Leon Jackson
In 1829, two down at heel poets met in a bookstore in Baltimore and traded insults. Their dispute might have ended in blows or a duel, but before it could do so, a different sort of challenge was issued. “I’ll bet you five dollars,” said one, “I can write more stanzas in one hour than you can in a day.” The other picked up the gauntlet with a sneer. Pencils and paper were produced and so began one of the period’s stranger “tournament[s] of rhymes.” The challenger was the wretchedly obscure John Lofland, also known as the Milford Bard; his competitor was Edgar Allan Poe.1 Familiar though we are with Poe’s contentious personality, and even with his habit of competing with his peers, we have failed until now to appreciate the extent to which Poe was also engaged in the world of formal literary competitions. Over the course of his career, Poe acted as a competition entrant, organizer, and judge; he reviewed prize-winning plays and poetry; he became involved in competition scandals, lawsuits, even fistfights; and, crucially, he wove the central themes of competition into his poetry and fiction, as well as into his nonfictional prose. Few figures, in fact, were involved so intimately in so many aspects of the competitive world as Poe, and, importantly, perhaps none more fully dramatized the tensions inherent in literary competitions.
Poe’s engagement with the world of competitions is more than a footnote to literary history, moreover, because to an extent that we have failed to appreciate, writing competitions were themselves a vitally important part of the antebellum literary terrain. The impact of competitions was immense. Those who entered and won included writers as prominent as Susan Warner, Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Hale, Nathaniel P. Willis, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Indeed, when we include the writing competitions organized by schools, academies, and colleges, then it would be fair to say that almost every American author with a diploma or degree participated in this mode of economic and cultural exchange. Nor was the competitive impulse limited to literary productions alone. There were competitions organized to encourage animal breeding, agricultural innovation, scientific development, and domestic manufactures. There were prize jellies and jams, prizefights, prize races, and prizes for binding books and setting types. Early national, and, especially, antebellum America were dominated by a culture of competitions.2
Considering competitions helps us see a new—an other—Poe, but, still more, considering Poe helps us understand something new about competitions. A curiously torn figure, Poe could neither embrace literary competitions nor leave them wholly alone. When he won, he endorsed their operating assumptions enthusiastically; when he lost, he submitted them to blistering and uniquely insightful critiques. Finally, Poe not only participated in the world of literary competitions, but he also hastened their transformation, treating them less as chances for personal improvement and more as opportunities for financial gain. Poe, in other words, offers us a unique vantage point from which to consider this forgotten but immensely important activity.
When competitions first began to appear in America in the 1780s, their appeal and success were explained by reference to two psychological drives with which Poe would have been intimately familiar: these were emulation and approbation. Although emulation today suggests the desire to imitate, in the eighteenth century it was defined, according to John Adams, as “imitation and something more—a desire not only to equal or resemble, but to excel.” Emulation, in other words, was not the desire to do one’s best but to surpass the best of another, even while working within a shared, or imitative, frame of reference. It was regarded as a powerful, and indeed almost uncontrollable, impulse. The urge to emulate, however, was driven by what pundits believed to be the still more fundamental and compulsive need for approbation, which Adams described as “the desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired.” Individuals sought to emulate one another in order to garner the approbation that success brought them.3 Emulation was widely praised stimulating every achievement in the arts and sciences and also for its capacity to ennoble those who were moved by it, yet it was feared, too, for its tendency to promote ruthlessness, hostility, and envy, and—in those who did not succeed—a hopeless loss of motivation. Approbation, likewise, was seen as a powerful spur to effort and, at the same time, as a selfish and superficial impulse. Emulation has been well described as a “slippery virtue that always hovered on the brink of a vice,” and the same might be said of approbativeness too. Rather than rejecting either of them, however eighteenth-century thinkers sought to harness them and play off one against the other through what Adams called “the checks of emulation and the balances of rivalry.” Literary competitions were just such a system of checks and balances, in which one passion (the urge for approbation) was used to propel another (the urge to excel).4
The competitive ideal informed a number of informal literary jousts that flourished through the eighteenth century, such as Crambo, or verse capping, in which a group of friends took turns adding improvised lines to a group poem, the players being eliminated as they faltered or failed to come up with a suitable rhyme.5 Formal literary competitions differed from such games, however, in two important ways. In the first place, they entailed prizes, sometimes of money. Although the sums could be fairly substantial, such premiums were meant only to be symbolic—to give some tangible manifestation to the approbation the winner would receive. Money was never the point of a competition; the goal, rather, was emulation, and, indeed, to the extent that everyone did their best, the assumptions was that everyone “won.” Secondly, formal competitions required judges who were not, as in Crambo, also players. Competition judging was predicated on Enlightenment notions of scrupulous, disinterested objectivity, impeccable taste, and absolute fairness, all of which were guaranteed by the gentility of the judges and anonymity (or pseudonymity) of the entrants. Of course, not everyone necessarily agreed with the judges of a competition, and one of the genres that grew out of the competitive world was the volume of “rejected addresses,” the first example being Horace and James Smith’s spoof volume of that title, published in England in 1812.6 By that time, competitions were just beginning to take off in America. By the 1820s, they had become common—fuelled by a vibrant nationalist impulse—and poet Charles Sprague, who won every contest he entered, became a household name. They became still more prominent in the 1830s, after actor Edwin Forrest launched and bankrolled lavishly a series of contests for plays in which he would act. Between 1828 and 1852, there were no less than twenty playwriting contests organized in New York City alone. While competitions eventually generated hostility and boredom, in the antebellum period, few aspiring authors were either able, or willing, to ignore them. Poe, certainly, could not.
