Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

"For my little son Edgar, who should ever love Boston"

These words–written by Eliza Arnold Poe on the back of a watercolor she had painted of Boston Harbor–serve as a point of origin for the complex story of Boston's relation to the most influential writer ever born here. While it's true that Poe fought a career-long battle against Boston area authors, whose moralistic poems and stories sounded to him like the croaking of frogs, it's also true that he had positive feelings about the place.

He knew that his mother had found her best friends here. He discovered his first literary supporter, and published his first and last works here. Indeed, his decision to move here in 1827 and his determination to move back in the weeks before his unexpected death in 1849 suggest that he thought of Boston as a place of refuge and new beginnings. That he also thought of it in connection with misguided ideas about literature meant that Poe would advance his most forceful critical arguments against Bostonians such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Cornelia Wells Walter. In the shallow, murky water of the Frog Pond, the Raven sharpened his beak and found his voice.