Hardly a man is now alive who hasn't encountered the opening lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's most famous poem: "Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere."
Before the original publication of "Paul Revere's Ride"—today is the 150th anniversary of its appearance in a Boston newspaper—Revere's story went mostly unheard. The folk hero of the American Revolution was only half-remembered in Massachusetts and almost totally forgotten everywhere else. It took the poetic craft of Longfellow to rescue Revere from obscurity, transforming him into the patriotic icon he remains today.
Yet the project also required Longfellow to stretch the truth so much that several historians have wanted to revoke his poetic license. David Hackett Fischer of Brandeis University has called the poem "grossly, systematically, and deliberately inaccurate." Revere was a man of courage and conviction, but not a lone champion who single-handedly "spread the alarm / Through every Middlesex village and farm."
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