s, the
Holmeses, the Nortons, to whom Poe seemed a piratical intruder from
Javan or Gadire.

Nothing is so discouraging to a young poet of originality as to find
himself isolated. Everything new is regarded with suspicion and dislike
by the general world of readers, and usually by the leaders of criticism
as well. Yet the daring prophet feels supported if he has but his Aaron
and his Hur. In the generation that immediately preceded Poe, Wordsworth
and Coleridge had been derided, but they had enjoyed the emphatic
approbation of one another and of Southey. Shelley had been a pariah of
letters, yet he was cordially believed in by Byron and by Peacock. Even
Keats could shrink from the mud-storms of the Scotch reviewers behind
the confident zeal of Leigh Hunt and Reynolds. At a still later moment
Rossetti and Morris would shelter themselves securely, and even
serenely, from the obloquy of criticism, within a slender peel-tower of
the praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set against the
stupidity of the world at large the comfortable cleverness of a few
strong persons of taste, founded, as all good taste must be, upon
principles. The poet could pride himself on his eclecticism, on his
recognition within, as Keats said, "a little clan." But Poe's misfortune
was to have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely those
persons who represented, and on the whole justly represented, good taste
in America.

His behaviour in this predicament was what might have been expected from
a man whose genius was more considerable than his judgment or his
manners. He tried, at first, to conciliate the New England authorities,
and he flattered not merely the greater planets but some of the very
little stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher P.
Cranch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that his blandishments
were of no avail, he turned savage, and tried to prove that he did not
care, by being rude to Bryant and Longfellow. He called the whole solemn
Sanhedrim a college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, he
closed upon himself the doors of mercy, since the central aim and object
of the excellent men who at that time ruled American literature was to
prove that, in what this impertinent young man from Virginia called the
Frog Pond, the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, its
home of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the recognition of
Europe, which began to flow in richly