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12. Christopher Pearse Cranch
Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) was born in Alexandria, District of Columbia (now Virginia). Both parents were New Englanders and his father was a United States Circuit Court judge. Cranch graduated from Columbia College in Washington, D. C., in 1831 and from the Harvard Divinity School in 1835. In the following four years he preached in the New England states [page 325:] and in Richmond, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville. He wrote for the Western Messenger, the Cincinnati organ of transcendentalism, and in New England in the early 1840's he became closely associated with the movement through his association with its leaders and his contributions to the Dial. In 1843 he married Elizabeth DeWindt, of Fishkill, New York, and moved to New York City.
By this time Cranch had virtually abandoned the ministry, and thereafter devoted himself to painting and literature. He spent three years (1846-1849) in Europe, writing, painting, and studying art, and for ten years (1853-1863) lived in Paris. Again in America, he lived in or near New York until 1873, when he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Cranch collected his verse in Poems (1844), The Bird and the Bell, with Other Poems (1875); and Ariel and Caliban, with Other Poems (1887). In 1872 he brought out a translation of the Aeneid. He wrote two popular stories for children, The Last of the Huggermuggers (1856) and Kobboltozo (1857), a sequel.(1)
“The works of Christopher Pease [sic] Cranch are slightly tinged with the spirit of mixed Puritanism, utilitarianism, and transcendentalism’, which seems to form the poetical atmosphere of Massachusetts — but dismissing this one sin, are among the [page 326:] truest of American poetry.” Writing thus in a “Marginalia” paper published, in the Democratic Review for July, 1846,(2) Poe sounded the chord that he struck more forcibly in the “Literati” sketch of Cranch, which appeared in Godey's for the same month.
Poe's prejudices against Bostonians and transcendentalists led him to attribute most of the weaknesses he saw in Cranch's poetry to the author's association with those groups.(3) Cranch's poetry lacks imagination, Poe wrote in the “Literati” sketch, because “the word-compounders and quibble concoctors of Frogpondium” had taught him to prefer fancy. “It is laughable,” he observed in commenting on one of Cranch's poems,” to see that the transcendentalist poets, if beguiled for a minute or two into respectable English and common sense, are always sure to remember their cue just as they get to the end of their song ....” But Poe regarded Cranch as “one of the least intolerable of the school of Boston transcendentalists” and complimented his poetry [page 327:] for its “unusual vivacity of fancy and. dexterity of expression.(4)
In the Democratic Review article Poe had praised Cranch's versification in terms which he repeated in part in “The Rationale of Verse,” which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in November, 1848.(5) In writing of Cranch for the Messenger Poe omitted reference to transcendentalism and termed Cranch one of “our finest poets.” When he revised the “Literati” sketch of Cranch for “Literary America,” Poe added some of the remarks on versification but otherwise made no significant changes.(6)
As Poe noted in the “Literati” sketch, Cranch had a studio “in one of the Gothic chambers of the University,” on Washington Square, near Poe's home on Amity Street. Available evidence, however, is insufficient to show a personal association between the two.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 325:]
1 Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch, Boston, 1917; Frederick U. Coburn's sketch in the Dictionary of American Biography; the Duyckincks’ Cyclopaedia (1880), II, 486; the National Cyclopaedia, VII, 140; and Appletons' Cyclopaedia.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 326:]
2 XIX, 32; not reprinted in Works.
3 When he wrote the “Literati” sketch of Cranch, Poe undoubtedly had not forgotten his most recent dispute with the “Frogpondians,” to use the term by which he referred to the inhabitants of Boston. In October, 1845, Poe had been harshly criticized following his reading of “Al Aaraaf” before a Boston audience which had expected to hear an original poem (Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 485-489). Replying in the Broadway Journal, Poe stated that 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.” (II, 262 [November 1, 1845]; Works, XIII, 11). Three weeks later he wrote in the Journal: “The Frogpondians may as well spare us their abuse The fact is, we despise and defy them (the transcendental vagabonds!) and they may all go to the devil together” (II, 311 [November 22, 1845]; Works, XIII, 9).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 327:]
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PNYL, 1954] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe and the New York Literati (Reece)