Text: Sidney P. Moss, “Chapter 05,” Poe's Literary Battles, 1963, pp. 132-189 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 132:]

Poe's encounters with Longfellow have aroused so much emotionalism in Poe and Longfellow partisans that to look at the evidence afresh and with detachment requires the utmost self-discipline. To forestall such emotionalism from prejudicing the evidence, let it be repeated here that our purpose is not so much to defend Poe as a critic but to understand him in that capacity; to consider this “battle” as we have considered earlier ones, in the context of his critical career and literary milieu; and, finally, to draw judgments from the evidence, whether those judgments happen to be favorable or unfavorable to Poe or, in this instance, to Longfellow. Thus, let it be acknowledged at once that in his notices of the Cambridge poet Poe was blunt and quarrelsome at times; that he made serious errors of judgment on occasion; that he was not unwilling to use Longfellow for sensational purposes to enlarge the subscription lists of the magazines he was serving; that the last of his protracted replies to “Outis” may even betray the first symptoms of a mental disturbance that became obvious in the [page 133:] following year; and, having acknowledged this, let us proceed to as impartial an examination of the available evidence as is possible in the circumstances.

Poe first took critical notice of Longfellow when his prose tale, Hyperion: A Romance (1839), came to his attention as reviewer for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. This was Longfellow's second published work, if we regard the three editions of Outre-Mer as one and ignore his textbooks.

The thin autobiographical narrative was, in the persona of Paul Flemming, an account of his second European trip from the death of his first wife following a miscarriage to his frustrated romance with Frances Appleton (Mary Ashburton). Steeped in German Romanticism, Longfellow responded to his wife's death and to Frances Appleton in a pretentiously literary style which he later abandoned. Thus, in Hyperion, his dead wife was the bough which had broken under the burden of the unripe fruit, and Frances Appleton is the wraith who haunts his dreams “with her pale, speaking countenance and holy eyes.” The literary influences manifest in the work are many, but Jean Paul's is most obvious.(1) But the story, however derivative its manner, was essentially a frame on which to hang all sorts of miscellaneous materials: anecdotes, legends, travel notes, translations of German poems, and even discussions of literary topics, some drawn from his Harvard lectures on German literature.

Poe, who insisted time and again that “totality, or unity, of effect” is a desideratum of a literary work and who repeatedly held that “than the true originality there is no higher literary virtue,” was bound to be unhappy with the book:

Such criticism of Hyperion was by no means unusual then or now. Longfellow himself observed: “The Boston papers are very savage, and abuse me shockingly ... ”(3) One such “abusive” review was written by Orestes A. Brownson, editor of the Boston Quarterly Review, whose reaction to Hyperion was similar to Poe's: “I do not like the book. It is such a journal as a man who reads a great deal makes from the scraps in his table-drawer. ... You cannot guess why the book was written ... ”(4) Another “abusive” reviewer confessed in the Boston Mercantile Journal of September 27, 1839, that one “book” of the four “books” of Hyperion was a dose as large as he could swallow because he found it a “mongrel mixture of descriptions and criticism, travels and bibliography, commonplaces clad in purple, and follies ‘with not a rag to cover them.’ “Amusingly enough, Frances Appleton, unhappy at being served up to the public under the persona of Mary Ashburton, remarked privately: “There are really some exquisite things in this book, though it is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches like the author's mind.”(5)

But not all notices of Hyperion were unfavorable, for four of Longfellow's friends — Cornelius Conway Felton, Samuel [page 135:] Ward, and the Clark brothers — published their reviews of that work too.(6) For the Boston Courier Felton wrote a stinging reply to the Mercantile Journal reviewer, which he trenchantly titled, “Hyperion to a Satyr” (a reply that Willis Clark reprinted in his Philadelphia Gazette),(7) as well as a seventeen-page defense of Hyperion for the North American Review. In the North American, Felton conceded what was already the fact, that Hyperion “must encounter a variety of critical opinions”; yet, he maintained, the book “must not be judged by the principles of classical composition” — that is to say, by the principle of unity, as Poe and others had judged it. Readers, he said, who were “attuned to sentiments of tenderness,” who had an imaginative turn of mind, and who were “sensitively alive to the influence of the beautiful,” would come back to the book again and again. Ward devoted twenty pages of the New York Review to affirming that the book is a “lay ... uttered by the scholar with the lips of a minstrel,” and “that the appearance of Hyperion is an event in the annals of our scholarship and literary taste.” Willis Clark, who pronounced the work great, promised to review it “with liberal extracts, some Saturday” for his Philadelphia Gazette. And Lewis Clark, declaring in the Knickerbocker that the Romance “is an exquisite production and will be so pronounced by every reader of taste,” urged his subscribers to “possess themselves at once of ‘Hyperion,’ and sit down to a feast of calm philosophy, poetry, and romance.”

Encouraged by the reception of Hyperion — he oversanguinely remarked that a large edition of the book had been sold in a few weeks(8) — Longfellow created another opportunity [page 136:] to appear on the literary market in that same year. He collected his “Voices of the Night” (eight “Psalms,” including “Hymn to the Night,” “A Psalm of Life,” “The Beleaguered City,” and “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year,” which had appeared in the Knickerbocker), sorted through his “Earlier Poems” (from which he selected seven), gathered twenty-three of his “Translations” (some of which had appeared in Hyperion and elsewhere), and made a modest, three-sectioned volume of the whole, which he inappropriately christened Voices of the Night.

Unlike Hyperion, this work was widely acclaimed by the press. As Longfellow wrote, “Every one praises the book. Even the Boston papers which so abused Hyperion, praise this highly.”(9) Before the volume appeared in December, Lewis Clark announced in the Knickerbocker:

And when the book was published, Clark observed:

Felton, too, in the North American, extolled the volume, especially the title section, saying that they “are among the most remarkable poetical compositions, which have ever appeared in the United States”(12) — a verdict that Clark, not to be [page 137:] outdone, quoted in his “Editor's Table,” adding that “we are especially gratified to find the praise which has been bestowed in these pages upon ... ’Hyperion,’ ... and . . Voices of the Night,’ reechoed in the deliberate verdict of the ‘North American’ ”(13)

Such acclamation by the press was in great measure deserved. Reviewers familiar with the run of American poetry were bound to be impressed by the command of language, the freshness of imagery, and the sureness of technique that characterize most of the Psalms. Felton's opinion, that the Psalms were “among the most remarkable poetical compositions, which have ever appeared in the United States,” was perfectly sound at the time. Reviewers like Poe, however, who held that the world, not America, “is the true theatre of the biblical histrio”; who refused to let literary patriotism enter into their judgments; who felt compelled to compare Longfellow's accomplishments with those of Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley rather than with John Brainard's, Fitz-Greene Halleck's, and Mrs. Sigourney's, were bound to be more moderate in their acclaim. Thus, in reviewing Voices for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Poe remarked that when he had first. seen “Hymn to the Night” in a newspaper, he had been impressed with the “firm belief that a poet of high genius had at length arisen amongst us.” No poem, he remarked, ever opened with a beauty more august and the first five stanzas are nearly perfect. Had Longfellow always written this way, Poe continued, “we should have been tempted to speak of him not only as our finest poet, but as one of the noblest poets of all time.” His perusal of Voices had not modified his conviction. that Longfellow had genius; it had, however, altered his opinion as to his “capacity for .. . any enduring reputation.” For though Longfellow possesses the “loftiest qualities of the poetical soul . ... he has nothing of unity” — the same observation, Poe added, that Hyperion had induced in him. Even the five stanzas of the “Hymn” alluded to have defects consequent upon lack of unity — defects which he considered symptoms of inability to achieve “that perfection which is the result only [page 138:] of the strictest proportion and adaptation in all the poetical requisites. ...” Hence, he said, the defects he had pointed out existed not only in the poems but “in the mind of the writer, and thence ineradicable ... ”(14)

If we can condone Poe's questioning the degree of Longfellow's talents (and neither in this notice nor in subsequent ones did he fall into the easy fatuity of condemning Longfellow's poems contemptuously or of admiring them vacuously), we may not be so willing to condone his questioning Longfellow's honesty in the high-handed way he proceeded to do at the close of this review. Copying Longfellow's “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year” and Tennyson's “The Death of the Old Year,” he called attention to a plagiarism “too palpable to be mistaken, and which belongs to the most barbarous class of literary robbery: that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore his least defensible and least reclaimable property is purloined.” Aside from occasional lapses, Poe admitted, “there is nothing of a visible or palpable nature by which the source of the American poem can be established. But then nearly all that is valuable in the piece of Tennyson is the ... conception of personifying the Old Year as a dying old man, with the singularly wild and fantastic manner in which that conception is carried out. Of this conception and of this manner he is robbed.” Needless to say, Poe ruled out all possibility of coincidence, if he considered it at all.(15) [page 139:]

If the puffing lavished on Hyperion by the North American Review, the Knickerbocker, and the Philadelphia Gazette had not provided Poe with evidence of logrolling or, to use his expression, the “corrupt nature of our ordinary criticism,” and if the phenomenon of Voices passing through four printings within the year(16) had not signalized to him that Longfellow was being abetted by the New York and Boston coteries, he must have at least suspected the fact when he ran into an old adversary, Willis Clark, whom he had encountered under similar circumstances in the Norman Leslie incident. Most likely in order to stimulate sales of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Poe called attention to what he deemed Longfellow's plagiarism in Alexander's Weekly Messenger, a journal to which he was contributing at the time. In his column for January 29, 1840, he referred to a review in Burton's “which shows up Professor Longfellow as a plagiarist of the first water ... ”(17) The allegation, made so bluntly, reached Longfellow at Cambridge, and he proceeded to deny it to his friend Ward: “My brother told me yesterday that some paragraphs had appeared in some New York paper [Alexander's was printed in Philadelphia] saying I stole the idea of the ‘Midnight Mass’ from Tennyson. Absurd. I did not even know that he had written a piece on this subject.’ ”(18) Unfortunately, the evidence does not entirely support Longfellow's statement. “The Fifth Psalm: A Midnight Mass for the Dying Year” first appeared in the Knickerbocker [page 140:] in October, 1839. In 1838 Emerson, in correspondence with C. C. Little, who wanted to bring out the first American edition of Tennyson's Poems (London, 1833) the book that contains “The Death of the Old Year” — told that publisher that Longfellow owned a copy.(19) Moreover, Longfellow in a letter to Frances Appleton written sometime in 1837 or 1838 extolled the virtues of Tennyson (“the nicest ear can ask no richer melody: — and the most lively imagination no lovlier [sic] picture, nor more true”) and even quoted verses and cited page numbers from the very volume containing “The Death of the Old Year.”(20) Had Longfellow been candid, Poe's charge would appear today, as it must have appeared then, decidedly unfair; but Longfellow's denial in the circumstances tends to draw suspicion from the accuser to the accused.

Having written to Ward, Longfellow wrote to Willis Clark as well: “Pray who is it that is attacking me so furiously in Philadelphia. I have never seen the attacks, but occasionally I receive a newspaper with a defense of my writings, from which I learn there has been an attack. I thank you for what you have done for me; and for your good thoughts and good words.”(21) Clark, responding to Longfellow's letter, wrote: “You ask me who attacks you here? The only ones I have seen against you, have been in Burton's ... I have answered thoroughly, any attack upon you — and shall continue to do so, whenever they appear.”(22) Clark spoke the truth, for he had answered Poe's anonymous articles in Burton's and Alexander's. On February 4, 1840, he had printed a statement in his Gazette designed to acquit Longfellow of plagiarism by [page 141:] convicting Tennyson of stealing from Longfellow, or, failing that, by suggesting that Longfellow, at worst, had only filched from one of his own earlier poems. His defense, based on the error that Tennyson was a Scotsman and on the reduction of Poe's charge to imitation, only evidenced his partiality for Longfellow:

On February 12, his earliest opportunity, Poe did as Clark bade him. He reprinted Clark's caveat in Alexander's and added:

Poe, needless to say, did not oblige the editor of the Gazette and the matter lapsed.

