Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Edgar Allan Poe
Review of "Orion" by R. H. Horne Graham's Magazine
Graham's Magazine, March 1844
[Full text]

Poe argues here that Horne (1806-1870) was infected with "the customary cant of the day – the cant of the muddle-pates who dishonor a profound and ennobling philosophy by styling themselves transcendentalists." According to Poe, Horne's fashionable error was to conceive of his poem as an "experiment upon the mind of a nation." Rather than trying to argue for particular ideas or causes, Poe insists "that under the sun there exists no work more intrinsically noble, than ... [a] poem�written solely for the poem's sake."

Boston Public Library, Research Library Collection