Text: William Whipple, “Chapter IV,” A Study of Edgar Allan Poe's Satiric Patterns Story, dissertation, 1951, pp. 119-149 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 119:]

Edgar Allan Poe did not strictly satirize New England writers. What he satirized was a literary race of people whom he called “Frogpondians.” Therefore, to understand the satire it is necessary to know who these people were whom Poe so classified, for the Frogpondians were not strictly a geographically-homogeneous group, although as a rule they lived in or near Boston. Some, like Rufus Griswold and Cornelius, were not even New Englanders, but were Frogpondians by association. Nor were the Frogpondians limited to editors or writers. Some were ministers, some were hears, sui some were alienated women who had once been attracted to Poe. But whatever their differences, to Poe, at least, they had this in common — they were in opposition to Poe and they were sure that Boston was the intellectual center of the United States. Included among the Frogpondians were such eminent people as Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Dr. Channing, William Ellery Channing, Lowell, Longfellow, R. H. Dana, Sr., Christopher P. Cranch, Cornelius Mathews, Edwin P. Whipple, and innumerable others who had either incurred Poe's wrath [page 120:] or who were unsympathetic to his views.

Probably at no single time, unless it was in 1849, was Poe ever down on all these men at once. But, as we shall show, the group as a whole was in an almost constant state of disrepute with him. Nevertheless, Poe had not always been antagonistic to Boston and all it stood for, In the summer of 1827 he published his first book under the title, “Tamerlane and Other Poems, by a Bostonian,” seeking to identify himself with the city of his birth and temporary residence.(1) The fact that the book created no big stir, either in Boston or elsewhere, and that the New Englanders always refused to consider Poe as one of them, certainly furnished an initial and lasting emotional basis for an antagonism which Poe always attributed to differences in point of view, but which his own remarks repeatedly manifest to have been based in a feeling of being outside a charmed circles.(2)

Poe was frequently a visitor in Boston although he never made his home there.(3) He corresponded with many of the people he later attacked and he even performed on the lyceum stage to the mixed pleasure of his Boston [page 121:] audiences.(1) Still, this social and business intercourse with the Bostonians did not stay his ever-mounting bitterness toward them. Poe found the Frogpondians exponents of many ideas to which he was antipathetic. The New Englanders were in many ways tied to a European culture from which Poe felt America should tear herself. For instance, Longfellow studied at the Göttingen University, in Germany; Emerson visited extensively in England, meeting such men as Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and James Stuart Mill. The young Boston publisher, James T. Fields, corresponded regularly with English writers and was instrumental in persuading Charles Dickens to visit here. It was the New Englanders who joined to give Fourierism its most successful trial in America. And above all, for Poe, there was the fact that in New England transcendentalism flourished. Although Poe's concept of transcendentalism is never too clearly understood or presented, he seemed to feel that the Transcendentalists received, through Intuition, esoteric truths, and that they loved mysticism for mysticism's sake. Poe believed in intuitively divined truth but the truths he sought were pragmatic rather than spiritual.

Poe discovered, aside from these ideological [page 122:] differences, that he was constantly being obstructed by these New Englanders — in his personal life, in his securing acceptance of his creative work and his criticisms, and economically. Poe lived in an age when the New Englanders dominated American letters to an extent unique in American literary history. Even after his most successful poem, “The Raven,” in 1845, Poe was still never able to equal the popularity of Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Emerson.

Nevertheless, Poe's first satiric prodding of the Transcendentalists was in no sense bitter. In the November issue, 1838, of American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts, Poe published “Psyche Zenobia” and “The Scythe of Time.”(1) These two companion stories were designed primarily as satires of the type of story carried by Blackwood's magazine, as we have discussed earlier; yet there is a sub-theme which is clearly making satiric gibes at the Transcendentalists, and at Margaret Fuller in particular. There is seemingly no reason for Poe's joining this subtheme to the original satiric pattern for it is hardly organically related. Yet it was characteristic of Poe to couple uncongenial themes in his satiric tales. We are led to believe from this, that Poe did not expand his desire for unity of effect in the tale to a desire for unity of [page 123:] satiric effect in his satire. For an example of Poe's fusing of these two themes, glance at Mr. Blackwood's discussion of the “transcendental tone” as one of those acceptable for Blackwood's magazine.

