Text: Arlin Turner, “Poe and Simms: Friendly Critics, Sometimes Friends,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 140-160

[page 140:]

Arlin Turner

DUKE UNIVERSITY

 

Poe and Simms: Friendly Critics,
Sometimes Friends

 

IN THE 1830's and 40's Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms dominated Southern letters and stood more prominent on the national literary scene than anyone else in the ante-bellum South. Their personal acquaintance was slight — they had no such extended association as Emerson and Thoreau had, nor such a brief, intense relationship as Hawthorne and Melville had in 1850. But they were aware of each other at least from 1836, when Poe first reviewed a book by Simms; they were confreres in the Young America group and collaborated in the literary wars of the time, especially from 1845, when Poe became editor of the Broadway Journal, until his death in 1849; and for a few months in 1845 and 1846 they stood together in a common cause and intentionally exchanged literary favors. Moreover, they published criticism on each other's works as great in total amount and as perceptive as exists, perhaps, for any other pair of our authors.

Their literary endeavors followed lines often parallel: both wrote poetry, fiction, and criticism; they wrote voluminously for magazines and were magazine editors and proprietors; as champions of literary nationalism, they had largely the same friends and the same enemies; when the literary warfare extended to sectional antagonisms, they found their common ground enlarged. It might be noted that both Poe and Simms had experienced — and were conscious of — social, educational, and financial handicaps. But it is more important to note [page 141:] that in temperament, outlook, and habits two men more different would be hard to find. Their relations were not personal but literary, and those relations are important for what they reveal about the American literary scene of the time, and perhaps more important for what they disclose about the mind and character and literary outlook of each author as he criticized the works of the other in that scene.

In January 1836 Poe reviewed Simms's new romance, The Partisan, in the Southern Literary Messenger (II, 117-121),(1) of which he had become editor the preceding December. Earlier romances by Simms had won popular and critical favor, Martin Faber and Guy Rivers in 1834 and The Yemassee in 1835. The considerable reputation Simms had gained is suggested by the fact that in the same month Poe's review appeared the Philadelphia magazine Atkinson's Casket: Or Gems of Literature, Wit and Sentiment (No. 1, pp. 55, 59) carried a favorable review of The Partisan and asserted elsewhere in the same issue that Simms, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Pendleton Kennedy “give cheering evidence that the mantles of Shakespeare, Byron and Scott have not been hermetically sealed in the grave, and that here, in the wilds of America, there is a promise of genius as powerful and luxurious” as Europe has produced.

Poe's review of The Partisan was severe, and for the most part harsh in tone; but the value he placed on Simms is attested by the fact that his review is a long one and that his severe criticism is offset by high praise. It resembles others of the review-essays in which his assessment of the work in hand is less important than his formulation of theories for the genre to which it belongs. His review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) lays down principles for the short story; his review of The Partisan presents views on the novel of his time, especially the historical romance. This review falls well below the review of the Twice-Told Tales both in quality and importance in the Poe canon. Three reasons suggest themselves: it is one of his earliest critical essays; it deals with a work inferior to Hawthorne's tales; the romance, in contrast to the short story, was not a literary type Poe wrote or even liked.

That Poe is using The Partisan to illustrate criticism aimed at a broader target is apparent in several instances where he points out flaws in this book, only to add that Simms is following the usual practice and does no worse than others. The review opens with an extravagant burlesque of Simms's dedication, but Poe calls it a burlesque and adds that this dedication is “quite as good as one half the antique and [page 142:] lackadaisical courtesies with which we daily see the initial leaves of our best publications disfigured.” For another matter, the work has “very little plot or connexion,” but the author “aimed at neither, for he was writing a historical romance and had as a main purpose to present historical scene and event. “The interweaving of fact with fiction is at all times hazardous,” and Simms had failed in this work, but Poe found no reason to wonder “at his failure in performing what no novelist whatever has hitherto performed.” As if to interject a light note at this point, after remarking that Simms has said he may not continue his projected series of romances of the Revolution, Poe then solemnly opines, “Upon the whole we think that he had better not.”

The list of flaws continues, flaws that The Partisan has in common with other historical romances. The “silly practice,” the “frippery” of opening a chapter with “And” or “But” Simms had found “in its most reprehensible form” in Bulwer and Disraeli. Each chapter in The Partisan is introduced by lines of poetry “(we suppose in line with the good old fashion),” but the author was “wiser than his neighbors,” for he wrote his own verses. The description of the hero need not be quoted, for “a perfect fac-simile of it may be found near the commencement of every fashionable novel since the flood.” All of the fictional characters, including the women, “will not bear examination.” One of them belongs to a type of “anomalies so swarming in fiction”; another “”is in the very worst style of the times un peu passes.” Porgy is “a most insufferable bore,” who bores the reviewer especially with his constant use of “d — n” — Poe calls any use of profanity “despicable.” How Simms fell into his errors in creating Porgy is to Poe “a mystery of mysteries,” and he adds unbelievingly, “Yet Porgy is evidently a favorite with the author.” Although such “horrible” characters as these receive most attention in the review, others “are really excellent. ... The historical characters are, without exception, well drawn ..., vivid realities, ... positively unsurpassed by any similar delineations within our knowledge.”

