Rufus Wilmot Griswold

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Rufus Wilmot Griswold : biography

February 15, 1815 – August 12, 1857

Second marriage

On August 20, 1845, Griswold married Charlotte Myers, a Jewish woman;Bayless, 107 she was 42 and he was 33.Silverman, 342 Griswold had been pressured into the marriage by the woman’s aunts, despite his concern about their difference in religious beliefs. This difference was strong enough that one of Griswold’s friends referred to his wife only as "the little Jewess".Silverman, 354 On their wedding night, he discovered that she was, according to Griswold biographer Joy Bayless, "through some physical misfortune, incapable of being a wife"Bayless, 108 or, as Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman explains, incapable of having sex. Griswold considered the marriage void and no more valid "than there would have been had the ceremony taken place between parties of the same sex, or where the sex of one was doubtful or ambiguous". Still, the couple moved together to Charleston, South Carolina, Charlotte’s home town, and lived under the same roof, albeit sleeping in separate rooms. Neither of the two was happy with the situation, and at the end of April 1846 she had a lawyer write up a contract "to separate, altogether and forever, … which would in effect be a divorce".Bayless, 111 The contract forbade Griswold from re-marrying and paid him $1,000 for expenses in exchange for his daughter Caroline staying with the Myers family.Bayless, 111–112 After this separation, Griswold immediately moved back to Philadelphia.

Move to New York City

A few years later, Griswold moved back to New York City, leaving his younger daughter in the care of the Myers family and his elder daughter, Emily, with relatives on her mother’s side. He had by now earned the nickname "Grand Turk", and in the summer of 1847 made plans to edit an anthology of poetry by American women.Bayless, 143 He believed that women were incapable of the same kind of "intellectual" poetry as men and believed they needed to be divided: "The conditions of aesthetic ability in the two sexes are probably distinct, or even opposite", he wrote in his introduction.Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1977: 70–71. ISBN 0-292-76450-2 The selections he chose for The Female Poets of America were not necessarily the greatest examples of poetry but instead were chosen because they emphasized traditional morality and values.Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1978: 73. ISBN 0-292-76450-2 That same year, Griswold began working on what he considered "the maximum opus of his life", an extensive biographical dictionary. Although he worked on it for several years and even advertised for it, it was never produced.Bayless 201 He also helped Elizabeth F. Ellet publish her book Women of the American Revolution, and was angered when she did not acknowledge his assistance in the book.Bayless, 143–144 In July 1848, he visited poet Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence, Rhode Island, although he had been suffering with vertigo and exhaustion, rarely leaving his apartment at New York University, and was unable to write without taking opium. In autumn of that year, he had an epileptic fit, the first of many he would suffer for the remainder of his life. One fit caused him to fall out of a ferry in Brooklyn and nearly drown.Silverman, 441 He wrote to publisher James T. Fields: "I am in a terrible condition, physically and mentally. I do not know what the end will be … I am exhausted—betwixt life and death—and heaven and hell." In 1849, he was further troubled when Charles Fenno Hoffman, with whom he had become good friends, was committed to an insane asylum.Bayless, 149

Griswold continued editing and contributing literary criticism for various publications, both full-time and freelance, including 22 months from July 1, 1850, to April 1, 1852, with The International Magazine.Bayless, 205 There, he worked with contributors including Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Mary E. Hewitt and John R. Thompson.Bayless, 206–207 In the November 10, 1855, issue of The Criterion, Griswold anonymously reviewed the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, declaring: "It is impossible to image how any man’s fancy could have conceived such a mass of stupid filth". Griswold charged that Whitman was guilty of "the vilest imaginings and shamefullest license", a "degrading, beastly sensuality." Referring to Whitman’s poetry, Griswold said he left "this gathering of muck to the laws which… must have the power to suppress such gross obscenity."Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 105-106 Whitman later included Griswold’s review in a new edition of Leaves of Grass.Loving, 184–185 He ended his review with a phrase in Latin referring to "that horrible sin, among Christians not to be named", the stock phrase long associated with Christian condemnations of sodomy. Griswold was the first person in the 19th century to publicly point to and stress the theme of erotic desire and acts between men in Whitman’s poetry. More attention to that aspect of Whitman’s poetry would only surface late in the 19th century.Katz, 105-106; Loving, 202