Poe’s engagement with competitiveness began early. His classmates at Joseph Clarke’s academy in Richmond remembered the thirteen-year-old Poe as being “eager for distinction” and “inclined to be imperious,” while Clarke himself invoked the textbook definition of emulation in describing his young charge as being “ambitious to excel.” In 1821 or 1822, Poe won his first competition: a public elocution contest, or exhibition, held in Richmond. By the time he entered William Burke’s academy in 1823, he had become an expert at “capping verses,” and it was at this time, too, that he swam an alleged six miles up the James River against the tide, in deliberate emulation of Lord Byron’s famous swim of the Hellespont. (Byron was, of course, and would remain for some time, the figure whom Americans emulated.) Even at the University of Virginia, Poe showed no let up in his competitive drive. He “grew noted as a debater,” as one student recalled, and also participated in boxing and jumping competitions.7
Poe’s relentless drive to compete and succeed, according to Kenneth Silverman, can be traced back directly to his status as an orphan and to his need to be recognized and approved of by figures of authority. It was a lifelong and, apparently, insatiable hunger. Years later, a friend recalled of Poe that “no man living loved the praises of others better than he did . . . whenever I happened to communicate to him anything touching his abilities as a writer, his bosom would heave like a troubled sea.”8 What the world of competitions gave him was a stage on which to act out these deep-seated needs; what the concepts of emulation and approbation gave others was a convenient language with which to explain his actions. So far from seeming aberrant, then, Poe’s emulative drive was seen as, in fact, quite admirable, at least initially.
Unfortunately for Poe, his chief judge—at least in his own mind—would always be his guardian, John Allan, a bitter man who was determined not to see him win. Poe’s early letters to Allan are filled with anguished pleas, in which he asks to be judged, but flinches from the judgment: “you can judge for yourself,” “I will give you the reason . . . then judge,” “suspend your judgement until you hear of me again,” “I begged that you would suspend any judgement,” “If you conclude upon giving me a trial please enclose me the letter,” “I would beg you to judge me impartially,” and, revealingly, “I have offended only in asking your approbation.”9 But Allan was unwilling to give his approbation. An orphan himself, he bore an unresolved grudge at his own foster father’s failure to support his intellectual development, and he seemed determined to inflict on Poe the neglect he had himself received. No matter what Poe achieved, it was rarely ever enough to merit his flinty foster father’s approval, and as Poe entered his mid teens, their relationship grew increasingly tense. A man who could in private admit to his own “pride and ambition,” Allan came to revile those same traits in his young charge, and he left Poe with a painfully skewed view of the world: one in which he felt it necessary to win the approval of those who judged him, but which at the same left him convinced that he would never be judged fairly. Life, for Poe, was a rigged competition in which he nonetheless had no choice but to participate.10
Fittingly enough, Poe’s first published poem, “Tamerlane,” which appeared mere months after he had fled Allan’s household, both denounced “the folly of even risking the best feelings of the heart at the shrine of Ambition” and at the same time vaunted that very impulse as a means of achieving greatness. It was, in fact, a text utterly characteristic of Poe’s ambivalent feelings concerning competitiveness, and it would directly inform his engagement with the world of formal literary competitions.11
Poe makes a fascinating case study, then, both because he felt such a powerful need to compete with others, and because he betrayed an equally powerful contempt for such competitions and, indeed, for competitiveness as a whole. His conflicted feelings, moreover, were only exacerbated by the fact that he tended to enter writing contests at moments of acute financial and emotional vulnerability, when the promise of winning prizes seemed to hold out redemption on several distinct levels: monetary, vocational, and emotional. The prize money, for Poe, was never merely symbolic. The great irony for Poe is that his feelings about competitions were so wholly conflicted that even when he was a winner he lost, never able to accept fully either the premises or the practitioners. Yet Poe’s loss is our gain, so to speak, for his curious blend of blindness and insight concerning the world of competitions makes him an almost unique informant: engaged and detached, starry-eyed and cynical, both in and out of the game.
Poe’s entry into the world of adult competitions came in May 1831, when he learned of a contest in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier offering a premium of one hundred dollars for the best American tale submitted.12 Poe submitted five. That he was driven by something like emulation and approbation is apparent, but he was driven just as much if not more by poverty, for he was in desperate straits, living in a tiny Baltimore apartment with his impoverished aunt, Maria Clemm, and several others. At a period in time when it was common for periodical authors to receive little more than two dollars a page, the opportunity to win one hundred dollars must have been hard to resist.13
Poe’s decision to enter the competition, however, should not be taken as an indication that he approved of such events. Many dozens of contests were advertised over the twenty or so years Poe was writing to sustain himself, but he entered only three of which we are aware, and in every case he entered at a time of absolute financial desperation, treating the contests as a high stakes gamble. Indeed, there is reason to believe that he experienced a deep humiliation at having to hawk his wares in such a way. That Poe’s feelings about competitive success were conflicted was apparent from the tales themselves, one of which, “A Decided Loss,” featured a few well-placed swipes at Edwin Forrest, John Augustus Stone, and their prize-winning script, Metamora (1829). Whatever he thought of Indian dramas—and the evidence is that he thought very little of them indeed—it is clear that he resented the pair’s prize-driven celebrity. The approbation and money that came with being a star were precisely what Poe wanted, and lacked, and therefore despised. The fact that one of the Courier’s judges—Richard Penn Smith—was a friend of Forrest’s who had himself just won (and very likely fraudulently) a Forrest prize of one thousand dollars for his play Caius Marius would have galled Poe deeply, and simply reinforced his conviction that all competitions were rigged, had he been aware of it.14 Poe, as it turns out, was neither as lucky, nor as well connected, as Penn Smith. He lost the competition and, with it, control over his five stories; while all of them were published in the Courier in 1832, he received no money from them and, besides, very little cachet, for his name appeared over only the first, and none indicated that they had been competition entries. If, as I am arguing, Poe entered the world of competitions with a well-entrenched prejudice against them on the score of fairness, then his first experience simply reinforced such beliefs.
