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316 THE AKRON OFFERING. January, 1850. Selected for the Offering. Extract from Thoughts on the Poets. By H. T. Tuckerman.1 Byron.2 Three thousand copies of Byron’s poems are sold annually in this country . Such a fact affords a sufficient reason for hazarding some remarks on a theme which may well be deemed exhausted.—“My dear sir,” said Dr. 1. Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1813–71) was a prolific and well-regarded American literary critic of the mid-nineteenth century. Born in Boston, Tuckerman moved to New York City in 1845, where he joined the literary salon of Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta (1815–91) after 1855. There Tuckerman had regular interaction with a staggering collection of literary figures of that time and place. This experience did much for him and his national reputation. As biographer Robert L. Gale writes for American National Biography, though Tuckerman “and his vast production have been described by many modern commentators as commonplace, diffuse, and superficial,” in his own day “he was revered by his grateful contemporaries as cosmopolitan, graceful, and instructive.” See Gale, “Tuckerman, Henry Theodore,” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-01029 .html. Here Cumings extracts an entire chapter, “Byron,” from Tuckerman’s 1846 book, Thoughts on the Poets (New York: C. S. Francis, 1846), 165–74, Google Books, http://books.google.com /books?id=jLdp96LPH-wC. 2. The writings of British poet George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824) were popular in England and the United States in the decades after his death. A notable American edition is the eight-volume Works of Lord Byron published by Philadelphia’s Carey & Hart in 1839. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and American Monthly Review—then edited by Edgar Allan Poe—declared it “undoubtedly, the best edition of Byron and most splendid specimen of book printing that has appeared in the United States.” See 7, no. 1 (July 1840): 57, Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=dnNMAAAAMAAJ. At the end of 1849, Akron’s Beebe & Elkins book store were advertising the sale of editions of Byron January, 1850 317 Johnson, “clear your mind of cant.”3 This process is essential to a right appreciation of Byron. No individual, perhaps, ever more completely “wore his heart upon his sleeve”4 and no heart was ever more thoroughly pecked at by the daws.—The moral aspect of the poet’s claims has never been fairly understood. No small class of well-meaning persons avoid his works as if they breathed contagion whereas it would be difficult to find a poet whose good and evil influence are more distinctly marked. The woods, and flowers, the poisonous gums, and “roses steeped in dew,”5 are not inextricably mingled in the garden of his verse. The same frankness and freedom that marked his life, is evident in his productions. It is unjust to call Byron insidious. The sentiments he unveils, are not to be misunderstood . They appear in bold relief, and he who runs may read. There is, therefore, a vast deal of cant in much that is said of the moral perversion of the poet. Where he is inspired by low views the darkness of the fountain tinges the whole stream; and where he yields to the love of the beautiful, it is equally apparent. There are those who would cut off the young from all acquaintance with his works, because they are sometimes degraded by unworthy ideas or too truly reflect some of the dark epochs of his life. But it is to be feared that the mind that cannot discriminate between the genuine poetry and the folly and the vice of those writings, will be unsafe amid the moral exposure of all life and literature. Indeed, there can scarcely be conceived a book at once more melancholy and more moral than Moore’s alongside Caroline May’s late 1840s anthology American Female Poets, Pilgrim’s Progress, “Poets of England and America,” “Women of the Scripture,” and books by Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant, and Burns. See “Just Received by Beebe & Elkins,” Summit Beacon (September 19, 1849), 2. 3. Well-known quote by English author Samuel Johnson (1709–84). The expression begins a remarkable scolding of Johnson’s biographer and disciple, James Boswell (1740–95): “My dear friend,” Johnson says, “clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, ‘Sir, I am your most humble servant.’ You are not his most humble servant. You may...

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