Rufus Wilmot Griswold (February 13, 1815 - August 27, 1857) was an American anthropologist, editor, poet, and critic. Born in Vermont, Griswold left home when he was 15 years old. He works as a journalist, editor, and critic in Philadelphia, New York City, and elsewhere. He built a strong literary reputation, in part because of his 1842 collection of The Poets and Poetry of America. This anthology, the most comprehensive of its time, included what he considered the best example of American poetry. He produced a similar revision and anthology version for the rest of his life, though many of his promoted poets have faded into obscurity. Many authors wish for their work to be included in one of these editions, although they commented furiously on Griswold's abusive character. Griswold married three times: his first wife died young, his second marriage ended in a public and controversial divorce, and his third wife abandoned him after the previous divorce was almost repealed.
Edgar Allan Poe, whose poetry was included in Griswold's anthology, published a critical response that questioned which poets were included. It started a growing competition when Griswold replaced Poe as a Graham's Magazine editor with a higher salary than Poe. Later, both of them compete for the attention of the poet Frances Sargent Osgood. They never reconciled their differences and, after Poe's mysterious death in 1849, Griswold wrote an unsympathetic obituary. Claiming as Poe's chosen literary executor, he initiated a campaign to undermine Poe's surviving reputation until his own death eight years later.
Griswold considers himself an expert in American poetry and is an early proponent of inclusion in the school curriculum. He also supports the introduction of copyright laws, speaking to Congress on behalf of the publishing industry, though he does not overrule the copyrights of others' works. A fellow editor commented, "even while raving the hardest, [he] sneaking fastest".
Video Rufus Wilmot Griswold
Life and career
Early life
Griswold was born to Rufus and Deborah (Wass) Griswold on February 13, 1815, in Vermont, near Rutland, and appointed a strict Calvinist in the hamlet of Benson. He was the twelfth of fourteen children and his father was a farmer and a shoemaker. In 1822, the family sold the Benson farm and moved to nearby Hubbardton. As a child, Griswold is complex, unpredictable, and reckless. He left home when he was 15 years old, calling himself "a solitary soul, roaming the world, a street child without home and without pleasure".
Griswold moved to Albany, New York, to live with a 22-year-old journalist named George C. Foster, a writer famous for his New York work by Gas-Light. Griswold lives with Foster until the age of 17, and both may have a romantic relationship. When Griswold moved in, Foster wrote to him begging him to return, signing his letter "Come to me if you love me". Griswold attempted to enroll at Rensselaer School in 1830, but was not allowed to take any classes after he was caught trying to play games with a professor.
First career and marriage
After a brief spell as an apprentice printer, Griswold moved to Syracuse where, with some friends, he started a newspaper called The Porcupine . This publication deliberately targeted the locals for what was later recalled as mere criticism.
He moved to New York City in 1836 and, in March of that year, was introduced to the 19-year-old Caroline Searles, whom he later married. She was hired as an editor for various publications in the New York area. In October, he was considered running for a Whig but not receiving party support. In 1837 he received permission as a Baptist minister, though he never had a permanent congregation.
Griswold married Caroline on August 12, 1837, and the couple had two daughters. After the birth of their second daughter, Griswold left his family in New York and moved to Philadelphia. His departure on November 27, 1840, suddenly appeared, leaving his job with Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, and his library of several thousand volumes. He joined the Philadelphia Daily Standards staff and began to build his reputation as a literary critic, becoming famous for his cruelty and revenge.
On November 6, 1842, Griswold visited his wife in New York after she gave birth to their third child, a son. Three days later, after returning to Philadelphia, she was told that she and her baby had died. Very surprised, Griswold traveled by train along with his coffin, refusing to leave his side for 30 hours. When a fellow passenger urges her to try to sleep, she answers by kissing her dead lips and hugging her, her two children crying beside her. He refused to leave the grave after his funeral, even after other mourners left, until forced to do so by a relative. He wrote a long poem in an empty verse dedicated to Caroline, "Five Days", printed on the New York Tribune on November 16, 1842. Griswold had trouble believing that he had died and often dreamed of reunions. Forty days after being buried, she enters the vault, cuts her hair, kisses it on her forehead and lips, and cries for several hours, stays by her side until a friend finds her 30 hours later.
