The year after his request to Longfellow and Longfellow’s polite refusal, Poe began to sharpen his steel for his Little Longfellow War. In the March 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine, Poe published a negative review of Longfellow’s Ballads of the Night, a collection of original poems and translations. Longfellow’s translations, Poe claimed, failed to do justice to the author or translator, but Poe reserved his most scathing criticism for Longfellow’s own poems, basing his disapproval, as he would again in the “Little Longfellow War,” on theoretical reasoning: “Mr. Longfellow’s conception of the aims of poesy is all wrong,” he wrote, “and this we shall prove at some future day.”
Three years later, in January 1845, now living in New York and reviewing Longfellow’s The Waif in the Daily Mirror, Poe revised his conception of Longfellow as a didactic naif who wrote “brilliant poems—by accident” to accuse him of that most serious of literary crimes—plagiarism: “We conclude our notes on the ‘Waif,’ with the observation that, although full of beauties, it is infected with a moral taint . . . somebody is a thief.” Poe accused Longfellow not of copying others’ words verbatim, which is our contemporary understanding of plagiarism, but of appropriating others’ ideas, meters, rhythms, and images. Longfellow, he charged, was guilty of “the most barbarous class of literary robbery; that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore least defensible and least reclaimable property is purloined.”
Two months later in March, now editing the New York-based Broadway Journal, Poe took advantage of his position to expand his charges of plagiarism against Longfellow. His elaboration of this “large account of a small matter” filled the pages of the Broadway Journal for six consecutive weeks, from March 1, 1845, to April 5, 1845. Poe claimed that he was writing in response to several of “Longfellow’s friends,” who had sent protests to the Daily Mirror, defending Longfellow against Poe’s attack on The Waif. According to Poe, Outis was the most persistent of the group, and Poe reproduced his long essay verbatim from the Daily Mirror to the Broadway Journal, prefacing an even more lengthy response. Outis asked:
What is plagiarism? And what constitutes a good ground for the charge? Did no two men ever think alike without stealing one from the other? or, thinking alike, did no two men ever use the same, or similar words, to convey the thoughts, and that, without any communication with each other? To deny it would be absurd.