may expect in a poem which presumably was to deal only with matters literary. He is not striking beneath the belt: he is warding off a blow already aimed beneath the belt. But the omission of the anti-southern lines from the college editions of Lowell's poem makes Poe's reference seem an irrelevant and unwarranted intrusion of sectionalism. Is it not unfair and un-American to cite Poe's outburst of indignation without citing at the same time the lines that called it into being? Poe's review of the Fable for Critics, read as a whole, does credit to his impartiality and to his desire to see North, South, East, and West justly represented in a national American literature. He begins with a discussion of the reasons for the absence of satire in our literature:
"It seems to us that, in America, we have refused to encourage satire—not because what we have had touches us too nearly—but because it has been too pointless to touch us at all. Its namby-pambyism has arisen, in part, from the general want, among our men of letters, of that minute polish—of that skill in details—which, in combination with natural sarcastic power, satire, more than any other form of literature, so imperatively demands. In part, also, we may attribute our failure to the colonial sin of imitation. We content ourselves—at this point not less supinely than at all others—with doing what not only has been done before, but what, however well done, has yet been done ad nauseam. We should not be able to endure infinite repetitions of even absolute excellence; but what is 'McFingal' more than a faint echo from 'Hudibras'?—and what is 'The Vision of Rubeta'
