Text: Sidney P. Moss, “Chapter 03,” Poe's Literary Battles, 1963, pp. 63-84 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 63, unnumbered:]

Poe's conduct in the Norman Leslie incident was high-principled and courageous, however arrogant and acidulous he was on occasion and whatever bid he was making for notoriety. He recognized the dangers of attacking men who, individually powerful, were made even more powerful by belonging to coteries. He certainly knew that Theodore S. Fay — a power in his own right — was a figurehead of the most formidable literary clique in America, and that to attack him was to confront the phalanx of a group that could destroy his burgeoning reputation in a matter of months. Not that the coterie was tightly organized. The membership was a shifting one; there were too many personal rivalries and affronts, real or imagined, for any group of writers to maintain perfect solidarity at all [page 64:] times. Despite this, however, the power a clique could and did wield when it banded together to defend an issue was enormous, as such men as James Fenimore Cooper and James Gordon Bennett discovered.(1)

If Poe had any doubt on this score, he had simply to recall the well-known case of James McHenry, which parallels the Norman Leslie affair at every turn and which even involved many of the men who attacked him.

James McHenry (1785-1845) was born in Ireland and came to the United States in 1817. Besides being a practicing physician, he wrote poetry, plays, and novels. He settled at length in Philadelphia, where in 1827 he served as critic for the American Quarterly Review, a magazine that came to thrive on provocative criticism, even as the Southern Literary Messenger thrived. under Poe's editorship. In 1828 McHenry became a naturalized citizen, and in 1842 was appointed to the consulate in Londonderry, Ireland.

Like Poe, McHenry had clashed with the New York clique. In an article called “American Lake Poetry” published anonymously in the American Quarterly Review in 1832,(2) McHenry called attention to the fact that American poets were imitating (imitation was a nasty accusation long before Poe took up the charge) the Lake poets, whose influence he considered baneful. Far from being condemned for such imitation, however, McHenry declared, these poets were receiving injudicious praise from “pretended friends and sciolous editors” — an [page 65:] “editorial trumpeting” that not only confirmed them in their imitativeness but induced other American poets to follow suit. He criticized these “good-natured editors” for lending their periodicals to this “immoderate trumpeting” from motives of “courtesy” either to the poets themselves or to their publishers. In addition to these “seducers of young poets,” McHenry asserted, “there are the hireling puffers, whose business is, for pay, to write commendatory notices and reviews of new books” for the publishers — ”easy-conscienced critics” whose purpose is to dupe the public into buying works of the “merest trash.”

Having pointed out his objections to the cliques and their tactics, McHenry criticized Nathaniel P. Willis and William Cullen Bryant — the first with savage dispraise and the other with faint praise, incidentally peppering James Gates Percival, another New York favorite, in the process.

This article, like Poe's review of Norman Leslie, precipitated violent editorial reaction, with such periodicals as the Baltimore Gazette, the National Gazette, the United States Gazette, the New York American, the Album, the New York Mirror, the New York Commercial Advertiser, the New England Review, the New England Magazine, and the New England American Monthly Review becoming embroiled. As with the Norman Leslie review, editors seemed to resent both the exposure of their system and the apparent high-handedness of the reviewer. The New York Commercial Advertiser, edited by Colonel Stone, observed that the American Quarterly Review “might have to cease publication because of the controversy.”(3)

McHenry became not only the target of magazine and newspaper editors who attempted to destroy him as a critic, even as Poe became during the Norman Leslie incident; he also became the subject of an anonymous satire, just as did Poe. In the same year that McHenry's article appeared, Harpers — the publishers of Norman Leslie and the rejecters of Poe's [page 66:] tales — published a two-volume collection of stories by writers who were members of the Knickerbocker group Catharine M. Sedgwick, James Kirke Paulding, William Cullen Bryant, William Leggett, and Robert C. Sands — called Tales of Glauber-Spa. One of the stories written by Sands, a native New Yorker and a member of the staff of Colonel Stone's Commercial Advertiser,(4) satirized Dr. McHenry under the sobriquet of Green-Bice, quite like the way Poe was satirized in the Mirror article under the name of Bulldog. Lest the reader fail to identify the original of Green-Bice, who is portrayed as a pretentious humbug, McHenry's own words, lifted from his “American Lake Poetry,” are echoed.(5) In similar fashion, the original for Bulldog was identified in the Mirror.

McHenry's controversy with the New York coterie continues to have its parallels with the Norman Leslie incident. The twin brothers Lewis and Willis Gaylord Clark, the latter of whom Poe engaged when defending himself from attack, had hitherto not joined the fray against McHenry, however much they wanted to exterminate him as a critic. Willis Clark, for his part, did not intend to waste his powder in sniping. Rather, he was carefully enlisting his allies so that he could blast McHenry once and for all out of the critical ranks.(6) Once Clark was ready, his brother Lewis identified the character of Green-Bice as McHenry and published in the same number of the Knickerbocker Willis Clark's anonymous fourteen-page [page 67:] blast at McHenry.(7) In that article, “American Poets and Their Critics,” Clark systematically reviled McHenry for his intermittent criticisms of such New York favorites as Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck, James Gates Percival, and William Cullen Bryant, and asserted that McHenry's own volume of poetry, which had recently been published, contained “more palpable plagiarisms [McHenry had charged Bryant and Willis only with imitation] than can be found in any book of its size in Christendom.” Despite Willis Clark's disclaiming in that article “every sentiment of unkindness and sinister partiality,” his attack was so effective that years later Lewis Clark claimed that “literarily and literally speaking, this paper [“American Poets and Their Critics”] killed the Quarterly critic ‘very dead’ indeed.”(8)

