Text: Sidney P. Moss, “Chapter 04,” Poe's Literary Battles, 1963, pp. 85-131 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 85:]

The battle between Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark constitutes a campaign that can be isolated from the melee and studied almost clinically. Poe and Clark crossed swords time and time again in journals, in the form of defamatory and derisive articles. These articles, culled from those periodicals and arranged chronologically, serve to document the shifting fortunes of their quarrel. More important, they reveal for what reasons and under what circumstances Poe became one of the most maligned persons in literary history.

Not that some of the charges leveled against Poe were baseless. Poe in his letters, both private and public, stands self-confessed as an unstable person and an occasional drunkard. But Clark and his friends did not proclaim Poe's faults, nor exaggerate them, nor ascribe to him vices of which he was guiltless, nor hint at unmentionable acts of wickedness, until Poe singled them out for attack. [page 86:] Clark, as will be seen, enjoyed a singular advantage over Poe: he had his own magazine, the Knickerbocker, which was widely circulated, whereas Poe had to take his stand wherever opportunity afforded. And if Clark was not altogether a combatant worthy of Poe's mettle, he had more than enough allies to make up the difference.

Even as Rufus Wilmot Griswold was Poe's posthumous nemesis,(1) Clark was Poe's contemporary one. The reasons for Clark's consistent baiting of and hostility toward Poe are not obscure, as some writers believe; they are simply numerous.

First, as we have said, Clark was the self-appointed protector of New York reputations, and Poe's assaults upon the works of members of his clique were enough to antagonize him. Second, being the pivot of the New York group, Clark tended to be a sectionalist and to favor only New York writers, although he did not discriminate against such New Englanders as Longfellow when they proved serviceable to him. Clark's hostile treatment of one Southerner, William Gilmore Simms, to cite only one instance, became so notorious that one writer, signing himself “S. T.,” blasted the Knickerbocker on this score from three separate journals.(2) And Simms's own letters are full of such statements as: “Clarke [sic] is a creature to be kicked or spit upon not argued with or spoken to,” and, “Had I been living in N. Y. I could not have refrained, long ago, to have scourged him hip & thigh for the scoundrel & puppy that he is.”(3) On the grounds of such sectionalism, perhaps aggravated by the fear of rivalry, can Poe's remark be explained, that the Knickerbocker “refused to exchange with us [the Southern Literary Messenger] from the first.”(4) [page 87:]

Third, Clark's twin brother Willis, co-editor of the Knickerbocker, had attacked Poe on more than one occasion, as we have seen, and it was only natural, perhaps, that Lewis Clark should bombard the same target.

A fourth, if less likely, reason for the mutual antagonism between Poe and Lewis Clark “may have been partly due to the latter's role in the ‘Moon Hoax.’”(5) Poe had hoaxed the country with his “Hans Phaall — a Tale,” which was published in the June, 1835, number of the Southern Literary Messenger. A similar hoax was perpetrated only a few weeks later in New York. As a contemporary reported the incident:

What our contemporary narrator calls “the secret history” of the “Moon Hoax” has possible bearing on the antagonism between Poe and Lewis Clark:

In regard to this hoax, Poe wrote his friend, John P. Kennedy, on September 11, 1835:

As late as 1846 Poe publicly repeated these charges and amplified them:

Poe then stated that he was “bound to do Mr. Locke the justice to say that he denies having seen my article prior to the publication of his own; and I am bound to add, also, that I believe him.” Unfortunately, however, “Having read the Moon story to an end and found it anticipative of all the main points of my ‘Hans Phaall,’ I suffered the latter to remain unfinished.”(8) Clark and Poe may have become antagonistic on this account, the former because Poe suggested plagiarism in the “Moon Hoax,” which Clark had had a hand in perpetrating; the latter because he had been despoiled of his idea.

Whatever the background of the animosity between Poe and Clark, it was Poe's repeated bombardment of the New [page 89:] York coterie that finally caused Clark to cease his sniping at Poe and to open fire at him with everything in his arsenal. Poe seemed to consider Clark and his antics contemptible and noticed him only occasionally. Nevertheless, Clark grew more and more vituperative, and it is not too much to say that the reverberations of his charges are still echoing.

Sniping began on August, 1838. The May, 1837, issue of the Knickerbocker had carried Harpers’ announcement of the publication of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,(9) and Lewis Clark's review of the novel duly appeared fifteen months later. Clark began by reprinting the long title, making certain to italicize the word incredible in the phrase, “together with the incredible adventures and discoveries ... to which that distressing calamity gave rise,” then remarked:

That Clark, in dealing with an imaginative story, should dwell upon “Mr. Pym's veracity” is ironic. The same irony was involved in Clark's questioning the veracity of Herman Melville's Typee (1846), a novel that by and large was founded on fact.(11)

Despite Lewis Clark's boast to Longfellow at the time that Outre-Mer was in production, that Harpers “tell me, that they can lose on no book, now — even the worst,(12) such reviews(13) [page 90:] made this Harpers’ book sell “less than a thousand copies.”(14) In England, however, where no clique militated against the book, the “authorized” edition of Pym appears to have been successful, if the fact that the work was pirated is indicative of success.(15)

In December, 1839, the Knickerbocker carried this announcement: “Notices of the following works, although in type, are unavoidably postponed till our next number: ... Tales [of the Grotesque and Arabesque] by E. A. Poe. ... ”(16) But the promised notice, “although in type,” never appeared. Instead, Clark, in reviewing a number of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, made it a point to indicate that the “Journal of Julius Rodman,” which had been appearing serially in that magazine since January, 1840, was another fabrication like Pym.(17)

In June, 1840, Poe began circulating his “Prospectus of the Penn Magazine, a Monthly Literary Journal, To Be Edited and Published in the City of Philadelphia, by Edgar A. Poe.” In this prospectus he stated the critical principles he intended to observe in the projected magazine, a statement that reveals mature self-examination:

Turning to another matter, Poe wrote: “To the mechanical execution of the work the greatest attention will be given. ... In this respect, it is proposed to surpass, by very much, the ordinary Magazine style. The form will nearly resemble that of The Knickerbocker. The paper will be equal to that of The North American Review.” Clearly, Poe intended to compete with the two magazines he contemned, magazines that represented the two most powerful literary cliques then operating in America and in whose pages he refused to compromise himself by appearing.(19) Another reason Poe had for singling out the Knickerbocker and the North American Review may be explained by his remarks in a subsequent prospectus issued August, 1840, in which, reiterating what he had said earlier, he added:

Clark, when news reached him that William E. Burton had put up his Gentleman's Magazine for sale, used his chance to [page 92:] gloat at what he considered the failure of a rival enterprise, as well as to make a rather garbled gibe at Poe's prospectus:

The distortions in this brief paragraph are many. First, the initial quotation marks are sneers of disbelief, something that “S. T.” called attention to when he wrote of Clark's inveterate use of inverted commas as “one of those small typographical tricks in which the Magazine delights.” Second, the assertion that Poe was the principal editor, when actually he was only Burton's assistant, implies that Poe was responsible for the “downfall” of the “miscellany in question.” And third, the misquotation of Poe's prospectus statement makes it appear that Poe intended to imitate, not rival, the Knickerbocker.