Even for the two flaws Poe considers worst in The Partisan, the “shockingly bad” English and the “villainously bad taste,” he allows some extenuation. Two dozen or so quoted examples of faulty diction and confused and opaque sentences justify characterizing the language as “‘exceedingly confused, ill-arranged and ungrammatical.” But even here the strictures are softened. Poe quotes a sentence which he defies his Satanic Majesty to translate, and he is no more than half serious in citing the over-use of pet words, “coil,” “hug,” and “old-time.” In [page 143:] the next issue of the Messenger (11, 179),(2) moreover, Poe remarks that “all fine writers have pet words and phrases” and names Simms as one example. In charging The Partisan with bad taste, Poe means the drawing out of literal realistic details of brutality and suffering — and he can cite impressive examples in the book. His objection is not to the effect of horror or terror gained through indirection and from a distance, as he probably would have said was the case in “Berenice,” “The Case of M. Valdemar,” and “Hop-Frog,” among others of his own stories. His protest is against what he terms “that mere physique of the horrible which has obtained for some Parisian novelists the title of the ‘French convulsives.”

In spite of “its manifest and manifold blunders and impertinences,” Poe concludes, “”The Partisan’ is no ordinary work. Its historical details are replete with interest. The concluding scenes are well drawn. Some passages descriptive of swamp scenery are exquisite. Mr. Simms has evidently the eye of a painter.” Then, to end on the note of light banter that has echoed throughout the review, ‘Perhaps, in sober truth, he would succeed better in sketching a landscape than he has done in writing a novel.”

Taking full account of the contents and the implications of this review is important to an understanding of the Poe-Simms relations afterward. It does not contain the scathing criticism of the book or the personal derogation and insinuation some of those writing on Poe or Simms have attributed to it.(3) Rather, Poe makes clear that Simms is a major author, that this book is unworthy of him, having the shortcomings common to the historical romance and other current types of long fiction, that it has genuine merits, nevertheless, particularly in the portrayal of historical characters and the narration of exciting events. In subsequent references to The Partisan, Poe echoed this assessment. For example, in his note among the “Autography” sketches, in the Messenger for August 1836 (II, 602),(4) he repeated that Simms had “the eye of a painter,” a compliment he also paid John Pendleton Kennedy. Poems by Simms appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger for August 1836 (II, 530, 535), and September (III, 635636), and Poe most likely accepted some of the poems by Simms that were printed in the Messenger during 1837, when Poe was no longer editor (February, III, 157; March, III, 194-196; June, III, 353-360, 367-369; October, III, 619; and November, III, 666).

Poe's second extended comment on a romance by Simms, his review of The Damsel of Darien in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine for [page 144:] November 1839 (V, 283-285),(5) is an essay on the historical romance as a type and the related matter of imitation, with the book used to illustrate his general views. The Partisan, “with many excellences” and also “very many disfiguring features,” he thought “hardly worthy the literary reputation of Mr. Simms.” But Martin Faber, now in a third edition, “well deserves a permanent success,” and the new romance, compared with The Partisan, is “a much better book; evincing stricter study, with a far riper judgment, and a more rigidly disciplined fancy.” Poe speaks now of “specimens of good writing” and chapters “particularly forcible and full of interest.” Though “the style of our novelist has improved of late,” the dedication is “laboriously bad” and the work replete “with awkward or positively ungrammatical phrases.” Such “blunders and inadvertences” as these may be remedied in a second edition, but there is no easy remedy for the “grossness of thought and expression,” the “images which repel and disgust,” the “horrid barbarities.”

Part of the interest in The Damsel of Darien, like The Partisan a historical romance, lies in “its adherence to fact” and “”is essentially independent of the author.” The novel has few defects and they are “seldom radical.” “The leading sin is the sin of imitation — the entire absence of originality. Mr. Simms adheres to the good old-fashioned way of getting at his subjects, and of handling them when attained. Every sentence puts us in mind of something we have heard similarly said before. This imitation is also perceptible in higher particulars.” These assertions rest on the same definitions of originality and imitation that underlie Poe's reservations about Hawthorne's originality in his review of the Twice-Told Tales five years later. What is demanded is something that reminds us of nothing we have read before. The kind of imitation Poe means is less a fault than the absence of a positive merit. The charge is different in kind and in severity from his charge of plagiarism against Longfellow later, by which he meant specific borrowing from specific works.

A series of brief statements by Poe were consistent with the earlier reviews in assessing Simms's works, but tended to give more sweeping approval. A note in Graham's Magazine for March 1841 (XVIII, 143), after Poe had become editor, declared that “since the publication of the Pathfinder,” the writer had “seen nothing equal to” Simms's The Kinsmen: Or the Black Riders of the Congaree. “Many of the characters are well drawn,” the note continued. “Flora Middleton is an exquisite creation.” In “A Chapter on Autography,” in [page 145:] Graham's for November 1841 (XIX, 229),(6) Poe placed Simms above John Pendleton Kennedy in “his appreciation / of the graceful,” “his sense of beauty,” but below in other regards, and added that he liked Simms as a poet better than as a novelist. The next month he said in Graham's (XIX, 306) that Simms put him “in mind of a volcano, from the very darkness issuing from whose crater we judge of the fire that is weltering below.” It had been a mistake for Simms to write historical romances, such as The Partisan and The Yemassee, for “his genius does not lie in the outward so much as in the inner world.” With Simms's new book, Confession: Or the Blind Heart. A Domestic Story, he continued, “we welcome him home to his own proper field of exertion — the field of Godwin and Brown — the field of his own rich intellect and glowing heart.” Returning in Graham's for May 1842 (XX, 300), to his quarrel with the historical romance, Poe said that the tragedy of Sharpe and Beauchampe, on which Simms had based his romance Beauchampe, was itself so thrilling that little was “left for invention.” He found the theme skilfully handled,” nevertheless, and concluded, “The author ... is one among the best of our native novelists — pure, bold, vigorous, original.”

