Text: Helen Lucile Watts, “Preface,” Poe's The Life and Writings of Henry Beck Hirst of Philadelphia Story, Masters Thesis, 1925

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PREFACE

In the literature of every country and. period. there are writers, possessing some talent but no genius, who loom large in their own locality and in the years of their prime, but whose importance becomes gradually less and less through the sifting process of later years. Such a literary figure was Henry Beck Hirst, the subject of this essay. His biography and a criticism of his poems are now written chiefly because he was “Poe's Philadelphia satellite”, and so still has something of reflected significance. Therefore the facts of his life are here set forth with as much detail and care as the available sources permitted; while in the criticism chief attention is given to the poems written during his association with Poe, and to his best known work (“Endymion”) which he was said to have written “after Keats”.

The essay is based principally on materials preserved in the New York Public Library, which has now a considerable number of letters to Hirst, sold by a member of his family in 1921, and of which the greater part were obtained for the Library by Dr. Thos. O. Mabbott.