All that can be said here is that Poe was still plumping for sales of Burton's and that he exercised some restraint by merely reiterating the original accusation. He could easily have strengthened his position by adducing other and far less questionable instances of “plagiarism” in Voices — even from the very poem “Autumn” which Clark had cited. Consider the last nine lines of that poem, for example, in respect to ideas, phrases, and even the blank verse of “Thanatopsis”:

In his original review of Voices, however, Poe had said that no author of mature age should desire to have his poetical character estimated by the productions of his mind at immaturity, and “Autumn,” like the rest of the “Earlier Poems,” was written, as Longfellow had acknowledged, before he was nineteen.

Twice during the next year Poe had occasion to write to Longfellow — the first and last time letters were exchanged between them. As editor now of Graham's Magazine, Poe was asked by the proprietor to solicit contributions from Longfellow, who had become, almost overnight on the strength of Voices, America's best-selling poet and thus a most desirable contributor. Poe's position was awkward, for however much [page 143:] he had acclaimed Longfellow as a poet, he had not only pointed out his weaknesses but had accused him of plagiarism, and he felt he could anticipate the poet's response. His letter reflects his dilemma:

Poe added that if Longfellow were interested, he could submit an article every month, whether in poetry or prose, length, subject, and price at his discretion.

Longfellow replied on May 19, refusing the offer and acknowledging Poe's existence. With nice discretion, he avoided mentioning Poe's recent strictures on his work and, at the same time, managed to return the compliment Poe had paid him:

During the next month Poe sought to establish his own journal. Having found Longfellow more agreeable than he had reason to expect, Poe wrote him a second letter in which he discussed his projected magazine and asked again for contributions: “In your former note you spoke of present engagements. The proposed journal will not be commenced until the 1st January 1842.(26) What Longfellow replied, if he replied at all, is not known, but it can hardly be coincidence that, despite his previous objections, he appeared in Graham's Magazine for January, 1842, and soon became one of Graham's headliners.

In the meantime Poe, upon request, submitted some of his poems to Rufus Griswold for inclusion in that compiler's anthology, The Poets and Poetry of America. Earlier in the month Poe had praised “The Beleaguered City” in his letter to Longfellow; now, he called Griswold's attention to the similarity between the Longfellow poem and his own “Haunted Palace” in what was evidently a private attempt to acquit himself in advance of the charge of plagiarism. “The Beleaguered City” was well known, not only to subscribers of the Knickerbocker, but to readers of Voices, whereas his own poem had led an obscure, not to say fugitive, existence; and he no doubt felt justified in trying to forestall the charge. It would have been embarrassing, to say the least, to one who had so recently accused Longfellow of plagiarizing from Tennyson to be accused, in turn, of plagiarizing from Longfellow. Thus, Poe furnished Griswold with evidence that “The Haunted Palace” antedated Longfellow's poem. If he could have conceded the possibility of coincidence, his tone would have been less offensive, but Poe typically saw such likenesses only as evidence of plagiarism:

As matters turned out, plagiarism was adduced from this evidence only by Poe and, after Poe's death, by Griswold. Though in full possession of the facts, that compiler twisted the charge so that Poe was made to appear the plagiarist of Longfellow. Moreover, using these very poems as evidence, Griswold commented that Poe's “plagiarisms are scarcely paralleled for their audacity in all literary history.” Griswold even assigned this as “the first cause of all that malignant criticism which for so many years he carried on against Longfellow.”(28)

Before he reviewed another Longfellow volume, Poe alluded to the Cambridge poet on four occasions,(29) twice quite cuttingly and twice quite admiringly, an ambivalence that was to become characteristic of his attitude toward Longfellow. If he could have explained imitation in terms of coincidence, Poe would have been, allowing for his aesthetic reservations, one of Longfellow's strongest advocates, for he never doubted his genius. But unable, for most of his career, to explain imitation in any terms other than intention, he praised the poet but condemned the “plagiarist.” His attitude became quite clear in his review of Wilmer's Quacks of Helicon. Confronted with Wilmer's indictment that Longfellow “Steals all he can and butchers what he steals,”(30) Poe treated the statement as a half-truth. “Mr. Longfellow will steal,” he conceded, “but, perhaps, he [page 146:] cannot help it, (for we have heard of such thing,) and then it must not be denied that nil tetigit quod non ornavit.” Similarly, Poe in his signed “Chapter on Autography” declared that Longfellow was “entitled to the first place among the poets of America,” but that he was guilty of imitation — ”an imitation sometimes verging upon downright theft.” Yet twice in February, 1842, Poe praised Longfellow without qualification. In atomizing a poem by Cornelius Mathews, he remarked that the poem had first appeared in Arcturus, a magazine co-edited by Mathews, where, insultingly, “it took precedence of some exceedingly beautiful stanzas by Professor Longfellow. ...” And in another critique he observed that John Brainard has “written poems which may rank with those of any American, with the single exception of Longfellow. ...”

The publication of Longfellow's second small collection of verse, Ballads and Other Poems (1841), which contained four translations and twelve of his own poems, including “The Skeleton in Armour,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Village Blacksmith,” and “Excelsior,” consolidated Longfellow's literary position and entitled him to be called — as he has been called — America's first professional poet and her unofficial poet laureate. Of the many reviews celebrating the book, Felton's in the North American Review is perhaps most pertinent. Longfellow had become so established and the salability of his works so certain that Felton, in his thirty-page discussion, conceded that Longfellow no longer needed puffs — that the mere announcement of a book bearing his name would suffice to guarantee a best-seller. Nevertheless, not to blink at the fact, Felton continued to review almost every one of Longfellow's works and almost always in the North American:

Mr. Longfellow's poetry has become so generally known, and, wherever known, is so universally admired, as to need no aid from the journals of literature ... It is, therefore, with no expectation of adding to its widespread renown, or of increasing the number of its admirers, that we call our readers’ attention to this second volume [of poetry] from Professor Longfellow's pen.(31) [page 147:]

In the din of such universal and generally uncritical acclaim, Poe's two reviews of the Ballads may be unique for their reservations. In the first of these reviews, Poe remarked that he had space only “to say a few random words of welcome to these ‘Ballads,’ by Longfellow, and to tender him, and all such as he, the homage of our earnest love and admiration.” Nevertheless, the man who had argued early in his career (in his “Letter to B — ”) that a poem “is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object pleasure, not truth,” and who, at the end of his career (in “The Poetic Principle”) charged that the “heresy of The Didactic” had “accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined,” felt compelled to qualify his homage. Thus, he said that Longfellow's insistence on didactics was preventing him from realizing his full genius that his conception of the aim of poetry was, in fact, forcing him to utter conventionalities that, by their nature, seemed imitative and reminiscent. In Poe's words:

In the following month Poe devoted another review to the Ballads to amplify points he had raised here. This second review was no more an attack upon Longfellow than the first. Rather, it was Poe's effort to release him from the trammels of didacticism. For Longfellow's error, Poe contended, is that he regards the inculcation of a moral as essential to his poetry and thereby does violent wrong to his high powers: “His invention, his imagery, his all, is made subservient to the elucidation [page 148:] of some one or more points ... which he looks upon as truth. ... Now with as deep a reverence for ‘the true’ as ever inspired the bosom of mortal man, we would limit, in many respects, its modes of inculcation. ...” Yet he did not wish to be misunderstood. Poetry “is not forbidden to depict — but to reason and preach of virtue.” He then said that the true poet is not concerned with truth but with beauty. He recognized that such a rigorous definition would rule out much of what has been considered poetic — Hudibras and the Essay on Man, for instance — and he cited Keats as the poet “most fully instinct with the principles now developed. ... Beauty is always his aim.”

Poe was either uncertain of his position or else overstated his views in an effort to make a strong case against the heresy of the didactic, a “heresy” that, needless to say, was an orthodoxy in its time. In his first review of the Ballads, he made a mechanical division between the aesthetic and the moral (Poe used the term didactic loosely, sometimes in connection with moral truth, more often in connection with conventional doctrine and obtrusive moral tags), saying that a “didactic moral may . .. be ... the under-current of a poetical thesis ... .” In the second review, however, he declared that poetry has nothing to do with truth (the “obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth” are irreconcilable) an assertion he repeated to the very words in “The Poetic Principle” when deriding the idea that “the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth.” Yet in both [page 149:] reviews of the Ballads and in other contexts, Poe suggested that when the moral becomes aesthetic — when, in other words, the moral, far from being an appendage to a poem, becomes implicit in the poem — ”Poetry and Truth” are perfectly reconcilable. In discussing, for example, Ludwig Uhland's “Das Gluck von Edenhall,” which Longfellow had translated and included in the Ballads, Poe remarked that the “pointed moral with which it terminates is so exceedingly natural — so perfectly fluent from the incidents — that we have hardly heart to pronounce it in bad taste.” His objection, clearly, is to the explicit statement of a moral that should have been made implicit in the poem. Even in “The Poetic Principle” Poe cited among “a few of the simple elements which induce in the Poet himself the true poetical effect ... all noble thoughts ... all holy impulses. ...” And in his “Marginalia” Poe categorically declared: “I confidently maintain that the highest genius is but the loftiest moral nobility.”(34)

Though Poe went too far in denying the relation between the moral and aesthetic, we should not lose sight of the significant fact that he was fighting fire with fire and an extreme position with an extreme position. The position he was opposing is that a work of art is never self-justifying: it justifies itself only insofar as it imparts ethical doctrine — a position that even Emerson, for all his brilliance, rigidly adopted in “The Poet.” Thus, artistic value is identified with, if not identical to, moral content; therefore, the loftier the moral, the greater the work of art; and, by the same reasoning, a work of art that has no ostensible message must be, a priori, seriously deficient. As Poe stated the case more fully in “The Poetic Principle”:

Whether Poe misrepresented or had failed to synthesize his views, he did not distort Longfellow's, as anyone familiar with the Voices and Ballads is aware. Earlier, Longfellow had stated the principle implicit in such poems as “The Rainy Day,” “A Psalm of Life,” “The Village Blacksmith,” and “Excelsior,” that the “natural tendency of poetry is to give us correct moral impressions, and thereby advance the cause of truth and the improvement of society”(36) — a tendency he reinforced by emasculating the burly Jean Paul Richter and the passionate Heinrich Heine in his “translations, comments, and frequent imitations of these writers. ...” Thus a poet in whose work “there was always enough easily recognizable middle-class morality ... to make him seem entirely safe in a country still distrustful of beauty for its own sake,(37) and who adopted principles associated more with Pope and Gray than with Shelley and Keats, was bound to be received with some reservation [page 151:] by a Romantic critic like Poe. The fact that Poe could not dismiss him out of hand is indication enough that Longfellow was a force to reckon with. We can only conjure with the idea of what Longfellow might have accomplished had Poe become his literary conscience, as Edmund Wilson became Scott Fitzgerald's, at least to the extent of urging him to reexamine his poetic principles or of listening to his neighbor Emerson when he said in “The Poet”: “... it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem — a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own. ...” Yet America, needless to say, was hardly prepared to receive poets who wrote “simply for the poem's sake” or whose poems (to use Emerson's phrase) did not contain “the ground-tone of conventional life,” despite the efforts by Poe and others to prepare the ground for their reception. Had Longfellow been tempted to write otherwise — had he used ideas less comfortably familiar, sentiments less aseptically decent, didactics less obtrusive, language less explicit and mellifluous — his poems might in their time have shared the fate of Leaves of Grass (Whitman, after all, had listened to Emerson) rather than have enjoyed what was probably the greatest popular success that any poems ever had — and success more than greatness seems to have been Longfellow's concern.

