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Browsing named entities in a specific section of Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.). Search the whole document.

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Shakespeare (search for this): chapter 1.4
ertson, New essays towards a critical method, p. 117. His most distinctive gifts as critic were clearness of intellect and a faculty for analysis. Few Americans of his time had finer intellectual endowments. He also had the poet's faculty of ideality, on which he laid great stress in his judgments of others. And he was the most independent and fearless of critics, disdaining not to attack either high or low. He had not read very widely; but he knew his Milton well, and probably his Shakespeare and his Pope, and he was familiar with the chief Romantic poets of the age immediately preceding his own; while as editor and magazinist he kept in close touch with contemporary literature. On the other hand, he was prone to exaggerate technical blemishes and to underestimate ethical and philosophical significance. And his taste was not always impeccable. By his contemporaries he was thought of as inexcusably harsh in his criticisms: by one of them he is dubbed the tomahawk man, by an
Dickens (search for this): chapter 1.4
had preceded it, remarks William Morton Payne (American Literary Criticism, 1904, p. 14), that one might almost be pardoned for saying that this department of our literature began when, in 1835, The Southern literary Messenger engaged his services. Assuredly no other American critic of his day, save Lowell, may take rank above him. This residue of good work comprises a score of masterly book-reviews, including the memorable notices of Longfellow's Ballads, Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, and Dickens's Barnaby Rudge; some half-dozen essays in the theory of criticism, of which the earliest is his Letter to B—— and the most significant is his Poetic principle; and a series of obiter dicta, collected under the title Marginalia, which have justly been held to contain much of his best work as critic. F. C. Prescott, Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. p. XIX; J. M. Robertson, New essays towards a critical method, p. 117. His most distinctive gifts as critic were
Mellonta Tauta (search for this): chapter 1.4
ion of having invented the short story will depend on our interpretation of terms; but at least he invented the detective story, and more than any other he gave to the short story its vogue in America. Like his poems, his tales are notably unequal. Some of his earlier efforts—especially his satirical and humorous extravaganzas, as Lionizing and Bon-Bon—are properly to be characterized as rubbish; and he was capable in his later years of descending to such inferior work as The Sphinx, Mellonta Tauta, and X-ing a Paragrab. One feels, indeed, that Lowell's famous characterization of him: Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge, applies with entire justice to him as a maker of short stories. The best of his narrative work is to be found in his analytical tales, as The gold Bug or The descent into the Maelstrom, in certain stories in which he combines his analytical gift with the imaginative and inventive gift, as The Cask of Amontillado and William Wilson, or in cer
Palmer Cobb (search for this): chapter 1.4
teps of the Orientalists. On the other hand, in some of his tales of incident he achieves a realism and a minuteness of detail that betray unmistakably the influence of Defoe. And it is easy to demonstrate an indebtedness to divers of his contemporaries, as James and Bulwer and Disraeli and Macaulay. It has been proved also that he knew the German romancer, E. T. A. Hoffmann, if not in the original, at least in translation, and that he caught his manner and appropriated his themes. Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Woodberry, Life of Poe, vol. I, pp. 379-381, and passim. For the rest, he drew for his materials largely on the magazines and newspapers of his day, finding in a famous newspaper sensation of the forties the suggestion of his Mystery of Marie Roget (as he had found in another sensation, of the twenties, the plot of his Politian), and taking advantage of certain contemporary fads in his myth-making about mesmerism, ball
Shelton (search for this): chapter 1.4
cation of his Eureka, a philosophical disquisition on the origin and composition of the universe. The year 1849 opened auspiciously for the poet; during the first half he wrote at least one new tale, and several new poems, including the lines For Annie, Eldorado, a revised and much enlarged version of The bells, and the last of his poems, Annabel Lee. In the summer of 1849 he went to Richmond, where he renewed his addresses to the sweetheart of his boyhood, Miss Royster, now the widow Mrs. Shelton and wealthy, and they became engaged for a second time. Late in September Poe left Richmond for the North, intending to bring his mother-in-law, who remained loyal to him throughout the years, to the South for the marriage; but at Baltimore he was induced to break a temperance pledge that he had made in the summer, and as a result he fell into excesses from the effects of which he died 7 October, 1849. He lies buried in the churchyard of Westminster Presbyterian Church, Baltimore. Su
