Text: Various, “Chapter 06,” The Book of the Poe Centenary (1909), pp. 100-185

VI

IN CABELL HALL, AGAIN

We are met again on this evening of the Centenary of his birth to honor the memory and to study the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, a man of genius, who, for a brief period, studied within the halls of this University. The task of appraising the value to the world of Poe, the poet and the man of letters, has been assigned by our committee to the two scholars who have already discharged their duties so ably and thoughtfully this morning, and to two other scholars whom I shall shortly have the honor to introduce to you. Professor Barrett Wendell, of Harvard University, who will speak to you upon “The Nationalism of [page 101:] Poe,” and Professor Alphonso Smith, of North Carolina, who will speak upon the “Americanism of Poe.” All Americans look up to Harvard University with reverence and respect, especially at this moment when the most venerable of our institutions is passing into a new epoch of its vigorous life, and I shall be pardoned, I am sure, for a feeling for the University of North Carolina as close and warm as a son may bear.

It is in no sense my task to discuss in a critical way Edgar Allan Poe. I may, however, with propriety utter a simple, intimate word, expressing for him the tenderness and affection which this University has always borne for him, as well in the days of his waywardness and eclipse, as in this time, when the star of his fame has climbed to the zenith and is shining there with intense and settled glory. There is nothing finer in the world than the love that men bear for institutions, unless it be the solemn pride which institutions display in men who have partaken of their benefits. Celebrations similar to this have been held today in London and in five American [page 102:] cities — New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond and Boston.

That experience of the elder world is repeated today save that the number of cities is five instead of seven through which the living Poe suffered and struggled. It is the same old story, too, of outward defeat and ap parent oblivion, and yet of inward victory and a sure grasping of enduring fame, I may be frank and say that there was a time when Poe did not greatly appeal to me. I felt the sheer, clear beauty of his song, indeed, as one might feel the beauty of the lark's song, but his detachment from the world of men, where my interests most centered, left me unresponsive and simply curious. The great name of poet had held place in my thinking as signifying a prophet, or as a maker of divine music for men to march by towards serener heights. My notion of the poet came down me out of to the Hebraic training that all of our [page 103:] receive; and Poe did not fit into this conception. I have come, however, to see the limitations of that view, and to behold something very admirable and strange and wonderful in this proud, gifted man, who loved beauty and mystery, who had such genius for feeling the pain of life and the wonder of it, who grasped so vainly at its peace and calm, and who suffered, one feels, a thousand deaths under its disciplines and conventions. To me the glory of Poe as a man is that, though whipped and scourged by human frailties, he was able to keep his heart and vision unstained and to hold true to the finest thing in him, so that out of this fidelity to his very best there issued immortal work. World poets like world conquerors are very rare. Not many universities have had the fortune to shelter a world poet, and to offer him any nourishment. Christ College, at Cambridge, has warmed itself at the fire of Milton's genius for three hundred years. In our own young land, with its short intellectual annals, Williams College sheltered Bryant for a while; and Virginia, Poe; and Harvard, Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes; Bowdoin, Longfellow; and Oglethorpe, a little [page 104:] college in Georgia, that other child of genius and misfortune, Sidney Lanier. We might say, therefore, that only four out of the four hundred American colleges have sheltered great poets, and perhaps only two, poets of worldwide fame, and perhaps only one, a world artist. Not such a poet as Sophocles or Virgil or Dante or Shakespeare have we nourished here, to be sure, but a world poet in a legitimate and classic sense. In many of these colleges minor poets have appeared, who have sung truly and clearly, like our own Thompson, and Lucas, and Page, and Lindsay Gordon and Armistead Gordon. So long is the list of the great singers who knew no college training, and so short the list of those who did, that we may well cherish here our high privileges in the fame of Poe. I have often wondered just what the University of Virginia did for Poe in that short year of his life here. He makes no mention of the University in his writings, but that is like him and his detachment from time and place. He saw the University when it was young. He must have heard much talk about him of the dreams and hopes for the new institution [page 105:] founded here on the western borders of the young republic by the statesman whose renown then filled the world. The great philosopher of democracy and the great classic artist must have often passed each other on the Lawn and doubtless often held speech with each other, little dreaming that each would share with the other the widest fame to be accorded to the thousands who would hereafter throng these halls. It is probably true that “Annabel Lee” and the “Ode to Helen” would have sung themselves out of Poe's heart and throat if he had never seen the University of Virginia; but surely there was genuine inspiration in the place in that time of its dim beginnings. There were noble books here, few in number and great in quality, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the great Greeks were all here; sincere scholars from the old world and the new had set up their homes here. Here were unbeaten youths with young hearts and passions; here hopes gleamed and ambitions burned. And then, as now, beauty dwelt upon the venerable hills encircling the horizon, and the University itself lay new and chaste in its simple lines upon the young Lawn. I venture [page 106:] to think sometimes that when our poet wrote those stateliest lines of his

perhaps there flashed into his mind's eye the vision of the Rotunda upon some such night as this, with its soaring columns whitened by the starlight and vying with the beauty and witchery of the white winter about it.

It is perhaps easier to answer the question, What has Poe done for the University? We hear much of endowments in connection with universities. The words donor and endowment are the technical phrases of college administration baffling and alluring the builders of universities. Poe has endowed his alma mater with immortal distinction, and left it a legacy which will increase with the years. This legacy is not endowment of money, for there was no scrip left in his poor purse, but simply the endowment of a few songs and a fund of unconquerable idealism. I am not of those who believe that Poe has been to our young men a kind of star that has lighted them to their destruction, as some good [page 107:] Presbyterians believe Burns to have been to the youth of Scotland. The vast tragedy of his life, its essential purity, its hard work, the unspeakable pity of it, have kept his name a name of dignity and the suggestions of his career to modern youth are suggestions of beauty and of labor. Let us concede that he was no exemplar or pattern of correct living to whom we can point our youth, but the fact that there is a little room on West Range in which dwelt a world poet who never wrote an unclean word, and who sought after beauty in form as passionately as a coarse man might seek after gain, has contributed an irreducible total of good to the spirit which men breathe here, as well as a wide fame to his alma mater that will outlive all ill-fortune, change, or disaster. May I call this spiritual residuum a clear tradition of beauty and poetic understanding, a feeling for the gold and not the dross in life, a genius for reverence, an instinct for honor, and an eye to see, burning brightly, the great realities that are wont to pale and disappear before the light of common day? [page 108:]

One hundred years ago today, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston. The vital records of that period are scanty and defective. It is only within the past two weeks that my friend, Mr. Walter Watkins, has collected, from the newspapers of 1808 and 1809, notices of all the plays in which the parents of Poe appeared during that season. From them it is clear that Mrs. Poe withdrew from the stage about Christmas time, 1808, and returned only on February 9th, 1809, when one of the newspapers congratulated her on her happy recovery from her confinement. This is apparently the most nearly contemporary record of Poe's birth. The researches of Mr. Watkins did not end here. It had been supposed that all record of Poe's birthplace was lost; and indeed it is improbable that he himself ever knew just where it was. By examining the tax lists for 1808 and 1809, Mr. Watkins discovered that David Poe was taxed that year as resident in a house owned by one Henry Haviland, who had bought the property, a few [page 118:] years before, from a Mr. Haskins, a kinsman, I believe, of the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The house was pulled down some fifty years ago; but Mr. Watkins has ascertained from the records that it was situated at what is now No. 62 Carver Street. In 1809, this was a respectable, though not a fashionable, part of the city. There Poe was born.