Poe did not review Longfellow's next volume, his Poems on Slavery (1842), disqualifying himself, perhaps, on the grounds of his antipathy to abolitionism and his avowed prejudice to didactic poetry. But in 1843 he used a stanza from “A Psalm of Life” as an epigraph to his story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,”(38) and in a letter to Lowell he reaffirmed his conviction that “Longfellow has genius. ...” Yet, however much he admired the poet, he confessed that he did not know “how to understand him at times. I am in doubt whether he should not be termed an arrant plagiarist.” He then called Lowell's attention to [page 152:] Longfellow's recent book, The Spanish Student: A Play in Three Acts (1843), and mentioned that he had written “quite a long notice of it for Graham's December number. The play,” he added, “is a poor composition, with some fine poetical passages.”(39)

This notice was never printed in Graham's for two reasons. First, Graham would hardly welcome adverse criticism of a work that had originally appeared in his own magazine.(40) Second, both Graham and Griswold (the latter was now editor of Graham's) had had trouble with Longfellow and were using their rejection of Poe's adverse review to reconcile their star contributor. The trouble began in 1842 when an artist, Franquinet by name, had painted a portrait of Longfellow while the poet was abroad, which, without Longfellow's approval, was engraved to appear in Graham's in May, 1843. When the poet returned from Europe and saw the portrait, he was angry at the thought that Graham and Griswold would allow this “most atrocious libel imaginable; a very vulgar individual, looking very drunk and very cunning,” to appear in the magazine and demanded that the painting and the plate be destroyed. Graham, faced with the choice of sacrificing the $405 he had invested or of losing his headliner, decided to concede to Longfellow's demand and begin all over again “with a. portrait — the best you have.” But Longfellow had none that satisfied him and insisted that he be given time to have one done. Graham refused to wait and the portrait made its scheduled appearance.(41) The “libel” was atrocious enough to impel Lewis Clark to condemn the portrait in the Knickerbocker as a “ ‘counterfeit presentment,’ sure enough”; to assert that “the artist ought to be indicted”; and to describe Longfellow as a “handsome man with ‘soft and flowing hair,’ touched with the slightest possible tinge of ‘sable silver;’ an eye with a liquid, interior look,” etc.(42) [page 153:]

Griswold, who relinquished his editorship of Graham's in October of that year, wrote Longfellow in an evident attempt to placate him and smeared Poe in the process. Poe, he said,

Graham also sought to pacify Longfellow by showing a concern for him which he had failed to show before in respect to the portrait:

As he exaggerated the price, Graham seems to have exaggerated the severity of the review. Soon after Poe had submitted the critique to Graham, he had observed that the Student as a play was poor but that it contained fine poetical passages. Moreover, his treatment of that play in his article “The American Drama” fails to justify Graham's statement. In that article Poe stated the crux of his position, that the “great adversary of Invention is Imitation.” One must forget the old models and “consider de novo ... the capabilities of the drama — not [page 154:] merely ... its conventional purposes.” In considering Nathaniel Willis's Tortesa, the Usurer, he objected to mere complexity passing for plot. Ideally, he said, a plot “is perfect only inasmuch as we shall find ourselves unable to detach from it or disarrange any single incident involved, without destruction to the mass. ...” Practically, a plot may be considered of “high excellence, when no one of its component parts shall be susceptible of removal without detriment to the whole.”

Then he turned to The Spanish Student, which had passed through three editions in the first year of its publication and with which Longfellow confessed himself “much disheartened. Neither you [Ward], nor Sumner, nor Ticknor, nor Felton likes it. .. . I shall probably throw it into the fire.”(45) Poe dissented from the general opinion regarding the play. The few, he asserted, who do not have their opinions formed for them “received the play with a commendation somewhat less prononcée ... than Professor Longfellow might have desired, or may have been taught to expect.” He then quoted the “finer passages. ... by way of justice to the poet” and proceeded to criticize the dramatist. He demonstrated that Longfellow was imitative of the old models: he mistook complexity for plot; his incidents were the stock-in-trade of a “thousand and one comedies”; two-thirds of his material was unnecessary and the arrangement of it was random; moreover, the play echoed the “quaint and stilted tone of the English dramatists”:

That this is harsh criticism cannot be doubted. The only question is whether the harshness is not an inevitable consequence of Poe's aesthetic principles and critical candor. Poe, of course, thought so. When the New York Evening Gazette of August 8, 1845, declared this review a “somewhat sweeping condemnation” and added, “but Mr. Longfellow does not seem to please Mr. Poe in anything that he writes,” Poe was indignant. In the Broadway Journal of August 16, 1845, he replied that he had been grossly misrepresented by the statement that he could find nothing to admire in Longfellow:

These were Poe's major reviews of Longfellow, and before we turn to less literary, more journalistic, matters, we should assess them briefly. With one conspicuous exception — the shot-in-the-dark accusation that Longfellow had plagiarized his “Midnight Mass” from Tennyson, not to mention the occasional harshness of tone that Poe seems to have considered an earmark of critical candor — nothing in the Poe critiques we have examined seems in any way discreditable. In the first [page 156:] of them, Poe pronounced Hyperion imitative and disunified, a judgment that can hardly be questioned. In the second, he said that Voices evinced poetic genius but not of the highest order — a declaration that errs, if at all, on the side of indulgence. In the two reviews of the Ballads, Poe demonstrated that Longfellow, by warping his art for didactic ends, was abusing his high powers, and he attempted, in the process, to perform a service for him, from which, at least for his present reputation, he might have benefited enormously. In his article on the American drama, Poe again stated what seems sufficiently clear, that The Spanish Student as a drama is devoid of merit. And in passing, Poe remarked that Longfellow was entitled to the first place among American poets, but that his tendency to imitate sometimes verged on plagiarism.(48)

Poe did not notice Longfellow again until he had joined the staff of the Mirror as assistant editor.(49) In reviewing his Waif (1844, dated 1845), a collection of about fifty poems to which Longfellow contributed only the “Proem” (“The day is done and the darkness ... ”), Poe made three significant comments. First, that the “Proem” was the best poem in the collection, despite the fact that the anthology contained works by Herrick, Marvell, Shelley, and Browning. Second, that a comparison of “The Death-Bed” by Hood (which also appeared in The Waif) and a poem that appeared in Griswold's Poets and Poetry of [page 157:] America (which Poe mentioned neither by title nor author) showed that “somebody is a thief.” Third:

If there was any single reason for the animus of this final comment, one can find it in an anonymous article that, upon its appearance in the London Foreign Quarterly Review, became a cause célèbre. Typical of the English view except in its wholesale condemnation, the article insisted that American poets were either imitators or plagiarists. The major exception was “the most accomplished of the brotherhood, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But we have some doubts whether he can be fairly considered an indigenous specimen. His mind was educated in Europe. ... But America claims him, and is entitled to him. ... He is unquestionably the first of her poets, the most thoughtful and chaste; the most elaborate and finished.” Among the imitators and plagiarists was Poe, a “capital artist after the manner of Tennyson; [who] approaches the spirit of his original more closely than any of them.” The article concluded with the statement that almost every American poet was “on a level with the versifiers who fill up the corners of our provincial journals, into which all sorts of platitudes are admitted by the indiscriminate courtesy of the printer.”(51)

Poe, of course, considered the charge of imitation ridiculous. Writing to Lowell, who had been completely ignored by the [page 158:] Foreign Quarterly reviewer, Poe asked if he had seen the article:

In answering Poe's letter, Lowell said that the article was written, not by Dickens but by John Forster, Dickens’ friend, though Dickens “may have given him hints. Forster is a friend of some of the Longfellow clique here which perhaps accounts for his putting L. at the top of our Parnassus!”(53)

In reaction to this information, Poe apparently felt that [page 159:] Longfellow, inadvertently or otherwise, had been instrumental in enlisting a transatlantic journal for the purpose of reducing almost every other American poet's claim to an impertinence so that, relatively, his position would be all the more unquestionable. Moreover, as a consequence, he probably began to see himself as the butt of a bad joke. He who had condemned imitation was now charged with that very sin. The man whose imitativeness he had censured was now held up as an original poet, at least by conspicuous default of any statement to the contrary in an article teeming with charges of imitation and plagiarism. And, as if to make the barb penetrate deeper, the poet he was said to imitate was the very poet he had accused Longfellow of plagiarizing. Whatever the validity of these speculations, Poe found the stigma of imitation so intolerable that, to exculpate himself, he footnoted the section “Poems Written in Youth” in the Raven volume (1845) as follows: “Private reasons — some of which have reference to the sin of plagiarism, and others to the date of Tennyson's first poems — have induced me, after some hesitation, to republish these, the crude compositions of my earliest boyhood . ... the date of which is too remote to be judiciously acknowledged.”(54) Thus, to all appearances, the remarks in the Foreign Quarterly were still rankling in Poe when he reviewed The Waif.

Poe's innuendoes in the Mirror drove Hiram Fuller and George Morris, co-editors of that journal, to print a joint disclaimer of them, saying: “For the opinions of the Daily paper, Mr. Willis is alone the gate-keeper, and by himself or by his direction, all its principal articles are written.”(55) Poe's allegations, moreover, elicited a letter from a self-acknowledged friend of Longfellow, a Mr. “H.,” now known to have been George S. Hillard,(56) one of the members of the [page 160:] “Five of Clubs” at Cambridge, which included Henry R. Cleveland, Charles Sumner, Cornelius C. Felton, and Longfellow. The letter, coming from Boston and dated January 15, was published in the Evening Mirror on January 20, and was prefaced by Willis, who also disclaimed responsibility for the Waif review: “We are willing to take any position to serve our friends, and if, by chance, we play the antagonist to shew another's ‘skill of fence’ in his behalf, we trust not to be believed less his friend, after the joust is over. The criticisms on the ‘Waif’ ... were written in our office by an able though very critical hand.” Willis also made a point of publishing in this and the next issue of the Evening Mirror Lowell's high estimate of Poe as a critic that was to appear in the February number of Graham's Magazine.

“H.'s” principal concern was “with the sting in the tail of the second communication [the second instalment of Poe's review of The Waif], in which Mr. Longfellow is charged with omitting, from discreditable motives, any extracts from American poets, though he continuously imitates some of them. This is no light accusation; and is one against which his friends feel bound to enter their most emphatic protest.” “H.” maintained that an anthologist has the privilege of selecting any materials he cares to and declared that the charge of discrimination was wholly untrue, especially in this instance, since he had known the compiler for a long time. “If it be asked,” he concluded, “why has he not given public demonstration of this kindness of spirit towards his poetical brethren, the answer is obvious. He is a poet himself, and addresses the public in that capacity, and not as a critic ... The charge of habitually imitating other American poets touches Mr. Longfellow in his public character as a poet, and not his personal character as a man, and therefore requires no especial reply from his friends.”

Directly following “H.'s” letter and under the title, “Post-Notes by the Critic,” Poe published his rejoinder: [page 161:]

Nothing more was heard from “H.” nor, apparently, was anything to be heard again from Boston or Cambridge on this score; and though, most likely, Poe would have furnished articles on imitation and plagiarism for the Mirror, he might have ignored Longfellow indefinitely. Unfortunately, however, a series of episodes occurred which gave a sensational vogue to Poe's comments and made it imperative for Longfellow's friends to rescue the poet from the notoriety which, for a time, threatened him.

On January 25 the Buffalo Western Literary Messenger published a letter from “Pi Kappa Rho,” who compared Longfellow's translation of “The Good George Campbell from the German of O.L.B. Wolf[f]” (which had appeared in Graham's Magazine in February, 1843) with the ballad, “Bonnie George Campbell” (which had appeared in William Motherwell's collection, Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, Glasgow, 1828). “Pi Kappa Rho,” assuming that Wolff, a professor at the University of Jena, had not translated the Scotch ballad, accused Longfellow of a “gross plagiarism” and of impudence in “supposing that he can, undetected, palm off upon us, in a mutilated state, this ... beautiful ancient Scottish song, as a translation from the German of O.L.B. Wolf.” [page 162:]

The charge, apparently unanswerable, became common editorial fare, which brought Longfellow's integrity into question and began to make Poe's recent allegations appear valid. Among the New York papers that carried the Messenger charge were The Rover, the Broadway Journal, and the Daily Tribune.(57) The Rover, also assuming that the Wolff translation did not exist, noted:

The editor then printed the Scottish poem and Longfellow's alleged plagiarism side by side and concluded, “Singular coincidence, eh?”