John M. Daniel (search for this): chapter 1.4
are inaccurately given, and in which we have one of several apocryphal accounts of a voyage to Europe in 1827. As to Poe's character and personality the most divergent views have been expressed. According to Griswold, whom he chose as his literary executor, Poe was a naturally unamiable character, arrogant, irascible, envious, without moral susceptibility or sense of gratitude, and exhibiting scarcely any virtue in either his life or his writings. According to the Richmond editor, John M. Daniel, who saw him frequently during the summer of 1849, he was sour of nature, capricious, selfish, a misanthrope, possessing little moral sense. In the view of Lowell's friend, C. F. Briggs, with whom he was associated for several months in 1845 as co-editor of the Broadway journal, he was badly made up, a characterless character, and utterly deficient of high motive. And Horace Greeley was disturbed lest Mrs. Whitman should marry him, giving it as his opinion that such a union would be a
Louis A. Godey (search for this): chapter 1.4
Broadway journal; in July he became sole editor, and in October editor and proprietor of this paper; and thus was enabled to realize an ambition that he had cherished for more than a decade, to edit a paper of his own. But owing to financial embarrassments arising from various causes, he was compelled to give up this paper at the end of the year. During the first half of 1846 he was ill, so he himself claimed, for several months. In the middle of the year (May to October) he published, in Godey's Lady's Book, his Literati, a series of biographical—critical papers dealing with the chief living writers of Gotham; and the year was further made memorable by the controversy with Thomas Dunn English engendered by the publication of the Literati, and by a scandal growing out of his friendship with the poetess, Mrs. F. S. Osgood. Early in 1847 the poet's wife died, and throughout the year, as indeed during the preceding year, the family suffered keenly from the pinch of poverty. The year
Edmund Clarence Stedman (search for this): chapter 1.4
aneity. But it is not to be denied that some of his best-known poems—as Lenore and The Raven—exhibit too much of artifice; that The Conqueror Worm and passages in still other poems approach too near to the melodramatic; and that, with many readers, his verses must suffer by reason of their sombreness of tone. Poe's tales, which exceed in number his fully authenticated poems, have been held by some of the most judicious of his critics to constitute his chief claim to our attention. E. C. Stedman in the Stedman-Woodberry edition of Poe, Vol. x, p. XIII; and Robertson,l.c., p. 75. There are those who will not subscribe to this view, but it is plain that he was the most important figure in the history of the short story during his half-century. Hawthorne alone may be thought of as vying with him for this distinction; but although the New Englander is infinitely Poe's superior in some respects—as in the creation of character and in wholesomeness and sanity—he must yield place to
Disraeli (search for this): chapter 1.4
makes constant use of Gothic machinery, of apparitions, cataleptic attacks, premature burial, and life after death. In several of his stories—as also in his long poems, Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf —he follows in the steps of the Orientalists. On the other hand, in some of his tales of incident he achieves a realism and a minuteness of detail that betray unmistakably the influence of Defoe. And it is easy to demonstrate an indebtedness to divers of his contemporaries, as James and Bulwer and Disraeli and Macaulay. It has been proved also that he knew the German romancer, E. T. A. Hoffmann, if not in the original, at least in translation, and that he caught his manner and appropriated his themes. Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Woodberry, Life of Poe, vol. I, pp. 379-381, and passim. For the rest, he drew for his materials largely on the magazines and newspapers of his day, finding in a famous newspaper sensation of the forties the s
Fenimore Cooper (search for this): chapter 1.4
ching. As poet, he has had many imitators both in his own country and abroad, but especially in France and England. In the view of Edmund Gosse, there is hardly one [of the later English poets] whose verse-music does not show traces of Poe's influence (Questions at issue, p. 90). On Poe's influence and vogue in France, see L. P. Betz, Edgar Poe in der franzoesischen Litteratur: Studien zur vergleichenden Litteraturgeschichte der neueren Zeit (1902), pp. 16-82; C. H. Page in The [New York] Nation for 14 January, 9009; and G. D. Morris, Fenimore Cooper et Edgar Poe, pp. 67 f. (Paris, 1912). As romancer he has probably wielded a larger influence than any English writer since Scott. And as critic it is doubtful whether any other of his countrymen has contributed so much toward keeping the balance right between art-for-art's-sake and didacticism. His fame abroad is admittedly larger than that of any other American writer, and his vogue has been steadily growing among his own people.
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