Text: Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass, “[Comment on Poe's Lecture],” Baltimore Saturday Visiter (Baltimore, MD), February 2, 1844

Edgar A. Poe delivered a lecture in Odd-Fellows Hall, on Wednesday evening — theme “American poetry.” He was very entertaining, and enforced his views well — though to some of them we cannot assent. For instance — that the inculcation of truth is not the highest aim of poetry! He was witheringly severe upon Rufus W. Griswold, and declared it was a shame that he placed the name of N. C. Brooks in the “appendix” — and so it was a “shame” — but we think we should have prefered [[preferred]] silence on the topic, had we been placed among the ephemera of a volume large enough certainly to admit of putting all in the body of the work! But such alas, is often the fate of “undiscovered genius.”