Poet's Prophecy

RUFUS WILMOT GRISWOLD--Joy Bayless -- Vanderbilt University Press ($3.50).

When he was 27, Rufus Griswold became associate editor of The Saturday Evening Post and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia. That was in 1842. Graham's, with a circulation of 40,000--huge for that period--made money. Griswold's salary was $1,000 a year, his work tempestuous; his stay there brief.

Intense, ambitious, handsome, emotional, able, fluent, glib and graceful, Rufus Griswold had left his Vermont home and wandered from town to town as a printer, became a protege of Horace Greeley, got into politics briefly, edited the New-Yorker and other gaslight scandal sheets of the 1830s, married happily and became one of the zealots who insisted that American literature could be emancipated from its subservience to England. He also became a Baptist minister, though he never had a church. His anthology, The Poets and Poetry of America, went through 16 editions in his lifetime.

Recognition of Worth. In that pre-Civil War period, the literary life merged with politics and was almost as violent. Two or three great developments charged the intellectual atmosphere with incredible tension, and made each book, and each review of each book, a matter of strategy, vigilance, scandal. One was the recognition by America that its literature was good. The experience was like the sudden awakening of an ex-slave to the knowledge of his freedom, his worth and his inheritance. Griswold's anthology contained Longfellow, Bryant, Poe, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier. (Griswold slighted the South.)

Graham's published Hawthorne's stories and Cooper's biographies of naval heroes. Thousands upon thousands of Americans were reading poetry and memorizing the great lines that have been treasured ever since, from Poe's magical Helen, thy beauty is to me ... to Lowell's What is so rare as a day in June? They were reading poetry about themselves, scenes they knew and friends they remembered, a gentle, sunlit, innocent poetry of farms, snowdrifts, schoolhouses, pilgrims, heroes, ships and ghosts.

The second great development was the war between the North and the South that had not yet reached the stage of battle. The third was not entirely distinct: it was the literary and political rivalry with England that grew with the increasing self-confidence of America. All the conflicts were tense and some of them were bitter. In this stormy period, Rufus Griswold made his way.

Time and Death. He crashed on the rocks of the journalist's life. His wife died, and Griswold, suffering from tuberculosis, broke down. His collapse was like the literal living-cut of one of Poe's stories. In his derangement Griswold went to his wife's tomb, unfastened the coffin lid, "turned aside the drapery that hid her face," and seeing "the terrible changes made by Death and Time," fell uncon scious, to be found the next day by a friend.

No modern literary figure combines Griswold's prominence, his position as a cultural master of ceremonies, and his un steady, enigmatic personal life. His second marriage was to a wealthy spinster of Charleston, S.C. He was 30. She was 13 years older, living with two spinster aunts. The women believed that Griswold and his two daughters had a fortune of $50,000. They did not. Griswold on his part dreamed of a winter home in the temperate South. "On his wedding night the bridegroom learned that . . . the woman who bore his name was, through some physical misfortune, incapable of being a wife. . . . Whether Charlotte or her aunts knew of her unfortunate condition before the marriage cannot be determined; but Griswold believed that they were aware of it, and he considered himself the victim of a vicious trick. He believed that these women deliberately set out to catch a husband for Charlotte in order to signify to the world that she was a normal woman." Griswold left one daughter with her in Charleston, returned to New York. He remained legally married to her for seven years.

Opium & Acrostics. Editing The Female Poets of America, Griswold was involved in circles so vindictive that modern gang wars seem gentle in comparison. One slighted poetess misused a key to his room, read his private papers each day, quizzed the wives of poets to get material for troublemaking among them. The one delightful and wise woman among the poetesses -- Mrs. Frances Sargeant Osgood -- was Griswold's friend. She wrote Griswold this acrostic:

For one, whose being is to mine a star,

Trembling I weave in lines of love and fun

What Fame before has echoed near and far

A sonnet if you like -- I'll give you one To be cross-questioned ere its truth is solv'd.

Here veiled and hidden in a rhyming wreath

A name is turned with mine in cunning sheath

And unless by some marvel rare evolved Forever folded from all idler eyes Silent and secret still it treasured lies Whilst mine goes winding onward, as a

rill

Thro' a deep wood in unseen joyance dances

Calling in melody's bewildring thrill Whilst through dim leaves its partner dreams and glances.

Reading down one letter of each line (beginning with F and moving one letter in with each line down) makes up Frances S. Osgood. A roughly similar pattern at the end of the lines makes up Rufus W. Griswold. Readers may find other meanings in the poem. Griswold was in deeper waters than he knew. By the time he wrote the introduction to Female Poets, he had tasted opium and suffered an epileptic fit.

Insulted and Injured. Modern readers know Griswold because of someone else. A penniless, difficult poet dogged him all his life. This poet was drunk, tormented, wild. Griswold replaced him as Graham's editor. Griswold quarreled with him, patronized him, lent him money, and after his death became his literary executor. He did one of the poorest jobs with the richest material that any literary executor has ever done. This poet (or someone writing for him) said what Griswold was and would be with deadly accuracy: For gotten, save only by those whom he has injured and insulted, he will sink into oblivion, without leaving a landmark to tell that he once existed; or, if he is spoken of hereafter, he will be quoted as the unfaithful servant who abused his trust. The poet: Edgar Allan Poe.

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