The circumstances of Poe's career were restless; on the whole, they were solitary. Throughout his forty years of mortal sunlight and shadow, he was never quite in accord with his surroundings. He was never tried by either of the tests for which ambition chiefly longs — the gravely happy test of wide responsibility, or the stimulatingly happy test of dominant success. Troublous from beginning to end his earthly life seems; to him, this world could not often have smiled contagiously sympathetic. So much is clear; and yet a little more is clear as well. When he sought sympathy, or found semblance of it, and thus for a little while could feel trouble assuaged, he could find it most nearly among those generous phases of Southern spirit which surrounded the happier years of his [page 119:] youth. There was little trace of it, for him, in the still half-Puritan atmosphere of that New England where he chanced, a stranger, to see the light.

So it was with deep and reverent sense of your Southern generosity that I received your grave and friendly summons to join with you here and now. Here, in this sanctuary of Virginia tradition, you have not scrupled to call me from the heart of New England, to pay tribute not only for myself, and for my own people, but tribute in the name of us all, to the memory of Poe. If one could only feel sure of performing such a task worthily, no task, of duty or of privilege, could be more solemnly happy. For none could more wonderfully imply how Virginians and the people of New England, — each still themselves, — have so outlived their long spiritual misunderstandings of one another that with all our hearts we can gladly join together, as fellow countrymen, in celebrating the memory of one recognized everywhere as the fellow-countryman of us all.

For everywhere is no hyperbolic word to describe the extent of Poe's constantly extending [page 120:] fame, sixty years after they laid him in his grave. His name is not only eminent in the literary history of Virginia, or of New York, or of America; it has proved itself among the very few of those native to America which have commanded and have justified admiration throughout the civilized world. Even this does not tell the whole story. So far as we can now discern, he has securely risen above the mists of time and the fogs of accident. His work may appeal to you or leave you deaf; you may adulate it or scrutinize it, as you will; you may dispute as long and as fruitlessly as you please concerning its positive significance or the magnitude of its greatness. The one thing which you cannot do — the thing for which the moment is forever past — is to neglect it. Forever past, as well, all loyal Americans must gladly find the moment, — if indeed there ever was a moment, — when any of us could even for an instant regret it. There is no longer room for any manner of question that the work of Poe is among the still few claims which America can as yet urge unchallenged in proof that our country has enriched the literature of the world. Even [page 121:] with no other reason than this, loyal Americans must already unite in cherishing his memory.

So true, so obvious, this must seem today that we are prone, in accepting it, to forget the marvel of it, as we forget the marvels of Nature, — of sunrise, of sleep, of birth, of memory itself. The marvel of it, in truth, is none the less reverend because, like these, we need never find it miraculous. Happily for us all, — happily for all the world, — Poe is not an isolated, sporadic phenomenon in our national history. He was an American of the nineteenth century. If we ponder never so little on those commonplace words, we shall find them charged with stirring truth. To summarize the life of any nation, there is no better way than to turn to the successive centuries of its history, and to ask yourself, with no delay of slow or painful study, what names and what memories, unborn at the beginning of these epochs, were in enduring existence when they ended. When we thus consider our United States of America, the spiritual splendor of the nineteenth century glows amazing.

That nineteenth century, as we all gravely [page 122:] know, was by no means a period of national concord. Rather, far and wide, it was a period when the old order was fatally passing, yielding place to new. Thus inevitably, throughout our country, it was a period of honest and noble passion running to the inspiring height of spiritual tragedy. For no tragedy can be more superbly inspiring than that of epochs when earnestly devoted human beings, spiritually at one in loyalty to what they believe the changeless ideals of truth and of righteous ness, are torn asunder by outbreaks of such tremendous historic forces as make the mechanical forces of Nature seem only thin parables, imaging the vaster forces still which we vainly fancy to be immaterial. It is not until epochs like this begin to fade and sub side into the irrevocable certainty of the past that we can begin to perceive the essential unity of their grandeur. Nothing less than such supreme ordeal of conflict can finally prove the quality and the measure of heroes; and in the stress and strain, no human vision can truly discern them all; but once proved deathless, the heroes stand side by side, immortally brethren. So, by and by, we come [page 123:] wondrously to perceive that we may honour our own heroes most worthily, — most in the spirit which they truly embodied, most, I believe, as they themselves would finally bid us, if our ears could still catch the accents of their voices, — when we honour with them their brethren who, in the passing years of passion, seemed for a while their foes.

When we of America thus contemplate the nineteenth century, we cannot fail to rejoice in the memories it has left us. They are so many, so full of inspiration, so various in all but the steadfastness with which they with stand the deadening test of the years, that it would be distracting, and even invidious, to call the roll of our heroes at a moment like this. What more truly and deeply concerns us is an evident historical fact, generally true of all the human careers on which our heroic memories of the nineteenth century rest unshaken. Among those careers almost all North and South, East and West — won, in their own time, distinguished public recognition. What I have in mind we may best realize, perhaps, if for a moment we imagine ourselves in some nineteenth century congregation [page 124:] of our countrymen, similar to this where we are gathered together. Fancy, for example, the companies assembled to welcome Lafayette, far and wide, during his last visit to our nation, which he had helped call into being. Among the American worthies then in their maturity, and still remembered by others than their own descendants, almost every one would already have been well and widely known. A local stranger in any such assemblage, to whom his host should point out the more distinguished personages then present, would generally have found their names not only memorable but distinguished, just as we should find them still. And what would thus have been the case in 1824 would have stayed so, five and twenty years later. The heroes of our olden time were mostly gladdened by the consciousness of recognized and acknowledged eminence.

Now, in contrast with them, let us try to imagine a figure which might perhaps have attracted the eye in some such American assemblage sixty-five years ago. Glancing about, you might very likely have observed a slight, alert man, with rather lank, dark hair, [page 125:] and deep, restless eyes. His aspect might hauntingly have attracted you, and set you to wondering whether he was young or old. On the whole you might probably have felt that he looked distrustful, defiant if not almost repellant, certainly not ingratiating, or engagingly sympathetic. Yet there would have hovered about him an impalpable atmosphere of fascination, which would have attracted your gaze back to him again and again; and each new scrutiny would have increased your impression that here was some one solitary, apart, not to be confused with the rest. He would hardly have been among the more distinguished personages, on the platform or at the high table. You might well have wondered whether anybody could tell you his name. And if, in answer to a question, your neighbor had believed that this was Edgar Allan Poe, you might very probably have found the name by no means familiar. You would perhaps have had a general impression that he had written for a good many magazines, and the like, — that he had produced stories, and verses, and criticism, but the chances are that you would not clearly have distinguished him [page 126:] unless as one of that affluent company of literati who illustrated the ‘40's, and who are remembered now only because their names occur in essays preserved among Poe's collected works. Almost certainly he would hardly have impressed you as a familiarly memorable personage. His rather inconspicuous solitude would not have seemed noteworthy. Very likely, if you were a stranger thereabouts, you would have paid little more attention to his presence, but would rather have proceeded to inquire who else, of more solid quality, was then and there worth looking at.

