Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “The Apprenticeship of a Critic,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 61-93 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 61:]

III  •  The Apprenticeship of a Critic

 

JUST when Edgar Poe began reviewing books for the Southern Literary Messenger is not certain. His letter to White late in April, 1835, indicates that he considered himself a regular contributor.(1) Some bibliographers believe that his first book review for the magazine appeared in the February issue.(2) However, “Berenice,” his first short story for the Messenger, was published in March, and the first book review that can be established as his by external evidence appeared in the April number. All that can be said positively is that at some time between January and March, 1835, Poe, through the good will of John Pendleton Kennedy, established a connection with the Richmond magazine. He had no editorial prerogatives. He was simply a contributor, paid by the column. Yet Poe was displaying somewhat more than the usual contributor's interest in the Messenger; he was inserting notices of the magazine, a form of advertising, in Baltimore newspapers.

Unquestionably Thomas Willis White, the publisher, needed the help of an editor who was capable of intelligent discrimination. Formerly a printer, White was handicapped by his limited education and his acknowledged incapacity to make literary value judgments. From the beginning of his enterprise he sought advice and contributions from his more sophisticated friends, and without their help the Messenger would probably have foundered before Poe arrived to make it famous — or notorious, as some contemporaries thought.

White's first editor, who evidently served without pay, was James E. Heath, who was at the time auditor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Heath had had no journalistic experience, but [page 62:] he had written a novel called Edge-Hill; or, The Family of the Fitzroyals, which White himself had published in 1828. Furthermore, Heath was the first recording secretary of the Virginia Historical and Philosophical Society, which had been organized in 1834. As literary men were reckoned in the Virginia of 1834, Heath was well qualified for the position, and, more important, he belonged to a group of intellectuals who had status and influence. How he found the time to edit the magazine is another question.

White did not depend solely upon Heath. He also called upon his friend Beverley Tucker. A professor of law at William and Mary, Tucker had yet to publish the two novels upon which his literary reputation would rest.(3) A third friend from whom White received advice and contributions was Lucian Minor. Minor, like Tucker, was a respected lawyer for whom literature was an avocation. When Heath wanted to resign in February of 1835, White had tried to persuade Minor to become his editor at an annual salary of $800.00, telling him that he would be expected to work only thirty hours a week;(4) but Minor declined. Perhaps White was fortunate (though he would have been unlikely to admit it), because less than a year later he employed Edgar Poe for $520.00, and one suspects that Poe's working week was often considerably longer than thirty hours.

The chief point of interest here is that White was aiming at a thoroughly respectable provincial publication and that he was seeking help from Virginians of status — professional lawyers with literary inclinations. Thus the Messenger, in White's vision, was to be primarily a magazine which served sectional interests. It would be an outlet for what Southern men of letters apparently assumed was the vast, untapped storehouse of local literary treasure, a treasure strangely undiscovered by the money-grubbing publishers of the North. [page 63:]

To understand what Poe confronted when he assumed the “assistant” editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger it will be helpful to survey the magazine before his pen and his authority, limited though it was, made themselves felt. When White undertook to publish a magazine in Richmond, he knew that the odds were against him. Magazines had not flourished in the South, even in Charleston, the most “literary” of the Southern cities. Hugh Swinton Legaré's Southern Review, a somewhat ponderous quarterly modeled after the Edinburgh Review, had survived only four years, 1828-32. It had been a review only, impressive in its learning and conservative dignity, but unlikely to succeed with the general reading public. The North American Review was well established in the North, but Southerners were prone to read British publications, which were available at bargain rates.

White wanted to publish a monthly “variety” magazine, with articles, stories, poems, and reviews. That such a journal could have tremendous popularity had already been proved by Blackwood's in England. Then, too, White hoped to gain subscriptions by playing upon the South's sensitivity to its literary backwardness in comparison with the North. The first issue of the Messenger in August, 1834, called for a “Southern” literature: “Are we to be doomed forever to a kind of vassalage to our Northern neighbors — a dependence for our literary food upon our brethren, whose superiority in all the great points of character, — in valor — eloquence and patriotism, we are no wise disposed to admit?”

It was assumed by many that Southern literature had languished because most of the publishing houses and journals were in the North and displayed sectional bias in rejecting Southern offerings. It was also assumed that many educated Southerners had manuscripts stacked in their closets and that urging from patriotic editors would bring them to light, since Southerners were too gentlemanly to engage in the vulgar business of trying to persuade Northern publishers. That most of this was an aspect of the Southern chivalric myth is likely, but certainly Philip Pendleton Cooke would never have published his one book without the encouragement of Poe, John Pendleton Kennedy, and Rufus Wilmot [page 64:] Griswold.(5) As far as the Messenger was concerned, however, White's call to literary arms perhaps had more than the desired effect.(6) Many of the unpublished poems of the South had been written on odd scraps of paper, as Cooke described his own habit, or they were inscribed in the albums in which every genteel young woman kept her sentimental memorials. Emily Dickinson to the contrary notwithstanding, not much good poetry is produced this way. When White and Heath called for Southern contributions, the albums yielded their treasures, presumably over the dead bodies of the protesting authors. An attempt at anonymity was usually made, some contributors allowing their effusions to be sent in by a “friend,” others modestly concealing themselves behind single or multiple initials or pseudonyms. Frequently the disguises were transparent. John Collins McCabe signed his verse “M’C,” and Alexander Beaufort Meek went so far as to give his address — “A. B. M. of Tuscaloosa.”

Philip Cooke, the best of the Messenger poets except for Poe, called himself “Larry Lyle,” but formed his I's so peculiarly that the editor printed the pseudonym as “Zarry Zyle.” Cooke almost gave his identity away, however, by writing an indignant protest against a criticism of his “Song of the Seasons” by an anonymous correspondent who simply gave his address — Shepherdstown, Virginia. The critic had objected in a mild way to the “obscurity” of the poem (this was the usual charge in America against anything less pellucid than Gray's “Elegy”). In his rebuttal Cooke quoted an attack that Editor Heath himself had made against critics in general, implying that the Shepherdstown correspondent must be, as Heath had described critics, “one of the little great men in the world, who have the vanity to conceive that their taste and judgment, (if they have any) is the standard for all mankind, and who snap and bark like the curs which infest our streets, and annoy the byways ....”(7) [page 65:]

Cooke's defense is not particularly significant as literary criticism, but it does show how easily the ire of an American author, particularly a Southern amateur, could be aroused by hostile criticism. Harsh criticism, particularly of the sort that had been in fashion a few years earlier in the British quarterlies and in a few American journals, would have seemed especially out of place in a new provincial journal.(8) White had invited contributions from friends and acquaintances in Virginia, and no doubt some contributors thought that the Messenger would be a kind of organ for a mutual admiration society of unpublished Southern authors. The Shepherdstown correspondent had been very tactless in speculating that the bad poems printed in the Messenger must have come from White's friends. “I know that you have too much taste to have printed them through choice,”(9) Shepherdstown hastened to add. Literary logrolling was the order of the day, and the correspondent simply assumed that it was going on in the Messenger.

