Graham's Magazine Research Articles

Poe's Lost “Lenore”

Poe's Lost “Lenore”

Poe in Richmond: Conserving Poe's Papers

Poe in Richmond: Conserving Poe's Papers

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

The Last Salvos of the Lyceum War: Poe, <i>The Harbinger</i>, and <i>The Blithedale Romance</i>

If Bird or Devil: Meta-Plagiarism in “The Raven”

Edgar Allan Poe's tendency to “borrow” material from contemporaries remains an unsettling fact of his art. Too few studies have lingered, for example, on a striking resemblance between the “bird or devil” of Poe's “The Raven” (1845) and the talking raven named Grip in Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841), except to say that Poe praised the novel (and especially Grip) in a review for Graham's Magazine. Yet the poem's Dickensian matter provides an ideal gateway to its deeper obsession with creativity itself. Through close reading and historicization, my article recasts “The Raven” as a paranoid allegory of its own quasi-plagiaristic origins. Read against the backdrop of a literary marketplace unchecked by international copyright law, the poem defies both its speaker and us to locate the true source of its strange power. In supposing that his guest learned the word “Nevermore”—so like Grip's cries of “Nobody!”—from “some unhappy master” long ago, the speaker points not only to Dickens (who kept three pet ravens in the course of his life), but also to the raven's entire symbolic provenance, stretching back to Roman myth and beyond. Ultimately, as bird and devil, Poe's raven condemns the futile, even disastrous struggle to isolate any symbol from its prior lives.

Poe vs. Himself

Poe vs. Himself Anne Whitehouse (bio) On May 3, 1841, Edgar Allan Poe, a thirty-two-year-old editor at Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia, penned a request to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University. Two years Poe's senior, Longfellow was established in an academic career and already had achieved a considerable reputation as a poet, translator, and author of travelogues and romances. Ambitious and poor, Poe was hoping to make his literary reputation and support himself as an editor and tastemaker. He had been trying to raise funds for his own publication, to be called Penn's Magazine, when a young Philadelphia lawyer and cabinetmaker, George Rex Graham, made him a liberal offer to join the staff of his newly established magazine, with a circulation of five thousand. Poe seized his chance. To impress the professor of modern languages, Poe self-consciously sprinkled his entreaty with French phrases and flattered him with compliments: DEAR SIR—Mr. George R. Graham, proprietor of Graham's Magazine, a monthly journal published in this city and edited by myself, desires me to beg of you the honor of your contribution to its pages. Upon the principle that we seldom obtain what we very anxiously covet, I confess that I have but little hope of inducing you to write for us,—and to say the truth, I fear that Mr. Graham would have opened the negotiation much better in his own person, for I have no reason to think myself favorably known to you; but the attempt was to be made, and I make it. I should be overjoyed if we could get from you an article each month, either poetry or prose, length and subject à discretion. In respect to terms, we would gladly offer you carte blanche; and the periods of payment should also be made to suit yourself. In conclusion, I cannot refrain from availing myself of this, the only opportunity I may ever have, to assure the author of the "Hymn to the Night," of the "Beleaguered City," and of the "Skeleton in Armor," of the fervent admiration with which his genius has inspired me; and yet I would scarcely hazard a declaration whose import might be so easily misconstrued, and which bears with it, at best, more or less of niaiserie, were I not convinced that Professor Longfellow, writing and thinking as he does, will be at no less to feel and to appreciate the honest sincerity of what I say. With the highest respect, Your obedient servant, Edgar A. Poe As Poe anticipated, Longfellow turned down the request. In a noncommittal yet gracious response, he conveyed to Poe his own compliments: [End Page 98] May 19, 1841 Your favor of the 3d inst., with the two numbers of the Magazine, reached me only a day or two ago. I am much obliged to you for your kind expression of regard, and to Mr. Graham for his very generous offer, of which I should gladly avail myself under other circumstances. But I am so much occupied at present that I could not do it with any satisfaction either to you or to myself. I must therefore respectfully decline his proposition. You are mistaken in supposing that you are not "favorably known to me." On the contrary, all that I have read from your pen has inspired me with a high idea of your power, and I think you are destined to stand among the first romance-writers of the country, if such be your aim. The two writers never met, and this exchange marked the beginning and end of their correspondence. Nevertheless, their names have been linked in the annals of American cultural history because of Poe's literary attacks against Longfellow four years later in 1845, which Poe titled the "Little Longfellow War." Poe's "War" was an unprovoked aggression against one of the most beloved figures of the New England literary establishment, outraging Longfellow's friends and fans. Chief among the contemporary writers who responded in Longfellow's defense was someone who referred to himself as "Outis," Greek for "nobody." This curious contretemps in American literary history...

