The Poe-Griswold Controversy

Killis Campbell

doi:10.2307/456891

The Poe-Griswold Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020

Killis Campbell

Article contents

Extract
References

Get access

Rights & Permissions

Extract

In any serious consideration of Poe's life and character it will be necessary to take account of Griswold's estimate of the poet. This estimate was set forth in two articles published during the year following Poe's death—one, an obituary notice published in the New York Tribune of October 9, 1849; the other, the memoir of Poe included by Griswold in his edition of Poe's works and first published in September, 1850. Out of these two papers sprang the bitterest of all the controversies that have been waged about Poe. Most of Poe's editors and biographers of the present generation have ranged themselves on the side of Poe and have condemned Griswold; but there have been some—and among them some that may speak with the highest authority—who have held that Griswold's estimate of Poe is essentially just and fair. The present paper attempts a fresh examination of the case in the light of the evidence collected by Poe's biographers, and also brings to bear on the case a number of documents, mainly from the periodicals of Griswold's time, that have heretofore been either overlooked or ignored.

Type: Research Article
Information: PMLA , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , 1919 , pp. 436 - 464

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/456891 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1919

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

^{page 437 note 1} Griswold's edition of Poe's works, i, p. xxi. This edition is hereafter referred to merely by Griswold's name. My references are to the edition of 1856.

^{page 437 note 2} Virginia Poe, ed. Harrison and others, xv, p. 215.

^{page 437 note 3} At the same time, however, he limits the number of Poe's poems that he includes in his anthology to three, although he had made room for twenty-five of Percival's poems and no fewer than thirty-three of Charles Fenno Hoffman's.

^{page 437 note 4} See the Boston Miscellany for November, 1842, and the Virginia Poe, xi, p. 156. There was also a review in Graham's Magazine for June, 1842, which Poe probably wrote.

^{page 437 note 5} Griswold, i, p. xxi.

^{page 437 note 6} The Critic, April 16, 1892.

^{page 437 note 7} Woodberry's Life of Poe, i, p. 353; ii, p. 87.

^{page 437 note 8} Modern Language Notes, March, 1913, xxviii, p. 68.

^{page 437 note 9} Not included among Poe's works by any of his editors, but assigned to him by W. M. Griswold in Passages from the Correspondence of Rufus W. Griswold, p. 118, and, apparently also by L. G. Clark, in the Knickerbocker, April, 1843 (xxi, p. 380).

^{page 437 note 10} The article is republished by W. F. Gill in his Life of Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 327–346, and is accepted as Poe's both by Harrison (who prints it in the Virginia Poe, xi, pp. 220–243) and by Woodberry (ii, p. 48).

^{page 437 note 11} Griswold, i, p. xxi.

^{page 437 note 12} Letter of Briggs to Lowell, quoted by Woodberry, ii, p. 123.

^{page 437 note 13} Griswold, i, p. xxii.

^{page 437 note 14} See Griswold, i, p. xxii; Virginia Poe, xvii, pp. 196, 198.

^{page 437 note 15} Griswold, i, p. xxii; Virginia Poe, xvii, p. 203.

^{page 437 note 16} In his review of “The Magazines” in the Broadway Journal of May 17, 1845 (in a note on Hoffman's sketch of Griswold in Graham's Magazine for June, 1845), and in his notice of Griswold's edition of The Prose Works of John Milton in the Broadway Journal for September 27, 1845 (reprinted in the Virginia Poe, xii, pp. 244–247).

^{page 437 note 17} See Poe's letters of October 26 and November 1, 1845: Griswold, i, p. xxii.

^{page 437 note 18} Not published till the spring of 1847.

^{page 437 note 19} He mildly condemns Poe's work as a critic, however; and in later editions he was less liberal in his praise of the tales.

^{page 437 note 20} See the list given by him of articles he had published about Griswold, in a letter written in the year of his death (Griswold, i, p. xxii), in which he includes the item “Letter in Int., 1847.” “Int.” is perhaps an abbreviation for Intelligencer, but a fairly careful hunt through the columns of the National Intelligencer for 1847 reveals nothing that I can recognize as Poe's.

