Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/64

44 more than a vast gilded swill-trough overflowing with Dunciad and water? Although we are not all Archilochuses, however—although we have few pretensions to the ὴχήεντες ἶαμβοι—although, in short, we are no satirists ourselves—there can be no question that we answer sufficiently well as subjects for satire."

When Poe comes to the lines about himself,

Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge— Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge; Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, In a way to make all men of common sense d....n metres; Who has written some things far the best of their kind; But somehow the heart seems squeezed out by the mind, his objection is not to Lowell's fractional distribution of "genius" and "fudge" but to the omission of all other southerners save himself:

"It is a fashion among Mr. Lowell's set to affect a belief that there is no such thing as Southern Literature. Northerners—people who have really nothing to speak of as men of letters,—are cited by the dozen, and lauded by this candid critic without stint, while Legaré, Simms, Longstreet, and others of equal note are passed by in contemptuous silence. Mr. L. cannot carry his frail honesty of opinion even so far south as New York. All whom he praises are Bostonians. Other writers are barbarians, and satirized accordingly—if mentioned at all."

Yet in this same review, one of the last that Poe wrote, he defends Longfellow and Lowell against the attack of Margaret Fuller: