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"Oh, you mean the jingle-man."
— R. W. Emerson, in 1859, referring to Poe,
quoted by W. D. Howells in Literary Friends and Acquaintances.
"To me his [Poe's] prose is unreadable — like Jane Austen's. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."
— Mark Twain [Samuel L. Clemens], letter to W. D. Howells, January 18, 1909.
Reprinted in Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, eds.,
Mark Twain-Howells Letters,
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960, II, p. 841.
"That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted person before puberty."
— T. S. Eliot, "From Poe to Valery,"
Library of Congress Lecture, November 19, 1948.
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