The reputation for publishing too much bad verse continued to dog the Messenger even during Poe's editorship, but even so he sometimes found it necessary to apologize for rejecting contributions from friends, either his or White's. Too, it must have been a [page 66:] frustrating experience for Poe simply to wade through the mass of anonymous contributions that appeared in response to White's call. Occasionally these contributions appeared with covering letters such as the following: “I send you these lines without the writer's name. It is one of many instances in proof of what I have long believed, that selections might be made from the unpublished writings of Virginians, composing a volume of which any country might be proud. The writer of the above throws off such scraps at idle times, without effort and without pretension. With so much of the inspiration of poetry, he has nothing of its madness, and will never consent to be known to the world as an author.”(10) This communication speaks for itself about the uneasiness that writing poetry caused among Virginians. A poet was quite likely to be a mad fellow, and the only way for a gentleman to compose poetry was to “throw off scraps” at idle times. The scrap thrown off in this case was called “Beauty Without Loveliness,” a poem neither worse nor better than dozens of others White published during the first year of his magazine.

Thus one of Poe's problems after he became editor had to do with accepting or rejecting the contributions of Southern poetasters, who could be very superior in refusing to acknowledge themselves as authors but who could also be furious when their literary offspring were mistreated. Each author who had some personal claim had to be handled as a special case, as Poe's several letters of apology indicate.(11) And there was always the editorial embarrassment of refusing a Southern contribution after Heath and White had announced that the chief purpose of the journal was to awaken the slumbering Southern muse. [page 67:]

From the first, however, the Messenger had several regular contributors, some of them from the North, who were a little better than most of the Southern amateurs. Notable among these were Mrs. Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Mrs. E. F. Ellet (with whom Poe was to have an unpleasant involvement ten years later). To modern taste the moralistic melancholy of Mrs. Sigourney, who was called the “American Hemans,” is scarcely preferable to the death-and-damnation despair of the Byronic tribe, but at least she was a professional writer, highly esteemed in both North and South.

The prose selections in the Messenger during the first year, except for articles reprinted from other journals and Poe's tales, were not much better than the poems. Apparently Virginians doted (or at least Heath thought they did) on descriptions of visits to the Virginia Springs, which he published with monotonous regularity. Then there was a fairly steady diet of moral tales, frequently of revenge, jealousy, or some other “low passion,” but invariably ending with an exhortation to the audience to take heed from the horrible example presented in such frightening detail. For heavy reading the subscriber to the Messenger had a few articles on aesthetic subjects, such as George Cooke's series called “The Fine Arts,” and speeches, most of which had been delivered before the Virginia Historical and Philosophical Society. George Tucker's “Discourse on the Progress of Philosophy” was greatly admired, but then Tucker was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia and had already achieved a reputation as a writer. Other speeches were somewhat less instructive. The most impressive piece of fiction was a serial novel called “Lionel Granby,” which proceeded on its deadly course through number after number.

This, then, was the journal to which Poe was contributing and of which he was to become the editor. A more formidable problem than the quality of the contributions (over which Poe never had complete editorial control) was the journal's opinion, probably originated by Heath but assented to by White, that literature must be moral and instructive in purpose. In this the policy of the Messenger approximated that of the other American journals of the day, and it was against such a policy that Poe was to mount his [page 68:] strongest attack, basing his own critical standards on art instead of morality.

Heath soon made it clear that he could not approve of what he called “fairy tales,” that he had no liking for “German diablerie,” and that if a writer did not display “good sense, sound morality, and correct taste,”(12) he could expect short shrift from the editor of the Messenger. And short shrift he usually got, although Heath had no scruples against condemning a writer such as Edward Bulwer, who was enormously popular, and then filling his pages by pirating in its entirety one of the tales that he had condemned. William Beckford's Vathek, an oriental Gothic novel which Byron had liked and which Poe was rather fond of himself, aroused Heath's deepest indignation: “We should pronounce it ... to be the production of a sensualist and an infidel — one who could riot in the most abhorred and depraved conceptions and whose prolific fancy preferred as its repast all that was diabolical and monstrous, rather than what was beautiful and good. We shall not even attempt a detailed account of this volume ....”(13)

But Heath never gave a detailed account of any volume. Excuses were usually made, giving one reason or another for failing to analyze the contents of the book being reviewed. Actually Heath had sufficient reason: he was a busy man, and the work he did for the Messenger was done out of friendship.

Beverley Tucker was also a reviewer for the Messenger during its first year; his reviews are superior to Heath's both in style and critical [page 69:] objectivity. In fact, some of them have been mistaken for Poe's.(14) Tucker found less fault with Bulwer than Heath had. The Last Days of Pompeii, Tucker averred, had raised the popular British author 50 per cent in his opinion. But even with Tucker Bulwer did not get off scot-free: “Mr. Bulwer's pictures, in all his works that we have read, are too gaudy, — too highly wrought, — and therefore too much above nature, — and want the delightful repose and serene features which distinguish the great Scottish magician [Sir Walter Scott].”(15) Thus, according to this Southern critic, Sir Walter followed nature's simple plan, whereas Bulwer was too prone to artifice. Even Bulwer's “vivid and powerful fancy,” his “extensive learning,” his “fine imagery and impassioned eloquence” did not redeem him from the fault of imposing art too strenuously upon unpretentious nature. After such generalizations, however, Tucker was no more willing than Heath to undertake an analysis of the book being reviewed, for that would deprive the reader “of much of that exquisite pleasure which attends the progressive development of the plot.”

In spite of Tucker's fairly favorable review, we can conclude that the Messenger was hostile to Bulwer until Poe took over, for immediately after Tucker's review, as if to atone for his leniency, a long diatribe by the poet Sumner Lincoln Fairfield was printed which accused Bulwer of having stolen the idea for his novel and some of his scenes from Fairfield's narrative poem, “The Last Night of Pompeii.”(16) Fairfield was bitter over the fact that Bulwer's novel was immensely popular while his own poem had languished [page 70:] and died. Such treatment, he trumpeted, drives American poets “far away from the barren realm of Parnassus.” Plagiarism, native versus foreign authors — these were problems to which Poe was to address himself later; but they appeared in the Messenger before Poe made them his special concern.

Probably the greatest difficulty Poe was to encounter after his connection with the Messenger became official was the announced editorial opposition of the journal to harsh analytical criticism. In the “Editorial Remarks” of the March, 1835, issue Heath had stated: “We can fearlessly recommend the poetry in this number, — if not faultless, as at least superior to the carpings of illiberal and puerile criticism.” Obviously he meant to forestall any criticism of the poems, because he went on to attack the critics who “snap and bark” like curs. This was the editorial statement that Philip Pendleton Cooke quoted in his own defense after being assailed by the Shepherdstown correspondent. Even after Heath left the journal, White continued to be wary of harsh criticism, and that Poe did manage to publish some scathing reviews of worthless books is as much a tribute to his nerve as to his perceptiveness as a critic. Publisher White apparently shuddered many times during 1836 over the occasional savagery of Poe's book reviews.(17)

