An Attack on Lowell at the 1900 MLA Convention: A Poe Supporter Appeals to Swinburne

MARGINALIA This section is devoted to notes, comments, and replies . We wish to provide here an outlet for source studies and focused interpretations that do not feature the extended argument and proof customaryin articles, for items of special interest that otherwise might not appear, and for formal exchanges on relevant scholarly and critical issues. Contributions should generally be from one to four paragraphs in length, although notes extending to five typescript pages are acceptable; all documentation should be in brackets within the text. An Attack on Lowell at the 1900 MLA Convention:A Poe Supporter Appeals to Swinburne As young scholars fear (and old scholars sometimes recall), first steps in the Temple of Academe are not always easy. Especially in times when the profession is rent by conflicts over the canon, young Turks out of tune with the prevailing orthodoxy are prone to stumble-or to be tripped. The letter below,a cri decceurfrom a selfdescribed “humble yet ardent” graduate student frustrated at the reception (over a hundred years ago) of his first Modern Language Association paper still resonates today in ways at once serious and amusing. [I print the letter with permission from Letters to Foreign Correspondents, Berg Collection of English and American Literature; The New York Public Library; Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.] The writer of the letter was interested in toppling an icon,James Russell Lowell,who he thought was absurdlyovervalued . He was also apparently (and in a style that may seem to us comicallyself-inflated)hopeful that a consequent revaluing and resorting of writers would move Edgar Allan Poe higher in the pantheon. The question of Poe’s standing was, of course, much disputed by scholars and critics well into the twentieth century [for helpful reviews of Poe’s stature inAmerica and abroad, seeJeffrey Meyers’schap ter “Reputation”in EdgarAllanPoe:His Life and Legacy (NewYork: Charles Scribner’s,1992);Lois D. Vines’s collection Poe Abroad: Injluence, Reputation, Affinities (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1999);and the introductions and notes to both Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Boston: G. K Hall, 1987) and Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ian W.Walker (NewYork:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986)3.Just about the time our young and anguished rebel would have been contemplating his paper, this question was again under public discussion.The New York Timesreported on 4 August 1900 [in its Saturday Review of Books and Arts, p. 5251 that Professor W. P. Trent, recently moved from Sewanee University to Columbia University,had deliveredin the earlyspring “a noteworthy lecture” to the Lyceum in Richmond, Virginia,on Poe’scriticalstanding.The Timesdirected attention to a long extract from Trent’slecture in the August issue of East and West and itself provided a sympathetic summary of his argument that, “of all our own writers up to the present time, with the possible exception of Whitman, Poe is the one who has the best chance not only of permanent but of constantly increasing fame.” The generational, temperamental, and aesthetic values the letter illustrates are clear: on the one side the establishment figures of the senior professoriate (admirers ofJames Russell Lowell) and on the other aperhaps hopelesslyidealisticyoungman of the 1890s trying to push Lowell aside. The writer of the letter was Charles Moore Magee (1870[?]-1950),who in 1900wasworkingon his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and teaching at Temple College. Chagrined at the way his radical revaluation of Lowell was received at the 1900 MLA convention in Philadelphia and perhaps seeking to puff his own reputation, Magee turned for solace to one of his heroes, the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), then living a quiet life in Putney, on the edge of London. Though himself a veteran of many intense literary quarrels, Swinburne may not have thought he had a dog in the fight between Magee and the American literary establishment . Swinburne did read Magee’s letter (a query shows him puzzling out the name of Defoe), but I have yet to find any response from him. If he did engage the choice Magee offered, no doubt he supported Poe,whose forthright reviewof Lowell’sA Fabb for Criticshe admired as “among...