By 1833, Poe was in yet more desperate straits, writing to Allan in April of that year that he was “perishing—absolutely perishing for want of aid.” Allan never replied. Starved for both attention and money, Poe could hardly have ignored the news that the Baltimore Saturday Visiter was also running a competition, this time with a fifty dollar premium for the best short story and twenty-five for the best poem submitted. He knew that the competition again represented a serious gamble. If he won in both the prose and poetry divisions, he stood to make seventy-five urgently needed dollars—or, if he chose, two “Silver medals”—but if he lost, his submissions automatically became the “property of the Publishers.” Risking much, Poe again employed a saturation technique, sending in six short stories and a poem entitled “The Coliseum.”15
Ironically, the six tales Poe submitted to the Visiter formed the nucleus of his new and still unpublished story collection, Tales of the Folio Club, which evinced a deeply critical suspicion of the entire axiological process on which literary contests were predicated. The narrative that frames the collection describes the inner workings of the intensely competitive Folio Club. Each month, the narrator of the frame explains, the members of the Club convene over food and wine, read aloud their stories, critique one another, and then vote on the works read. “Much rivalry will ensue,” he adds, for the members of the Club compete not merely to win, but also to avoid losing, since while the winner is made club President, the loser is compelled to pay for the food and wine at the club’s next meeting. The organization of the Club’s meetings seems a striking and pointed commentary on Poe’s view of competitions. In the first place, it suggests that he saw the competitive world as an incestuous clique where authors wrote for, and judged, one another. More important still, it indicates that Poe saw contests less as noble and emulatory events in which, to the extent that one tried one’s best, “everyone won” and more as zero sum games with losers as well as winners. Losing, indeed, seemed to be both costly and humiliating. When the narrator of the frame loses the contest, however, he does not submit to the decision of the members; rather, he grabs all of the manuscripts, “and, rushing from the house, determines to appeal, by printing the whole, from the decision of the Club, to that of the public.” It is these stories, then, together with the Club’s comments, that comprise Poe’s volume, and from which he selected six for the Visiter.16
While scholars have seen the roots of Poe’s projected volume in works as diverse as Plato’s Symposium, Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), and Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveler (1824), the parallels with the rejected address tradition are hard to miss. Like the aggrieved participants in that genre, the narrator of the Folio Club collection seeks to shift the center of axiological gravity from a small group, or club, of judges to the opinion of “the public.” Poe’s decision to frame his narrative in this way was anything but arbitrary; he was familiar with the works of Horace and James Smith and more generally with the history of British theater, so his reliance on this axiological maneuver, and especially in the context of his own entry into a literary contest, is telling indeed. If nothing else, it suggests his deep ambivalence about competitions and makes clear the irony of his engagement in a zero-sum authorial economy in whose fairness he reposed so little trust.17
In the instance, Poe ended up being both winner and loser. The committee of judges—whose meeting sounded remarkably like that of the Folio Club, complete with cigars, wine, and balloting—unanimously voted Poe’s story collection the best, selecting one tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” for the prize. The judges also admired Poe’s poem and they came close to voting for it too, but in the end they settled on another, entitled “The Song of the Wind,” written by one Henry Wilton.18
Poe, recalled Visiter editor John Hill Hewitt many years later, was “greedy for fame, as well as in need of money,” and in winning this competition, he managed to gain a combination of both.19 Desperately as he needed the money, however, he seemed to need fame, and the approval it suggested, still more. In 1835 he sent Thomas Willis White, the proprietor of the Southern Literary Messenger, a copy of the Visiter containing the judges’ warm praise of his work and begged him to have it “copied into any of the Richmond papers.” White immediately printed it in his own magazine. Indeed, Poe continued to harp on his competition successes long after others might have left them behind, and he milked them for all they were worth. An 1843 biographical sketch ghost-written by Poe claimed that the author had received “first honours” at the University of Virginia, “headed every class” at West Point, jumped “the distance of twenty-one feet, six inches, on a dead level, with a run of twenty yards,” swam the James in an effort that made “Byron’s paddle across the Hellespont” look like “mere child’s play in comparison,” and, significantly, won “both premiums” in the Visiter contest. Almost every statement was a falsehood.20
In fact Poe might well have felt that he had won the poetry as well as the prose division, for shortly after the awards were announced, he discovered that the poetry winner, “Henry Wilton,” was none other than John Hill Hewitt himself, the editor of the very paper in which the competition had been run. He discovered, too, that the judges had initially favored his poem over Hewitt’s but had felt uncomfortable awarding all the prizes to one entrant and so had given Hewitt’s poem first place instead.21 The fact that Hewitt had entered pseudonymously and that his pseudonym was not even known to the judges until after they had selected his poem seemed irrelevant to Poe. Attuned, as he was, to even the slightest taint of bias in the act of judgment and, moreover, predisposed to see competitions as zero sum games, Poe felt that, in some ill-defined way, Hewitt had defrauded him of a prize that was rightly his.