Despite all this sniping, Poe refrained from noticing Lewis Clark. Only in a private letter to a fellow editor, Joseph Evans Snodgrass, did he fleetingly express his contempt for Clark when he wrote that the Knickerbocker was “still edited by Clark the brother of W. Gaylord,”(22) an expression almost identical to the one he used five years later in his Literati paper on Clark: “Mr. Clark is known principally as the twin brother of the late Willis Gaylord Clark.”(23)

The hostility that Clark felt toward Poe was not eased by the fact that Poe, who had become editor of Graham's Magazine, was proceeding to make that periodical the chief competitor of the Knickerbocker.(24) Nor was Clark pacified when Poe went on the literary warpath, hacking at the scalps of such men as [page 93:] Thomas Ward, popularly known as Flaccus, who was a permanent contributor to the Knickerbocker.(25) The article called “Our Amateur Poets, No. I — Flaccus”(26) was Poe's typical attack on the New York coterie. To this article he signed his name, an unusual procedure in a period of anonymous reviewing:

Poe ended the review by announcing that he was throwing Flaccus's book to the pigs.(27)

About the same time that this tomahawking took place, Poe reached for Lewis Clark's head, among others. The article, entitled “Our Magazine Literature,” appeared with only an “L” as signature on March 11, 1843, in the New World and, despite the mixed views that Poe scholars have regarding its authorship,(28) the fact that Clark attributed it to Poe is sufficient to make it figure as a shot in the continuing war between them: [page 94:]

Then praising Graham, whose magazine Poe had edited, for his liberal payment for articles and for “patronizing a large[r] number of eminent writers in prose and verse, than any other publisher in the country,” the writer turned to Griswold, who had replaced Poe as editor of Graham's. “Neither do we like the nominal editor of Graham's Magazine. And why? Because ... he possesses too many of the peculiar characteristics of Lewis G. Clark. Mr. Rufus W. Griswold is wholly unfit, either by intellect or character, to occupy the editorial chair of Graham's Magazine.”(29)

More than three years after this article appeared, Lewis Clark suggested that Poe had first submitted it to the Knickerbocker.(30) It is impossible to credit this suggestion, considering what their relations were at this time. What makes the suggestion [page 95:] equally incredible is that Clark did not mention the rejection at once when he could have capitalized on it, but waited for more than three years to publish the assertion — and then only when he was openly assailed by Poe in the Literati papers. Neither, as Clark suggested in his initial statement below, was the article submitted to Epes Sargent of Sargent's New Monthly Magazine before Park Benjamin, editor of the New World, accepted it.

Clark, more concerned for himself than for his friend and contributor, Thomas “Flaccus” Ward, responded to the New World article in the next issue of the Knickerbocker:

Clark's statement that Park Benjamin disclaimed the writer of “Our Magazine Literature” was a falsehood. Typical of Benjamin's caustic irony — a technique that Clark himself [page 96:] might have admired in other contexts — was the comment he subjoined to the article, a comment that, far from disclaiming, reinforced the remarks of his anonymous contributor:

It was not until July that Clark took Poe to task for his review of Flaccus, and then indirectly, through an unnamed correspondent:

Clark, contrary to his own advice to Epes Sargent, did not leave the “critic” to his “native insignificance.” Instead, he began gunning for Poe with a vengeance. Poe in August, 1843, had published another in his series “Our Amateur Poets” in Graham's,(36) this time dealing with William Ellery Channing, a nephew of the brilliant Unitarian minister. A rationalist in his criticism and one who liked to imagine himself rigorously so in [page 97:] the creation of his poems and stories (see “The Philosophy of Composition,” for instance), Poe was inveterately opposed to Transcendentalism, especially to what he considered its lack of clarity and intellectual rigor. While lambasting this Transcendental poet whose poems, he demonstrated, were “full of all kinds of mistakes, of which the most important is that of their having been printed at all,” Poe asserted that Channing had become infected with the Carlyle virus in that he seemed to have deduced from Carlyle “an opinion of the sublimity of everything odd, and of the profundity of everything meaningless. ...

Using another person as a shield again, this time the editor of the Louisville Daily Journal, George Denison Prentice — a form of attack that was becoming characteristic of him — Clark wrote:

Though Poe did not reply to this attack, he remembered both Prentice and Clark for their abuse. In revising his sketch [page 98:] “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” (which first appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in December, 1844) for the Broadway Journal (July 26, 1845), Poe wrote:

“I bought auction copies (cheap) of. ‘Prentice's Billingsgate,’ (folio edition,) and ‘Lewis G. Clarke [sic] on Tongue.’”(38)

The quarrel lapsed for a while. In the meantime, Poe's criticism was of such a caliber that he was winning much prestige among some of the independent critics. James Russell Lowell, for example, observed in Graham's (at this time the most widely circulated magazine in the country) that Poe was

In addition, Poe had sold “The Raven” to the American Review, where, appearing under the pseudonym of “Quarles” on February, 1845;(40) it proceeded to make an impression that in all likelihood has not been surpassed by any single piece of American poetry.

Apparently, and only apparently, veering with the critical wind, Clark published in the Knickerbocker a favorable report of Poe — a report conspicuous because unique:

But Clark, by the time the next number of the Knickerbocker appeared, had recovered from his ostensible surprise and revised his opinion of “The Raven”:

Clark then quoted a few stanzas of the parody.

This solitary favorable report of Poe in the Knickerbocker may be explained most likely by the fact that George H. Colton, then editor of the American Review, was Clark's relative, and that Clark may only have been doing Colton a good turn by noting the appearance of “The Raven” in its pages with approbation.

In any event, the Broadway Journal, of which Poe officially became a co-editor on March 8, 1845, treated the Knickerbocker and its editor — at least at the outset — quite flatteringly, declaring in one instance that the Knickerbocker was one of the few magazines that exhibited a “higher reach in the department of magazine literature than the country has ever offered before,” and, in another instance, favorably noticing the Knickerbocker Sketch Book that had been edited by Lewis Clark.(43) Clark, however, still nursing his grudge against Poe for having written “Our Magazine Literature,” and looking for an opportunity to express his animosity, took issue with an unsigned article by Poe — ”Magazine-Writing — Peter Snook” — that appeared in the Broadway Journal on June 7, 1845:(44) [page 100:]

Clark then called the “sage correspondent” a “literary Aristarchus,” and contrasted his taste for literary works produced abroad with the bias of the Knickerbocker for those produced at home to imply that the “correspondent” was anti-American. Hardly by coincidence, Clark also contrasted Rufus Griswold's pro-American literary attitudes with those of the unnamed writer of the article, whom he alluded to as an “anonymous decrier of our own periodicals.”(45)

The statement regarding the “indiscriminate fling at American periodicals” may be an allusion to “Our Magazine Literature” or to the “Peter Snook” article, or both. In the latter article (a revision of the original that appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in October, 1836), Poe had said that American critics were deficient: “The best American review ever penned is miserably ineffective when compared with the notice of [Macaulay's] ... Bacon — and yet this ... is, in general, a piece of tawdry sophistry. ... ” Moreover, he added, American tale-writers, who supplied the very staple of the magazines, showed the “most remarkable deficiency in skill. If we except first Mr. Hawthorne — secondly, Mr. Simms — thirdly Mr. Willis — and fourthly, one or two others, ... there is not even a respectably skilful tale-writer on this side the Atlantic.”

Clark must have suspected that Poe had written the “Peter Snook” article, for, beginning with the March 8 number of the Broadway Journal, Poe's name appeared on the masthead as one of its editors. Furthermore, in five weekly numbers of the Journal (from March 8 to April 5) Poe had replied to [page 101:] “Outis” in the so-called Longfellow war that had created an uproar among the Boston and New York cliques, the details of which are recounted in the next chapter.

Poe, in his ironic way, responded to the veiled attack. In the Broadway Journal of July 12, he called the forty-two-line attack a three-line compliment, which he “sincerely” hoped it was not. In the process of correcting Clark's error in French — an unnecessary cedilla — he omitted a circumflex and insisted rather perversely that the preposition was a verb:

These exchanges almost led to a street fight between Poe and Clark. Thomas Holly Chivers, a rather unreliable witness, who, after Poe had died, claimed that “The Raven” and “Ulalume” were plagiarized from two of his poems,(47) takes up the story. He met Poe in New York soon after the July number of the Knickerbocker had appeared, in which Clark had denounced the writer of the “Peter Snook” article. “Edgar A. Poe,” wrote Chivers, was “as drunk as an Indian.” He joined him nevertheless, and they

When Poe, on August 23, in writing an obituary of Dr. James McHenry, pointed out that, as a literary critic, McHenry had fallen victim to the maliciousness of a clique, which had systematically written him down and which afterward had no scruples in publicly boasting of the triumph,(49) Clark preferred to ignore the unmistakable allusion to himself and company, apparently recognizing the truth of the charge and perhaps remembering his recent encounter with Poe. Clark, in fact, did not spoil for an editorial fight with Poe again until November. In the meantime, the Broadway Journal with due justice noticed that the September number of the Knickerbocker “has a remarkably pleasant appearance and abounds in good things; which no one can better supply than its editor — when he feels [page 103:] ‘in the vein.’ ”(50) And again in October — with Poe now in full editorial control — the Journal remarked that the “Knickerbocker for October is unusually good. ... ”(51)

The antagonism that Clark had withheld from venting on Poe for a few months he released on Cornelius Mathews in a review of his Big Abel, and the Little Manhattan.(52) In asserting that the volume contained mere commonplaces when it did not involve “ridiculous verbal imitations of Dickens and Carlyle,” Clark committed the libel of remarking that one cannot help thinking that Mathews “has ‘a screw loose’ somewhere in his mental machinery. ... ”

Poe, incensed at the imputation of insanity in an ostensibly literary review, made his comment in the Broadway Journal:

But Duyckinck had far more at stake than Poe. That he was a very close friend of Mathews was as widely known as the fact that he was the editor of the Library of American Books in which series Big Abel had appeared. Duyckinck, signing himself “S. T.,” wrote a furious denunciation of Clark and submitted the article broadcast to the journals, some of which were sufficiently in sympathy with his views to publish it — namely, the New York Evening Mirror, the New York Weekly Mirror, the New York Morning News, and Godey's Lady's Book:(54)

Duyckinck added that the Knickerbocker selected high game and cited Simms and Poe as two of his examples.

