Text: Sidney P. Moss, “Chapter 06,” Poe's Literary Battles, 1963, pp. 190-248 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 190, unnumbered:]

Three events combined to cause Poe's downfall as a critic his Boston Lyceum “hoax,” his sentimental episode with Mesdames Osgood and Ellet, and the publication of his papers on the literati of New York City. The exchanges consequent upon these events can be described as literary battles only by semantic generosity. They would be better described as occasions for Poe's enemies to expose and exaggerate his failings as a human being — failings that became quite pronounced in 1845 and that reached pathological proportions by 1846. For this was the period of Poe's crack-up, a crack-up from which he never fully recovered and in the throes of which he behaved quite unfortunately, when not irresponsibly. Unhappily, this is the period that has been taken to characterize Poe's entire career — indication enough that his enemies wrought better than they knew. Admittedly, Poe created those enemies with his acidulous criticism and editorial comment; and not only created them, but supplied them with the materials to ruin him. And ruin him they did, with a vengeance, trumpeting his weaknesses and discrediting his opinions until he was disgraced and all but barred from the magazines which represented [page 191:] the fountainhead of his existence. Though somewhat tangential to the tracing of Poe's work as a critic, an account of these events is necessary if we are to see Poe's critical career in its entirety, if we are to understand how so seasoned a veteran of controversy could have been destroyed as a critic, and if we are to discern the origins of the Poe legend.

As we have seen, Poe had achieved a wide reputation as a critic, and in 1845 testimonies of his critical genius were not infrequent and came from such respected sources as Lowell, Duyckinck, and Greeley. Moreover, “The Raven,” published on January 29, 1845, proved so popular that Wiley and Putnam, eager to capitalize on Poe's fame, brought out two Poe volumes, his Tales (June) and The Raven and Other Poems (November) in that year, from the first of which he received a royalty of eight cents a copy, though copies sold for only fifty cents — a sure sign that Poe had arrived. Also, and what could not but impress him, Poe became a lion of the New York salons, much sought after and admired by the literary ladies. But what must have struck Poe as the final certification of his arrival was the fact that the officers of the Boston Lyceum invited him to help dignify the thirteenth anniversary of that institution by appearing on the same platform with the Honorable Caleb Cushing, the distinguished Massachusetts statesman who had lately returned in triumph from his commission to China — an invitation offered him though he had only recently concluded his quarrel with Longfellow and the Bostonians.(1)

Not everyone, of course, suddenly forgot old and recent animosities in 1845 — not with the Longfellow war to keep those animosities alive and to demonstrate that Poe had not [page 192:] sheathed his critical sword. If anything, men like Lowell, Duyckinck, and Greeley constituted only an impressive minority. In a review of Poe's Tales, for instance, George H. Colton, editor of the American Review, felt the need to plead that personal enmity should not enter into a judgment of the volume. As he remarked:

And of The Raven volume, Margaret Fuller wrote: “A large band of ... offended dignitaries and aggrieved parents must be on the watch for a volume of poems by Edgar A. Poe, ready to cut, render, and slash in turn!”(3)

Well known Poe no doubt had become, whatever notoriety he had gained in the process, but he was desperately poor, and the stipend offered him by the Boston Lyceum was sufficient to lure him into the enemy camp, despite the warnings issued by such Boston papers as the Atlas and Evening Transcript during the Longfellow war, that if “he was to come before a Boston audience with such stuff, they would poh at him, at once.”(4)

For about two weeks, announcements appeared in Boston papers that Cushing was to deliver an address and Poe was to [page 193:] “pronounce” a poem, presumably one written for the occasion. Thus, on the evening of October 16, Cushing spoke to a crowded house, and Poe, apparently unable to write a poem for the occasion,(5) perversely read the obscure “Al Aaraaf.” Leaving it to be inferred that the poem was new (he seems to have called it “The Messenger Star”), he introduced it with characteristic remarks about didacticism and followed it, upon request, by a recitation of “The Raven.” Some members of the audience, whether restless from having listened for reportedly three hours to Cushing, or frankly bewildered by the poem, or simply hostile to Poe for his treatment of Boston literary figures, began to leave. That night, when the doors of the Odeon had been locked, Poe, anticipating exposure of his “hoax” and wanting to vindicate an unsatisfactory performance,(6) made the absurd “confession” to four Bostonians — the critic Edwin Percy Whipple, the publisher James T. Fields, the Shakespearean lecturer Henry Norman Hudson, and Cushing — that the poem he had foisted off as a new one was written before he was twelve years old.

As has been noted, Cornelia Wells Walter, editress of the Boston Evening Transcript, had a grievance against Poe for his recent treatment of Longfellow. Thus, on October 17, she printed this editorial in her paper:

Two days after the event, on October 18, Miss Walter exposed Poe's “hoax”:

In another column of that same issue, Miss Walter printed a communication from a correspondent who signed himself “P” and who had been present at the anniversary exercises. Crudely satirical, “P” remarked that the chief merit of Poe's “apologetic preface” was its length; that his poem, “at whatever age it may have been written, and for what purpose soever he may have given it in Boston, was fully equal to anything we have ever seen from him”; that his “system of criticism is ... applicable to nobody's poetry but his own”; and that, as a critic, he “writes for nobody's sense or understanding but his own.” “P” then added this garbled statement: “Mr. Poe, we are told, has a great horror of plagiarism. It is about the only literary vice of which he is guilty, and no one can charge him with plagiarism without charging somebody else.” He concluded that Poe's “productions are eminently new ... and all of them are replete with the same kind of life as a watch.”(7)

In this way, Miss Walter and later, by his own admission, Henry Norman Hudson anonymously baited Poe from time to time, a baiting in which many Boston editors joined.(8) An exception [page 196:] was the Boston Daily Courier which, on October 18, carried this editorial, “Mr. Poe's Poem”:

Friendly as this writer was, he too must have become resentful of Poe when he discovered that he had been hoaxed. For the only thing new about the poem was the title. It had been printed in 1829; it had been revised and published in 1831; and it was scheduled to appear in November again in its original form in The Raven volume.

Goaded from day to day by the Boston papers, Poe promised to retaliate: “We have been quizzing the Bostonians,” he remarked, “and one or two of the more stupid of their editors and editresses have taken it in high dudgeon. We will [page 197:] attend to them all in good time.”(9) Undaunted, Miss Walter or Hudson quoted this statement on October 28 and commented: “The promise conveyed in this last line is certainly very poe-tential. We thought the poet might possibly be poe-dagrical, but it seems he is intending to take time enough to become a poe-ser! “The next day Miss Walter ran this item in her paper:

In another column in that issue, Miss Walter or Hudson observed that Poe, in announcing his sole control of the Broadway Journal, had asked for the support of his friends. With what was apparently intended as a sneer at his reputation for insobriety, the writer remarked: “What a question to ask! Edgar A. Poe to be in a position to require support! It is indeed remarkable.”

The next day too Miss Walter squibbed Poe:

Again on the following day Miss Walter printed these comments from a correspondent: [page 198:]

Subjected to this continual baiting, Poe decided to answer Miss Walter and other hostile Boston editors. He had little choice in any case. There were few editorial friends disposed or militant enough to defend him; he had allowed two weeks to elapse, yet the Boston papers were still clamoring for his head; and his head they were likely to have unless he answered them in kind. To maintain a dignified silence under the circumstances was, he knew, to commit literary suicide. As the Philadelphia editor, John Du Solle, was to remark: “If Mr. P. had not been gifted with considerable gall, he would have been devoured long ago by the host of enemies his genius has created!”(10) He began by quoting Major M. M. Noah's comments in the Sunday Times and Messenger of October 26:

Poe commented that Major Noah had been taken in by Miss Walter, who “has been telling a parcel of fibs about us, by way of revenge for something we did to Mr. Longfellow. ... ” He then reviewed the event and agreed that the audience was large and distinguished; that Cushing preceded him with a very capital discourse; that he himself was most cordially received; that he had occupied some fifteen minutes with an [page 199:] apology for not delivering, as is usual in such cases, a didactic poem; and that, after some further words of apology for the “general imbecility” of what he had to offer — ”all so unworthy a Bostonian audience” — he commenced and, with many interruptions of applause, concluded. “Upon the whole the approbation was considerably more (the more the pity too) than that bestowed upon Mr. Cushing.”

When he had finished, Poe continued, the audience, of course, arose to depart, and about one-tenth of them had actually departed when Mr. N. W. Coffin, the corresponding secretary of the Boston Lyceum who was acting as chairman, arrested those who remained by the announcement that the poet had been requested to deliver “The Raven.” He had obliged, was again very cordially applauded, “and this was the end of it — with the exception of the sad tale invented to suit her own purposes, by that amiable little enemy of ours, Miss Walters [sic].”

Unfortunately, Poe did not leave the matter there, however distortedly he may have presented it. He admitted having been born in Boston, and said that he was heartily ashamed of the fact. The Bostonians “have always evinced toward us individually, the basest ingratitude for the services we rendered them in enlightening them about the originality of Mr. Longfellow.” He said that the only reason he had accepted the invitation from the Boston Lyceum was a “curiosity to know how it felt to be publicly hissed and because we wished to see what effect we could produce by a neat little impromptu speech in reply.” But, he confessed, he had overrated his own importance or the Bostonian want of common civility. He assured Major Noah that he was wrong: “The Bostonians are well-bred — as very dull persons very generally are.”

