Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Lecture on the Times: Introductory Lecture Read at the Masonic Temple in Boston, Thursday Evening, December 2, 1841"
The Dial, Vol. III, July 1842
Boston: E.P. Peabody

For a sense of the gulf between how Poe and Emerson saw the world, consider the following point from the Concord sage's lecture to a Boston audience: "I think that only is real which men love and rejoice in; not what they tolerate, but what they choose; what they embrace and avow, and not things which chill, benumb, and terrify them."

Boston Public Library, Research Library Collection