In reviewing Cooper's Wyandotté in Graham's for November 1843 (XX, 261),(7) Poe placed Simms along with Charles Brockden Brown, John Neal, and Nathaniel Hawthorne “among American writers of the less generally circulated but more worthy and more artistic fictions” than Cooper's. Among the “Marginalia” sketches in the Democratic Review of December 1844 (XV, 585, 592),(8) Poe quoted two excerpts from The Damsel of Darien, both repeated from his earlier review: the poem “Indian Serenade,” which he called the best portion of the romance, and two elaborate images that he again called absurd. A thumbnail estimate in the same number concluded with the highest praise he had yet printed: “Mr. Simms has abundant faults — or had; — among which inaccurate English, a proneness to revolting images, and pet phrases, are the most noticeable. Nevertheless, leaving out of the question Brockden Brown and Hawthorne (who are each a genus), he is immeasurably the best writer of fiction in America. He has more vigor, more imagination, more movement and more general capacity than all our novelists (save Cooper) combined.”

The attention Simms's works received in the magazines Poe edited from 1836 to 1845 (the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, and Graham's Magazine) was considerable and was preponderantly favorable. During the same years Simms took only the [page 146:] barest note of Poe in print or in his letters. Prompted by John Tomlin of Jackson, Tennessee, he printed in the June 1843 number of the journal he was editing in Charleston, the Magnolia (n.s. II, 400), an announcement of the magazine Poe was planning to found:

Tomlin, who called Poe and Simms his “two most valued friends,” tried more than once to bring the two together. On 2 July 1843, he wrote Poe that in “private letters to me, he speaks in high praise of your Endowments as an artist.”(9) Although Poe had published two books in this period, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in 1837 and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840, he had little prominence until he published “The Raven,” 29 January 1845. In Rufus Wilmot Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America, 1842, it might be noted, Simms occupies twice as much space as Poe for both the biographical sketch and the selections. In Griswold's Prose Writers of America, 1846, the same proportions prevail.

Simms's silence on Poe before 1845 (except for his announcement of the Stylus) therefore might need no explanation, but Poe's review of The Partisan no doubt was partly responsible. In a letter of 15 March 1845, to Evert A. Duyckinck in New York Simms recalled that review published in January 1836.(10)

It was Simms's habit to look closely at the reviews of his books, and often in letters to his long-time friend James Lawson he answered in unequivocal language any criticism he thought unwarranted. On 3March 1836, two months after Poe's review appeared, Simms wrote Lawson his objections to portions of a review of The Partisan by Henry William Herbert, but he did not mention Poe's review. He recognized the justice of much Poe had said, and he may have been reluctant to acknowledge to Lawson a divergence from the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. In writing to Duyckinck after nine years, he showed a tolerance and equanimity that would have been impossible earlier. [page 147:] Moreover, Poe was at the time engaged in a literary battle in which the sympathies of both Simms and Duyckinck were with him. In the New York Evening Mirror of 13 and 14 January 1845, Poe had charged Longfellow with plagiarism, thus opening the “Longfellow War.”(11)

Simms had failed to convince Cornelius Mathews of Poe's singular merits, he wrote, and was glad to have Duyckinck “think and speak well of Poe.” He continued, “Poe is no friend of mine, as I believe. He began by a very savage attack on one of my novels — the Partisan. I cannot say that he was much out in his estimate. In some respects, as a story for example — and in certain matters of taste and style, that was one of the very worst of the books I have ever written.” His protest was that Poe had passed over the merits of the novel to belabor its faults. Simms seems to have been remembering Poe's criticism in the context of the current literary war. “My deportment had not justified it. He knew, or might have known, that I was none of that miserable gang about town, who beg in the literary highways. I had no clique, mingled with none, begged no praise from anybody, and made no conditions with the herd. He must have known what I was personally — might have known — and being just should not have been rude.”

Continuing his letter to Duyckinck, Simms explained, “I tell you all this to satisfy you of my sense of verities. I do not puff the man when I say I consider him a remarkable one. He has more real imaginative power than 99 in the 100 of our poets and tale writers. His style is clear and correct, his conceptions bold and fanciful, his fancies vivid, and his taste generally good.” Probably recalling Poe's reviews of The Partisan and The Damsel of Darien, Simms remarked that he seemed “too much the subject of his moods” and said “bitter things through a wanton consciousness of power,” and that his criticism was “too frequently given to the analysis of the inferior points of style. ... But, I repeat,” Simms continued, ‘he is a man of remarkable power, to whom I shall strive one day to do that justice which a great portion of our public seems desirous to withold.” He added, with a note of sympathy, that he knew of Poe's extreme poverty and ‘’irregular” private life.

