Abstract
In 1847, Henry Longfellow, a well-known American writer published a poem entitled 'Evangéline, a Tale of Acadie', in which he tells a tragic love story of two young Acadians forced to exile during the time of the Deportation. This epic poem of 1400 verses is based on oral tradition and tells the story of Evangéline Bellefontaine and her fiancé Gabriel Lajeunesse. They are separated during the deportation of Grand-Pré in 1755 and the two lovers will have to travel on their own across North America to avoid political tensions between France and England and the constant war between these two nations at this time. Evangéline will try all her life to meet again Gabriel until the day, working as nurse, she sees him in a hospital in his old days, very weak and ill where he dies in her arms. Longfellow was born in 1807 in Maine and became a teacher in 1829 after having graduated from Bourdouin College, Maine. He became a professor in modern languages at Harvard University, a position he quit in 1847 to become a full-time writer. His main source of inspiration is from the story told by two of his friends Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Lorenzo Conolly about a young married couple separated by the English and the quest of the bride to find her fiancé all over North America and their reunion at the end of his life. As soon as Longfellow heard this story, he began to write and published Evangeline two years later.