He then created his own parcel of lies to justify his failure to compose an original poem for the occasion. For the price and for “an audience of Transcendentalists,” he said, the poem he read was good enough (they understood and especially applauded “all those knotty passages we ourselves have not yet been able to understand”) — a poem which he wrote, printed, [page 200:] and published in book form before “we had fairly completed our tenth year.” He then explained that the only reason another paper, the Boston Times, had become incensed with him was that he had let “some of our cat out of the bag a few hours sooner than we had intended” by confessing to a few “natives who swear not altogether by the frog-pond” — Poe's term of contempt for Boston — ”the soft impeachment of the hoax.”(11)

Miss Walter's reply on November 4 was to reprint Poe's entire statement, calling attention on another page to “what Edgar A. Poe says of the ‘natives’ of our ‘provincial town’ and of various matters connected with the late poem before the Lyceum. The poet's confession is a most amusing one. Has he done requiring the support of his friends?” She also introduced the reprinted Poe article with these remarks:

Simms, who despised Boston cliquism, came to Poe's defense in the Charleston Southern Patriot. Poe, he said, was in many respects one of the most remarkable of our literary men and, at the same time, an admirable critic: “he is methodical, lucid, forcible; — well-read, thoughtful, and capable, at all times, of rising from the mere consideration of the individual subject, to the principles ... by which it should be governed.” To these qualities, Simms continued, should be added that Poe “is not a person to be overborne and silenced by a reputation; — that mere names do not control his judgment; that he is bold, independent, and stubbornly analytical, in the formation of his opinions.” Poe has his defects, Simms admitted, which he described as capricious moods that occasionally operate to impair the value and consistency of his judgments. [page 201:]

Simms then turned to a discussion of the Boston Lyceum affair. Poe, he said, committed three blunders in accepting the invitation. First, such occasions call for moral or patriotic commonplaces in rhyming heroics or merely declamatory verse, and Poe was too highly imaginative to write such a poem. Second, Poe had been exercising himself as a critic at the expense of some of Boston's favorite writers:

Poe's third blunder was in consenting to address an audience in verse who, for three mortal hours, had been compelled to listen to Cushing in prose. “The attempt to speak after this, in poetry, and fanciful poetry too, was sheer madness. ... But, it is denied that Mr. Poe failed at all .... The ‘Boston Courier,’ one of the most thoughtful of the journals of that city, gives us a very favorable opinion of the performance which has been so harshly treated.” Simms concluded by quoting much of that article, which has already been noted.(12)

Poe took advantage of Simms's defense in the Broadway Journal: “As we very confidently expected, our friends in the Southern and Western Country ... are taking up arms in our cause — and more especially in the cause of a national as distinguished from a sectional literature. They cannot see (it appears) any farther necessity for being ridden to death by New-England.” Poe then quoted Simms's article in full, demurring at the disparagement of Cushing and perversely commenting that “the most exquisite of sublunary pleasures ... [is] the [page 202:] making of a fuss, or, in the classical words of a western friend, the ‘kicking up a bobbery.’ “The bobbery he had kicked up may “open their eyes to certain facts which have long been obvious to all the world except themselves — the facts that there exist other cities than Boston — other men of letters than Professor Longfellow — other vehicles of literary information than the ‘Down-East Review’ [Poe's contemptuous epithet for the North American Review].”

Poe then quoted Joseph M. Field, who, as editor of the St. Louis Reveille, agreed with an “exchange paper” on November 9 that if Poe “had as much tact as talent, he would make success for half a dozen papers.” But, Field added, he “has too much contempt for tact; he is wrong, but his error makes his career the more remarkable.” Then Field called Poe's bluff: Does Poe mean “that his late Boston poem, was intended by him as a hoax?” Poe commented:

The fact that the poem was applauded, Poe went on, indicates that

He then derided the Boston Star which had copied the “third edition of the poem” in full, which was “too good ... by one half” for the occasion, and in several columns said that he really ought to be hanged for perpetrating the hoax. He then mocked “a thing” that the “Frogpondian faction” hired called the Washingtonian Reformer to insinuate that he “must have been ‘intoxicated’ to have become possessed of sufficient audacity to ‘deliver’ such a poem to the Frogpondians.” Why, he said, couldn’t “these miserable hypocrites say ‘drunk’ at once and be done with it?” He was willing to admit anything, including the cutting of his grandmother's throat, if he knew what relevance that admission had to do with his poem. “As for the editor of the ‘Jeffersonian Teetotaler’ (or whatever it is) we advise her to get drunk for when sober she is a disgrace to her sex on account of being so awfully stupid.”

In a postscript he noticed what, of course, was not the case, that Miss Walter had been overwhelming him with apologies. He concluded:

In the next number of the Broadway Journal, Poe, in his review of America and the American People, properly took issue with Frederick Von Raumer's statement (and he could have cited his own recent rebuttals as evidence) that the “greater American periodical or critical reviews distinguish themselves by propriety, moderation, and dignity,” and that “they display an accurate knowledge of all sciences and often contain criticisms which are masterly both in form and substance.” He noted with ironic amusement that the moderation of the Down-East Review “must have reference to the applause or attention bestowed upon those insignificant individuals who have the misfortune to reside out of the limits of Massachusetts.” In [page 204:] the same number, he remarked: “The Frog-Pond seems to be dried up — and the Frogs are, beyond doubt, all dead — as we hear no more croaking from that quarter.”(14)

But the “Frog-Pond” was hardly dried up. On December 2 Miss Walter printed this item under the heading, “Poe's Poem of ‘Al Aaraaff’ [sic].” “This poem (the same delivered at the opening of the Lyceum of our city) and lately published in a new volume of its author's poetical writings, is mentioned as follows by a Baltimore correspondent of the [Boston] Atlas.” She then quoted the correspondent to the effect that the 1831 edition containing the poem failed to sell because people could not understand either that poem or “Tamerlane.” Unhappy with her backbiting, Poe maliciously remarked on December 6:

On that same day the Harbinger, edited and printed by the Brook Farm Phalanx, joined the fray. In reviewing The Raven volume, that journal made a fair summary of the reputation Poe was beginning to earn by his coarse replies:

Poe, after quoting the Harbinger's remarks in the Broadway Journal of December 13, commented that the Harbinger is “the most reputable organ of the Crazyites,” that he respected it because it is conducted by well-read persons who mean no harm and whose objects are honorable, “all that anybody can understand of them. ... ” He wondered what he could have done to offend the Brook Farm Phalanx that they should stop the ordinary operations at Brook Farm for the purpose of abusing him. But since the Harbinger talked to him like a Dutch uncle, he would reply to it, very succinctly, in the same spirit. “Insanity,” he said, “is a word that the Brook Farm Phalanx should never be brought to mention under any circumstances whatsoever.” The “old time-honored tyrant of the North” is really “King Log at best.” The statement that he insulted a Boston audience was “very true — meant to do it — and did.” The charge of “getting singed in return” referred, he presumed, “to the doubling, in five weeks, the circulation of the ‘Broadway Journal.’ “The statement that his “motive of publication was apparent” is wrong: his poems were in the publishers’ hands “a month or six weeks before we received the invitation from the Lyceum.” He was happy, however, that the Phalanx could discover no shadow of resemblance between his and Tennyson's poems:

“As for the rest,” Poe concluded, “we believe it is all leather and prunella — the opinion of ‘The Snook Farm Phalanx.’ We do trust that, in future, ‘The Snook Farm Phalanx’ will never have any opinion of us at all.”

Lewis Clark, not to be excluded from the altercation, added this tidbit: “The circumstances must indeed be exceedingly unhappy and distressing, which would cause a poet to accept an invitation from a learned society to deliver an original poem at its annual meeting, and after receiving payment therefor, to read a rhapsody composed and published in his tenth year, and afterward bring forward, as a proof of the stupidity of his audience, that they listened to him with civil attention!”(17)

Poe could not answer this notice, for on January 3, 1846, his journal having failed, he had published his abrupt valedictory: “Unexpected engagements demanding my whole attention, and the objects being fulfilled, so far as regards myself personally, for which ‘The Broadway Journal’ was established, I now, as its editor, bid farewell — as cordially to foes as to friends.”(18) But his foes were not so easily placated, nor was the storm which he had provoked so easily lulled. Without a journal in which to defend himself, and never again to have another editorial berth, Poe became a stationary target for abuse. On January 2, taking note that the Broadway Journal had failed, despite Poe's plea for the support of his friends, Miss Walter wrote this piece of doggerel:

And as late as May 5, 1846, Miss Walter copied from the Knickerbocker one of the nastiest pieces of vilification she could find — the piece that declared Poe to be “today in the gutter, tomorrow in some milliner's magazine; but in all places, and at all times, magnificently snobbish and dirty, who seems [page 207:] to invite the ‘Punchy’ writers among us to take up their pen and impale him for public amusement.” To which she added her own choice comment: “This same individual is famous for indulging in gross falsehoods, and these have become so common with him that whenever seen in print they are ever met by the reader, with the simple exclamation, Poh! Poe!”(19) And when, in the eighteenth annual report of the Boston Lyceum, the Board of Trustees recorded their censure of Poe for his conduct at the Odeum as well as in the Broadway Journal, Miss Walter published the censure in her paper: “The report says, ‘the Board had invited this person on the strength of his literary reputation and were not aware of his personal habits or the eccentricities of his character. For the merit or faults of his literary productions, he, of course, is alone responsible. The public were disappointed as well as ourselves in the poem, and his subsequent abuse of our city and its institutions, show Is] him to be an unprincipled man, while the venom which he ejected against us, only defiled himself.”(20) With this, the memory of that unhappy episode faded until it was revived by another, equally disagreeable, event.

For in the same year that marked the Boston Lyceum fiasco, Poe — again more by accident than design — precipitated a scandal that by 1846 became ruinous to his reputation. The enemies he had made in the past and of late seized upon and added to the gossip until, by word of mouth, by letter, and by print, Poe's name became anathema, even after his death. By the time the scandal ended, to quote the remark made by Mrs. Elizabeth Frieze Lummis Ellet to Mrs. Frances Sargent Locke Osgood both of whom may be regarded as authorities in the matter — no one (Mrs. Ellet said neither of us) has “any thing [page 208:] to apprehend from ... a wretch so steeped in infamy as he is now.”(21) The sequence of events that led to such a horrendous verdict needs to be reconstructed.

In March, 1845, Poe met Mrs. Osgood, a charming, attractive, and consumptive poetess two years his junior, and the first of the literary ladies with whom he conducted his series of “little poetical episodes” — to borrow Mrs. Osgood's words — ”in which the impassioned romance of his temperament impelled him to indulge,” despite the fact that Virginia Poe “was the only woman whom he ever truly loved.”(22) What must have been a typical salon scene of the period was drawn by Thomas Dunn English about a half-century later in his series called “Reminiscences of Poe”:

Impulsively, as seemed to be her nature, Mrs. Osgood engaged in a literary flirtation with Poe, the verses of which Poe published from time to time in the Broadway Journal. The first of her verses appeared on April 5, 1845, under the name of Violet Vane, and reveals Poe as the reluctant suitor:

“SO LET IT BE.”

