In a review of Graham’s Magazine published in the March 1, 1845 issue of The Broadway Journal, Edgar Allan Poe predicted of magazine literature, “[i]n a few years its importance will be found to have increased in geometrical ratio” because “[t]he whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward.” Busy mid-century readers, speeding along in “the rush of the age,” required a medium that kept pace. “We now demand the light artillery of the intellect,” Poe insisted: “we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused – in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible.”1 It can be difficult to pin down how seriously Poe took such declarations. Praise and ironic critique intertwine in his critical writings, as in subsequent paragraphs of this review, where he describes the engraving “Dacota Woman and the Assiniboin Girl” as “worthy of all commendation,” while another engraving in the same issue, “The Love Letter,” “has the air of having been carved by a very small child, with a dull knife, from a raw potato.”2 If Poe marks a genuine trend toward periodical forms of literature in the period, he also stages an ambiguous response to the trend, vacillating between praise and condemnation.

Writing in 1883 to organizers in Sante Fe who had invited him to contribute a poem honoring the 333rd anniversary of the city’s Spanish settlement, Walt Whitman prophesied a future American civilization to embrace what he called – initially – “the Spanish element in our nationality”: To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander historic retrospect – grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity, and honor. … Then another point, relating to American ethnology, past and to come, I will here touch upon at a venture. As to our aboriginal or Indian population – the Aztec in the South, and many a tribe in the North and West – I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence, a blank. But I am not at all clear about that. As America, from its many far-back sources and current supplies, develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own – are we to see it cheerfully accepting and using all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside globe – and then rejecting the only ones distinctively its own – the autochthonic ones?1