The adverb between "take" and "shape" is intrusive, if that's what you're calling a split infinitive,but I suppose the times were more forgiving. Longfellow was once a part of an American childhood. "The Village Blacksmith," "Hiawatha," his poem about the "midnight ride of Paul Revere" are a part of Americana, once a staple in shools and home libraries. He has been largely eased out of the school curricula for diversity reasons, I think. He represents to many of our own contemporaries a stopping off point, a pit-stop, on the road to a very mixed America, adn is excoriated by some, though some of his best known poems are about American Indians, Cajuns (Acadians), etc. His is a very WASPY and sentimentalizing point of view. Benign, but implicitly patronizing in the minds of many. I don't remember whether I encountered him in school first or at home, but around the age of ten or eleven, I loved "Hiawatha," "The Village Blacksmith," "Evangeline," "Paul Revere" etc., though by the time I was fourteen LOngfellow was someone who belonged to my personal past. I could measure the distance I had come by looking back at him. I think he remains that for many Americans.
He probably fails to hold the interest of adults, not because of his craft, but because of his sentimentality and his tendency to make the big picture look simple. Which I suppose is the task of one writing about a new land without legend or myth of its own--or at least the literary elaboration of it. He was perhaps better, given his intent, than he appears today, when the power centers of the country seem to have shifted away from white bread to rye. "Speaking for" rather than "letting others speak for themselves," he may look a bit quaint.
I don't regret having read him, but I don't miss him either.
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