Poe, a victim of gallantry, it seems, rather than of passion, “replied” noncommittally, if flatteringly, to Frances Osgood's advances with a poem he had earlier addressed “To Mary” and “To One Departed,” which he initialed with an “E.” All that was new was the title, “To F———,” and the revisions:

Thus encouraged, Mrs. Osgood on September 6, casting off pseudonymity and writing under her own name, responded with her “Echo-Song”:

Still gallant and doubtless pleased by Mrs. Osgood's attentions, if hardly inspired by her, Poe published another “To F———” on September 13, which earlier had borne the title, “To Eliza.” Instead of printing all eight lines, however, he printed only four to satisfy the limits of the column and, possibly, to keep the poem innocuous:

Delighted that she seemed a zephyr to Poe's lyre, Mrs. Osgood became even more impetuous, addressing Poe openly for the first time on November 29:

To ———

If Mrs. Osgood could not “tell the world” how thrilled her heart, she seems to have had fair success in apprising the readers of the Broadway Journal, for tongues were beginning to wag. When she left New York, whose weather had become inimical to her health, she even wrote letters to Poe, which, according to report, seem to have been quite intimate. Whether Poe answered her confidences is not known — no letters (except perhaps for the note mentioned in note 28) from Poe to Mrs. Osgood have been discovered. Neither Poe's wife nor Mrs. Osgood's husband — Samuel Stillman Osgood, a portrait painter — objected to the friendship. Virginia encouraged the relationship, it seems, feeling that Mrs. Osgood “had a restraining and beneficial effect” upon her husband,(29) and Mr. Osgood, apparently, was used to his wife's impetuous and unconventional behavior.

During Mrs. Osgood's absence, however, another literary lady, Mrs. Ellet, nine years Poe's junior, seems to have come [page 212:] under his spell, at least according to Poe, and she also seems to have directed a flirtatious poem to Poe under her own name, which Poe also published in the Broadway Journal:

COQUETTE'S SONG

Though Poe did not respond in verse to Mrs. Ellet, he spoke most highly of her in the Broadway Journal, asserting on one occasion that a recent tale of hers was “one of the most exciting [page 213:] stories we have ever read,” and calling her on another occasion “one of the most accomplished of our country-women.”(31)

Jealous and forlorn at what seemed Poe's seeking a “prouder prize” (Mrs. Ellet was far more widely known in literary circles), Mrs. Osgood sent him another poem called “A Shipwreck,” which Poe had the bad taste to publish in the same number of the Broadway Journal that contained Mrs. Ellet's “Coquette's Song”:

Given this situation, it may be inferred that Mrs. Osgood's letters to Poe became more importunate, more intimate. According to Mrs. Ellet's version, at least, when she made one of her visits to the Poe cottage at Fordham, Mrs. Poe “first repeated and afterwards pointed out” to her some “fearful paragraphs” in a letter written by Mrs. Osgood to Poe.”(32) Whatever Mrs. Ellet's motivation, whether jealousy or a taste for scandal-mongering, she proceeded to calumniate Mrs. Osgood, intimating that her relation with Poe was far from merely literary and, according to Poe, to so torture his dying wife with [page 214:] anonymous scurrilous letters that Virginia “on her death-bed declared ... Mrs. E. had been her murderer.”(33)

Virginia was quite aware of “the tattling of many tongues,” since she wrote as much in her 1846 valentine poem to her husband.(34) And that someone was writing poison pen letters to Virginia as early as August, 1845, in all likelihood about Mrs. Osgood's infatuation with Poe, is borne out by Frances Osgood herself in her poem “Slander,” which Poe published on August 30. Whether those letters were written, as Poe contended, by Mrs. Ellet is indeterminable.

In any case, Mrs. Osgood on November 22 proclaimed Poe's innocence in the “affair,” and innocent he seems to have been:

To ———

But now, tormented by the calumnies going the rounds, Mrs. Osgood, in a poem called “To ‘The Lady Geraldine,’ “reproached Mrs. Ellet for having initiated them. This poem Poe published in the Broadway Journal on December 20. The title, an allusion to Christabel, is as revealing as the poem itself. In Coleridge's poem, Christabel, while praying in a forest at midnight for her lover, encounters a lady in distress — the lady Geraldine. Moved by the story of her misfortune, Christabel takes Geraldine to her castle, where she is hospitably received. She turns out to be, however, a diabolic creature who has assumed Geraldine's form only to work evil. Though Christabel comes to recognize her true identity, she cannot expose her, for she is silenced by a spell. [page 216:]

Mrs. Ellet responded to “The Lady Geraldine” poem by avowing that she was only trying to keep Mrs. Osgood “safe for heaven” and by assuring her that “cross and thorn” are better than “fruits and flowers” — ”fruits and flowers,” whether by intent or coincidence, being an allusion to Poe's “To One in Paradise,” a poem that appeared in his tale “The Assignation,” most recently reprinted in the Broadway Journal of June 7 and separately in The Raven volume. [page 217:]

Such self-righteousness could only have served to gall, rather than relieve, Mrs. Osgood, who apparently had become quite ill with anxiety, and she ceased her communications to the Broadway Journal. When, however, these calumnies of Mrs. Ellet's reached her more aggressive husband, he demanded that Mrs. Ellet formally apologize to his wife or face a court action for libel. So threatened, Mrs. Ellet sent Mrs. Osgood a letter in which she retracted her slanders by fixing the blame entirely on Poe.(37) “The letter shown me by Mrs Poe must have been a forgery,” a crime which, she wrote, Poe would not hesitate to commit. “It is unfortunate both for you & me [page 218:] that we ever had any acquaintance with such people as the Poes. ... ” But in the very process of clearing herself, Mrs. Ellet admitted her guilt. If Mrs. Osgood had seen the paragraphs in the “forged” letter she had seen, “you would not wonder I regarded you as I did.” She was sorry to have caused pain to one of her own sex by carrying scandal, and she wished that Heaven would forgive her for having done so. She hoped that the injury to Mrs. Osgood's reputation would not be lasting. She assured her that rumors would soon be forgotten. She promised that she and her friends would preserve absolute silence on the subject, except to say, should her name be shamefully mentioned, that she had been wrongfully traduced. And she closed by disowning any ill will toward Mr. Osgood for the harsh things he had said of her and by beseeching God “to guard you in future from danger — and make your life a happy one.”

Despite the “explanation” for her gossiping and the “retraction,” in both of which Mrs. Ellet regarded herself as the injured party, and despite her prayer to God that Mrs. Os-good's life be a happy one, she did not desist from slandering Mrs. Osgood and Poe, nor did she believe for a moment that the letter was forged. Even as late as 1849, a year before her death, Mrs. Osgood, to stop Mrs. Ellet's incessant tongue, enlisted the aid of Rufus Griswold, who had become infatuated with her. Armed with the retraction, Griswold accosted Mrs. Ellet and told her flatly that “if she ever repeated these falsehoods [he] would print her letter of confession ... ”(38)

In the meantime the literary ladies, concerned about Mrs. Osgood's reputation and apparently prompted by Mrs. Ellet, sought that persecuted woman's permission to solicit the return of her letters from Poe, which Mrs. Osgood — sick and wanting to end her torment — gave with whatever reluctance. When the committee — Margaret Fuller and Anne C. Lynch — came for the letters, Poe, outraged at the affront and heartily sick of the machinations of Mrs. Ellet, blurted out that Mrs. Ellet had better look after her own compromising letters to him. Though [page 219:] warrantably provoked, Poe, according to his own statement, felt that his angry words had violated a confidence, not to mention his code of Southern gentleman, and, in contrition, he immediately “made a package of her [Mrs. Ellet's] letters, addressed them to her, and with my own hands left them at her door.”(39) Whether Poe on impulse wished those letters into existence, or whether they really existed, will probably never be known, since, if they had existed, they would in all likelihood have been destroyed. There are only two known extant notes from Mrs. Ellet to Poe — an unsigned one addressed to the Broadway Journal and postmarked December 16 [1845] which contains only two sentences and reveals nothing. The other, an earlier note, undated and signed “E,” is likewise innocuous, but on the verso appear these words in imperfect German: “Ich habe einen Brief fur Sie — wollen Sie gefalligst heute abend nach Uhr den sebben bei mir entnehmen oder abholen lassen?” The letter Mrs. Ellet had for Poe, which she invited him to get, need not, of course, have been written by her. Likewise, there are no known letters of Poe to Mrs. Ellet to cast light upon their epistolary intimacy.(40)

If Mrs. Ellet was vicious before, her vindictiveness became boundless now, for she had been badly compromised by Poe's outburst. Even if her logic — that a correspondence with a married man necessarily implies a relationship other than Platonic — could not be applied to her, as she had made it apply to Mrs. Osgood, she seemed at least exposed as a hypocrite, and, possibly, a jealous one at that, scrupulous about Mrs. Osgood's reputation, which she had not hesitated in damaging, but scarcely about her own. Wanting vindication, which she [page 220:] knew she could have, since she either had never written letters to Poe or had repossessed her letters, she urged her brother, William M. Lummis, to make Poe prove that he had compromising letters from her or else make him declare himself a slanderer.(41)

Mr. Lummis, obliged to protect his sister's reputation, armed himself with a pistol and went in search of Poe. Poe, no longer having the letters assuming that he had once had them, or proof that he had received them, and naturally alarmed about his welfare — went to the apartment of Thomas Dunn English to ask for a pistol with which to defend himself against his stalker. English refused, saying that Poe's “surest defense was a retraction of unfounded charges.”(42) Such advice, under the circumstances, was the most infuriating that English could have offered. It echoed the charges initiated by Mrs. Ellet and now freely circulating in New York literary circles that Poe was the rankest kind of liar, if nothing worse. Even Simms, living as far from New York as Charleston, South Carolina, wrote to Duyckinck on March 27, 1846: “Your hints with regard to Poe, the Ladies, Billet doux &c quite provoke my curiosity. What is the mischief — who the victims &c.”(43) It was no wonder that a fist fight ensued, in which Poe seems to have been beaten.(44)

Unable to free himself from the menace of Mr. Lummis, or, as he may have imagined, a rout of Lummises; helpless to prove he was innocent of slander; and, with his code of chivalry, unwilling, even if he could, to make the accusation stick, Poe, wanting to end the nightmarish episode once and for all, adopted a most desperate solution. He claimed that his statement regarding Mrs. Ellet's letters was made during a seizure [page 221:] of insanity. If he had not been insane at the time he accused Mrs. Ellet of sending him letters, he had by this time been driven to, if not over, the edge of sanity by this concatenation of events in whose power he was all but helpless. The letters he wrote during this period complain of sickness and mental disturbance; and in his letter to Mrs. Whitman, he frankly expostulates: “Is it any wonder that I was driven mad by the intolerable sense of wrong?” Unfortunately, far from ending the crisis, his declaration only provided his enemies with further materials to defame him, and defame him they proceeded to do.