Anthologist and critic
In 1842, Griswold released the anthology of American poetry 476 pages, The Poets and Poetry of America , which he dedicated to Washington Allston. Griswold's collection features poems from over 80 authors, including 17 by Lydia Sigourney, three by Edgar Allan Poe, and 45 by Charles Fenno Hoffman. Hoffman, a close friend, is given twice as much space than any other writer. Griswold went on to oversee many other anthologies, including the Annual Biography, which collects memoirs from "eminent people who have just died",
Between 1842 and 1845 while Griswold gathered material for the Prose Writers of America he discovered the identity of Horace Binney Wallace, who had written in various literary magazines at that time (including Burton) under the pen name of William Landor. Wallace refused to be included in the anthology but both became friends, exchanging many letters over the years. Wallace finally ghostwrote Griswold Napoleon and Marshals of the Empire (1847).
Prose Writers of America , published in 1847, was specially prepared to compete with similar anthologies by Cornelius Mathews and Evert Augustus Duyckinck. The prose collection produced Griswold competition with two people, which Griswold expected. As it was being published, Griswold wrote to Boston publisher James Thomas Fields that "Young America is going crazy". In preparing his anthology, Griswold will write to surviving authors whose work includes suggesting them about the poems to be included, as well as for gathering information for biographical sketches.
In 1843 Griswold founded The Opal, an annual prize book collecting essays, stories, and poems. Nathaniel Parker Willis edited his first edition, released in the autumn of 1844. Griswold was editor of the Saturday Evening Post and published a collection of poems, The Cypress Wreath (1844 ). His poems, with titles such as "The Happy Hour of Death", "On the Death of a Young Girl", and "The Slumber of Death", emphasize mortality and mourning. Another collection of poems, Christian Ballads and Other Poems , published in 1844, and his book nonfiction, The Republican Court or, American Society in the Days of Washington, was published in 1854 This book is meant to cover events during George Washington's presidency, though it mixes historical facts with apocryphal legends until one is indistinguishable from the other. During this period, Griswold occasionally offered his services in the pulpit delivering the sermon and he may have received an honorary doctorate from Shurtleff College, a Baptist institution in Illinois, which led to his nickname "Rev. Dr. Griswold".
Second marriage
On August 20, 1845, Griswold married Charlotte Myers, a Jewish woman; he is 42 years old and 33 years old. Griswold has been forced to marry by the aunt of the woman, though she is concerned about their differences in religious beliefs. This difference is strong enough that one of Griswold's friends refers to his wife only as "the little girl". On the night of their marriage, he finds that he, according to Griswold biographer Joy Bayless, "through some physical misfortune, is unable to be a wife" or, as Poe's biographer Kenneth Silverman puts it, is incapable of sex. Griswold thought the marriage was null and nothing more valid "than there would be a ceremony held between parties of the same sex, or where one sex is doubtful or ambiguous." However, the couple moved together to Charleston, South Carolina, the hometown of Charlotte, and stayed under the same roof, despite sleeping in separate rooms. Neither of them was pleased with the situation, and by the end of April 1846 he had a lawyer who wrote the contract "to separate, together and forever,... which would essentially be divorce". The contract forbade Griswold to remarry and pay him $ 1,000 for a fee in exchange for his daughter, Caroline, living with the Myers family. After this breakup, Griswold soon moved back to Philadelphia.
Move to New York City
A few years later, Griswold moved back to New York City, leaving his younger daughter in care of the Myers family and her older daughter, Emily, with relatives at her mother's side. He has now earned the nickname "Grand Turk", and in the summer of 1847 made plans to edit the anthology of poetry by American women. She believes that women can not afford to have the same kind of "intellectual" poetry as men and believe they need to be shared: "The conditions of aesthetic abilities in the two sexes may be different, or even opposite," he writes in his introduction. The choice he chose for the The Female Poets of America is not always the greatest example of poetry, but was chosen because they emphasized morality and traditional values. In the same year, Griswold began working on what he considered "maximum work" in his life, "a broad biographical dictionary. Although he worked for several years and even advertised for it, it was never produced. She also helped Elizabeth F. Ellet publish her book The Women of the American Revolution, and was angry when she did not acknowledge her help in this book. In July 1848, he visited the poet Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence, Rhode Island, though he suffered vertigo and fatigue, rarely left his apartment at New York University, and could not write without drinking opium. In the fall of that year, he suffered from epilepsy, the first of many he would suffer for the rest of his life. One fit caused him to fall off a ferry in Brooklyn and nearly drowned. He wrote to publisher James T. Fields: "I am in a terrible state, physically and mentally, I do not know what will eventually be... I am tired - alive and dead - and heaven and hell." In 1849, he became more and more disturbed when Charles Fenno Hoffman, who became his best friend, was committed to a mental hospital.
