Text: James E. Carnes, “Sketches of Living Poets — Edgar A. Poe,” Vicksburg Tri-Weekly Whig (Vicksburg, Mississippi), vol. X, no. 128, August 5, 1848, p. 1, col. 6

[page 1, column 6:]

[For the Whig.

IT may seem strange to some of our readers, that we should in our first sketch, present a name so little known as that which heads this article; but surely such cannot be aware that the great Rufus Wilmot Griswold in his “Poets Poetry of America,” accords to it an honorable place, and that Messrs. Wiley & Putnam in their library of “books which are books,” (some of them, alas! ain’t anything else) have a volume bearing the following title: “The Raven and other Poems, by Edgar A. Poe.” We believe it to be not an unusual custom, when a basket of fruit is set before one, to select the rotten specimens first, and throw them away. Then with a kind hand, but with a sharp knife, excise defective portions from such as need the process, sparing until the last, only those that are perfect, and even deferring for the last delicious morsel, the sun-kissed and heaven-refined hemispheres of these. We have been impelled in making our selection of Mr. Poe as the subject of our first sketch, by the same motives which induce a man to throw away first, the worst fruit he has in his basket. In other words we consider Mr. Poe's poetry a rotten peach, with as stony a heart as any peach — a cling stone at that, with every fibre knit to that heart, and preserving its form even in spite of its treacherously yielding rottenness. But we stick our quill into it and proceed to throw it away.

Edgar A. Poe took out a “poetic license” very young in fact that he modestly hesitates to fix the date, young, fur fear that we wont believe him. From the fact that he says that some of his productions were written during his surliest boyhood, we conclude that they were not written during his second childhood, though the latter would have been the natural conclusion. The longest of these juvenile poems, “Al Anraaf,” is illustrated by German, Spanish and Latin annotations, quotations from Milton, Marlowe, Voltaire, Legge, Shakspeare, and a host of well known and little known authors, and betrays in its composition knowledge of Indian fiction, classical subjects, and objects, and a large amount of general Arabian literature. Quotations introduced as illustrations of poetical text, are generally understood to be authority upon which certain words, phrases, or facts are produced in the composition, and the notes of explanation are made for the purpose of instructing be the general reader. in matters with which he la supposed 10 unacquainted. Taking this view of the subject, we do not wonder at al at Mr Poe a hesitation, in stating his precise age when this early poetical blossoming took place; for if he had made himself less than eighteen, or twenty years old no one would believe him. Not that there is anything in the conception of the poem, that argues maturity particularly, or that there is anything of merit in the construction of its verse, but it is just such an unnatural thing, as no mere boy can write. When therefore he gravely asserts, that this with several other poems were products of his “earliest boyhood,” and assumes with that assertion that he knew all the authority which he brings forward to explain his text to his mature readers withal; we believe him guilty of degree of impudence of which no one but the small critic of Graham's Magazine, the literary sketcher of Godey and the author of “Al Aaraaf” is capable.

The grand characteristic of Mr. so-called poetry that it be objectless. It is neither the exponent of the sublime, nor the beautiful. The elements into which every piece, with only one or two exceptions, is resolvable, are a ghoul, fragments of a badly remembered nightmare dream, an object or two that in very “weird,” the three words “nevermore,” “aghast,” and “Lenore,” and a few “vast formless things,” which are horribly slimy, and pokerishly repulsive. The “Raven” is considered Mr. Poe's principal poem. N. P. Willis pronounces it the most effective specimen of all modern fugitive poetry, and Mr. Poe himself has placed it at the head of his productions, but when stripped of its strangely quaint versification, it is as soulless, and incongruous as a mess of literary botch potch, as ever found oblivion under a book-cover. The argument or narrative runs thus — Sometime in the month December, (year not stated) Mr. Poe was sitting on a velvet-cushioned seat, surrounded by purple curtains, but feeling very badly on account of a “rare and radiant maiden,” named Lenore, who had “been exhaled” and gone somewhere. He was interrupted in his meditations by a rap at the door as he supposed, but afterwards finding the window to be the point attacked, he proceeded to it, raised it, and admitted to his room a raven. He asks the raven, (who comes from Pluto's dominions) whether he shall meet Lenore in heaven. (For our own part we should as soon think of asking the Emperor of China, what news there was stirring in New Orleans.) The raven answers him directly that he never will. Mr. Poe gets extremely angry with the bird, calls him names, raves, tells him to get back to the dark place that he came from, and begs him to take his form from the door, and his beak out of him (Mr. Poe's) heart. The distance of Mr. Poe's heart from the top of the door where the raven was sitting when this last double command was given is not stated. It was probably from six to ten feet. The raven disregarded his commands in toto, and the “present position of parties” can be learned from the following verse, which closes the poem:

We leave it to Mr. Poe, and his friends, if the outline we have given be not a faithful one. We acknowledge that it is written in the style of carricature, but we protest that it no carricature, and more than this, we do not believe that it can be carricatured.

Mr. Poe has written but one piece in his long life of writing, that breathes anything of the pure, exalted, poetic spirit. “The Coliseum,” a short poem of forty or fifty lines, contains his only natural and beautiful expression of his only natural and beautiful poetic thoughts. The rest of his book is nothing but trash, and from its character might with strict propriety be denominated “the poetry of champagne and oysters after midnight.” One can hardly rid himself of the idea when reading “Dreamland.” “The haunted palace.” “The conqueror worm,” “Silence,” “The city in the sea,” and several others, that he is reading the notes of a traveller through the wild nameless, senseless yet startling, maze of a dyspeptic dream. To use a homely but most expressive phrase there is neither head nor tail to them. They are nothing but eggs fall by that same incomprehensible, preternatural, nondescript raven — dropped anywhere, every where all over the world- collected together, and strung on a string.