All this might well have happened little more than sixty years ago; and though to some of us sixty years may still seem to stretch long, they are far from transcending the period of human memory. It would be by no means remarkable if in this very company, here present, there were some who can remember the year 1845, or the election of President Taylor. Beyond question, every one of us has known, with something like contemporary intimacy, friends and relatives, only a little older than ourselves in seeming, to whom those years remained as vivid as you [page 127:] shall find the administration of President Roosevelt. That olden time, in fact, when amid such congregations as this, anywhere throughout America, the presence of Poe would hardly have been remarked, has not quite faded from living recollection. And yet, at this moment, there is no need to explain anywhere why we are come together here, from far and wide, to honor his memory. Not only all of us here assembled, not only all Virginia, and all New York, and all New England, and all our American countrymen beside, but the whole civilized world would instantly and eagerly recognize the certainty of his eminence. What he was, while still enmeshed in the perplexity of earthly circumstance, is already become matter of little else than idle curiosity. What he is admits of no dispute. So long as the name of America shall endure, the name of Poe will persist, in serene certainty, among those of our approved national worthies.

In all our history, I believe, there is no more salient contrast than this between the man in life and his immortal spirit. Just how or when the change came to be we need not [page 128:] trouble ourselves to dispute. It is enough for us, during this little while when we are together, that we let our thoughts dwell not on the Poe who was but on the Poe who is. And even then we shall do best not to lose ourselves in conjectures concerning his positive magnitude, or his ultimate significance, when you measure his utterances with what we conceive to be absolute truth, or the scheme of the eternities. We should be content if we can begin to assure ourselves of what he is, and of why.

The Poe whom we are met to celebrate is not the man, but his work. Furthermore, it is by no means all the work collected in those volumes where studious people can now trace, with what edification may ensue, the history, the progress, the ebb and the flow, of his copious literary production. His extensive criticism need not detain or distract us; it is mostly concerned with ephemeral matters, for gotten ever since the years when it was written. His philosophical excursions, fantastic or pregnant as the case may finally prove to be, we need hardly notice. The same is true concerning his copious exposition of literary [page 129:] principle, superficially grave, certainly ingenious, perhaps earnest, perhaps impishly fantastic. All of these, and more too, would inevitably force themselves on our consideration if we were attempting to revive the Poe who was. At this moment, however, we may neglect them as serenely as we may neglect scrutiny of outward and visible signs — such questions as those of where he lived and when and for how long, of what he did in his private life, of whom he made love to and what he ate for dinner, of who cut his waistcoats, and of how — if at all — he paid for them. The very suggestion of such details may well and truly seem beneath the dignity of this moment. They are forced into conscious recognition not by any tinge of inherent value, but because of the innocently intrusive pedantry now seemingly inseparable from the ideal of scholarship. We have passed, for the while, beyond the tyranny of that scholarly mood which used to exhaust its energy in analysis of every word and syllable and letter throughout the range of literature. From sheer reaction, I sometimes think, we are apt nowadays, when concerned with letters, to pass our [page 130:] time, even less fruitfully than if we were still grammarians, in researches little removed from the impertinence of gossip. And gossip concerning memorable men and women is only a shade less futile than gossip concerning the ephemeral beings who flit across our daily vision. So far as it can keep us awake from superstitious acceptance of superhuman myth, it may perhaps have its own little salutary function. If it distract us from such moods of deeper sympathy as start the vagrant fancies of myth-makers, it does mischief as misleading as any ever wrought by formal pedantry, and without the lingering grace of traditional dignity. Your truly sound scholarship is concerned rather with such questions as we are properly concerned with here and now. Its highest hope, in literary matters, is to assert and to maintain persistent facts in their enduring values. In the case of Poe, for example, its chief questions are first of what from among his copious and varied work has incontestably survived the conditions of his human environment, and secondly of why this survival has occurred. What contribution did Poe make to lasting literature? Does this [page 131:] justly belong to the literature of the world, as well as to that of America? In brief, why is he so memorable as we all acknowledge by our presence here today?

Stated thus, these questions are not very hard to answer. The Poe of literature is the writer of a good many tales, or short stories, and of a few intensely individual, though not deeply confidential, poems. Stories and poems alike stand apart not only from all others in the literature of America, but — I believe we may agree — from any others anywhere. Some profoundly, some rather more superficially, they all possess, in their due degree, an impalpable quality which the most subtle of us might well be at pains to define, but which the most insensitive man imaginable can always, surely, recurrently feel. The most remarkable phase of the impression they thus make is probably the complete and absolute certainty of its recurrence. Turn, whenever you will and in whatever mood, to any of Poe's work which has proved more than ephemeral. Tale or poem, it may chance either to appeal to you or to repel you. In one mood you may think it inspired; in another, [page 132:] you may find it little better than prankishly artificial. You may praise it until dissent gape breathless at your superlatives; or you may relentlessly point out what you are pleased to believe its limitations, its artificialities, its patent defects. Even then, a very simple question must bring you to pause. Let anybody ask you what this piece of literature is like, or what is like it, — let anybody ask with what we should match it. Whether you love it or are tempted to disdain it, you must be forced to the admission that it is almost unique. Whatever its ultimate significance, the better work of Poe remains altogether itself, and therefore altogether his. This gleams the more vividly as you come to recognize how his individuality asserts itself to you, whatever your own passing mood, under any imaginable conditions. The utterance of Poe is as in contestably, as triumphantly, itself as is the note of a song bird — as poets abroad have found the music of the skylark, or of the nightingale, or as our own countryfolk find the call of the whippoorwill echoing through the twilight of American woods.

His individuality, the while, is of a kind for [page 133:] which our language hardly affords a name more exact than the name poetic. The accident that we are generally accustomed to con fuse the spirit of poetry with some common features of poetic structure can mislead us only for a moment. Poetry is not essentially a matter of rhyme or meter, of measure and quality in sound or syllable. The essence of it is not material but spiritual. There are few more comprehensive descriptions of it than the most familiar in all English literature: —

In all the literature of America, and indeed in all that of the English language, you will be at pains to point out utterances more illustrative of these lines, — I had almost said more definative [[definitive]], — than you shall find in the tales and [page 134:] the poems of Poe at their surviving best. Momentarily illusive though his concrete touches may sometimes make his tales, — and he possessed, to a rare degree, the power of arousing “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith,” — the substance of his enduring phantasies may always be reduced to the forms of things un known, bodied forth by sheer power of imagination. To these airy nothings the cunning of his pen, turning them to shapes, gives local habitations and names so distinct and so vivid that now and again you must be at pains to persuade yourself that in final analysis they are substantially unreal. Yet unreal they always prove at last, phantasmally and hauntingly immaterial. They are like figured tapestries spun and woven, warp and woof, from such stuff as dreams are made of. Only the dreams are not quite our own. The dreamer who has dreamed them is the poet who has woven them into this fabric, making them now forever ours as well as his. Without his own innermost life they could never have come into being at all. Without his consummate craftsmanship, itself almost a miracle, they must [page 135:] have hovered inexorable beyond the range of all other consciousness than his who dreamed them. Dreamer and craftsman alike, and supreme, it is he, and none but he, who can make us feel, in certain most memorable phases, the fascinating, fantastic, elusive, incessant mystery of that which must forever environ human consciousness, unseen, unknown, impalpable, implacable, undeniable.

