 Margaret Fuller judged him " artificial and imitative " and lacking force . Poet Walt Whitman also considered Longfellow an imitator of European forms , though he praised his ability to reach a popular audience as " the <unk> of common themes – of the little songs of the masses " . He added , " Longfellow was no <unk> : never traveled new paths : of course never broke new paths . " Lewis Mumford said that Longfellow could be completely removed from the history of literature without much effect . Towards the end of his life , contemporaries considered him more of a children 's poet as many of his readers were children . A contemporary reviewer noted in 1848 that Longfellow was creating a " Goody two @-@ shoes kind of literature ... slipshod , sentimental stories told in the style of the nursery , beginning in nothing and ending in nothing " . A more modern critic said , " Who , except wretched schoolchildren , now reads Longfellow ? " A London critic in the London Quarterly Review , however , condemned all American poetry , saying , " with two or three exceptions , there is not a poet of mark in the whole union " but singled out Longfellow as one of those exceptions . As an editor of the Boston Evening Transcript wrote in 1846 , " Whatever the miserable envy of trashy criticism may write against Longfellow , one thing is most certain , no American poet is more read " . 