The April, 1835, number of the Messenger was the last one published under Heath's supervision. He was growing restless from the demands of his unsalaried position and found it necessary to devote full time to his own affairs. In the May issue White happily proclaimed that he had secured “a gentleman of approved literary taste and attainments, to whose especial management the editorial department of the ‘Messenger’ has been confided.” Poe was still on the sidelines, a mere contributor, and this new editor was Edward [page 71:] Vernon Sparhawk. His literary attainments were a volume of verse he had published at the age of twenty-two and writing he had done as a reporter for the New York American. For some reason Spar-hawk did not get along well with White. His journalistic experience, plus the fact that he was to devote full time to the editorial task, should have augured well for White's magazine, but Sparhawk remained at the post for only three months. The May, June, and July issues of the magazine were under his guidance, yet the superiority of a few of the reviews during this period can be credited to Tucker and Poe. Sparhawk's own reviews, when they can be identified, are brief and perfunctory. White must have had problems with Sparhawk from the beginning, because within a month after the new editor had been employed, the publisher was inviting Poe to come to Richmond and join his staff, if there should be occasion for his services during the coming winter.(18)

Poe did come to Richmond, but only on a temporary basis. White wrote to Minor on August 18 that he had discharged Sparhawk as “regular editor” but that he would continue to receive assistance from Sparhawk and from Poe, who had promised to remain for one month. Evidently this arrangement was unsatisfactory, however, for early in September White wrote again to Minor, saying that he was acting as his own editor and that he had put together the July number himself. Poe had written several reviews, but, for reasons that we shall see later, he had not been entrusted with the editorship.

The problems Poe was to face when he did become a full-time member of the Messenger staff in October are reasonably clear. The owner and publisher, though he was unqualified as an editor, was determined to keep the editorial management of the journal as much as possible in his own hands. Then too, as we have seen, the journal's policy of encouraging Southern writers placed a restriction upon the editorial prerogative to accept contributions on the basis of merit. Finally, the Messenger under Heath's management had announced editorial opposition to harsh criticism, obviously with [page 72:] White's sanction; yet Poe's first fully authenticated review in the magazine employed the type of satire we have noted in the “Letter to Mr. — —.” Even against these odds, within one year Poe managed to transform the Messenger from an innocuous provincial journal into a nationally known publication, primarily if not entirely through his literary criticism. There were other difficulties of a more personal nature with White, but discussion of these will be reserved while an examination is made of the reviews attributed to Poe before he achieved some measure of editorial authority.

2

As might be expected, Poe's first reviews — if indeed they are his — show little of the quality that was to make him famous. The earliest one which with some reason can be attributed to him is a review of Robert Montgomery Bird's Calavar; or The Knight of the Conquest. The review appeared in February, 1835, and there is no external evidence connecting Poe with the Messenger before March, but Bird was reviewed three times in the journal, apparently by the same critic, and the last review is certainly Poe's.(19) The first review is distinctive only because the style is better than that of the other Messenger reviews in the first few numbers and because it sticks fairly well to its subject. Tucker was the only other Messenger reviewer who was capable of writing so well, and he was addicted to the essay-type review that was becoming common in American journals — discoursing at length on whatever struck his fancy, even if it was not directly connected with the book being reviewed. [page 73:]

It makes little difference, except for bibliographical accuracy, whether this review is accepted in the Poe canon or not; it can neither add to nor detract from his reputation. It is useful, however, as an illustration of the standards applied to the novel. The reviewer examined the work in terms of verisimilitude, characterization, and style, and concluded that, although “it is certainly the very best American novel, excepting one or two of Mr. Cooper's ... ,” it fails in one respect because it is “too unnatural even for romance.”(20) This sounds like Tucker, but Poe also employed the standard of nature in regard to the novel. Since there were no rules for the novel, the critic had to borrow his criteria from other genres. If the novel departed too obviously from verisimilitude, or if it made use of what William Gilmore Simms called “the wild and the wonderful,”(21) it could be considered as a romance and the demand for verisimilitude was mitigated. If it were a novel of manners, it was supposed to depict with fidelity the society upon which it focused. Journalistic critics were calling for lifelikeness long before the advent of realism, yet the fidelity to nature demanded by the critics of Poe's time was as different from the realism of William Dean Howells as Howells’ realism was different from the naturalism of Norris and Dreiser. What Poe and his fellow journalists demanded in a novel was Aristotelian probability in both action and character. Although Bird's Calavar was supposed to be a historical romance, the critic complained of its lack of probability: “There is too much improbability and miraculous agency in the various life-preserving expedients, and extraordinary rescues which are constantly occurring ... they impart to a tale founded on historical truth, an air of oriental fiction which is not agreeable.”

Characters too should be true to nature, and Bird, the reviewer thought, was no more qualified “to depict the female” than was Fenimore Cooper. Today we object to Cooper's idealized heroines because they do not come to life: they wander through the forests, unmussed in clothing and deportment, swooning at frequent intervals, [page 74:] and voicing only the proper sentiments. The reviewer of the 1830's was also annoyed by the somnambulism of Cooper's females, but he had no objection per se to their exemplary behavior. When Poe and his contemporaries came to judge a fictional character, they measured not by life itself but by what they thought people should be. We will find in later reviews that when Poe applauded fidelity to nature in character portrayal, he was speaking of idealized human nature, not the sweaty actual. Neither he nor his contemporaries approved of inconsistency in behavior — which is of course characteristic of real life. A female character in fiction should behave according to her station in society, her education, and the received moral standards of her class. If her behavior were inconsistent with these, she was considered unnatural.

An essay which appeared in a later number of the Messenger, though it is not Poe's, is worth quoting at length because it illustrates the attitude of many American critics toward fiction. After discoursing on the amount of moral good that could be achieved by a novel which observed the usual pieties, the anonymous essayist stated:

Thus the novel had value, but not aesthetic value. It was likely to be viewed as social history or, if a romance, as an instrument formative of character. This attitude underscores the necessity, as conceived by the critic of the 1830's, of characters being consistently [page 75:] good or evil. The idealized heroes of romances were models for emulation; the villains were dramatized warnings of the penalties of vice. To neglect this moral assessment in favor of intrinsic literary value, as Poe was increasingly prone to do, was thought by many to be an abdication of the critic's primary responsibility.

The review of Calavar, whether it is Poe's or not, is conventional enough in its approach. Here and there it follows the pattern set by Heath and Tucker, particularly in the apology for not examining the work closely: the critic would “forbear making quotations from the work, or entering into a more minute analysis of the story.” Unlike the Poe of later years, who was not provincial in his attitudes, this reviewer betrayed American self-consciousness by claiming that Calavar would not “shrink from competition with the very best European works of the same character.” If the review is Poe's, he was not yet sure enough of himself to deviate from the norms of American journalistic criticism. An American critic was expected to scrabble industriously among American publications to find something with which to answer Sydney Smith's contemptuous query, “ ‘Who reads an American book?”