Griswold continued the editing and contributed literary criticism to various publications, both full and loose, including 22 months from 1 July 1850, to 1 April 1852, with The International Magazine . There, he worked with contributors including Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Mary E. Hewitt and John R. Thompson. In the November 10, 1855 edition of The Criterion, Griswold anonymously reviewed the first edition of Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, stating: "It is impossible to imagine how a fancy person could have so many stupid filth ". Griswold alleged that Whitman was guilty of "the most vile imagination and embarrassing license", "degrading and cruel sensuality". Referring to Whitman's poetry, Griswold says he abandoned "this collection of filth into a law that... must have the power to suppress such filthy profligacy." Whitman then incorporated the Griswold review in a new edition of Grass Leaves. He ended his review with a phrase in Latin referring to "that horrible sin, among unnamed Christians," an old stock phrase linked to Christian condemnation of sodomy. Griswold was the first person in the nineteenth century who openly pointed and emphasized the theme of erotic desire and action between men in Whitman poetry. More attention to aspects of Whitman's poetry will appear in the late 19th century.
Divorce and third marriage
After a brief temptation with the poet Alice Cary, Griswold pursues a relationship with Harriet McCrillis. He initially did not want to divorce Charlotte Myers because he was "afraid of publicity" and because of his love for his daughter. He applied for a divorce at the Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia on March 25, 1852. Elizabeth Ellet and Ann S. Stephens wrote to Myers urging him not to divorce, and for McCrillis not to marry him. To convince Myers to approve the divorce, Griswold allowed her to keep her daughter Caroline if she signed a statement that she had left him. He agreed and divorce made official December 18; she may never see Myers or her daughter again. McCrillis and Griswold married shortly thereafter on December 26, 1852, and settled on 196 West Twenty-third Street in New York. Their son, William, was born on October 9, 1853.
Ellet and Stephens went on writing to Griswold's ex-wife, urging him to divorce the divorce. Myers was finally convinced and filed in Philadelphia on September 23, 1853. However, the court has lost divorce records and had to postpone appeals. Adding to Griswold's problem, that fall, a gas leak in his home caused an explosion and a fire. He was badly burned, lost eyelashes, eyebrows, and seven fingernails. That same year, his 15-year-old daughter, Emily, nearly died in Connecticut. A train he rode fell from the bridge to the river. When Griswold arrived, he saw 49 bodies in the emergency morgue. Emily has been declared dead when pinned under water but a doctor can revive her. On February 24, 1856, a divorce petition was brought to justice, with Ellet and Stephens giving long testimonies on the character of Griswold. Neither Griswold nor Myers was present and the call was dismissed. Embarrassed by the ordeal, McCrillis left Griswold in New York and moved with his family in Bangor, Maine.
Death
Griswold died of tuberculosis in New York City on August 27, 1857. Sarah Anna Lewis, a friend and writer, claimed that Elizabeth Ellet's disorder had aggravated Griswold's condition and that she "persuaded Griswold to death". At the time of his death, the only decorations found in his room were his portraits, Frances Osgood, and Poe. A friend, Charles Godfrey Leland, was found on Griswold's desk several documents that attacked a number of writers being prepared by Griswold for publication. Leland decided to burn them.
Griswold funeral was held on August 30th. The bearers include Leland, Charles Frederick Briggs, George Henry Moore, and Richard Henry Stoddard. His body was left for eight years at the burial tomb of Green-Wood before being buried on July 12, 1865, without a headstone. Although the library was several thousand volumes auctioned, earning more than $ 3,000 to be placed towards the monument, no one ever assigned.
Maps Rufus Wilmot Griswold
Reputation and influence
Griswold's Anthology The Poets and Poetry of America is the most comprehensive to date. As critic Lewis Gaylord Clark says, Griswold's book is expected to "be incorporated into the eternal permanent literature of our age and nation". The anthology helped Griswold build a considerable reputation throughout the 1840s and 1850s and its first edition through three prints in just six months. However, the choice of authors is sometimes questionable. A British editor reviews the collection and concludes, "with two or three exceptions, no poet throughout the Union" and refers to anthology as "the most striking act of martyrdom yet undertaken in transatlantic worship services." Even so, the book was popular and even continued in several editions after Griswold's death by Richard Henry Stoddard.
In more modern times, The Poets and Poetry of America has been dubbed the "poet of the poets" because its anthologist writers have since passed the obscurity to become, as the literary historian Fred Lewis Pattee, "to die... beyond all resurrection". Pattee also referred to the book as "a collection of poetic waste" and "vain".
