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.