The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [876]
POE.
These are all the letters (unless I have given away some notes of his to autograph collectors) ever received by me from Mr. Poe. They are a sufficient answer to the article by John Neal, and to that under the signature of “George R. Graham,” which have induced their publication. I did not undertake to dispose of the poem “Annabel Lee,” but upon the death of the author quoted it in the notice of him in “The Tribune,” and I was sorry to learn soon after that it had been purchased and paid for by the proprietors of both “Sartain’s Magazine,” and “The Southern Literary Messenger.”
R.W.G.
NEW-YORK, September 2, 1850.
OF CRITICISM — PUBLIC AND PRIVATE.
[In 1846, Mr. Poe published in The Lady’s Book a series of six articles, entitled “The Literati of New-York City,” in which he professed to give “some hones opinions at random respecting their autorial merits, with occasional words of personality.” The series was introduced by the following paragraphs, and the personal sketches were given in the order which they are here reprinted, from “George Bush” to “Richard Adams Locke.” The other notices of American and Foreign writers, were contributed by Mr. Poe to various journals, chiefly in the last four or five years of his life.]
IN a criticism on Bryant, I was at some pains in pointing out the distinction between the popular “opinion” of the merits of cotemporary authors, and that held and expressed of them in private literary society. The former species of “opinion” can be called “opinion” only by courtesy. It is the public’s own, just as we consider a book our own when we have bought it. In general, this opinion is adopted from the journals of the day, and I have endeavoured to show that the cases are rare indeed in which these journals express any other sentiment about books than such as may be attributed directly or indirectly to the authors of the books. The most “popular,” the most “successful” writers among us, (for a brief period, at least,) are, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, persons of mere address, perseverance, effrontery — in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks. These people easily succeed in boring editors (whose attention is too often entirely engrossed by politics or other “business” matter) into the admission of favorable notices written or caused to be written by interested parties — or, at least, into the admission of some notice where, under ordinary circumstances, no notice would be given at all. In this way ephemeral “reputations” are manufactured, which, for the most part, serve all the purposes designed — that is to say, the putting money into the purse of the quack and the quack’s publisher; for there never was a quack who could be brought to comprehend the value of mere fame. Now, men of genius will not resort to these manœuvres, because genius involves in its very essence a scorn of chicanery; and thus for a time the quacks always get the advantage of them, both in respect to pecuniary profit and what appears to be public esteem.
There is another point of view, too. Your literary quacks court, in especial, the personal acquaintance of those “connected with the press.” Now these latter, even when penning a voluntary, that is to say, an uninstigated notice of the book of an acquaintance, feel as if writing not so much for the eye of the public as for the eye of the acquaintance, and the notice is fashioned accordingly. The bad points of the work are slurred over, and the good ones brought out into the best light, all