The Broadway Journal observed: “Charges of plagiarism are very frequently made, and often with good reason, against our popular authors. ... The ‘Rover’ ... contains a very grave charge against Longfellow ... which, if true, would lead us to distrust everything that came from his pen.” The Tribune, however, cited a “correspondent of the Boston Post” to explain that Longfellow's error was not one of plagiarism but one of inadvertence:

This was scarcely a vindication. Since the source that Longfellow had used remained unspecified, the charge that Wolff plagiarized instead of merely translated is unsupported. A collection [page 163:] by Wolff that contains the poem is, as Poe later pointed out, Halle der Völker: Sammlung vorzüglicher Volkslieder der bekanntesten Nationen, grösstentheils zum ersten Male metrisch in das Deutsche übertragen (Frankfurt, 1837), a title that plainly clears Wolff of plagiarism. Aware that this explanation satisfied few of his critics, Longfellow wrote a letter to Graham, dated February 19, 1845, to explain the situation more convincingly. But mysteriously — and it is only one of the mysteries of this affair — the letter was not published in Graham's until May, 1845. The source he had used while abroad in the summer of 1842 was not a collection by Wolff at all, but one by Karl Gollmick. That collection, called Der Sängersaal: Auswahl von Gedichten zum Komponieren (Darmstadt, 1842), contained the Wolff translation of “Bonnie George Campbell,” where it “appeared as an original poem by Wolf ...” Fortunately, Longfellow found that the printer had made an error (actually, the error — or liberty taken had originated with Wolff) and transcribed the Scottish river Tay for the German Tag, an error that Longfellow had faithfully translated and that, as he put it, is “an unimpeachable witness of the falsity of the charge brought against me.”(58)

In the meantime, with Longfellow's honesty impugned and his reputation at stake, a second defender of Longfellow, now [page 164:] identified as Charles Sumner, Longfellow's friend, decided to take issue with Poe's innuendoes regarding The Waif. Willis reopened the controversy with these words:

Willis then proceeded to quote part of Charles Sumner's letter, though he did not disclose his correspondent's identity to the public:

Clearly, Longfellow was becoming good “copy,” and, as editor of the Mirror, Willis had reason to encourage the “controversy.” Yet, though Poe's remarks had apparently helped Mirror sales, Willis felt no need to sully his reputation for geniality by seconding Poe's charges nor, on the other hand, [page 165:] any urge to diminish those sales by discounting Poe's charges entirely. Graham, however, concerned with protecting the reputation of his drawing card, asked Willis to make his “disclaimer” stronger, a request with which Willis complied by saying that he “dissented from all the disparagement of Longfellow” in his assistant editor's review of The Waif.(60)

Graham wrote to Longfellow too: “What has ‘broke loose’ in Poe? I see he is down on you in New York papers and has written demanding return of Review [of The Spanish Student] I mentioned he had written for me. If he sends money or another article I shall be obliged to let him have it. ...” He added in a postscript: “Mr. Willis made a disclaimer of being an endorser of Poe's views, at my request. I cannot see what Poe says now, can hurt you.”(61) And Mrs. Longfellow wrote to Samuel Longfellow just prior to Willis's publishing his stronger disclaimer: “If you see the Mirror, you know how shabbily Willis tries to excuse Poe's insolence. Have you seen a curious poem by the latter entitled ‘The Raven,’ most artistically rhythmical but ‘nothing more,’ to quote the burden?”(62)

Despite Willis's disavowal of “all the disparagement of Longfellow,” Poe was allowed to continue his criticism of Longfellow, this time indirectly in an article entitled “Imitation — Plagiarism.” Having in mind such articles as that which had appeared in the Foreign Quarterly, Poe wrote that the “British reviewers have very frequently accused us of imitation, and the charge is undoubtedly well based.” He explained why this was true: [page 166:]

He then made the observation that the

He added, with an apparent allusion to Longfellow and his defenders:

Briggs in his magazine, the Broadway Journal, objected to Poe's allegation that James Aldrich — a New York editor and sometime poet — had stolen from Hood. The resemblance between the two poems, Briggs contended, was insufficient to warrant such a conclusion, and he urged, though he was in error, that Aldrich's poem had been written before Hood's.(64) Poe's reply, printed under the title “Plagiarism” and introduced by a brief and neutral foreword by Willis, was that there were ten distinct similarities between the two short poems, which he enumerated to support the conclusion that somebody was a thief, and — he added curtly — the “only doubt in our mind is about the sincerity of any one who shall say that somebody is not.”(65) [page 167:]

On February 28 Poe mounted the platform of the New York Historical Society to deliver his lecture on American poets. The event was sensationally announced in the Evening Mirror as follows:

The nature of the lecture can be inferred from the comments it elicited from the editors of the Daily Tribune, the Evening Mirror, The Town, and the Democratic Review.(67) Greeley observed that the lecture embodied “much acute and fearless criticism,” but that Poe was often unjust in his censure of American reviewing. Moreover, he objected to Poe's “broad assertion that Longfellow is a plagiarist. Of all critical cant, this hunting after coincidence of ideas, or phrase, often unavoidable, between authors, is the least endurable.” Nevertheless, he asked if the lecture might not be repeated. Willis stated that “one of the most readable and saleable of books would be a dozen of such Lectures by Mr. Poe, and we give him a publisher's counsel to print them.” He mentioned that Poe discussed Bryant, Halleck, Longfellow, Sprague, and Dana and found Longfellow to have more genius than any of the others, but that “his fatal alacrity at imitation made him borrow, when he had better at home.” The Town reported that the lecture “was worthy of its author — keen, cutting and withering, when it touched on the mountebanks of American literature; and full of faith and hope, when it spoke of the future.” John L. O'Sullivan of the Democratic Review praised Poe for the

Poe's own comment on the lecture is of interest too:

The opportunity Poe promised to find or make was already awaiting him. A pseudonymous correspondent, “Outis,” moved. by Poe's editorial, if not forensic, attack upon his friend Longfellow, entered the lists on March 1.(70) Asking Willis for fair play and the privilege of having his remarks published in the Mirror, he argued that “identities” between poems do not necessarily imply plagiarism, for if plagiarism was the only inference to be drawn from identities, then every author was liable to the charge, since no one could possibly read everything that was published. To clinch his argument, he added:

Outis then submitted excerpts from an “anonymous” poem, “The Bird of the Dream,” and, comparing it with “The Raven,” pointed out eighteen similarities, outnumbering the ten similarities which Poe had noted in comparing the Aldrich and Hood poems. Outis concluded: “Such criticisms only make the author of them contemptible, without soiling a plume in the cap of his victim.”(71)

Poe did not reply to Outis in the Mirror. Though on excellent terms with Willis, he severed connections with him to accept the more promising position of co-editor of the Broadway Journal. Briggs, in charge of the Journal, recognized in Poe a drawing card (“his name is of some authority”; “Wiley and Putnam are going to publish a new edition of his [page 170:] tales and sketches”; “Everybody has been raven-mad about his last poem, and his lecture”). Moreover, though Briggs regarded the “very ticklish hobby” of detecting plagiarisms unfortunate for Poe's reputation, he felt that such articles, together with the replies they might provoke from journals avid for scandal, would serve as advertisements of the Journal and enlarge its subscription list.(72)

Poe, as expected, replied to Outis as soon as he became associated with the weekly Journal, for the innuendoes in Outis's letter were as embarrassing to him as his in the review of The Waif must have been to Longfellow. Abandoning editorial anonymity, he began by summarizing the history of the controversy, even reprinting the “documents” in the case — his, Briggs's, Willis's, and those of Longfellow's defenders. Then, proceeding to the matter at hand, he said that he admired the chivalry that prompted Outis's reply, but nothing else, and that he especially disliked the “desperation of the effort to make out a case.” Poe then questioned whether a critic might make a charge of plagiarism, not from “littleness” or “envy,” but from strictly honorable and even charitable motives. To answer his own question, he reasoned that if the possibility of plagiarism is admitted at all, then the chances are that an established author steals from an obscure one. The obscure author is thus falsely accused of plagiarism, which makes the real culprit guilty on two counts: that of the original theft, which would alone deserve exposure, and that of foisting his crime upon the guiltless struggler. He summed up this phase of the argument by saying that because he, for one, wished to convict the guilty to exonerate the innocent, the charge of “carping littleness” was brought against him. He paused here for want of space, but promised to resume the discussion in the next number of the Journal.(73) [page 171:]

Poe's remarks began to arouse newspaper and magazine editors, among them J. Hunt, Jr., of the National Archives:

On March 17 Poe, without respect for the full truth, answered the editor of the National Archives, but the magazine had become defunct in the meantime:

Poe then explained his reasons for commenting upon the Outis letter at length: “... it demanded an answer & no proper answer could be given in less compass — ... the subject of imitation, plagiarism, &c is one in which the public has lately taken much interest & is admirably adapted to the character of a literary journal and ... I have some important developments to make, which the commonest principles of self-defence demand imperatively at my hands.”(75)

As he had promised, Poe resumed his discussion of plagiarism on March 15. He agreed with Outis that identities between poems might exist by coincidence but that the admission of such a possibility would by no means eliminate the possibility of plagiarism, particularly as in the case of the Aldrich and Hood poems when “in the compass of eight short lines” there are “ten or twelve peculiar identities of thought and identities of expression.” To demonstrate, as Outis had demonstrated, that in another instance two writers by coincidence had used an identical metaphor did not by any means prove that “Mr. Longfellow is innocent of the imitation with which I have charged him, and that Mr. Aldrich is innocent of the plagiarism with which I have not charged him. ...” He added that he would “continue, if not conclude this subject, in the next ‘Journal’. ...”(76)

In his third reply, Poe said that Outis suffered from the misapprehension that one accusation cancels another — that by insinuating that Poe had committed plagiarism, it could be reasoned that Aldrich and Longfellow had not. When he had accused Aldrich or Hood of plagiarism, Poe said, he printed their poems together and in full, but he had not been accorded such treatment by Outis. Instead,

Then, registering a doubt as to the existence of the poem, he examined the eighteen identities that Outis had pointed out, only to discover that the poems failed to tally except on two points.

