Hyperion (Longfellow novel)

Its lackluster performance as well as Longfellow's commitments to his Harvard College professorship prevented him from producing significant literary works for a time until his poem "A Psalm of Life" and Hyperion.

[11] 20th-century literary scholar Edward Wagenknecht referred to Hyperion as a "disorganized Jean-Paul Richter kind of romance".

[12] The thinly veiled autobiographical elements of Hyperion did not go unnoticed; Frances Appleton was aware that she was the basis for the Mary character.

Embarrassed by this, as biographer Charles Calhoun writes, she "displayed a new degree of frostiness toward her hapless suitor.

"[13] Longfellow himself admitted the deliberate resemblance in a letter: "The feelings of the book are true; the events of the story mostly fictitious.

Nathan Appleton bought the former Craigie House as a wedding present to the pair and Longfellow lived there for the rest of his life.

[17] The book often alludes to and quotes from German writers such as Heinrich Heine and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.