The third event that stemmed from and combined with the previous two events to bring about Poe's downfall was the serial publication from May through October, 1846, in Godey's Lady's Book of sketches called, “The Literati of New York City: Some Honest Opinions at Random Respecting Their Autorial Merits, with Occasional Words of Personality.”(45) Simms's warning of July 30, 1846 — ”you are now perhaps in the most perilous period of your career — just in that position — just at that time of life — when a false step becomes a capital error — when a single leading mistake is fatal in its consequences”(46) — was analytic rather than predictive. For Poe's fiasco at the Boston Lyceum had already occurred, the aftermath of which had been climaxed on May 25, 1846, with the censure of him by the Board of Trustees. His disgrace through the instrumentality of Mrs. Ellet was so thoroughly accomplished that, on July 8, 1846, she could declare him to be “steeped in infamy.” And three instalments of his Literati papers had appeared and three more were forthcoming.

That Poe had prepared papers on New York writers and that Louis A. Godey had accepted them for publication was no secret. Godey, quite aware of Poe's notoriety as a critic, was intent on creating a sensation with the papers, and went to some [page 222:] pains to publicize them in advance of publication. According to Hiram Fuller, who, with the departure of Willis and Morris, was now in sole editorial control of the Mirror:

And when Godey published the first of the series, he announced with delighted anticipation that “Mr. E. A. Poe commences No. 1 of the New York Literati. We are much mistaken if these papers of Mr. P. do not raise some commotion in the literary emporium.”(48) Godey's expectation of sales was satisfied, for in the June number containing the second instalment, Godey noted that he had “been forced to reprint No. 1 of Poe's Literary Opinions. The demand for the May number we could not supply by some hundreds of copies.”(49)

With his reputation for mordancy exploited by Godey's “advertisements and placards,” Poe must have sounded threatening indeed in his “Author's Introduction,” especially to those writers who felt they might be sketched in subsequent numbers. In that introduction Poe pointed out that two kinds of opinion exist in regard to contemporary authors, the one, popular and clique-manufactured; the other, private and honest. Referring to his article on Bryant which had appeared in the preceding number of Godey's(50) and which described the way reputations were made, Poe said that the most “popular” and “successful” authors, being in almost every case “busybodies, toadies, quacks,” were simply those who profited from a [page 223:] system of chicanery. Citing Hawthorne and Longfellow as examples, he observed that the first “is not an ubiquitous quack” and therefore, despite his extraordinary genius, poor,(51) whereas the second, though “a determined imitator and a dexterous adapter of the ideas of other people,” is regarded as a “poetical phenomenon,” especially since he has “through his social and literary position as a man of property and a professor at Harvard, a whole legion of active quacks at his control. ... ”

Having intimated that justice was to be rendered in the form of an exposé, Poe declared that he would discuss only New York authors and that he would introduce each individual “absolutely at random.”

If, to those writers who felt they might be summoned before the critical bar, the introduction made Poe appear both judge and executioner, only his sketches of Charles F. Briggs (“Harry Franco”) and, subsequently, of Lewis Clark and Thomas Dunn English confirmed the impression. But the other thirty-five sketches, when they did not damn with faint praise, praised with enough damnation to make the flattery suspect and the portraits unwelcome. There was some obvious, if ill-intended, hoaxing and caricaturing in these papers, which Simms, no doubt prompted by Poe, noted in a letter published in the Southern Patriot: “Poe is fond of mystifying in his stories, and they tell me, practices upon this plan even in his sketches; more solicitous, as they assert, of a striking picture than a likeness.”(52) [page 224:]

Unhappy with the series, some New Yorkers began writing letters to Godey that were, at turns, anonymous and signed, threatening and wheedling; and some editors such as Hiram Fuller and Lewis Clark began printing vicious remarks about Poe's morals and sanity.(53) What prompted Clark, we know; but it is anybody's guess why Fuller “hated Poe.”(54) They had known each other when Poe had been assistant editor of the Mirror in the previous year, and Fuller, as we have seen, had blamed Willis and thereby exculpated himself (and Morris) of all responsibility for Poe's attacks on Longfellow. When the second instalment of the Literati sketches appeared, Fuller published a long notice in the Evening Mirror (a portion of which has already been quoted) called “Mr Poe and the New York Literati,” in which he attempted to supply an antidote to Poe's comments that was as nasty as anything Poe was to indite. He began his derisive remarks by saying that, owing to Godey's announcement that Poe was to powder the New York literati, “two milliner's apprentices never slept a wink one whole night,” that some students “made a pilgrimage to Bloomingdale to gaze upon the asylum where Mr. Poe was reported to be confined,” and that “the New York literati ... all sat in their garrets shaking in their shoes, with their wives and children clinging to their knees, in fear.” Then, becoming coarse, despite his own admission that the sketches were, for the most part, innocuous, Fuller continued:

Fuller concluded “after the fashion of our Thersitical Magazinist” by making Poe appear deformed and idiotic. He alleged that Poe was “in height about 5 feet or two inches,” and that he weighed about 115 pounds; that “his tongue shows itself unpleasantly when he speaks earnestly, and seems too large for his mouth”; that his forehead, “where phrenology places conscientiousness and the group of moral sentiments,” was quite flat; and that “his walk is quick, jerking, sometimes waving.” He added that he supposed Poe to be a contributor to the Knickerbocker, but of this he could not be certain, and that Poe was the author of Politian, “to which Professor Longfellow is largely indebted, it is said by Mr. Poe, for many of his ideas.”(55)

The very furor that Godey wanted to excite and had now succeeded in exciting began to frighten him — enough to prompt him to print a disclaimer when the second series of the sketches appeared in June:

When the September number of his magazine appeared, containing the penultimate instalment of the series, Godey again ran a disclaimer:

We hear of some complaints having been made by those writers who have already been noticed by Mr. Poe. Some of the ladies have suggested that the publisher has something to do with them. This we positively deny, and we as positively assert that they are published as written by Mr. Poe, without any alteration or suggestion from us.(57)

There is no point in touching upon all the authors Poe treated in the series, authors such as George B. Cheever, Mary Gove, and Henry Carey, but Poe's remarks about Duyckinck, James Aldrich, Margaret Fuller, Mrs. Osgood, and Anne C. Lynch deserve passing mention, since these people have figured in our account. Duyckinck was noted for “his active beneficence, his hatred of wrong done even to an enemy, and especially for an almost Quixotic fidelity to his friends.” Aldrich, who had attained brief but unenviable recognition by Poe's review of Longfellow's Waif, was again charged with plagiarism and acquitted in the way and even in the words that Longfellow had been. Margaret Fuller was lauded for “high genius” and for the integrity of her review of Longfellow's Poems:

Mrs. Osgood was praised as “ardent, sensitive, impulsive; the very soul of truth and honor; a worshipper of the beautiful, with a heart so radically artless as to seem abundant in art”; and, despite her light fame at the moment, “universally respected, admired and beloved.” Miss Lynch, one of the committee who had come for Mrs. Osgood's letters to Poe, “has her hobbies ... (of which a very indefinite idea of ‘duty’ is one,) and is, of course, readily imposed upon by an artful person who perceives and takes advantage of this most amiable failing.” Mrs. Ellet, although alluded to in this manner, remained conspicuously absent from the series.

What cannot be mentioned only in passing, however, is Poe's sketch of English that appeared in July. His resentment of English for his role in the Ellet affair bared his real feeling of contempt for a man whom, hitherto, he had been guilty of using.(58) The sketch, divested of its elaborate sarcasm, accused English of plagiarism and deficiencies in English grammar, and concluded with the statement that he was not personally known to the writer. English rallied to the attack at once by sending his reply to all the New York papers, if we are to believe Hiram Fuller,(59) but — as far as can be determined — only the Morning Telegraph and Evening Mirror published it — on June 23. English's “Card” was prefaced by Fuller as follows:

And “Mr. English's Reply to Mr. Poe” began:

The fact that Poe disowned acquaintance with him, English continued, was due to the “severe treatment he received at my hands for brutal and dastardly conduct. ... Unfortunately, I know him; and by the blessing of God, and the assistance of a grey-goose quill, my design is to make the public know him also.” He said that he knew Poe by a succession of his acts, which he proceeded to recount. His elaborate charges, stripped of scurrilous language and insinuation, were: 1) Poe had obtained a sum of money from him under false pretenses(60) — a fact, he said, he could support by Poe's written acknowledgment which he had in his possession. 2) Poe by his conduct had virtually admitted to the truth of an accusation of forgery leveled against him by a “merchant of this city.” 3) Poe had “accepted an invitation to deliver a poem before a society of the New York University,” but, unable to “compose a poem on a stated subject,” drank until intoxicated, “as he always does when troubled,” and remained intoxicated during the entire week. Thus, when the “night of exhibition came, it was gravely announced that Mr. Poe could not deliver his poem, on account of severe indisposition.” 4) Poe was guilty of similar but more discreditable behavior at the Boston Lyceum:

5) Poe, “having been guilty of some most ungentlemanly conduct, while in a state of intoxication, I was obliged to treat him with discourtesy”:

English concluded his indictments by accusing Poe of using billingsgate and of being not only “thoroughly unprincipled, base and depraved, but silly, vain and ignorant not alone an assassin in morals, but a quack in literature ... ; while his cool plagiarisms ... excite the public amazement.”

In his “Reminiscences of Poe,”(61) English said that if his own language was scurrilous at times, it was only that it fell in character with Poe's. But the reply must have struck quite a few readers as extremely brutal. Even Griswold, a month after English's reply had appeared, wrote Duyckinck that he “would sooner have cut off my hand than used it to write such an ungentlemanly card, though every word were true. But my indignation of this treatment even of an enemy exceeds my power of expression.”(62) There were no public allusions to [page 230:] English's “Card,” at least none that I have encountered, and even Lewis Clark, on the lookout for quotable material with which to malign Poe, ignored this item.

Poe, under such an attack, which, in his contempt for English, he called a bagatelle, bestirred himself and sent a reply to Godey for publication in his magazine. He felt he had a distinct advantage over English in this quarrel, for Godey's Lady's Book, according to Poe's estimate (which assumed four readers to a number), had a circulation of at least 200,000, whereas the Mirror had a circulation of only a few thousand. But Poe was mistaken in assuming that Godey would publish his reply. Godey was apprehensive: he was still publishing the Literati papers that were exciting importunate letters and sales (he was to die a millionaire); there were other fish to be netted, perhaps the largest of which was Lewis Clark, who might retaliate as English had; and he was aware that if he lent his magazine gratuitously to give a slander currency, he might become a defendant in a libel suit.(63) Preferring to be a noncombatant, he sent Poe's reply to a sportsman's paper of small circulation, the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times, edited by John Stephenson Du Solle, paying ten dollars to have it printed and charging Poe with the cost. Poe, of course, was indignant. He wrote Godey that he regretted his action: he would have “found no difficulty in getting it printed here, in a respectable paper, and gratis”; that he was rather ashamed for Godey, who, knowing his poverty, demanded ten dollars from him; that the reply would clear him; and, finally, that he had referred English's charges to an attorney, who, when the matter was brought before a court, would mention the ten dollars as an item.(64)

Godey apparently wrote to Simms, whether to explain his refusal to publish Poe's letter or his rejection of further Literati papers is not clear; and Simms on July 30 wrote Poe: “But how can you expect a Magazine proprietor to encourage contributions [page 231:] which embroil him with all his neighbors?”(65) — a rather peculiar question considering that Godey had published and would continue to publish the Literati sketches, though under no compulsion to do so.