^{page 437 note 21} Or, possibly, late in 1845: see Poe's animadversions on Griswold's poetical anthology in the Broadway Journal of November 29, 1845. Evidently this breach did not extend to a complete severance of relations; see Griswold's Correspondence, p. 230, for mention of a meeting in 1847, and Griswold's Memoir (Poe's Works, i, p. xlii) for a meeting in 1848.

^{page 437 note 22} Griswold, i, p. iii.

^{page 437 note 23} See, in this connection, Sartain, Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, p. 215.

^{page 437 note 24} This article I have not seen, nor do I know precisely at what date it appeared; but something of its nature we may glean from a letter of Poe's written at the time apparently to Eveleth (see Ingram, Life and Letters of Poe, p. 222), and a clue to the date is furnished by his reference to it in a letter to Mrs. Whitman, written November 26, 1848 (Last Letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, p. 43).

^{page 437 note 25} Griswold, iii, pp. 289–292.

^{page 437 note 26} Ibid., i, p. xxiii.

^{page 442 note 1} The article is reprinted in the Virginia Poe, i, pp. 348–359.

^{page 442 note 2} Ibid., i, pp. 360–367.

^{page 442 note 3} It should be noted, however, that this testimony conflicts with. the testimony given by Willis in an earlier notice of Poe (Some Journal, December 19, 1846), in which he tells of having seen Poe on one occasion when the poet was suffering from the effects of drink.

^{page 442 note 4} In Graham's Magazine for March, 1850 (xxxvi, pp. 224–226).

^{page 442 note 5} American Whig Review, March, 1850 (xi, pp. 308–315).

^{page 442 note 6} The Knickerbocker, xxxv, pp. 163–164.

^{page 442 note 7} See Woodberry, ii, pp. 452–453. I have not seen this article.

^{page 442 note 8} Solden's Review, iv, pp. 765–766. The article was unsigned, but was evidently by Briggs, who was editor of the magazine.

^{page 442 note 9} Southern Literary Messenger, xvi, pp. 172–187.

^{page 442 note 10} It is only fair to Poe to say that three of these five—Briggs, Clark, and Daniel—nursed a grudge of some sort against Poe. Briggs and Poe had quarrelled in 1845 over the Broadway Journal, and Poe had been attacked by Briggs in the Literati papers (Virginia Poe, xv, pp. 20–23); Clark, also, had been “used up” by Poe in the Literati papers (Virginia Poe, xv, pp. 114–116); and Daniel had been challenged by Poe to fight a duel in the summer of 1848 (Woodberry, ii, pp. 273, 443 ff.; Whitty, The Complete Poems of Poe, p. lxix).

^{page 445 note 1} It first appeared about the middle of September, 1850: see the New York Tribune for September 14, 1850, and the Literary World for September 21, 1850. It was also published about the same time in the International Monthly Magazine (for October, 1850); see the New York Tribune of September 25 and the Literary World of September 28, 1850.

The “Memoir,” though first published in the third volume of Griswold's edition, was transferred to the first volume on the publication of a second edition in 1853, and it continued to occupy this position on the publication of an edition of four volumes in 1856.

^{page 445 note 2} Griswold, also, in a note prefixed to the Memoir interprets his office to be simply “the collection of his works and their publication.”

^{page 445 note 3} This letter is preserved among the Griswold Papers in the Boston Public Library. See also a letter of Griswold to John Pendleton Kennedy (Sewanee Review, April, 1917, xxv, p. 198).

^{page 445 note 4} See in this connection a letter to J. T. Fields (of September 25, 1850), published in Passages from the Correspondence of Griswold, p. 267.

^{page 445 note 4a} Griswold, i, p. xxvi.

^{page 445 note 5} Ibid., p. xxvii.

^{page 445 note 6} Ibid., p. xxvii.

^{page 445 note 7} Ibid., p. xlviii.

^{page 445 note 8} Ibid., p. xlix.

^{page 445 note 9} Ibid., p. xlvii.

^{page 445 note 10} Reprinted in Littell's Living Age, xxxiii, pp. 422–424.

