Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"Poe" in Short Studies of American Authors
Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1880

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) was a student at Harvard when he attended Poe's Lyceum performance in 1845. Decades later he wrote about the experience, remembering Poe as a "genius."

There was much curiosity to see him; for his prose-writings had been eagerly read, at least among college-students, and his poems were just beginning to excite still greater attention. ... It was not then generally known ... that the poet was himself born in Boston. ... [W]alking back to Cambridge my comrades and I felt that we had been under the spell of some wizard.

O'Neill Library, Boston College