After Duyckinck's article appeared, Poe published these remarks on the front page of the Broadway Journal:

Clark had had formal opportunities for attacking Poe when two of his books appeared during the year: the Tales (June) and The Raven and Other Poems (November), but he failed to take advantage of either — for a time. Moreover, these books had appeared in the very series (Library of American Books) in which Big Abel had appeared, a series Poe felt called upon to defend by defending the works recently issued in that series — namely, Simms's and Mathews’. Poe's stake was more than personal. As he observed later, Duyckinck, as editor of Wiley and Putnam, “afforded unwonted encouragement to native authors by publishing their books, in good style and in good company, without trouble or risk to the authors themselves, and in the very teeth of the disadvantages arising from the want of an international copyright law.”(56) Thus, on October 4, 1845, he [page 105:] had called Simms's Wigwam and the Cabin “decidedly the most American of American books,” declaring that all the stories in it had merit, and gave it as his “deliberate opinion” that, despite certain faults, Simms was, upon the whole, “the best novelist which this country has produced. ... ”(57) And again, in the January, 1846, number of Godey's Lady's Book, Poe observed:

Poe had also reviewed Big Abel in the November, 1845, number of Godey's, but unable to muster any enthusiasm for the work, he suspended his critical judgment and dutifully declared: “This is by all means an original book ... a book especially well adapted to a series which is distinctly American.” He allowed that its “chief defect is a very gross indefinitiveness, not of conception, but of execution . ... Out of ten readers nine will be totally at a loss to comprehend the meaning of the author. Of course, nothing so written can hope to be popular; but we presume that mere popularity is by no means Mr. Mathews’ intention.”(59)

Poe's critical indulgence provided Clark with the opportunity to satirize both his assailants in the December number of the Knickerbocker: “What a pudder our last number has created among two or three inferior members of the small ‘Mutual Admiration Society,’ who for ‘mutual’ ends swear just now by the author of ... ‘Great [sic] Abel,’ but usually by each other recriprocally! “Clark amusedly observed that the writer in the Mirror (“S. T.”) regrets the Knickerbocker's “‘attacks upon our best writers,’ including especially the author of ... ‘Big Abel’. ... ” In the Morning News, Clark continued, “the same commentator complains of our notice of ‘Big Abel’ as ‘a [page 106:] departure from common decency, purporting to be a criticism’ ... ” Clark then speculated that Poe was the author of both the “S.T.” articles he had alluded to: “Probably it is the same writer who adopts or dictates kindred ‘reasoning’ with the foregoing in a weekly journal [Broadway Journal] now living; a print which in one number deems the Knickerbocker ‘utterly beneath notice and beneath contempt’ ... ” Irony aside, Clark went on, he wanted to “justify ourselves from the serious charge of uttering slanderous words,” and to that purpose he would “waste a leaf or two of our Magazine. ... ” He said that no publisher ever twice made the mistake of publishing Mathews; that he had been given Big Abel to review and he had reviewed it honestly; that the press of the country had been even harsher than he in his condemnation of Mathews. He himself had a great regard for Mathews as a gentleman, but not, unfortunately, as a writer. Because Mathews was an American, patriotism would lead him “rather to exaggerate than lessen his merits; and if he were only half as good as Dickens, we should likely think him superior.” He trusted that “our readers will not charge us with manifesting any thing like a disposition to decry our own authors. Our sins all lie in an opposite direction.” He then called his remarks on Big Abel “candid and forbearing,” and could scarcely understand why Mathews should talk about a libel suit, or why the “Forcible-Feeble of a weekly sheet” (Poe) should inform the publisher of the Knickerbocker that “our Magazine was doomed.” Clark then cited the London Spectator to second his opinion that Big Abel was incomprehensible, after which he quoted Poe, “the personal friend and client of Mr. Matthews [sic], his admirer and reviewer, the Aristarchus of the Ladies’ Magazines”: “ ‘It's [sic] (Big Abel's) chief defect is a very gross indefinitiveness, not of conception, but of execution. (What chiefer defect could it have?) Out of ten readers, nine will be totally at a loss to comprehend the meaning of the author! Of course, nothing so written can hope to be popular.’ “Of course not, Clark commented, for “in works of humor, popularity is an infallible test.” In summarizing, he said that Big [page 107:] Abel “is an utterly incomprehensible farrago, or rather, that the only comprehensible thing about it is a very palpable aim to copy the peculiarities of Boz.” He then quoted an article from the North American Review of April, 1844, that had condemned Mathews, and wondered why his complainants did not pounce upon that magazine “for its bold heresy.” Why didn’t they “pretend that that grave Quarterly journal is influenced by ‘personal malignity’ toward Mr. Matthews, as it is that the Knickerbocker is thus actuated. It is, in fact, ‘as easy as lying,’ to assume that position, in relation to either publication.” All that he liked about Mathews was his choice of American subjects and his advocacy of international copyright, but in the latter instance, he asserted, he does the cause infinite harm, since influential men refuse to play second fiddle to Mathews. As an author, the only way Mathews could pass without ridicule was to pass without observation.(60)

Clark, assuming that Poe was the writer of the “S. T.” articles and resenting him now with rankling bitterness, proceeded to review The Raven and Other Poems in the next number of the Knickerbocker.(61) A possible explanation of Clark's failure to review the Tales is that the book was successful, selling more than fifteen hundred copies in less than three months,(62) and that Clark did not wish to fly too obviously in the face of public opinion. His review, as might be expected, was hardly a consideration of Poe's poetry so much as a sustained sneer at the poet himself. Clark quoted passages from Poe's preface, the better to mock at him. Then, singling out the famous declaration, “With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion,” he noted how pitiable and meager were the results of that passion, although Poe had reached the age “at which all the great poets produced their great works.” He then derided Poe's claim to precocity by saying: “We ... are disposed to [page 108:] believe the author, and should believe him if he said the same of the poems we have read.” Then he charged Poe with having only an “aptitude for rhythm”; said that his criticisms of poetry seemed written after a very thorough cramming of Blair's lectures and the essays of Lord Karnes; recalled an earlier assertion made by Poe that “there cannot be such a thing as a didactic poem,”(63) and from this unqualified premise deduced the absurd conclusion that Poe thinks a “poem is a metrical composition without ideas.” Not only his best poems, Clark declared, but many of Poe's criticisms were composed on this principle, “words being the sole substance in them.” Clark then accused Poe of having drawn upon Tennyson in writing “Lenore,”(64) and proceeded to find humor in the vagueness of some of Poe's titles, as, for example, “To the River ——,” “as though there were something mighty private or naughty in his address to a running stream, which might compromise its character, if known.”