Although William Doyle Hull lists several brief reviews in the April number as Poe's, the only one for which there is external evidence is the review of Confessions of a Poet.(23) This review is the first of the type that gained Poe the reputation of a literary hatchet man. In it some of his pet prejudices, which later were proposed as critical principles, first manifested themselves; chief among these was his distaste for any form of affectation. He was quick to point it out in this review: “The author has very few claims to the sacred name he has thought proper to assume. And indeed his own ideas on this subject seem not to satisfy himself. He is in doubt, poor man, of his own qualifications, and having proclaimed himself a poet in the title page, commences his book by disavowing all pretensions to the character. We can enlighten him on this head. [page 76:] There is nothing of the vates about him. He is no poet — and most positively he is no prophet. He is a writer of notes.” Explanatory notes were to be Poe's special abomination. Later he was to formulate the dictum that a poem should contain within itself all that was necessary for its comprehension; but as yet he merely ridiculed the author's method: “Lest his book should not be understood he illustrates it by notes, and then lest the notes should be understood, why he writes them in French. All this is very clear, and very clever to say no more.” What Poe would have said about Eliot's The Waste Land is alarming to contemplate.

Less forgivable, if we think that a literary critic should exercise caritas toward his subjects, is Poe's application to the unfortunate author of the mordant humor he had learned from his study of the reviews in Blackwood's Magazine:

Today we are likely to think that the author of the Confessions got no more than he deserved, but Thomas Willis White, who was afraid of offending anyone who might be in a position to injure his young journal, did not think so. Poe had to defend his review to White because an article in the Richmond Compiler charged that he had not read the book that he reviewed.(24)

It is difficult to understand American journalists’ uneasiness about harsh reviews without reference to reviewing practices in England for the preceding quarter-century. The British quarterlies had [page 77:] a reputation for savage reviewing. It was thought that Keats had been “killed” by criticism.(25) Everyone who kept up with literature was familiar with the fact that a lashing given to Byron's Hours of Idleness had provoked the hot-tempered lord's retaliation in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.” Sydney Smith, notorious for his contempt for American literature; William Gifford, who though not guilty was generally credited with the destruction of Keats's “Endymion” in the London Quarterly in 1818; Christopher North; and Francis Jeffrey had been feared, respected, or sometimes detested in America for years before Poe tried the “tomahawk” method.

Distaste for the harsh criticism of the early reviewers had been marked in the South. In 1816, Thomas Jefferson had written to William Wirt, upon publication of Wirt's biography of Patrick Henry: “You must expect to be criticized; and by a former letter I see you expect it. By the Quarterly Reviewers you will be hacked and hewed, with tomahawk and scalping knife. Those of Edinburgh, with the same anti-American prejudices, but sometimes considering us as allies against their administration, will do it more decently.”(26) Jefferson, an experienced politician, cynically expected political bias to control the tone of a review, but, like a few other Southern writers, he disliked analytical criticism. In the same letter he went on to say: “I have always very much despised the artificial canons of criticism. When I have read a work in prose and poetry, or seen a painting, a statue, etc., I have only asked myself [page 78:] whether it gives me pleasure, whether it is animating, interesting, attaching?”

Wirt, one of the most professional of the Virginia writers before Poe, fumed at a review of his book of essays, The Old Bachelor, by the American critic Robert Walsh. Walsh had charged Wirt with “extravagance of fancy,” but Wirt defended himself in a letter to Francis Walker Gilmer, asserting that Walsh's “fancy has no retina in common with mine; it does not reflect the same colours, nor the same objects.” But, he continued, “because this critic's auditory nerves are of lead, his eye dim, and his sensibility comparatively cold, my language is foolishness and hyperbole to him. This I verily believe is the chief ground of his censure.”(27) The fact that Wirt defended himself is not important — all writers are prone to do that. It is the nature of his defense that is revealing. Apparently he considered as the chief qualification of a critic the sensibility of genius. He goes on to say of Walsh:

Wirt's opinions remind us of Poe's insistence upon natural sensibility as a qualification for the critic, as well as of his early hostility toward criticism. Such opinions put into practice would result in appreciation, not analysis, and Poe's “letter” of 1831 was much more consonant with the attitude of Jefferson and Wirt than were the reviews he wrote after he became a journalist.

In order to understand the taboos Poe was violating when he reviewed [page 79:] Confessions of a Poet, it is necessary to examine the grounds upon which harsh criticism was usually based in the American journals of the 1830's. It was perfectly safe to be venomous toward a book, as Heath was in his review of Vathek, if atheism, irreverence, or immorality were either explicit or implicit in it. It was equally safe to condemn a book if it contained ideas that were considered daring, radical, or dangerous. The Southern distaste for transcendentalism, which Poe professed to share, had to do with the political, social, and religious implications of the philosophy. Among the transcendentalists were abolitionists, social levelers, and pantheists. Furthermore, transcendentalist jargon was “mystical” and “obscure.” Most good Americans thought that the truth should be clearly expressed and easy to understand.(28)

There were also the idiosyncrasies of individual editors or publishers. Heath's opposition to “fairy tales” and “German diablerie” was not based upon any aesthetic or philosophical consideration. He objected to the first because he considered fairy tales, like The Arabian Nights, trivial and childish and not fit “for the intellectual appetite.” He objected to the second on grounds of good taste and morality, often considered almost synonymous in American criticism.

Hostility toward a book on purely literary grounds was comparatively rare. “Affectation” and “striving for effect” were pejorative terms occasionally used in critiques, but these really had as much to do with the character of the author as with his work, for the work was an index to character. The demand for sincerity was normally made.(29) In the criticism of poetry, when an attempt was made to invoke an aesthetic standard, it was usually derived from the premises of taste. The critic simply held up the “beauties” and “sublimities” of the work for admiration. When he censured, he quoted the faulty passages, as Poe did in the “letter,” pronouncing them bad in ex cathedra fashion. Occasionally an American critic during the 1830's pointed out imaginative or fanciful passages of a [page 80:] poem, but not often did he follow Coleridge's lead and attempt to make a psychological distinction between the two. In fact, now and then a critic objected to “overheated” imagination or to “extravagant” fancy, echoing neoclassic opinion. There is no evidence of distrust of the imagination in the Messenger, however. Even Heath extolled the imagination in the manner of the Scottish critics when it obeyed the conventional moral sanctions. Reviewing the Sketches by Mrs. Sigourney, Heath wrote: “Though highly gifted with the powers of imagination, and of course capable of exciting that faculty in others, her object seems to be rather to touch the springs of the heart and awaken the moral feelings of our nature .... She is an example altogether worthy of imitation among the professors of literature, in enlisting all its allurements in the great cause of human virtue.”(30) Heath never forgot that the chief value of literature was moral edification, and he could never bring himself to believe that Poe's excursions into the horrible served any useful purpose. The critic, as well as the creative writer, was supposed to direct his efforts according to the accepted criteria of social value, to enlist in “the great cause of human virtue.”

These, then, were the critical practices Poe was expected to observe, the practices hallowed by custom and safe to follow. As we shall see, Poe followed some of them. He felt his way for a time, but as soon as he gained experience and assurance he began to search for viable aesthetic principles upon which to base his decisions, principles by which he could demonstrate literary merits or faults.

