SOURCE: “Poems by Christopher Pearse Cranch.” Southern Literary Messenger 11, no. 5 (May 1845): 295-99.

In the following anonymous review, the critic provides a mixed reading of Cranch's Poems.

In spite of the matter-of-fact character ascribed to our nation, we have every day instances that the soil of Uncle Sam's great farm is not only fertile in producing merchants, whose possessions are those of princes, statesmen and military heroes, who, by the way, in these peaceful times, earn epaulets and laurels bloodlessly enough; but also numberless writers of greater or less distinction, and in every class of literature.

Among the latter, none are more numerous than the (so-called!) poets, (verily, bellua multorum es capitum!) the height of whose ambition it frequently is, to contribute “stanzas” and “lines” on so-and-so to some magazine with a colored fashion-plate. In process of time, these effusions accumulate on the hands of our young composers, and...