In an autobiographical account written to Rufus Wilmot Griswold 6 December 1846, Simms described Poe's review of The Partisan with still greater tolerance than in his letter to Duyckinck. Poe's criticism had been “as full of detailed objections as a plum pudding is of currants,” he said; the review was “a severe, but in many respects, just [page 148:] critique upon the work.” Simms's purpose was to quote for Griswold Poe's most laudatory comments on the romance.

In 1845 Simms made his annual visit to New York about 20 August and stayed into the second week of October. He and Poe met, possibly for the first time, and entered a year in which they in effect collaborated in the current literary debate and made occasions each to bolster the literary reputation of the other. Simms made good his intention to do Poe justice. He reviewed volumes of Poe's tales and poems, and he published comment suitable for Poe to reprint in defense of his own increasingly embattled position. Poe wrote his most favorable review of a book by Simms, The Wigwam and the Cabin, commended Simms as author and as editor, and regularly published poems by Simms in the Broadway Journal. This mutual support was intentional on both sides. They occupied common ground in demanding a national literature, in charging journals in Boston and New York with sectional bias, and, as invidious regional comparisons were introduced, in arguing the merits of Southern literature. That each valued the work of the other highly cannot be doubted; and their deliberate mutual support did not prevent each from publishing some of the most discerning criticism of the other that was written in their time.

During the summer of 1845 Simms asked Duyckinck regularly for news on the “Longfellow War,” and he in turn made it clear that he favored Poe's position. On 6 June: “How does Poe get on with the Longfellows[?] He is more than half right.” Two days later: “I think Longfellow's ‘Waif” a poor compilation. I had almost said a dishonest one. His own verses are quite tasteful and pretty.” On 15 July: Longfellow does not “possess a native character”; he is a “man of nice taste, a clever imitator, — simply an adroit artist.” To another correspondent, William Henry Carpenter, 24 April 1847, Simms wrote: “We have had few or no ballad writers in America. Mr. Longfellow, whose friends insist upon his pretensions in this respect, lacks utterly that muscle, that bone, sinew and nervous energy which, with a delightful quaintness constituted the peculiar characteristic of the English ballad.”

In print also Simms said much that explicitly or implicitly supported Poe. Sharing Poe's opinion that the North American Review championed New England unquestioningly, including Longfellow and other authors, Simms published in the Southern and Western Magazine (often called Simms's Magazine) for May 1845 (I, 297-311), an essay entitled “A Passage with ‘The Veteran Quarterly,” in which he said [page 149:] of the Review, “It clings to itself, to New-Englandism only, and knows no nation beside.” In the Editorial Bureau of the Southern and Western for November (II, 348-350) he remarked that James Russell Lowell was “‘more of a poet and less of an artist than Longfellow, and more pregnant with thoughts and fancies, original and fresh,” than Longfellow or Whittier, and continued: “Longfellow is an artist — delicate, graceful, ingenious — in all respects of versemaking. He has an exquisite ear for the appreciation of the harmonies of language — but it strikes us that it would not be difficult to point to the ear-mark of another in the thoughts contained in every sentence which he ever penned. His first labors in verse were the most servile copyings of Bryant. The Germans and early English song writers furnish his present models.” His drama “The Spanish Student” is “a bald and feeble copy. ... It is the grace and sweetness of his verse, and that extreme simplicity of thought which taxes no intellect to scan, — which we read as we run — that constitutes his claims upon the regards of the reader.” Longfellow's new volume, The Poets and Poetry of Europe, had little of Longfellow in it; he “had helped himself without scruple, to the riff-raff translations of beginners.” In the same issue (II, 357) Simms lamented that publishers offered the latest book by Disraeli more readily than “the productions of a native writer.” The need, he said in phrases Poe would have approved, is “to shake off the colonial thraldom which still fetters, in so large a degree, the otherwise free spirit of this nation.”

Simms regretted, in a letter to Duyckinck 8 June 1845, that the Broadway Journal did not reach him regularly; “Poe's writings are always interesting to me.” And he fretted (15, 31 July, 7 August) because Poe's volume of tales in Wiley and Putnam's Library of American Books had not come, for, as he had repeated on 25 June, he had “every disposition to do him justice.” The promised review of Poe's tales appeared in the Editorial Bureau of the Southern and Western for December 1845 (II, 426-427). It begins:

As if to explain his lateness in writing on Poe and the brevity of this review, Simms spoke of him as an author whose works he had been “more or less familiar” with for several years and “one of those writers of peculiar idiosyncrasies, strongly marked and singularly original, whom it must be of general service to analyze with justice and circumspection.” He said he would write more fully on Poe another time, and on 2 March of the next year he reviewed The Raven and Other Poems in the Southern Patriot (his editorship of the Southern and Western had ended at the close of the year). His favorable review could have been read as a response to abusive treatment the book and its author had received in the Knickerbocker in January and again in February (XXVII, 69-72, 184).

Poe's personal affairs troubled Simms more as their acquaintance grew. Before leaving Charleston for New York, Simms had written Duyckinck on 8 August: “What you tell me of Poe distresses me. But, in his circumstances, and for such a man, it is difficult to devise anything, — unless it be to control his infirmities with a moral countenance which coerces while it soothes and seems to solicit. This should be the case of the circle in which he moves.” And after visiting in New York, Simms was prepared to champion Poe against his enemies, some of whom he had castigated in other contexts earlier. Writing James Lawson on 22 August 1842, he had referred to “those dirty dogs of the New York Mirror,” meaning N. P. Willis and his associates. On 19 October 1845, a week after returning home, he wrote Duyckinck about “the dirty fellows at the Mirror ..., wretched and base creatures” who probably had been influenced by “that other dirty crawling creeping creature, Clark” of the Knickerbocker.

