Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Hopping out of the Frog Pond

Eight months before his death, in the letter to Frederick W. Thomas dated February 24, 1849, Poe reworked the insults he had been directing toward Boston throughout his career. "I wish you would come down on the Frogpondians," he wrote. "They are getting worse and worse." Just thinking about Boston got him "into a passion," he conceded. Called the Tomahawk Man for his rough treatment of writers he reviewed, Poe relished a debate as much as anyone and could give as good as he got in any exchange of insults. But there was far more than mere pique in the rude but also hilarious combat that erupted between Poe and his Boston detractors in the autumn of 1845. Indeed, quarrelling with Boston writers and editors helped Poe develop the ideas that shaped his thinking as a theorist and practice as a writer. In the process, he became a foundational figure in the development of popular culture.

Did Poe, then, hate Boston? Surely not if what we mean by Boston is the place where his mother felt most at home, or the place to which he retreated more than once in search of a new life. On the contrary, the "Boston" Poe insulted was far more limited. In the endless croaking of the frogs he mocked, Poe heard a self-congratulatory and exclusive clique that pretended "not to be aware that there are any literary people" anywhere else. And yet as a group, Poe noted, "[the Frogpondians] are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive." Above all, Poe's characterization of New England writers, editors, and reviewers as ranting frogs was based on the central principle of his criticism: anti-didacticism.

Beyond the insults, then, Poe developed his core beliefs about literature in part by responding to the work of New England writers–including Lowell, Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Fuller. His rejection of didacticism, puffery, and imitation informed his reviews of their works and shaped his growth as a critic and author. In the shallow, murky water of the Frog Pond, the Raven sharpened his beak and found his voice.

And the Raven, never flitting, still is   sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above   my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a   demon's that is dreaming
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming   throws his shadows on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that   lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted–nevermore!