In brief, then, the transcendental tone is made up of quoting Channing and Emerson, of reading the Dial, of taking a simple idea and implying that it is profound in its implications, and by digging beneath superficialities for the very choice roots of truth.

Zenobia took this advice, as she took every bit of advice Mr. Blackwood gave her, and utilized it in her own story, “The Scythe of Time.” Zenobia has just mounted the [page 124:] long stairway to the steeple of the Cathedral. She is tired but not so tired as to forget to use the “transcendental tone” when her dog, Diana, smells a rat. At a moment of fatigue, when anyone else would have said to hell with rats, Zenobia, under Poe's guiding hand, becomes transcendental.

. . . One step! One little, little step! Upon one such little step in the great staircase of human 1ife how vast a sum of human happiness or misery often depends! I thought of myself, then of Pompey, and then of the mysterious and inexplicable destiny which surrounds us. I thought of Pompey! — alas, I thought of love! I thought of the many false steps which have been taken and may be taken again.(1)

These two passages point up Poe's satire of the “transcendental tone.” The dog smelling a rat becomes an incident of a “momentous nature in a moral, and also in a metaphysical point of view,” Poe's feeling that the [page 125:] Transcendentalists approached a simple truth obliquely is burlesqued by Zenobia's saying, “It appeared to me- indeed I was quite confident of the fact — I could not be mistaken — no!” before she could bring herself to say that her dog smelled a rate. And finally, Zenobia's philosophizing on “the great staircase of human life” is an allusion to the conception Poe had that the Transcendentalists felt every inconsequential fact of life had some inner meaning behind it, some philosophical point of departure.

Psyche Zenobia, as Mr. McNeal has pointed out, is a satiric representation of Margaret Fuller.(1) Mr. McNeal draws these comparisons: Zenobia prides herself on being a queen; Margaret Fuller's regal bearing had excited comment before 1838. Zenobia is the secretary of the Pretty Blue Batch; Miss Fuller was a “blue stocking.” Zenobia is associated with the Transcendentalists. Margaret Fuller was an acknowledged member of the transcendental group and one of the editors of the Dial. Zenobia is learned, having been taught, among other things, Greek and metaphysics. Miss Fuller had an excellent education in the classics, philosophy, German and Italian literature. Zenobia loves to wear bright clothes. Margaret Fuller was sometimes called the “gorgeous pedant” [page 126:] because she dressed sumptuously while conducting her “conversations” in Boston.(1)

Mr. McNeal suggests too that Dr. Moneypenny, or Dr. M. as he is sometimes called, might be a jab at Emerson (‘Merson) because of his closeness to Zenobia and because of his interest in the world of finance. The parallels in this likeness are too few and too inconclusive for us to accept it as more than an hypothesis.(2) Dr. Moneypenny was Zenobia's friend and advisor. Poe treats him the least satirically of any of the characters in the story, for it is Dr. Moneypenny who recognized Zenobia's friends as a “pretty blue batch,” and who calls the Blackwood stories “bizarreries” instead of intensities. Furthermore, we must admit that Mr. McNeal has strayed too far afield when he identifies Dr. Ollapod with Bronson Alcott.(3) For Ollapod, as we have shown earlier, in our section on Poe satire of the New York literati, was the gentle poet~editor, Willis Gaylord Clark, who contributed to the Knickerbocker magazine under the name Ollapod.

However, as important as this second level of [page 127:] satire is, i.e., the satire on Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalists, we must not lose sight of the primary purpose of the tale — a satire on Blackwood stories.

In September, 1841, Poe published another satiric tale on the Transcendentalists; but this time it is evident that the Transcendentalists are the secondary objects of the satire.(1) It is difficult to reconstruct from Poe's letters and from his writing at this time the exact pattern of his thought. His letters are few and usually written to members of his family, like Mrs. Clemm, who could not be expected to draw from Poe a discussion of his literary : opinions, or of what he was reading, or of his attitude toward the intellectual forces around him.