Clark continued his gibing by adding that “there are very few boys who have not written scores of verses like this; but very rarely do they publish such verses when they become men.” Poe's poetical reputation, Clark contended, rested mainly on “The Raven,” but even that poem “will not bear scrutiny.” Clark then declared how magnanimous he was being in this “review”:

Immediately following this treatment of Poe's poems appeared Clark's review of Longfellow's Poems. A eulogy of Longfellow, it was at the same time a scarcely veiled attack on Poe who, in the first half of the preceding year, had gained a wide, if mixed, reputation by leveling charges of plagiarism and imitation against Longfellow. The review concluded with this statement:

Poe was aware of these comments but he saw fit to ignore them. In the meantime, he had obtained an appointment to read a poem before the Boston Lyceum. Whether Poe could not write a poem to order for the occasion or whether he wanted to hoax the Bostonians is a question that need not detain us at this point, except to note that the episode created a furor and was editorially discussed in numerous journals, in and against Poe's favor. Clark, always alert for material that could be quoted to Poe's disparagement, picked up this item and published it in the February number of the Knickerbocker: “The Boston Morning Post, in commending the review of Mr. Poe's poems in our last number, takes exception to the inference which might be drawn from our remarks, that Mr. Poe really ‘humbugged’ the courteous people of Boston. ... In justice to the Bostonians, we make the annexed extract from the ‘Post's[‘] notice. ... ” The extract stated that Poe spoke before a large audience; that he recited in a “baby voice”; that few could [page 110:] tell whether it was prose or poetry he was delivering, “had it not been for the sing-song reading of the author”; that the reaction of those who heard the poem was “expressed by nods, winks, smiles and yawns”; and that almost half the audience had left the hall before Poe concluded. The extract Clark quoted ended: “Let us hear no more of this ‘humbugging’ the Bostonians, who from kindly feelings to a stranger heard in silence that which they knew was balderdash, or who silently left a place from which they felt the ‘poet’ ought to have been expelled. And yet he boasts of his conduct!”(66)

Shortly afterward, Poe's “Literati of New York City,” ominously subtitled, “Some Honest Opinions at Random Respecting Their Autorial Merits, with Occasional Words of Personality,” was awaiting publication in Godey's Lady's Book. When in May, 1846, the first series appeared, it created such a demand that Godey had to put out extra editions of the magazine and finally reprint the series along with the second series in the June number. Only two of the eight articles that constituted this first series could have offended Clark. The first was the introduction in which Poe touched upon Longfellow, who, he alleged, had a “whole legion of active quacks at his control” — an allusion to Clark, who had puffed Longfellow continually in the Knickerbocker. The second was the sketch of Charles F. Briggs (“Harry Franco”), in which Poe said that Briggs was “grossly uneducated” and a contributor to the Knickerbocker.

But what offended Clark most was the news that he himself was to be included in the Literati papers. He had heard the information from Louis Godey himself. As Godey reported the incident in “A Card” published in the New York Evening Mirror on May 8, 1846:

Thus apprised, Clark had his attack on Poe ready for the May number of the Knickerbocker:

The “Card” in which Godey had advertised the fact that he had informed Clark of his inclusion in the Literati papers was, of course, a rebuke of Clark for this scurrilous attack. Godey went on to say in that card that Clark's “desperation is laughably exhibited in the insane attack he has made on Mr. Poe, in the Knickerbocker for May, where Mr. Poe is represented as [page 112:] imbecile from physical infirmity, and at the same time is threatened with impalement. It would undoubtedly afford the public much amusement to witness an attempt on the part of Mr. Lewis Gaylord Clark to impale Edgar A. Poe. ... ” Godey then said that it takes a “born blockhead” to make the blunder of asserting that Mr. Poe's personalities are not worthy of notice and that they destroy themselves, and then proceed to make them the subject of special notice in an attempt to destroy the writer, “even descending to the heartless and cruel insinuation, that illness has weakened the powers of his mind.” Godey concluded:

The unmistakable way, of course, was sales, and according to Griswold, who had no reason to favor Poe, “three editions were necessary to supply the demand for some numbers of the magazines containing them.”(68)

In September, Poe's attack on Clark appeared, even as Godey had promised. He began with the familiar gibe that “Mr. Clark is known principally as the twin brother of the late Willis Gaylord Clark” and added: “He is known, also, within a more limited circle, as one of the editors of ‘The Knickerbocker Magazine.’ “Poe spoke of the “editorial scraps” to be found at the back of each number of the Knickerbocker — an allusion to Clark's own “Editor's Table,” a famous feature of the magazine — as “the joint composition of a great variety of gentlemen,” which it was in the sense that Clark was in the habit of quoting in that Table, as we have seen, items from newspapers, magazines, and correspondents. “Were a little more pains taken in elevating the tone of this ‘Editors’ Table,’ (which its best friends are forced to admit is at present a little Boweryish),” [page 113:]

Poe went on, deliberately misplacing the apostrophe and, at the same time, alluding to such vulgar attacks as those that appeared there on Cornelius Mathews and himself, “I should have no hesitation in commending it ... as a specimen of ... easy writing and hard reading.” Then, speaking of Clark's other contributions to the magazine, Poe remarked that the style of them “has its merits, beyond doubt, but I shall not undertake to say that either ‘vigor,’ force’ or ‘impressiveness’ is the precise term by which that merit should be designated. Mr. Clark once did me the honor to review my poems [an allusion to Clark's recent treatment of The Raven volume], and — I forgive him.”

When Poe turned to a discussion of the Knickerbocker itself, he said that it seemed “to have in it some important elements of success”: its title was good, it had some eminent contributors, “although none of these gentlemen, continue their contributions”; the printing and paper have been excellent; and — a loaded remark — ”there certainly has been no lack of exertion in the way of what is termed ‘putting the work before the eye of the public.’ “

Poe then mischievously speculated about the current circulation of the Knickerbocker and arrived at the ridiculously low figure of “some fifteen hundred copies.”(69)

In a final paragraph, Poe offered a description of Clark, his characteristic way of ending all these sketches. In doing this, [page 114:] he overestimated Clark's age by four or five years, said that his “forehead is, phrenologically, bad — round and what is termed ‘bullety’ [and that] ... the smile is too constant and lacks expression.”(70)

Considering Clark's recent remarks on Poe in his “review” of The Raven volume and in “The Literary Snob,” this sketch was less harsh than Clark had reason to expect. Nevertheless, Poe seems to have irritated all the sore points of Clark, for when Clark prepared his retort for the October number of the Knickerbocker, he was fouler than he had been:

Here for the first time — three years before his death — we have in print the allegations so familiar these days — that Poe [page 116:] was a “wretched inebriate”; that he was a “hack ... for common hire,” which is to say that he tailored critical opinions to order for a price; that he had an “utter lack of principle”; that he had certain unspecified “infirmities” that had ruined him; and that his friends, whom he witlessly maligned in praising, were aware of his “unfortunate peculiarities.” Lest readers of the Knickerbocker should regard these views of Poe as aroused and distorted by rancor, Clark “corroborated” them by citing apparently impartial opinions to indicate that his views were universally held. He alluded to an unnamed correspondent, “J.G.H.” He “quoted” an article from an unidentified “respectable” newspaper (whether Poe actually “sat” for such a portrait is questionable, since no mention of Poe appears in the extract that Clark purported to quote and since a diligent search has failed to uncover the article in question). And he cited the London Athenaeum. Thus, J. G. H.'s view of Poe is by implication so much harsher than Clark's and even, perhaps, so obscene that “man! you can’t expect us to publish it.’‘ Thus, from the second source, real or invented, there are further charges: “imbecility,” “evil living,” “radical obliquity of sense,” and “suicide” upon body and character. Moreover, Poe is shown to be in the care of a keeper, and that an “aged female relative,” whose task is to prevent him from drinking — a woman upon whom he is utterly dependent but whom he should be comforting if he had any conscience at all — all of which so pains the compassionate writer that he proceeds to smear the “poor creature” in his “respectable” paper. And thus, in the third and only identified source, there appear to be further heinous charges, but ones which only assert that Poe was pretentious at times or obscure or even absurd in his stories, though Clark fobbed off these adjectives, not in relation to Poe's stories and poems, as the Athenaeum had, but to his “literary opinions.”(74) What Clark failed to mention is just as illuminating, that the Athenaeum habitually found fault with American writers, especially with their addiction to English [page 117:] models, and that, for example, only recently the Athenaeum had accused Longfellow of imitation.(75)

Thus wrote, quoted, and commented the editor of the Knickerbocker whose complacency, so he averred, was not ruffled for a moment. So unruffled was he that he added this controversial footnote, obviously to assign a discreditable motive to Poe's attacks on him in the Literati series, that of vengeance for the rejection of a number of his manuscripts by Clark:

For reasons given earlier, the first of Clark's statements — that he had rejected a manuscript of Poe's — is extremely doubtful. And if the second statement implies that Clark repeatedly rejected a number of Poe's manuscripts, then the statement is plainly false and casts even greater doubt on the veracity of the first statement. Moreover, Clark claimed to have met Poe on only two occasions — both, as he described them, decidedly unfavorable to Poe. He may have been merely forgetful in neglecting to mention a time when he and Poe, among others, proposed toasts at the booksellers’ dinner held in New York City on March 30, 1837.(76) [page 118:]

But Poe had not discharged all his cannon. Godey's Lady's Book carried in its next number Poe's paper on Charles Fenno Hoffman. Here Poe wrote:

Clark retaliated the following month by discharging two attacks on Poe. One was in the form of doggerel, no doubt written by Clark himself, since he had referred to Poe as “Aristarchus” and “Poh” in many of his diatribes. The subtitle seems to be a strained pun on Poe, pooh, and pro in the expression pro pudor (for shame):

Epigraph on a Modern ‘Critic.’