With these delays, “Mr. Poe's Reply to English and Others,” though dated June 27, made its belated appearance on July 20. Addressing the public, Poe said that he attached little importance to the Literati sketches, however much others might, for he regarded them as “loosely and inconsiderately written aiming at nothing beyond the gossip of criticism — unless, indeed, at the relief of those ‘necessities’ which I have never blushed to admit and which the editor of ‘The Mirror’ has, in the same manner, never blushed publicly to insult”; and that the “spasms of one or two enemies have given the articles a notoriety far surpassing their merit or my expectation,” for which notoriety, he added, he could hardly be held accountable. He then turned to a consideration of English's reply, and, in so turning, he promised he would “not permit any profundity of disgust to induce, even for an instant, a violation of the dignity of truth.” Yet, though aware that his assailants — among them Clark, Mrs. Ellet, Hiram Fuller, and English himself, not to mention the scores who had exchanged gossip about the Boston Lyceum and Mrs. Osgood affairs were in possession of the facts, however distorted they may have become by this time, he rebutted only two of English's five charges. Of the remaining three, he evaded two entirely and merely palliated the other.

Poe's answers, reduced to their essential elements and presented in the order he presented them, took this form (the numbers in parentheses have reference to the order of English's charges): 3) An explanation of his “irregularities” which, hitherto, he said, he had not been the coward to deny or even to extenuate — irregularities which “were the effect of a terrible evil rather than its cause” — and which now, “in redemption from the physical ill I have forever got rid of the moral.”(66) His [page 232:] failure to make his scheduled appearance at New York University he ignored,(67) as he also ignored 4) the Boston Lyceum affair. 5) A claim that he suffered an attack of amnesia while at English's apartment, so that he could “pretend to no remembrance of anything which occurred — with the exception of having wearied and degraded myself, to little purpose, in bestowing upon Mr. E. the ‘fisticuffing’ of which he speaks” (the same seizure of amnesia he earlier alleged to have suffered when the committee came for Mrs. Osgood's letters). In respect to Mrs. Ellet, he was blatantly evasive: “The ‘celebrated authoress’ is a mystery. With the exception, perhaps, of Mrs. Stephens, Mrs. Welby, and Miss Gould ... there is no celebrated authoress in America with whom I am not on terms of perfect amity at least, if not of cordial and personal friendship.” 1, 2) An assertion that the charges that he had taken money under false pretenses and that he had committed forgery were “criminal, and with the aid of ‘The Mirror’ I can have them investigated before a criminal tribunal.” He defied English to produce the acknowledgment he named in proof of the first of these two allegations, and he cited a letter from the bearer of the second allegation to prove that it was baseless rumor.(68) He concluded with a blast at Hiram Fuller “who [page 233:] (also with a thorough knowledge of the facts, as I can and will show) prostituted his filthy sheet to the circulation of this calumny ... ”

English wasted little time in writing a reply, and Fuller, unlike Godey, lent his journal again to “A Card” from English, which appeared in the Evening Mirror on July 13, 1846, under the title, “In Reply to Mr. Poe's Rejoinder.” In it English pointed out that Poe's rejoinder, though dated June 27, was printed on July 10, from which he inferred that Poe “had some difficulty in obtaining a respectable journal to give currency to his scurrilous article.” Then, listing the opprobrious words and phrases appearing in Poe's reply and saying that he could not respond to such vulgarity, he proceeded to accept Poe's challenge, noting in the process Poe's evasions:

He then exposed the “charlatanry of Mr. Poe's reply,” particularly “his proclamation of recent reform, when it is not a week since he was seen intoxicated in the streets of New York,” and “his attempt to excuse his drunkenness and meanness on the ground of insanity. ... ”

Soon after this card appeared, Poe, on July 23, through an attorney, Enoch L. Fancher, filed suit for libel in the New York Superior Court against Hiram Fuller and Augustus W. Clason, part-owner with Fuller in the firm that published the Mirror. The declaration read in court on that date stated:

A preliminary hearing was scheduled for August 4, 1846, in New York City Hall. At that time, the defendants, through their attorney, William H. Paine, pleaded not guilty to the charge of libel, and the trial was set for the first Monday in September, then unexplainably postponed until the first Monday in February, 1847.

During this protracted interval, rumors concerning Poe's insanity became rife. The public quarrel with English not only spread the gossip that Poe was a slanderer of a lady and a coward to boot who would resort to any subterfuge, even to a pretense of insanity, to save his skin; it also lent substance to that gossip, largely because of Poe's evasiveness. Poe was aware of these defamations but helpless to stop them, because of his own admission of insanity — an admission which he had written and delivered to Mr. Lummis and which that gentleman, in turn, had given to his sister.(70) Poe wrote to Willis:

Clark, it will be recalled, quoted the Evening Gazette and Times, which had stated that Poe was “in a state of health which renders him not completely accountable for all his peculiarities,” and Hiram Fuller had satirically put Poe in the [page 235:] Bloomingdale insane asylum. But Poe's enemies were not alone in circulating the story. Well-intentioned friends, living outside the confines of New York and reading the gossip about Poe which they regarded as true, if only because of the frequency of its repetition, innocently repeated the most notorious of the rumors, that Poe's mind had collapsed. Simms, for example, wrote to a friend on May 15, 1846: “I see by one of the papers that it was gravely thought to send P. to Bedlam.” And in his favorable review of the Literati appearing in the Southern Patriot on July 20, he announced that Poe was “sick, according to a report which reached me yesterday, of brain fever.”(72) Joseph Evans Snodgrass, editor of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter and a friend of long standing, reported on April 18 that “Edgar A. Poe, according to a New York letter writer, labors under a mental derangement to such a degree that it has been determined to send him to the Insane Retreat at Utica.”

If Poe could barely eke out a livelihood before, he became impoverished now, for few editors wanted his articles, even if he were well enough to write them. Even the do-gooders who, without Poe's knowledge or consent, sought to raise funds for the Poes in their sickness and poverty, helped only to defame him the more. The Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, for instance, wrote that “Edgar A. Poe is lying dangerously ill with the brain fever” and that he and his wife “are without money and without friends ... ”(73) The New York Morning Express of December 15 carried this item:

And Willis, good friend of Poe though he was, devoted much of his editorial plumping for a “Hospital for Disabled Labourers with the Brain” to Poe, partly to raise funds for him and partly to defend him against his calumniators; but for all the harm it did, it might have been written by Poe's worst enemy:

He related how he had discovered, when Poe was his associate on the Mirror, that a single glass of wine made Poe talk “like a man insane,” though he showed “no symptom of ordinary intoxication,” and that, under such influence, Poe was “neither sane nor responsible.”

Clearly, the gossip involving Mrs. Ellet and Poe's plea of insanity had reached, ridiculously, such a wide audience that [page 237:] Willis needed only to allude to the episode rather than detail it. It is indication enough of the position to which Poe had been reduced that he could tell Willis that this editorial was “kindly and manly.”(75)

But English was not done with Poe yet. Learning that Poe had filed suit, he, who had publicly pledged “to make my charges good by the most ample and satisfactory evidence,” fled to Washington, D. C., to avoid involvement in the criminal action. Because of his absence, the case, called to order as scheduled, on the first Monday in February, was again post-poned — this time for two weeks. When the court reconvened, the judge ordered that a commission be directed to receive English's deposition, which was done. Among other things, that deposition repeated what English had said earlier, that “the general character of said Poe is that of a notorious liar, a common drunkard, and of one utterly lost to all the obligations of honor” — statements that seem to have been widely copied in the papers.(76) In the meantime too, English's novel, 1844, or The Power of the “S.F.,” which had begun appearing anonymously and serially in the Weekly Mirror of July 25, 1846, abruptly introduced on September 5 — several months before the trial for libel took place — a new character by the name of Marmaduke Hammerhead, which was an obvious satire of Poe. “Hammerhead is presented as author of a well-known poem, ‘The Black Crow,’ and of a volume, The Humbug and Other Tales. We are told that he had written criticism on the Literati of the country and that he considers himself the ‘great Mogul of all the critics.’ He refers to his friend M. Dupin, and constantly to his severe articles on Longfellow!”(77) In addition, [page 238:] Hammerhead is depicted as going insane at the time he writes his criticisms of the literati. In the passages relating to Hammerhead, the familiar charges are repeated ad nauseam: habitual drunkenness and sponging; pedantry; hatred of Longfellow, the Transcendentalists, and Boston; plagiarism; susceptibility to women (he was also accused of flogging his wife); constant threats to annihilate his enemies by criticism. The serial, we are told, “attracted no little attention as a feuilleton in the New York Mirror,” and in book form was “probably destined to still more general circulation.’‘(78)

On February 17, 1847, Poe won his libel suit and was awarded $225.06 in damages, Fuller and Clason being assessed that amount together with court costs of $101.48. Despite the number of Poe's enemies, the degree of their animosity, and the frequency of their attacks, the defense could not produce a single witness to testify under oath either against Poe's conduct or his character (English was still in hiding), whereas Poe's attorney produced three — the merchant Thomas, who cleared Poe of the charge of forgery, and Judge Noah and Freeman Hunt, who never “heard anything against him except that he is occasionally addicted to intoxication.” But to Poe the news that his name had, at least, been cleared in court, was anticlimactic: Virginia had died only eighteen days earlier. Broken in health and spirit, he was not even in attendance at court.(79)

The verdict, instead of clearing Poe once and for all, detonated instead a spate of newspaper articles which reviewed the affair in a way unfavorable to Poe. Hiram Fuller in the Evening Mirror of February 18, 1847, for example, remarked that the “facts in the case are well known to our readers, and [page 239:] also the parties, who by resorting to low personal abuse of each other, have lost more in character than they have gained in money or fame.” He had hardly expected Poe to resort to a libel suit, he confessed, since, with the possible exception of Bennett, he “has probably written and published more libellous articles than any other man in the whole country.” He added that he had offered the plaintiff free use of his columns to vindicate himself, “an offer which he at the time accepted, but was probably advised differently by counsel, who hoped to find something worth picking from this ‘bone of contention.’ “And in another article in the same issue, he complained: “We gave a certain Poe-t $15 a week for three months, at a time when we neither needed his services nor could afford to pay for them, and have during the present winter contributed our mite to relieve his distresses, who in return gives us a viper's gratitude.”