“Never Bet the Devil Your Head” is the story of a boy, Toby Dammit, who seemed born to evil; who refused to sign the temperance pledge at the age of eight months; and who acquired the habit of betting the Devil his head at every chance at a wager. One day, while out on a stroll, Toby came to a stile and offered to bet the Devil his head that he could jump over it. The Devil accepted; and, when Toby made the leap, caught Toby's head as it was knocked off by an iron beam Toby had failed to see.

This is the plot upon which Poe draped his satire. The tale, as its title would indicate, is a burlesque, [page 128:] first, of the moral tale and, second, of the Transcendentalists. The satire of the moral tale is put so broadly that one is apt to accept its existence and forget it; while the satire of the Transcendentalists, coming at us in short electric charges, excites our risibility and proves the more effective.

There is no clue to Poe's initial stimulus for writing the story, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” But it is evident, after surveying the current literature, what the type of thinking was that Poe had in mind. A representative example would be the oration delivered by Orestes A. Brownson before the United Brothers Society of Brown University, on September 3, 1839, at Providence, Rhode Island; an oration in which Brownson discussed the aims of literature.

It was this insistence on a moral in literature, or on “didacticism” as Poe referred to it in his criticism, that [page 129:] he was satirizing in the story, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.”

Most of Poe's satires have lost, along with their frame of reference, the appeal which Poe obviously intended them to have. We still catch glimpses of “irrepressible merriment” in the satire, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” It would be laboring the obvious to set out to show that this piece is a satire of transcendentalism. Still, an analysis of the satire will furnish us with the characteristics of transcendentalism that Poe finds worthy of satirizing. We have, of course, as in the satire, “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” the satirizing of the Dial, the magazine edited by Margaret Fuller. There is the reference to the “North American Quarterly Humdrum” by which Poe obviously meant the North American Review, a quarterly to which he was in opposition.(1) Poe even burlesques the immediate genealogy of transcendentalism in his passage,

and again,

All through the story is the constant harking back to the Transcendentalists which serves to drive home the point of the satire, The concluding paragraph will serve to illustrate this.

In concluding, it is interesting to note that Poe, in a letter to Joseph Evans Snodgrass, on September 19, 1841, had this to say about his satire: [page 131:]

In spite of what Poe says, the tale seems particularly pointed in its satire; although, as the tales frequently did, it contained more than one satiric object and many incidental satiric allusions. We cannot always trust Poe's letters as an interpretation of what he planned to do in a story, for he: is influenced, often, by the man to whom he is writing. Still, in this case, the extravaganza corroborates his letter to Mr. Snodgrass, for it is without the specific undertone of animosity toward an individual, which is felt in many of his satires.

The antagonism shown by Poe toward the Frogpondians gradually increased from September, 1841, until his death in 1849. If one were to chart this feeling of animosity one would find it reached its highest points in 1845 and in 1849, But the antagonism was a prominent part of Poe's emotional disturbances during each of the intervening years. It is at this point that we ask ourselves, if Poe's reaction to the Transcendentalists reached its most violent phase in 1845 and 1849, why was he stimulated to satirize the Frogpondians in 1849 but not in 1845? We [page 132:] would like to answer that question and, as & preliminary to that answer, establish the fact that “Xing a Paragrab”“ was intended as a satire on the Frogpondians.

As early as January, 1842, Poe, in his article “Autography” appearing in the Southern Literary Messenger, set down his objections to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This same month Poe suggested to Cornelius Mathews that, since the word “criticism” had specific meaning to most people, Mathews might do well to select another word to describe his book reviewing.