‘P’oh’ Pudor!’

The second attack(79) — not only on Poe, but on Simms, Duyckinck, and Mathews as well — began with a quotation [page 119:] from the North American Review, whose favorite poet — Longfellow — Poe had attacked during 1845. First of all, Clark, quoting and agreeing with the North American, charged that the Library of American Books (edited by Duyckinck and published by Wiley and Putnam) “with the exception of a few of the volumes, is not likely to do much honor to American literature.” Secondly, Clark suggested in a footnote, Duyckinck, for the sake of helping his friend Mathews, had been dishonest with his employers in that, “through a misunderstanding, or without their knowledge,” Big Abel had been announced as a forthcoming book in the series. Clark, together with the North American Review, wondered

In “justice to the enterprising publishers,” Clark explained in the footnote alluded to, Mathews had insisted upon the publication of Big Abel, even though Wiley and Putnam had offered him a hundred dollars to release them from an obligation they had inadvertently incurred.

Having disposed of Mathews in this way, Clark turned to Simms, again quoting the North American but omitting its praise:

Clark continued:

The last of Poe's Literati papers appeared in the October number of Godey's. He ended them, he wrote his young admirer, George W. Eveleth, because they were considered “elaborate criticisms when I had no other design than critical gossip,” and because the “unexpected circulation of the series, also, suggested to me that I might make a hit and some profit, as well as proper fame, by extending the plan into that of a book on American Letters generally, and keeping the publication in my own hands.” Poe also commented in that letter:

Having blackened Poe to the limits of his ability, and Poe refraining from giving further offense, Clark seemed satisfied to let the quarrel lapse. Only once before Poe died did Clark mention him again, and then only under the exigency of having to defend himself against charges of personal malice toward Mathews, Simms, and Poe. That occasion was in January, 1848, when Clark found an article in Blackwood's Magazine that, he thought, would acquit him of the charges and prove him an honest editor. He wrote:

Having suggested that a universal opinion could be adduced from two instances, Clark then quoted the article in Blackwood's to discredit Mathews and Simms and to redeem himself. Finished with those authors, he turned to Poe:

Poe died on October 7, 1849, and Griswold, friend of Clark, began to edit his works. The first two volumes entitled The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe: With Notices of His Life and Genius by N. P. Willis, J. R. Lowell, and R. W . Griswold appeared in January, 1850. The “Notice” by Griswold was simply a republication of the “Ludwig” smear of Poe, now acknowledged, that had originally been printed in the New York Tribune two days following Poe's death. This edition, if we are to credit such articles as that which appeared in the March, 1850, number of the Southern Literary Messenger, was, ironically enough, used for the very kind of humbuggery that Poe had decried throughout his critical career. Written by John M. Daniel, editor of the Richmond Examiner and a man whom Poe claimed to have challenged to a duel, the article, scathing as it was of Poe, was scathing of his editor also, although Daniel made the mistake of assuming that Willis and Lowell were co-editors. With vitriol, Daniel asserted that Griswold, Willis, and Lowell

In addition to such reports, violent protest was aroused against the two-volume edition by such men as George R. Graham, who knew Poe far better than Griswold and who felt that Griswold had not only betrayed a trust but had taken revenge upon a dead man. In his magazine, he published an open letter to Nathaniel Willis, in which he declared the Griswold Notice of Poe to be “unfair and untrue. ... It is Mr. Poe, as seen by the writer while laboring under a fit of the nightmare. ... ” He then inquired into the reasons for this vilification of Poe:

He added that literature was a religion to Poe and that, as its high priest, he scourged the money-changers from the temple with a whip of scorpions. [page 123:]

Clark, who publicly stated that he had known Griswold for nearly the entire period of his connection with the Knickerbocker, and with whom Griswold almost became an associate editor on that magazine, felt impelled, as usual, to aid his friend, and what better way than to vilify Poe still further? Yet it must have posed something of a dilemma to Clark to have to defend the editor and, at the same time, to attack his subject. He began his review quite promisingly: “The intellectual character of the late Mr. Poe may now be examined, and its qualities decided upon, without any of those disadvantages which his personal conduct constantly presented as barriers to the fair appreciation of his genius.” But the promise failed. Clark pointed out that Poe was “destitute of moral or religious principle,” and that, although “very few of our American authors have possessed more of the creative energy or of the constructive faculty,” Poe was “frequently a plagiarist of both thoughts and forms.”(84) Then, significantly, he stressed “literary thefts” which Griswold himself did not point out in print until his greatly enlarged biographical sketch of Poe appeared in the third volume of the edition: The Literati: Some Honest Opinions about Autorial Merits and Demerits, With Occasional Words of Personality ... By Edgar A. Poe ... with a Sketch of the Author, by Rufus Wilmot Griswold.(85) This volume was issued about the middle of September, 1850, more than half a year after Clark's review appeared. Clark asserted that “The Pit and the Pendulum” was plagiarized from “Vivenzio, or Italian Vengeance” and from a tragic scene of the German, E. T. A. Hoffmann. An investigator has shown, however, that a “careful search through the tales of Hoffmann reveals no story of a pendulum used as an instrument of torture,” and that if Poe borrowed in this instance, it was not from “Vivenzio,” but from a tale called “The Iron Shroud” by [page 124:] William Mumford. The conclusion is that the Knickerbocker's “reviewer's wish was evidently father to the thought.”(86)

Clark then maintained that Poe's “charge of plagiarism against Professor Longfellow, we happen to know, was so false that the plagiarism was on the other side [sic].” Longfellow, although he recognized the accusation to be absurd, did not protest this statement until September 28, and then not to Clark, who originally made it in print, but to Griswold.(87)

As to Poe's criticisms, Clark found them “acute and ingenious, in some respects; but for the most part [they] are carping, and entirely worthless, for any judgments they embrace of books or authors; he was so much the creature of kindly or malicious prejudice, or so incapable of going beyond the range of the grammarian.”

When the third volume of Poe's works appeared, containing the Griswold version of the Literati series, Clark was not happy. He found himself and many of his friends being served up again for public amusement. It was inevitable that he should write: “On the score of entertainment of any sort ... or of good taste, we trust these disjointed criticisms ... are not considered by their editor as presenting any considerable claim to the regard of the public. Indeed, we have his implied judgment in this respect.” Then he remarked that, having “in a notice of the first and second volumes of the present series” already expressed his judgment of Poe's writings, he would now content himself with a “synopsis of the extraordinary career of the author as furnished us by Dr. Griswold in a biography accompanying the work.”(88)

We may well question the authenticity of the “synopsis” by “Dr.” Griswold, a man who had balked at little to malign Poe. He had circulated stories that Poe had had “criminal relations” with his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm.(89) He had seized an [page 125:] opportunity, two days after Poe's shocking death, to publish in the Tribune a pseudonymous smear of the man in the form of a characterization of Poe, much of which was, in fact, taken almost verbatim from Bulwer's characterization of Francis Vivian in The Caxtons. He had tailored a dead man's text for his own purposes so as to alienate by intent even such a friend of Poe as Duyckinck.(90) He had twisted some strands of truth with so many falsifications and half-truths in the Memoir he prefixed to The Literati volume that no one has yet quite untangled the snarl. And finally, though it has not yet been conclusively proved, he had probably pocketed a profit from the sales of the works of the very man he had so used. Such vilification no literary figure ever suffered; and when we consider that this Memoir, coming as it did from the “approved” editor of Poe, was reproduced “as authentic in all save a very few of the contemporary notices of Griswold's edition,” as well as in “virtually every other edition of Poe's writings that appeared during the first two decades after the poet's death,”(91) we can understand how far-reaching and deep-rooted became the calumny, and how it must have exceeded Griswold's most sanguine expectations.