Writing in the New York Evening Mirror 7 November, the Morning News the next day, and the Weekly Mirror 15 November (III, 96), Duyckinck attacked Lewis Gaylord Clark and the Knickerbocker, protesting ‘”’against the tone of depreciation which the magazine has assumed in repeated instances towards such men as” Cornelius [page 151:] Mathews, John Neal, Simms, and Poe.(12) Simms wrote James Lawson 13 November, “The assaults on Clarke [sic] are not as strong as they should have been. ...Duyckinck is only too gentle an enemy.” The same day he wrote Duyckinck, “No doubt you should long ago have silenced and crushed the miserable reptile in question. Had I been living in New York I could not have refrained, long ago, to have scourged him hip and thigh for the scoundrel and puppy that he is. He is of your parish not of mine, and he deserves that you should use the flail without mercy. ... had you all turned in and hammered him when Poe began the game, you would have timed it rightly. ... I shall do a trifle in the Patriot and Mag. but really having given him the lie in print and cut him in society, I feel loath to soil my fingers with the skunk.” In the Southern Patriot of 19 November Simms wrote about the Knickerbocker: “ ... some of our Northern contemporaries are beginning to speak of this dishonest and trashy periodical, in the terms which it deserves. ... The total want of character which its matter exhibits, has sufficiently done the work of criticism upon it.”(13) In writing Duyckinck 24 November, Simms had more to say on Clark: “It is necessary that the war once begun should be a war of extermination. Either this, or you just make noise enough to give him notoriety & prolong his existence. You should speak more plainly and show him up as a mere liar & skunk. Do not treat him as a literary man at all, but as the swindler of literary men.”(14)

Simms's fullest defense of Poe — or apology — was in the Southern Patriot 10 November, a defense that Poe exultantly reprinted in the Broadway Journal of 22 November (II, 309-311),(15) introducing it as follows: “As we confidently expected, our friends in the Southern and Western country (true friends, and tried) are taking up arms in our cause — and more especially in the cause of a national as distinguished from a sectional literature. They cannot see (it appears) any farther necessity for being ridden to death by New England.” Simms was writing to support Poe in the flurry of accusations that followed his reading at the Boston Lyceum on 16 October. (He had read not a new poem but portions of “Al Aaraaf.” The Lyceum trustees voted on the following 25 May to censure him for the reading.)

Simms began by assessing Poe, mainly in phrases of high commendation: “singular endowments of imagination. ... an admirable critic. ... methodical, lucid, forcible; — well-read, thoughtful, and capable, at all times, of rising from the mere consideration of the individual subject, to the principles, in literature and art, by which it [page 152:] should be governed. ... not a person to be overborne and silenced by a reputation. ... bold, independent, and stubbornly analytical, in the formation of his opinions.” Poe has defects also, Simms conceded: “he is sometimes the victim of capricious moods; — his temper is variable — his nervous organization being such, evidently, as to subject his judgments, sometimes, to influences that may be traced to the weather and the winds. — He takes his colour from the clouds. ... His fancy takes the ascendant in his Poetry, and wings his thoughts to such superior elevations, as to render it too intensely spiritual for the ordinary reader.”

Thus Simms came to the first mistake he said Poe made in accepting the invitation to read in Boston: For such an audience you must pitch your flight no “higher than the penny-whistle elevation” of a couplet by Pope. “Either this, or declamatory verse, — or something patriotic, or something satirical, or something comical. At all events, you must not be mystical. ... Your song must be such as they can read running, and comprehend while munching peanuts. Mr. Poe is not the writer for this sort of thing. He is too original, too fanciful, too speculative.” It was a mistake, further, for Poe to read in Boston because as a critic he “had dealt with the favorites of Boston unsparingly, and they hankered after their revenges.” “The swans of New-England, under his delineation, had been described as mere geese, and those, too, of none of the whitest. He had been exposing the short comings and the plagiarisms of Mr. Longfellow, who is supposed, along the banks of the Penobscot, to be about the comeliest bird that ever dipped his bill in Pieria.” Still another error of Poe was to go to the platform after the audience had suffered the infliction of “a discourse of three mortal hours by a prosing orator,” Caleb Cushing. To prove that Poe did not fail at all, Simms quoted from the Boston Courier a laudatory report of the reading.