All that needs to be added here is that, according to McHenry's biographer, this “killing” article was, with a single exception, a tissue of misrepresentations and lies.(9)

With the difference that Poe survived attack and gave back better than he received, the resemblance of this affair to the Norman Leslie incident continues to be noteworthy. Clark's article, although of prohibitive length for republication, was nevertheless reproduced almost in toto in the New York Mirror, with which, of course, Nathaniel Willis one of the men whom McHenry had assailed — was associated, and was, in addition, given front-page prominence.(10) With pious satisfaction, the editorial comment subjoined to the reprinted article read: “We believe our readers will coincide in our opinion, [page 68:] that there is very little left of this second McGrawler — this contemporary editor of a contemporary Asinaeum.”

McHenry's biographer notes what has been detailed here in earlier chapters, that the storm which McHenry loosed with his attack on a few favorites of the New York clique reflects the temper of literary criticism of the time — the violent sectional antagonisms, the personal malice which vitiated impartiality of criticism, the cavalier resort to invective and lies, and the not at all infrequent use of an ostensibly critical article to assault a critic of an opposing camp.(11)

Familiar as he was with the American literary scene, Poe, at the time at least that he assumed the editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger, could scarcely have been unaware of the McHenry incident and of the men who had joined to destroy him as a critic — something that may account in part for his oversensitivity and caustic defensive tactics in the Norman Leslie incident. In Graham's Magazine, of which he was then editor, Poe had this to say: “Dr. James McHenry, of Philadelphia, is well known to the literary world as the writer of numerous articles in our Reviews and lighter journals, but, more especially, as the author of The Antediluvians, an epic poem which has been the victim of a most shameful cabal in this country ... ”(12) Poe's allusion to a “most shameful cabal” was directed, of course, at the New York group whose members were continually deriding McHenry through such publications as the Knickerbocker, which had recently called The Antediluvians, or the World Destroyed a “tuneless abortion!”(13) And again in the Broadway Journal, of which he was then coeditor, Poe noted on the death of McHenry that he “fell a victim to the arts of a clique which proceeded, in the most [page 69 :] systematic manner, to write him down not scrupling, either, to avow the detestable purpose.”(14)

Despite his presumed awareness of the McHenry case and his certain knowledge of the retributive power that the New York clique could wield against those who threatened its interests, Poe did not stop with criticizing only one New York favorite. Once he had published his review of Norman Leslie, and even while answering his attackers, Poe proceeded to criticize others of that group, notably Fitz-Greene Halleck, a favorite of the New York coterie in general and of the Clark brothers in particular. That Halleck was favored by the Clark brothers is clearly shown by Willis Clark's letter to Halleck dated January, 1836, in which the following passage occurs: “By the way, your work will be handsomely reviewed in the next number of the American Quarterly, and the part relating particularly to you will be from my pen, dove-tailed into the rest of the article. ... I tell you this as a profound secret, to be repeated to no one ... ”(15) Yet, in April, 1836, Poe had asserted in the Drake-Halleck review cited earlier: “Halleck's poetical powers appear to us essentially inferior, upon the whole, to those of his friend Drake. He has written nothing at all comparable to [Drake's] Bronx. By the hackneyed phrase, sportive elegance, we might possibly designate at once the general character of his writings and the very loftiest praise to which he is justly entitled.”(16)

Although Poe's review was well-mannered enough, not to mention brilliant in its analysis of individual poems, it created a disturbance sufficiently great to put Poe on the defensive. The Supplement to the July, 1836, number of the Messenger contained Poe's remarks on the “disputed matter of Drake and Halleck,” and two quotations, one from a correspondent who rightly thought Poe's “article on Drake and Halleck one of the [page 70:] finest pieces of criticism ever published in this country,” the other from Halleck himself who, Poe commented, “since our abuse of his book, writes us thus: ‘There is no place where I shall be more desirous of seeing my humble writings than in the publication you so ably support and conduct. It is full of ... frank, open, independent manliness of spirit ... ’”(17)

Another member of the New York coterie whom Poe attacked on more than one occasion during and after the Norman Leslie affair was the redoubtable Colonel Stone of the New York Commercial Advertiser.(18) Stone had antagonized a number of literary figures before he and Poe clashed, among them Bryant, who, in 1831, struck Stone over the head with a whip,(19) and Cooper, who twice sued Stone for libel.(20) How dangerous it was to attack Stone, or any member of the Knickerbocker clique for that matter, and with what alacrity that group went to work to protect its members, is exemplified by the following episode. When the eccentric Laughton Osborn (1809-1878) wrote his Vision of Rubeta (1838), a Dunciad-like satire of the two leading New York newspaper editors, Stone of the Commercial Advertiser and Charles King of the New York American, he had to publish his poem anonymously and in Boston, for apparently no New York publisher would accept it. Moreover, in his preface, he defied anyone to discover his identity. When the book appeared, the New York Mirror wrote:

