Tuesday, December the 16th, 2003
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William Fearing Gill's book Edgar Allan Poe—After Fifty Years begins with a supremely bad-tempered paragraph:
“When Rufus W. Griswold, ”the pedagogue vampire,“ as he was aptly termed by one of his contemporaries, committed the immortal infamy of blighting a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's works, which he found ready at hand, by supplementing his perfunctory labors with a calumniating memoir of the poet, nearly fifty years ago, there were many protests uttered by the poet's contemporaries at home and abroad. Charles Baudelaire, the Poe of French literature, in his tribute to the dead poet, indignantly wrote: ”What is the matter with America? Are there, then, no regulations there to keep the curs out of the cemeteries?“ In view of the fact that the Griswold biography of Poe has been incontestably discredited, and proved to be merely a scaffolding of malevolent falsehoods—the outcome of malice and mendacity—the deference paid to Griswold and his baleful work in the memoir accompanying the latest publication of Poe's writings seems well-nigh incomprehensible.”