Two weeks after reprinting Simms's defense of his Babson Lyceum reading, Poe carried in the Broadway Journal, 6 December (II, 339-341), “pregnant extracts from Mr. Simms's editorial farewell” in the November Southern and Western (II, 344-345) — without apology, he said, for using so much space in this way. Earlier in the 7 June number of the Journal (I, 354)(16) he had ranked Simms below Hawthorne but above N. P. Willis among the few ‘”respectably skilful tale-writers” in America. In the issue of 30 August (II, 121) he had commended Simms's Magazine: “as ably edited as any journal of its species in America — if not more ably edited than any.” He praised [page 153:] the contents, quoted two paragraphs in which Simms agreed with him and the Democratic Review in condemning “the very mediocres poems” of William W. Lord.(17) He also reported that Simms soon would publish a volume of critical essays. In the number for 27 September (II, 184) Poe announced that Simms would contribute to the Broadway Journal, apparently reflecting an agreement reached since Simms had arrived in New York. Poems by Simms began appearing with the issue for 4 October (II, 190), in which Poe said the September number of Simms's Magazine was, “as usual, excellent” and in which he quoted from one of the “remarkably fine poems” in it (II, 192). Likewise Poe's review of The Wigwam and the Cabin on 4 October (II, 130-131)(18) evidences a special readiness to praise Simms. He restated objections registered earlier — the “many inaccuracies of style” in The Partisan and “the prevalence of the merely repulsive, where the horrible was the object,” the repression exercised by “historical truth” on the natural strength of the artist, as in Beauchampe. But phrases of superlative approval dominate the review: “the most American of the American books”; “the best novelist which the country has, upon the whole, produced”; “in invention, in vigor, in movement, in the power of exciting interest, and the artistic management of his themes, he has surpassed, we think, any of his countrymen”; “‘Beauchampe’ is intensely interesting”; ‘Richard Hurdis’ is the perfection of rough vigor in conception and conduct — a very powerful book. ‘Castle Dismal’ is one of the most original fictions ever penned”; ‘Murder Will Out’ is the first and most meritorious of the series now lying before us. We have no hesitation in calling it the best ghost story we ever read. It is full of the richest and most vigorous imagination — is forcefully conceived — and detailed throughout with a degree of artistic skill which has had no parallel among American story-tellers since the epoch of Brockden Brown.”

In Godey's Lady's Book for January of the next year (XXXII, 41-42)(19) Poe printed a rewriting of this review, citing the same merits and faults, but with more specific reference to the faults and with the added note that “there is still abundant room for improvement.” This version is sober in tone, lacking the earlier effect of exuberant praise. Poe's purpose now is not simply to evaluate Simms, but also to argue, with bitter irony, for an American literature and also for the recognition of Southern authors. A sub-sub-editor of an English journal had by chance called one of Simms's stories, “Murder Will Out,” readable. Had the story been very bad, “still, under the circumstances, we [page 154:] patriotic and independent Americans would have declared it inimitable; but, by some species of odd accident, it happens to deserve all that the British sub-sub had condescended to say of it, on the strength of a guess as to what it was all about. It is really an admirable tale, nobly conceived, and skilfully carried into execution — the best ghost story ever written by an American — for we presume that this is the ultimate extent of commendation to which we, as an humble American, dare go.” To urge the same point with another instance, Poe returned to his earlier judgment that Martin Faber is superior to another book, Miserrimus,(20) which popular opinion had favored. “The difference in the American reception of the two is to be referred to the fact (we blush while recording it,) that ‘Miserrimus’ was understood to be the work of an Englishman, and ‘Martin Faber’ was understood to be the composition of an American as yet unaccredited in our Republic of Letters.” Going on to his second point, Poe wrote, “The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indication, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a southerner, and united the southern pride — the southern dislike to the making of bargains — with the southern supineness and general want of tact in all matters relating to the making of money.” The book had to depend therefore on its own merits, but “made its way in the end.”

A passage in the Marginalia papers in the Democratic Review of July 1846 (XIX, 31-32), which quotes again from Poe's favorite of all Simms's poems, “Indian Serenade,” epitomizes Poe's reiterated judgment of Simms's work and throws sharp light on what he meant by imitation. He points out flaws in the poem, but adds: “These and other imitations, however, are but the inevitable sins of the youth of genius — which invariably begins its career by imitation — an imitation, nevertheless, interspersed with vivid originality. I think I have before observed that, in letters, a copyist is, as a general rule, by no means necessarily unoriginal, except at the exact points of the copy. Mr. Simms is, beyond doubt, one of our most original writers.”

Simms continued to inquire after Poe. His letters to Duyckinck reflect a steady interest, some uneasiness, and a half-amused tolerance of Poe's behavior. 12 December 1845: “What of Poe & the rest?” 22 December: “Will you see Poe and ask him” about a poem I left at his office before leaving New York? 9 February 1846: “What of him? [ am told that the” Broadway Journal has stopped (as it had done with the [page 155:] number for 3 January). 17 March: “Did you receive a notice of” Poe's poems I sent you? “Where is Poe & what doing?” 27 March: “Your hints with regard to Poe, the Ladies, Billet doux &c quite provoke my curiosity. What is the mischief — who the victims &c. Entre nous, I half suspected that mischief would grow out of all those fine critical discriminations &c. It is dangerous to the poetess when the critic teaches her the use of spondees, and trochaics, dactyls, trimeters & dimeters. But I wait tidings and will hush conjecture. Let me hear from you soon.” On 15 May Simms sought from James Lawson more information than Duyckinck had supplied on reports that “Poe had been dealing in mischief” and “that it was gravely thought to send” him to Bedlam.