The mood we are thus attempting to de fine is bafflingly elusive; it has no precise sub stance, no organic or articulate form. It is essentially a concept not of reason, or even of pervasive human emotion, but only of poetry — a subtly phantasmal state of spirit, evocable only by the poet who has been endowed with power to call it from the vasty deep where, except for him, it must have lurked forever. If it were not unique, it could not be itself; for it would not be quite his, and whatever is not quite his is not his at all. So much we may confidently assert. And yet if we should permit ourselves either to rest with the assertion, or to stray in fancy through conclusion after conclusion towards which it may have seemed to lead us, we should remain or wander [page 136:] mischievously far from the truth. That Poe's imagination was solitary, like so much of the circumstances of his life, we need not deny or dispute. Clearly, nevertheless, he lived his solitary life not in some fantastic nowhere, but amid the familiarly recorded realities of these United States of America, during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is equally clear that throughout the years when his solitary poetic imagination was giving to its airy nothings their local habitations and their names, countless other poetic imaginations, at home and abroad, were striving to do likewise, each in its own way and fashion. Solitary, apart, almost defiant though the aspect of Poe may have seemed, isolated though we may still find the records of his life, or the creatures of his imagination, he was never anachronistic. Even the visual image of his rest less presence, which we tried to call up a little while ago, will prove on scrutiny not only individual, but outwardly cast in the form and the habit of its own time — to the very decade and year of the almanac. With his dreams, and with the magic fabrics — [page 137:] into which he wrought them, the case is much the same. Neither dreams nor fabrics, any more than his bodily presence, could have been quite themselves — and still less could the dreams and the fabrics have fused forever in their wondrous poetic harmonies during any other epoch than that wherein Poe lived and moved and had his being.

What I mean must soon be evident if we stop to seek a general name for the kind of poetical mood which Poe could always evoke in so specific a form and degree. The word is instantly at hand, inexact and canting if you will, but undeniable. It is the word which his contemporaries might carelessly, yet not untruly, have applied to his personal appearance, alluring to the eye if only for the quiet defiance of his temperamental solitude. It is the word by which we might most fitly have characterized such impulsive curiosity as should have impelled us, if we had seen him, to inquire who this mysterious-looking stranger might be. It is the word — misused, teasing, elusive — by which we are still apt indefinitely to define the general aesthetic temper of his time, all [page 138:] over the European and American world. We use it concerning all manner of emotion and of conduct, and all phases of literature or of the other fine arts throughout their whole protean ranges of expression. You will have guessed already, long before I come to utter it, the word thus hovering in all our minds — the word romantic.

If we should hereupon attempt formally to define what this familiar word means, there would be no hope left us. Turn, as widely as you will, to dictionaries, to encyclopædias, to volumes, and to libraries of volumes. Each may throw its ray of light on the matter; none will completely illuminate it or irradiate. You might as well seek words which should comprehend, in descriptive finality, the full, delicate, sensuous truth of the savor of a fruit or of the scent of a flower. Yet, for all this, there are aspects of romanticism on which we may helpfully dwell; and of these the first is an acknowledged matter of history. Throughout all parts of the world then dominated by European tradition, the temper of the first half of the nineteenth century was strongly [page 139:] romantic. This was nowhere more evident than in the spontaneous outburst of poetry which, in less than twenty years, enriched the roll of English poets with the names of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Scott. Now the way in which this period of poetry was lately described in an American announcement of teaching may help us to perceive with a little more approach to precision, one feature of what romanticism everywhere means. Some worthy professor, doubtless chary of indefinite terms, chose to describe the romantic poets as those of the period when the individual spirit revived in English literature. Poetic or not, this sound instructor of youth was historically right. The very essence of romanticism lies in passionate assertion of literary or artistic individuality. Where fore, as we can now begin to feel sure, that romantic isolation of Poe's has double significance; it not only marks him, apart from others, as individual, but it defines him, at the same time, as an individual of his own romantic period.

We shall not go astray, then, if we ponder [page 140:] for a little while on this whole romantic generation. Before long, we may content fully agree that the individualism of the romantic poets resulted everywhere from their passionate declaration of independence from outworn poetic authority. The precise form of poetic authority from which they thus broke free was the pseudo-classic tradition of the eighteenth century — in matters literary a period of formal rhetorical decency, and of a cool commonsense which had little mercy for the vagaries of uncontrolled æsesthetic emotion. Already we may well feel insecure. We are straying, beyond dispute, into dangerously elusive generalization, interminably debatable. Yet, if our present line of thought is to lead us anywhere, we must not hesitate to generalize more boldly still. That same eighteenth century, from which romanticism broke free, was not a sporadic and intensive episode in the history of European culture; it was the culmination of a period at least five hundred years long. This period began when the reviving critical scholarship of the Renaissance brought back to the dominant upper consciousness of [page 141:] Europe vivid understanding of the facts of classical antiquity; and when, so doing, it began to suppress the vigorous and splendid body of intervening tradition and temper to which we have consequently given the name of mediaeval. In matters literary, at least, the spirit which began with the Renaissance persisted until the Revolution of the dying eighteenth century prepared the way for that nineteenth century, of romantic freedom, wherein Poe lived and did his living work.

Already we can begin to see that there was some analogy between the Middle Ages, which preceded the Renaissance, and the epoch of romanticism which ensued after the eighteenth century. Both periods, at least, were free each in its own way from the intellectual control of such formal classicism or pseudo-classicism as intervened. A little closer scrutiny of the Middle Ages may therefore help us to appreciate what nineteenth-century romanticism meant. Throughout that whole mediaeval period, we may soon agree, the intellect of Europe was authoritatively forbidden to exert itself [page 142:] beyond narrowly fixed and rigid limits. European emotion, meanwhile, was permitted vagrant and luxuriant freedom of range and of expression. It might wander wherever it would. In contrast with this period, we can now perceive, the Renaissance may be conceived as an intellectual declaration of independence; and through a full five hundred years, the intellect of Europe was increasingly free. Its very freedom made it, in turn, tyrannical. At least in the matters of temper and of fashion, it repressed, controlled, or ignored the ranges of emotion which had flourished during its subjection. In literature its tyranny extended far and wide. Though for awhile thought was permitted to range more or less free, emotion was at best sentimentalized. So, when the centuries of tyranny were past, poetry, if it were ever to regain full freedom of emotional existence, to enjoy again the fine frenzy of creation, needed more than independence. To revive the spirit which should vitally reanimate its enfranchisement it needed to drink again from the fountains for which it had thirsted for centuries; it must revert [page 143:] to something like the unfettered emotional freedom of the Middle Ages. To put the case a little more distinctly, the romanticism of the nineteenth century could be its true self only when to the intellectual maturity developed by five centuries of classical culture it could add full and eager sympathy with the emotional freedom of the Middle Ages, inevitably ancestral to all modernity. So it was a profoundly vital instinct which directed the enthusiasm of poets to mediaeval themes and traditions, even though these were imperfectly understood. The inspiration derived from them came not so much from any detail of their actual historical circumstances as from their instant, obvious remoteness from the commonsense facts of daily experience — matters judiciously to be handled only by the colorless activity of intellect. It was remoteness from actuality which above all else made romantic your romantic ruins and romantic villains, your romantic heroines, your romantic passions and your romantic aspirations. Yet even your most romantic poet must give the airy nothings of his imagination a local habitation [page 144:] and a name. Unreal and fantastic though they might be, they must possess at least some semblance of reality. And this semblance, whether bodily or spiritual, normally assumed a mediæval guise.

