A Fable For Critics - Critical Response

Critical Response

John Ruskin labeled the poem "in animal spirit and power... almost beyond anything I know". Oliver Wendell Holmes found it "capital—crammed full and rammed down hard—with powder (lots of it)—shot—slugs—very little wadding... all crowded into a rusty-looking sort of blunderbuss barrel, as it were—capped with a percussion preface—and cocked with a title page as apropos as a wink to a joke". Henry Wadsworth Longfellow compared it to Lord Byron's "English Bards" as being "full of wild wit and deviltry, and amazingly clever". Freeman Hunt reviewed the poem for Merchants' Magazine in December 1848 and remarked on how true the character assessments were: "Our friends Bryant, Halleck, Willis, Whittier, Poe, and last but not least, Harry Franco, (Briggs,) are, in our judgment, as genuine life pictures as were ever sketched with pen or pencil, in prose or verse. The severity, if any, is lost in the general fidelity of the delineations."

Lowell's friends objected to the intense criticism of Fuller, specifically William Wetmore Story and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Edgar Allan Poe reviewed the work in the Southern Literary Messenger and called it "'loose'—ill-conceived and feebly executed, as well in detail as in general... we confess some surprise at his putting forth so unpolished a performance". His final judgment was that the work was not successful: "no failure was ever more complete or more pitiable". Ultimately, A Fable for Critics earned Lowell notoriety as a poet, once his name was revealed, though he did not significantly profit from its publication.