Terry L. Meyers

"An Attack on Lowell at the 1900 MLA convention:
A Poe Supporter Appeals to Swinburne"

In 1900 a graduate student, Charles M. Magee, outraged the annaul Modern Language Association meeting by daring to attack the august James Russell Lowell, hoping to displace him and possibly open a place for Edgar Allan Poe in the American literary pantheon. In an impassioned letter to the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, Magee sought support. One result of the uproar Magee occasioned among the literary establishment was tighter review by the MLA of papers to be presented.