Throughout Europe such semblance could always be guided, controlled, and regulated by the pervasive presence everywhere of relics, material or traditional, of the mediaeval times thus at length welcomed back to the light. So far as the full romantic literature of Europe deals with mediaeval matters, accordingly, or so far as intentionally or instinctively it reverts to mediaeval temper, it has a kind of solidity hardly to be found in the poetic utterance of its contemporary America. For, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, America was not only consciously further than Europe from all the common roots of our ancestral humanity; it possessed hardly a line of what is now accepted as our national literature. As patriots and as men of their time, the poets of America were called on to add their part to romantic expression. To give their expression semblance of reality they had no mediæval relics [page 145:] to guide them, nor enduring local traditions, thick and strong about them. They were compelled to rely on sheer force of creative imagination. Pretentious as that phrase may sound, it is animated by a spirit of humility. Its purpose is in no wise to claim superiority for the romantic literary achievement of our country. It is rather, by stating the magnitude of our national task, to explain ouf comparative lack of robust solidity, and to indicate why the peculiar note of our country must inevitably have been a note of singular, though not necessarily of powerful, creative purity.

Now just such creative purity is evidently characteristic of Poe. It may sometimes have seemed that among our eminent men of letters he is the least obviously American. A little while ago, indeed, when I again turned through all the pages of his collected works, I was freshly surprised to find how little explicit trace they bore of the precise environment where they were written. Throughout all their length, it seemed, there was not a single complete page on which a stranger might rest proof that it had come [page 146:] to the light in this country. The first example which occurs to me — it happens to be also the most generally familiar — will show what I have in mind: the mysterious chamber where the Raven forces uncanny entrance is not American. The image of it originated, I believe, in a room still pointed out. Yet, so far as the atmosphere of it is concerned, that room might have been anywhere; or rather, as it lives far and wide, it is surely nowhere. Yet, all the while, it has strange semblance of reality. What is true here proves true throughout. The Paris of Poe's detective stories is no real Paris; the House of Usher never stood, or fell, on any earthly continent; Poe's maelstrom whirls as fantastic as the balloon or the moon of Hans Pfaal. One might go on unceasingly, recalling at random impression after impression, vivid as the most vivid of dreams, and always as impalpable. There is nowhere else romantic fantasy so securely remote from all constraining taint of literal reality; there is none anywhere more unconditioned in its creative freedom. And thus, paradoxical though the thought may at first seem, Poe tacitly, but clearly and triumphantly, [page 147:] asserts his nationality. No other romanticism of the nineteenth century was ever so serenely free from limitation of material condition and tradition; none, therefore, was so indisputably what the native romanticism of America must inevitably have been. Call his work significant, if you like, or call it unmeaning; decide that it is true or false, as you will, in ethical or artistic purpose. Nothing can alter its wondrous independence of all but deliberately accepted artistic limitations. In this supreme artistic purity lies not only the chief secret of its wide appeal, but at the same time the subtle trait which marks it as the product of its own time, and of its own time nowhere else than here in America, our common country.

American though Poe's utterance be, the while, it stays elusive. When one tries to group it with any other utterance of his time, one feels again and afresh the impression of its temperamental solitude. This solitude is far from prophetic or austere; it is as remote as possible from that of a voice crying in the wilderness. Nor indeed was America, in Poe's time, any longer a wilderness wherein [page 148:] a poet should seem a stranger. Even though when the nineteenth century began there was hardly such a thing as literature in America, the years of Poe's life brought us rather copiousness than dearth of national expression. As a New Englander, for example, I may perhaps be pardoned for reminding you that in the year 1830 Boston could not have shown you a single enduring volume to demonstrate that it was ever to be a centre of purely literary importance. Twenty years later, when Poe died, the region of Boston had already produced, in pure literature, the fully developed characters, though not yet the complete and rounded work, of Emerson, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Holmes, and Whittier and Hawthorne. For the moment, I call this group to mind only that we may more clearly perceive the peculiar individuality of Poe. In many aspects, each of the New England group was individual, enough and to spare; no one who ever knew them could long confuse one with another. Yet individual though they were, none of them ever seems quite solitary or isolated. You rarely think of any among them as standing apart from [page 149:] the rest, nor yet from the historical, the social, the religious or the philosophic conditions which brought them all to the point of poetic utterance. Now Poe was in every sense their contemporary; yet the moment you gladly yield yourself to the contagion of his poetic sympathy, you find yourself alone with him aesthetically solitary. You might fancy yourself for the while fantastically disembodied a waking wanderer in some region of un alloyed dreams. American though he be, beyond peradventure, and a man of his time as well, he proves beyond all other Americans throughout the growingly illustrious roll of our national letters, resistant to all imprisonment within any classifying formula which should surely include any other than his own haunting and fascinating self.

This isolation might at first seem a token of weakness. For enduring as the fascination of Poe must forever be, — even to those who strive to resist it and give us dozens of wise pages to prove him undeserving of such attention, — the most ardent of his admirers can hardly maintain his work to be dominant or commanding. Except for the pleasure it gives [page 150:] you, it leaves you little moved; it does not meddle with your philosophy, or modify your rules of conduct. Its power lies altogether in the strange excellence of its peculiar beauty. And even though the most ethical poet of his contemporary New England has immortally assured us that beauty is its own excuse for being, we can hardly forget that Emerson's aphorism sprang from contemplation of a wild flower, in the exquisite perfection of ephemeral fragility. A slight thing some might thus come to fancy the isolated work of Poe — the poet of nineteenth century America whose spirit hovered most persistently remote from actuality.

If such mood should threaten to possess us, even for a little while, the concourse here gathered together should surely set us free. That spirit which hovered aloof sixty and seventy years ago is hovering still. It shall hover, we can now confidently assert, through centuries unending. The solitude of weakness, or of fragility is no such solitude as this; weak and fragile solitude vanishes with its earthly self, leaving no void behind. Solitude which endures as Poe's is enduring [page 151:] proves itself by the very tenacity of its endurance to be the solitude of unflagging and in dependent strength. Such strength as this is sure token of poetic greatness. We may grow more confident than ever. We may unhesitatingly assert Poe not only American, but great.

And now we come to one further question, nearer to us, as fellow-countrymen, than those on which we have touched before. It is the question of just where the enduring work of this great American poet should be placed in the temperamental history of our country of just what phase it may be held to express of the national spirit of America.

That national spirit — the spirit which ani mates and inspires the life of our native land has had solemn and tragic history. From the very beginning of our national growth, historic circumstance at once prevented any spiritual centralization of our national life, and encouraged in diverse regions, equally essential to the completeness of our national existence, separate spiritual centers, each true to itself and for that very reason defiant of others. So far as the separate phases of our [page 152:] national spirit have ever been able to meet one another openhearted, they have marvelled to know the true depth of their communion. But openhearted meeting has not always been possible. And throughout the nineteenth century — the century in which Poe lived and wrought — it was hardly possible at all.

