"Messrs. Longfellow and Lowell, so pointedly picked out for abuse [by Miss Fuller] as the worst of our poets, are, upon the whole, perhaps, our best—although Bryant and one or two others are scarcely inferior."[1]
The more Poe's Americanism is studied the less restricted it will be seen to be. "You are almost the only fearless American critic," Lowell wrote him in 1842, and, when inviting him to address the Boston Lyceum, he added: "The Boston people want a little independent criticism vastly." Poe was not only fearless and independent; he was untrammeled by local prejudice and he was singularly future-minded. Our cause, he says, is "the cause of a national as distinguished from a sectional literature." He saw clearly that America would not always be hemmed within its present boundaries, and he looked to the Pacific as the arena of our future exploits and to "a hardy, effective, and well disciplined national navy" as "the main prop of our national power." Commenting on the "Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs," of March 21, 1836, he writes:
- ↑ Stedman's reference to the clash between Poe and Lowell is amusing: "A speck of reservation spoiled for him [Poe] the fullest cup of esteem, even when tendered by the most knightly and authoritative hands. Lowell's Fable for Critics, declaring 'three-fifths of him genius,' gave him an award which ought to content even an unreasonable man. As it was, the good-natured thrusts of one whose scholarship was unassailable, at his metrical and other hobbies, drew from him a somewhat coarse and vindictive review of the whole satire." Poe, it must be remembered, did not happen to belong to the "Sweet Alice" type, so affectingly portrayed by Thomas Dunn English:
"She wept with delight when you gave her a smile,
And trembled with grief at your frown."