Clark, having reiterated many of the Griswold villainies, then repeated precisely what he himself had charged in his earlier review, and for which he now pretended to find support [page 126:] in the Griswold Memoir: “... Poe's plagiarisms are ... pronounced by his biographer as ‘scarcely paralleled in literary history.’ He accused Mr. Longfellow, for example, of a plagiarism from himself, when it turned out that the poem of Longfellow was written two or three years before the publication of that by Poe, and was, during a portion of that time, in Poe's possession. His unsupported literary opinions [note the non sequitur] could rarely be received with credit.”

Clark was referring here to Griswold's charge that Poe's “Haunted Palace,” which had been widely circulated in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” was plagiarized from Longfellow's “Beleaguered City.” Poe, as early as 1841, had anticipated such a charge in the prospect of having his poem published with Longfellow's in Griswold's edition of Poets and Poetry of America (1842), and had called Griswold's attention to Longfellow's possible plagiarism from him, even citing proof of prior publication.(92) Nevertheless, Poe must have appeared so hateful to Griswold personally — granted that Poe had given him some provocation — that Griswold had an overmastering compulsion to make Poe universally hated. Thus, despite the evidence in his possession, he made Poe appear to be the plagiarist of Longfellow.

Longfellow himself, much as he had reason to dislike Poll, balked at the deception. In his letter to Griswold, dated September 28, 1850, he denied the charge made in the Memoir, saying that “The Beleaguered City” “was written on the nineteenth of September, 1839. I marked the date down at the time!”(93) But Longfellow's denial is not needed on this point, except to demonstrate that both Clark and Griswold were colluding in “hacking at the cold remains,” to use Graham's phrase. “The Haunted Palace” had appeared in the Museum as a separate publication in April, 1839. Clearly, both Clark and Griswold were parties to deliberate falsehoods. To concur in a truth is simple; to concur in a lie betrays collaboration. [page 127:]

In November, 1856, after a passage of six years, Clark quoted the North American Review, since it contained a harsh article on Poe. The passages Clark reprinted were only re-phrasings of the charges trumped up by Clark and Griswold. A significant passage which Clark omitted to quote reads:

This omitted passage also states that Poe approached “the American Parnassus ... with all the enginery he could command or invent, — by sapping, mining, blasting, bombardment, stratagem, and storm; his shafts being ever the more keen and swift when aimed at the highest heads.”

Having quoted the now familiar allegations against Poe, Clark appended his approval: “True, every word of it: as is also the subsequent remark that the secret of Poe's impotency over the public taste’ — for he had no literary influence what-ever — ‘lies in the fact that his critical reviews, like all that he wrote, were destitute of moral sentiment.’ “The writer in the North American Review had concluded with a prayer for some “potent chemistry to blot out from our brain-roll for ever beyond the power of future resurrection, the greater part of what has been inscribed upon it by the ghastly and charnel-hued pen of Edgar Allan Poe. Rather than remember all, we would choose to forget all that he has written.” Clark concluded by recommending the number of the North American Review “most cordially to our readers.”(94)

Godey, in whose magazine the Literati papers, as well as a number of other Poe articles and stories, had first appeared, [page 128:] wrote to Clark to say that he was not to be counted among those to whom Poe was alleged to have been faithless. Clark replied by evading responsibility for the accusation, and used his typographical tricks to imply that Godey was certainly exceptional: “Mr. L. A. Godey ... writes us to say, that he is not to be ‘counted in’ among those in Philadelphia to whom the late Edgar A. Poe proved faithless, in his business and literary intercourse. His conduct toward Mr. Godey was in all respects honorable and unblameworthy. The remark which elicits the note of Mr. Godey was copied as a quotation into our pages from the North-American Review’ in a recent notice of that venerable and excellent Quarterly.”(95)

Clark's last public strike at Poe was made four years later when he reviewed Sarah Helen Whitman's defense of Poe, Edgar Poe and His Critics (1860). A widow, she had been engaged to Poe in 1848, but the notoriety he had gained during his crack-up period and his strange behavior at the time caused her to break the engagement. Poe, pleading with her, had written:

Belatedly contrite, Mrs. Whitman had written her small volume in defense of Poe's personal and literary reputation. Clark, in reviewing the work, said that the opinions of the Knickerbocker in regard to Poe had been recorded “frankly and conscientiously” several years earlier, and that “it would give us [page 129:] pleasure to add, that Mr. Poe's biographers had since given us occasion to change them,” implying, of course, that his opinions remained justifiably unchanged. Then, as usual, he resorted to quoting, this time the Baltimore Methodist Protestant. That paper had called Mrs. Whitman's book a noble effort, “but it does not wipe out the ... dishonorable records in the biography of Dr. Griswold. ... After reading it, we turned to Dr. Griswold's Memoir, and for the first time were able to peruse it without impatience and a sense of wrong to its subject.”(97)

It is true that Poe sometimes played favorites in his criticism and praised writers hardly better than those he derided; that he mistook cruelty for candor; that he sometimes attacked from the ambush of anonymity. But on the whole, allowing for these and similar gross faults, he began his journalistic career as a critic of high principles, and fearlessly asserted and applied those principles, whatever the occasion, the author, the publisher, or the coterie involved. But the literature in America of that time was, for the most part, incredibly bad. One need only read at random in the leading periodicals of the period — in Godey's, in Graham's, in the Knickerbocker, in the Mirror — to be convinced of that. To borrow a phrase from George E. Woodberry, no quotation can do sufficient justice to the writers of that time — they must be read to be properly damned. Moreover, the great books of the period were bound for commercial failure. We are told by the authority in the field that not a “single literary work of genuine originality published in book form before 1850 had any commercial value to speak of until much later, and most of our classics were financial failures.”(98) Such mediocrity prevailed, in fact, that it seemed a necessary qualification for commercial success. All this considered, it is hardly possible to believe that Poe and Hawthorne, Melville and Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, could have survived as artists. As a practicing critic, a critic whose profession was criticism and who earned his livelihood chiefly by his criticism, [page 130:] Poe continually received from publishers and individual authors the books they were marketing. Bad as most of them were, it was inevitable that Poe, given his standards and taste, should react to them in indignation, that he should slash at them in his reviews, and that his indignation should be exacerbated by those groups who imposed such works upon the public as monuments of American literature. Nothing, unless Poe abandoned his principles or his profession, could have stopped his clash with the authors, the publishers, and the cliques who wrote, published, and logrolled such works.

Graham, who knew Poe well, recognized Poe's essential critical integrity and the enmity he aroused by maintaining that integrity when he wrote, somewhat exaggeratedly, that his “pen was regulated by the highest sense of duty.” Graham also recognized, as few of us do today, that if Poe had compromised himself and puffed the authors he condemned and toadied to the coteries he despised, the doors of fortune would have swung open to him. In Graham's own powerful language:

The clash came with Poe's slashing review of Norman Leslie in 1835 and continued throughout his life. The men such as Clark who contended with him were, at first, only trying to starve him out as a writer by curtailing the sale of such works as Arthur Gordon Pym, or to destroy him as a critic, as they had destroyed Dr. James McHenry. Failing that, and finding that he was bringing the battle into their very camp, they then attacked him, not as a writer and critic any longer, but as a man, in order to bring him into such disrepute that his critical charges would not be credited. Then, and only then, were such rumors circulated as those alleging him to have carnal relations with his mother-in-law; then was he called a literary snob, [page 131:] today in the gutter and tomorrow in some milliner's magazine; then was he labeled a dirty critic who infested the literary world — a man tainted with alcoholism, immorality, plagiarism, and insanity.

The truth is that Poe, with all his failings, was as a critic successful to the point of his own undoing. Having allowed his enemies no ground on which to stand, he drove them to discredit his criticism by discrediting him as a human being — the familiar argumentum ad hominem whose fallaciousness we may all recognize but to whose contagion few of us are immune. In this they succeeded and so well that it may be forever impossible to deflate the Poe myth to its proper proportions.

