Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Poe & Hawthorne

Perhaps because Poe identified with the little-known author of Twice-Told Tales (1837; 1842), his first review of Hawthorne's work, published in Graham's Magazine in 1842, was mostly positive. In the process of characterizing Hawthorne as an original thinker and "high genius," Poe seized the opportunity to praise the genre he himself was exploring and refining: "The tale proper, in our opinion, affords unquestionably the fairest field for the exercise of the loftiest talent, which can be afforded by the wide domains of mere prose." In this review, Poe also develops key ideas that inform his own practice, including a keen sensitivity to effect. Poe's later essay on Hawthorne, here seen as virtually free of Frogpondian taint, retreats considerably from this positive assessment. Between the two reviews, in June of 1846, Hawthorne wrote to Poe: "I have read your occasional notices of my productions with great interest – not so much because your judgment was, upon the whole, favorable, as because it seemed to be given in earnest."

Had Hawthorne delayed writing this letter until after he had seen Poe's second review, included in the November 1847 issue of Godey's Lady's Book, he might not have expressed appreciation for this earnestness. Including Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)–a book more closely associated with Concord, Massachusetts, than was his earlier collections–in the analysis, Poe begins by contrasting his own prior recognition of Hawthorne's genius with the general lack of critical attention Hawthorne's work had attracted. While Poe still has positive points to make about Hawthorne, these are fewer and more qualified. The 1842 review sees the author of Twice-Told Tales as a "skillful literary artist" who excelled in "invention, creation, imagination, [and] originality"; the 1847 review insists that "he is not original in any sense." In the first review, Poe had detected "something which resembles a plagiarism" in Hawthorne's "Howe's Masquerade," but concluded that it might be "a coincidence." In the later review, he pondered the issue of popularity, asking why Hawthorne was not more widely appreciated. And the conclusion of the review strongly suggested that the downgrading of Hawthorne had everything to do with Poe's rising association of Boston, or New England, with literary didacticism run amok: "Indeed, his spirit of "metaphor run mad" is clearly imbibed from the phalanx and phalanstery atmosphere in which he has been so long struggling for breath. ... Let him mend his pen, get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott, hang (if possible) the editor of The Dial, and throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of The North American Review."