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[page 4, column 2, continued:]
The Poe Revival.
There are two, men in the ranks of the dead immortals the merest mention of whose names will excite men to argument at any time, in place-Napoleon and Edgar A. Poe. When, by chance they are referred to by any person in a group of men all other business is laid on the table and argument begins.
Just at this time the magazines and newspapers are discussing Poe again — Poe and his biographer, Griswold. The subject is one of keen interest for even the ordinary reader. Anything which has the remotest connection with Edgar A. Poe interests everybody — from the high scholar to the old-field schoolmaster. And so the world is now talking “all at once,” on its favorite theme.
Eugene Field has a word to say for him in The Chicago Record, and ‘he makes some fine points in defense of America's greatest genius — who has been
“Defamed by every charlatan”
Since the day of his death. Referring to the manner in which Griswold vilified Mr. Field says:
As we recollect, Griswold was for a time literary critic for The New York Tribune. This position would give him an authority which, without the position, would never have been his. It is easy to understand the gravity of Poe's offense in presuming to write disparagingly of the literary style and. judgment and accomplishments of the consequential critic who fancied he could unmake poets as readily as he could invest with immortality the sentimental chambermaid who handled with equal facility a pen and a dustpan. But, after it all, is it not true that Griswold lives in the memory of humanity as the contemporary of Edgar Allan Poe, and as the one individual among all the acquaintances of Poe that was just coward and just knave enough to vilify the dead? History repeated itself; an ass achieved immortality by kicking the dead lion. Had Poe been of the same cloth as those others of the little literary group which swung between Richmond and New York, would he be known and read today? Would not the whole pack of Southern Literary Messenger and Graham's Magazine contributors be forgotten but for the transcendent, erratic, luminous genius of Poe one bright surviving sun of that period, by whose splendid light. It is to recall and review dead planets and extinct moons?
So it goes. But for Poe's genius the men who have traduced his memory would never have been heard of. Since his death, small men have accumulated fortunes by simply abusing him. It is said that he once gave the poet, R. A. Stoddard, a kick. Out of that kick Mr. Stoddard has netted thousands of dollars [column 3:] in long drawn magazine articles, which have appeared annually over his signature as regularly as do the measels.
Little men, with little minds, will continue to sun themselves in the transcendent light of Poe's genius as long as that genius blazes from continent to continent and that will be as long as literature lasts.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - AC, 1894] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - The Poe Revival (Anonymous, 1894)