawatha," was written 152 years ago, but Michael Maglaras thinks the story can be as appealing to modern-day audiences as "Superman" or "Star Wars."

Like Clark Kent and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Indian hero Hiawatha has human traits and super powers, while battling evil and doing right. Maglaras, the owner of a record company, is now producing a six-CD audio recording of the poem that he plans to complete in late summer.

It's fitting that the CDs are being recorded in a studio here in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's hometown in the year of the 200th anniversary of his birth. Maglaras hopes the project will stimulate interest in both Longfellow and the art of storytelling.

Hiawatha, Maglaras said, is a saga with enough incredible stories - giants, magicians, talking animals, Indian gods, fierce battles and a giant sturgeon that swallows Hiawatha whole - to captivate today's audiences.

"We're convinced this story was intended to come alive," Maglaras said during a break in a recording session last month.

The production should appeal to people who want to be entertained in a "literate, intelligent, sensitive way," he said. "There is a silent majority out there of people who are hungering after entertainment of a different form."

Maglaras, 57, is a former opera singer who founded Two17 Records in Stamford, Conn. He has produced recordings of alternative rock and jazz music as well as poetry.

He began working on the Hiawatha project last year after reading the poem in its entirety and coming away impressed. The work, 22 chapters in all, is based on stories and legends of various North American Indian tribes.

When Longfellow published Hiawatha in 1855, it was an immediate success. Some 50,000 copies were sold, and it was translated into French, Italian, German and other languages.

In time, it became one of the best-known American poems. Who doesn't know these lines: "On the shores of Gitche Gumee, Of the shining Big-Sea-Water."

Inside a small recording studio last month, Maglaras recorded - performed is a more apt description - the final eight chapters of the poem. As he recited Hiawatha's eight-syllable lines, his hands gestured left and right and above while his voice changed pace and pitch and volume as he transformed from character to character.

His opera training has helped in acting out more than 45 voices, ranging from the narrator to Hiawatha to seven varieties of birds, gods, old men and women, animals, monsters and magicians. Sound effects and music - drums, flutes and shaker instruments - will be added later.

"He brings a drama to the poem," said Michael McInnis, who is recording the production at his studio. "Older works are easily dismissed because they fall into the realm of slightly archaic language. He's bringing a drama to it that has brought the story and the beauty of the poem alive."

Although "The Song of Hiawatha" was a commercial success, it was criticized for being overly sentimental and parodied for its monotonous meter.

Among Native Americans, it has been criticized for perpetuating Indian stereotypes but also praised for showing Indian culture - even a romanticized version - to whites at a time when wars with Indians were still being fought.

"There is evidence certainly that a good many Indians accepted the poem," said Alan Trachtenberg, a retired Yale University professor and the author of "Shades of Hiawatha."

Maglaras maintains that the poem is a "great national epic" worthy of a dramatic performance - not just a reading.

"Hiawatha in its entirety has not been recited aloud in over 120 years anywhere we can find," he said. "And certainly never with sound effects and Native American music and all the things we're doing."

Steve Bromage, assistant director of the Maine Historical Society, said he thinks there's a market for a CD set of the poem. More than 15,000 people each year visit the Wadsworth-Longfellow House, the home where Longfellow spent his youth that is now owned by the society.

"You'd be amazed at the people who come through here and feel a connection to Longfellow," Bromage said.

Maglaras plans an initial run of 5,000 or so boxed CD sets with a cover photo of Longfellow in his older years, a bushy beard and flowing white hair and a cape about his shoulders. The CD sets will sell in the $30 range.

He is also planning a live performance in December where he will read "The Song of Hiawatha" from cover to cover in an auditorium in Portland.

Maglaras finds inspiration in the city where Longfellow grew up and is now the home to Longfellow Square, Longfellow Statue, Longfellow Books and the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. Not far from the recording studio is a brewery that makes Longfellow Ale.

"We're delighted to be recording this in Portland," he said, "because this is Longfellow country."

AND MORE:

Discordant notes: Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, community, race, and performance politics.(Critical Essay)

Source: Journal of American Culture (Malden, MA)

Publication Date: 01-DEC-04

Author: Gaul, Theresa Strouth

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Discordant notes: Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, community, race, and performance politics.(Critical Essay)

COPYRIGHT 2004 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

On the Mountains of the Prairie,



On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry, Gitche Manito, the mighty, He the Master of Life, descending, On the red crags of the quarry Stood erect, and called the nations, Called the tribes of men together. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha

In the 1957 film Desk Set, Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) heads the research department of a media corporation. In charge of locating obscure bits of information, Watson's powers of recall astound the "methods engineer" (Spencer Tracy) who has invented a computer system to maximize efficiency in the department. Throughout the film, Watson answers telephone calls and provides the answers to callers' queries from memory. Upon answering the phone on one of these occasions, Watson begins reciting the most famous lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha: "Forth upon the Gitche Gumee, / On the shining Big-Sea-Water" (52).

