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By RAY ROUTHIER, Staff Writer Sunday, February 18, 2007

Kids love stories.

That's why a young Annie Finch was drawn to the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Longfellow was the great American poet of his time, a national celebrity in the 1800s. But growing up in New Rochelle, N.Y., in the 1950s and 1960s, Finch still liked the stories he told: of America's settlement in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," of the Colonies' fight for freedom in "Paul Revere's Ride," and of American Indians in "The Song of Hiawatha." Longfellow told the sometimes-forgotten story of the Acadian exile from Canada in "Evangeline."

"I read poetry all over the place when I was young, but what I remember about Longfellow was that he told stories," said Finch, 50, a published poet and director of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine. "You don't get a lot of the story poems in school, so I never read him in school. But that made him more special to me, that my reading him was in private."

Longfellow's ability to tell compelling stories in simple, accessible ways in his poetry is just one reason why Finch sees him as important and relevant today.

Finch, who has written books of poetry and about poetry, tells stories herself. For example, she has created a series of narrative poems that tell the stories of various goddesses.

Finch also said Longfellow had "the rare knack of being part of his society's conscience," by expressing what people of his time felt and thought about.

His phrases and expressions remain part of common speech 150 years later. Finch cites "the patter of little feet" from "The Children's Hour" and "into each life some rain must fall" from "The Rainy Day" as examples.

As a poet, Finch believes Longfellow resonates today because of his adventuresome attitude toward meter, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.

Today, Finch says, most poetry is written in the classic iambic pentameter, the meter of Shakespeare, or with no meter at all. But Longfellow was a student of poetry in many languages, and used meters found throughout history and from many cultures. In "The Song of Hiawatha" he used trochaic meter, which is used in Finnish poetry and sounds like a drumbeat, Finch said.

"Poetry is all about your ears and your body rhythms, but I think when the typewriter came along, poetry became something you simply read in a book," Finch said. "But Longfellow, I think, wrote his poems to be easily memorized, to be memorized and recited. He was all about the ears and the body."

Finch, who often teaches Longfellow's use of meter to her students, is currently working on a poem that will be part of a Longfellow celebration in November in Portland.

"It's a poem about him and to him," she said.

Staff Writer Ray Routhier can be contacted at 791-6454 or at: