Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet, translator, and educator born in Portland, Maine, in 1807. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825, taught modern languages there from 1829 to 1835, and subsequently taught French and Spanish literature at Harvard. His command of European languages informed both his teaching and his literary work; later achievements included his influential translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Longfellow wrote Blind Bartimeus on November 3, 1841, after reading Mark 10:46-52 in Greek. The poem, included in Ballads and Other Poems, closely reshapes that Gospel narrative, retaining three Greek expressions as dramatic refrains and then turning from narration to an appeal for spiritual sight. It was a literary poem rather than a text written for a particular congregational tune. Its regular six-line stanzas nevertheless allowed later editors to adapt it for hymnal use. In this record Longfellow is properly identified as the author of the words only: Jeremiah Ingalls's FILLMORE predates the poem and was not composed for it. Hymnal versions commonly modernize the spelling to Bartimaeus and replace or translate the Greek phrases.