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Poe's Reputation in England and America, 1850-1909

1942; Duke University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2920972

1527-2117

Dudley R. Hutcherson,

Publishing and Scholarly Communication

IT HAS BEEN Edgar Allan Poe's fortune-or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the writer himself provided adequate insurance-that nothing connected with his name is dull, not even the story of his fame.' In the New York Tribune two days after Poe's death, Rufus W. Griswold, signing himself Ludwig, presented, anticipation, one surmises, of the weight of his words, the conclusions which were to be for thirty years or more the major issues in the Poe controversy. Griswold also edited in I850, at the insistence, he stated, of Poe's friends who remembered the dead writer's wish,2 the collected works.3 There are three prefatory notices. Lowell's excellent study, first published in Graham's in February, I845, is reprinted with a number of omissions and additions.4 N. P. Willis's memoir from the Home Journal of October 20, I849, containing a vigorous refutation of the Ludwig assault, is given alteration. Griswold's own memoir affirms and amplifies the Ludwig piece. In his review5 of the i85o edition, Poe's old enemy Lewis Gaylord Clark declared that Poe's intellectual character could now be considered without any of those disadvantages which his personal conduct constantly presented as barriers to the appreciation of his genius. Clark was willing to grant to Poe's work an enduring 1 The present study begins approximately where the late Professor Killis Campbell ended his Contemporary Opinion of Poe, The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1933). In order to give a full picture of the period considered it has been necessary in the first paragraphs to refer sometimes to material Professor Campbell used, and to material considered in much greater detail by Professor Arthur Hobson Quinn in Edgar Allan Poe (New York, I94I), pp. 642-695. 2 See The Literati (New York, I 85o), Griswold's preface, p. v. 'The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe . . . (2 vols., New York, x850). The third volume, The Literati, to which Griswold's memoir was prefixed, appeared a few months later. 4 For a discussion of Griswold's part in these changes, see Quinn, op. cit., pp. 658-660. It is also to be taken into account that Lowell's feeling toward Poe had changed since I845 (see H. E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell, I, I62-I67; letter to C. F. Briggs, Aug. 21, I845, Letters of James Russell Lowell, I, 99-I02; Quinn, oP. ci., p. 455). 5Knickerbocker, XXXV, I63-I64 (Feb., I850).