who control our whole literature in controlling the larger portion of our critical journals,) it requires no small amount of courage, in an author whose subsistence lies in his pen, to hint, even, that anything good, in a literary way, can, by any possibility, exist out of the limits of a certain narrow territory."
Everything that Poe said about southern literature and western literature was said not with the view of unduly exalting either but of giving to both a place of impartial representation beside the literature of New England. When Whitman a generation later pleaded for a literature that should be commensurate with American life, he was only transmitting the torch
lighted by Poe.
But the charge of intemperate sectionalism is brought most frequently against Poe's criticism of Lowell's Fable for Critics. "Mr. Lowell," he writes, "is one of the most rabid of the Abolition fanatics; and no southerner who does not wish to be insulted, and at the same time revolted by a bigotry the most obstinately blind and deaf, should ever touch a volume by this author." One may well ask, What has this to do with Lowell, the poet, or Lowell, the literary critic? Nothing whatever. But Lowell had called his Fable only "a slight jeu d'esprit" and yet had introduced into it such lines as,
Forty fathers of Freedom, of whom twenty bred
Their sons for the rice swamps at so much a head,
And their daughters for . . . . . faugh!
Surely one can not blame Poe for abdicating the rôle of literary critic for a moment and warning the readers of the Southern Literary Messenger of what they
