The Last Salvos of the Lyceum War: Poe, The Harbinger, and The Blithedale Romance

Drawn back to the city of his birth—physically in 1827, 1845, and 1848, and imaginatively throughout his career as a writer and literary theorist—Edgar Allan Poe began by embracing Bostonian didacticism and then wielded his tomahawk against it. Over the course of his career as an active literary critic and book reviewer, Poe repeatedly, even obsessively, assailed the Boston literati with some of his most barbed phrases and neologisms, including the "coterie in Boston," "Bookseller-coteries," "coterie of abolitionists, transcendentalists and fanatics in general," "Longfellow junto," "junto of dreamers," "knot of rogues and madmen," "Crazyites," and, most famously, "Frogpondians." (See CL 1:493; Graham's Magazine, January 1842; "Longfellow's Poems," Aristidean, April 1845; "Review of Orion," Graham's Magazine, March 1844; and "Editorial Miscellany," Broadway Journal, December 13, 1845.)

Many of these insults were hurled in the runup to and aftermath of Poe's Lyceum lecture on October 17, 1845, an event that was savagely and even obsessively reviewed in the Boston press. Two newspapers in particular—the Boston Evening Transcript (BET) edited by Cornelia Wells Walter and the Boston Daily Star (BDS) edited by Leander S. Streeter—published numerous articles including ones that deliberately misspelled Poe's name as "Poh" (BET, March 5); ridiculed "Al Aaraff," which Poe read at the Lyceum, as a "baby-born poem" (BET, November 4); and called him a "small potatoe poet" (BDS, November 26). By the end of the first week of December, only six weeks after the lecture, the BET had published nineteen comments related to it, while the BDS had run sixteen comments of its own. With his vulture eye focused on the conflict, Poe responded to the Bostonian onslaught in his "Editorial Miscellany" column in the Broadway Journal (BJ) on October 25; November 1, 22, and 29; and December 13.

For a sense of the combative and often personal nature of these exchanges, consider that, two weeks after Poe wrote "we have been quizzing the Bostonians and one or two of the more stupid of their editors and editresses have taken it in high dudgeon" (BJ, October 25), Streeter called him a "quizzical buffoon" and "that quizzical gentleman" (BDS, November 11 and 13). At the most insultingly high (or low) points, Poe referred to his antagonists as "miserable hypocrites" and to Walter, in particular, as a "little darling" and "Syren" whose wig was sometimes "out of place" (BJ, November 22), while Streeter characterized Poe as "a literary abortion producer" and "noisy and silly simpleton" (BDS, November 15 and 25). For a sense of the underlying commercial interest that motivated the brouhaha on both sides, consider that Streeter—in an effort to prove that "Al Aaraaf" was "rich in intense twaddle" and therefore unworthy of presentation in Boston—printed the poem first in the November 4 issue of the BDS; then, because it quickly sold out, he went on to print it again in the two following issues. This delighted Poe who responded as follows in the November 22 issue of the Broadway Journal: "To demonstrate its utter worthlessness, 'The Boston Star' (a journal which, we presume, is to be considered as a fair representative of the Frogpondian genius) has copied the poem in full." As Kent P. Ljungquist observes—in "Poe's 'Al Aaraaf' and the Boston Lyceum: Contributions to Primary and Secondary Bibliography" (Victorian Periodicals Review 28 [1995]: 199–216)—Streeter's decision allowed Poe to promote the hot-off-the-press, 1845 edition of The Raven and Other Poems.

While this story, rich in banter, was animated by pique, ambition, and wounded pride, it also drew power from a crucial esthetic disagreement of the period. On one side stood the Boston literary establishment: high-minded, committed to using literature to advance an array of social and political causes—including abolitionism, temperance, women's rights, poor relief, Unitarianism, and Transcendentalism. On the other side stood Poe, who was among the first theorists to argue in defense of art for art's sake. The dual nature of Poe's critique of the Frogpondians—that is, his dislike...