Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/61

Rh personality is the real issue. If New England writers are omitted from such surveys or inadequately represented, Poe is prompt to note the defect. When Griswold published his famous Poets and Poetry of America, in 1842, Poe wrote of it: "Perhaps the author, without being aware of it himself, has unduly favored the writers of New England," but he adds that injustice has also been done to two New Englanders, Lowell and Holmes: "A few years hence Mr. Griswold himself will be amazed that he assigned no more space to Lowell than to McLellan, Tuckerman, and others." It is in prophecies of this sort, by the way, that Poe's critical sagacity is seen at its best. Lowell had written hardly anything when this forecast was made but in that little Poe had detected unerringly the coming poet.

Of Griswold's Female Poets of America, Poe writes:

"We are glad, for Mr. Griswold's sake, as well as for the interests of our literature generally, to perceive that he has been at the pains of doing what Northern critics seem to be at great pains never to do—that is to say, he has been at the trouble of doing justice, in great measure, to several poetesses who have not had the good fortune to be born in the North. The notices of the Misses Gary, of the Misses Fuller, of the sisters Mrs. Warfield and Mrs. Lee, of Mrs. Nichols, of Mrs. Welby, and of Miss Susan Archer Talley, reflect credit upon Mr. Griswold, and show him to be a man not more of taste than—shall we say it?—of courage. Let our readers be assured that, (as matters are managed among the four or five different cliques