"Gaze On!": The Transformations of Pygmalion and Galatea in the Poe-Osgood Affair

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on some of the intertextual poems and stories that Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Sargent Osgood published in the Broadway Journal and Graham's Magazine throughout 1845 and 1846, in a literary conversation that hinted broadly at romantic relationship. The works of the Poe-Osgood exchange—which I construe to include a number of well-known stories reprinted during the same period—are self-conscious about their transformation of supposed biography into art for mass consumption. This self-consciousness is, I argue, publicly enacted through the Pygmalion trope. In texts that center on the transformation of a work of art into life—or its reversal, the transformation of a living being into art—Poe and Osgood construct a public literary exchange that considers the era's blurring of the lines between literary celebrity, biographical reality, and art.

Poe as “A Critical Jack Ass”

Abstract A long-lost January 3, 1842, essay titled “A Critical Jack Ass” (appearing in the New York Evening Tattler) constitutes a lengthy condemnation of Edgar Allan Poe's Graham's Magazine review of Henry Cockton's novel Stanley Thorn. This newly recovered piece constitutes further evidence of the sometimes overheated response that Poe's frank and incisive critical commentary prompted. The authorship of this piece is unknown.

The "Forgotten Era": Race and Gender in Ann Stephens's Dime Novel Frontier

The "Forgotten Era"Race and Gender in Ann Stephens's Dime Novel Frontier Rebecca S. Wingo In the summer of 1860 the House of Beadle and Adams (HBA) launched their first dime novel, starting a genre filled with sensational, typically Western adventure stories woven with a delicate layer of romance and lessons about Victorian morality and racial stereotypes. The first among many rival dime novel publishers, HBA's inaugural novel, Malaeska, Indian Wife of the White Hunter (June 9, 1860) by Ann Sophia Winterbotham Stephens, chronicles the relationship between Malaeska and her mixed-blood son. Two days before Malaeska's release, the publishing house ran an advertisement in the New York Tribune: "BOOKS FOR THE MILLION! A dollar book for a dime."1 Before they shut down their printing presses in 1898, HBA alone published 3,158 separate dimes.2 Despite their significant contribution to the genre of Western literature, dime novels were replaced as quickly as they started by the cloth-bound book, leading some scholars to term the dime novel era from 1860 to 1900 the "forgotten era."3 Stephens contributed six more dime novels between 1860 and 1864, ending with The Indian Queen, the third novel in a trilogy about a mixed-race woman who returns to the Seneca Nation to assume leadership after the chief (her father) dies. On the surface, Stephens's first and last novels are extraordinarily similar: they are about Native American tribes in the Northeast during the colonial period, center on women, and discuss interracial sex. Since HBA published them in 1860 and 1864 respectively, one might even link them to Civil War era racial ideologies. However, this connection elides a more probing read of the racial subtext. Malaeska actually originated in 1836, not 1860, as a short story called "The Jockey Cap," published in Stephens's first magazine, Portland Magazine. Comparing Malaeska to The Indian Queen highlights the cultural and social shifts that occurred in mid-nineteenth-century America. Between the 1830s and the 1860s, racial theories began shifting away from the [End Page 121] belief that Native Americans could assimilate into "civilized" white society, favoring instead the idea that no amount of social uplift could separate Native Americans from their "savage" blood.4 While Malaeska reflects more of the 1830s mentalité, The Indian Queen reflects the growing emphasis on scientific racism. These two dime novels tell a national story as they reveal dominant American attitudes toward Indigenous peoples. They also illuminate the cultural importance of female authors who used the power of suggestion in their narratives, both to challenge and to confirm the confines of Victorian gender roles, using Native Americans as proxy stand-ins for white women's liberation. ann stephens and the history of the dime novel Before we can understand the narratives, we must first understand the author and the period in which she wrote. It is no coincidence that HBA chose Stephens's work as their first dime novel. Her prolific writing career with a wide audience made her the ideal choice to boost their immediate popularity and success. Stephens grew up in a solid middle-class family. Her father, John Winterbotham, worked a steady job at Humphreysville Manufactoring Company in Connecticut, which ensured that Stephens would receive an excellent education. She read voraciously at the public library in what her biographer Paola Gemme calls a "self-imposed literary apprenticeship." She married Edward Stephens, a local merchant, in 1831. The couple moved to Maine in 1834 and started their own regional magazine called Portland Magazine. Edward served as publisher, Ann as editor and main contributor.5 Stephens's initial foray into editing, literature, and writing launched her career. The couple moved to New York City in 1837, where she became the associate editor of publisher William Snowden's Ladies Companion, a monthly magazine. In addition to contributing literature to the magazine, Stephens increased circulation from 3,000 to 17,000 readers per month. Her work for Ladies Companion further propelled her success: she went on to hold an associate editor position at Graham's Magazine alongside Edgar Allan Poe in 1841; co-edited Lady's World of Fashion, which later became Peterson's Magazine (1842–53...