Days later, Poe confronted the editor on the street and an ugly scene ensued. “You have used underhanded means, sir, to obtain that prize over me,” said Poe. Hewitt vehemently denied the accusation. “Then why did you keep back your real name?” Poe persisted. Hewitt explained that he had had his “reasons,” but Poe pushed on. “But you tampered with the committee, sir,” he said. “The committee are gentlemen,” retorted Hewitt, “and above being tampered with; and if you say that you insult them.” This was too much for Poe. “I agree that the committee are gentlemen,” he said, “but I cannot place you in that category.” On hearing this, Hewitt turned and punched Poe in the face, and a fight was only averted by the interference of friends. It was hardly the most decorous conclusion to what was, in many respects, the most important moment in Poe’s literary coming of age, but in some sense it is typical. The committee, for Poe, was both above reproach and yet also capable of being tampered with. Winning a prize was both priceless (to the extent that it validated Poe) and worthless (to the extent that it could also, for whatever reason, validate a scoundrel like Hewitt). When Poe’s poem was reprinted in the Southern Literary Messenger two years later, Poe very pointedly retitled it, “The Coliseum, a Prize Poem.”22
As the aftermath of the Visiter affair suggests, Poe evinced a curious double consciousness regarding competitions. When he won, he not only endorsed the justice of the judges, but he bragged endlessly of his attainments, magnified them, and at times simply fabricated ‘facts’ that were not true. When, by contrast, he lost, or when he was commenting on competitions in which he was not an entrant, he cast scorn on the proceedings in their entirety, vilifying the judges, belittling the entrants, and ridiculing the winner. At times, he offered up witheringly cynical and, the truth be told, devastatingly accurate critiques of the hypocrisy and deceit on which many such competitions were based. The fact that he so often saw deceit where none was to be detected does not mean that his analyses of those situations that were fraudulent lacked bite. They did not.
In the case of the Visiter competition, for example, Poe was perhaps right to suspecting dishonesty but wrong laying the charge at Hewitt’s door. In submitting his poem pseudonymously, Hewitt had, in fact, been operating strictly within the conventions of the traditional competition; in choosing to spread the wealth among the entrants, however, the judges had not.23 (That Poe did not criticize the judges was directly a result of their having awarded him first place in the story contest and, equally, of his continuing reliance on their largesse).
Of course, it is quite possible that both Hewitt and the judges colluded in rigging the competition, as Poe might have suspected deep down. If this was the case, it would have been neither the first nor the last time that such a fait accompli had taken place. Just six months after the announcement of the Visiter results, the New Yorker ran a similar contest, with a one hundred dollar premium for best short story and fifty dollars for the best poem and the best essay. Contest judge Lewis Gaylord Clark arranged for his friend, a Bowdoin College professor named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to win the contest, but in the end, the panel (Clark, H. W. Herbert, and Samuel Woodworth) decided to give him only half the prize, the other being given out of pity to none other than Poe’s recent publisher Eliza Leslie: a combination of deceit, then, and meddling.24 Although it is highly unlikely that Poe ever learned of the machinations that took place in this event, he already had his eye on Clark and would very soon accuse him, and a small cadre of fellow writers, of orchestrating a generally corrupt clique that rigged everything from contests and contracts to puffs and plagiarism. One of the authors whom he accused of benefiting from this incestuous world of critics and editors was none other than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.25
But the problem went further, in fact, than even this isolated incident. While there were honest competition judges, there were just as many—and probably more—who bent, if they did not outright break, the rules, typically though nepotism. Although there were few cut-and-dried cases of cheating, many savored of dishonesty and collusion. Consider: Nathaniel P. Willis won several poetry competitions in a newspaper edited by his father; Harriet Beecher won a prize in the school essay contest run by her sister Catharine; Judge James Hall later begged Harriet to enter a story in his Western Literary Magazine contest after deciding that the submissions entered on time were inadequate and then promptly awarded her first prize; Ann Stephens won first prize in a contest run by Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion, a journal she co-edited; and Edwin Forrest routinely awarded prizes to plays that had not yet been written, that had been written years earlier, or that had not been submitted formally to his contests.26
Such juxtapositions are highly suggestive of deceit or collusion but no more than that. Yet definitive evidence of competition rigging does exist. In 1847, Maine author Elizabeth Oakes Smith received a remarkable and remarkably frank letter from magazine editor Alice B. Neal. With little apology, Neal explained that her periodical, The Gazette, had organized a competition with a hefty $150 premium for the best tale on the American Revolution, and with only three weeks left before the deadline no submissions had been made that were worthy of the award. Completely unwilling to either cancel the contest or extend the deadline, Neal decided to commission a story from Smith. “Will you not be so good,” asked Neal, “if previous engagements do not interfere—as to write one, for which we guarantee you shall receive the prize.” Completely undaunted, Smith cranked out a story—“The Bald Eagle”—for which she was duly awarded first place. Poe’s sense that committees were, from time to time, tampered with, turns out, then, not have been so farfetched.27
When Poe began to write for the Southern Literary Messenger in late 1834, he was propelled in part by a campaign designed to expose this kind of literary fraud in all its manifestations, and while he did not challenge the results of competitions specifically during his tenure in Richmond, he would perhaps never have begun his campaign had it not been for his own competition disappointments. Poe raged against puffing, plagiarism, and the power of ruthless literary cliques. Even his benign essays, such as “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” were designed to unveil hidden machinations, or, to quote Willis himself, to reveal “who pulls the wire to all the literary puppets.”28 Upon firing Poe in 1836, Messenger owner Thomas W. White heaved a sigh of relief that he was now free of this self-appointed “Judge or Judge Advocate.” Poe had, indeed, made it his mission to judge judges. All that remained now was for him to become, himself, a judge.29
