Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

The Lyceum Lecture and its Aftermath

On October 16, 1845, with Lowell's support, Poe spoke at the Boston Lyceum. Kept waiting for over two hours while the first lecturer went on, Poe read not a new poem, as requested, but "Al Aaraff," written in his adolescence. When Boston reviewers decried his lack of tact, Poe mocked them as "Frogpondians" and insisted that he had been trying to hoax and insult the audience: to make "a fuss."

Poe's quarrel with Boston, simmering for over a decade leading up to this reading, came to a boil in post-Lyceum exchanges with his greatest critic: Cornelia Wells Walter, editor of the Evening Transcript. In a series of He Said/She Said exchanges, they traded insults and returned repeatedly and with great delight to the fray!

Mocking Poe "as the author of a particular piece of poetry on a celebrated croaking bird," Walters called him a "poe-ser" and used his name (spelled Poh) as a slur. In response, Poe called Walter a "syren" and "witch." Beyond the level of insult, he defended his performance by saying that, "We were invited to 'deliver' (stand and deliver) a poem before the Boston Lyceum. As a matter of course, we accepted the invitation. ... We occupied some fifteen minutes with an apology for not 'delivering,' as is usual in such cases, a didactic poem: a didactic poem, in our opinion, being precisely no poem at all." Six weeks after the reading, in his final comment on the affair, Poe wrote, "The FROG-POND seems to be dried up–and the Frogs are, beyond doubt, all dead–as we hear no more croaking from that quarter."