Simms was in New York from late June to the end of July. During that time he would have learned of the scandals involving Poe and Mrs. Osgood and Mrs. Ellet, and he would have read the published exchanges of Poe, Thomas Dunn English, Lewis Gaylord Clark, and Hiram Fuller, which led to Poe's suing the Mirror for libel on 20 July. He would have followed the newspapers’ redoubled exploitation of the scandals after the suit was filed. The libel case remained lively news until it was concluded on 17 February 1847, in Poe's favor — and even afterward.(21)

Apparently Simms did not see Poe during the summer of 1846, but he had at least two letters from him and wrote him on 30 July one of the most remarkable letters in all our epistolary literature. Poe had first written, it seems, asking Simms for support, presumably by publishing something that Poe could reprint in Godey's Lady's Book to support him against the abuse being heaped upon him, as had been done in the quarrel following his Boston Lyceum reading. This time Simms did not comply at once and may have told Poe he would not. About 23 July he had another communication of a “very desponding character,” in Simms's phrase, again asking assistance. With his letter on 30 July Simms enclosed a passage he on second thought had included in his regular letter to the Patriot, dated 15 July and published 20 July.(22) In it he said he did not know how true the “Literati” sketches were but he found them amusing and they had “caused no little rattling among the dry bones of our Grub street.” lt was being said that the sketches were “given to a delineation as well of the persons as of the performances of his subjects,” and that the author was “more solicitous ... of a striking picture than a likeness.” These assertions could not have pleased Poe or helped his cause, nor could his characterization [page 156:] of Poe: “He is a man, clearly, of sudden and uneven impulses of great nervous susceptibility, and one whose chief misfortune it is not to have been caught young and trained carefully. The efforts of his mind seem wholly spasmodic. He lacks habitual industry.” Simms noted that he had seen Poe “on two or three occasions’ and had enjoyed “”a good opportunity of examining him carefully.” Hence he could describe Poe's appearance, no doubt intending to counter the aspersions cast at Poe's appearance in the recent scandal-mongering. He concluded by saying that Poe was in retirement and, he had just learned, was sick of brain fever. The tone of the sketch is suggested in the one sentence nearest to praise: “He is undoubtedly a man of very peculiar and very considerable genius — but is irregular and exceedingly mercurial in his temperament.”

This passage in the Patriot suggests that Simms believed that Poe had sunk so low in health, personal relations, and literary endeavors as to be almost beyond hope. His letter of 30 July has a sober tone in decided contrast to that of his remarks to Duyckinck on 27 March about Poe and the poetesses. It is a personal document, starting from a realization of Poe's misfortunes and his faults, and striving with obvious pain and an earnest wish to help. His regret was the greater, he said, because he could see “no process for” his “relief and extrication but such as must result from’ his “own decision and resolve.” Such necessary resolves Simms delineated for him: He must subdue his impulses, return to the “moral province of society,” remain in seclusion for a while, cherish his wife, discard harmful associates, change his “tactics and begin a new series of papers with” his publisher. After saying that the enclosed excerpt from the Patriot might be printed in Godey's, he continued, perhaps reflecting his thought on the libel suit Poe had entered: “But, surely, I need not say to you that, to a Southern man, the annoyance of being mixed up in a squabble with persons he does not know, and does not care to know, — and from whom no Alexandrine process of cutting loose, would be permitted by society — would be an intolerable grievance.” Simms said he would have come to see Poe if he could, and remarked, as if at the end of their relationship, I “shall always be solicitous of your reputation and success.”

Poe did not reprint Simms's enclosure from the Patriot. That passage and the letter enclosing it could not fail to chill the personal element that had evolved in their relations over the past year. [page 157:]

During his last three years, Poe mentioned Simms several times in print, but wrote no long reviews and showed little enthusiasm. Once for Beauchampe and once for the story “Murder Will Out” he repeated briefly his earlier judgments.(23) But he named Simms most often in his thrusts at his literary enemies, and especially in accusing New York and Boston journals and critics of sectional bias. Following up his earlier contention, already mentioned, that if Simms had been a Yankee his genius would have been recognized earlier, he cited the treatment Simms received in the North American Review,(24) the omission of Simms from Lowell's A Fable for Critics (in fact the omission of all Southern authors except Poe), and the slight attention given other writers in the South, to support his reiterated charge that such authors “were born too far South” to receive fair treatment.(25)

Poe and Simms continued to be associated in the literary warfare revolving about the Young America faction. In the North American Review and the Knickerbocker they might be named along with Cornelius Mathews and Evert Duyckinck and share the same condescension and insinuation. A review of The Wigwam and the Cabin, together with Simms's Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction, in the North American Review of October 1846 (LXIII, 357-381), for example, labeled The Wigwam and the Cabin Simms's best book and conceded the tales in it to have some merit, but added that Simms is “deficient in the first elements of originality”; “there is in his literary outfits a decided touch of the shabby genteel”; and “his style ... is deficient in grace, picturesqueness, and point.” “He has put on the cast-off garments of the British novelists.” As if unwilling to miss an opportunity to strike at Poe, the reviewer paused long enough to relegate him “to the forcible-feeble and shallow-profound school.” These passages were among those reprinted and endorsed in the Knickerbocker the next month (XXVIII, 450-454).