^{page 445 note 11} Ibid., xxxvii, pp. 157–161.

^{page 445 note 12} First published in the London Critic, and reprinted in the Southern Literary Messenger for April, 1854, and in Littell's Living Age, xli, pp. 166–171.

^{page 445 note 13} That this review was from the pen of Thompson is established by a letter of Thompson's, of September 30, 1850, to Griswold; now among the Griswold Papers.

^{page 445 note 14} See the Knickerbocker, October, 1850 (xxxvi, pp. 370–372).

^{page 445 note 15} Edinburgh Review, cvii, pp. 420–4.21.

^{page 445 note 16} A Third Gallery of Portraits, London, 1854, p. 376. Another clergyman, A. K. H. Boyd (Critical Essays of a Country Parson, p. 248,—see also Fraser's Magazine for June, 1857), is perhaps echoing this statement of Gilfillan's when he asserts that “Poe starved his wife, and broke her heart.”

^{page 445 note 17} Probably the editor of the Post, Henry Peterson.

^{page 445 note 18} Fraser's Magazine, June, 1857 (lv, pp. 684–700). Also in Critical Essays of a Country Parson, London, 1867, pp. 210–248.

^{page 445 note 19} Democratic Review, February, 1851 (xxviii, p. 172).

^{page 445 note 20} Literary World, September 21, 1850 (vii, pp. 228–229).

^{page 445 note 21} Ingram's Life and Letters of Poe, p. 432.

^{page 445 note 22} Graham's Magazine, December, 1850.

^{page 445 note 23} See the Home Journal for October 18, 1856.

^{page 445 note 24} Nineteenth Century, v, pp. 19–33.

^{page 445 note 25} National Magazine, ii, p. 197.

^{page 445 note 26} See Graham's Magazine, February, 1854, xliv, pp. 216–225. He further declares that Poe was a “long-suffering, much-persecuted, greatly-belied man [who] had a soul as soft, as delicate, as tender as a child's ”and that“ every effervescence of excess, of anger, of irritation, or of wrong done to others, was followed by an agony of penitence, and oftentimes by earnest, long-sustained and half-successful efforts at reformation.” He explains the attacks upon Poe after his death as dictated largely by a spirit of revenge on the part of those whom he had antagonized by his criticisms and reviews. But he admits that Poe's criticisms were in some cases unjust; and he instances his attacks upon Longfellow as among the few that were “utterly unjust.”

^{page 445 note 27} “Edgar Poe: sa vie et ses æuvres”; published as an introduction to his translation of Poe's tales.

^{page 445 note 28} Russell's Magazine, November, 1857 (ii, p. 171).

^{page 445 note 29} Knickerbocker, January, 1857 (ixi, p. 106).

^{page 445 note 30} See especially pp. 284–285. See also a more detailed defense of Poe by Wilmer in the Baltimore Daily Commercial, May 23, 1866.

^{page 445 note 31} Poe and his Critics, pp. 11, 14, 15.

^{page 445 note 32} Onward, April, 1869, i, pp. 305–308.

^{page 445 note 33} Newark Northern Monthly, January, 1868.

^{page 445 note 34} Discussions and Diversions, by Parke Van Parke, p. 264.

^{page 445 note 35} Griswold, i, p. xxv.

^{page 445 note 36} Virginia Poe, i, pp. 344–346.

^{page 445 note 37} Griswold, relying on Poe's autobiographical memorandum, gives the date as 1811.

^{page 445 note 38} Griswold had followed Poe in stating that the period of his stay in England was 1816 to 1822; in reality it covered the years 1815 to 1820.

^{page 445 note 39} This yarn survives in several different versions, all apparently traceable to Poe. See Woodberry, i, pp. 72 ff., 365 ff., and the Sewanee Review for April, 1912 (xx, pp. 209–210).

^{page 445 note 40} See the Virginia Poe, i, pp. 146–148, and Woodberry, i, pp. 194–198. Griswold, however (i, pp. xlviii-xlix), badly overstates the case against Poe as a plagiarist.

