Longfellow around 1850, daguerrotype, Southworth & Hawes, Boston
Nearly two centuries after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow introduced students to the “soaring” poetry of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, two recent Bowdoin grads have published new findings about the Longfellow-Dante connection in the prestigious journal Dante Studies.
Both alumnae worked with primary documents in Bowdoin’s Special Collections and Archives to aid in their research.
“I was looking at marginalia, Longfellow’s handwritten notes,” says Kelsey Abbruzzese ’07.
“It was so amazing to think that Longfellow held this, he wrote on it, and here it is at the College where I can hold it and incorporate it into my essay.”