Simms settled into a reserved judgment of Poe and his works, largely without the personal interest he showed in 1845 and 1846. In the Southern Quarterly Review for July 1853 (XXIV, 284), he wrote, “Of the general merits of Poe's mind, curiously metaphysical and subtle, with something of the mathematical element, and much of the bizarre, there can be no question. His writings constitute a decided feature in our literature, and demand a prominent place in the American library.” For all the gifts he recognized in Poe, Simms [page 158:] thought him (along with Tennyson) a bad model for other poets. In a letter of fatherly advice not unlike his earlier letter to Poe, he wrote Thomas Holley Chivers on 5 April 1852, “Poe, who wrote in jerks and spasms, only, and in intervals of passion or drink, contended for fugitive performances. This was his excuse and apology only, for his own short comings. Do not allow his errors to wreck you as they did himself. Give him up as a model and as a guide. He was a man of curious genius, wild and erratic, but his genius was rather curious than valuable — bizarre, rather than great or truthful.” In a similar vein he wrote a dozen years later, 22 November 1864, to Theodore H. Hill of Raleigh, North Carolina, who had sent him manuscript poems to criticize:(26) “Poe and others, who aimed at nothing more than musical effects, and pretty surprises, have noticeably injured the present growth of poets. Even Tennyson, exquisite master as he is, is working ingenious effects upon thousands, who might succeed as original writers, yet are content to fail and blunder as his imitators. Beware of this. Use rhyme only as the organ of thought.”

Following his visit to New York in the summer of 1846, Simms soon lost his earlier tolerance for Poe's failings. In a letter to Duyckinck 2 February 1847, he asked, almost casually at the end of a sentence, “and what is become of Poe?” The next year, 11 February, he wrote Duyckinck, “Poe is a very remarkable man. It is a great pity that he should be wasted and should waste himself, as he does. I should like to see him succeed — still more gladly see him deserve wholly to succeed.” In the Charleston Mercury of 9 July 1860, he called Poe “one of the most morally wretched of gifted men.”(27) Still later, 20 March 1867, Simms encouraged John Reuben Thompson to accede to a request expected from a publisher, and write a biography of Poe, saying that Thompson was the best person to do it and adding, “Still the task, in his case, is a very difficult one, since all biography should be written con amore, and the poor fellow was perpetually upsetting his own buckets of milk, to the great disgust of friends and admirers. Still, you could do it, without violating the truth, and yet with some softening of its harsher aspects.”

[page 158, continued:]

NOTES

1 Rpt. in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York, 1902), VIII, 143-158.

2 Works, VIIL, 202. [page 159:]

3 See A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), p. 244; Edd W. Parks, Edgar Allan Poe as Literary Critic (Athens, Ga., 1964), pp. 31-32.

4 Works, XV, 168.

5 Works, X, 49-56.

6 Works, XV, 193.

7 Works, XI, 206.

8 Works, XVI, 41, 59-60.

9 Letters from Tomlin to Poe, dated 22 November 1840, 1 March, and 2 July 1843, are printed in Poe's Works, XVII, 61-62, 133, 149-151.

10 This and other letters by Simms, unless indicated otherwise, are in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant and others (Columbia, S.C., 19521956), where they appear in chronological order.

11 For the literary warfare in which Poe was a central figure and Simms had a minor part (including the Longfellow War, the accusations prompted by Poe's reading at the Boston Lyceum and his “Literati” sketches, the debate over literary nationalism, and the activities of the Young America group), see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (New York, 1956) and Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles (Durham, N.C., 1963). Another book by Moss, Poe's Major Crisis (Durham, N.C., 1970), recounts the events and reprints the documents connected with Poe's successful suit for libel against the New York Mirror.

12 See Simms, Letters, II, 114 n. 338.

13 Printed in Simms, Letters, II, 118 n. 347.

14 Mary Ann Wimsatt has kindly called my attention to a fictional use Simms made of Clark, characterizing him in language similar to that in the letter to Duyckinck. In the novel Paddy McGann; or, the Demon of the Stump, serialized in the Southern Illustrated News from 14 February to 30 May 1863, the backwoods title character visits New York and is victimized by reporters and editors, especially a “Mr. Cook, or Clark, or Park” who edits the “New York Niggerbitcher,” later called “Niggerknocker” and “Niggerbotcher.” Paddy hears this editor called “Jeremy Diddler” and characterized as a “dirty fellow, ... the very worst of all these fellows; a liar, a swindler, a whole-sale inventor of scandals and a levier of black mail” (25 April, pp. 5-7; 9 May, p. 6).

15 Works, XIII, 1-9.

16 Works, XIV, 74-75.

17 In the Southern and Western for August 1845 (II, 134), Simms reviewed Lord's poems, saying that Lord had taken Poe and Tennyson as models, and pointing to “faint efforts in the way of “‘ various poets. “Here is a little of Bryant, and here something more of Coleridge.” Poe had reviewed Lord in the Broadway Journal of 24 May 1845.

18 Works, XII, 247-250.

19 Works, XIII, 93-97.

20 By Frederick Mansel Reynolds, first published anonymously in London in 1832.

21 See the full account in Moss, Poe's Major Crisis.

22 Reprinted in Moss, Poe's Major Crisis, pp. 93-95. [page 160:]

23 “The Literati,” Godey's Lady's Book, XXXIII (Oct. 1846), 157-158, in Works, XV, 118-119; “”Tale-Writing — Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Godey's Lady's Book, XXXV (Nov. 1847), 53-54, in Works, XIII, 153-154.

24 “Tale-Writing — Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Godey's Lady's Book, XXXV (Nov. 1847), 52, in Works, XIII, 150.

25 See the Southern Literary Messenger for March, April, and September, 1849 (XV, 190-191, 220, 600); in Works, XIII, 172; XVI, 142, 143, 148, 175-176.

26 This unpublished letter is in the Charles E. Johnson. Papers at the Duke University Library.

27 see Simms, Letters, IV, 186.