Text: Anonymous, “[Review of Gill's Life of Poe],” The Nation (New York, NY), vol. 26, whole no. 667, April 11, 1878, p. 248, cols. 1-2

[page 248, column 1:]

The Life of Edgar Allan Poe. By William F. Gill. Illustrated. Fourth edition, revised and enlarged. (New York: W. J. Widdleton.) — The disappointed reader may at least recognize the truth of one sentence in this most unsatisfactory book — the passage, namely, in which it is asserted that “the relentless fate that pursued the unhappy poet [Poe] during his lifetime followed him after death “ (p. 268). It is quite true up to this moment, and Mr. Gill's biography is simply Fate's latest instrument. The “phenomenal catastrophe” which, it instated, prevented the erection of a slab over the poet's grave, has been followed by the severer catastrophe involved in the production of this memoir. Yet, after all, Mr. Gill is simply the last and worst of those relentless friends of Poe who persist in seeing in every criticism upon his sad career only a new proof that “his temperament was totally at variance with the spirit of the age in which he lived” (p. 241). If these deluded people could only recognize the fact that the cloud which rests over the poet's fame is not of Mr. Griswold's creating; that Mr. Griswold himself is almost forgotten: that nobody is fighting for him: and that the world would only be too thankful to anybody who should prove that Griswold was wrong and Poe right! Yet they do not prove it — they do not even attempt proof; they only rain down epithets with a virulence worthy of Poe himself, and end by conceding, and even reaffirming, almost every charge that ever was made against the unhappy poet.

Here comes Mr. Gill, for instance, and issues an angry controversial pamphlet of more than three hundred pages. Yet he adds not one fact of importance to our knowledge of Poe, and the only real value of the book is in its concessions. He frankly admits that Poe quarrelled with his adopted father for refusing to pay the gambling debts of his unworthy protége (p. 40); that he made his child-wife very unhappy in the early days of their marriage (p. 140); that his word was utterly worthless when speaking of his own life and writings (p. 136); that he insulted one of his most intimate female friends. Mrs. Ellet, in a way which he afterwards owned to be “a dishonor,” though he never seems to have apologized for it. As to the poet's fits of drunkenness, Mr. Gill admits them again and again, and abundantly confirms what he calls a statement of “ferocious cruelty” when Griswold makes it, that “his [Poe's] habits of frequent intoxication and his inattention to the means of support had reduced him to much more than common destitution “ (p. 185). Nay, the new biographer goes so far as to print a fac-simile of a letter of the poet's, during his disastrous visit to Washington, and this for no apparent purpose but to show by the handwriting the “unfortunate condition of the author” (p. 120). If it is desirable to cover up the infirmities of genius, Mr. Gill has thus hit upon a refinement of cruelly that never would have occurred to the duller hostility of Griswold.

As if finally to refute his own theory of the malice of the previous biographer, Mr Gill prints al the end of his book a review by Poe of Griswold's ‘Poets of America,’ alleging that this was what stung that prosaic compiler into blackening the memory of the poet. Now, not only [column 2:] is the criticism itself in the very worst style of that crude and abusive early period of American literature: not only does it show us Poe as introducing puffs of himself, over and over again, as thus: “Edgar A. Poe, who has spent more time in analyzing the construction of our language than any living grammarian, critic, or essayist” (p. 334), but it specifically refutes the precise argument for whose sake it is introduced. This review by Poe was aimed at the third edition of Griswold's tedious book: whereas any one who will refer to the first edition will find that the author had already implied there, very distinctly, the same low moral estimate of Poe which he later showed. In short, it was Poe, not Griswold. who wrote under a grudge.

The conclusion of the whole matter is that Mr. Gill adds little if anything to our knowledge of Poe: and that little tells against the cause which the biographer so vehemently maintains. This leaves it in doubt why the book was written until we reach the appendix, and there learn that, at the dedication of the Poe monument in Baltimore. Mr. Gill recited the “Raven” publicly: that “the large audience was absolutely spell-bound by his perfect elocution “ (p. 270): and that he “was made the recipient of an ovation at its close” (p. 308). We fear that he will not win a similar tribute from his readers.