Americans were brethren, as they were brethren before, as they are brethren now, as they shall stay brethren, God willing, through centuries to come. For the while, however, their brotherhood was sadly turbulent. They believed that they spoke a common language. The accents of it sounded familiar to the ears of all. Yet the meanings which those accents were bidden to carry seemed writhed into distortion on their way to the very ears which were straining to catch them. It was an epoch, we must sadly grant, of a Babel of the spirit.

So, throughout Poe's time, there was hardly one among the many whom the time held greater than he to whose voice the united spirit of our country could ever unhesitatingly and harmoniously respond. What I have in mind may well have occurred to you, of Virginia, [page 153:] when a little while ago I named the six chief literary worthies of nineteenth century New England. They were contemporaries of Poe. They were honest men and faithful poets. They never hesitated to utter, with all their hearts, what they devotedly believed to be the truth. And every one of them was immemorially American. Not one of them cherished any ancestral tradition but was native to this country, since the far-off days of King Charles the First. In every one of them, accordingly, any American — North or South, East or West — must surely find utterances heroically true to the idealism ancestrally and peculiarly our own. Yet it would be mischievous folly to pretend that such utterances, speaking for us all, can ever tell the whole story of the New England poets. They were not only Americans, as we all are; they were Americans of nineteenth century New England. As such they could not have been the honest men they were if they had failed to concern themselves passionately with the irrepressible disputes and conflicts of their tragic times. They could not so concern themselves without utterance after utterance fatally [page 154:] sure to provoke passionate response, or passionate revulsion in fellow-countrymen of traditions other than their own.

Even this sad truth hardly includes the limitation of their localism. Turn to their quieter passages, descriptive or gently anecdotic. Strong, simple, sincere, admirable though these be, they are themselves, we must freely grant, chiefly because they could have been made nowhere else than just where they were. In New England, for example, there was never a native human being who could fail to recognize in “Snow Bound” a genuine utterance straight from the stout heart of his own people; nor yet one, I believe, who, smile though he might at his own sentimentality, could resist the appeal of the “Village Black smith.” But we may well doubt whether any Southern reader, in those old times, could have helped feeling that these verses — as surely as those of Burns, let us say, or of Wordsworth — came from other regions than those familiar to his daily life.

The literature of New England, in brief, American though we may all gladly assert it in its nobler phases, is first of all not American [page 155:] or national, but local. What is thus true of New England is generally true, I believe, of literary expression throughout America. Turn, if you will, to the two memorable writers of New York during the first quarter of the nineteenth century — Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. They were good men, and honest men of letters, and admirable storytellers. Neither of them, however, wasted any love on his neighbors a little to the eastward; both hated the unwinsome surface of decadent Puritanism; and neither understood the mystic fervor of the Puritan spirit. So, even to this day, a sensitive reader in New England will now and again discover, in Irving or in Cooper, passages or turns of phrases which shall still set his blood faintly tingling with resentment. Whatever the positive merit, whatever the sturdy honesty of most American expression in the nineteenth century, it lacked conciliatory breadth of feeling. Its intensity of localism marks it, whatever the peacefulness of its outward guise, as the utterance of a fatally discordant time.

Now it is from this same discordant time that the works of Poe have come down to us; [page 156:] and no work could have been much less in spired by the local traditions and temper of New England. To his vagrant and solitary spirit, indeed, those traditions must have been abhorrent. New England people, too, would probably have liked him as little as he liked them. You might well expect that even now, when the younger generations of New Eng land turn to his tales or his poems, sparks of resentment might begin to rekindle. In one sense, perhaps, they may seem to; for Poe's individuality is too intense for universal appeal. You will find readers in New England, just as you will find readers elsewhere, who stay deaf to the haunting music of his verse, and blind to the wreathing films of his un earthly fantasy. Such lack of sympathy, however, you will never find to be a matter of ancestral tradition or of local prejudice or of sectional limitation; it will prove wholly and unconditionally to be only a matter of individual temperament. Among the enduring writers of nineteenth century America, Poe stands unique. Inevitably of his country and of his time, he eludes all limitation of more narrow scope or circumstance. Of all, I believe, [page 157:] he is the only one to whom, in his own day, all America might confidently have turned, as all America may confidently turn still, and forever, with certainty of finding no line, no word, no quiver of thought or of feeling which should arouse or revive the consciousness or the memory of our tragic national discords, now happily for all of us heroic matters of the past. The more we dwell on the enduring work of this great American poet, the more clearly this virtue of it must shine before us all. In the temperamental history of our country, it is he, and he alone, as yet, who is not local but surely enduringly national in the full range of his appeal.

As I thus grow to reverence in him a wondrous harbinger of American spiritual re union, I find hovering in my fancy some lines of his which, once heard, can never be quite forgotten. To him, I believe, they must have seemed only a thing of beauty. He would have been impatient of the suggestion that any one should ever read into them the prose of deeper significance. It was song, and only [page 158:] song, which possessed him, when he wrote the words —

And yet is it too much to fancy that today we can hear that bolder note swelling about us as we meet in communion? None could be purer, none more sweet. And none could more serenely help to resolve the discords of his fellow-countrymen into enduring harmony. [page 159:]

The continental tributes to Poe which were read this morning recalled an incident in which the name of the founder of this University and the name of its most illustrious son were suggestively linked together. In the Latin Quarter of Paris it was my fortune to be thrown for some time into intimate companionship with a young Roumanian named Toma Draga. He had come fresh from Roumania to the University of Paris and was all aflame with stimulant plans and ideals for the growth of liberty and literature in his native land. His trunk was half filled with Roumanian ballads which he had collected and in part rewritten and which he wished to have published in Paris as his contribution to the new movement which was already revolutionizing the politics and the native literature of his historic little motherland. He knew not a word of English but his knowledge of French gave him a sort of eclectic familiarity with world literature in general. Shakespeare [page 160:] he knew well, but the two names that were most often on his lips were the names of Thomas Jefferson and Edgar Allan Poe. Time and again he quoted in his impassioned way the Declaration of Independence and the poems of Poe with an enthusiasm and sense of personal indebtedness that will remain to me as an abiding inspiration.

Let the name of Toma Draga stand as evidence that the significance of genius is not exhausted by the written tributes of great scholars and critics, however numerous or laudatory these may be. There is an ever-widening circle of aspiring spirits who do not put into studied phrase the formal measure of their indebtedness but whose hands have received the unflickering torch and whose hearts know from whence it came. And let the names of Jefferson and Poe, whose far flung battle-lines intersected on this campus, forever remind us that this University is dedicated not to the mere routine of recitation rooms and laboratories but to the emancipation of those mighty constructive forces that touch the spirits of men to finer aspirations and mould their aspirations to finer issues. [page 161:]

In an address delivered at the exercises at tending the unveiling of the Zolnay bust of Poe, Mr. Hamilton W, Mabie declared that Poe alone, among men of his eminence, could not have been foreseen. “It is,” said he, “the first and perhaps the most obvious distinction of Edgar Allan Poe that his creative work baffles all attempts to relate it historically to antecedent condition; that it detached itself almost completely from the time and place in which it made its appearance, and sprang suddenly and mysteriously from a soil which had never borne its like before.” That Mr. Mabie has here expressed the current conception of Poe and his work will be conceded by every one who is at all in touch with the vast body of Poe literature that has grown up since the poet's death. He is regarded as the great declasse of American literature, a solitary figure, denationalized and almost dehumanized, not only unindebted to his Southern environment but unrelated to the larger American background, — in a word, a man without a country.