This was to be the pattern for Poe's criticism through the following months and, indeed, years. In February, 1842, [page 133:] Poe published a satiric criticism of Cornelius Mathews's poetry.(1) On February 3, 1842, Poe wrote to F. W. Thomas that he could not bring himself to like Park Benjamin, a transplanted Bostonian, because he was “too thorough-souled a timeserver,”“ and that he would not again repeat the favorable criticism he had given of Park Benjamin in the “Autography.”(2) In April he criticized Longfellow for Ss didacticism even as he admitted Longfellow's genius.(3) In June, in reviewing Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America, Poe objects that undue favoritism has been shown New England writers.(4) A reverberation of this review is sounded in a letter from Poe to a Southern correspondent in which Poe writes that he intends, in a magazine he is projecting, to “make war to the knife against the New England assumption of ‘all the decency and all the talent’ which has been so disgustingly manifested in the Rev, Rufus W. Griswold's ‘Poets and Poetry of America.”(5) An even more violent criticism was Poe's discussion of William Ellery Channing under the title, “Our Amateur Poets: No 3” which appeared in Graham's Magazine in August, 1843. He [page 134:] accused Channing of adopting Carlyle's obscurity and of living in the reflection of an eminent name, that of his uncle, Willlam Ellery Channing, the Unitarian clergyman.

This is abusive criticism but apparently Poe found . in Channing one of the literati he could not endure. Poe repeatedly ridiculed Channing but never praised him. What a contrast between this review and the review of Lowell's Poems in March, 1844, where, after the highest of praise for his poetic ability, Poe 1ightly rebukes him for being “seduced” into didacticism.(2)

To us, now, the lines marking Poe's estrangement [page 135:] from the Frogpondians seem sharp and clear; yet, on July 10, 1844, Poe corrected an identical impression held by Dr. Thomas H. Chivers.

Whatever the state of the cold war in July, 1844, by the next year the battle between Poe and the Bostonians was at white heat. There was nothing casual about Poe's reply to the Outis letter, Poe had been occasionally scoring Longfellow for what Poe called his plagiarisms, and a reader, Outis, wrote to Poe's paper, pointing out that a similar charge could be made against himself, The war was on. The main body of Poe's criticism of Longfellow was published in the Broadway Journal in successive issues: the first reply appearing on March 8 and the last article appearing on April 5.(2) These criticisms lost Poe many admirers but he was not to be deterred. To one critic, Mr. J. Hunt, Jr., Poe explained that his criticisms were inspired partly by the spleen loosed on him, partly because he felt a principle a involved, and partly because he felt the subject would gain the public's interest. The postscript to this letter shows one of the contributing causes for Poe's feeling of harrassment. [page 136:]

Simultaneously with the Outis papers Poe reviewed Park Benjamin's poem, “Infatuation.” This gave Poe an excuse for discussing America's contribution to satire and also permitted him to taunt William Ellery Channing, a poet he seems never to have liked, with being an unconscious satirist because his writings cannot be under stood any other way. April saw the publication of “Some Words with a Mummy,” a satire on the concept of progress. The Mummy's interrogators — one of whom is Silk Buckingham, a writer of travel literature and formerly an editor in Boston — are disconcerted by the Mummy's cogent reasoning and seek for safer ground in metaphysics.

But the Mummy counters this when he tells them that they had tried the same thing but found that Progress never progresses.

Fourierism, like Carlylism, was one of the elements of Frogpondianism, in Poe's opinion. During the months of May and June Poe not only attacked this evil but also ridiculed the Transcendentalists’ idea of taste. The Fourierists were believers in everything old whose only bond was credulity.(1) Also, says Poe, “I have no doubt that the Fourierists honestly fancy ‘a nasty poet fit for nothing’ to be the true translation of ‘poeta nascitur, non fit,’”(2) We see how this works into the pattern of Poe's thought by recalling that Brook Farm, from 1841 to 1847, was the workshop of Fourierism in America.(3) So it isn’t surprising to find, in the same issue of Graham's Magazine, a jab at the friends of Emerson.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to leave the impression that this literary warfare was one-sided. Poe received [page 138:] as good as he gave, Charles A. Dana reviewed Poe's Tales for The Harbinger — a magazine which partially superseded the Dial as a literary mouthpiece for the Transcendentalists — on July 12, 1845, and took evident pleasure in wrenching phrases from their context to give a distorted impression of the Gothic element of Poe's writing.