In considering plagiarism, Poe continued, one must regard, not only the number of coincidences, but the peculiarity of each one; and not only that, but “the antagonistic differences, if any, which surround them — and very especially the space over which the coincidences are spread, and the number or paucity of the events, or incidents, from among which the coincidences are selected.” He then used the Aldrich and Hood poems again to explain in greater detail why he considered one of them a plagiarism. He summarized this analysis by remarking:

He concluded by saying that he would endeavor to bring this subject to an end in the next number of the Journal.(77) In his fourth reply to Outis,(78) Poe declared:

For himself, he said:

He continued:

Poe then objected to Outis's supposing him to make certain charges against Longfellow and then holding him responsible for them. Thus, he proceeded to cite his own charges. First, as he had in 1839, Poe compared the “Midnight Mass” and the “Death of the Old Year” and repeated that this imitation was too palpable to be mistaken and belongs to the most barbarous class of literary piracy. Second (with Longfellow's explanation still unpublished in Graham's), he compared Longfellow's translation of “Der gute George Campbell” from Wolff with the original in Motherwell's and commented: “Professor Longfellow [page 175:] defends himself (I learn) from the charge of imitation in this case, by the assertion that he did translate from Wolff, but that Wolff copied from Motherwell. I am willing to believe almost anything rather than so gross a plagiarism as this seems to be — but there are difficulties which should be cleared up.” How did it happen, “in the translation from the Scotch into the German, and again from the German into the English, not only the versification should have been rigidly preserved, but the rhymes and alliteration?” Why had Longfellow, “with his known intimate acquaintance with ‘Motherwell's Minstrelsy,’ “failed to recognize at once “so remarkable a poem when he met it in Wolff”? What was the source that Longfellow had used in retranslating from Wolff? It seemed clear to Poe that the Wolff translation must have appeared in a work “plainly acknowledged as a translation, with its original designated,” a work whose subtitle Poe footnoted but a copy of which he had been unable to obtain. Third (and Poe seemed driven to his wits’ end here), he argued that Longfellow had modeled a scene in his Spanish Student upon his own Politian, the thirteen coincidences he pointed out textually being “sufficiently noticeable to establish at least the imitation beyond all doubt.” Finally, he found certain lines in Longfellow coincidental with lines in Bryant, Sidney, Milton, and Henry King.(79) Poe concluded by remarking that he could point out a “score or two” of such imitations, and that, therefore, Longfellow's friends, instead of charging him with carping littleness, should credit him with great moderation for accusing Longfellow only of imitation: “Had I accused him, in loud terms, of manifest and continuous plagiarism, I should but have echoed the sentiment of every man of letters in the land beyond the immediate influence of the Longfellow coterie.” Further evidence of his moderation, he said, was the fact that he himself had submitted “to accusations of plagiarism for the very sins [page 176:] of this gentleman against myself,” but that, despite this, he had set “forth the merits of the poet in the strongest light, whenever an opportunity was afforded me.” Yet the moment that he ventured “an infinitesimal sentence of dispraise” of Longfellow, he received — under what he claimed was Longfellow's instigation — ”ridiculous anonymous letters from his friends” and, in the Boston Evening Transcript, “prickings with the needles of Miss Walter's innumerable epigrams, rendered unnecessarily and therefore cruelly painful to my feelings by being first carefully deprived of the point.”(80)

There was a postscript to these replies to Outis still to appear, but, in the meantime, the Aristidean, a New York monthly newly founded by Thomas Dunn English, Poe's acquaintance from the Philadelphia days, published the harshest indictment of Longfellow ever made. The article affirmed that Longfellow was vastly overrated by the Boston clique. “In no literary circle out of Boston — or, indeed, out of the small coterie of abolitionists, transcendentalists and fanatics in general, which is the Longfellow junto — have we heard a seriously dissenting voice on this point.” Outside of this “knot of rogues and madmen,” his real virtues are simply a [page 177:] “sufficient scholarship, a fine taste, a keen appreciation of the beautiful, a happy memory, a happier tact at imitation or transmutation, felicity of phrase and some fancy.” The anonymous writer, turning to Poe's recent lecture, confessed surprise to hear that Poe had claimed for Longfellow a “pre-eminence over all poets of this country on the score of the ‘loftiest poetical quality imagination.’ “He believed that an opinion so crude must have arisen from “want of leisure or inclination to compare the works of the writer in question with the sources from which they were stolen.” However, a letter written by “an unfortunate wight who called himself ‘Outis,’ seems to have stirred up the critic to make the proper examination. .. .” For himself, he felt that, “whatever may be the talents of Professor Longfellow, he is the Great Mogul of the Imitators,” and that he had achieved his eminent position by “accident or chicanery.”

The minute analysis and the charges of plagiarism that followed indicate that Poe had more than a hand in the article and that he planted the article in the Aristidean to gain corroboration of his own judgments — a corroboration so devastating that his statements in the Broadway Journal would appear mild by comparison. The writer pointed out that such rhymes as angel and evangel are inadmissible because identical. He cited a passage from “Hymn to the Night” to demonstrate that Longfellow had such a strong tendency to imitation “that he not unfrequently imitates himself.” He argued that “A Psalm of Life” is “chiefly remarkable for its containing one of the most palpable plagiarisms ever perpetrated by an author of equal character. ... Mr. Poe, in his late exposé, has given some very decisive instances of what he too modestly calls imitations on the part of Mr. Longfellow from himself (Mr. Poe).” But there are others that can be adduced: Longfellow's “Footsteps of Angels” has lines taken from Poe's “The Sleeper”; “The Beleaguered City” is a palpable imitation of Poe's “Haunted Palace”. ... “We do not like to be ill-natured; but when one gentleman's purse is found in another gentleman's pocket, how did it come there?” The Spanish Student [page 178:] as a poem “is meritorious at points — as a drama it is one of the most lamentable failures.” Longfellow, it is true, acknowledged that it was “taken, in part, from the ‘Gitanilla’ of Cervantes. In part, also, it is taken from Politian ... by Edgar A. Poe’ ... no acknowledgement, however, is made in the latter instance.” Longfellow “has stolen ... much from Mr. Poe. ... There are other plagiarisms of Mr. Longfellow which we might easily expose, but we have said enough. There can be no reasonable doubt in the mind of any, out of the little clique, to which we at first alluded, that the author of ‘Outre Mer,’ is not only a servile imitator, but a most insolent literary thief.”(81)

Thus, however often Poe had opposed such malicious attacks as this, however often he had inveighed against a reviewer's remaining anonymous, and however often he had objected to “personalities” in critical articles, he resorted to all the arts of literary assassination for his self-justifying purposes. In commenting on this article in the Broadway Journal, Poe only remarked: “There is a long review or rather running commentary upon Longfellow's poems [in the Aristidean]. It is, perhaps, a little coarse, but we are not disposed to call it unjust; although there are in it some opinions which, by implication, are attributed to ourselves individually, and with which we cannot altogether coincide.”(82)

If Poe acted in his own defense against the ire of editors, O'Sullivan of the Democratic Review came to his aid voluntarily:

On April 5 Poe concluded his reply to Outis with an effort at dignity, but if he accomplished that effect, it was at the cost of misrepresentation and special pleading. His purpose in replying to Outis at such length, he said, had been “to place fairly and distinctly before the literary public certain principles of criticism for which I have been long contending, and which ... were in danger of being misunderstood. ... The thesis of my argument, in general, has been the definition of the grounds on which a charge of plagiarism may be based, and of the species of ratiocination by which it is to be established: that is all.” He had not intended to be malevolent or discourteous, whatever one might suspect; and if anyone would take the trouble to read what he had written, he would see that he had made “no charge of moral delinquency against either Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Aldrich, or Mr. Hood: — indeed, lest in the heat of argument, I may have uttered any words which may admit of being tortured into such an interpretation, I here fully disclaim them upon the spot.”(84)

Poe's sudden reversal of position, not to mention the fact that these remarks were in the form of a postscript, suggests that he had finally found an explanation for imitation other than one of intention — an explanation with which he seemed [page 180:] delighted, for he used it again on several occasions(85) and here for the first time. Thus, he proceeded to acquit Longfellow of “moral delinquency” — that is, of wilful plagiarism — and to explain his unconscious plagiarism — imitation — in these terms:

Though Poe “exonerated” Longfellow, he raised more questions than he answered. Agreed that the poetic sentiment and the poetic power coexist in the poet. Agreed too that poetic power compels the poet to render his own vision of the beautiful (“primary origination”), which, by definition, is original, and that the poetic sentiment compels the poet, all unawares, to reproduce reproductions of such visions (“secondary origination”), which, again by definition, are unoriginal. Still, crucial problems remain — and Poe, neither here nor elsewhere, solves them, which may account for his dropping the entire “explanation” by 1847. Do the works of the “most eminent [page 181:] poets” (and Poe in the Marginalia article means the greatest) really contain “the most frequent and palpable plagiarisms”? Does not greatness imply primary origination, as every Romantic critic thought, including Poe himself? Is plagiarism — a sign of the poetic sentiment — rendered negligible by the poetic power evinced in such “plagiaristic” works as Hamlet and The Waste Land? And, by the same token, is plagiarism to be censured only when the poetic sentiment, acting independently of the poetic power, produces merely a copy? In his article on James Aldrich in the Literati papers, Poe seems to suggest as much when he said that “A Death-Bed” is indefensible because both “in matter and manner it is nearly identical with ... ‘The Death-Bed,’ by Thomas Hood.” And in his “Marginalia,” Poe remarked that “Imitators are not, necessarily, unoriginal — except at the exact points of imitation.” And what are we to do with the fact of coincidence, which Poe entirely ignored — the kind of coincidence that caused Longfellow to remark, when he chanced upon a simile in Brainard's “Mocking Bird” identical with one in “Excelsior”: “Of a truth one cannot strike a spade into the soil of Parnassus, without disturbing the bones of some dead poet.”(86)

With this, the “war,” precipitated by a single, ill-advised paragraph concluding Poe's Waif review, came lamely to a halt, as far as Poe was concerned. True, he would fire Parthian shots at Longfellow from time to time, but he would never review another book of his — neither his Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845), nor the Estray: A Collection of Poems (1846), nor the new edition of Outre-Mer (1846), nor Evangeline (1847), nor Kavanagh: A Tale (1849). Only in his essay, “The American Drama,” when he struck again at the problem of imitation, did he consider Longfellow once more at any length.

Yet, if only to conclude the “war” with a flourish, it seemed necessary to atomize the North American Review, which had felt duty-bound to acclaim the literati of Massachusetts and, [page 182:] in particular, to expatiate upon the virtues of almost every Longfellow book, whether in A. P. Peabody's review of Outre-Mer, in Felton's reviews of Hyperion, Voices, Ballads, and Poems, in Francis Bowen's review of Poets and Poetry of Europe, or in various unidentified reviews devoted to the Cambridge poet, including one of The Waif. Simms, badly treated by the North American, furnished the occasion for that attack in his Southern and Western Magazine, and an anonymous writer, presumably Thomas Dunn English, possibly with Poe's assistance, did the devoir for the Broadway Journal.(87) The writer in the Journal called attention to Simms's observations concerning the “parochial review” and quoted passages from Simms's article so that Northerners “may see in what estimation the North American is held at the South.” Simms's theme was that the North American, in its thirty years of existence, was guilty of the most flagrant literary sectionalism:

The writer in the Journal reaffirmed Simms's charges and added “that the North American is held in as little reverence in Boston as in South Carolina,” and that “we have not seen, in the pages of this journal, a single instance where it has shown the slightest solicitude in behalf of any young writer, — always assuming that he is not a sprout of New England ... ”(88) [page 183:] Poe's views of Longfellow, though he ceased to express them at any length, were now voiced by others, who had apparently become emboldened by his example. Simms, for instance, remarked:

Another independent critic, Margaret Fuller, wrote:

In the meantime, Longfellow's edition of the Poets and Poetry of Europe had appeared. Poe merely noticed the volume in passing, reporting that the “translations are from a great variety of sources” and that “the professor receives three thousand dollars for editing the work.”(91) Simms, however, was quite harsh, declaring that the anthology had not been a labor of love with its editor:

Though suddenly a target for the independent critics, Longfellow maintained silence, except to explain the mistake he had made in respect to “The Good George Campbell.” His friends, however, were hardly silent. Lewis Clark, for instance, replied to Longfellow's assailants, abusing Poe personally, as [page 185:] we have seen in an earlier chapter, and now, in answering Simms's review, he remarked:

Clark's sentiment that the public constituted the literary tribunal was shared by Longfellow himself, for on December 30, 1845, he wrote in his journal: “The Belfry [of Bruges and Other Poems] is succeeding famously well. ... This is the best answer to my assailants.” And Longfellow was quite aware of his assailants. On December 9, 1845, he noted: “Read a very abusive article upon my poems by Mr. Simms, the novelist. I consider this the most original and inventive of all his fictions.” The next day he observed: “In Graham's Magazine for January, received this morning, is a superb poem by Lowell, — ‘To the Past.’ If he goes on in this vein, Poe will soon begin to pound him.” The following day he recorded: “Miss Fuller made a furious onslaught upon me in The New York Tribune. It is what might be called ‘a bilious attack.’ ”(94)