A short time later the Mirror carried this item under the heading, “An injurious rumour contradicted”: “We are assured that there is no truth whatever in the malicious report that the ‘Gingerbreadman’ is the author of the ‘Vision of Rubeta.’ That gentleman disclaims the authorship with becoming indignation.”(22)

The person, however, who became the hub of the New York group was Lewis Gaylord Clark, a man with whom Poe contended almost his entire critical career and who had much to do with shaping Poe's reputation. When Clark arrived in New York City in 1833 or 1834, Charles Fenno Hoffman, founder of the Knickerbocker Magazine and intimate friend of Colonel Stone and Rufus Wilmot Griswold (destined to become Poe's first “official” biographer and literary executor), introduced him to the literati of the city.(23) Shortly afterward, Clark contributed a story to the Knickerbocker, which was immediately accepted,(24) and which, when published, was widely copied.(25) Though copying from magazines, including American ones, was perfectly legitimate at this time and continued to be so until magazine proprietors learned to copyright each number of their periodicals, not infrequently such copying, far from being piracy, was planned in order to give wider circulation to an attack (as, for instance, in the Mirror's wholesale copying of Willis Clark's attack on McHenry), or, as seems true [page 72:] in the case of Lewis Clark's story, to create a reputation. The incident is noteworthy because Samuel D. Langtree had replaced Hoffman as editor of the Knickerbocker when he resigned that post, and Langtree was the literary editor of Stone's Commercial Advertiser.(26)

In May, 1834, a month after his story appeared, Clark and his friend, Clement M. Edson, bought the Knickerbocker, and Clark assumed the position of editor. A sure sign of Clark's persistent co-operativeness with the New York literati is the fact that his editorship of the magazine (1834-1861) was one of the longest in periodical history-in fact, almost commensurate with the existence of the Knickerbocker itself. It may be supererogatory to add that the Knickerbocker in his hands soon became notorious as the “specially appointed guardian of New York reputations.”(27) The New York Mirror, like many another metropolitan journal, recognized a cohort by praising Clark's first number and continuing to puff succeeding numbers ad nauseam.(28)

Once Clark had established himself in New York, he began to make alliances in Boston and Philadelphia, the only other vital spheres of literary influence.(29) He enlisted the services of his twin brother, Willis Clark, who owned and edited the Philadelphia Gazette, and those of Longfellow, some of whose relations with Clark were discussed earlier. Willis Clark contributed only poems to the May and June, 1834, numbers of the Knickerbocker, but in October of that year his official connection [page 73:] with the magazine was announced.(30) In March, 1835, Willis Clark began a series of monthly articles called “Olla-pondina” — a play on his pen name, Ollapod — that helped to popularize “Old Knick,” as it was beginning to be called with punning affection. Needless to say, the magazine under such management consistently puffed members of the coterie, Fay and Stone being only two upon whom such puffs were lavished.(31)

At the time Poe attacked Norman Leslie, Lewis Clark had become strongly intrenched among the New York literati, and the Knickerbocker was a bulwark probably second only to the Boston North American Review, another magazine that intermittently became Poe's target in his struggles with the cliques. In combination with the New York Mirror, the Knickerbocker “refused to exchange” issues of magazines with the Southern Literary Messenger “from the first,” though such exchange was common practice and expected courtesy among magazine editors, and united as we have seen, “in covert, and therefore unmanly, thrusts at the ‘Messenger’”(32) in retaliation for Poe's attack on Fay.

Lewis Clark could afford to be covert in his attacks on Poe and thereby retain his reputation for good-naturedness, for he had sufficient allies to do his hatchet work for him. Two of his allies, for instance, Willis Clark and Stone, were apparently in the habit of combining their forces and their [page 74:] newspapers to attack an enemy. In the same month that Clark and Stone united to attack Poe, they had, curiously enough, adopted similar tactics to slur the reputation of Willis, one of the editors of the Mirror. The Mirror retorted in a paragraph titled, “Slanders of the publick press”: “Our attention has been called to the following paragraph in a late Commercial Advertiser [Stone's journal], copied from the Philadelphia Gazette [Clark's journal] . Its appearance in a respectable paper ... induces us to take that notice of it, which, from its origin, it would not have merited.” The writer then reproduced the original squib which stated that Fay, who had recently been appointed as Secretary of the American Legation in Berlin, could be trusted not to abuse his office as “some of his immediate contemporaries” had done. The writer in the Mirror noted that the “allusion which cannot be mistaken” was to Mr. Willis, the only immediate contemporary of Mr. Fay who had filled a similar office abroad, and he proceeded to attack Willis Clark, the originator of the squib, in order “to pluck forth,” as he put it, “this reptile to the light.”(33)

But there is even more damaging extant evidence of collusion between Clark and Stone. In 1837 Willis Clark wrote the following letter to Stone, from which it may be legitimately inferred that such a combination as instanced both in regard to Willis and Poe was neither their first nor their last:

The machinations of the New York group inspired several verse satires, two of which have already been mentioned, Osborn's Vision of Rubeta and Wilmer's Quacks of Helicon. Though both these satires blasted away at essentially the same powers that Poe had bombarded, Poe, when he considered them as poetry, reviewed them harshly. His severest statement labels the Vision of Rubeta a “vast gilded swill-trough overflowing with Dunciad and water,”(35) and, though he confessed. that “Mr. Wilmer is a personal friend of our own,” he nevertheless condemned his poem for “gross obscenity.”(36) Yet as contemporary comment these works are revealing, whatever epithets they deserve as poems. Osborn, in the copious notes to his satire, pointed out such collusions as the following:

Wilmer, a fiery editor who, like Poe, despised cliques and cliquish practices, wrote:

It is clear, then, that Poe was aware that he was facing a powerful clique when he criticized, among other works, Fay's Norman Leslie, Stone's Ups and Downs, and Halleck's Alnwick Castle during his brief career on the Messenger.

Poe, of course, did not spend all his editorial time on the Messenger bombarding the New York clique. Nevertheless, in his analyses of books stemming from whatever quarter of America, he made it a point to articulate the principles he indorsed and to censure practices antagonistic to the emergence of a genuine American literature. Months before he had attacked Norman Leslie and even before he had definitely established himself as editor of the Messenger, he derided puffing: “If half the praise be due, which is lavished on the works that daily issue from the press, we may live to see the writings which instructed and delighted our youth, laid on the same shelf with Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.” As [page 77:] for himself, “we never expect to travel as caterers for a public journal.”(39) He objected, as we have seen, to any form of chicanery in gaining a reputation. In reviewing, for instance, the prolific Lydia Huntley Sigourney, he said: “It would be an easy, although perhaps a somewhat disagreeable task, to point out several of the most popular writers in America ... who have manufactured for themselves a celebrity by ... very questionable means”; that though Mrs. Sigourney “does not owe her reputation to ... chicanery ... it cannot be denied that it has been thereby greatly assisted”; and that inquiry into her real merits shows that she had acquired the title of the “American Hemans” “solely by imitation” of that English poet.(40) He rebuked publishers not only for tolerating poor typography, miserable paper, and slipshod misprints (at the same time lauding those publishers who did respectable print jobs), but also for publishing worthless manuscripts. Of the novel Paul Ulric, he said: “In itself, the book before us is too purely imbecile to merit an extended critique — but as a portion of our daily literary food — as an American work published by the Harpers — as one of a class of absurdities with an inundation of which our country is grievously threatened — we shall have no hesitation, and shall spare no pains, in exposing fully before the public eye its four hundred and forty-three pages of utter folly, bombast, and inanity.” His elaborate examination of the novel revealed unquestionable plagiarism from Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature (five series, 1791-1834). Clearly, Poe remarked ironically, Disraeli was “one of the most scoundrelly plagiarists in Christendom. He had not scrupled to steal entire passages verbatim from Paul Ulric!” The author of Paul Ulric, Poe continued, had even transcribed typographical errors from his source. He concluded: “In summing up an opinion of Paul Ulric, it is by no means our intention to mince the matter at all. The book is despicable in every [page 78:] respect. Such are the works which bring daily discredit upon our national literature. We have no right to complain of being laughed at abroad when so villainous a compound ... of incongruous folly, plagiarism, immorality, inanity, and bombast, can command at any moment both a puff and a publisher.”(41)

In another review he urged that authors who possess talent should “either think it necessary to bestow a somewhat greater degree of labor and attention upon the composition of their novels, or otherwise ... not think it necessary to compose them at all.”(42) In still another review, he asked: “When shall the artist assume his proper situation in society ... ? How long shall the veriest vermin of the Earth, who crawl around the altar of Mammon, be more esteemed of men than they, the gifted ministers to those exalted emotions which link us with the mysteries of Heaven? To our own query we may venture a reply. Not long.” He added, with what may be an allusion to his own crusading activities: “A spirit is already abroad at war with it.”(43) He decried American imitations of the “Ratcliffe [sic] dynasty, the Edgeworth dynasty, and [particularly of ] the Scott dynasty” and those who “study, as at a glass, to make themselves like him, as if ambitious to display their thefts.(44) And, in a subsequent review, he said of Robert M. Bird's Hawks of Hawk-Hollow that, had the novel reached him some years ago, and had the title page borne the statement, “A Romance by the author of Waverley,” he would have noted, “It is unnecessary to tell us that this novel is written by Sir Walter Scott; and we are really glad that he has at length ventured to turn his attention to American incidents, scenery, and manners.” And then, in a mock sigh: “But alas! for our critical independency ... Robert M. Bird is an American.”(45) In similar blunt terms he said that for “undefiled, vigorous, and masculine prose,” Robert Southey was [page 79:] Irving's superior, despite the views of Alexander Hill Everett, then editor of the North American Review. “In saying thus much we do not fear being accused of a deficiency in patriotic feeling. No true — we mean no sensible American will like a bad book the better for being American,” nor dislike a good one because it is written by an alien.(46)

Aside from such statements, Poe presented models of criticism in his own critiques. Years later he asked, “What American ... thinks of making his critique a work of art in itself?”(47) Could he have violated editorial modesty, he might, of course, have less subtly suggested himself, for some of his criticisms written during the Messenger period, as many of his later ones, are models of literary analysis. Even his subjective criticism of Marvell's “Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn” is a classic of its kind.(48) Moreover, while he dutifully gibbeted literary charlatans and incompetents, he also did the far more agreeable work of heralding Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Dickens, and Hawthorne on the threshold of their careers and paying homage to Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge at the end of theirs.