A Villainous Question

A Villainous Question

Poe in Richmond: Revealing Rufus Griswold

Poe in Richmond: Revealing Rufus Griswold

Blithedale Revised: Nathaniel Hawthorne, E. P. Whipple, and the Author-Critic Feedback Loop

On May 2, 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne sent the completed manuscript of his new novel, a tale about a botched utopian scheme tentatively titled Hollingsworth: A Romance, to the rising critical talent Edwin Percy Whipple. Though Hawthorne was generally wary of critics, Whipple's reviews of Hawthorne's two previous novels in the popular Graham's Magazine had impressed Hawthorne so forcibly that before handing his new manuscript over to Ticknor and Fields, he sent it to Whipple for one last round of feedback. As Hawthorne quipped in the accompanying letter, Behold a huge bundle of scribble, which you have thoughtlessly promised to look over! If you find it beyond your powers, hand it over to Ticknor at once, and let him send it to the Devil; but before that happens, I should be glad to have it looked over by a keen, yet not unfriendly eye, like yours. Nobody has read it, except my wife; and her sympathy, though very gratifying, is a little too unreserved to afford me the advantages of criticism. After all, should you spy ever so many defects, I cannot promise to amend them; the hardens very soon after I pour it out of my melting-pot into the mould. (16:536) (1) Though Hawthorne could not promise to implement Whipple's proposed revisions, he was nonetheless anxious for his friend's opinion. And despite his avowed reticence to alter the metal once hardened, Hawthorne did make changes, and substantial ones at that. In the days that followed he altered significantly the text of what would become The Blithedale Romance. The precise nature of these changes challenges established accounts of the novel's textual history, in particular the notion now held as authoritative that Hawthorne added the final chapter, Miles Coverdale's Confession, in response to Whipple's feedback. Yet the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne, that most private of authors, solicited creative advice from Whipple in the first place also reveals the increasingly tangled relationship between authors and critics in antebellum America. Though Hawthorne's influence left a clear imprint on Melville's work, inscribed quite literally as it was in the dedication to Moby-Dick, it was not to Melville but rather to Whipple that Hawthorne turned for advice regarding his own writing. The two men in fact had much in common. Like Hawthorne, Whipple was from Salem and received a self-education of sorts from the Salem Athenaeum Library. As they grew older, both men spent the 1840s slowly building their reputations in and around Boston and eventually formed ties with Ticknor and Fields. Yet while Hawthorne's recognition came late, by 1850 Whipple was already the most respected critic in the country, as well as one of its most popular essayists (Fig. 1). Like Hawthorne's tales, Whipple's critical pieces were twice-told, appearing first in an array of prestigious periodicals before finding more permanent form in a series of collections, nearly all of which went through several editions. Between 1843, when an essay upon Thomas Babington Macaulay (to whom Whipple was frequently compared) appeared in the Boston Miscellany, and 1848, when his first collection, Essays and Reviews, was published, Whipple wrote a series of perceptive, temperate essays on subjects central to the nation's cultural development, from Rufus Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America and Daniel Neal's History of the Puritans to figures active in shaping that development, such as Daniel Webster and William Prescott. (2) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] His critical vision was equally judicious and comprehensive on foreign subjects, which he treated in essays upon topics ranging from Byron and Wordsworth, English poetry anthologies and Elizabethan dramatists, to American literature's arch-rival Sydney Smith, most notorious for his infamous barb, Who in the four quarters of the globe reads an American book? (3) Critics and criticism were also favorite subjects for Whipple and topics he treated extensively in essays upon not only Macaulay and Smith but also British critics as a whole, contemporary Shakespeare criticism, and Coleridge as philosophical critic. …