In summary, it must be said at once that the “sting in the tail” of Poe's Waif review and his need, in consequence, to [page 186:] defend himself against his assailants has obscured the real importance of his encounters with Longfellow. He was the first American critic who, in recognizing Longfellow's real gifts, had the hardihood to tell the poet that his poems were sometimes weak, or warped for didactic purposes, or suspiciously imitative — statements which are safe and easy enough to make now, but which to make then was, as we have seen, to risk one's critical reputation, to have one's motives questioned, and to be charged with envy and spite.(95) Longfellow, if he understood the uses of criticism at all,(96) preferred to ignore Poe's strictures, however he may have regarded his praise. For he was not a poet in the sense that the Romantic critic understood the term. He was, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge, a man of talents and much reading who had acquired poetry as a trade. Weak in inspiration, conventional though cultivated in taste, and full of bookish ideas and sentiments,(97) [page 187:] he was nevertheless possessed by an intense desire for literary reputation, and his poems as well as his career suggest that poetry was all too often a means to that end than an end in itself.(98)

If Poe was harsh in his criticism, he was so because he continually overrated Longfellow's powers (he was only on occasion the genius that Poe from his first notice to his last insisted he was) and pointed out faults in his work that Longfellow did not or perhaps could not correct. Only belatedly — and Poe was dealing with the emergent poet — did he realize that Longfellow was not debasing his talents wilfully; his talents were simply limited. He came to understand at last that Longfellow's imitations, which he had supposed premeditated, were really accidental — that his highly cultivated taste caused him to assimilate ideas, images, and sentiments in other poets’ works and, unconsciously at the moment of creation, to adapt them to his own purposes — and he exonerated Longfellow for a tendency he apparently could not help. Even Lewis Clark agreed with this explanation, the evidence became so clear and the charges so persistent. “Much has been said, at sundry times and in diverse places,” he wrote, “concerning Longfellow's alleged plagiarisms. ... There is such a thing ... as unconscious plagiarism!”(99) Yet if Poe could forgive Longfellow for his proneness to imitation, he could as a critic scarcely condone the all too apparent fact that his imitations were acclaimed and the poet himself venerated for them.(100) His explanation no more canceled the fact that Longfellow often imitated than the explanation of kleptomania annuls the charge of continual theft.

There were other matters, of course, that complicated the critic's attitude, especially from the time he wrote the Waif review until he took his final notice of the poet. He could not help being aware that Longfellow was a favorite of the two magazines which, because of their cliquishness, were the special objects of his detestation — the Knickerbocker and North American Review. Nor could he help knowing that Longfellow had “a whole legion of active quacks at his control,”(101) to use his exaggerated statement — a legion, as it must have seemed to him, that even managed to use the Foreign Quarterly Review to extol his virtues and to deny the merits of other American poets. Nor could he help noticing that Longfellow was being accorded critical indemnity by American critics, a fact that hardly needed the attestation provided by the suppression of his Spanish Student review and the animosities aroused by his comments upon Longfellow's poems. Nor, finally, could he help realizing that, though Longfellow was creating an audience for poetry the like of which had never been known in America, readers were being conditioned to receive only the kind of poetry written by a Longfellow and, later, devoid of Longfellow's artistry and culture, a James Whitcomb Riley and, still later, an Edgar A. Guest — that second-, third-, and fourth-rate poetry is not a way toward first-rate poetry but a substitute for it.

Longfellow, no doubt, found Poe's strictures disagreeable, but he must have also found that they served to advertise his books. When Fields, for example, was contemplating lawsuits [page 189:] to blanket derision of Hiawatha, Longfellow told his publisher: ‘, ... don’t you think we had better let those critics go on advertising it?” Whatever the case, Longfellow's attitude toward Poe may be summed up by two statements he made about him after his death. The first, made publicly a month after Poe had died, was kinder for the reason that it was almost accurate: “The harshness of his criticism I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by an indefinite sense of wrong.”(102) The second, made privately, was reported by William Winter, a young friend of the poet. Longfellow, Winter wrote, had indicated to him that “Poe had grossly abused and maligned him,” but that he felt sorry for his “unfortunate and half-crazed adversary.” He attributed Poe's remarks “to a deplorable literary jealousy,” and concluded: “My works seemed to give him much trouble, first and last; but Mr. Poe is dead and gone, and I am alive and still writing — and that is the end of the matter.”(103)

Whatever may be said of Poe's encounters with Longfellow, Poe was on the side of genius and on the side of a free criticism, where he belonged. One can deplore his harshness, his bad taste, his occasional poor judgment, but one cannot condemn his over-all verdict in respect to Longfellow, nor the principles upon which he based that verdict, nor the cause for which he struggled, even at the cost of such statements as those that Winter attributed to Longfellow.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 133:]

1. See, for instance, Thompson, Longfellow, p. 405 n. 5; Edward Wagenknecht, Longfellow: A Full-Length Portrait (New York, 1955), p. 5; and James Taft Hatfield, New Light on Longfellow, with Special Reference to His Relations with Germany (Boston, 1933), p. 140.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 134:]

2. Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, V (Oct., 1839), 227.

3. Letter dated Oct. 1, 1839. Earlier, on Sept. 12, Longfellow had written to Willis Clark in Philadelphia, urging him to send “all notices of Hyperion, particularly the most abusive ones.” (For both these statements, see Livingston, Longfellow Bibliography, pp. 24-25.) Wagenknecht (Longfellow, p. 5) calls Hyperion a “disorganized, Jean-Paul Richter kind of Romance,” but Hatfield (New Light on Longfellow, p. 78) contends that “in spite of all the sweepings which it contains, the work is essentially original.”

4. Boston Quarterly Review, III (Jan., 1840), 128.

5. Quoted by Wagenknecht, Longfellow, p. 233.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 135:]

6. Felton's reviews appeared in the Boston Courier of Oct. 2, 1839, and in the North American Review, L (Jan., 1840), 145-161; Ward's in the New York Review, V (Oct, 1839), 438-457; Willis Clark's in his Gazette, unlocated but see Dunlap, The Clark Letters, p. 53; and Lewis Clark's in the Knickerbocker, XIV (Sept., 1839), 277-280.

7. Unlocated but see Dunlap, The Clark Letters, p. 54.

8. Letter to George W. Greene, dated Oct. 1, 1839 (Livingston, Longfellow Bibliography, p. 24). On Jan. 2, 1840, however, Longfellow recognized his error: “But see what ill luck with Hyperion; the publisher fails; half the edition is seized by creditors and locked up; and the book has been out of the market for four months.” Again, on March 5, 2842, Longfellow wrote, this time to [page 136:] Ward: “All I have received from him [Colman, the publisher of Hyperion] is $72.50” (ibid., p. 25).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 136:]

9. Thompson, Longfellow, p. 303.

10. Knickerbocker, XIV (Nov., 1839), 470.

11. Ibid., XV (Jan., 1840), 75.

12. L (Jan., 1840), 266-269. The Hyperion review is attributed to Felton by Allibone (Dictionary of Authors), by Poole (Index to Periodical Literature), etc. Evidence for Felton's authorship of the Voices review appears in the review itself: “And we shall observe the same general fact, which we have pointed out in our remarks upon the style of ‘Hyperion,’ ”etc. (p. 268).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 137:]

13. Knickerbocker, XV (Jan., 1840), 81.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 138:]

14. VI (Feb., 1840), 100-103. In Biographia Literaria (chap. xv) Coleridge too had remarked of a “man of talents and much reading” that he had “mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought, or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 138, running to the bottom of page 139:]

15. A later Poe critique, “Tale-Writing — Nathaniel Hawthorne” (Godey's, XXXV, Nov., 1847, 252-256), amplifies many of the points made in this review. In that critique, Poe explained that “to be peculiar is to be original,” but that true originality, however, implies a “peculiarity springing from ever-active vigor of fancy — better still if from ever-present force of imagination, giving its own hue, its own character to everything it touches, and especially, self impelled to touch everything.” In more modern terms, Poe suggests here that the unmistakable sign of a truly original writer is that he leaves his signature on everything he writes because he has a characteristic and even compulsive vision that selects, [page 138:] shapes, and orders miscellaneous incidents, ideas, characters, etc. — a statement that becomes clear enough if we think of William Faulkner's fiction or of Robinson Jeffers’ poetry. Longfellow, as Poe seems to have seen the matter, had borrowed the “vision” ordering Tennyson's poem, and, to this extent, though he had avoided his language, he was guilty of plagiarizing Tennyson's least defensible property. This further explains too why Poe said that Longfellow had little capacity for any enduring reputation: if his poems have no unity, the poet cannot be said to have a characteristic vision, let alone a compulsive one. And, as Poe pointed out in “Tale-Writing,” he did not judge an author “altogether by what he does, but in great measure — indeed, even in the greatest measure — by what he evinces a capability of doing.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 139:]

16. Livingston, Longfellow Bibliography, pp. 26-27. According to the Knickerbocker, XIX (Feb., 1842), 181, Voices passed through five printings by Feb., 1842, but this claim seems exaggerated.

17. Brigham, Poe's Contributions to Alexander's, p. 29.

18. Henry Marion Hall, “Longfellow's Letters to Samuel Ward,” Putnam's Monthly, III (Oct., 1907), 42. Thompson (Longfellow, p. 416 n. 4) states that this letter was written sometime between Feb. 10 and 27, 1840.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 140:]

19. John Olin Eidson, Tennyson in America (Athens, Ga., 1943), pp. 33 and 210 n. 97.

20. Thompson, Longfellow, pp. 413-414.

21. Letter dated July 5, 1840 (ibid., p. 306). Longfellow had reason to thank Clark, for Clark had been helpful on several occasions. The kind of assistance he provided may be inferred from two of his extant letters to Longfellow. The first, dated Feb. 25, 1837, reads: “Have you anything in press, now? If you have command me in the American Quarterly here, for which I am constantly asked to write.” The second, dated July 18, 1840, reads: “If you have seen my Gazette ... you would have found that I missed no chance to offer my testimony in behalf of the master spirit, so far as deep poetical thought is concerned, of our American Age. ... I am not through with him yet.” See Dunlap, The Clark Letters, pp. 39 and 57.

22. Letter dated July 18, 1840 (ibid., p. 58).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 142:]

23. Brigham, Poe's Contributions to Alexander's, pp. 33-34.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 143:]

24. Letter dated May 3, 1841 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 158-159) .

25. Samuel Longfellow, ed., Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence (Boston, 1891), I, 390-391.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 144:]

26. Letter dated June 22, 1841 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 166-167) .

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 145:]

27. Letter dated May 29, 1841 (ibid., pp. 160-161). The bibliographical information in this letter is correct. “The Haunted Palace” first appeared in the American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts in April, 1839, and, later, incorporated into “The Fall of the House of Usher,” appeared in Burton's in Sept., 1839. The Longfellow poem first appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in Nov., 1839. Earlier, in reviewing Voices, Poe had said that he regarded “The Beleaguered City” as Longfellow's “finest poem,” for he discovered “a certainty of purpose about it which we do not discover elsewhere” — a statement that some may consider as sincere praise but that others, familiar with Poe's penchant for tongue-in-cheek remarks, may want to consider otherwise.

28. “Memoir,” The Literati, pp. xxxii-xxxiii.

29. These four notices appeared in Graham's Magazine, XIX (Aug., 1841), 92; (Nov., 1841), 229; and XX (Feb., 1842), 129 and 120, to note them in the order in which they are discussed in the text.