Greeley too reviewed the events leading up to the trial in the New York Tribune on February 19:

Poe wrote to Greeley on February 21, enclosing this editorial article, lines of which he had underscored the passages referring to his failure to meet his debts and his throwing away the quill. With an obtuseness hard to understand, he said that the only personality in his sketch of English was contained in the words, “I have no acquaintance, personally, with Mr English” — meaning, he explained, that he wished to decline his acquaintance in the future. Under such slight provocation, Poe continued, English had libeled him with what he must have presumed would be impunity “on account of my illness and expected death. ... I sue; to redeem my character from these foul accusations. ... The jury returned a verdict in my favor — and the paragraphs enclosed are the comments of the ‘Tribune!” He acknowledged that he owed Greeley money, but he had been “ill, unfortunate, no doubt weak, and as yet unable to refund the money — but on this ground you, Mr. Greeley, could never have accused me of being habitually ‘unscrupulous in the fulfillment of my pecuniary engagements.’‘ The charge is horribly false — I have a hundred times left myself destitute of bread for myself and family that I might discharge debts. ... ” He added that he did not throw away the quill, but arose from a sick-bed to write a reply which was published in the Spirit of the Times. He admitted that the columns of the Mirror had been offered him, but only “with a proviso that I should forego a suit and omit this passage and that passage, to suit the purposes of Mr Fuller.” In closing, Poe begged Greeley “to do by me as you would have me do by you in a similar case” — to disavow his damaging statements,(81) but that request Greeley ignored.

English was not silenced by the libel suit. In the John-Donkey that he edited and co-owned, he continually smeared Poe until the seven libel suits filed against the magazine by various complainants forced him to discontinue publication. The most telling of his smears, perhaps, was that the Germanesque style in the short story was “accessible to every impudent and contemptible mountebank who may choose to [page 241:] slander a lady and then plead insanity to shelter himself from the vengeance of her relatives.”(82)

Nor did the matter end there. Charles Frederick Briggs, better known as Harry Franco in his day, was ready to pick up the cudgels the moment that English had dropped them. He, like English, had reason to dislike Poe. Poe had edged him out of the co-editorship of the Broadway Journal(83) and, to compound the injury, had attacked him in the first instalment of the Literati papers. In that sketch Poe observed, among other things, that Briggs's novels were insipid imitations of Smollett's and that Briggs “has never composed in his life three consecutive sentences of grammatical English.” Thus, even as English's 1844 was drawing to a close, Hiram Fuller promised his readers that a “new novel of very great interest, but of a very different character, written expressly for the Mirror by one of our most popular authors” would be serialized.(84) Briggs was the popular author in question and his picaresque novel, The Trippings of Tom Pepper, or The Results of Romancing, was the work to be serialized. On February 27, 1847 — ten days after Poe had been awarded damages in his libel suit there appeared an instalment that was designedly a smear of Poe and that had special reference to the Poe-Ellet scandal. Briggs in that instalment openly announced his satire of Poe, even while disowning any intention of “wantonly exposing the private conduct of any person to the public,” because, as he said, alluding to Poe and his Literati papers, he had “always looked down upon those authors who write histories of their own contemporaries from mercenary motives, with abhorrence,” and that “such a person[‘s character] shall form the only episode in my autobiography.”

In this satire Lizzy is a central character — a girl who sends [page 242:] “her compositions to the magazines signed with her full name” — clearly, Elizabeth Frieze Ellet. Wanting to have a “conver-sazione,” Lizzy takes advantage of the absence of her family to invite a number of artists, among them the “celebrated critic, Austin Wicks, author of the ‘Castle of Duntriewell,’ a metaphysical romance, and a pscychological [sic] essay on the sensations of shadows. ... ” Here again Wicks-Poe is shown to be shallow and pretentious, a man whose “highest efforts in literature had been contributions to a lady's magazine.” He imbibes but a single glass of wine and begins “to abuse all present in ... profane and scurrilous terms.” He calls one man an ass who cannot write English, and, after a brawl from which he is rescued, the party disbands in great disorder.

At this point Briggs rakes over the Mrs. Ellet affair. After the party, he continues:

After this novel had run its course both in serial and book form, Briggs, like English, continued to attack Poe. When he edited Holden's Dollar Magazine, for example, he printed a poem by “Motley Manners, Esq.,” which, modeled on a Fable for Critics, contained this passage:

And on Poe's death, Briggs wrote: “His merits as a critic were very slender, he was a minute detector of slips of the pen, and, probably, was unequalled as a proof reader ... One of the strange points of his strange nature was to entertain a spirit of revenge towards all who did him a service. ... he rarely, or never, failed to malign those who befriended him.”(87) Years afterward, in 1877, he again reviewed Poe's character. Poe's dissipations, he declared,

Nor did the story end with Poe's death. To damage Poe's posthumous reputation, Griswold retold the Ellet episode, basing his “facts” on Briggs's satire or, possibly, on Briggs's personal account, for he and Briggs were very close friends.(89) According to Griswold:

Typically, editors like Clark — more concerned with Griswold's portrait of Poe than with Poe's works, and not loath to introduce racy reports into their columns, if with a touch of sanctimony — repeated the Griswold version of Poe's dishonorable conduct: “Two of the most painful things mentioned in his subsequent history is [sic] the slander of a well-known literary lady, who had befriended him when in need, and which slander he was obliged to retract under the threat of personal chastisement from the lady's brother on the plea of temporary insanity.”(91) [page 245:]

What were the reasons for Poe's private affairs becoming public knowledge and his weaknesses common copy? For his criticism to be discredited and his career virtually ended? The answer lies in his journalistic career and in the literary battles he fought against the coteries, publishers, and editors that were dominating American letters for their own commercial ends. As we have seen, Poe as a critic had many glaring faults. He did not always fight his battles on purely literary grounds. He did not reserve his powder for coterie-sponsored authors but as freely “used up” authors who were not members of cliques. He praised a number of writers who were hardly better than those he gibbeted. He did not always analyze books but, like the very critics he derided, quoted specimens from them to exhibit their good and bad points. He had a separate critical standard for female authors, forgivable, perhaps, in the light of his gallantry, though it was a gallantry he could forget when a female author attacked him. And he was too eager to make a journalistic splash at whatever cost to himself or others.

Nevertheless, with all his faults, Poe appeared on the literary scene at a crucial point in history. The public had taken the place of the patron. Coterie art had given way to works aimed at masses of people. Books were judged by publishers who, as businessmen, were far less concerned with artistry than with salability. With literacy being the only qualification for authorship, writers were rushing into the market place. And, with competition in the book market becoming severer by the day, publishers and authors, banding with their new-found allies, the editors and reviewers, sought to trick the public into buying certain books and avoiding others.

Having a high regard for the literary profession, Poe for the most part sought to resist its being disgraced by dilettantes who would not or could not master the craft. Having a vital concern for literary taste, he tried, on the whole, to keep public taste from becoming degraded by a regimen of bad books and to protect the public from a system of puffing that would, in their eyes, transform poor works into great ones and literary dabblers [page 246:] into geniuses. And having in general sound literary values, he condemned the prevailing notion that popularity and sales were measures of a book's worth by insisting there were standards of judgment other than those of the market place.

The efforts that Poe made to safeguard a tradition whose value it is impossible to exaggerate were absolutely necessary, but a less militant man would not have devoted a career to the task. Whatever his motives, for he was by no means entirely altruistic, his militancy is attested by the fact that for almost his entire career he single-handedly fought the two most powerful cliques in America — those in Boston and New York — which were undermining that tradition. Whatever his motives, his devotedness to that tradition is attested by the fact that he persisted in his assaults (the lapses that occurred during his breakdown notwithstanding) despite the very real danger of ruin — a ruin to which he was finally reduced.

Though Poe was not an “ideal” critic, his struggles with the coteries led him to develop critical principles and practices that, for America, were unprecedented and brilliant — brilliant enough for him to be called our first great critic. Had he been an “ideal” critic serene, unimpoverished, not forced to write against the clock — there is every reason to question whether he would have remained in the profession or have made himself felt as a force. From the beginning to the end of his career, there were those among his contemporaries who encouraged him to be ruthless in his analysis, scathing in his comments, and merciless in his judgments to offset forces that were extremist in an entirely opposite way — in a way calculated, either through indifference, ignorance, or chicanery, to prevent the free play of talent — and who lauded him when he was.(92) And no [page 247:] doubt Poe's temperament and his sense of journalism were such that he relished the role of literary crusader.

But whatever quarrel one may have with Poe as a critic, one must finally concede what is of ultimate importance, that he did range himself on the side of the artist; that he did call for support of worthy authors; that he did urge a free, outspoken, and responsible criticism; and that he did struggle to provide an audience for deserving works.

The price Poe paid for his militancy was enormous — poverty for the most part and defamation for the rest. As Griswold reminds us, Poe worked at a time when a man could “not write a purely literary criticism without encountering for it streams of personal abuse drawn from all the sinks and sewers of slanderous blackguardism.”(93) It was also a time, as we have seen, when a man was bound to be starved or hooted out of the critical profession if he kept insisting there were other standards than commercial ones and if he clashed with those coalitions whose watchword, despite their lofty slogans, was profits. And this is precisely what occurred. Threatened by Poe's continual attacks, the coteries indeed destroyed Poe as a critic. They so damaged his reputation that his critical judgments became discredited; that he himself became the target, as Lewis Clark said, for “‘Punchy’ writers ... to take up their pen and impale ... for public amusement”; and that finally led to his being hounded out of the profession. There is no question that Poe abetted his enemies by the life he led, and only an error of charity would impel anyone to make a special plea for his weaknesses — his drinking, his relations with women, his defense of his Boston Lyceum performance, his quarrel with Thomas Dunn English.