In August Poe returned to his criticism of Longfellow's imitations.(2) In November he reprinted his review of Cornelius Ma thews's poem, “Wakondah.”(3)

Lest we should be amazed at Edgar Allen [[Allan]] Poe's bravado in accepting an invitation to lecture before a Boston audience, after so severely criticizing the principal literati, we need only to remind ourselves that Poe was clearly eager to be accepted by these Bostonians. He decided to read “Al Aaraaf” since he could not, like Holmes, write occasional poetry.[[(4)]] The poem met with a mixed reception. Miss Walters, [page 139:] of the Boston Transcript, however, was stingingly critical of the performance.(1) Poe tried to carry off his reply with a patronizing air but his bitterness gleams through, for Poe had been hurt as Boston was always to be able to hurt him.

Poe took refuge in claiming that the reading was a hoax in which he, instead of trying to please those who were prejudiced against him, read a juvenile poem and completely gulled the Bostonians

That is to say they may get 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 did not have the final word on the affair, but he wisely turned to other things. Nevertheless, the Rubicon had been crossed. The chances that Poe and the New Englanders would ever agree to a cease-fire order were nil, Margaret Puller, in November, wrote that “The Raven” was written chiefly to show the writer's skill.(2) John S. Dwight said that Poe's poems lacked humanity and warmth.(3)

Poe's anger toward the Bostonians abated somewhat in 1846. Perhaps he realized that he had gone too far. More likely it was only that his attention was deflected to enemies nearer home by the toasting that the Knickerbocker clique was giving him in its pages. At any rate, Poe dealt more gently with the men from Frogpondia; but he didn’t forget them. In March, 1846, Poe agaln criticized Carlyle for his euphuisms and for his rant and cant, adding, sarcastically, that Carlyle had performed one important service.

Still, a mellowing of tone was there. A letter to Evert A. Duyckinck indicates that Poe continued to consider Cornelius Mathews his friend.(2) Poe unbent enough to find Reverend C., P. Cranch the “least intolerable of the Transcendentalists; although he had to add that he regretted Cranch's innoculation by the “word-compounders and quibble concocters of Frogpondia,” with a preference for fancy over imagination.(3) Poe also praised Margaret Fuller, although he found her attempts at poetry were tainted with the affectation of the Transcendentalists.(4) Emerson was too much an imitator of Carlyle.(5) At the same time Poe admitted that his prejudices sometimes led him to criticize New Englanders unfairly.(6)

1847 brought little fuel to rekindle the blaze of Poe's wrath toward New Englanders. He did rewrite “The Rationale of Verse” during this year, and maybe the [page 142:] verbal lashing he gave the Bostonians for their misconception of the principles of verse, in this article, eased his sense of irritation. This cricisism includes praise for Christopher Pearse Cranch, a New England poet, while it roundly scores Longfellow, Felton, and the “Frogpond Professors collectively.”(1) George H. Colton refused to publish “The Rationale of Verse” in the American Review and the article did not appear until the October and November issues, in 1848, of the Southern Literary Messenger.(2)

By January 4, 1848, Poe had altered his warm appraisal of Miss Fuller given in the “Literati” papers — perhaps because of her participation in the attempt to recover Miss Osgood's letters from him. He wrote to a friend that Miss Fuller had no particular critical powers but that she belonged to the “Göthean asthetic, euloglistic” school of criticism. Finally, he summed up his opinion, “In a word, she is an ill-tempered and very inconsistent old maid-avoid her.”(3)

February 3, 1848, Poe read “Eureka” as a lecture.(4) “Eureka” satirized, but only incidentally, Fourierism, Transcendentalism, and Kant. By now we recognize that [page 143:] in Poe's mind this was but another way to ridicule the New Englanders since all three of these were channeled to America through the Bostonians.

Poe felt the pressure of New England upon him even in affairs of the heart. On October 18, 1848, he explained in a letter to Sarah H. Whitman that Miss Lynch, Miss Fuller, Miss Blackwell, and Mrs. Ellet weren’t his friends, and enlarged the group by saying.