30. Quacks of Helicon, pp. 35-36.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 146:]

31. LV (July, 1842), 114-144. This passage is quoted from p. 114.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 147:]

32. Graham's Magazine, XX (March, 1842), 189-190.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 148:]

33. Ibid., XX (April, 1842), 248-251. This and the second review of the Ballads caused Lewis Clark, when reviewing The Raven and Other Poems in the Knickerbocker (XXVII, Jan., 1846, 69-72), to reason that, since Poe claimed “there cannot be such a thing as a didactic poem,” a poem, according to Poe, “is a metrical composition without ideas.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 149:]

34. Southern Literary Messenger, XV (June, 1849), 336. Norman Foerster discusses this problem too in “Poe,” American Criticism: Studies in Literary Theory from Poe to the Present (Boston, 1928), pp. 8-14, as does Floyd Stovall in “Poe's Debt to Coleridge,” University of Texas Studies in English 10 (July, 1930), pp. 112-114.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 150:]

35. Sartain's Union Magazine, VII (Oct., 1850), 232-233. For an almost identical statement written during the so-called Longfellow war, see Poe's article, “Increase of Poetical Heresy,” Weekly Mirror, I (Feb. 8, 1845), 281.

36. “Defence of Poetry,” North American Review, XXXIV (Jan., 1832), 56.

37. Both these quotations are from Odell Shepard's Introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Representative Selections (New York, 1934) pp. xxxi and xxxix respectively. Whatever may be said about the nature of poetry, Poe's essential criticism holds: didacticism, especially of a truistic nature, is anti-poetic. According to modern critics, Poe was much too gentle with Longfellow in this respect, for he cited (in regard to the Ballads, for instance) too many exceptions (“The Village Blacksmith,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “The Skeleton in Armour”), despite the fact that he objected to such moral tags as that which concludes “The Village Blacksmith”:

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 151:]

38. As the tale appeared in The Pioneer, I (Jan., 1843), 29-31. In his subsequent reprinting of the story in the Broadway Journal of Aug. 23, 1845, Poe dropped the epigraph because, as he said during his quarrel with “Outis,” the stanza was a plagiarism.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 152:]

39. Dated Oct. 19, 1843 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 238).

40. The play appeared in Graham's in three instalments: XXI (Sept., 1842), 109-113; (Oct., 1842), 176-180; and (Nov., 1842), 229-234. Poe's review was five pages long and Poe expected to receive $20 for it (see Ostrom, I, 272).

41. Bayless, Griswold, pp. 57-58.

42. XXI (June, 1843), 591.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 153:]

43. Letter dated Dec. 26, 1843 (quoted by Bayless, Griswold, p. 76). The statement that Graham refused the review is untrue. In a letter to Longfellow dated March II, 1845 (quoted by Mary E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man, Chicago, 1926, II, 978), Graham acknowledged that Poe had “written demanding return of Review. ... If he sends money or another article I shall be obliged to let him have it. ...” Griswold's last statement is merely malice, arising from the fact that Poe had trained his fire on Griswold in a lecture which he delivered on Nov. 25, 1843, in Philadelphia (see Campbell, Mind of Poe, p. 65) . It was not Poe who attempted to win Longfellow's friendship either by letter or criticism, but Griswold himself.

44. Letter dated Feb. 9, 1844 (quoted by Bayless, Griswold, p. 76).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 154:]

45. Livingston, Longfellow Bibliography, p. 35.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 155:]

46. American Review, II (Aug., 1845), 117-13r.

47. In the light of such evidence, one is tempted to surmise that Graham was feigning indignation in his letter and was really glad to have the opportunity Poe had given him to appease Longfellow. The fact that Graham continued to publish Poe's contributions, that he remained friends with Poe, and that he militantly came to his defense when Griswold blackened him in the “Ludwig” article and in the “Memoir,” seems to lend support to this surmise. In any case, Graham's failure to publish the review was bound to strike Poe as an attempt to grant Longfellow critical indemnity.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 156:]

48. Poe's concern with copyism may strike one as a quirk; yet, to quote the findings of Nelson Adkins, who has published the most thorough study of that problem to date: “Any examination of Poe's principles touching the problem of plagiarism leads, it seems to me, to one conclusion: the man's essential sincerity in the charges he was continually making. In art, Poe stood for genius, and what must inevitably be the product of genius, originality. This high critical purpose Poe stated unequivocally” (“ ‘Chapter on American Cribbage’: Poe and Plagiarism,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XLII, Third Quarter, 1948, 169-210.

49. The Mirror, at this time under the ownership of Nathaniel Willis, George Morris, and Hiram Fuller, appeared in two editions — the Evening Mirror and the Weekly Mirror. The evening edition appeared six times a week and was unpaginated; the weekly edition, consisting largely of items published in the Evening Mirror, appeared on Saturday. In the Weekly Mirror, I (Oct. 12, 1844) 715, Willis alluded to Poe's connection with the journal for the first time: “We wish to light beacons for an authors’ crusade and we have no leisure to be more than its Peter the Hermit. We solemnly summon Edgar Poe to do the devoir of Coeur de Lion — no man's weapon half so trenchant!”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 157:]

50. This notice, entitled “Longfellow's Waif,” appeared in two instalments in the Evening Mirror, I (Jan. 13 and 14, 1845). The notice was also republished in its entirety in the Weekly Mirror, I (Jan. 25, 1845), 250-251, together with Willis's “disclaimer,” “H.'s” reply, and “Post-Notes by the Critic,” to be discussed in the text. Since no satisfactory bibliographical notation exists on this “controversy,” I have documented the exchanges in detail.

51. “The Poets of America,” XXXII (Jan., 1844), 291-324. For an amusing article that returns the compliment by using the same arguments and, at times, the same language, see “The Morals, Manners, and Poetry of England — The Poets and Poetry of America: An Article in the Foreign Quarterly Review, for January, 1844,” North American Review, LIX (July, 1844), 1-44.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 158:]

52. Letter dated March 30, 1844 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 246-247). That Poe wrote earlier than Tennyson may or may not be true: Poe often claimed to have been precocious. But that he published before Tennyson is an error, since both their first volumes appeared in 1827. The error seems an honest one, however, since Tennyson's first book — Poems by Two Brothers — did not reach America until the 1850's. See Eidson, Tennyson in America, p. 3.

53. Letter dated June 27, 1844 (quoted by W. M. Griswold, ed., Passages from the Correspondence and Other Papers of Rufus W. Griswold, Cambridge, Mass., 1898, p. 151). Woodberry, when he earlier published this letter in “Lowell's Letters to Poe,” Scribner's Magazine, XVI (Aug., 1894), 170-176, expurgated the last sentence quoted. Lowell's surmise rather than Poe's seems correct, though both surmises could be right if Dickens and Forster had collaborated. Longfellow too felt that Forster had a “hand in” the article, a speculation that does not necessarily exclude Dickens. More than a year after the article appeared, Longfellow wrote to Forster: “I have never yet thanked you directly, though I have commissioned Felton to do it, for the cordial praise of me in the Foreign Quarterly, which I am confident you had a hand in, & for which I beg you now to receive my warmest thanks.” To which Longfellow added: “It has had a curious effect here, namely that of making some of the critics very furious against me; but that is of no consequence, as in the end I am confident the result will be good.” (Letter dated May 8, 1845, from a typescript supplied by Mr. A. W. Wheen of the Victoria & Albert Museum.) Though Forster answered this letter of Longfellow's on June 3, he conspicuously avoided any denial of having had a hand in the article. (This Forster letter is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and I am grateful to Mr. William H. Bond, Curator of MSS there, for finding it for me.) The “Longfellow clique” had entertained. Dickens in 1842 when he visited America, and Longfellow had been in correspondence with Dickens and Forster before he became a guest in Dickens’ home while on his third European trip, where he renewed his friendship with Forster. The warmth that Forster and Dickens felt for Longfellow is evident in Forster's letter to Longfellow dated Jan. 3, 1843, a year before the article in the Foreign Quarterly was published: “... here will Dickens and myself be smacking our lips ... in brimming bumpers in honor of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow” (Samuel Longfellow, Longfellow, II, 7).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 159:]

54. The poems in that section, with the exception of “To Helen,” were, in fact, selected from his 1827 and 1829 volumes, although they appeared in their revised forms (see Quinn, Poe, p. 482).

55. Weekly Mirror, I (Jan. 18, 1845), 227. Despite this disclaimer, Poe's Waif review also appeared in the Weekly Mirror on Jan. 25.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 159, running to the bottom of page 160:]

56. This identification was made by R. Baird Shuman, “Longfellow, Poe, and The Waif,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXXVI [page 160:] (March, 1961), 155-156. This article also identifies Charles Sumner as the second of Longfellow's defenders.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 162:]

57. Rover, Feb. 8, 1845, p. 336; Broadway Journal, I (Feb. 15, 1845), 109; Tribune, Feb. 14, 1845.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 163:]

58. Graham's Magazine, XXVI (May, 1845), 240. Another mystery is why, when Griswold, as editor of Graham's, explained that the poem was “really an old Scottish ballad” and even gave him some evidence of that fact in a letter dated March 3, 1843, Longfellow withheld an explanation of his mistake. (See Bayless, Griswold, p. 58.) Longfellow's diary entry of Sept. 1g, 1842, shows that he copied “Der gute George Campbell von O.L.B. Wolf” from Gollmick's work, but no translation of the poem appears in the diary at this time, despite his statement in Graham's “that I immediately wrote a translation of it, with a pencil, in my pocketbook. ...” (I am grateful to Mr. William H. Bond, Curator of MSS of the Houghton Library at Harvard University for this information.) However, now that a copy of the Gollmick edition has been found (in the city library of Mainz, Germany), Longfellow's testimony can receive full corroboration. That collection does contain the Wolff translation, faithfully reproduced; Wolff is cited as the composer of the poem; and there is no suggestion in the compilation that the poem did not originate with Wolff. (I am grateful to Dr. Schneiders and Dr. Middendorf of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, as well as to Dr. Bulling of the Universitäts-Bibliothek in Jena and Dr. Köhler of the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, for assistance in this matter.) I have taken the liberty of making certain corrections and additions in the Longfellow explanation. He did not cite the subtitle of Gollmick's collection or the place and date of publication, and he spelled Gollmick's name with a final h.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 164:]

59. Evening Mirror, I (Feb. 5, 1845); reprinted in the Weekly Mirror, I (Feb. 8, 1845), 287.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 165:]

60. Evening Mirror, I (Feb. 14, 1845); reprinted in the Weekly Mirror, I (Feb. 22, 1845), 317. Poe regarded Willis's disclaimer as satirically intended. “Now when we consider that many of the points of censure made by me in this critique [of The Waif] were absolutely as plain as the nose upon Mr. Longfellow's face — that it was impossible to gainsay them — that we defied him and his coadjutors to say a syllable in reply to them — and that they held their tongues and not a syllable said — when we consider all this, I say, then the satire of the ‘all’ in Mr. Willis’ manifesto becomes apparent at once. Mr. Longfellow did not see it; and I presume his friends did not see it. I did.” (Broadway Journal, I, March 8, 1845, 147.)

61. Letter dated March 11, 1845; quoted by Phillips, Poe, II, 978.

62. Letter dated Feb. 13, 1845; quoted by Edward Wagenknecht, ed., Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow (1817-1861) (New York, 1956), p. 116. “The Raven” had appeared in the Evening Mirror, I (Jan. 29, 1845) and in the Weekly Mirror, I (Feb. 8, 1845), 276.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 166:]

63. Evening Mirror, I (Feb. 15, 1845); reprinted in the Weekly Mirror, I (Feb. 22, 1845), 306.

64. I (Feb. 15, 1845), 309.

65. Evening Mirror, I (Feb. 17, 1845); reprinted in the Weekly Mirror, I (Feb. 22, 1845), 310.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 167:]

66. I (Feb. 27, 1845).

67. Tribune, March 1, 1845; Evening Mirror, March 1, 1845; The Town, I (March 8, 1845), 46; Democratic Review, XVI (April, 1845), 413.

