Text: Sidney P. Moss, “Introduction,” Poe's Major Crisis, 1970, pp. xv-xvii (This material is protected by copyright)

[page xv:]

The concatenation of events that thoroughly discredited Poe with his audience and that accounts for his being hooted and almost literally starved out of the literary profession was that which led to and followed his libel suit against the owners of the New York Mirror. Poe seemed headed for ruin in any case. He had damaged himself badly by his Boston Lyceum “hoax”; by what, given the conventions of the time, was considered his extraordinarily poor taste in quarreling publicly with a lady, Miss Cornelia Walter, editress of the Boston Transcript; by his wrangle with Longfellow and his circle, the “Five of Clubs”; by his continual slanging match with Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker magazine, and with members of the New York literary clique; by his abusive criticism of the Transcendentalists as well as the Boston coterie of the North American Review; and by the scandal arising from his involvement with Frances Osgood and Elizabeth Ellet.(1) But the events leading to and following his lawsuit proved the ordeal that finally ended his brilliant, if erratic and notorious, career and that shortened his life.

One wonders what Poe would have done differently if he had had the chance to relive his career. Given his character and sense of independence, he would, no doubt, have persisted in refusing to join the New York literary establishment, much as an alliance with that group would have ensured him material success and have added to his contemporary reputation as a poet and writer of fiction. Surely, however, knowing their disastrous consequences, he would have chosen to avoid certain actions or at least have modified them considerably. Given a second chance, he would not have accepted the invitation to speak at the Boston Lyceum. He would not, I also believe, have befriended the flirtatious Mrs. Osgood and would unquestionably have avoided the malicious Mrs. Ellet. Above all, he would not have written those lampoons that appeared in “The Literati of New York City,” especially the one of Thomas Dunn English which led to his libel suit, an action that, in turn, all but ended his career. [page xvi:] But second chances are given to no one, and the literary historian, while he may deplore them, can only reconstruct the circumstances and reenact the choices that led in this instance to a most unfortunate outcome for Poe, his enemies, and the literary world in general.

Since the causes and consequences of his libel suit constitute the major crisis in Poe's literary career, I have considered it important to collect the pertinent documents and present them here, wherever reasonable, in the order in which the events they disclose occurred. I was tempted for a time to preface these documents with an introduction that would put them all in focus and that would make the general assessment due them. Notwithstanding that I accomplished this task,(2) I have decided not to use that kind of introduction here on the grounds that it would deprive the reader of a measure of suspense as the documents and the events they disclose unfold before him, and would infringe upon his privilege of forming his own judgment. I have then, apart from the headnotes, which are designed to put each document in context and to explain whatever in the document requires explanation, allowed the record to speak for itself, a record that reveals the literary world in which Poe worked and the choices he made, and that shows as nothing else can how Poe was cannibalized by the enemies he helped to create.

One cautionary note needs to be added before we turn to the record itself. The image of Poe reflected in these documents should not be taken as the image of Poe that appears throughout his entire career. Such simplification would not be true of Wordsworth, Carlyle, or Whitman, and it is not true of Poe either. Though cruel and untrustworthy at times, Poe as a critic was principled at heart, as I have tried to show elsewhere, so much so that, without flagrant exaggeration, one could make a case for his being a martyr to the cause of the literary profession in America. And whatever reservations one may have about the man as a man, poet, critic, and writer of fiction — and I have my share of them — one must concede what is of ultimate importance, that Poe ranged himself on the side of the artist; that he urged support of worthy authors; that he called for a respectable criticism; that he exhorted publishers to exercise standards other than commercial ones; and that he struggled to provide an audience for deserving books. Though, despite his fifteen-year struggle made at great personal cost, he lost that battle, the loss was finally ours, for we [page xvii:] can see the shambles of that defeat everywhere about us, in literary cliquism and log-rolling, in literary commercialism, in irresponsible criticism, and, worst of all, in an audience whose taste has been all but irredeemably corrupted.

These documents then, which are at once concerned with literary history, with American journalism of the 1840s, and with biography, reflect only one image of Poe and that far from his best. As literary history, this study revives the personalities that figured so largely in the period and that made their impact upon Poe's life and career. As a study in journalism, it exposes the coteries that were formed haphazardly to defend or attack a man, and the defamatory techniques that editors so easily employed, devices to which Poe often lent himself by his weaknesses of character. As biography, it shows the kind of hack work, such as “The Literati of New York City,” that Poe cranked out to earn a livelihood, as well as the notoriety he courted and the persecution he had to cope with in consequence, if he was to survive in the journalistic and literary world that could not pay him enough for his poems and fiction.

In the words of a contemporary who was an authority in the matter, “Poe was sensitive to opinion. He sought, . . . as I often witnessed, with an intense eagerness the smallest paragraph in a newspaper touching himself or his writings.”(3) The paragraphs that Poe might not have found for himself, others probably found for him, for New York's editorial and publishing world, concentrated within eight short square blocks around City Hall, was then as provincial as a small town today. No doubt Poe did not see every document presented here, but there is little doubt that he saw many of them.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page xv:]

1. For a detailed discussion of these events, see Moss, Poe's Literary Battles. Full citations of this and other works pertinent to the libel suit appear in the Bibliography.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page xvi:]

2. Moss, “Poe, Hiram Fuller and the Duyckinck Circle.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page xvii:]

3. From a diary entry made on 1 November 1875 by Evert A. Duyckinck. The diary is in the Duyckinck Manuscript Collection in the New York Public Library.