In the contemporary American literary scene Griswold is known to be erratic, dogmatic, pretentious, and vengeful. As historian Perry Miller writes, "Griswold is just as tortuous as they come in this dark era: there is not much documentation to prove that he really exists, we might think of him as... one of the less sensible discoveries of Charles Dickens". Then anthologies such as the Prose Writers of America and the American Poet helped him become known as literary dictators, whose approval sought by writers even as they feared his growing power. Even when they tried to impress him, some writers voiced their opinions about the character of Griswold. Ann S. Stephens called him two faces and "constitutionally incapable of speaking the truth". Even his friends know him as a perfect liar and have a saying: "Is that a Griswold or a fact?" Another friend had called him "one of the most angry and vengeful people I've ever met". Writer Cornelius Mathews wrote in 1847 that Griswold lured the authors to exploit, warning "poor little innocent fish" to avoid his "Griswold Hook." A review of one of Griswold's anthologies, published anonymously in the Philadelphia Museum on Saturday 28 January 1843, but believed to have been written by Poe, asked: "What will be the fate of [Griswold]? Forgot, except only by people the people he has wounded and insulted, he will drown in forgetting, without leaving a landmark to say that he ever existed, or if he is spoken of in the hereafter, he will be cited as an unfaithful servant who abuses his belief. "
James Russell Lowell, who personally calls Griswold "a donkey and, moreover, an" investigator ", composed a verse about Griswold's temperament in his satirical A Fable for Critics :
Griswold was one of the earliest advocates of teaching American poetry schoolchildren other than English poetry. One of his anthologies, Reading in the American Poem for School Use , was tailored for that purpose. His knowledge in American poetry is emphasized by his claim that he had read every American poem published before 1850 - about 500 volumes. "He has more literary patriotism, if that phrase can be... than someone we once knew," writes a contributor to Graham . "Because the pilgrims landed, no man or woman wrote anything about any subject that escaped his tireless research." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. notes that Griswold examines literature as "a kind of naturalist whose subject is the author, whose memory is the perfect fauna of all flying and creeping things that eat ink."
Evert Augustus Duyckinck commented that "[national literary] thought seems to have entered and mastered [Griswold's] mind with the power of monomania." Poet Philip Pendleton Cooke questioned Griswold's sincerity, saying he "should love [it]... better than to say it". In the 1850s, Griswold's literary nationalism had somewhat subsided, and he began to follow the more popular contemporary literary trends of England, France and Germany. He separated himself from the "unreasonable idea... that we should create literature that is completely new".
Publicly, Griswold supports the creation of international copyright, although he himself often duplicates the entire work during his time as an editor, especially with The Brother Jonathan. A contemporary editor said of him, "He takes advantage of the state of things that he claims to be 'immoral, unjust and evil,' and even when the loudest rattling is the fastest." , he was chosen to represent the publishing industry before the Congress in the spring of 1844 to discuss the need for copyright laws.
Relationship with Poe
Griswold first met Edgar Allan Poe in Philadelphia in May 1841 while working for Daily Standards . At first, their relationship is warm, at least superficial. In a letter dated March 29, 1841, Poe sent some poems to The Poets and Poetry of America anthology, writing that he would be proud to see "one or two of them in the book". Griswold includes these three poems: "Coliseum", "The Haunted Palace", and "The Sleeper". In November of that year, Poe, who previously praised Griswold in his "Autography" series as "a man of fine taste and good judgment", wrote a critical review of the anthology, on behalf of Griswold. Griswold paid Poe for a review and used his influence to publish it in Boston on a regular basis. The review was generally favorable, though Poe questioned the entry of certain authors and the disappearance of others. Poe also said that Griswold was "well-liked" by New England writers. Griswold expected more praise and Poe personally told others he was not too impressed with the book, even calling it "the most humiliating humbug" in a letter to a friend. In another letter, this time to fellow writer Frederick W. Thomas, Poe suggests that Griswold's promise to help get the published review is actually a bribe for favorable reviews, knowing that Poe needed the money.
Making the relationship more tense, just a few months later, Griswold was hired by George Rex Graham to take the former Poe position as editor of Graham's Magazine. Griswold, however, was overpaid and given more editorial control than a magazine than Poe. Shortly after that, Poe began presenting a series of lectures called "The Poets and Poetry of America", first given in Philadelphia on November 25, 1843. Poe openly attacked Griswold in front of his large audience and continued to do so in similar lectures. Graham said that during these lectures, Poe "gave Mr. Griswold a few blows over the knuckles enough to remember". In a letter dated January 16, 1845, Poe tried to make peace with Griswold, promising him that his lecture now eliminated all that Griswold deemed inappropriate.
