[It] was as critic . . . that Poe was best known to his contemporaries in America. By this I do not mean that his book-reviews and other critical papers were felt to exceed in importance his poems or his tales: the consensus of intelligent opinion would have given first place in the matter of actual worth to his tales. Nevertheless, it is clear from the contemporary references to Poe that it was as critic and book-reviewer that he was most widely known to his generation in America: the mention of his name brought to the minds of his fellow-Americans of the thirties and forties of last century the idea, first of all, of book-reviewer and editor, rather than of tale-writer or of poet.

It does not affect the validity of this assertion to add that Poe was chiefly known as a fearless and caustic critic, rather than as a just and discriminating critic. Indeed, we shall find, I think, in the boldness and the occasional severity of his critical notices the secret of much of his contemporary vogue; for then, as now, it was the controversial and the spectacular that most readily caught the public fancy. And Poe's criticisms, though far more just than his contemporaries could have brought themselves to admit, were in no small degree controversial in nature,—or, at best, calculated to arouse controversy,—and were from the beginning more caustic, I imagine, than anything that had preceded them in American letters.

As in the case of his tales, it was during his connection with the Southern Literary Messenger (1835-1837) that he first came into prominence as a critic. Where or when he had served his apprenticeship as a book-reviewer, we shall probably never know. There is no tangible evidence that he had published anything in the way of criticism before 1835, save the "Letter to B—" in the Poems of 1831. But by the end of his first year with the Messenger he had won for that magazine a place among the leading American critical journals and had brought about an increase in its list of subscribers but little short of miraculous. His tales contributed in good part, no doubt, to this result, but it was his book-reviews and his scorching editorials that were mainly responsible; and it was these, even more than the tales, that attracted the newspaper critics of the time.

His reputation as critic seems to have undergone some arrest in its development during his connection with Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1839-1840, owing, as he would have had us believe, to the "milk-and-water" policy of its proprietor. But he won fresh laurels for himself while editor of Graham's Magazine (1841-1842), writing now some of the ablest of his critiques and earning for himself the almost uniform commendation of the Philadelphia press. Graham, in announcing his accession to his editorial staff, spoke of him as "a stern, just, and impartial critic" who held "a pen second to none in the country"; Lowell wrote in praise of his critical work as early as 1842; and Dr. J. Evans Snodgrass, a Baltimore editor of ability, declared in 1843 that his book-reviews were "unequalled in this country."

As critic Poe also came prominently before the public in 1845 and 1846. During most of 1845 he was either assistant editor or editor of the Broadway Journal, and in that capacity wrote, each week, critiques of the more important books appearing at that time. In the spring and summer of 1846 he published in Godey's Lady's Book his Literati. Of his reviews in the Broadway Journal some were very able; but in a number of his papers published there, notably the articles attacking Longfellow, and likewise in the Literati, he stooped to personalities of various sorts and displayed a spitefulness that cost him the esteem of some of his staunchest admirers and earned for him the disapproval of most of the influential men of the time. Indeed, the unhappy reputation that he made by these papers he found it impossible to live down during the few remaining years allotted to him.

After 1846 he wrote nothing of importance as critic save "The Poetic Principle," itself a revision in part of work earlier done.

In the notices of Poe published during his lifetime the trait in his criticisms that was most dwelt on was his severity. Before the end of the first year on the Messenger he had been taken to task by one of the Richmond newspapers for his "regular cutting and slashing"; and he had been attacked earlier in the year by the New York Mirror, in a satirical squib in which he figured as "Bulldog, the critick." Burton reproached him in 1839 for the sharpness of his critical notices in the Gentleman's Magazine. Dr. Snodgrass described him in 1842 as "provokingly hypercritical at times"; and in a notice of the Broadway Journal in April, 1845, he remarked that it "would be more significant to call this the Broad-axe Journal." George D. Prentice violently attacked the poet in 1843 in consequence of his contemptuous references to Carlyle. And Clark, who had been "used up" in the Literati, kept up a continual fire at him for a year or more after these papers began to appear. In the Knickerbocker of May, 1846, he speaks of Poe as "'The Literary Snob' continually obtruding himself upon public notice; to-day, in the gutter, tomorrow in some milliner's magazine; but in all places, and at all times magnificently snobbish and dirty."

Lowell suggested in his sketch in Graham's that Poe sometimes mistook "his phial of prussic acid for his ink-stand"; and he rebuked him in his Fable for Critics for throwing mudballs at Longfellow. The Brook Farm Harbinger in 1845 lamented the fact that Poe had taken to a sort of "blackguard warfare." A contributor to the Talisman and Odd Fellow's Magazine in September, 1846, dubbed him "the tomahawk man" and "the Comanche of literature"; and the Philadelphia editor, Du Solle, remarked in 1847, "If Mr. P. had not been gifted with considerable gall, he would have been devoured long ago by the host of enemies his genius has created." In Holden's Dollar Magazine for January, 1849 (then edited by C. F. Briggs), Poe is ridiculed in the following doggerel lines:

With tomahawk upraised for deadly blow,
Behold our literary Mohawk, Poe!
Sworn tyrant he o'er all who sin in verse—
His own the standard, damns he all that's worse;
And surely not for this shall he be blamed—
For worse than his deserves that it be damned!

Who can so well detect the plagiary's flaw?
"Set thief to catch thief is an ancient saw:
Who can so scourge a fool to shreds and slivers?
Promoted slaves oft make the best slave drivers!
Iambic Poe! of tyro bards the terror—
Ego is he—the world his pocket-mirror!

The articles published shortly after Poe's death also made much of his defects as critic. The trait now most stressed was not his causticity, I think, but his disposition to allow his prejudices and personal likes and dislikes to color his critical judgments. Among the first to make this complaint against him was his early friend, John Neal. Griswold declared in his "Memoir" that "his unsupported assertions and opinions were so apt to be influenced by friendship or enmity, by the desire to please or the fear to offend . . . that they should be received in all cases with distrust of their fairness," an opinion which was echoed by Clark in the Knickerbocker for October, 1850. Even Graham admitted that Poe's "outcry" against Longfellow was prejudiced and unjust. A contributor to the North American Review expressed the opinion that Poe was intensely prejudiced "against all literature emanating from New England." Evert A. Duyckinck, in 1850, publicly lodged the charge of venality against Poe, declaring that he "was, in the very centre of his soul, a literary attorney, and pleaded according to his fee." Mrs. Gove-Nichols, also, in her novel, Mary Lyndon, while apologizing for the poet's weaknesses, admitted that he "sometimes sold favorable opinions, that were not opinions, but shams"; and Clark, in the Knickerbocker, characterized him sneeringly as a "jaded hack who runs a broken pace for common hire." Others complained of the over-minuteness of his criticisms and, in particular of his fondness for "verbal fault-finding."

Among those who wrote in praise of his work as a critic were Lowell, Horace Greeley, and Richard Henry Stoddard. Lowell in his sketch of Poe in 1845 declared that he was "at once the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works . . . in America." Greeley, after hearing his lecture on the American poets in February, 1845, praised him, in the columns of the Tribune, dwelling upon his candor and his acuteness, and pronouncing him a "critic of genius and established reputation." Stoddard declared in 1853, "No other modern, save Tennyson, [was] so versed in the philosophy of criticism." Willis praised him enthusiastically in the Mirror in 1845 and again in the Home Journal at the time of his death. . . .