Abstract
American critics of the nineteenth century did little to establish or to evaluate the position of Edgar Allan Poe. Generalities were made all too freely. In fact, one biographer says that Poe has had more of them than any other author of his day. Without analytical substantiation, moreover, contemporaries called him either a. willful eccentric or “three-fifths genius." |Early in 1845, however, Graham1s Magazine carried what has since become a famous review of Poe, by James Russell Lowell. Though this study, too, abounds in generalities and gives the Impression that the writer is not intent upon a conclusion, it does propose to analyze the genius of him who had already written such poems as "The Haunted Palace," such tales as "The Gold Bug," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "William Wilson"; and who had already served as editor of The Southern Literary Messenger.