One last word is in order. It is impossible to assess the full value or power of Poe's critical work unless one understands that Poe was fundamentally a literary reformer, a rather lone figure on the American scene who, wanting to maintain a high literary tradition, waged a career-long war against those commercial [page 248:] forces that today have become all too conspicuous. The attempt has been made here to present a significant record as fully as possible — not to whitewash Poe but to give him his due.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 191:]

1. Lowell had been instrumental in getting Poe the invitation. In his letter dated March 6, 1844, he wrote: “I spoke to the secretary of the Boston Lyceum ... about engaging you for next year & he seemed very much pleased with the plan & said that the Society would be glad to do it” (Woodberry, “Lowell's Letters to Poe,” p. 174). In this letter, Lowell also suggested that Poe “write an article now and then for the North American Review,” whose editor Lowell knew and who, he thought, “would be glad to get an article.” Poe thanked Lowell on March 30 for the trouble he had taken, said he would be “very glad to avail myself, next season, of any invitation from the ‘Boston Lyceum,’ “and that he would bear “the hint about the North A. Review ... in mind” (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 247).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 192:]

2. American Review, II (Sept., 1845), 306.

3. New York Tribune, Nov. 26, 1845.

4. Atlas, March 4, 1845, and Transcript, March 5, 1845. Lowell in his letter of March 6, 1844, said, “The Lyceum pays from fifty to a hundred dollars, as their purse is empty or full,” but Poe stated without question or complaint that the sum he received was $20. See his letter to Duyckinck dated Nov. 13, 1845 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 301).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 193:]

5. In his Memoir in The Literati, p. xxii, Griswold cited a letter purported to be written by Poe, in which Poe is made to implore Mrs. Frances Osgood to compose the poem for him. “You compose with such astonishing facility, that you can easily furnish me, quite soon enough, a poem that shall be equal to my reputation. For the love of God I beseech you to help me in this extremity.” This letter appears neither in Ostrom's nor Harrison's edition of Poe's letters, and Mrs. Osgood could hardly have attested that Poe wrote such a letter, since she was dead when Griswold printed it.

6. There is little question that Poe's performance was poor. The Boston Daily Times that on Oct. 16, 1845, called for a full house to “testify the public appreciation of these distinguished writers,” on Oct. 18 said that Poe “made what is called a ‘no go’ of it, and even when he mounted his Pegasus, the Raven, Mr Poe didn’t go down with the audience at all.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 195:]

7. I am indebted to Joseph Edgar Chamberlin's chapter, “The Lady Editor,” in his Boston Transcript: A History of Its First Hundred Years (Boston, 1930), as well as to his article, “Edgar A. Poe and His Boston Critic, Miss Walter,” Boston Evening Transcript, Book Section, Jan. 26, 1924, p. 2, for calling attention to the Walter attacks upon Poe.

8. In a letter to Duyckinck dated Nov. 24, 1845, Hudson confessed, in order to exonerate Miss Walter, that the most offensive remarks about Poe in the Transcript had been written by him. (See Phillips, Poe, II, 1058-1059, for the letter.) There were conceivably two reasons for Hudson's animosity toward Poe. One was to avenge Miss Walter whom Poe was eventually driven to bait in retaliation for her thrusts at him, for Miss Walter had been kind enough to puff the series of Shakespeare lectures Hudson had given in Boston (see Transcript for Jan. 13, 17, 27, March 1, Nov. 6, 8, 14, 19, Dec. 3 and 20, 1845, for such puffs). The second reason was that his Shakespeare lectures given in February in New York were a failure — a failure which a writer, whom Hudson and Miss Walter probably thought to be Poe, did nothing to alleviate. Miss Walter admitted Hudson's failure (Transcript, April 28, 1845) when she wished him better success in Providence than he had met with in New York. The writer in the Broadway Journal had remarked in part: “Mr. Hudson was expected to make [page 196:] a sensation. He had made a sensation in Boston. ... [but]what is a thirty-two pounder in the provinces is a mere pop-gun here ... “(I, Feb. 22, 1845, 123). Poe later learned about Hudson's hand in the Transcript attacks, most likely from Duyckinck, and took his revenge upon him in the Broadway Journal (II, Dec. 13, 1845, 359): “His bad parts are legion — ... an elocution that would disgrace a pig, and an odd species of gesticulation of which a baboon would have excellent reason to be ashamed.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 197:]

9. Broadway Journal, II (Oct. 25, 1845), 248.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 198:]

10. Philadelphia Spirit of the Times, Jan. 8, 1847.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 200:]

11. Broadway Journal, II (Nov. 1, 1845), 261-262.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 201:]

12. I (Nov. 10, 1845), 2.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 203:]

13. II (Nov. 22, 1845), 309-311.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 204:]

14. II (Nov. 29, 1845), 320-321.

15. Broadway Journal, II, 339.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 205:]

16. I (Dec. 6, 1845), 410-411.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 206:]

17. Knickerbocker, XXVII (Jan., 1846), 72.

18. Broadway Journal, II, 407.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 207:]

19. Miss Walter was bound to be partial to the Knickerbocker: Lewis Clark as systematically supported Longfellow as he derided Poe. In the same issue of the Transcript ( Jan. 2, 1845) that announced “the advent of a new paper in New York entitled ‘The Broadway Journal,’ “Miss Walter commented: “The last number of ‘The Knickerbocker’ is full of good things, and the ‘Editor's Table’ plethoric with viands for the laugher and satirist, the man of humor and the man of sense.”

20. Transcript, May 25, 1846.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 208:]

21. The letter containing this remark is dated July 8 [1846], and is reproduced in full by Bayless, Griswold, pp. 141-142.

22. Mrs. Osgood's letter as printed in Griswold's Memoir in The Literati, p. xxxvii.

23. Independent, XLVIII (Oct. 29,1896), 449.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 209:]

24. I, 217. The poem later appeared in Mrs. Osgood's Poems (Philadelphia, 1850), pp. 403-404. Quinn (Poe, p. 478) is responsible for identifying this poem as Mrs. Osgood's. Of the two poems by Mrs. Osgood published in the Broadway Journal on April 12, 1845 (p. 231), “Spring” and “Love's Reply” under her pseudonym and her own name respectively, the first has no relevance and the second only the slightest to this literary flirtation.

25. Broadway Journal, I (April 26, 1845), 260. This poem appeared under the same title in The Raven volume.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 210:]

26. Ibid., II (Sept. 6, 1845), 129.

27. Ibid., p. 148. When the complete poem appeared in The Raven volume, it bore a fuller title, “To F———s S. O———d.” The last four lines are:

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 211:]

28. Ibid., p. 318. Poe, in an undated note, gingerly addressed to “My Dear Madam” (presumed to be Mrs. Osgood), thanked her “a thousand times for your sweet poem, and for the valued words of flattery which accompanied it,” and added — again gingerly, it seems — that he would “not be able to spend an evening with you until Thursday next” because of business pressures. Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 300. Ostrom dates this note “late October, 1845.”

29. From Mrs. Osgood's undated letter as quoted by Griswold in his Memoir in The Literati, p. xxxvii.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 212:]

30. Poe's statement about Mrs. Ellet's love for him (“whose loathsome love I could do nothing but repel with scorn”) appeared in a letter to Sarah Helen Whitman dated Oct. 18, 1848 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 393). That Mrs. Ellet “loved” Poe is partly borne out by this poem. That he scorned her at this time is hardly to be inferred from the fact that he published this poem in the Broadway Journal, II (Dec. 13, 1845), 349, or from Mrs. Osgood's reaction to the rumor of Poe's “new romance.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 213:]

31. II (Oct. II, 1845), 213, and (Nov. I, 1845), 258.

32. See n. 21 of this chapter.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 214:]

33. Letter to Sarah Helen Whitman dated Nov. 24, 1848 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 408).

34. Quinn, Poe, p. 497, prints the entire valentine. The only poem that Poe seems to have really written for Mrs. Osgood alone was also “A Valentine” — an acrostic in which “her own sweet name ... nestling, lies / Upon this page” — her middle name, unfortunately, misspelled in the Evening Mirror version (Feb. 21, 1846), but corrected in the 1849 version. There is nothing in the poem to reveal that Poe was especially infatuated with Mrs. Osgood.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 215:]

35. Broadway Journal, II (Nov. 22, 1845), 307.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 217:]

36. Ibid., II (Dec. 27, 1845), 381.

37. See n. 21 of this chapter.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 218:]

38. See Phillips, Poe, II, 1146, and Bayless, Griswold, p. 153.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 219:]

39. Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 407-408. English, though a hostile witness, supported this account in one of his Independent articles, XLVIII (Oct. 29, 1896), 449, except that he whitewashed Mrs. Ellet. He wrote that the mutual admiration of Poe and Mrs. Osgood became the “town talk, at least among literary people. The coterie thought it should be stopped, and it was suggested to Mrs. Ellet that she should say something to Poe about it. Poe became very much excited at this and when some of the rest suggested that he should return the lady's letters he accused Mrs. Ellet of having instigated it, and was imprudent enough to say that she had better take care of her own letters which he had, and which compromised herself.”

40. Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 409 n.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 220:]

41. Ibid., II, 408. In this letter Poe seems to have exaggerated the number of his persecutors. He refers to Mrs. Ellet's brothers and brother-in-law who were sent “to demand of me the letters.”

42. New York Evening Mirror, IV (June 23,1846).

43. Oliphant et al., Simms's Letters, II, 159.

44. See English's article in the Evening Mirror, June 23, 1846, and in the Independent, XLVIII (Nov. 5, 1896), 4-5; Poe's “Reply to Mr. English and Others” in the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times, July 10, 1846; and T. O. Mabbott's article, “Reply to a ‘Minor Poe Mystery,’” Princeton University Library Chronicle, V (April, 1944), 106-114.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 221:]

45. These papers appeared in six instalments in Godey's Lady's Book, XXXII (May, 1846), 194-201; (June, 1846), 266-272, together with a reprint of the May instalment, 289-296; XXXIII (July, 1846), 13-19; (Aug., 1846), 72-78; (Sept., 1846), 126-133; and (Oct., 1846), 157-162.

46. Oliphant et al., Simms's Letters, II, 175.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 222:]

47. Part of a long notice called “Mr Poe and the New York Literati,” Evening Mirror, May 26, 1846. See this issue also for a number of statements to the effect that Willis and Morris had retired from the Mirror and that Fuller (a relative of Margaret Fuller) was in sole charge of both the evening and weekly editions. Augustus W. Clason, Jr., a brother-in-law of Fuller and part owner of the Mirror, remained in the background.

48. Godey's Lady's Book, XXXII, 240.

49. Ibid., XXXII, 288.

50. Ibid., XXXII (April, 1846), 182-186.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 223:]

51. Poe was kindly disposed to Hawthorne, despite the fact that in his “Hall of Fantasy” Hawthorne had written: “Mr. Poe had gained ready admittance for the sake of his imagination, but was threatened with ejectment as belonging to the obnoxious class of critics” (Pioneer, I, Feb., 1843, 51). Later, however, Hawthorne appears to have modified his opinion of Poe as a critic, notwithstanding that he admired him “rather as a writer of tales than as a critic upon them.” In his unique letter to Poe written on June 17, 1846 (from which the above quotation is taken), Hawthorne said: “I presume the publishers will have sent you a copy of ‘Mosses from an Old Manse.’ ... I have read your occasional notices of my productions with great interest — not so much because your judgment was, upon the whole, favorable, as because it seemed to be given in earnest. I care for nothing but the truth; and shall always much more readily accept a harsh truth, in regard to my writings, than a sugared falsehood” (Harrison, Poe's Works, XVII, 232-233). The book mentioned in the letter contained a second version of “The Hall of Fantasy” with the captious passage deleted.

