Rufus Wilmot Griswold - Reputation and Influence

Reputation and Influence

Griswold's anthology The Poets and Poetry of America was the most comprehensive of its kind to date. As critic Lewis Gaylord Clark said, it was expected Griswold's book would "become incorporated into the permanent undying literature of our age and nation". The anthology helped Griswold build up a considerable reputation throughout the 1840s and 1850s and its first edition went through three printings in only six months. His choice of authors, however, was occasionally questioned. A British editor reviewed the collection and concluded, "with two or three exceptions, there is not a poet of mark in the whole Union" and referred to the anthology as "the most conspicuous act of martyrdom yet committed in the service of the transatlantic muses". Even so, the book was popular and was 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 nicknamed a "graveyard of poets" because its anthologized writers have since passed into obscurity to become, as literary historian Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, "dead... beyond all resurrection". Pattee also called the book a "collection of poetic trash" and "voluminous worthlessness".

Within the contemporary American literary scene Griswold became known as erratic, dogmatic, pretentious, and vindictive. As historian Perry Miller wrote, "Griswold was about as devious as they came in this era of deviousness; did not ample documentation prove that he actually existed, we might suppose him... one of the less plausible inventions of Charles Dickens". Later anthologies such as Prose Writers of America and Female Poets of America helped him become known as a literary dictator, whose approval writers sought even while they feared his growing power. Even as they tried to impress him, however, several authors voiced their opinion on Griswold's character. Ann S. Stephens called him two-faced and "constitutionally incapable of speaking the truth". Even his friends knew him as a consummate liar and had a saying: "Is that a Griswold or a fact?" Another friend once called him "one of the most irritable and vindictive men I ever met". Author Cornelius Mathews wrote in 1847 that Griswold fished for writers to exploit, warning "the poor little innocent fishes" to avoid his "Griswold Hook". A review of one of Griswold's anthologies, published anonymously in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum on January 28, 1843, but believed to have been written by Poe, asked: "What will be fate? Forgotten, 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."

James Russell Lowell, who had privately called Griswold "an ass and, what's more, a knave", composed a verse on Griswold's temperament in his satirical A Fable for Critics:

But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold, and leads on
The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on—
A loud-cackling swarm, in whose feathers warm dressed,
He goes for as perfect a — swan as the rest.

Griswold was one of the earliest proponents of teaching schoolchildren American poetry in addition to English poetry. One of his anthologies, Readings in American Poetry for the Use of Schools, was created specifically for that purpose. His knowledge in American poetry was emphasized by his claim that he had read every American poem published before 1850—an estimated 500 volumes. "He has more literary patriotism, if the phrase be allowable ... than any person we ever knew", wrote a contributor to Graham's. "Since the Pilgrims landed, no man or woman has written anything on any subject which has escaped his untiring research." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. noted that Griswold researched literature like "a kind of naturalist whose subjects are authors, whose memory is a perfect fauna of all flying and creeping things that feed on ink."

Evert Augustus Duyckinck commented that "the thought seems to have entered and taken possession of mind with the force of monomania". Poet Philip Pendleton Cooke questioned Griswold's sincerity, saying he "should have loved ... better than to say it". By the 1850s, Griswold's literary nationalism had subsided somewhat, and he began following the more popular contemporary trend of reading literature from England, France, and Germany. He disassociated himself from the "absurd notion... that we are to create an entirely new literature".

Publicly, Griswold supported the establishment of international copyright, although he himself often pirated entire works during his time as an editor, particularly with The Brother Jonathan. A contemporary editor said of him, "He takes advantage of a state of things which he declares to be 'immoral, unjust and wicked,' and even while haranguing the loudest, is purloining the fastest." Even so, he was chosen to represent the publishing industry before Congress in the spring of 1844 to discuss the need for copyright law.