Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Outre-Mere, or The Pilgrimage
Boston: Hillard, Gray, & Company, 1835.

In a discussion of this book, published in the Aristidean six months before his Lyceum lecture, Poe ramped up his criticism of Longfellow's plagiarisms:

There can be no reasonable doubt in the mind of any, out of the little clique, to which we at first alluded, that the author of "Outre Mer," is not only a servile imitator, but a most insolent literary thief. ... we doubt whether he could write without helping himself to the ideas and style of other people. Indeed, if he were by chance to perpetrate an original idea, he would be as much astonished as the world around; and would go about cackling and "making a fuss in general," like a little bantam hen, who by a strange freak of nature, had laid a second egg on the same day.

Boston Public Library, Rare Books & Manuscripts