Poe’s conflicted feelings concerning competitions and their judging were merely reinforced by his experiences as an editorial assistant for Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine between 1839 and 1840. In November 1839, the magazine announced its own competition with one thousand dollars in prizes, editor William Burton’s novel twist on the literary competition being to dispense altogether with the typical committee of judges, who, he opined, “generally select, unread, the effusion of the most popular candidate as the easiest method of discharging their onerous duties.” The submissions in this case, he said, would be read “by the Editors alone.” Poe was horrified, not because this scheme dispensed with even the semblance of objectivity held out by most competition organizers, but also because he had nothing but contempt for Burton’s critical prowess. If Burton was to be judge, then everyone was in trouble. Poe suspected, too, that Burton intended not to make any awards, a suspicion that was simply reinforced when Burton decided to cancel the competition and sell his magazine. Several of the submissions were not returned and appeared later in Graham’s Magazine, unpaid for. Poe’s view from within the world of competitions was as disappointing as the view from without.30
Yet as we have seen, Poe was unable to walk away from the need to compete. Even as he was deploring the fraudulence of Burton’s premium scheme in letters to friends, he was establishing his own informal and eccentric competition, which, much like Burton’s, dispensed with a committee of judges in favor of a more singular form of adjudication. The venue for this contest was Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, a newspaper at which Poe moonlighted between December 1839 and May 1840. (It was, fittingly enough, published by the same firm that issued Burton’s.) In the issue for December 18, 1839, Poe claimed rather boldly that there was no cryptogram that he could not solve. “Let this be put to the test,” he announced. “Let any one address us a letter in this way, and we pledge ourself to read it forthwith—however unusual or arbitrary may be the characters employed.”31 Poe’s readers immediately leapt to the challenge, and his throwaway comment became a strange two-way competition: the readers challenging Poe to decode their ciphers, and Poe challenging his readers to figure out how he did it. Prizes, too, entered the equation, as Poe offered to reveal his secret in exchange for forty subscribers, and one reader promised him “ten subscribers and the cash” if he could solve his puzzle.32
Poe’s “competition” differed from the usual events in many ways. In the first place, rather than pitting a group of entrants against one another, Poe sought to compete against the entrants, taking on all comers; as such, Poe’s contest had absolutely nothing to do with emulation, which was meant to be a collectively ennobling venture. In the second place, where a typical contest involved acts of creation, Poe’s claim was that he could take apart any cryptogram presented him; it was not an act of encoding but an instance of decoding, less creative, on other words, than destructive. Thirdly, and most significantly, Poe’s contest was predicated on a deep-seated need to reveal precisely the kind pretense he saw going on in other competitions. For every cryptogram he solved, he showed several more to be based upon deceit or dishonesty: using inconsistent codes, foreign words, and so on. It was Poe’s ideal competition: one in which he not only won (being the only competitor) but which, in so doing, he managed to defeat everyone else and show how mendacious and deceitful most of the entrants were. He was also the judge, passing summary judgment on the coding abilities of the entrants.33
Poe’s dual strategy of critique and engagement continued into the 1840s when he became an editorial assistant at Graham’s Magazine. It was at this time that he issued perhaps his sternest criticism of the competitions by attacking the nation’s best known prize poet, Charles Sprague. In an 1841 review of Sprague’s writings, Poe derided “Prize Odes for Festivals and Opening Nights of new theatres” as “a species of literature almost beneath contempt,” noting only that inasmuch as “all prize articles are bad ex officio,” the most that could be said of Sprague’s “Shakespeare Ode” was that it was “the best of them.” Angrily criticized by pundits in Boston, Poe repeated the claims again in 1842, describing the “Shakespeare Ode” as “mawkish, passé, and absurd,” and noting that it was “just such a one as would have obtained its author an Etonian prize some forty or fifty years ago,” an ironic comment for a man who had still not finished trumpeting his teenaged achievements as a jumper and swimmer. In a review of Robert Walsh’s Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, published in April 1841, Poe continued his attack on competitions, noting several anecdotes in that text recounting instances in which French competition judges had defrauded authors of their rightfully won prizes.34
Again, however, and even as he denounced competitions as corrupt and competition genres as beneath contempt, Poe was reviving his own cryptography competitions, issuing new challenges and even offering a year’s free subscription to the reader who could decode a cryptogram that Poe himself had just succeeded in decoding. In December 1841, Poe printed a letter from a reader named W. B. Tyler, whom many critics believe to be Poe himself, dubbing the author “the king of ‘secret-readers.’” If Tyler really was Poe’s stand-in, then this was a remarkable act of self-consecration; if not, it was an even more compelling act of vindication.35
Poe’s final competitive entry was, again, spurred by crushing poverty and a sense of desperation. In January 1842, his wife, Virginia, had begun to show the first signs of tuberculosis. Rather than battening the hatches, however, Poe threw all caution to the wind, drinking heavily and resigning his position at Graham’s Magazine. By June, he was jobless and penniless, writing to a correspondent that his “pecuniary embarrassments” were driving him “to distraction.” It would be another two years before he found steady, salaried employment.36
In March 1843, the Dollar Newspaper announced a short story competition with two hundred dollars in prizes: one hundred for the best story, sixty for the second best, and forty for the third. Everything about Poe’s engagement with this competition seems familiar. He was, again, desperately poor; the panel of judges again included a recent Forrest prize winner; and again he made a rash gamble, buying back a story he had already sold to his former employer, George Graham. For Poe, the one hundred dollars he believed that he might win were more appealing than the fifty-two that Graham had already paid him and which he was compelled to pay back with other materials. Poe’s gamble, however, paid off; in June, the Dollar Newspaper announced that Poe’s short story, “The Gold-Bug,” had won first prize. There followed a giddying period of celebrity, in which Poe saw the paper containing his story sell out within one day, go into a second and then a third authorized printing, appear elsewhere in pirated form, and occasion enthusiastic reports and extensive summaries in publications around the nation. Poe had the immense satisfaction, too, of seeing the story reprinted in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, scene of his impoverishing competition loss in 1831, while the Baltimore Saturday Visiter obligingly reprinted an abridgement of his ghost-written and exaggeration-filled biography, leaving uncorrected his assertion that he had won both poetry and prose divisions in their 1833 contest. The prize-winning tale was even adapted for the stage and performed twice in August 1843. In a letter to a friend written much later, Poe claimed that he had written his story “for the sole purpose of running,” an allusion to his own childhood racing experiences perhaps; for a while, at least, “The Gold-Bug” ran far and fast. Yet even this was not enough for Poe. In a revealing indication of his insatiable hunger for praise, he claimed in private that he had only submitted the tale to the Dollar Newspaper after it had been rejected by Graham, seeking thereby to amplify both his consecration and vindication still more by making it seem as if his achievement was a success d’estime.37
Yet Poe’s satisfaction was hardly unalloyed. Less than a fortnight after the results of the contest had been announced, the Daily Forum published a letter from Francis Duffee claiming that the competition had been rigged and that the judges had arranged to offer Poe first prize if he was willing to accept fifteen dollars. It was a stunning and extraordinarily clever accusation, since it implied both the corruption of the judges and the stinginess of Poe, who was willing to sell himself for so trifling a sum. Poe filed suit and Duffee retracted his claim but not before another pundit suggested that Poe had plagiarized his story from a thirteen-year-old girl, Ann Humphreys Sherburne, who had written a story entitled “Imo-gene; or the Pirate’s Treasure” in 1839. The accusations were, again, retracted, but they cast a pall over Poe’s achievement, depreciating the prestige he might otherwise have accumulated. Although Poe claimed a year after the contest that more than 30,000 copies of his story had been disseminated, the story was never completely free of the taint of scandal.38
In a sense, Poe brought this misery upon himself. His relentless criticism of the achievements of others and his carping accusations that the entrants and organizers of contests were in cahoots was being turned back upon him. While Poe was correct in assuming that many contests of the 1830s and 1840s were rigged, he could hardly make such accusations and not expect recriminations. His criticisms notwithstanding, it was becoming increasingly clear to his enemies how desperately Poe relied on competitions when at his most economically and emotionally vulnerable moments, and so it was with some satisfaction that they set about discrediting his own competitive achievements. Duffee’s assault on the integrity of the Dollar Newspaper competition was only the first instance. Penning his infamous “Ludwig Article” immediately after Poe’s death, Rufus Griswold not only savaged Poe’s character and morality but also claimed that his success in the Saturday Visiter competition was based solely on his handwriting, the judges having “unanimously decided that the prizes should be paid to the first of the geniuses who had written legibly,” adding as a coup a grace: “Not another MS. was unfolded.” When John Hill Hewitt, the winner of the Visiter’s poetry section, recalled in his 1877 memoirs Poe’s tipsy rhyming tournament with John Lofland, then, he was simply joining the company of those who were motivated to discredit every element of Poe’s competitive endeavor.39
Perhaps the most striking example of how the antebellum critical establishment was of Poe’s position on competitions is the fact that it took so long for him to be invited to judge one. While most prize winners were invited to serve as judges soon after having won their own competitions, it was a dozen years before Poe was extended that privilege. In 1845, finally, he received the call, but even here he was dogged by embarrassment. The competition in question was at the Rutgers Institute, a private girl’s school in New York: hardly the prestigious venue for which he might have hoped. More frustrating still, the other judge, Rufus Griswold, who would later tarnish his reputation, backed out at the last moment, leaving one of Poe’s many other enemies, Henry Tuckerman, to take his place. The two “sat alone” together for most of the afternoon, reading the students’ manuscripts. For Charles Fenno Hoffman, writing to Griswold, it was “a good joke,” but for Poe, it must have been excruciatingly embarrassing. It was a fitting finale to his engagement with the competitive world. Poe would never again become involved with a competition.40
Poe’s engagement with literary competitions in the 1830s and 1840s reflect an attitude completely at variance with the ideal expounded in the 1820s and exemplified by an author like Charles Sprague. Where Sprague competed for honor, Poe dueled for money. The premium from the “MS. Found in a Bottle” represented something like three months’ room and board in Baltimore at the time he lived there. At the same time, Poe understood that no matter what the dollar amount of the premium, the prestige it accrued offered both status, social connection, and further potential earnings. For these rewards, too, Poe fought vigorously, fuelled by his insatiable need for approbation, yet he fell afoul of the social networks that reproduced and protected social and cultural distinction. Poe was simply too belligerent and too poorly connected to capitalize effectively on the dynamic potentialities of the competitions. His good will, that is, ran out almost as fast as the cash he received. It is little wonder that Poe was as much repelled by as drawn to contests. No honors could appease this brilliantly talented author, because he was dueling as much with the dead as with the living, and the dead, as his stories showed time after time, could never be beaten.
1. William F. Gill, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: D. Appleton, 1877), 49. There is another version of this story in which the setting is a tavern, Poe rather than Lofland throws down the challenge, and the wager—significantly, in light of the Folio Club narrative—is for the loser to pay for everyone’s drinks. See William W. Smithers, The Life of John Lofland, “The Milford Bard” (Philadelphia: Wallace M. Leonard, 1894), 108. In both versions, Poe loses.