Inspiration or Competition? Catharine Sedgwick's Influence on Nathaniel Hawthorne

Despite Catharine Maria Sedgwick's many personal and professional links to Nathaniel Hawthorne and her international renown as an author in the nineteenth century, few Hawthorne or Sedgwick biographers or literary scholars have considered her possible influence on Hawthorne. Fifteen years Hawthorne's senior, Sedgwick was well established in her career by the time he began publishing in 1830; for the next twenty years the two authors' short works were often published in the same journals and gift-book annuals--including The Token, The U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review, Godey's Lady's Book, and Graham's Magazine--even appearing side by side. (1) By the time Hawthorne's first stories appeared anonymously in The Token and The Salem Gazette, Sedgwick had published five books and eighteen short stories and sketches. Because, like Hawthorne, Sedgwick initially published anonymously, in her case with a "by the author of" byline, readers might mistakenly assume that Hawthorne was unaware of whose work he was reading. But from the outset Sedgwick's authorship was no secret, particularly in Boston and New York City circles, as several sources attest, including the private correspondence of Elizabeth and Mary Peabody in the 1820s. (2) Not only did Hawthorne undoubtedly read Sedgwick, but evidence suggests that his career was, in some part, influenced by hers. Nevertheless, in my incomplete survey of a dozen Hawthorne biographies, from Newton Arvin's of 1929 to Robert Milder's of 2013, only half contain Sedgwick's name, two literally just her name. Of the four others, Robert Cantwell (in 1971) gets Sedgwick's age wrong--by a decade--in his two sentences about her presence in Lenox (433), and Arlin Turner (in 1980) mentions only a tea party (211). James Mellow (in 1980) is the only one to acknowledge Sedgwick's "international reputation"; his four sentences include Hawthorne's "rather feeble" reference to the "most truthful" Sedgwick in A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (323). Most recently, Brenda Wineapple's three brief mentions (in 2004) culminate in Sedgwick's negative comment (in a private letter to her niece) about The House of the Seven Gables, removed from its largely positive context. (3) In all, that is about ten sentences in 84 years. (4) Only two biographical studies of Sedgwick exist: Mary E. Dewey's 1871 Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick (excerpted letters with biographical segues, as Dewey knew Sedgwick personally), and Edward Halsey Foster's 1974 Twayne series volume. Neither book is a comprehensive biography. Both include references to Hawthorne but no sustained analysis of the two writers' points of contact. In recent decades, several introductions to works by or about Sedgwick have helped to fill gaps in her biography, but none include an examination of the possible literary connections between Sedgwick and Hawthorne. (5) By retracing the known biographical links between Sedgwick and Hawthorne and exploring a few of their literary connections, I hope to demonstrate the need for further scholarly investigation of both. The evidence I have gathered here suggests that Hawthorne looked to Sedgwick as he figured out how to be a writer. He was part of a social and literary circle that admired her, and he interacted with her both personally and professionally. Commonalities in the two authors' subject matter and publication venues suggest that Sedgwick may have served as a model for Hawthorne as he chose what and where to publish. He thought enough of her to compliment her in print and to "talk back" to her, writing the occasional story in response to her own, revising or arguing her position. Taken together, these points of contact should provoke further comparative study. I. Intersecting Lives Hawthorne's explicit references to Sedgwick in several stories demonstrate his knowledge of her work, but exactly what he read by her, and when, is not known. Marion Kesselring's transcription of Hawthorne's borrowings from the Salem Athenaeum, 1828-1850, reveals that only 24% were works of literature, and that of these very few were by Hawthorne's American contemporaries, aside from fiction published in English and American magazines (8, 11). …

