The stick in the mud stirs

  

"The New York Times review of The Song of Hiawatha was scathing. 

The anonymous reviewer judged that the poem "is entitled to commendation" for "embalming pleasantly enough the monstrous traditions of an uninteresting, and, one may almost say, a justly exterminated race.  

As a poem, it deserves no place" because there "is no romance about the Indian." He complains that Hiawatha's deeds of magical strength pale by comparison to the feats of Hercules and to "Finn Mac Cool, that big stupid Celtic mammoth." 

 The reviewer writes that "Grotesque, absurd, and savage as the groundwork is, Mr. LONGFELLOW has woven over it a profuse wreath of his own poetic elegancies."  

But, he concludes, Hiawatha "will never add to Mr. LONGFELLOW's reputation as a poet." 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Hiawatha 

Scratch the surface, the pond nary ripple 

Better greenhorn that no horn 

An amateur suffice in deconstruction armed with a sledge 

Creating destruction as entertainment

Some leader hate hats as verb 

One hate atop each, dunce pedestal atop spine 

Romanticism the pagan put-on 

Still suckle roman columns 

Holding child's marbles  

And cats made to fight, a new coliseum 

A world wide web ones staggered through 

On the path to put out recycling bin 

Even though it's trash or 

Incinerated upstream from the formula plant 

The stick in the mud 

Stirs 

 

___ 

"English writer George Eliot called The Song of Hiawatha, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 book The Scarlet Letter, the "two most indigenous and masterly productions in American literature". " 

"Numerous artists also responded to the epic. The earliest pieces of sculpture were by Edmonia Lewis, who had most of her career in Rome.  

Her father was Haitian and her mother was Native American and African American. 

 The arrow-maker and his daughter, later called The Wooing of Hiawatha, was modelled in 1866 and carved in 1872. 

By that time she had achieved success with individual heads of Hiawatha and Minnehaha. Carved in Rome, these are now held by the Newark Museum in New Jersey."