2. For an extended discussion of literary competitions in this period, see chapter 5 of my book, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
3. John Adams, Discourses on Davila, in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000), 347, 311. For a broad survey of ideas on emulation and approbation, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961); G. W. Pigman III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1–32; and Howard D. Weinbrot, “‘An Ambition to Excell’: The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Huntington Library Quarterly 48 (1985): 121–39.
4. Laura Auricchio, “The Laws of Bienséance and the Gendering of Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Art Education,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36 (2003): 231; Adams, Discourses on Davila, 356.
5. On Crambo and verse capping, see David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997), 165–69; and Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (London: Thomas Tegg, 1831), 398–99.
6. On the rejected address tradition, see Dennis Hall Sigmon, Jr., “Rejected Addresses and the Art of Poetic Parody” (Ph.D. diss., Purdue University, 1976).
7. Eugene Didier, The Life and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: A. C. Armstrong, 1882), 32; J. T. L. Preston, “Some Reminiscences of Edgar A. Poe as a Schoolboy,” in Sara Sigourney Rice, Edgar Allan Poe: A Memorial Volume (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1877), 40; Didier, Life and Poems, 30. See also Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 23–24, 29–30, 41; and Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 84–85. On capping verses: Preston, “Some Reminiscences,” 39–40. For Poe’s very deliberate emulation of Byron’s feat, see “Swimming,” Southern Literary Messenger 1 (May 1835): 468.
8. See Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 25, 458 (on competition); 155 (quotation).
9. See Poe to Allan, September 21 1826; March 19, 1827; December 1, 1828; December 28, 1828; May 29, 1829; June 25, 1829; July 26, 1829, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 1:6, 7,10, 12, 20, 22, 26. All italics are in the originals.
10. Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 11–14 (Allan’s adoption); 22 (quotation). A slightly more nuanced argument along the same lines has been made by J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Violence of Melancholy: Poe against Himself,” American Literary History 8 (1996): 533–51.
11. Edgar Allan Poe, “Tamerlane,” Complete Poems, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 22.
12. The announcement, rules, and results are reproduced in John Grier Varner, Edgar Allan Poe and the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1933).
13. See Poe to Allan, October 16, 1831; Poe to Allan, November 18, 1831; Poe to Allan, December 15, 1831; Poe to Allan, December 29, 1831, Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1:46–49. On typical per page rates, see John Ward Ostrom, “Edgar Allan Poe: His Income as Literary Entrepreneur,” Poe Studies 15 (1982): 1–7.
14. Smith had written his play in the 1820s; when he sent it to Forrest for feedback, the actor promptly awarded it first prize in his contest. See Marshall, “Playwriting Contests,” 105; Moody, Edwin Forrest, 100. On Poe’s generally contemptuous attitude toward Native American-themed literature and Forrest’s brand of racial cross-dressing in particular, see Leon Jackson, “‘Behold Our Literary Mohawk, Poe’: Literary Nationalism and the ‘Indianation’ of Antebellum American Culture, “ ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 48 (2002): 97–133.
15. Poe to Allan, April 12, 1833, Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1:49–50; “Premiums,” Baltimore Saturday Visiter, June 15, 1833. For a brief discussion of the competition, see John C. French, “Poe and the Baltimore Saturday Visiter,” Modern Language Notes 33 (1918): 257–67.
16. For the frame of the collection, which was never published, see Edgar Allan Poe, “The Folio Club,” Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 1:200–207 (quotation 204). Poe developed the frame narrative further in Poe to Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham, May 4, 1833; and Poe to Harrison Hall, September 2, 1836, Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1:54, 103–4 (quotation 104), and I have used these descriptions too. It is clear, however, that the basic idea was established by the time Poe entered the Visiter contest.
17. On the origin, organization, and final disposition of the collection, see Alexander Hammond, “A Reconstruction of Poe’s 1833 Tales of the Folio Club: Preliminary Notes” Poe Studies 5 (1972): 25–32; Hammond, “Further Notes on Poe’s Folio Club Tales,” Poe Studies 8 (1975): 38–42; Hammond, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club: The Evolution of a Lost Book,” in Poe at Work: Seven Textual Studies, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978), 13–43; and Kenneth Alan Hovey, “‘These Many Pieces Are Yet One Book’: The Book-Unity of Poe’s Tale Collections,” Poe Studies 31 (1998): 3–5. Poe’s familiarity with Horace and James Smith is established by Burton R. Pollin, “Figs, Bells, Poe, and Horace Smith,” Poe Newsletter 3 (1970): 8–10.
18. “The Premiums,” Baltimore Saturday Visiter, October 12, 1833. The details of the judging emerge from two accounts of judge John H. B. Latrobe. See his “Reminiscences of Poe” [1875], in Edgar Allan Poe: A Memorial Volume, 57–62; and Latrobe to Burr, December 7, 1852, reprinted in Jay B. Hubbell, “Charles Chauncey Burr: Friend of Poe,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 69 (1954): 837–39 (quotation 838).
19. Hewitt, quoted in Vincent Starrett, “One Who Knew Poe,” Bookman 66 (1927): 200.
20. Poe to White, 20 July 1835, Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1:65; “The Poets and Poetry of Philadelphia. Number II. Edgar Allan Poe,” Philadelphia Saturday Museum, 4 March 1843.