“My Heart Laid Bare”

Abstract In 1848 in Graham's Magazine Poe argued that there is one “little book” that no one will ever dare, or ever be able, to write: a true and complete autobiography. Poe contends that this book should be titled “My Heart Laid Bare” and adds that if someone attempted to write it, the page “would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.” Throughout his literary career, Poe actually wrote this book in increments as isolated passages in his poems, short stories, essays and reviews, and letters. These passages are not only candid and revealing of Poe's true nature and reflect various events in his life; they are often, even when embedded in prose works, effectively poetic and lyrical. Taken as a whole, they constitute an autobiographical poem, a beautifully phrased portrait of Poe as he conceived of himself, along with his conception of the role of the poet. This is a poem well worth extracting from Poe's work, for it is the seemingly impossible little book Poe actually did write over his entire career; it is his heart laid bare.

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. vii + 271 pp. $45.Since the impact of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) on the academic study of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars in the last three decades have debated Matthiessen's criteria for inclusion, his nearly exclusive focus on five major authors (three from New England and two from New York), and the writers excluded from his overall discussion. Notable by his absence in American Renaissance was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who represented to Matthiessen the tragic consequences of isolation, a contrast to those writers who consciously or unconsciously confronted a larger social world. If Walt Whitman's poetry represented engagement with the ordinary experiences of the common man, Poe's works, according to Matthiessen, suggested an escape from such concerns, a retreat into a realm out of space and out of time. body of Poe's writings represented the trappings of an abnormal Romantic temperament, a horror and anxiety generated by a tortured sensibility.Several of the contributors of the ten essays in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture invoke Matthiessen or use his work as a point of departure. Maurice Lee, in particular, does so with a hint of weariness. He duly cites the number of Matthiessen-influenced works-from American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), edited by Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels, and David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) to more recent studies. He notes, however, that Matthiessen, when currently cited, represents a once-dominant tradition of scholarly inquiry that examined a more manageable canon at a time of an apparent scholarly consensus. Pointing to Poe's critical neglect, according to Lee, seems less compelling today, and his own essay, via a numerical accounting, shows that academic interest in Poe remains strong and shows few signs of abating.The metaphor in the volume's title, addressed by editor J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction, is mapping, a marker suggesting a decentralized and volatile network of writers, editors, and publishers of varied, competing, and often antagonistic agendas and interests. It was this literary, economic, and social marketplace that Poe, the magazine editor aspiring for independence, aimed to negotiate and control. As the contributors demonstrate, however, he was often the victim of his own assertiveness and was subject to forces in the publishing milieu, most notably a vast culture of reprinting, that he failed to master.Kennedy seizes on the metaphor of mapping in his opening essay, which focuses on Poe's mixture of literary criticism and gossip, The Literati of New York City (1846). Despite acknowledgment that the series was a random selection of his New York contemporaries, the compilation constituted a fairly systematic appraisal of antebellum authors, including portraits of every person of literary note in (24). Clergymen, politicians, and scholars appeared alongside poets and fiction writers, and Poe took pains to include over two dozen editors of periodicals, fellow arbiters of literary taste. Kennedy charts the course from Poe's early Autography installments in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), to the Autography series in Graham's Magazine in 1841-42, to the Literati. All these efforts led Poe toward a plan in the last years of his life for a more ambitious project on American authors and their literary productions. If Kennedy's essay elaborates on Burton R. Pollin's pioneering work in presenting the notes and outline for Living Writers of America (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991), a project Poe never completed, persuasive claims are made for Poe's achievements in broadening the scope of American letters by including profiles of women writers, practitioners in a diversity of genres, and figures from different regions. …

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. vii + 271 pp. $45.Since the impact of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) on the academic study of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars in the last three decades have debated Matthiessen's criteria for inclusion, his nearly exclusive focus on five major authors (three from New England and two from New York), and the writers excluded from his overall discussion. Notable by his absence in American Renaissance was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who represented to Matthiessen the tragic consequences of isolation, a contrast to those writers who consciously or unconsciously confronted a larger social world. If Walt Whitman's poetry represented engagement with the ordinary experiences of the common man, Poe's works, according to Matthiessen, suggested an escape from such concerns, a retreat into a realm out of space and out of time. The body of Poe's writings represented the trappings of an abnormal Romantic temperament, a horror and anxiety generated by a tortured sensibility.Several of the contributors of the ten essays in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture invoke Matthiessen or use his work as a point of departure. Maurice Lee, in particular, does so with a hint of weariness. He duly cites the number of Matthiessen-influenced works-from The American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), edited by Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels, and David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) to more recent studies. He notes, however, that Matthiessen, when currently cited, represents a once-dominant tradition of scholarly inquiry that examined a more manageable canon at a time of an apparent scholarly consensus. Pointing to Poe's critical neglect, according to Lee, seems less compelling today, and his own essay, via a numerical accounting, shows that academic interest in Poe remains strong and shows few signs of abating.The metaphor in the volume's title, addressed by editor J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction, is mapping, a marker suggesting a decentralized and volatile network of writers, editors, and publishers of varied, competing, and often antagonistic agendas and interests. It was this literary, economic, and social marketplace that Poe, the magazine editor aspiring for independence, aimed to negotiate and control. As the contributors demonstrate, however, he was often the victim of his own assertiveness and was subject to forces in the publishing milieu, most notably a vast culture of reprinting, that he failed to master.Kennedy seizes on the metaphor of mapping in his opening essay, which focuses on Poe's mixture of literary criticism and gossip, "The Literati of New York City" (1846). Despite acknowledgment that the series was a random selection of his New York contemporaries, the compilation constituted a fairly systematic appraisal of antebellum authors, including portraits of "every person of literary note in America" (24). Clergymen, politicians, and scholars appeared alongside poets and fiction writers, and Poe took pains to include over two dozen editors of periodicals, fellow arbiters of literary taste. Kennedy charts the course from Poe's early "Autography" installments in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), to the "Autography" series in Graham's Magazine in 1841-42, to the "Literati." All these efforts led Poe toward a plan in the last years of his life for a more ambitious project on American authors and their literary productions. If Kennedy's essay elaborates on Burton R. Pollin's pioneering work in presenting the notes and outline for The Living Writers of America (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991), a project Poe never completed, persuasive claims are made for Poe's achievements in broadening the scope of American letters by including profiles of women writers, practitioners in a diversity of genres, and figures from different regions. …

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Discarding the Literary Emporium: An Unauthorized Reprint of “The Raven”

Discarding the <i>Literary Emporium</i>: An Unauthorized Reprint of “The Raven”

Reversals in Poe and Stevens

Reversals in Poe and Stevens Samuel Jay Keyser Reversal in Poe's "The Raven" IN APRIL of 1846, in Graham's Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe published an essay that would become one of his most frequently anthologized texts, "The Philosophy of Composition." In it he proposed an account of what we would now call the "algorithm" according to which he created his most successful poem, "The Raven," published only the year before. His self-declared aim was to dispel the notion that art is created in "a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition" (749): It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible [sic] either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. (750) Many critics have taken Poe's essay as a joke. Yet some serious scholars, including the famous linguist Roman Jakobson, have questioned the easy dismissal: Although Poe's letter of August 9, 1846, to his friend Cooke recommended this commentary as the "best specimen of analysis," an alleged oral statement by the writer was quoted post-humously: a supposed confession that he had never intended this article to be received seriously. French poets, however, admiring both Poe's poetry and his essays on poetry, have wondered in which instance he was jesting: whether in writing this marvelous commentary or in disavowing it . . . . (55-56) In his analysis of Poe's essay, Jakobson identifies a property of "The Raven" that is as remarkable as it is unexpected. Commenting on the famous refrain "Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore,'" Jakobson notes that [End Page 224] The utterance is inhuman, both in its persistent cruelty and in its automatic, repetitive monotony. Hence an articulate but subhuman creature is suggested as speaker, and in particular a corvine bird, not only because of its gloomy appearance and "ominous reputation" . . . but also because in most of its phonemes the noun raven is simply an inversion of the sinister never. Poe signals this connection by adjoining the two words: Quoth the raven "Nevermore." (54) The fact that raven and never are almost perfect reversals of one another is a form of chiasmus, a classical rhetorical device defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other." This is the device John F. Kennedy used in his now famous exhortation: In "The Raven," to be sure, it is phonemes, not words, that are being reversed: The similarity between raven and its almost perfectly palindromic mirror image never is an accident of English, which by the same token guarantees the near-impossibility of translating the poem into another language, especially since the reversal is not a mere ornamentation. As we shall see, it is emblematic of the basic narrative structure of the poem. A good place to start this discussion is by looking at Poe's own commentary about the conclusion of "The Raven": Here then the poem may be said to have its beginning—at the end, where all works of art should begin—for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, that I first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza: "Prophet," said I, "thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil!By that heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore, [End Page 225] Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn,It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore." Quoth the raven "Nevermore." (753) Of course, we know that the poem does not really end here. This stanza is the antepenultimate one. The final stanza runs as follows: And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sittingOn the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;And my soul from out that shadow that...