The final irony is that the man most guilty of creating and circulating calumnies of Poe while Poe was alive enjoyed a reputation for humor and kindliness. In the words of Thomas Bangs Thorpe, a friend of Clark and a contributor to the Knickerbocker: “The intellectual peculiarity of Lewis Gaylord Clark was humor; with him it was, of course, instinctive and genuine. He was never else to the world than light-hearted, always kindly disposed, and ever discovering amusement. ... He viewed every thing, if you please, from a delicate, truly refined, and humorous stand-point. Nothing to him was really serious, yet he never was irreverent, unfeeling, or sarcastic.(100)

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 86:]

1. See Killis Campbell, “The Poe-Griswold Controversy,” in The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), pp. 63-98.

2. The article first appeared in the New York Evening Mirror, III (Nov. 7, 1845), and was reprinted in the New York Weekly Mirror, III (Nov. 15, 1845), 96, as well as in part or in whole in Godey's Lady's Book, XXXII (May, 1846), 240, and in the New York Morning News, Nov. 8, 1845. The writer has been identified as Evert A. Duyckinck, a friend of Simms, by Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms (Columbia, S. C., 1953), II, 114 n. 338.

3. Ibid., pp. 115, 117. Both letters are dated Nov. 13, 1845.

4. Southern Literary Messenger, II (June, 1836), 460.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 87:]

5. T. O. Mabbott's suggestion in Dunlap, The Clark Letters, p. 16 n. 108.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 88:]

6. Benson J. Lossing (1813-1891), History of New York City (New York, 1884), pp. 360-362.

7. Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 74. Poe was not consistent in his spelling of “Phaall.”

8. Godey's Lady's Book, XXXIII (Oct., 1846), 159-162.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 89:]

9. Knickerbocker, IX, 529.

10. Ibid., XII (Aug., 1838), 167.

11. Ibid., XXVII (May, 1846), 450.

12. In a letter dated Nov. 2, 1834 (Dunlap, The Clark Letters, p. 83). William Gowans, a man who became a distinguished bookseller, bears out Clark's statement. He wrote that Pym “was the most unsuccessful of all his writings, although published by the influential house of Harper & Brothers, who have the means of distributing a single edition of any book in one week” (quoted by Quinn, Poe, p. 267).

13. See the New York Mirror, XVI (Aug. II, 1838), 55, for a curiously similar review.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 90:]

14. William F. Gill, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1877), p. 86.

15. According to Heartman and Canny, Poe Bibliography, pp. 39-40, Wiley and Putnam issued the volume in London in 1838 and a third edition — this one pirated — appeared in London in 1841 (not to mention numerous pirated editions that appeared subsequent to Poe's death). Judging from the remarks of another zealous bibliographer of Poe, who published his Edgar A. Poe: A Study (San Francisco, 1921) privately and anonymously, the first London edition of Pym, a mutilated version, appears to have been authorized by Harpers (or else Harpers sold the right to Wiley and Putnam), since that edition appeared “simultaneously” with the Harpers’ edition to protect the work under British copyright law. Contrast these statements with this of Griswold in his Memoir to Poe's Literati, p. xv: “The publishers sent one hundred copies to England, and being mistaken at first for a narrative of real experiences, it was advertised to be reprinted, but a discovery of its character, I believe, prevented such a result.”

16. Knickerbocker, XIV, 564.

17. Ibid., XV (April, 1840), 359.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 91:]

18. Heartman and Canny, Poe Bibliography, pp. 54-55.

19. In Doings of Gotham, ed. by Jacob E. Spannuth and Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Pottsville, Pa., 1929), p. 44, Mabbott remarks that Poe never contributed to either the Knickerbocker or the North American Review, “although at one time or another he succeeded in selling something to almost every other really important magazine of the time, and many unimportant ones.”

20. Heartman and Canny, Poe Bibliography, pp. 58-59.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 92:]

21. Knickerbocker, XVI (July, 1840), 88.

22. This letter is dated Sept. 19, 1841 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 183).

23. Godey's Lady's Book, XXXIII (Sept., 1846), 132.

24. Frank Luther Mott in American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690-1940 (New York, 1941), p. 319, notes that the “Knickerbocker's chief rival after 1841 was the Philadelphia Graham's Magazine.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 93:]

25. The announcement of “Flaccus” “as a permanent contributor of this Magazine” appeared in the Knickerbocker, XV (Jan., 1840), 88.

26. Graham's Magazine, XXII (March, 1843), 195-198.

27. Poe seemed to have a fondness for throwing books to pigs, the implication being that they would be more digestible to pigs than to human beings. He used the expression, for instance, to conclude his reviews of William Harrison Ainsworth's Guy Fawkes (Graham's Magazine, XIX, Nov., 1841, 249) and Henry B. Hirst's The Coming of the Mammoth ... and Other Poems (Broadway Journal, II, July 12, 1845, 8).

28. Herman E. Spivey in his article “Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, LIV (Dec., 1939), 1124-1132, discusses the various opinions respecting the authorship of this article and cites evidence to prove that it was written by Poe. In the light of the information I have assembled, I second Spivey's judgment. Such statements as the “only redeeming quality which we ... can find in this gentleman, is in the fact that he is the brother of the late Willis G. Clark,” the laudation of the “old” Southern [page 94:] Literary Messenger, and the treatment of Griswold leave positive clues to the authorship of the article.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 94:]

29. New World, VI (March I1, 1843), 302-303. Park Benjamin, himself a caustic critic “hated and feared by many of his contemporaries” (Taft, Minor Knickerbockers, p. 403), for reasons best known to himself, allowed the article to appear, although he had once shared the editorship of this selfsame paper with Griswold and Sargent (see Knickerbocker, XXXVI, Aug., 1850, 168).

30. Knickerbocker, XXVIII (Oct., 1846), 368 n.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 95:]

31. Sargent's response to “Our Magazine Literature” appeared in Sargent's New Monthly Magazine, I (April, 1843), 192. Sargent took issue with what he called “two injurious untruths,” but never so much as suggested, as Clark does by the words “rejected contributor,” that the anonymous writer ever submitted that article to his magazine.

32. The allusion to “a small volume ... in ‘a third edition’ “appears aimed at Poe's Poems of 1831, which purported to be a second edition, either because Poe considered this volume a revision of Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829) or because he wanted to encourage sales.

33. Knickerbocker, XXI (April, 1843), 380.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 96:]

34. New World, VI (March II, 1843), 303.

35. Knickerbocker, XXII (July, 1843), 89.

36. XXIII, 113-117.

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37. Knickerbocker, XXII (Oct., 1843), 392.

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38. Messenger, X, 719-727; Broadway Journal, II, 33-39.

39. XXVII (Feb., 1845), 49-53.

40. I, 143-145.

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41. Knickerbocker, XXV (March, 1845), 282.

42. Ibid., XXV (April, 1845), 368.

43. Broadway Journal, I (May io, 1845), 297, and I (June 7, 1845), 363.

44. Ibid., I, 354-357.

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45. Knickerbocker, XXVI (July, 1845), 76.

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46. II, 11.

47. For the merits of Chivers’ claim, see Joel Benton, In the Poe Circle (New York, 1899) and Foster Damon, Thomas Holly Chivers: Friend of Poe (New York, 1930).

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48. Richard Beale Davis, ed., Chivers’ Life of Poe (New York, 1952), pp. 57-59.

49. Broadway Journal, II, 110.

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50. Ibid., II (Sept. 6, 1845), 138.

51. Ibid., II (Oct. 11, 1845), 213.

52. Knickerbocker, XXVI (Nov., 2845), 451-453.

53. II (Nov. 8, 1845), 276.

54. The passage is quoted from the Weekly Mirror, III (Nov. 15, 1845), 96, but see note 2 above for citation of other sources in which the article has been found.

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55. II (Nov. 15, 1845), 284.

56. Godey's Lady's Book, XXXIII (July, 1846), 15-16.

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57. Broadway Journal, II, 130-131.

58. XXXII, 41-42.

59. XXXI, 218-219.

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60. XXVI, 579-583.

61. XXVII (Jan., 1846), 69-72.

62. According to Poe in the Broadway Journal, II (Oct. 25, 1845), 200. Poe's assertion is borne out by the fact that Wiley and Putnam, the publishers of the Tales, brought out his poems as well, which indicates that the Tales must have more than paid for the publication costs and that the publishers expected additional profits from an edition of the poems.