Much of Poe's criticism during his editorship of the Messenger, then, was written in opposition to the New York coterie or to the principles which it, in common with other groups, kept trumpeting, which made his remarks harsher than they might otherwise have been. Those principles sounded respectable, for they were designed to foster a national literature, which was the concern of every American writer. First, the group clamored in their editorials for an international copyright law which would prevent American publishers from reprinting foreign books and thereby inhibit them from discriminating against native works. Second, they opposed harsh criticism of American writers, and even argued for critical indulgence of their books as a kind of patriotic duty in encouraging an American literature. Yet, in practicing these basic [page 80:] principles, this clique, like others, became involved in serious contradictions. Though calling for an international copyright law, for instance, members of the clique often engaged in literary piracy themselves, the practice they loudly denounced. The profit to be gained from republishing foreign materials was simply too great a temptation to resist, whether one was a publisher, an editor, or a writer. Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1815-1857),(49) for example, passed himself off as an advocate of international copyright law, yet plundered literary works wholesale as co-editor of Brother Jonathan and as an anthologist.(50) Worse still, he seems to have stolen some books outright. As an avowed enemy of Griswold pointed out publicly,(51) Griswold, “who denounces ... our Congress for not protecting the works of authors, has himself taken D’Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, and tacking on a few ‘American Curiosities,’ so as to usurp the English edition in the American market, issued it with his name on the title page.” Nor was this his only theft, his accuser asserted. He had seized a book entitled “Sacred Poetry of England” that was issued in England and “by a few additions ... publishes it as his own. He takes advantage [page 81:] of a state of things which he declares to be ‘immoral, unjust, and wicked,’ and even while haranguing the loudest, is purloining the fastest.” Griswold, moreover, had no hesitation in disgracing Cornelius Mathews, perhaps the warmest of all proponents of international copyright, largely because Mathews was cordially detested by the Knickerbocker group in general and by Lewis Clark in particular.(52)

Though the coterie in New York, not to mention those in Boston and Philadelphia, also called for a national literature, its members tended to be sectionalists and were continually accused of sectional bias by Southern and Western journals. Sectionalism was the inevitable tendency of the striving for fame and the struggle for sales of books and magazines in an extremely competitive market; and such accusations and counter-accusations only served to intensify sectional loyalties.

Again, since the coteries professed to favor native literary works, they felt bound to retaliate upon a critic such as Poe or McHenry or Simms who criticized an author of their set. Characteristically, retaliation took the form of an attack upon the critic's character or upon his books. These being American works, the cliques found themselves, not uncomfortably it would seem, in the paradoxical position of attacking American works in order to defend American works.

Finally, the mutual puffing by members of a clique on the principle that they were encouraging a native literature was bound to provoke reaction, if only because they tended to subject the works of outsiders to silence or abuse. When critics such as Poe exposed the more outrageous instances of this practice, as in the case of Norman Leslie, and urged that the practice be stopped entirely as inimical to an American literature, all that such exposés and exhortations accomplished was to make the clique more clannish, to confirm its members in their sectional loyalties and their hostility to outsiders, and to inspire them to even windier puffing to counteract the damage that might have been done. [page 82:]

Once Poe recognized the enemy of a self-supporting, self-respecting authorship — an enemy whose banner was national.. ism, whose power derived from cliques, and whose weapons were the adulatory review for those in favor and silence or the abusive review for those out of favor — Poe assailed it whenever he could, whether by exposing cliquism as a racket or by assaulting those who were implicated in the cliques. To this end he mustered all the methods of the critical art, from Wilson's tomahawk attack, to Macaulay's point-by-point bombardment that pulverizes a work, to Coleridge's examination of the philosophic bases upon which to ground his criticism.(53)

The publication of Norman Leslie concurrent with his first editorship provided Poe with his initial opportunity to engage the New York clique in a battle royal — to state his objections to cliquism, to gibbet a few members of the clique, and to test the strengths and weaknesses of his methods. From this battle he emerged victorious but with a reputation for caustic candor unique in America until Mencken appeared on the literary scene. This reputation was sufficient to make the Knickerbocker group chary — so much so, in fact, that when he mounted his second major attack upon that clique (represented by his review of Wilmer's blast at the New York coterie), the clique apparently felt that the best response was silence. But whatever the response, Poe continued to assail the New York group (peppering the Boston clique in the meanwhile) and the corruption it was encouraging in all areas of authorship, whether in publishing, merchandising, or reviewing. Again and again, however unsuccessful were his efforts, Poe struggled to reform [page 83:] a practice that, as it stood, militated in favor of certain authors and against others, not so much on the grounds of literary merit as on the adventitiousness of geographical location and editorial connections, not so much on the basis of creative ability as on the talent to truckle and conspire.