There is some evidence that Poe was called upon to furnish a number of reviews for the April issue other than that of Confessions of a Poet; but those that may be attributed to him are brief notices such as any reviewer might have written. His contributions to the May number, the first issue under Sparhawk, were reviews of John Pendleton Kennedy's Horse-Shoe Robinson(31) and Mrs. Frances Anne Butler's Journal. In reviewing Horse-Shoe Robinson Poe confronted the difficulty any critic faces when handling the [page 81:] work of a friend and benefactor. It would have been standard for a journalistic critic to praise the novel without reservation, perhaps comparing it favorably with the work of Scott. Actually, Poe's commendation is quite measured. He acknowledged that the “spirit of imitation” had been visible in Kennedy's first book, Swallow Barn, and had, “in great measure, over-clouded its rare excellence.” Horse-Shoe Robinson was original, however, and should, in Poe's opinion, “place Mr. Kennedy at once in the very first rank of American novelists.” If this statement appears exaggerated, we should remember that the only major American novelist at this time was Cooper. Simms and Bird were just beginning to attract attention.

Poe followed the journalistic norm for reviewing novels, giving copious extracts from the book and commenting on character and style. As Heath and Tucker did before him, he made an excuse for omitting consideration of the plot: “We do not wish to attempt any analysis of the story itself — or that connecting chain which unites into one proper whole the varied events of the novel. We feel that in so doing, we should, in some measure, mar the interest by anticipation; a grievous sin too often indulged in by reviewers, and against which, should we ever be so lucky as to write a book, we would protest with all our hearts.”

Perhaps there is more here than meets the eye. Poe made the same excuse as did Heath, but one suspects that with Heath the motivation was either lack of time or ability. Poe, however, as he was to prove shortly, did examine plot construction, although in the novel he did not consider it an absolute desideratum. Kennedy's plots were anything but well constructed, so Heath's old evasion served Poe well if he wished to avoid censuring the work of his benefactor. He did praise the character of Horse-Shoe Robinson without reservation: “He is the life and soul of the drama — the bone and sinew of the book — its very breath — its every thing which gives it strength, substance, and vitality.” Here Poe was sound enough, and he has been sustained by subsequent opinion. Nor did he find fault with Kennedy's style: “Its general character, as indeed the general character of all that we have seen from the same pen, is a certain unpretending simplicity, nervous, forcible, and altogether [page 82:] devoid of affectation. This is a style of writing above all others to be desired, and above all others difficult of attainment.” Poe was making a perfectly standard comment. “Simplicity,” with the overtones it carried of “nature's truth,” was admired by Poe's contemporaries.(32) A complicated, rhetorical style, on the other hand, was likely to be considered affected or obscure. Poe's statement that Kennedy's style was devoid of affectation would have been very meaningful to the Messenger reader. In the March number an essay entitled “Thoughts on Affectation” had expressed the conventional attitude. The essay begins with the definition from Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: “Affectation ... is ‘an artificial show, an elaborate performance, a false pretense, ... affected — studied with overmuch care, or with hypocritical appearance.’ “It is the opposite of “the most captivating of all graces — simplicity and truth.” Thus affectation was not simply a harmless mannerism to the critic of Poe's time, as the essay goes on to indicate: “Of all the diseases of the mind or the heart, affectation is the fittest subject of ridicule — since we are ridiculous not for what we are, but for what we pretend to be ... la belle nature is loveliest when embellished, not prostituted, by art, in its most vulgar form, viz: affectation.”(33) Sincerity and plainness were virtues Americans tended to arrogate to themselves, in contrast to sophisticated, “affected” Europeans. Thus, by saying Kennedy's style was devoid of affectation, Poe was paying him a high compliment both as a man and as a writer.

The chief fault that Poe found with Horse-Shoe Robinson, once [page 83:] he had ruled out consideration of the plot, was the punctuation. Even here he hedged a bit by saying that he did not know whether to blame the author or the printer. Kennedy used the dash to excess, a fault Poe dwelt upon at some length; he even rewrote one of Kennedy's paragraphs without dashes to prove that it would read as well with normal punctuation. In conclusion he commended, after the manner of Heath, the “high tone of morality, healthy and masculine,” that “breathes throughout the book,” but he took exception to the “too scrupulously rigid poetical justice” that was dealt out to all the “great and little villains of the story.” In this objection Poe revealed a difference from most American journalistic critics. As a rule the critic did not cavil at poetic justice. In fact, in the very same issue of the Messenger an article, probably by Spar-hawk, declares a certain novel defective because the villains receive the same reward as the virtuous characters.(34) Poe, though not averse to praising the high moral tone of a piece of fiction, was concerned with technique. Ordinarily he deplored the wrenching of plot that was sometimes necessary to reward virtue and punish vice. The denouement of a tale, he was to insist in later years, should be a consequence of previous action and character development.

A review of the Journal by Frances Anne Butler (the actress Fanny Kemble), which also appeared in the May issue, has been attributed to Poe.(35) Mrs. Butler's work was one of those criticisms of America by an English traveler that aroused resentment among sensitive citizens. The Messenger reviewer displayed a far more liberal attitude toward foreign criticism than did most of his countrymen. Patriotic outrage was discarded in favor of common sense: “To be indignant at gross misrepresentation of our country is an exhibition of patriotism in one of its most laudable forms. But the sentiment may be carried too far, and may blind us to evils and deficiencies [page 84:] in our condition, when pointed out by a foreigner, which it would be well for us rather to consider with a view to their amendment.”(36) Although he was open-minded toward Mrs. Butler's attitudes, the reviewer showed typical American prudishness in regard to her language: “the style and language is often coarse, we might say vulgar; and her more impassioned exclamations are often characterized by a vehemence which is very like profanity, an offence that would not be tolerated in a writer of the other sex. We cite a few from among the many passages which we have noted, as specimens of undignified, unfeminine, and unscholarlike phraseology ....”(37) This “unscholarlike phraseology” consisted of such expressions as dawdled, gulped, walloped, and pottered, which would have been objected to by Dr. Johnson on grounds of taste but without the overtones of moral reprehension that we sense in the American critic.

Unquestionably Poe could be prudish. He shared the attitudes of his time toward coarse language and the delicacy expected of “females,” but if the May review of Mrs. Butler's Journal was his, he soon changed his mind about her coarseness. In the December number of the Messenger, the first issue under his editorship, he dismissed the charge of vulgarity in a review of the Edinburgh Review, pointing out that the British journal “defends her from the ridiculous accusation of vulgarity (there is positively not an iota of vulgarity in the composition of Fanny Kemble) and very justly gives us a rap over the knuckles for our overweening vanity, self-sufficiency, and testiness of temper.”(38) The December review is definitely in the pungent Poe manner. If the May review was his, he was feeling his way, diplomatically displaying current attitudes toward gentility of language and female behavior (Tucker thought it disgraceful for the “sacred name” of a woman to be “profaned by the public breath”). In the December number, however, Poe was primarily responsible for the editorial criticism and, as we shall see, this new authority made a difference. If the earlier review was not his, it is quite possible that his defense of Fanny Kemble in December was an open challenge to the previous editorial standards. [page 85:] By the end of 1835 a new critical voice was speaking in the Messenger, and Poe wanted the world to know it.