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63. Poe, taking issue with the “heresy of The Didactic” in many a review, had asserted in Graham's Magazine, XX (March, 1842), 189-100, that didacticism as a purpose is detrimental to poetry and that the didactics of Longfellow — Clark's friend — ”are all out of place. ... We do not mean to say that a didactic moral may not be well made the under-current of a poetical thesis; but that it can never be well put ... obtrusively forth. ... ” In “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) Poe took issue with Clark and proceeded to elucidate his “real meaning, which some of my friends have evinced a disposition to misrepresent.” He explained again that Beauty, not truth, should be the object of a poem, and that it by no means followed from anything he had said that truth may not be introduced into a poem, so long as it was properly subordinated to “that Beauty which is ... the essence of the poem.”

64. The charge that Poe was an imitator of Tennyson was first made in an anonymous article called “The Poets of America” and appeared in the Foreign Quarterly Review, XLIV (Jan., 1844), 321-322. The article, which is examined in the next chapter, gained wide notoriety, and Clark, in echoing the accusation, was simply capitalizing on a ready-made situation.

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65. Knickerbocker, XXVII (Jan., 1846), 72-73.

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66. Ibid., XXVII, 184. The article appeared in the Boston Post on Jan. 14, 1846.

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67. XXVII, 461. Despite all efforts to find the article in the New York Evening Gazette and Times which Clark alluded to, nothing remotely corresponding to Clark's “quotation” from that paper can be found, either by myself or by two other persons who were kind enough to double- and triple-check my own fruitless searches. Was the item faked? The passage beginning, “There is a wandering specimen ... ,” and ending, “infesting the literary world ... ,” was copied with minor typographical differences in the Boston Evening Transcript, May 5, 1846.

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68. Memoir to The Literati, pp. xxii-xxiii. Godey in his magazine, XXXII (May, 1846), 240, also reprinted the “S.T.” article to indicate, among other things, that Clark's suggestion that Poe was insane was typical of his attacks.

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69. Spivey, whose Ph.D. dissertation was a study of the Knickerbocker, states in “Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark,” p. 1131, that the circulation of the Knickerbocker was very much greater than five thousand in 1846.

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70. Godey's Lady's Book, XXXIII, 132.

71. “J. G. H.” of Springfield, Mass., may have been Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819-1881) or merely a crank. It is curious to note that an “H. G. J.” (a reversal of these initials), also of Springfield, Mass., was respectfully informed in Godey's Lady's Book, XXXIII (Nov., 1846), 240, “that we cannot republish any article in our ‘Book,’ especially the one he refers to — biographical notice of L. Gaylord Clark. He is referred to the September number of our magazine, which he can either buy or borrow.”

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72. Although in quotation marks, the statement respecting Longfellow is not Poe's. On the contrary, Poe repeatedly declared that Longfellow had genius, but that he abused it with imitativeness and, at times, with outright plagiarism, as well as with didacticism. Similarly, but of far less consequence, Poe did call Carlyle an ass, but not an unmitigated one.

73. XXVIII, 368-369.

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74. See the Athenaeum, No. 957 (Feb. 28, 1846), pp. 215-216.

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75. See, for instance, ibid., No. 950 (Jan. 20, 1846), pp. 35-36, and No. 959 (March 14, 1846), pp. 266-267.

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76. See the New York Commercial Advertiser, XL (April 3, 1837), which shows that Clark's toast preceded Poe's by only eight short toasts. The toasts Clark and Poe offered are revealing: Clark proposed “Protection to Home Manufactures, whether of the hands or of the intellect.” Poe proposed, with [page 118:] what appears to be his usual taste for hoaxing, “The Monthlies of Gotham — Their distinguished Editors, and their vigorous Collaborateurs.”

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77. XXXIII (Oct., 1846), 158.

78. Knickerbocker, XXVIII (Nov., 1846), 425.

79. Ibid., XXVIII, 452. The article from which Clark quoted may be found in the North American Review, LXIII (Oct., 1846), 357-381. The North American noticed the Knickerbocker only to condemn it. It appears that Clark had published an article disparaging C. C. Felton, a professor of Greek literature at Harvard and a favorite and apparently an assistant editor of the North American Review. In retaliation, the North American wrote: “But we cannot express our astonishment that ... it should have been allowed to appear in a magazine once so respectable as The Knickerbocker” (LXV, July, 1847, 242). For a similar instance, see the North American Review, XLIV (Jan., 1837), 270-272.

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80. Letter dated Dec. 15, 1846 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 332).

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81. Knickerbocker, XXXI, 68-71.

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82. XVI, 173. See also ibid., p. 192, in which the owner and editor of the Messenger, John R. Thompson, apologized to Willis and Griswold, making a conspicuous exception of Lowell, who had become an active abolitionist, for the article's appearing during his absence. Thompson and Clark seem to have been friends. In the Messenger, XVI (Feb., 1850), 127, Thompson acknowledged “with pleasure the handsome manner in which our friend of The Knickerbocker is pleased to speak of us. Praise from such a source is worth something. If it were necessary, we could have the heart to give it back tenfold.” And Clark in the Knickerbocker, XLVI (Oct., 1855), 424, spoke of “our friend ... John R. Thompson, Esq., of the ‘Southern Literary Messenger’. ... ”

83. Graham's Magazine, XXXVI (March, 1850), 224-226.

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84. Knickerbocker, XXXV (Feb., 1850), 163-164.

85. This sketch “was transferred to the first volume on the publication of a second edition in 1853, and it continued to occupy this position on the publication of an edition of four volumes in 1856.” See Campbell, The Mind of Poe, p. 74 n. 1, which also gives his reasons for dating the sketch “about the middle of September, 1850.”

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86. D. L. Clark, “The Sources of Poe's ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ “Modern Language Notes, XLIV (June, 1929), 349-356. See also the Griswold sketch in The Literati volume, p. xxxii, in which Griswold repeated the identical charges.

87. See Quinn, Poe, p. 674, for Longfellow's letter to Griswold.

88. Knickerbocker, XXXVI (Oct., 1850), 370-372.

89. Quinn, Poe, p. 680.

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90. Whatever reasons Griswold had — to hurt Duyckinck, to make him hostile to Poe's memory, to forestall the charges he must have anticipated were forthcoming from him, or to defame Poe by showing him to be treacherous — he interpolated a phrase in one of the Poe letters he quoted: “The last selection of my tales was made from about seventy by [one of our great little cliquists and claquers] Wiley and Putnam's reader, Duyckinck.” (Compare the Griswold distortion in his Memoir in The Literati volume, p. xxxi, with the original phrasing in Ostrom's edition of the Letters, II, 328.) Sad to say, Griswold succeeded to the extent that Duyckinck declared in a review of The Literati volume (Literary World, VII, Sept. 21, 1850, 228) that Poe was “a literary attorney, who pleaded according to his fee” — a charge that had not occurred to him before and one that, together with similar statements, has helped in shaping the Poe myth. Nevertheless, in the same article, Duyckinck asked this embarrassing question, which waited until 1941 for Arthur Hobson Quinn to answer in his biography of Poe, when he proved that Griswold had not only tampered with Poe's text, but had published forged versions of some of Poe's letters: Why, if Griswold was purporting to present an accurate record of Poe's opinions, was the record “purged of any unhandsome references to Dr. Griswold?”

91. Campbell, The Mind of Poe, p. 77.

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92. The letter is dated May 29, 1841 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 160-161).

93. For the dating of these poems and for Longfellow's letter to Griswold, see Quinn, Poe, pp. 271, 674.

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94. Knickerbocker, XLVIII, 517-518. The review which Clark quoted in part appeared in the North American Review, LXXXIII (Oct., 1856), 427-455. Mott (American Magazines, II, 243) attributed this article to a Mrs. E. V. Smith. No one by that name has been located; I think it a pseudonym, and not a woman's but a man's. Quinn (Poe, p. 685) referred to the writer as “he,” and I think legitimately.

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95. Ibid., XLIX (Jan., 1857), 106.

96. The letter is dated Oct. 18, 1848 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 394).

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97. Knickerbocker, LV (April, 1860), 429.

98. Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, p. 23.

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99. Graham's Magazine, XXXVI (March, 1850), 226.

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100. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, XLVIII (March, 1874), 587-592.