If we are to believe Foe's letters to both Sarah H, Whiteman and to Annie L. Richmond — letters months apart — Mrs. Ellet was active in her attempts to influence people against Poe.(2)

We have traced (perhaps in too much detail) Poe's alienation from the literary New England group. That his bitterness and resentment had deepened over the years is shown by the fact that in 1845 his criticism of the New Englanders is largely restricted to the criticisms and reviews which he published. However, by 1848 and 1849, this resentment is flowing over into his letters with increasing regularity. It is evident that, by the beginning [page 144:] of 1849, Poe's conflict with the Frogpondians had become a personal as well as a literary war, This is not surprising when we review what had been happening. For one thing, Poe's relations with Lowell, his closest New England friend, were strained as a result of Lowell's criticism of Poe in the “Fable for Critics.” Poe's courting of Sarah Whitman was being made awkward because of the gossip of Mrs. Ellet, a New York poetess who published her poems in the North American Review. Even Poe's lectures were being received critically by the New England press; so it is small wonder that Poe's anger with the Frogpondians took on a more highly personal coloring. A study of his letters end criticisms in 1849 sets the final groundwork for an understanding of his satire,”Xing a Paragrab.”

A letter to FP. W. Thomas, dated February 14, 1849, seems to indicate that Poe was considering writing another satire on the Bostonians.

I wish you would come down on the Frogpondians,. They are getting worse and worse, and pretend not to be aware that there are any literary people out of Boston. The worst and most disgusting part of the matter is, that the Bostonians are really, as a race, far interior in point of anything beyond mere talent, to another set upon the continent of N.A. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive. I always get into a passion when I think about it. It would be the easiest thing in the world to use them up en masse. One really well-written satire would accomplish the business: — [page 145:] but it must not be such a dish of skimmed milk and water as Lowell's [Fable for Critics) . . . Miss Fuller, that detestable old me id — told him, once, that he was “so wretched a poet as to be disgusting even to his best friends.” This set him off at a tangent and he has never been quite right since: — so he took to writing satire against mankind in general, with Margaret Fuller and her protege, Cornelius Mathews, in particular. . . — Lowell is a ranting abolitionist and deserves a good using up. It is a pity he is a poet.(1)

This letter is of the utmost importance in furnishing us with an insight into the satire “Xing a Paragrab”as will be seen when we come to discussing it.

In March Poe published a review of Lowell's “A Fable for Critics in the Southern Literary Messenger.(2) Not only does this review give Poe's most complete theory as to what is required in satire but it also includes comments on Margaret Fuller and her protégés, We E. Channing and Cornelius Mathews. Poe called Miss Fuller's “Essay on American Literature” “a silly and conceited piece of transcendentalism.”(3) And of her protégés he says,

In April, one month before Poe's satire was published, he was irritated by a review of his friend, Bayard Taylor's, poems, for he had this to say in his “Marginalia”:

Since this is followed by a complaint concerning the domination of the Review over American literary reputations, it seems certain that the poet-critic of whom Poe wrote was one of the Boston circle. Particularly does this seem so when we find Poe offering, in the same issue, to the North American Review clique a motto from Sterne's “Letter from France”:

The story, “Xing a Paragrab,’ was published in The Flag of Our Union, on May 12, 1849.(1) Briefly the plot is this: An editor moves into a large city where another editor already has a newspaper. There is the inevitable battle of wards which is ended by the happenstance that the rival newspaper has stolen all the o's from the box of type so that the copy boy is forced to use x's in place of o's. The result is gibberish and the new editor leaves town. The point of the tale, as we have shown in a preceding chapter, is its satirization of editorial clashes.

When we analyze the story we find clues which allow us to establish this as a deliberate satire of New Englanders. First, both the editors are Frogpondians, the one referred to as a Frogpondian, the other from Concord.(2) Although we can’t be certain, it is probable that the city of Alexander-the-Great-o-nopolis was meant to be Boston since Poe refers to Boston as ‘the little Athens.’(3) Second, the introductory sentence is a close transcription from his letter to F. W. Thomas.

Third, the phrase, “So much for Buckingham!”(2) while it may be just an echo from Cibber's version of Richard II, may also have been intended to be an allusion to Joseph T. Buckingham, former editor of the New England Magazine, or to Silk Buckingham whom he had satirized in “Some Words with a Mu,,u”; although there is no clear indication of what the allusion means. Fourth, the remark, “Another said that, Bullet-head had shown much X-uberance of fancy,”(3) certainly recalls to us that Poe had written that the Frogpondians had innoculated C. P. Cranch with Imagination's half-sister, Fancy.