Two reviews in the June, 1835, number of the Messenger are Poe's; the first is of Robert Montgomery Bird's The Infidel,(39) and the second, too perfunctory to discuss, is of Eliza Leslie's Pencil Sketches. Poe approves of The Infidel in measured terms, using the normative formula of praising exciting incidents, well-drawn characters, and enchanting descriptions of natural scenery. He impressed his own stamp on the review by a careful analysis of the author's style, finding fault only in the overuse of one “inelegant” word — working — used to describe the “convulsions of the countenance, under the influence of strong passions: as, his working and agonized visage ....” Poe preferred high-style, “elegant” language in all contexts except the humorous, but he was more concerned with taste than with verbal morality. Heath and Tucker, on the other hand, as was customary with American journalistic critics, had conceived it their duty to attack any expression that might ruffle the placid surface of linguistic gentility.

3

Although two reviews in the July, 1835, number of the Messenger were printed by Harrison in Poe's Works, a letter from White to Lucian Minor states that all the criticism in that issue was by Sparhawk;(40) but then Sparhawk was discharged and White called for help from Poe. At some time between July 20 and August 18, 1835, Poe came to Richmond. All of the book notices for the August number were his, but they were brief paragraphs obviously rushed through to meet a deadline. As yet Poe had no editorial authority, and White was reluctant to give him any, perhaps for the reason that appears in his letter to Minor on September 8. “Poe is now in my employ — not as Editor. He is unfortunately rather dissipated, — and therefore I can place very little reliance upon him. His disposition is quite amiable. He will be of some assistance to me in proof-reading — at least I hope so.” So much paper has been [page 86:] expended on Poe's drinking habits that it is supererogatory, to use one of his own favorite terms, to drag forth the matter again. But the letter quoted above was written before White should have developed any reservations about Poe on other grounds. True, he had objected, as did Heath, to the “horror” of Poe's “Berenice,”(41) and he had been a little alarmed at the reaction of the Richmond Compiler to Poe's first attempt at a satirical review; but, as he said, Poe was quite amiable. His only uneasiness about Poe in September of 1835 appears to have concerned his reliability; a man with a hangover is not at his best during office hours. This, on the face of it, accounts for his reluctance to extend editorial authority to Poe; it seems unlikely that White was so stupid as to fail to recognize the young man's flair for journalism.

On September 21 White wrote to Minor again: “Poe has flew [sic] the track already. His habits were not good. — He is in addition the victim of melancholy. I should not be at all astonished to hear that he had been guilty of suicide. I am now alone.” White was not in error about Poe's tendency toward melancholia. In a letter to Maria Clemm, his aunt, Poe revealed that he was extremely depressed by August 29, evidently because Mrs. Clemm was considering sending his cousin Virginia to live with Neilson Poe, a prosperous relative. This letter, full of the self-pity with which Poe was generously endowed, does hint at suicide. “Oh God have mercy on me. What have I to live for? Among strangers with not one soul to love me.”(42) Two weeks later Poe wrote to his friend Kennedy in the same vein, but without fixing a cause for his melancholy: “Excuse me, my dear Sir, if in this letter you find much incoherency. My feelings at this moment are pitiable indeed. I am suffering under a depression of spirits such as I have never felt before.”(43)

As he was prone to reveal his agony, Poe had probably expressed his feelings to his employer in equally vivid terms. Thus White was [page 87:] able to diagnose Poe as temperamental, and, sober citizen that he was, he feared to entrust the editorship of the Messenger to one so unstable. Evidently White had planned to offer Poe some form of permanent employment;(44) but between September 11, when Poe admitted his depression to Kennedy, and September 21, the date of White's second letter to Minor, Poe “flew the track,” and in spite of his urgent need for a literary editor White discharged him — or Poe returned to Baltimore on his own initiative. Before he left Richmond, Poe wrote all the reviews for the September number, but after his departure White's journal was in trouble. No October issue was published, and the November one was delayed until December, when it came out as Number 1 of Volume II. Thus Poe's undependability cost the Messenger two issues.

White had made up the August number, as he put it in a letter to Minor, “out of his wits,” but by September 29 he was at his wits’ end. On that date he wrote Poe the now famous letter censuring his drinking habits but holding out a conditional promise of reemployment. The letter seems to be in response to solicitations by Poe:

Unless White was being completely hypocritical in this letter, he admired Poe's talents, regretted losing him, and found fault only with his drinking — for moral and business reasons. Admirers of Poe's genius may fume over the patronizing tone used by a dull man to a brilliant one; but so is it ever when the dull man is in charge and the brilliant one has his problems. The upshot of the matter was that Poe did come to Richmond again, within a week after the date of White's letter. White wrote to Minor on October zo stating without comment that Poe was with him again. Four days later he again wrote to Minor, outlining his strategy for making Poe a sort of editor without title:

Why all this excess of caution? Did White simply wish to take credit for everything that happened in the magazine? Or was he afraid that Poe, who had demonstrated both his unreliability and a penchant for satirical reviews, would offend someone? If the latter, he could displace the blame by an editorial reminder that Poe was, after all, only a contributor. Obviously he did not want Poe to open the letter, for he directed Minor to address it to him personally. Why, above all, ask Minor to phrase an editorial notice for him? The “modest paragraph” should have been simple enough to write. [page 89:] The only answer which seems to make much sense is that Minor was a lawyer and would exercise legal caution. It seems that White wanted Poe to be editor in fact but not in title, and he wanted Minor to manage the public statement with great care because he distrusted Poe and wished to avoid any possibility of legal difficulty.

Poe had written the critiques for the September number, we presume, in the state of depression that prompted his drinking bout. Nevertheless, one of them shows traces of his mature approach in that it makes an effort to condemn on principle. The book he was reviewing was Mephistopheles in England, or The Confessions of a Prime Minister, anonymous, of course, as such pieces were likely to be. “The author,” Poe wrote, “whoever he may be, is a man of talent, of fine poetical taste, and much general erudition.” Having allowed this much, he proceeded to demolish the book itself: “It abounds with the coarsest and most malignant satire, at the same time evincing less of the power than of the will for causticity — and being frequently most feeble when it attempts to be the most severe. In this point it resembles the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The most glaring defect, however, in the structure of the book, is its utter want of keeping. It appears, moreover, to have no just object or end ....”(46) The last sentence shows that Poe was moving toward his most distinctive approach in criticism — the appraisal of a work as a teleological construct. In saying that the work had no “keeping,” he meant that it lacked the congruous association of various elements which would make it a harmonious whole. Furthermore, no controlling purpose or end was manifest. In his later criticism Poe showed an almost obsessive interest in the “pre-established design” of a work and the means by which the design was carried out, but in this brief review there is only a hint of what he was eventually to call a principle grounded in nature.

