Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Edgar Allan Poe
"Tale-Writing — Nathaniel Hawthorne"
Godey's Lady's Book, November, 1847
[Full text]

Poe returned to Hawthorne five years after his 1842 essay and revised his view sharply downward. In this later article, Poe asked why Hawthorne was not more widely appreciated and argued that this was a consequence of a lack of originality. The conclusion of the review strongly suggests that the downgrading of Hawthorne had everything to do with Poe's rising association of Boston and New England in general with literary didacticism run amok:

Indeed, ... [Hawthorne's] 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."

Boston Public Library, Research Library Collection