Pathos and Fun: Conrad and Harper's Magazine

Pathos and FunConrad and Harper's Magazine Richard Ruppel (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 5. Harper's Magazine, November 1911. Cover. [End Page 178] Though Joseph Conrad probably took the most pleasure from Blackwood's acceptance of Heart of Darkness for Maga early in his writing career, his relationship with Harper's publishing and with Harper's Monthly Magazine was at least as important to his eventual popular acceptance, both in England and in the United States, and to his financial success (see figure 5). Harper's was Conrad's American book publisher for Nostromo (1904), The Mirror of the Sea (1905), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), and A Personal Record (1912); "An Anarchist" (August 1906), "The Informer" (December 1906), "The Partner (November 1911), and "The Secret-Sharer" (August–September 1910) were all first published in Harper's Monthly Magazine (both in England and the United States) (Reid 57–58). "The Tallness of the Spars" (10 June 1905) and "The Weight of the Burden" (17 June 1905) first appeared in Harper's Weekly Magazine before being collected in The Mirror of the Sea (1906, where "The Tallness of the Spars" became "Cobwebs and Gossamer"). America's Preeminent Literary Magazine By the time its legendary, long-serving (1869–1919) editor, Henry Mills Alden, accepted "An Anarchist" in 1906, Harper's was the preeminent literary magazine in the United States. Harper's New Monthly Magazine began in 1850 as a "'compendium' for those of their customers who didn't have time to read through 'scores and hundreds of magazines and journals'" (Lapham xii). Copyright laws did not protect European authors and publishers in the American market, so Harper's early issues [End Page 179] were full of pirated pieces by Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and others—American authors were relegated to the back. Though the magazine achieved extraordinary popularity very soon—with fifty thousand subscribers after six months of publication (Exman 69–70)—its European orientation inspired a backlash: The American (Whig) Review (1845–1852) claimed that the Harpers were "anti-American in feeling as concern[ed] American literary development," and George R. Graham, of Graham's Magazine called Harper's Monthly a good foreign magazine and prophesized "the veriest worshipper of the dust of Europe will tire of the dead level of John Bull upon every page." (Haveman 16) Nearly bankrupt in 1896, it was restored to solvency through huge loans from J. P. Morgan, who wrote, "[t]he downfall of the House of Harper would be a national calamity"; Morgan never asked to be repaid (Lapham xx). Partly in response to the criticism the magazine suffered for being slavishly European, but mostly because of the increasing acceptance of American authors and the more general rise in American cultural self-confidence (fueled by its growing industrial power), Harper's priorities had reversed by 1900. American works were given preferential treatment, and European authors like Conrad appeared near the back. The magazine worked hard not to offend middle-class, late-Victorian tastes. "Harper's was notorious for its censorship of fictional writing, most notably an early version of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure in 1894, and it was the house policy of Harper and Brothers to print only material that could be read aloud before all members of the family" (Dawson). Harper's Monthly Magazine ("New" was dropped from the title in 1900) therefore tended to be a genteel, cautious outlet for middle-class taste and morality. William Dean Howells wrote the "Editor's Study" from January 1892 to March 1896 (Campbell). Before taking the position, he learned in an interview with one of the Harpers that there were things "a man might or might not say in the Harper periodicals […] at any approach to which it 'rang a little bell.' […] I tried to catch the tinkle of the little bell when it was not actually sounded" (Brake 111). Conrad's attitude toward Harper and Brothers began with enthusiastic gratitude for their generous terms. In November 1902 he told Pinker he would be happy to "occasionally furnish a story for Harper" because "they pay well; and I want to be well paid" (CL...