That in an age of underhanded publishing and journalistic tactics — of anonymous reviewing, critical collusion, and vicious gossip originated or at least exaggerated and disseminated by cliques — Poe was not silenced by the coteries as McHenry had been is astonishing. That he survived as a writer and for short periods even flourished as an editor is almost incredible. Besides planning several magazines that failed to materialize, he managed somehow to contribute to more than fifty known periodicals, annuals, and daily papers, and to help edit five journals in a space of little more than ten years (1835-1845), one of which (if we ignore the success of the Southern Literary Messenger) he brought to a position of leadership — namely, Graham's Magazine.(54)

The upshot of Poe's continual attacks upon the New York and, later, the Boston cliques was the formation of a loose alliance against him, an alliance that was to hound him during his life and even after his death, and that did much to create the Poe myth.

It was characteristic of the editorial hypocrisy that flourished during Poe's lifetime that the New York Mirror, guilty of every charge Gould had made, should print Gould's lecture (“American Criticism on American Literature”) in two instalments and even feature it on its front pages. An even greater travesty was that the number of the Mirror containing the first instalment of Gould's lecture should also contain Fay's lampoon of Poe, “THE SUCCESSFUL NOVEL!!”(55)

One quotation should indicate the kind of reputation Poe was earning by his critical candor, and that any independent and even less plain-spoken critic of the period was bound to [page 84:] earn. Park Benjamin, whom his biographer calls “one of the most feared of critics,”(56) had this to say in Greeley's New Yorker:

And such we know, with what justice is yet to be determined, were the observations made of Poe.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 64:]

1. For a detailed and thoroughly documented account of how the coteries operated in the case of Cooper, see Dorothy Waples, The Whig Myth of James Fenimore Cooper (New Haven, Conn., 1938). For the so-called Moral War in which the New York papers sought to smash the invincible Bennett and his New York Herald, see Don C. Seitz, James Gordon Bennetts, Father and Son: Proprietors of the New York Herald (New York, 1928).

2. XI (March, 1832), 154-174. Three of Poe's critical tenets coincide with McHenry's in this article — the first, that the voice of the public is often in direct opposition to critics because of the falsification involved in puffing (p. 156); the second, that a long poem is a contradiction in terms (“In all long poems, there are necessarily occasionally passages which partake in some degree of that abstruse dulness which is characteristic of the Lake poetry. ... Nor is Paradise Lost, itself, totally exempt from the blemish”) (p. 161) — the very example that Poe often used to make the identical point; and the third, an opposition to Wordsworth in particular, a hostility most flagrantly expressed in Poe's “Letter to B—.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 65:]

3. Quoted by Robert E. Blanc, James McHenry (1785-1845): Playwright and Novelist (Philadelphia, 1939), pp. 94-95. I am indebted to this study for many details concerning Dr. McHenry.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 66:]

4. Identification of Sands as author of the satire appears in the Knickerbocker, VII (Jan., 1836), 101: “Poor departed Sands, in the fine portrait which he drew of the author of ‘The Antediluvians’ [the book-length poem by McHenry], under the similitude of ‘Mr. Green Bice’ “etc. Sands's affiliation with the Commercial Advertiser began in 1827 and ended with his death in Dec., 1832.

5. “But, believe me, Mr. Green,” says one of the characters to Green-Bice, “that the injudicious praise which some poets have received from pretended friends and sciolous editors of newspapers have been their great misfortune.” To which the silly Mr. Green replies, burlesque-style, “Sci-what?” If this did not serve to identify Green-Bice, Sands noted ironically, “But he is a great writer in one of the leading Reviews . .” (Tales of Glauber-Spa by Several American Authors, New York, 1832, II, 136-138).

6. See Dunlap, The Clark Letters, pp. 64-66, 70, for evidence of how Willis Clark proceeded in this effort.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 67:]

7. The identification of Green-Bice as McHenry appeared in the “Editor's Table” of the Knickerbocker, IV (July, 1834), 76-77 — a series of disconnected comments which Clark insisted he alone wrote. The blast at McHenry appeared in that same number (pp. 11-24). Lewis Clark years later in the Knickerbocker, LIII (April, 1859), 422-423, proudly announced that his brother wrote the attack.

8. Knickerbocker, LIII (April, 1859), 422-423. Mott, American Magazines, I, 274, corroborates Clark's statement. Willis Clark's article, Mott comments, “pretty effectually finished him [McHenry] as a critic with an audience.”

9. Blanc, McHenry, pp. 98-99.

10. XII (July 19, 1834), 17-19. The pages of the Mirror were numbered serially, beginning with number one in January and July; thus, page 17 of this issue was the front page.

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11. Blanc, McHenry, p. 102.

12. Graham's Magazine, XX (Jan., 1842), 48. Earlier, in the same magazine, XVIII (Feb., 1841), 92-93, Poe, in reviewing The Antediluvians, had come to the same conclusion regarding that poem as that which appeared in the Knickerbocker, XVII (June, 1841), 524-525. Apparently he regretted his remarks concerning that poem because, concurring as they did with the consensus of the New York group, he found himself reinforcing their fire with his own.

13. Knickerbocker, XVII, 524.

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14. II (Aug. 23, 1845), 110.