The whole idea of using X's in the burlesque, Killis Campbell thinks, may have stemmed from the skit, “Xtraordinary Play Upon Xes.”(4) While this may be possible, we have a nearer source in Poe's own pun on the use of X in calling Mathews “execrable” and Channing “X + 1 ecrable.” Also we have Poe's own use of the “O” when he said that Channing belonged to the Bobby Button school of poetry — and that [page 149:] Mr. Button's only poetic fragment was “O Piggy Wiggy,” with the “O” italicized. Consequently, it is possible to claim “Xing a Paragrab” as one of Poe's attempts to “use up” the Frogpondians by means of a satire. That the story is sometimes considered a “satiric trifle” is also explainable by the fact that, not being well versed in the literary innuendos-of the day, we easily pass over bits of satire that Poe evidently expected to bite deep.(1) This failure to recognize clearly the object of Poe's sarcasm accounts for the greater charm of “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” where the satire is easily understood, and for the customary habit of crossing off “Xing a Paragrab” as merely Poe trying to be funny.

Poe's satire of the Frogpondians, while not starting as early as his satire of the foreign literati, continued up to his death. Here, if anywhere, Poe had the emotional basis for hard-hitting satire; but, from reasons stemming partly from his theory of satire and partly from his failure to generalize his troubles into a higher form of satire than the obscure personal billingsgate into which these satires fall, Poe never attained a satiric tale powerful enough to live for the reader's interest in the satire. On the other hand, having committed the stories to satire, Poe failed to secure the compelling unity of effect which makes his Gothic tales retain a place in American literature.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 120:]

1 Quinn, Poe, p. 119.

2 Longfellow was to write after Poe's death, “The harshness of his criticisms, I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.” Ibid., p. 655.

3 Ibid., pp. 118-29, 489, 590-91, 613.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 121:]

1 Quinn, Poe, pp. 485-89. Poe corresponded with Rufus Griswold, James R. Lowell, Henry W. Longfellow, and with Joseph and Edwin Buckingham. See: Index of Ostrom, op. cit., II, 641-64.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 122:]

1 Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, II, 1076.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 123:]

1 Ibid., I, 237-38. Poe's reference to the “fat little man with a delusive show of Can” is taken from a poem of Channing's which Emerson quotes in his article, “New Poetry,” published in the Dial for October, 1840. Channings lines are,

Thou meetst a common men

With a delusive show of can.

See: Dial, I (October, 1840), 230.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 124:]

1 Ibid., pp. 243-44.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 125:]

1 At this time Margaret Fuller had done little writing, although she had edited the Dial for more than “a year, had contributed articles to it, and had conducted her “Conversations” in Boston — a sort of informal seminar.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 126:]

1 Thomas H. McNeal, “Poe's Zenobia: An Early Satire on Margaret Fuller,” Modern Language Quarterly, II (June, 1950), 205-16. See: Thomas W. Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1884), pp. 126-29.

2 McNeal, op. cit., pp. 205-16.

3 Ibid.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 127:]

1 Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, I, 365 ff.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 128:]

1 Henry F. Brownson, The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, XIX (Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1885), 37-38.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 129:]

1 Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, I, 365. Poe apparently included these two magazines in the tale because they best represent the two aspects of Frogpondianism which he found most galling: the Dial represented Transcendentalism in its purest literary state; the North American Review represented the literary oligarcy of New England, for the Review had a powerful influence in the judgment passed on current writers.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 130:]

1 Ibid., p. 367. Coleridge was not generally included in the group which was linked, in Poe's mind, with the spread of transcendental thinking. Poe's poetry and criticism owed much to Coleridge's influence and Poe rarely wrote adversely of him, See: Floyd Stovall, Studies in English, X (July, 1930), 70-127.

2 Ibid., p. 369.

3 Ibid., p. 372.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 131:]

1 Ostrom, op. cit., I, 183.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 132:]

1 Harrison, op. cit., XV, 260. Poe's comparing Emerson with Carlyle was not intended ln any sense as a compliment, for Poe never liked Carlyle: Dbelleving that Cerlyle's style was euphuistic and obscure. A few years after his “Autography” papers Poe summed up his private opinion of Carlyle thus, “We can only say he is an ass — !” Harrison, op. cit., XI, 176-77.