21. The decision to award the prize to Hewitt was explained by Latrobe in “Reminiscences of Poe,” 59–60.
22. John Hill Hewitt, Recollections of Poe, ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (Atlanta: The Library, Emory University, 1949), 19. For a briefer account of the affair, see Hewitt, Shadows on the Wall, Or, Glimpses of the Past (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1877), 40–43, 154–59. There exists a rumor that Poe initially confronted Hewitt and told him that he could keep the prize money if he was willing to concede the contest, since he “only wanted the honors.” Gill, Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 69–70 (quotation 69). For the reprinting of “The Coliseum,” see Southern Literary Messenger 1 (August 1835): 706. Within the world of competitions, to call a piece a “prize poem” was to imply, quite unambiguously, that it had won a prize.
23. The judges might perhaps have responded that in spreading the prizes, they were more generally rewarding (and hence promoting) emulation. Kevin Hayes’s argument that Poe’s dispute with Hewitt was really a matter of editorial professionalism seems to me to miss the point, inasmuch as entering a contest anonymously obviates, at least in theory, any taint of professional indecorum. See Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 41–42.
24. See “Literary Notice,” New Yorker, March 22, 1834; Lewis Gaylord Clark to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, November 2, 1834, quoted in Lawrence Thompson, Young Longfellow (1807–1843) (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 201; and James Taft Hatfield, “An Unknown Prose Tale by Longfellow,” American Literature 3 (1931): 136–48.
25. For Poe’s feud with Clark, and his circle, see Sidney P. Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of his Literary Milieu (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963).
26. On Willis: Thomas N. Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21–22. On Catharine Beecher: Catharine E. Beecher, Truth Stranger than Fiction (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1850), 18–20; Vivian C. Hopkins, Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), 24. On Harriet Beecher: “The Proprietors of the Western Monthly Magazine Offer a Premium of Fifty Dollars,” Western Monthly Magazine 1 (September 1833): 429; “To Readers and Correspondents,” Western Monthly Magazine 1 (December 1833): 592; Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941), 125–26. On Stephens: Madeleine B. Stern, “Ann S. Stephens: Author of the First Beadle Dime novel, 1860,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 64 (1960): 306–7. On Forrest: Marshall, “Playwriting Contests,” 105; Moody, Edwin Forrest, 100.
27. Alice C. Neal to Elizabeth Oakes Smith, December 16, 1847, John Neal Correspondence, Maine Historical Society.
28. Nathaniel P. Willis, “Editor’s Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (November 1829), quoted in Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity, 44.
29. Thomas Willis White to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, January 24, 1837, quoted in Poe Log, 214.
30. See Dwight Thomas, “William E. Burton and his Premium Scheme: New Light on Poe Biography,” University of Mississippi Studies in English 3 (1982): 68–80 (quotation 73); Thomas S. Marvin, “‘These Days of Double Dealing’: Edgar Allan Poe and the Business of Magazine Publishing,” American Periodicals 11 (2001): 81–94.
31. “Enigmatical and Conundrum-ical,” Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, December 18, 1839, reprinted in Clarence S. Brigham, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 52 (1942): 58.
32. “Another Poser,” Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, January 22, 1840; “Our Puzzles Once More,” Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, February 26, 1840, both reprinted in Brigham, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions,” 66, 92 (quotation).
33. William K. Wimsatt, Jr. has pointed out that Poe only grudgingly acknowledged when other readers were able to decode the ciphers he presented, a practice consistent with his habit of embellishing his own competitive successes even as he deplored the practice in others. See “What Poe Knew About Cryptography,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 58 (1943): 757–59.
34. “Writings of Charles Sprague,” Graham’s Magazine (May 1841), Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 10: 140; “An Appendix on Autographs,” Graham’s Magazine (January 1842), Complete Works, 15: 248–49; “Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France,” Graham’s Magazine (April 1841), Complete Works, 10:133–39. For retorts to Poe’s Sprague bashing, see [Rufus W. Griswold], Boston Notion, May 22, 1841, quoted in B. Bernard Cohen and Lucian A. Cohen, “Poe and Griswold Once More,” American Literature 34 (1962): 98–99; and Cornelia Wells Walter, Boston Evening Transcript, March 5, 1845, quoted in Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, 176n80.
35. “Secret Writing,” Graham’s Magazine (August 1841), Complete Works, 14:134; “Secret Writing,” Graham’s Magazine (December 1841), Complete Works, 14:141. For the suggestion that Tyler was Poe, see Louis A. Renza, “Poe’s Secret Autobiography,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982–83, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 86–87n14; and Shawn Rosenheim, “The King of ‘Secret Readers’: Edgar Poe, Cryptography, and the Origins of the Detective Story,” English Literary History 56 (1989): 393–95. I am less certain than other critics that Tyler was Poe, a scepticism I share with John A. Hodgson and that is additionally supported by Stephen Rachman’s recent discovery of several possible Tyler pieces in both Graham’s Magazine and Alexander’s Weekly Messenger. See Hodgson, “Decoding Poe? Poe, W. B. Tyler, and Cryptography,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 92 (1993): 523–34; and Rachman, “Poe, Secret Writing, and Magazine Culture: In Search of W. B. Tyler” (unpublished essay, 2003). I am grateful to Rachman for sharing a copy of his essay with me.
36. Poe to James Herron, June 1842, Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1:198.
37. Poe to Frederick W. Thomas, May 4, 1845, Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1:287. For a concise account of the publication and controversies surrounding “The Gold-Bug,” see Tales and Sketches, 1:799–806.
38. Poe to James Russell Lowell, May 28, 1844, Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1:253; W. T. Bandy, “Poe, Duane, and Duffee,” University of Mississippi Studies in English 3 (1982): 87–89.
39. “Death of Edgar A. Poe,” New York Daily Tribune, October 9, 1849.
40. Hoffman to Griswold, July 11, 1845, quoted in Poe Log, 549.