Watson's ready recall of these lines suggests the ways that oral recitations of poetry function as part of the American collective memory. Watson's role as archivist and her immersion in the female community composed of the researchers is opposed to the emphasis on efficiency and technology represented by Tracy's character and the male managers who hire him. The triumph of the human sources of memory (the computer cannot retrieve the correct information as quickly as the women can) and community (the women are not fired, and thus separated from one another, after all, but are intended to use the computer as a sort of research assistant) suggests the maintenance of the values implicit in Watson's recitation of the most popular poem of the nineteenth century.

This article examines the social and racial politics of performances of Longfellow's famous poem, especially as they are crystalized in a performance tradition that continues through the present. On nine summer evenings of every year for the last half century, residents of Pipestone, Minnesota, have performed the Song of Hiawatha Pageant to large audiences. In an outdoor amphitheater, costumed white townspeople silently enact the scenes of the poem, the meters of which have been previously taped and are broadcast over loudspeakers to the listening audience. In its form, then, the Hiawatha Pageant can be considered a two-hour poetry reading accompanied by a visual pantomime.

Just as Hepburn's character's recitation of The Song of Hiawatha crystalizes the conflicts between human and computer, memory and technology, and female and male that are explored in the film, the oral performance that is part of the Hiawatha Pageant distills a number of contests in American culture--most importantly for this article, the relationship between poetic performances and notions of community. With the emerging field of performance studies offering an interdisciplinary rubric for examining a variety of cultural and social rituals, performances such as the one taking place annually in Pipestone offer new opportunities for cultural analysis. As Elin Diamond has emphasized, "To study performance is not to study completed forms"--such as the text of Longfellow's poem itself--but to "become aware of performance itself as a contested space, where meanings and desires are generated, occluded, and of course multiply interpreted" (4). My intention in this article, then, is not to provide a new reading of the text of the poem but to consider how its various performances, continuing through the present, are constellated within longstanding concerns about the nature of community in American society. This article takes up three related "contested space[s]," to use Diamond's phrase, relevant to the Hiawatha Pageant: oral performances in the nineteenth century establishing the notion of civic poetry; the history of the Hiawatha Pageant embedded in race relations and Cold War concerns about community; and current areas of conflict surrounding the performance, demonstrating the continued importance of these issues in American culture. The ability of the oral performance of a poem that has been described as "gather[ing] dust in the museum of popular culture" (Aaron xviii) to generate this inquiry highlights the need to reconsider Long fellow's The Song of Hiawatha and its performance history.

Though once one of the most popular poems in American literature, The Song of Hiawatha is not widely known today, especially among younger generations and even among academic specialists in American literature. First published in 1855, the poem opens with a prologue describing the poem's contents as the words of a singer who

... sang of Hiawatha, Sang the Song of Hiawatha, Sang his wondrous birth and being, How he prayed and how he fasted, How he lived, and toiled, and suffered, That he might advance his people! (2)

As the preceding lines suggest, the poem collects and narrates episodes and myths chronicling the life of Hiawatha from his birth through his childhood, adulthood, marriage, and final departure "In the glory of the sunset / ... / To the regions of the home-wind" (160), leaving his people to the guidance of "the Black-Robe chief, the Pale-face" (157). Longfellow's poem was embraced by its audiences, gaining almost instant popularity with five thousand copies sold in the first five weeks, ten thousand in the next six months, and forty-five thousand within three years (Aaron xvi).

Soon the poem was the subject of recitations and public readings. Longfellow himself commented in a letter only six months after the poem's initial publication that "'Hiawatha' rushes onward in readings, recitation and the like" (Hilen 534). In his journal, Longfellow notes public readings of the poem; four entries in a three-week span during March and April 1856, for example, describe such recitations (Tucker 296). Indeed, Longfellow seemed to tire of these public readings over the years. His weariness becomes increasingly evident in selected journal entries entered in the twenty years after his composition of the poem.

1856, March 12. Grace Darling (Miss Houg[h]ton) is reading 'Hiawatha' to crowded houses in Philadelphia, and last night...

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