15. Dunlap, The Clark Letters, pp. 35-36. Clark took the opportunity in this letter to solicit a poem from Halleck for the Knickerbocker.

16. Southern Literary Messenger, II (April, 1836), 334, 336. Compare this review with Willis Clark's fulsome review of Halleck's Alnwick Castle with Other Poems in the Knickerbocker, VII (Jan., 1836), 87.

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17. II, 517.

18. “Although Colonel Stone's influence was widely extended throughout the country, yet in New York city was it more particularly felt.” William L. Stone, Jr., “The Life and Writings of William Leete Stone” in his edition of The Life and Times of Sa-Go-Yo-Wat-Ma, or Red Jacket by the Late William L. Stone (New York, 1866), p. 83. Laughton Osborn, a contemporary of Stone, wrote: “It will hardly be believed, out of New York, that half of the mass of ordinary readers are in the city governed in their literary tastes by such a man of Rubeta [Col. Stone].” A Vision of Rubeta: An Epic Story of the Island of Manhattan (Boston, 1838), p. 289.

19. For an eyewitness account, see Bayard Tuckerman, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone (New York, 1889), I, 30.

20. William Stone, Jr., “Stone,” pp. 77-78.

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21. XVI (Oct. 27, 1838), 142. Poe had mixed views regarding A Vision of Rubeta, to which he frequently alluded. One of his strongest objections was to its “vulgarity and gross personality,” which he found inexcusable in a work that called for amused detachment. See Godey's Lady's Book, XXXII (June, 1846), 272.

22. XVI (Nov. 13, 1838), 151.

23. Charles Hemstreet, Literary New York: Its Landmarks and Associations (New York, 1903), pp. 175-176.

24. “A Contrasted Picture,” III (April, 1834), 281-289.

25. Herman E. Spivey, “The Knickerbocker Magazine, 1833-1865: A Study of Its Contents, History, and Significance,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (University of North Carolina, 1936), p. 21.

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26. Mott, American Magazines, I, 606.

27. Ibid., p. 407. Mott elsewhere notes (p. 610) the conspicuous exceptions Clark made of Cornelius Mathews and his friend, Evert A. Duyckinck, whom Clark consistently attacked.

28. See, for example, the Mirror, XI (May 10, 1834), 359; XIII (Aug. 15, 1835), 55; (Aug. 22, 1835), 63; (Dec. 19, 1835), 199; (March 26, 1836), 311; XIV (April 25, 1837), 335. Clark's tastes may be gauged by a contributor to the Knickerbocker, one who defended Clark at the same time that he condemned Poe. Mine, he said, “was obvious verse, but it suited Mr. Clark, who was an obvious man, not remarkable, perhaps, for his literary attainments, but knowing what he wanted and what his readers wanted.” Stoddard, Recollections, pp. 49-50.

29. Poe, in heralding Longstreet's Georgia Scenes in the Southern Literary Messenger, II (March, 1836), 287, acknowledged that “Thanks to the long indulged literary supineness of the South, her presses are not as apt in putting forth a saleable book as her sons are in concocting a wise one.”

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30. Knickerbocker, IV (Oct., 1834) 327.

31. For some mentions of Fay, see ibid., VI (Sept., 2835), 284; (Nov., 1835), 483; VII (March, 1836), 311; etc. For some mentions of Stone, see VI (Aug., 1835), 159-160; VII (May, 1836), 550; X (Nov., 1837), 455; XI (April, 1838), 390; etc. It may be gratuitous to add that the Mirror also puffed Stone. See, for example, its review of his Ups and Downs, XIII (May 28, 1836), 383. What really provides an index to Stone's influence with the press is the announcement in the Mirror, XIII (July 25, 1835), 31, that a two-thousand-copy edition of Stone's Matthias and His Impostures had sold out in forty-eight hours and that another printing, this time of ten thousand copies, was being prepared.

32. Poe's charges in the Southern Literary Messenger, II (June, 1836), 460. Poe no doubt meant from the first of his acknowledged editorship, which was marked by the publication of the Norman Leslie review; for earlier, on July 4, 1835, the Mirror (XIII, 6) had written: “We have derived no little gratification from the perusal of the ‘Southern Literary Messenger,’ published at Richmond, Virginia — and we utter no unmeaning compliment, or mere words, of course, when we say that the present number entitles it to take its stand in the very foremost ranks of our periodical literature.”

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33. XIV (Sept. 24, 1836), 103. This, of course, was precisely the tactic used against Poe after he had reviewed Norman Leslie. See the Commercial Advertiser, April 12, 1836, p. 1, in which Stone copied Clark's strictures on Poe from his Gazette (April 8, 1836) and added his own. By Feb. 25, 1837, Willis Clark wrote Longfellow that Nathaniel “Willis and me have made up. ... ” Dunlap, The Clark Letters, p. 38.

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34. Dunlap, The Clark Letters, pp. 68-69.