The only other review in the September issue worth mentioning is one of a translation of Euripides by the Reverend R. Potter.(47) In this review we can observe the difficulty which Poe was to have [page 90:] many times during his career as a professional critic: that of reviewing on short notice a book he really was not qualified to evaluate. Poe had a brilliant, absorptive mind, and his preparatory schools had been good ones. After his year at the University of Virginia he was undoubtedly better equipped to discuss Greek drama than even the most precocious sophomore of today, but he was certainly no expert in the field. Accordingly, he did what many another professional book reviewer has done, cribbed wholesale from the work of an acknowledged scholar. August -Wilhelm Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature had been translated into English and was available, so Poe used it liberally. He did give credit to Schlegel for the few direct quotations he used, but the indirect quotations and paraphrases were another matter. Almost the entire review was adapted from Lectures IV, V, and VIII of Schlegel's book, Poe merely rephrasing and reorganizing as he saw fit. Even in this borrowing, however, Poe did no more than one of the critics of the North American Review, who, in an essay entitled “Present Literature of Italy,” followed Schlegel slavishly for several pages with acknowledgment as scanty as Poe's.(48)

Some effort was made by journals to farm out books to reviewers who had special qualifications in the appropriate fields. Thus the Messenger often assigned books on law, history, and biography to Beverley Tucker, professor of law at the College of William and Mary. Frequently, however, a professional reviewer like Poe was expected to handle any book that turned up, whether the subject were oriental antiquities or medical jurisprudence. Poe reviewed these specialized studies as a matter of course, displaying a semblance of scholarship whenever he could. Much of the paraded learning of his reviews (and of his fiction, for that matter) came [page 91:] from the “research” he was forced to do as a reviewer. Fake erudition did not fool everyone, and then as now it was one of the marks of the hack. It was even satirized as such in a piece of fiction published in the Messenger for February, 1837, a month after Poe had left. The contempt expressed in this story for the harsh criticism and fake scholarship of the critic makes it worth quoting at length because it conveys the atmosphere in which a critic had to work in Poe's time.

This unkind description shows the attitude a “gentleman” frequently displayed toward the literary hack. Poe might have felt the projected image of the critic uncomfortably like his own, had he not possessed a somewhat lordly attitude himself. His publication of “Pinakidia” indicates that he wished to forestall this sort of criticism. It was the other American journalists who pilfered wholesale from such works as D’Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, not Poe. Much of the erudition displayed in periodical literature, he claimed, was derived from “either piecemeal cullings at second hand, from a variety of sources hidden or supposed to be hidden, or more audacious pilferings from those vast storehouses of brief facts, memoranda, and opinions in general literature, which are so abundant in all the principal libraries of Germany and France.”(49) [page 92:] Poe had published the “Pinakidia” only five months before the attack upon fake erudition appeared in the Messenger. Perhaps he had come to the conclusion, which would be in accord with his temperament, that the best defense was an attack, yet his own pilfering has been established beyond question. We are entitled to suspect that there was a motive other than self-aggrandizement behind the paraded erudition of Poe's reviews and fiction, particularly in view of the anti-intellectualism he displayed in the “Letter to Mr. —— ——” and in such tales as “The Colloquy of Monos and Una.” David K. Jackson is probably correct in his suggestion that the 175 items in “Pinakidia” had originally been intended as fillers in the Messenger.(50) It was already an established policy in the journal to use such materials, and in later years Poe found a ready market for similar items, some original but many, as various investigators have shown, culled from the handbooks of universal knowledge popular in both Europe and America. It was obviously Poe's intent in the “Pinakidia” to point out to the gullible public that the information and ideas so readily available in the journals and handbooks did not represent true scholarship on the part of the authors but only assiduity in the use of encyclopedias.

Americans, self-conscious about the shortcomings of the nation's culture, could never quite assume the bland contempt of pedantry characteristic of the British gentleman, even though some of them, including Poe himself, pretended to. American journals were making strenuous efforts to become purveyors of culture,(51) and Poe, although occasionally he was ironic about it, committed himself as a [page 93:] journalist to raising the American literary tone. His display of erudition, then, was not merely self-advertising but was related to the attempt of American journalism to educate a public that still manifested a colonial sensitivity to European charges of ignorance and vulgarity.

The difficulties Poe encountered as editor-sans-title for the Messenger were formidable. Considering his temperament and attitudes, one can safely say that some of these difficulties would have been present had he worked in any other region; but others may be associated with the peculiarly provincial nature of the Southern subculture. White had wanted to found a magazine, but he had wanted it to be a Southern, even a Virginian, magazine. As he wrote to Beverley Tucker in January of 1837, “I feel proud of the Messenger. I feel proud to believe that I have been the humble instrument of rearing up a publication which shall be a credit to my native State and Country.” But no credit, his letters to Tucker clearly indicate, was to be given to that scurrilous critic Edgar Poe. White's magazine had to put the South's best foot forward, which meant that it had to observe the customary pieties of Virginia society. How Poe earned a national reputation as a critic in spite of these inhibitory circumstances is our next topic.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 61:]

1.  Letters, I, 57-59. Poe indicated that he would send White one tale a month but said nothing about poems or book reviews.

2.  For a summary of the evidence see William Doyle Hull, “A Canon of the Critical Works of Edgar Allan Poe with a Study of Poe as Editor and Reviewer” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1941), 61.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 62:]

3.  George Balcombe and The Partisan Leader, both published in 1836.

4.  T. W. White to Lucian Minor, February 17, 1835, in David K. Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger (Richmond, 1934), 93-95. The pertinent letters from White to his advisers, Lucian Minor and Beverley Tucker, are in Jackson, 93-115, and hereafter in this chapter will be cited by date only.

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

5.  Allen, Philip Pendleton Cooke, 67-71.

6.  In July of 1835 Edward Sparbawk, White's second editor, printed this remark: “The quantity of rhyme poured in upon us, is indeed a matter of admiration. The effusions which we consign to outer darkness monthly, are past enumeration.” Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-35), 652.

7.  Ibid., 388.

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

8.  This opinion was expressed within a year by a Southern newspaper, the Newbern Spectator, after Poe's criticism had become well known. The Spectator charged that there was not enough talent in the South for the Messenger to adopt the tone of Jeffrey, Blackwood's, or Walsh. See Chapter VII, note;. Robert Walsh, a Philadelphia journalist, was the only American before Poe who had earned a reputation as a harsh critic. William Wirt had been angered by Walsh's criticism but in 1829 had advised Poe to get advice from Walsh about publishing his poems, and Poe had done so. See Letters, I, 20. One of the reviewers for Walsh's journal, Dr. James McHenry, learned that punishment for an overly harsh review could be swift. His assault upon William Cullen Bryant and Nathaniel Parker Willis in 1832 had aroused the enmity of the New York Knickerbocker, and the Knickerbocker rebuttal had destroyed him as a critic. See Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles (Durham, 1963), 64-67, for an account of the McHenry affair and its relevance as a forecast of what would happen to Poe a few years later. Regional rivalries were too intense for a journal to permit an “outside” attack upon a local author to go unpunished. For an account of these rivalries, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (New York, 1930); and Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (New York, 1956).

9.  Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-35), 324.

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

10.  Ibid., 255.

11.  In March, 1836, Poe wrote to the Richmond minister, John Collins McCabe, about the difficulty of making selections from the “mass of MSS.” and acknowledged his embarrassment at having to read contributions from friends. Letters, I, 86. He overcame his embarrassment enough to reject McCabe's poem, “The Consumptive Girl,” not on the grounds of its hackneyed subject (an astonishing number of poems were written about tuberculosis), but because of its defective versification. Poe also had to apologize to Beverley Tucker and Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and it is very probable that there were letters to unknown contributors that have been lost.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 68:]

12.  Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-35), 324. Heath had received some verses from a poet who signed himself “Fra Diavolo,” and he seized upon the occasion to make editorial remarks not only about the bad taste of writing poems featuring “lover fiends” but also about the folly of imitating such “vicious models as Byron, Shelly [sic], and other gentlemen of the ‘Satanic School.’ ” Several times he proclaimed his dislike for “fairy tales,” and he advised contributors to “throw aside the trammels of foreign reading.” Ibid., 64, 125, 377. Heath's attitude was precisely that of conservative British reviewers of some twenty years earlier. Southey and others had condemned the “Satanic School” and “lover fiends”; see William S. Ward, “Some Aspects of the Conservative Attitude Toward Poetry in English Criticism, 1798-1820,” PMLA, LX (1945), 397.

13.  Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-35), 189.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 69:]

14.  Tucker's reviews of Paulding's Slavery in the United States and of Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi are both printed in the Harrison edition of Poe's works. For the identification of Messenger authors other than Poe, I have been guided by David K. Jackson, Contributors and Contributions to the Southern Literary Messenger (Charlottesville, 1936).

15.  Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-3 5), 241

16.  Ibid., 246. Fairfield was also a journalist, having founded the North American Magazine in Philadelphia in 1832. The Messenger established closer relations with Baltimore and Philadelphia journals than with the New York and New England publications. It might have been predicted that Poe, after being rejected by New York, would go to Philadelphia, where he found a post in 1839.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 70:]

17.  See White to Lucian Minor, October 1, 1835, and November 23, 1835, for an expression of his reservations about Poe's reviewing methods. In a letter to Beverley Tucker dated April 26, 1837, White showed contempt for Poe's reviews and accused him of failing to read the books he reviewed. He was evidently afraid that Poe would make him legally liable and said as much concerning Poe's proposed inclusion of Cooper in the “Autography” series. White to Poe, September 29, 1835, in Works, XVII, 21. Cooper's habit of suing calumniators was well known. Poe was “no lawyer,” White exclaimed in the letter to Minor of November 23.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 71:]

18.  See Poe to White, June 22, 1835, in Letters, I, 63; Poe paraphrased White's offer in his reply.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 72:]

19.  The three novels reviewed were Calavar, The Infidel, and The Hawks of Hawk's Hollow. The author of the second review acknowledged the authorship of the first, and the author of the third indicated that he had already expressed his opinion of the previous two. However, he used the editorial “we,” and it is possible that he was simply acknowledging the fact that the two previous books had been reviewed by the Messenger. The third review is unquestionably Poe's, and the first two have been accepted by a number of bibliographers, including William Doyle Hull, Killis Campbell, David K. Jackson, and C. F. Heartman and J. R. Canny. Professor T. O. Mabbott, however, has written to me that he considers the two earlier reviews doubtful.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 73:]

20.  Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-3 5), 315.

21.  For a discussion of Simms's theory of the romance, see Edd Winfield Parks, William Gilmore Simms as Literary Critic (Athens, Ga., 1961), 10-22.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 74:]

22.  Southern Literary Messenger, I (18 34-3 5), 479.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 75:]

23.  Works, VIII, 2-3. The author of the Confessions was Laughton Osborn, a minor New York poet whose satire A Vision of Rubeta was also reviewed severely by Poe in 1845. Poe's letter to Osborn in 1845 professing admiration for the Confessions and denying authorship of the second review appears to be dishonest on both counts. See Letters, I, 294-95n.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 76:]

24.  Poe to White, May 30, 1835, in Letters, I, 59-60.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 77:]

25.  The first sentence of Poe's “The Duc De L’Omelette” is “Keats fell by a criticism,” a statement so out of place in the tale that it can be understood only by reference to Poe's intention in his projected “Tales of the Folio Club” to burlesque journalistic criticism. See Poe to Joseph and Edwin Buckingham, May 4, 1833, in Letters, I, 53. One of the members of the Folio Club was to be named Mr. Blackwood Blackwood. The irony is that in 1833 Poe was disposed to satirize criticism, while two years later he was defending satirical criticism in a letter to Beverley Tucker, December 1, 1835, ibid., 77. Poe's attitude toward criticism remained ambivalent for some time — until his necessary profession muted the protesting voice of the young poet.

26.  In Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1905), XII, 36.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 78:]

27.  In Richard Beale Davis, Francis Walker Gilmer: Life and Learning in Jefferson's Virginia (Richmond, 1939), 130.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 79:]

28.  Charvat, American Critical Thought, 7-26.

29.  For a discussion of the criterion of “sincerity” in romantic and Victorian criticism, see Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 298, 317-20.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 80:]

30.  Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-35), 22.

31.  Works, VIII, 4-11.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 82:]

32.  Poe, oddly enough, had just written a letter to White (April 30, 1835, Letters, I, 58) disparaging simplicity as a literary virtue: “Nobody is more aware than I am that simplicity is the cant of the day — but take my word for it no one cares any thing about simplicity in their hearts. Believe me also, in spite of what people say to the contrary, that there is nothing easier in the world than to be extremely simple.” By the evidence of this statement Poe adopted the “cant of the day” in order to say something good about the style of his friend.

33.  Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-35), 365. The author was John H. Bernard, of “Caroline,” according to a letter from T. W. White to Lucian Minor dated April 18, 1835. White disparaged the essay, probably because it was more platitudinous than most.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 83:]

34.  Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-35), 481.

35.  Several bibliographers have listed this review in the Poe canon, but I have considered it doubtful on the basis of style and attitude. In response to my query, Professor T. O. Mabbott indicated that it was probably not Poe's.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 84:]

36.  Works, VIII, 25.

37.  Ibid., 22.

38.  Ibid., 86.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 85:]

39.  Ibid., 32-37.

40.  August 18, 1835.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 86:]

41.  Poe to White, April 30, 1835, in Letters, I, 57-58. Poe admitted that “Berenice” was too horrible but undertook a defense of exaggerated effects in short tales and claimed that magazines had owed their success to such tales.

42.  Ibid., 69-71.

43.  Ibid., 73.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 87:]

44.  In the letters cited above, Poe told Mrs. Clemm that White was going to pay him $60 a month, but he told Kennedy that the salary would be $520 a year.

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45.  In Works, XVII, 20-21.

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46.  Ibid., VIII, 42.

47.  Ibid., 43-47.

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48.  That such acknowledgment was not considered necessary, even by scholars, is indicated by the fact that James Marsh, author of this essay, was a professor of languages and eventually became president of the University of Vermont. He did give Schlegel credit in a single footnote, but his use of Schlegel's Lectures is far more extensive than the footnote implies. See James Marsh, “Present Literature of Italy,” North American Review, XV (1822), 104-130, for the material on Italian drama that resembles Schlegel's work.

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49.  Works, XIV, 38.

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50.  “Poe Notes: ‘Pinakidia’ and ‘Some Ancient Greek Authors,’ “ American Literature, V (1933), 258-59.

51.  One of the curious byproducts of these efforts to educate the public was the “knowledge” magazine, which Mott has noted as existing in England and France as well as in America. The Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge was founded in New York in 183o, the Weekly Abstract of General Knowledge in 1833, and the Monthly Abstract of General Knowledge in 1834. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 363-65. Poe's “Pinakidia” was a timely journalistic endeavor, but, more than that, his prefatory note was an honest appraisal of the situation. Erudition was a salable commodity in a society that offered unparalleled opportunity for social mobility, and Poe was a professional journalist.