Maria Gowen Brooks, In and Out of the Poe Circle

Maria Gowen Brooks, In and Out of the Poe Circle Kirsten Silva Gruesz (bio) May I rise from the flames and fragments of her who is deplored, even as a phoenix, though less brilliant. —Idomen; or, The Vale of Yumurí (1838) The fictional account of the making of a woman poet offered in Maria Gowen Brooks's 1838 novel Idomen is unusually concerned with reception, reputation, and the construction of posthumous authorial legend. Idomen Burleigh's tragic life is recounted in fragments to one Herman Albrecht, a sensitive German living in Cuba who sees in her a rare talent, one whose burning desire to write great poems vies with her equally impassioned devotion to the wrong man. Idomen in a related poem dismisses a rival in love with a verse containing this scornful epithet: "She burns but with a common flame."1 But with literary and bodily passions thwarted, Idomen—the uncommon flame—has no air left to burn: in a kind of self-immolation that reiterates an earlier suicide attempt, she contracts a tropical fever that drives her toward the river, where she drowns. Albrecht attempts to reconstruct her, reading the documents she left behind and guessing at the contents of those she burned in hopes of resurrecting a "phoenix" from her "flames and fragments," which have passed through various hands and different languages. The difficult life, and pointedly difficult-to-get-at afterlife, of the fictive Idomen appears to fit neatly into a powerful nineteenth-century figuration of the Poetess "as improvisatrice, as statue or art [End Page 75] Click for larger view View full resolution Maria Gowen Brooks. From the frontispiece to "The Late Maria Brooks," by Rufus W. Griswold, in Graham's Magazine 33 (1848): 61-68. [End Page 76] object produced for man's pleasure, as abandoned woman"—to borrow Linda Peterson's characterization of Leticia E. Landon ("L.E.L.").2 The novel's preface hints, moreover, that Idomen, like L.E.L.'s History of the Lyre (1829), comes "from life," and Brooks's own construction of an exotic authorial persona—she published all her mature works as Maria del Occidente—would seem to perform the same coquettish gesture at truth behind a veil. As I will argue here, however, the reception history of Brooks's work labors under an overfidelity to the presumed truth-value of that novel, leading to the common misrepresentation that she did not participate in the periodical-driven literary marketplace of her time because of her protracted residence in Cuba, and thus remained relatively unknown. But a larger oversight rests in criticism's failure to register the pointed hopelessness of Albrecht's effort to reconstruct the "flames and fragments" of his idolized genius into a stable subject—and the implications of that failure for our understanding of Brooks's authorship. Although Idomen represents a recognizable type of the nineteenth-century Poetess—an unhappy figure struggling to sublimate her own emotional overflows into confessional lyric—that type does not in fact correspond to the persona cultivated by the novel's author. Through a closer examination of the circulation of both Brooks's texts and the persona of Maria del Occidente, I want to contribute to the growing body of work on the construction of the Poetess—"less a person than a persona that emerges during a time when poetry is increasingly defined in terms of its personifying function," as Yopie Prins reminds us. Prins and Virginia Jackson have importantly described the Poetess as "an increasingly empty figure: not a lyric subject to be reclaimed as an identity but a medium for cultural exchange, a common name upon which much depends, including the definition of lyric as a genre."3 Brooks threw off her married name to occupy the figurative body of Maria del Occidente yet inevitably was grouped with others under the common name of Poetess. Some very specific cultural transmissions took place through her persona in the form of nationalist rivalries and transatlantic visions, the in-between site of her "Occidente" (a western province [End Page 77] of Cuba, and by extension the dawning West) laying claim to a new space of poetic production. What she published was...