Another source of hostility between the two men was their rivalry for the attention of Frances Sargent Osgood's poet in the mid to late 1840s. While he and Poe are still married to their respective spouses, both are done with a common temptation that generates a lot of gossip among literati. Griswold, who fell in love with Osgood, drove her to a literary salon and became his staunch defender. "He is in all respects the most amazing woman I have ever known", he wrote to publisher James T. Fields in 1848. Osgood responded by presenting his poetry collection to Griswold, "as a souvenir of admiration for his genius, in terms of his generous character , and thanks for valuable literary advice ".
After Poe's death, Griswold prepared an obituary signed with a pseudonym "Ludwig". First printed in 9 October 1849 edition, New York Tribune , it was re-published several times. Here he asserts that "some people will be grieved" by Poe's death because he has several friends. He claims that Poe often roams the streets, either in "madness or melancholy," muttering and cursing to himself, irritable, jealous of others, and that he "considers society as being made up of criminals". Poe's encouragement to succeed, Griswold writes, is because he seeks "the right to hate the world that pollutes his pride". Most of the characterization of Poe is copied almost word for word from that of the fictitious Francis Vivian in The Caxtons by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Griswold's biographer, Joy Bayless, wrote that Griswold used a pseudonym to not hide his relationship with the news of death but because it was his habit not to sign newspapers and his magazine contributions. Regardless, Griswold's real identity was soon revealed. In a letter to Sarah Helen Whitman dated December 17, 1849, she acknowledged her role in writing Poe's death notice. "I am not his friend, not he is mine", he wrote.
Memoir
Griswold claims that "among Mr. Poe's last requests" is that he became a literary executor "for the benefit of his family". Griswold claims that Poe's aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, said that Poe had made such a statement on June 9, 1849, and that he himself waived any claim on Poe's work. And indeed there was a document in which Clemm transferred power to Griswold, dated October 20, 1849, even though no witnesses were signed. Clemm, however, has no right to make such a decision; Poe's sister, Rosalie, is her closest relative. Although Griswold has acted as a literary agent for other American writers, it is unclear whether Poe really appoints Griswold as his executor (perhaps as part of his "Imp of the Perverse"), if that is a trick in the Griswold section, or a mistake on Mary Clemm. It is also possible that Osgood persuaded Poe to refer to Griswold as the executor.
However, Griswold, along with James Russell Lowell and Nathaniel Parker Willis, edited the collection of Poe's work published in three volumes beginning in January 1850. He did not share the advantages of his edition with the surviving Poe family. This edition includes a biographical sketch entitled "Memoir Writer" which has become famous for its inaccuracies. "Memoir" describes Poe as a madman, drug addict and chronic drunk. Many of the elements made by Griswold use false letters as evidence and are criticized by people who know Poe, including Sarah Helen Whitman, Charles Frederick Briggs, and George Rex Graham. In March, Graham published a notice in his magazine that accused Griswold of betraying his beliefs and taking revenge on the dead. "Mr. Griswold," he wrote, "has allowed old prejudices and long-standing hostility to steal... into the coloring of the drawing." Thomas Holley Chivers wrote a book entitled New Life Edgar Allan Poe who immediately responded to Griswold's allegations. He said that Griswold "is not only incompetent to edit the works of [Poe], but is totally unaware of the duties he and every person who makes himself as a Literary Executor owe the dead".
Today the name Griswold is usually associated with Poe as a character assassin, though not all believe that Griswold is intentionally intended to cause harm. Some of the information Griswold declared or implied was that Poe was expelled from the University of Virginia and that Poe had tried to seduce second wife keeper John Allan. Even so, Griswold's efforts only draw attention to Poe's work; the readers are pleased with the idea of ​​reading the works of a "evil". Griswold's characterization of Poe and the false information that came from him emerged consistently in Poe's biography over the next two decades.
Bibliography
Anthologies
- Annual Biography (1841)
- The Poets and Poetry of America (1842, first of several editions)
- Gems from American Female Poets (1842)
- Readings in American Poetry for School Use (1843)
- Curiosity of American Literature (1844)
- Poetry and English Poetry in the Ninth Century (1844)
- The Prose Works of John Milton (1845)
- The Poets and Poetry of England (1845)
- Sentiment Poetry (1846)
- Scene in Life of the Savior (1846)
- American Pro Writer (1847)
- American Women Poet (1848)
- The Sacred Poets of England and America (1848)
- Poetry of the American Poem (1849)
- Flowers Faerie (1850)
- The Gift of Love (1853)
- Gift of Flowers, or Love's Wreath (1853)
- The Gift of Love (1853)
- Sentiment Gifts (1854)
Poetry
- The Cypress Wreath: A Pleasure Book (1844)
- Christian Ballad Illustrated Books (1844)
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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