52. The letter, dated July 15, appeared on July 20, 1846, and is quoted by Oliphant et al., Simms's Letters, II, 174 n. 145.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 224:]

53. Evening Mirror, May 26, 1846, and the Knickerbocker, XXVII (May, 1846), 461.

54. Alleged by English in the Independent, XLVIII (Oct. 15, 1896), 2.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 225:]

55. Poe evidently wrote various letters, including ones to Joseph M. Field, editor of the St. Louis Reveillé, dated June 15, 1846 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 318-320) and to Simms (letter is lost), asking that this article be condemned and that the impression of his appearance be corrected. Simms sent a letter to the Southern Patriot in compliance with the request (see n. 52 of this chapter).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 226:]

56. Godey's Lady's Book, XXXII, 288.

57. Ibid., XXXIII, 144.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 227:]

58. Poe admitted to having patronized English, but “I solemnly say that in no paper of mine did there ever appear one word about this gentleman — unless of the broadest and most unmistakable irony — that was not printed from the MS of the gentleman himself” (Philadelphia Spirit of the Times, July 10, 1846). Carl Schreiber in “A Close-Up of Poe,” Saturday Review of Literature, III (Oct. 9, 1926), 166, says of this statement: “This is the whole truth. I have carefully followed Poe's criticisms of The Aristidean [the monthly that English edited] from their beginning. These reviews Poe wrote tongue in cheek, keeping, however, always within a safe limit.”

59. Fuller asserted in the Evening Mirror, Feb. 18, 1847: “We were assured that it [“Mr. English's Reply to Mr. Poe”] was to be published in every newspaper in the city on the day that it appeared in the Mirror.” English's reply was also reprinted in the Weekly Mirror, IV (June 27, 1846), 186.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 228:]

60. According to English's deposition, as reported in the New York Tribune, Feb. 18, 1847, Mr. Poe solicited of him the loan of $30 to get the Broadway Journal in his own hands, and promising to get Mr. E. a share of the profits; that Mr. E. lent him the money, taking his note, but Mr. P. never afterward offered to transfer an interest in the Journal, and deponent understood that the paper had not yielded any profits.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 229:]

61. Independent, XLVIII (Oct. 15, 1896), 2.

62. Letter dated July 24, 1846 (quoted by Bayless, Griswold, p. 143). In his Memoir in The Literati, p. xxiii, Griswold repeated his indignation at English's card in almost the same terms and added that “every one acquainted with the parties” knew that Poe's sketch of English “was entirely false in what purported to be its facts.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 230:]

63. According to an explanation in the Philadelphia Public Ledger of July 4, 1843, of what constituted culpability for libel. See William Henry Gravely, Jr., “An Incipient Libel Suit Involving Poe,” Modern Language Notes, LX (May, 1945), 308-311.

64. Letter dated July 16, 1846 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 323-324).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 231:]

65. Oliphant et al., Simms's Letters, II, 176.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 231, running to the bottom of page 232:]

66. In a letter dated Jan. 4, 1848, almost a year after Virginia's death, Poe explained this passage in answer to George W. Eveleth's inquiry. He said that the evil responsible for his irregularities was the fact that his beloved wife continually [page 232:] ruptured a blood-vessel, and that, with each rupture, he experienced “all the agonies of her death.” He became insane, he said, with protracted intervals of “horrible sanity”; that during such seizures he drank, he did not know with what frequency or in what quantity; his enemies, he said, “referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.” He had all but abandoned hope of a permanent cure for himself when he “found one in the death of my wife. This I can & do endure as becomes a man — it was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope & despair which I could not longer have endured without the total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I received a new but — oh God! how melancholy an existence” (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 356). While this explanation would account for the “irregularities,” it would hardly explain the recovery mentioned in his reply to English, for Virginia was still alive, though dying, when he wrote that reply.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 232:]

67. According to the evidence presented by Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1934), p. 520, Poe was guilty as charged in failing to meet his obligation at New York University.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 232, running to the bottom of page 233:]

68. The rumor that Poe had committed forgery had originated from an unnamed source, and the rumor had actually been repeated to Mrs. Osgood by an Edward J. Thomas, the “merchant of this city” to whom English alluded and whose letter Poe quoted to disprove the rumor. Mrs. Osgood, in turn, conveyed the report to Poe. For the sake of delicacy, Mrs. Osgood's name was left unmentioned by English, Thomas, Poe, and by the court. Poe, sometime before July 5, 1845, wrote to Thomas to ask him whether he had originated the allegation. [page 233:] Thomas proceeded to investigate the rumor and found that “it undoubtedly arose from the misunderstanding of some word used” — a fact he acknowledged in a letter dated July 5, 1845.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 234:]

69. For many details of this suit, I am indebted to two articles by Francis B. Dedmond, “The War of the Literati: Documents of the Legal Phase,” Notes and Queries, CXCVIII (July, 1953), 303-308, and “Poe's Libel Suit Against T. D. English,” Boston Public Library Quarterly, V (Jan., 1953), 31-37.

70. Mrs. Ellet wrote Griswold's third wife in 1853 that she had not written the alleged letters to Poe and that she “possessed written evidence of the falsehood of such an assertion, in Mr. Poe's retraction of and apology for a slander of the kind once uttered by him, as he alleged, in a fit of lunacy” (Bayless, Griswold, pp. 278-280 n. 19).

71. Letter dated Dec. 30, 1846 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 338-339). Griswold, in his Memoir in The Literati, p. xxv, asserted with his gift for distortion that this letter was “written for effect. ... There was no literary or personal abuse of him in the journals. ... ”

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72. Oliphant et al., Simms's Letters, II, 163 and 174 n. 145.

73. Quoted by George W. Eveleth without date in his letter to Poe dated Jan. 19, 1847. See Thomas O. Mabbott, ed., The Letters from George W. Eveleth to Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1922), p. 9.

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74. New York Home Journal, Dec. 26, 1846.

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75. See n. 71 of this chapter.

76. As reported by the New York Tribune and Evening Mirror on Feb. 18, 1847.

77. Leonard B. Hurley was the first to make this discovery. This quotation and the summary that follows are taken from his article, “A New Note in the War of the Literati,” American Literature, VII (Jan., 1936), 376-394. The passages pertinent to Poe appeared irregularly from Sept. 5 to Nov. 7, 1846, when the serial concluded. Parts of the serial also appeared in the Evening Mirror from Sept. 9 to Oct. 31, 1846. Despite the show of candor in his series, “Reminiscences of Poe,” English made no mention of this satire or his subsequent outright smears of Poe in the John-Donkey.

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78. Literary World, I (June 5, 1847), 423. Duyckinck was no longer editor of the magazine at this time; Charles Fenno Hoffman, Griswold's friend, had taken over that position.

79. These facts are reported by the Tribune, Feb. 18, 1847. Hunt edited and owned the Merchant's Magazine, and Poe, when he discussed him in the Literati papers, remarked that he “is a true friend, and the enemy of no man. His heart is full of the warmest sympathies and charities. No one in New York is more universally popular.” Mordecai Manuel Noah was prominent in law, politics, drama, and journalism. His most recent journalistic venture had been editing the Sunday Times and Messenger, in which, on Oct. 26, 1845, he had defended Poe against attack during the Boston Lyceum affair.

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80. On Oct. 24, 1845, Greeley had signed a sixty-day promissory note made out to Poe to the value of $50, which, endorsed by Poe, was given to John Bisco on the same day as a down payment for purchase of the Broadway Journal. Greeley never collected the loan, and after Poe's death he remarked that he had an autograph of Poe which he was prepared to part with for far less than the amount it cost him (Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, New York, 1868, pp. 196-197).

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81. Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 344-345.

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82. I (Jan. I, 1848), 3. For similar smears in the John-Donkey, see Feb. 5, p. 96; Feb. 32, pp. 99-100 Feb. 26, p. 140; March 4, p. 155; March 18, p. 182 April 15, p. 245; and June 3, pp. 364-365.

83. For details see Briggs's letters to James Russell Lowell in Woodberry's two-volume life of Poe, II, passim, and in Quinn's Poe, passim.

84. As quoted by Miller, The Raven and the Whale, p. 177. Miller states that the serial began in the Weekly Mirror on Nov. 14, 1846 (which would be the week after English's 1844 was concluded), and “proved so popular that it could also be started in the Evening Mirror on January 6, 1847.”

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85. This serial was subsequently published in two volumes, the first volume appearing in 1847 and the second in 1850. The quotation here is from the book. This passage is to be found in the first volume, pp. 157 ff.

86. Holden's Dollar Magazine, III (Jan., 1849), 22.

87. Ibid., IV (Dec., 1849), 764-765.

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88. Independent, Dec. 13, 1877, quoted by Woodberry, Poe, II, 426. In various places, including the Dictionary of American Biography, it is said that Briggs wrote a sketch of Poe for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Careful search has failed to uncover the article, and the records of EB do not show that Briggs ever wrote about Poe for that work, either under his own name or that of Harry Franco.

89. Bayless, Griswold, pp. 125, 126, 253.

90. Memoir in The Literati, pp. xxiii-xxiv. From Mrs. Ellet's letter to Mrs. Griswold (cited in n. 70 of this chapter) written some three years after the publication of this Memoir, it appears that Griswold knew the facts in the case and was guilty of deliberate distortion. Mrs. Ellet in that letter accused Griswold of having told several persons that she had written letters to Poe.

91. Knickerbocker, XXXVI (Oct., 1850), 371.

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92. In 1839, for instance, James E. Heath wrote to Poe: “In the department of criticism ... I know few men who can claim to be your superior in this country. Your dissecting knife, if vigorously employed, would serve to rid us of much of that silly trash ... with which puerile and conceited authors, and gain-seeking booksellers are continually poisoning our intellectual food” (quoted by Harrison, Poe's Works, VIII, xi). And after Poe's death, a writer in the Democratic Review (XXIII, Feb., 1851, 164) remarked: “He determined the profession should not degenerate in his hands, and mapped out in his own mind a course of earnestness and a critical standard, which he followed with design and defended with ability.”

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93. In an undated letter to Abraham Hart postmarked Oct. 15, 1847 (quoted by Bayless, Griswold, p. 133).