^{page 445 note 41} Southern Literary Messenger, xvi, p. 176.

^{page 445 note 42} Among minor inaccuracies in Griswold's account are the allegations (1) that Poe was not born at Boston (Griswold, i, p. xxxvii); (2) that “not a line by Poe was purchased for Graham's Magazine” for “four or five years” before the poet's death (ibid., p. li: in reality two articles by Poe appeared in Graham's in 1849); and (3) that Poe “prepared with his own hands” the sketch of his life contributed by H. B. Hirst to the Saturday Museum in February, 1843 (ibid., p. 1).

^{page 445 note 43} Griswold, i, p. xlviii; Virginia Poe, xvii, pp. 408–409.

^{page 445 note 44} Mrs. Whitman (l. c., p. 15) speaks also of an article in the Borne Journal, in 1859, or slightly earlier, in which a “calumnious story” proceeding from Griswold was refuted.

^{page 445 note 45} Griswold, i, p. xxviii; Edgar Allan Poe: A Memorial Volume, ed. Miss S. S. Rice, p. 59.

^{page 445 note 46} Griswold, i, pp. lii-liv.

^{page 445 note 47} Ibid., p. xlvii.

^{page 445 note 48} Five of these (see the Virginia Poe, xvii, pp. 83–84, 198, 200–201, 202–203, 216) are in the Boston Public Library (four of the number being postmarked originals); and the sixth (ibid., pp. 346–347)— which is unhappily incomplete as preserved—is in the Wrenn Library of the University of Texas.

^{page 445 note 49} One of these is printed in the Virginia Poe (xvii, pp. 200–202) with the two versions juxtaposed.

^{page 445 note 49a} For each of these letters I use Griswold's text (l. c., i, p. xxii) as the basis for comparison. Certain minor variations from the manuscript originals are not taken account of.

^{page 445 note 50} Griswold, i, p. xxii.

^{page 445 note 51} Here Poe quotes four lines from The Raven, dividing them each into two lines: see the Virginia Poe, xvii, p. 202.

^{page 445 note 52} The original manuscript has “the line” where Griswold has “you have,” and “should read” where Griswold has “for”; and also has the word “alteration” where Griswold has “correction.”

^{page 445 note 53} This sentence appears as a postscript in the original manuscript.

^{page 445 note 54} That Griswold did, in one instance, follow a discarded first draft of one of Poe's letters—a letter to Mrs. Jane E. Locke—is established by examination of the manuscript (now in the Boston Public Library) on which he based his text of this letter (Griswold, i, p. xli). In this instance, however, he did not have the original manuscript in hand: see Griswold's Correspondence, p. 265.

^{page 445 note 55} Griswold points out in his Memoir (i, p. li) two instances in which Poe, in quoting from letters received by him, departed slightly from his originals. But Poe's derelictions in this particular will scarcely be held to excuse or to palliate Griswold's.

^{page 445 note 56} It seems that Griswold also took liberties with at least one other letter. In his Memoir (i, p. xlvii) he quotes a brief excerpt from a letter of Poe's to P. P. Cooke, one sentence of which differs in one important particular from the. original. The second sentence of this excerpt, as quoted by Griswold, reads as follows: “The last selection of my tales was made from about seventy by one of our great little cliquists and claquers, Wiley and Putnam's reader, Duyckinck.” In the manuscript of this letter as preserved among the Griswold Papers the words, “one of our great little cliquists and claquers,” do not appear. He also took the liberty, it seems, as Professor Harrison has pointed out (Virginia Poe, xvii, p. 198), of abridging and otherwise altering, in his Memoir, one of his own letters to Poe.

^{page 459 note 1} Literary World, September 21, 1850.

^{page 459 note 2} Poe's Works, Edinburgh, 1874, i, p. lxi.

^{page 459 note 3} Life of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 179.

^{page 459 note 4} Virginia Poe, xv, pp. ix, 263.

^{page 459 note 5} Ibid., x, pp. vi-vii.

^{page 459 note 6} See the variant readings as reported by Stedman and Woodberry, by Harrison, and by other editors.