35. Southern Literary Messenger, XV (March, 1849), 189.

36. Graham's Magazine, XIX (Aug., 1841), 90.

37. Vision of Rubeta (Boston, 1838), p. 373.

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38. Those referred to in this poem are, of course, George Pope Morris (1802-1864), then principal editor of the New York Mirror, whom Poe praised as “our best writer of songs” in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, V (Dec., 1839), 332-333, and whose popularity was not “altogether attributable to his editorial influence,” whatever “his enemies would fain make us believe,” he added in Graham's Magazine, XIX (Dec., 1841), 277; Willis Gaylord Clark (1808-1841), then editor of the Philadelphia Gazette and co-editor of the Knickerbocker, whom Poe described as “the first of our Philadelphia poets” in ibid., p. 274, despite earlier editorial clashes with him and his brother; Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867), the most successful magazinist of his time and then an editor of the Mirror, whom Poe consistently praised as a tale writer; and Theodore Sedgwick Fay (1807-1898), whom we have already discussed sufficiently. It was such “personalities” (to use the contemporary word) as inebriate Fay that caused Poe to brand the poem as gross obscenity.

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39. Southern Literary Messenger, I (May, 1835), 521. This and the quotations or summaries that follow are merely offered as specimens; such statements permeate his criticism, whether that written for the Messenger or for other magazines.

40. Ibid., II (Jan., 1836), 112.

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41. Ibid., II (Feb., 1836), 173-180. Paul Ulric was favorably noticed in the Knickerbocker, V (Dec., 1835), 569.

42. Southern Literary Messenger, II (Aug., 1836), 596.

43. Ibid., II (Feb., 1836), 195.

44. Ibid., I (May, 1835), 520.

45. Ibid., II (Dec., 1835), 43-44.

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46. Ibid., I (Sept., 1835), 780, and II (Dec., 3835), 64.

47. Broadway Journal, I (June 7,1845), 354-357.

48. Southern Literary Messenger, II (Aug., 1836), 586.

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49. Griswold's alliance with the New York coterie was subsequent to the Norman Leslie episode. Throughout this study I shall indicate how Griswold's connection with the clique resulted in the kind of vindictive obituary he wrote two days following Poe's death (New York Tribune, Oct. 9, 1849) under the pseudonym of Ludwig and in the kind of defamatory memoir he prefixed to his edition of Poe's Literati (1850) under his own name, a part of both memoirs being lifted with only the slightest alterations from Bulwer's characterization of the reprobate Francis Vivian in The Caxtons (Part Eighth, chap. iii) that had been published in 1849. For the moment it will suffice to mention that Lewis Clark said of Griswold: “ ... we have known him ... for nearly the entire period of our connection with the Knickerbocker” (Knickerbocker, XLVI, Oct., 1855, 398), and that Griswold's biographer notes that in Sept., 1841, he “tried to work out a scheme whereby he could do his work in New York, combining it with an associate editorship of the Knickerbocker Magazine, which Lewis Gaylord Clark led him to expect” (Joy Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold: Poe's Literary Executor, Nashville, Tenn., 1943, A. 265 n. 84).

50. See Mott, American Magazines, I, 359, and Miller, Raven and the Whale, p. 169.

51. Joel T. Headley, “The Prose Writers of America,” a review of Griswold's anthology of the same title, in Miscellanies (New York, 1850), p. 296. This article is republished from a magazine which I have not located. Poe's funniest, if one of his most atomizing reviews, written in the tradition of Macaulay's essay on Robert Montgomery and Mark Twain's “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses,” satirized Headley's Sacred Mountains. See the Southern Literary Messenger, XVI (Oct., 1850), 608-610, where it appeared posthumously. Clark, as might be expected, puffed Griswold's version of the Curiosities in the Knickerbocker, XXIII (May, 1844), 490-492, as he did all his works.

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52. One of Griswold's attacks was so bitter that Duyckinck, Mathews’ friend, took Griswold to task for it in the Literary World, I (March 20, 1847), 150.

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53. Though Poe admired John Wilson's “moral courage” which expressed itself in his criticism, according to Poe, as “sheer audacity,” he charged him with making literary judgments without the benefit of analysis (“ ... there has been no period at which he ever demonstrated anything beyond his own utter incapacity for demonstration”), something that Poe at his best avoided in his own critical articles, but of which he was sometimes guilty. (See the Broadway Journal, II, Sept. 6, 1845, 136.) For Macaulay as critic, Poe also had mixed admiration: he disliked his sophistry but warmly approved his manner. (See, for instance, Graham's Magazine, XXXVI, Jan., 1850, 49-51.) For Coleridge as literary theoretician and poet, Poe, though he caviled at times with his distinction between the Fancy and Imagination, had only the highest respect. (See among his other notices of Coleridge, Southern Literary Messenger, II, June, 1836, 451-453; Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, VI, Jan., 1840, 53-58; and Graham's Magazine, XXV, March, 1844, 137.)

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54. See Heartman and Canny, Poe Bibliography, p. 139.

55. Kendall B. Taft (Minor Knickerbockers: Representative Selections, New York, 1947, p. 398) identifies Fay as the author of the lampoon.

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56. Merle M. Hoover, Park Benjamin: Poet & Editor (New York, 1948), p. 189. In Graham's Magazine, XIX (Nov., 1841), 226, Poe observed that Benjamin “exerted an influence scarcely second to that of any editor in this country.”

57. VII (April 6, 1839), 45.