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68. In the American Review, I (Feb., 1845), 146-151, Duyckinck had called for the year 1845 to be one “of Rebellion ... against all shabbiness and unworthiness in literature,” and urged that authors who had hitherto fought the system single-handedly unite in this cause. Moreover, in the New York Weekly News, I (Feb. 1, 1845), 2, Duyckinck declared that whenever Poe's name was mentioned, “it has been with the comment that he is a remarkable man of genius.” He extolled the imaginative power displayed in his tales and criticisms — criticisms, he added, that were “profoundly constructed and original ... , and calling forth the same faculties as the production of the best books themselves.”

69. Letter “To the Editor of the Broadway Journal,” Broadway Journal, I (March 8, 1845), 159. Briggs, the editor, in a letter to Lowell dated March 8, 1845, remarked that he too had attended the lecture and felt that Poe's comments had gained for Poe a “dozen or two of waspish foes who will do him more good than harm” (quoted by Woodberry, Poe, p. 228) .

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70. Phillips (Poe, II, 956 ff.) has speculated that Poe created a defender of Longfellow out of whole cloth, assigning him the name of Outis (Gk. “Nobody”), the better to assail the poet. But see Killis Campbell, “Who Was ‘Outis’?” in University of Texas Studies in English, VIII (1928), 107-109, for a refutation that concludes with the statement that if Outis was not Cornelius Conway Felton, Longfellow's colleague, he was certainly not Poe. Anyone who troubles to read Poe's replies to Outis must conclude, I think, that Poe was thoroughly embarrassed by him and was, in fact, driven to his wits’ end to vindicate himself.

71. Evening Mirror, March 1, 1845.

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72. See Briggs's letters to Lowell dated March 8, 16, and 19, 1845 (Woodberry, Poe, pp. 227-229).

73. “Imitation — Plagiarism — Mr. Poe's Reply to the Letter of Outis — A Large Account of a Small Matter — A Voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War,” I (March 8, 1845), 147-150.

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74. I (March 13, 1845), 2.

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75. Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 282-283.

76. “A Continuation of the Voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War — Mr. Poe's Farther Reply to the Letter of Outis,” Broadway Journal, I, 161-163.

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77. “More of the Voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War — Mr. Poe's Third Chapter of Reply to the Letter of Outis,” ibid., I (March 22, 1845) 178-182.

78. “Imitation — Plagiarism — The Conclusion of Mr. Poe's Reply to the Letter of Outis,” ibid., I (March 29,1845), 194-198.

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79. This last charge involved the stanza from “A Psalm of Life,” which Poe had used as an epigraph for his “Tell-Tale Heart.” The fact that he considered it “at least an imitation” accounts for his dropping the epigraph from the reprinting of the story in the Broadway Journal, II (Aug. 23, 1845), 97-99.

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80. Poe seems to have exaggerated the number of this editress's prickings. The only pricking of Poe I have found in the Transcript prior to the time Poe wrote this reply appeared on March 5, 1845. Miss Walter copied the Boston Atlas's curt reply to the Daily Tribune's notice of Poe's lecture, which, deploring the fact that only some three hundred of the four hundred thousand people in New York had attended the lecture, added: “Any dancing dog or summerseting [sic] monkey would have drawn a larger house.” The Atlas article of March 4, copied into the Transcript, affirmed: “The Tribune may think as it pleases — but we commend the taste of the 399,70o people, as far preferable to that of the 300, in this case. We should much prefer the dancing dog, or sommer-seting [sic] monkey, to the man who could make such remarks as this Poe is said to have made, in reference to the poetry of Sprague [also a Boston poet] and Longfellow. If he was to come before a Boston audience with such stuff, they would poh at him at once.” To which Miss Walter added: “Somebody sent us the other day, an epitaph on a man named Poe, of which the above has reminded us. We know not in what burial place the record is made, but it runs as follows:

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81. I (April, 1845), 130-142. See also the glowing review in the Aristidean, I (Oct., 1845), 316-319, which hailed Poe's Tales as original and which reiterated the familiar charge that Longfellow had stolen all that was worth stealing of the “Haunted Palace” for his “Beleaguered City.”

82. I (May 3, 1845), 285.

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83. Democratic Review, XVI (April, 1845), 413.

84. “Plagiarism — Imitation — Postscript to Mr. Poe's Reply to the Letter of Outis,” Broadway Journal, I (April 5, 1845), 211-212.

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85. See, for instance, “Marginalia,” Democratic Review, XVI (April, 1846), 97, in which he exonerates both Longfellow and Aldrich on the same grounds as he exonerates them here.

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86. Journal entry dated Dec. 8, 1846 (Samuel Longfellow, Longfellow, II, 66).

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87. II (May 31, 1845), 337-339. Simms's article was entitled, “A Passage with ‘The Veteran Quarterly,’ I (May, 1845), 297-311. Mott, American Magazines, I, 756, calls this criticism too bitterly expressed but just.

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88. Such remarks, of course, reflect Poe's sentiments as expressed in his various articles and stories. In “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” he alluded to the “North American Quarterly Hum Drum.” He advised Hawthorne [page 183:] (Godey's, XXXV, Nov., 1847, 252-256) to “throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of ‘The North American Review,’ “for the “criticism of the conservatives, of the hackneys, of the cultivated old clergymen of the ‘North American Review,’ is precisely the criticism which condemns originality.” And just before his death, he wrote (Southern Literary Messenger, XV, April, 1849, 221): “I cannot say that I ever fairly comprehended the force of the term ‘insult,’ until I was given to understand, one day, by a member of the ‘North American Review’ clique, that this journal was ‘not only willing but anxious to render me that justice which had been already rendered me by the “Revue Française” and the “Revue des Deux Mondes” ‘ — but was ‘restrained from so doing’ by my ‘invincible spirit of antagonism.’ I wish the ‘North American Review’ to express no opinion of me whatever — for I have none of it.”

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89. From the Broadway Journal, II (Dec. 6, 1845), 339-341. Earlier, in a letter, Simms had observed that Poe was “more than half right” in his charges against Longfellow. In another, Simms thought Longfellow's Waif a “poor compilation. I had almost said a dishonest one.” In a third, Simms spoke of Longfellow as a “man of nice taste, a clever imitator — simply an adroit artist.” Letters dated June 6, 8, and July 15, 1845 (Oliphant et al., Simms's Letters, II, 68,74,90).

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90. Daily Tribune, Dec. 10, 1845. Poe reprinted detached passages from this review in the Broadway Journal, II (Dec. 13, 1845), 359-360.

91. Broadway Journal, I (June 14, 1845), 382.

92. Southern and Western Magazine, II (Nov., 1845), 349-350. Such comments were in sharp contrast with those in the North American Review, which praised the work in general and the editor in particular. Francis Bowen, the writer of the review, remarked: “In this great crowd of translations by different hands, certainly very few appear equal to Professor Longfellow's in point of fidelity, elegance, and finish,” and concluded that the “book abounds with material for the gratification of a cultivated taste, and for the instruction of every mind of a generous and inquiring nature” (LXI, July, 1845, 199-231).

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93. Knickerbocker, XXVI (Dec., 1845), 585.

94. These journal entries appear in Samuel Longfellow's Longfellow, II, 28, 26, 27 respectively. It was not Poe who “pounded” Lowell for the poem alluded to, but Bryant, who intimated that the poem was suggested by one of his own with the same title (see Horace Elisha Scudder, James Russell Lowell: A Biography, Boston, 1901, I, 245-246 n. 1). Poe, willing, as he said, to praise an enemy or damn a friend, had already remarked in the Broadway Journal (II, Aug. 16, 1845, 88) that a stanza of Lowell's “To the Future” was a “palpable plagiarism” from Wordsworth. On March 6, 1844, Lowell had written Poe: “You might cut me up as much as you pleased & I should read what you say with respect, & with a great deal more of satisfaction, than most of the praise I get, affords me” (Woodberry, “Lowell's Letters to Poe,” p. 174). Nevertheless, Lowell — as Poe charged in reviewing A Fable for Critics — retaliated in that poem, not only upon him, but upon Bryant and Margaret Fuller, who some years earlier had remarked: “But his verse is stereotyped: his thoughts sound no depth, and posterity will not remember him” (Scudder, ibid., p. 244 n. I).

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95. That Poe should be considered envious of Longfellow is such a naive notion that I, at least, am mystified that it has gained credence among scholars. The argument in favor of this notion is that Longfellow, after all, had achieved a reputation sufficient to inspire envy in a man who was himself aspiring to literary eminence — an argument that ignores the fact that Poe vociferously admired many writers whose reputation could have filled him with envy — William Cullen Bryant and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name only two — and whom he could have easily maligned, if, as the argument implies, malignancy is the int vi-table consequence of envy. Moreover, the argument ignores a second significant fact, that Bryant cherished a positive dislike for Poe, which extended even to his excluding him from his Selections from the American Poets (1840), and that Hawthorne satirized him as a critic in “The Hall of Fantasy” (1843)

96. Shepard (Longfellow, p. xi) thinks it is doubtful that Longfellow “ever quite understood what criticism aims at or is good for,” and Wagenknecht (Longfellow, p. 164) states that the “most disappointing thing about Longfellow's attitude toward criticism is that he never seems to have recognized its importance.”

97. Both in his time and in ours, Longfellow's weaknesses as a poet have been pointed out. Margaret Fuller, for example, in the Tribune, Dec. To, 1845, and in her Papers on Literature and Art (New York, 1846), which repeats much of this criticism, wrote: “Mr. Longfellow has been accused of plagiarism. We have been surprised that any one should have been anxious to fasten special charges of this kind upon him, when we had supposed it so obvious that the greater part of his mental stores were derived from the works of others. He has no style of his own growing out of his own experiences and observations of nature. Nature with him, whether human or external, is always seen through the windows of literature. There are in his poems ... very few showing him as an observer, at first hand, of the passions within, or the landscape without.” And Thompson (Longfellow, p. 264) observed that Longfellow's fundamental weakness was an “inability to work out ideas for himself and the consequent necessity for leaning on his ... favorite authors for support.” Elsewhere, Thompson notes that Longfellow, throughout his life, “drew far more material from books than he ever drew from his head or heart” (p. 177), and that “Experience rarely moved him to an expression of his own emotions or thoughts” (p. 165). For similar commentary, see Shepard, Longfellow, pp. xi-lv.

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98. Shepard (“The New England Triumvirate: Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell,” in Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al., pp. 590-591) states that Longfellow's “career suggests a cool calculation, not to say an opportunism, seldom found in poetic minds,” and in support of this impression he cites Longfellow's “choice and rejection of poetic themes, the timing of his publications, his dealings with publishers, and most of all his accurate knowledge of the public taste. ...”

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

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100. In a paragraph entitled “Plagiarists” (“The Blank Book of a Country Schoolmaster,” ibid., IV, Sept. 1834, 216), Longfellow raised this apparently soul-searching question: “We read in an old story book ... that a law once prevailed in a certain city, requiring that every knight should be buried in his armor; and that if any one should rob the grave, and deprive the dead man of his armor, he should suffer death. It once happened, when this city was closely [page 188:] besieged, that a poor cavalier transgressed the law, by borrowing the harness of a dead knight from his sepulchre, and though he thereby saved the city from destruction, he was nevertheless condemned to death, in order to satisfy the noisy populace, who were jealous of his fame. ... Will it not ... bear a literary application? Let the reader say, whether an author, who robs the grave, and borrows the weapons of the dead, even to do his country service, does not deserve to be put to death as a literary felon, and is not in danger of suffering such a fate.”

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101. “Author's Introduction” to “The Literati of New York City,” Godey's Lady's Book, XXXII (May, 1846), 194.

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102. Quoted by James R. Thompson, ed., Southern Literary Messenger, XV (Nov., 1849), 696.

103. “In Memory of Longfellow,” English Rambles and Other Fugitive Pieces in Prose and Verse (Boston, 1884), pp. 102-103. When Winter revised this essay for inclusion in Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days (New York, 1909), he bowdlerized this version to make Longfellow appear charitable.