Text: William Gilmore Simms, [Review of The Raven and Other Poems], Southern Patriot (Charleston, SC), March 2, 1846, p. 2, cols. 3-4

[page 2, col. 3, continued:]

The Raven and other Poems. By Edgar A. Poe [Wiley & Putnam's Library of American Books, No. VIII] — New York, 1845. — It is a great error of the multitude to confound poetry with those things and arts upon which a judgement is easily made up. If the standards of poetry be fixed, as must be the case with all human arts before we can possibly or wisely sit in judgement upon them, it is equally certain that its varieties are endless, and each calls for standards of its own. The vulgar disregard of this necessity, is at the bottom of all the thousand blunders which presumption commits, whenever it places its beefy bulk in the fauteuils of literary criticism. There it sits, dispensing judgment with the most vulgar air of authority, without the slightest consciousness [column 4:] of the true nature of the case before it. Without dreaming of the true principles involved, and making the arbitrary dicta of its narrow experience or comprehension, the code by which to judge of principles and performance wholly foreign to all which it has ever known or understood. Thus, to the person who pins his faith to the style of composition peculiar to Pope and Dryden, this volume of Mr. Poe will seem the most arrant nonsense. Such a person will be utterly at a loss to conceive the possibility of a human and sane reason having been present with the writer of the verses before us at any one moment during the performance of his whole task. The wild, fanciful and abstract character of these poems, will prove incomprehensible to him who requires that poetry shall embody an axiom in morals, or a maxim in philosophy or society, and the seemingly purposeless character — wholly purposeless in an economical and practical sense of these phantasies, will seem to him worthy only of the inmates of a cell in Bedlam. Without going so far as to approve wholly of the scheme and tenor of Mr. Poe's performances in verse, we must beg to caution those who, habituated to certain dissimilar kinds of composition, would utterly reject, or refuse any faith in their merits, that in making up their judgments, regard must be had to the not always understood varieties of poetry — to its wonderful flexibility — the numerous classes of style conception and utterance which it enjoys,-and the still more infinite forms in which it may hereafter, and in the hands of future artists be found to embody itself. We are apt, however wise, experienced and indulgent, to insist, after a certain age upon a certain routine in the course of our studies and reading; and to object to the novel and the unusual for no better reason than its singularity. Now, it is in poetry and the indefinite arts alone, that originality can be found or fancied, and a refusal to make the exception in respect to these has been the cause of all those unfortunate cases of judgement, which have had their decisions reversed by posterity. Mr. Poe is a fantastic and a mystic-a man of dreamy mood and wandering fancies. His scheme of poem requires that his reader shall surrender himself to influences of pure imagination. He demands as a preliminary that you should recognize totally unreal premises - that you should yield yourself wholly to the witch element, as implicitly as Mephistopheles requires it of Faust, ascending the wizard eminences of the Brocken. Unless you can make him this concession you had better have nothing to do with his volume. At all events, for your mutual sakes, do not venture to pass any opinion upon it. He has not written for you, and you are not the critic for him.

We have already more than once had occasion to declare our high opinion of Mr. Poe, as a largely endowed imaginative writer. It is not within the limits of a journal like this that we can be expected to go into any detailed consideration of his qualities. To say that he does justice to his endowments, however, must not be understood of us now when we declare our high respect for, and our great interest in their exercise. The training of Mr. Poe has been unfavorable to his peculiar genius. He has been too much his own master; and his moods are too capricious, and his purpose is too desultory, to afford sufficient opportunity to his various resources for the exercise of art in fiction. And still, even with these qualifications to success, it is wonderful with what symmetry — a severe symmetry, we may call it — he can carry out a plan at once ingenious and exactly. How intensely he can pursue, to its close, a scheme of the imagination — imagination purely — rigidly defining his principles as he goes, step by step, and maintaining to the sequel, the most systematic combinations of proprieties and dependencies. Some of his stories are the most remarkable specimens of the power of intensifying a conception of pure romance, to the exclusion of all the ordinary agents of fiction, which have been written. — His poems are less elaborate, but belong to the same order of writings. “The Raven,” which in part gives its title to this volume, and the merits of which, more than any thing besides, has drawn the attention of the public recently to the claims of this writer, is a happy specimen of the manner in which his genius enables him to use a very simple and common place, incident for the purposes of pure imagination. A bird which has been taught by its owner to repeat a single word, wanders away from its keeper, and is heard tapping at the window of a melancholy student, who is sadly musing over the recent loss of a beloved one. He hears the tapping, opens the window, and the dark and glossy visitor glides in, musing aloud on the singularity of the visit, he is surprised to hear from the throat of the raven, a word which strangely accords with the subject of his musings. His superstitions are awakened and he apostrophizes the bird, — speaks of the dear one he has lost — declares his sombre meditations, and glimpses at the future. To all of these topics, the single utterance of the gloomy Strayer is an appropriate and impressive answer. The beauty of the poem is in its picturesque, in the novelty of the conception, and the ingenuity with which the poet has so framed the language of the student, as to adapt it to the single word which is the only one in the vocabulary of the raven.

We can give but a single extract from this volume, which will exhibit equally the merits and faults of our author as a poet. It is not the best, by far, in the collection, but its character will perhaps, as well as any other, illustrate what we have been saying about the peculiarities of his genius as any other, and is short enough for our limits. The music of the verse, the vagueness of the delineation, its mystical character, and dreamy and spiritual fancies, are all highly characteristic:

[[“The Valley of Unrest” is quoted from the book, in full]]