[page 3, column 2, continued:]

We copy the following poem, partly, because Willis has called attention to it, but principally, because we have a word or two to say in relation to Edgar A. Poe, who is undoubtedly its author. No other American poet, in the first place, has the same command of language and power of versification: it is in no one else’s vein — it is too charnel in its nature; while Mr. Poe is especially at home in pieces of a sepulchral character. “Ulalume” is a continuation of the same Golgothian idiosyncrasy that produced the “Conqueror Worm,” the “Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” the revivification of Monsieur Valdemar, and others of the same genus. — We pity the man who can write such things, and, while we wonder at the artistic talent displayed by Mr. Poe in the working up of his repulsive subjects, — a wonder which it is his sole object to create, we remember his story or poem precisely as we would recall a cancer or tumor under which we had suffered, with feelings of absolute pain, terror and horror, if not disgust. There was a time when we considered [column 3:] Poe a man of genius, a very pardonable because natural mistake, and one, moreover, into which the larger mass of his readers have fallen. He is a man of great talent — wonderful talent — wonderful powers of ratiocination, nothing more, and withal not at all original. In short we question if he ever produced an entirely original article: indeed, he admits, we have understood, quite as much himself.

Let us look into “Ulalume;” and first as to the plot. The hero, Mr. Poe, (he always tells his story in the first person,) is a lover or husband who has lost his mistress by death, and on a night in October, accompanied by a female, entitled Psyche, or in other words, his own soul, wanders at night,

so absorbed in morbid speculation as not to remember the spot, and indeed having lost all sentience of time. A star arises ahead of him, Astarte, another title for Venus, which urges him on until he arrives at the door of a legended tomb. He asks of himself, or, to carry out Mr. Poe’s peculiar manner, of his companion, Psyche:

to which she relies:

The hero suddenly remembers that on the same night in the preceding year, in the month of October, through the same misty landscape, he had born the dead Ulalume to lay her in that legended tomb, and imagines that the Ghouls, who, he fancies, inhabit that region, have called up the spectre of a star, or in other words, the memory of his love for Ulalume, to prevent him from trespassing further on their haunts. The action of the lover in the poem, is intended to be entirely mechanical, and his soul filled with a morbid grief for the dead, impels him to her grave, there to dwell upon the Past. The typification of his love by the star, Astarte, is a fine touch of art, perhaps the finest in the poem, which is not altogether so remarkable for its epicureanism of language as Willis seems to think it. Neither is it so very perfect in its versification.

are defective verses, containing feet which exist in no living language; discords which, although under other circumstances allowable, in this case are radically wrong. The poem contains other lines still more defective, which no one, not even Poe himself, can read harmoniously.

embodies a very funny, not to say ridiculous idea, but it is Mr. Poe’s peculiarity to carry the sombre to the very verge of the grotesque. In this case he has stepped beyond it. “Ulalume,” in a few words, despite Mr. Willis’ opinion, is versification in a state of hydrophobia, and we hope that unlike Southey’s “Doctor,” it may not prove the forerunner of an approaching madness in its talented author. It certain borders on the queer.

Perhaps the best proof of Mr. Poe’s general want of originality is the poem before us, whose leading idea is taken from T. Buchanan Read’s “Christine.”

With its hopeless eyes uplifted, and its hopeless folded hands.

Here is Mr. Poe’s Psyche, here is his desert — his “misty, mid-region of Weir;” his soul

and, if it is necessary to carry out the proof of the plagiarism still further, turning to the fourth line of Christine from that last quoted, in the continuation of the same scene —

Mr. Poe’s “dank tarn of Auber” beyond a doubt. — But this is not all. We have spoken of the mystical appearance of Astarte as a fine touch of art. This is also borrowed, and from the first canto of Hirst’s Endymion, published years since in the “Southern Literary Messenger” —

Astarte is another name for Venus, and when we remember that Diana is about to descent to Endymion — that the scene which is about to follow is one of love — that Venus is the star of love, and that Hirst, by introducing it as he does, shadows out his story exactly as Mr. Poe introduces his Astarte, the plagiarism of the idea becomes evident.