2 Quinn and O'Neill, op. cit., p. 933.

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

1 Harrison, op. cit., II, 25 ff.

2 Ostrom, op. cit., I, 193.

3 Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, II, 937.

4 Harrison, op. cit., II, 125.

5 Campbell, op. cit., p. 65.

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

1 Harrison, op. cit., XI, 174.

2 Ibid., pp. 243 ff.

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

1 Ostrom, op. cit., I, 259.

2 Harrison, op. cit., XII, 41 ff.

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

1 Ostrom, op. cit., I, 282 ff.

2 Quinn and O’Niell [[O'Neill]], Poems and Stories, II, 632-33. Perhaps Poe referred to “Prophecy-Transcendentalism-Progress,” Dial, V (July, 1841), 83-121. The text of the article is that Through intuition man is progressing, constantly, perpetually.

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

1 Harrison, op. cit. [[op. cit.]], XIV, 179-80. For a fuller discussion of Poe's attitude toward Fourier, see discussion of “Mellonta Tauta” in the chapter on the New York literati.

2 Ibid., p. 172.

3 Poe referred to Brook Farm, in 1845, as the “Snook Farm Phalanx.” Ibid., XIII, p. 32.

4 Ibid[[.]], XIV, 179.

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

1 Charles A. Dana, “Tales by Edgar A. Poe,” The Harbinger, I (July 12, 1845), 73.

2 Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, II, 953 ff.

3 Harrison, op. cit., XI, 25.

4 Quinn, Poe, pp. 485 ff.

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

1 Ibid., p. 179.

2 Harrison, op. cit., XIII, 11.

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

1 Ibid., p. 5 ff.

2 Campbell, op. cit., p. 42.

3 John S. Dwight, “The Raven and Other Poems,” The Harbinger, I (December 6, 1845), 410-11.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 141:]

1 Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, II, 1051. John Wilson was the celebrated English critic who wrote for Blackwood's under the name, Christopher North. Henry Norman Hudson was a Shakespearean scholar. His two volumes of Lectures on Shakespeare were published in 1848.

2 Ostrom, op. cit., II, 325.

3 Harrison, op. cit., XV, 69.

4 Ibid., pp. 73 ff.

5 Ibid., XVI, 122.

6 Ostrom, op. cit., II, 353. Poe is referring to Re. He Dana, Sr., in particulars

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

1 Quinn, Poe, p. 561. Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, II, 1019 ff.

2 Ibid.

3 Ostrom, op. cit., II, 355.

4 Quinn, Poe, p. 539.

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

1 Ostrom, op. cit., II, 394.

2 Ibid., pp. 407, 431.

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

1 Harrison, op. cit., XVII, 332-33.

2 Ibid., XIII, 165-75.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

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

1 Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, II, 1051.

2 Harrison, op. cit., XVI, 144-45. According to a letter to Annie Richmond, written some time between April 28 and May 23, Poe had had a “final” argument with someone he found oppressive and insolent. Who he was we don’t know but that he was a literary figure seems certain because of the context in which he is mentioned. See: Ostrom, op. cit., 437.

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

1 Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, II, 1084.

2 Ibid., p. 709.

3 Horace Gregory, “Within the Private View,” Partisan Review, X (May-June, 1943), 266. Killis Campbell believed the city to be New York.

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

1 Quinn and O'Neill, Poems and Stories, II, 1084.

2 Ibid., p. 709, William Shakespeare, The Tragical History of King Richard III (London: Wellington, Bettesworth, and Clay, 1834), Act IV, Scene 3, p. 69.

3 Ibid., p. 711

4. Campbell, op. cit., p. 167, “Xtraordinary Play Upon Xes”“ appeared in the New York Mirror, XVIII (September 12, 1840), 90. There also appeared a poem entitled “Does Your Mother Know You’re Out,” which probably accounts for Poe's incorporating this expression into one of the editorials.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 149:]

1 Quinn, Poe, p. 596.