Edgar Allan Poe by Jeffrey Meyers

Author:Jeffrey Meyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 1992-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Ignoring the generous fraction of genius, Poe angrily attacked Lowell’s poem in the Southern Literary Messenger of March 1849. He justified his learned discourse on metrics and, appealing to Southern resentment of Yankee interference in their traditional way of life, gave a final kick by condemning Lowell’s politics:

The Fable is essentially “loose”—ill-conceived and feebly executed, as well in detail as in general. . . . [It is] a book at once so ambitious and so feeble—so malevolent in design and so harmless in execution—a work so roughly and clumsily yet so weakly constructed. . . .

So far from Mr. P.’s talking “like a book” on the topic at issue, his chief purpose has been to demonstrate that there exists no book on the subject worth talking about; and “common sense,” after all, has been the basis on which he relied, in contradistinction from the uncommon nonsense of Mr. L. and the small pedants. . . .

Mr. Lowell is one of the most rabid Abolition fanatics; and no Southerner who does not wish to be insulted, and at the same time revolted by a bigotry the most obstinately blind and deaf, should ever touch a volume by this author.16

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