The anti-Bostonian

WHEN HE DIED in 1849 at age 40, Edgar Allan Poe’s literary reputation was at its nadir. Why? According to ‘‘Poe’’ (Mississippi), a new biography by James M. Hutchisson, the writer’s ostracism from American literary culture can be chalked up to his unwise battles with influential Bostonian wordsmiths.

Though he was born in Boston (before being orphaned at age 2 and taken in by the Allan family of Richmond, Va.), and although he published his first book of poems with the tagline ‘‘By a Bostonian,’’ Poe was by temperament a Southerner, according to Hutchisson, a professor of American literature and Southern studies at The Citadel in South Carolina. In the 1830s, we read, Poe earned his spurs as a critic by tilting against such famed New England writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, and particularly Cambridge’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose moral didacticism (especially in regard to the slavery question) inspired the disgusted Poe to develop a theory of poetry that eschewed social progressivism in favor of the pursuit of Beauty itself.

In 1845, Poe’s aesthetic sectionalism torpedoed his career when he was invited by Bostonian poet James Russell Lowell to read his electrifying new poem ‘‘The Raven’’ before the Boston Lyceum, whose lecture series helped establish the reputations of the Transcendentalists (whom Poe nicknamed the Frogpondians). On Oct. 16, before a standing-room-only audience at Boston’s Odeon Theatre, Poe couldn’t resist prefacing his reading with some biting remarks about New England writing; insulted, most of the audience walked out.

Shortly afterward, Poe alienated his last few supporters here when he insisted, in the pages of a New York literary magazine, that although its pumpkin pie was ‘‘delicious,’’ Boston’s hotels were ‘‘bad’’ and its poetry ‘‘not so good.’’ As for Bostonians, Poe concluded, what few good qualities they possessed were erased by the fact that they had ‘‘no soul.’’