My own feeling about Poe has always been different, and the recent edition of the poet's [page 162:] works by Professor James A. Harrison, re producing almost four volumes of Poe's literary criticism hitherto inaccessible, has confirmed a mere impression into a settled conviction. The criticism of the future will not impeach the primacy of Poe's genius but will dwell less upon detachment from surroundings and more upon the practical and representative quality of his work.

The relatedness of a writer to his environment and to his nationality does not consist primarily in his fidelity to local landscape or in the accuracy with which he portrays representative characters. Byron and Browning are essentially representative of their time and as truly English as Wordsworth, though the note of locality in the narrower sense is negligible in the works of both. They stood, however, for distinctive tendencies of their time. They interpreted these tendencies in essentially English terms and thus both receptively and actively proclaimed their nationality. If we judge Poe by the purely physical standards of locale, he belongs nowhere. His native land lies east of the sun and west of the moon. His nationality will be found as indeterminate [page 163:] as that of a fish, and his impress of locality no more evident than that of a bird. No land scape that he ever sketched could be identified and no character that he ever portrayed had real human blood in his veins. The representative quality in Poe's work is to be sought neither in his note of locality, nor in the topics which he preferred to treat, nor in his encompassing atmosphere of terror, despair, and decay. But the man could not have so profoundly influenced the literary craftsman ship of his own period and of succeeding periods if he had not in a way summarized the tendencies of his age and organized them into finer literary form.

If one lobe of Poe's brain was pure ideality, haunted by specters, the other was pure intel lect, responsive to the literary demands of his day and adequate to their fulfillment. It was this lobe of his brain that made him not the broadest thinker but the greatest constructive force in American literature. He thought in terms of structure, for his genius was essentially structural. In the technique of effective expression he sought for ultimate principles with a patience and persistence worthy of [page 164:] Washington; he brought to his poems and short stories an economy of words and husbandry of details that suggest the thriftiness of Franklin; and he both realized and supplied the structural needs of his day with a native insight and inventiveness that proclaim him of the line of Edison.

The central question with Poe was not “How may I write a beautiful poem or tell an interesting story?” but “How may I produce the maximum of effect with the minimum of means?” This practical, scientific strain in his work becomes more and more dominating during all of his short working period. His poems, his stories, and his criticisms cannot be thoroughly understood without constant reference to this criterion of craftsmanship. It became the foundation stone on which he built his own work and the touchstone by which he tested the work of others. It was the first time in our history that a mind so keenly analytic had busied itself with the problems of literary technique. And yet Poe was doing for our literature only what others around him were doing or attempting to do in the domain of political and industrial [page 165:] efficiency. The time was ripe, and the note that he struck was both national and international.

Professor Münsterberg,(1) of Harvard, thus characterizes the intellectual qualities of the typical American: “The intellectual makeup of the American is especially adapted to scientific achievements. This temperament, owing to the historical development of the nation, has so far addressed itself to political, industrial, and judicial problems, but a return to theoretical science has set in; and there, most of all, the happy combination of inventiveness, enthusiasm, and persistence in pursuit of a goal, of intellectual freedom and of idealistic instinct for self-perfection will yield, perhaps soon, remarkable triumphs.” He might have added that these qualities may be subsumed under the general term of constructiveness and that more than a half century ago they found an exemplar in Edgar Allan Poe.

It is a noteworthy fact, and one not sufficiently emphasized, that Poe's unique influence at home and abroad has been a structural [page 166:] influence rather than thought influence. He has not suggested new themes to literary artists, nor can his work be called a criticism of life; but he has taught prose writers new methods of effectiveness in building their plots, in handling their backgrounds, in developing their situations, and in harmonizing their details to a preordained end. He has taught poets how to modulate their cadences to the most delicately calculated effects, how to re enforce the central mood of their poems by repetition and parallelism of phrase, how to shift their tone-color, how to utilize sound symbolism, how to evoke strange memories by the mere succession of vowels, so that the simplest stanza may be steeped in a music as compelling as an incantation and as cunningly adapted to the end in view. The word that most fitly characterizes Poe's constructive art is the word convergence. There are no parallel lines in his best work. With the opening sentence the lines begin to converge toward the predetermined effect. This is Poe's greatest contribution to the craftsmanship of his art.

Among foreign dramatists and prose writers [page 167:] whose structural debt to Poe is confessed or unquestioned may be mentioned Victorien Sardou, Theophile Gautier, Guy de Maupassant, Edmond About, Jules Verne, Emile Gaboriau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Hall Caine, and Conan Doyle. In English poetry the debt is still greater. “Poe has proved himself,” says the English poet critic Gosse, “to be the Piper of Hamelin to all later English poets. From Tennyson to Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse music does not show traces of Poe's influence.”

A German critic,(2) after a masterly review of Poe's work, declares that he has put upon English poetry the stamp of classicism, that he has infused into it Greek spirit and Greek taste, that he has constructed artistic metrical forms of which the English language had not hitherto been deemed capable.

But the greatest tribute to Poe's constructive genius is that both by theory and practice he is the acknowledged founder of the American short story as a distinct literary type. Professor [page 168:] Brander Matthews(3) goes further and asserts that “Poe first laid down the principles which governed his own construction and which have been quoted very often, because they have been accepted by the masters of the short story in every modern language.” It seems more probable, however, that France and America hit upon the new form independently,(4) and that the honor of influencing the later short stories of England, Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia belongs as much to French writers as to Poe.

The growth of Poe's constructive sense makes a study of rare interest. He had been editor of the Southern Literary Messenger [page 169:] only two months when in comparing the poems of Mrs. Sigourney and Mrs. Hemans he used a phrase in which lie may be said to have first found himself structurally. This phrase embodied potentially his distinctive contribution to the literary technique of his day. “In pieces of less extent,” he writes,(5) “like the poems of Mrs. Sigourney, the pleasure is unique, in the proper acceptation of that term — the understanding is employed, without difficulty, in the contemplation of the picture as a whole and thus its effect will depend, in a very great degree, upon the perfection of its finish, upon the nice adaptation of its constituent parts, and especially upon what is rightly termed by Schlegel the unity or totality of interest.” Further on in the same paragraph he substitutes “totality of effect.”

Six years later(6) he published his now famous criticism of Hawthorne's “Twice Told Tales,” a criticism that contains, in one oft-quoted paragraph, the constitution of the modern short story as distinct from [page 170:] the story that is merely short. After calling attention to the “immense force derivable from totality,” he continues: “A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents, — he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel.”

In 1846 he publishes his “Philosophy of Composition”(7) in which he analyzes the [page 171:] structure of “The Raven” and declares that he confined the poem to about one hundred lines so as to secure “the vastly important artistic element, totality or unity of effect.” In 1847, in a review of Hawthorne's “Mosses from an Old Manse,” he republishes(8) with hardly the change of a word the portions of his former review emphasizing the importance of “totality of effect.” The year after his death his popular lecture on “The Poetic Principle” is published,(9) in which he contends that even “The Iliad” and “Paradise Lost” have had their day because their length deprives them of “totality of effect.”