^{page 459 note 7} See, for instance, the variant readings of The Raven, Lenore, and Bream-Land.

^{page 459 note 8} See the list of errata collected by the editors of the Virginia Poe.

^{page 459 note 9} It is altogether probable, for instance, that Griswold was responsible for the combining of the several articles in reply to “Outis” into one article.

^{page 459 note 10} Griswold, m, pp. 87–99; reprinted in the Virginia Poe, xv, pp. 271–288.

^{page 459 note 11} In an unsigned review in the New York Nation for December 4, 1902, p. 446. I owe it to Professor Woodberry to say that I have been anticipated by him in still other points made in this section of the present paper and, likewise, in the general conclusions that I have reached as to Griswold's editing. I trust that it will not seem improper for me to add that I reached my main conclusions independently and before I knew of Professor Woodberry's article.

^{page 459 note 12} Griswold, iii, pp. 101–104; Virginia Poe, xv, pp. 266–270.

^{page 459 note 13} The Nation, l. c., p. 446.

^{page 459 note 14} Either in Poe's references to it in his letters or in contemporary advance notices of it in the press.

^{page 459 note 15} The rest of the title-page of this manuscript, which is dated “1848,” runs in part as follows: “Some Honest Opinions about our Autorial Merits and Demerits / with / Occasional Words of Personality. / By Edgar A. Poe.”

^{page 459 note 16} The chief reviews which exhibit important variations in the Griswold edition are those on Hawthorne (Griswold, iii, pp. 188–202; Virginia Poe, xiii, pp. 142–155, xi, 104–113), the Davidson sisters (Griswold, iii, pp. 219–228; Virginia Poe, x, pp. 174–178, 221–226), E. M. Bird (Griswold, iii, pp. 257–261; Virginia Poe, viii, pp. 63–73, ix, pp. 137–139), Griswold (Griswold, iii, pp. 283–292; Virginia Poe, xi, pp. 147–160), Longfellow (Griswold, iii, 292–334; Virginia Poe, xii, pp. 41–106), a second paper on Longfellow (Griswold, iii, pp. 363–374; Virginia Poe, xi, pp. 64–85), Mrs. Browning (Griswold, iii, pp. 401–424; Virginia Poe, xii, pp. 1–35), and R. H. Horne (Griswold, m, pp. 425–444; Virginia Poe, xi, pp. 249–275). By a most unhappy oversight, the last six paragraphs of the second of the two papers on the Davidson sisters (as published in Graham's Magazine for December, 1841) are omitted in the Virginia Poe (x, p. 226), thus making Griswold's supposed irregularities in the case of this article appear much more serious than they actually are.

The paper on Mrs. Lewis (Griswold, iii, pp. 242–249; Virginia Poe, xiii, pp. 215–225) for which no place of prior publication has hitherto been pointed out, appeared condensed and freely paraphrased in the sketch of Mrs. Lewis included by Griswold in his anthology of The Female Poets of America. The papers on Bayard Taylor and William Wallace, which Griswold prints as separate articles (iii, pp. 207–209, 240–241), were printed originally in the Marginalia (Virginia Poe, xvi, pp. 145–148, 175–177).

^{page 459 note 17} In the case of the Marginalia the order adopted by Griswold is so radically different from that originally adopted as to present a veritable puzzle to one who would unravel the mystery of their arrangement. So far as I can discover, no logical system of arrangement has been followed by Griswold. It looks as though the separate items might have been thrown pellmell into a basket and then taken out at haphazard and published in the order drawn.

^{page 459 note 18} See Woodberry, ii, p. 96. In a notice of this projected work, in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier of July 25, 1846, moreover, the statement is made that it will “embrace the whole Union”; and a similar statement was made by Hirst in his sketch of Poe in the Saturday Museum.

^{page 459 note 19} This point has been dwelt on by Professor Woodberry, l. c., p. 446.

Article contents

The Poe-Griswold Controversy

Extract

Access options

References

Save article to Kindle

Save article to Dropbox

Save article to Google Drive

Reply to: Submit a response

Your details

You have entered the maximum number of contributors

Conflicting interests