1 - The Man That Was Used Up: Poe's Place in American Literature, 1849–1909

Summary

Edgar Allan Poe is dead.

He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday.

This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.

THESE INFAMOUS WORDS, written by the Rev. Rufus Wilmot Griswold and published in the New York Tribune on October 9, 1849, two days after Poe's death, mark the beginning of Poe's afterlife. The Baltimore Sun had reported Poe's death a day earlier, and had also cast doubt on how fondly Poe would be remembered, declaring that this news “will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it” (A. H. Quinn 644). Similarly, the New York Journal of Commerce on October 9 hoped that recollection of everything about him other than his “great ability” would be “lost now, and buried with him in the grave” (Walker, Critical 303). But it was Griswold, the Poe-lover's arch villain, who deserves credit for assuring that Poe would have an afterlife worth writing a book about. The flat declamation of Ludwig's opening sentences, more like the opening lines of a hardboiled detective novel than an obituary, evokes the unsentimental message, but he loosens up his prose style to explain why few will be grieved:

The poet was known, personally or by reputation, in all this country; he had readers in England, and in several of the states of Continental Europe; but he had few or no friends; and the regrets of his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art lost one of its most brilliant and erratic stars.

(Walker, Critical 294)