This phrase, then, viewed in its later development, is not only the most significant phrase that Poe ever used but the one that most adequately illustrates his attitude as critic, poet, and story writer. It will be remembered that when he first used the phrase he attributed it to William Schlegel. The phrase is not found in Schlegel, nor any [page 172:] phrase analogous to it, Schlegel's “Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature” had been translated into English, and in Poe's other citations from this great work he quotes accurately. But in this case he was either depending upon a faulty memory or, as is more probable, he was invoking the prestige of the great German to give currency and authority to a phrase which he himself coined and which, more than any other phrase that he ever used, expressed his profoundest conviction about the architecture of literature. The origin of the phrase is to be sought not in borrowing but rather in the nature of Poe's genius and in the formlessness of the contemporary literature upon which as critic he was called to pass judgment. Had Poe lived long enough to read Herbert Spencer's “Philosophy of Style,” in which economy of the reader's energies is made the sum total of literary craftsmanship, he would doubtless have promptly charged the Englishman with plagiarism, though he would have been the first to show the absurdity of Spencer's contention that the difference between poetry [page 173:] and prose is a difference only in the degree of economy of style.

Schlegel, it may be added, could not have exerted a lasting influence upon Poe. The two men had little in common. Schlegel's method was not so much analytic as historical and comparative. His vast learning gave him control of an almost illimitable field of dramatic criticism while Poe's limitations made his method essentially individual and intensive. The man to whom Poe owed most was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The influence of Coleridge grew upon Poe steadily. Both represented a curious blend of the dreamer and the logician. Both generalized with rapidity and brilliancy. Both were masters of the singing qualities of poetry, and both were persistent investigators of the principles of meter and structure. Though Coleridge says nothing about “totality of effect.”(10) [page 174:] and would not have sanctioned Poe's application of the phrase, it is undoubtedly true that Poe found in Coleridge his most fecundating literary influence.

In his admiration for Coleridge and in his antipathy to Carlyle, Poe was thoroughly representative of the South of his day. The great Scotchman's work was just beginning and Coleridge's career had just closed when Poe began to be known. Carlyle and Coleridge were both spokesmen of the great transcendental movement which originated in Germany and which found a hospitable welcome in New England. But transcendentalism in New England meant a fresh scrutiny of all existing institutions, social, political, and religious. It was identified with Unitarianism, Fourierism, the renunciation of dogma and authority, and the increasing agitation of abolition. “Communities were established,” says Lowell, “where everything was to be common but common sense.” The South had already begun to be on the defensive and now looked askance at the whole movement. Coleridge, however, like Burke and Wordsworth, had outgrown his [page 175:] radicalism and come back into the settled ways of institutional peace and orderliness. His writings, especially his “Biographia Literaria,” his “Statesman's Manual,” and his “Lay Sermon,” were welcomed in the South not only because of their charm of style but because they mingled profound philosophy with matured conservatism. No one can read the lives of the Southern leaders of antebellum days without being struck by the immense influence of Coleridge and the tardy recognition of Carlyle's message. When Emerson, therefore, in 1836, has “Sartor Resartus” republished in Boston, and Poe at the same time urges in the Southern Literary Messenger the republication of the “Biographia Literaria,” both are equally representative of their sections.

But Poe as the disciple of Coleridge rather than of Carlyle is not the less American because representatively Southern. The intellectual activity of the South from 1830 to 1850 has been on the whole underrated because that activity was not expended upon the problems which wrought so fruitfully upon the more responsive spirits of New [page 176:] England, among whom flowered at last the ablest group of writers that this country has known. The South cared nothing for novel views of inspiration, for radical reforms in church, in state, or in society. Proudly conscious of her militant and constructive role in laying the foundations of the new republic, the South after 1830 was devoting her energies to interpreting and conserving what the fathers had sanctioned. This work, however, if not so splendidly creative as that of earlier times, was none the less constructive in its way and national in its purpose. Poe's formative years, therefore, were spent in a society rarely trained in subtle analysis, in logical acumen, and in keen philosophic interpretation.

Though Poe does not belong to politics or to statesmanship, there was much in common between his mind and that of John C. Calhoun, widely separated as were their characters and the arenas on which they played their parts. Both were keenly alive to the implications of a phrase. Both reasoned with an intensity born not of impulsiveness but of sheer delight in making [page 177:] delicate distinctions. Both showed in their choice of words an element of the pure classicism that lingered longer in the South than in New England or Old England; and both illustrated an individual independence more characteristic of the South then than would be possible amid the leveling influences of today. When Baudelaire defined genius as l’aflirmation de l’independance individuelle,” he might have had both Poe and Calhoun in mind; but when he adds “c’est le self-government appliqué aux oeuvres d’art,” only Poe could be included. Both, however, were builders, the temple of the one visible from all lands, that of the other scarred by civil war but splendid in the very cohesiveness of its structure.

I have dwelt thus at length upon the constructive side of Poe's genius because it is this quality that makes him most truly American and that has been at the same time almost ignored by foreign critics. Baudelaire, in his wonderfully sympathetic appraisal of Poe, considers him, however, as the apostle of the exceptional and abnormal. [page 178:] Lauvrière,(11) in the most painstaking investigation yet bestowed upon an American author, views him chiefly as a pathological study. Moeller-Bruck,(12) the editor of the latest complete edition of Poe in Germany, sees in him “a dreamer from the old mother land of Europe, a Germanic dreamer.” Poe was a dreamer, an idealist of idealists; and it is true that idealism is a trait of the American character. But American idealism is not of the Poe sort. American idealism is essentially ethical. It concerns itself primarily with conduct. Poe's Americanism is to be sought not in his idealism but in the sure craftsmanship, the conscious adaptation of means to end, the quick realization of structural possibilities, the practical handling of details, which enabled him to body forth his visions in enduring forms and thus to found the only new type of literature that America has originated.

The new century upon which Poe's name now enters will witness no diminution of [page 179:] interest in his work. It will witness, however, a changed attitude toward it. Men will ask not less what he did but more how he did it. This scrutiny of the principles of his art will reveal the elements of the normal, the concrete, and the substantial, in which his work has hitherto been considered defective. It will reveal also the wide service of Poe to his fellow-craftsmen and the yet wider service upon which he enters. To inaugurate the new movement there is no better time than the centennial anniversary of his birth, and no better place than here where his genius was nourished.

Mr. President: Your committee of arrangements has deemed it wise to have prepared a significant memorial of this interesting celebration which. is now coming to a happy close. Through the kindness and liberality of a young alumnus of the University of Virginia, we have been able to procure from Tiffany a beautiful bronze medal, bearing upon the reverse the seal of the University of Virginia, and on the obverse the profile of Edgar Allan Poe, with the date of his birth, and a reminder of this centenary. We have selected as the recipients of this medal those who were active in procuring for the University of Virginia the Zolnay bust of Poe; those who have contributed to the success of this present celebration; and others who by signal services in fixing or furthering the fame of Poe have deserved well of his alma mater. I have the honor to announce to you as worthy recipients of this medal the following:

The medals in commemoration of this [page 181:] Centennial of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe are bestowed: —

On The University of Virginia:

On the following who contributed significantly to the success of the movement to commemorate the poet with a bronze bust:

On the following who, by committee service, participation in the exercises, contribution of poems, etc., have contributed to the success of this occasion: —

On the following for literary services of various sorts connected with fixing and furthering the fame of Edgar Allan Poe: —

As representatives of the Poe family: