Text: Anonymous, “Revival of Interest in Poe,” Washington Post (Washington, DC), May 16, 1880, p. 4, cols. 3-4

[page 4,column 3, contnued:]

REVIVAL OF INTEREST IN POE.

The recent revival of interest in the character and writings of Edgar Allen [[Allan]] Poe is a cheering indication that the dawn of a better, and purer day for American literature is breaking. That this interest is deep-rooted is attested by the number of works written in biography of Poe and in on commentary on his literary labors. That it is not an ephemeral interest is shown by the fact that it has run through several years, with each succeeding one growing stronger and stronger, until now everything written about this “wayward child of genius” is sure to command absorbing attention. To the man of genius, to the scholar, the poet, the philosopher, the problem of Poe's life has always been a strangely attractive one, and to them the weird beauty of his style, the sombre splendors of his imagination, the brilliant play of his fancy, the daring boldness of his speculations and the marvelous subtlety and precision of his logic have ever been sources of admiration as genuine as it is unqualified. To Poe alone of writers of light literature has the compliment been paid of inserting one of his tales in a text-book of an exact science, and having the attention of the student particularly directed to it as a study eminently calculated to sharpen the powers of his analysis and to enhance the vigor of his understanding. But now the masses of the people are awakening to the merits of this author, and yielding to the spells of his sorcery, and it is in this fact that the student of American literature finds room for hope and cheer. When the masses of the people are attracted to works which models of the purest taste and of the most fascinating style; which present as their sole features of attractiveness the highest power of imaginative thought expressed in the perfection of artistic mode; and which, with a spell that cannot be exorcised, compel the mind to recognize and accept the laws of correct and exquisite taste, it will be seen that these masses are being rapidly educated to a plane of intellectual development specially favorable for the reception of the truest and severest culture. What distinguishes Poe most is the pure simplicity of the style wherewith he expresses thought. It is, however, the simplicity of knowledge, not the rusticity of ignorance, and depends for its appreciation upon minds that have been cleared of barbaric rubbish and tawdriness. In the pure sunlight of its chaste and artistic perfection the mists of the false and ugly are lifted and melted away. And if, as both Poe and Aristotle have maintained, the taste and the moral sense are so closely allied as not to be, in many of their operations, distinguished from each other, then the moralist should rejoice equally with the literary artist at the revival of interest in the works of an author who, more than any other American, inculcated the absolute necessity of rising and maintaining the loftiest, the purest and the noblest standard of taste, and whose works both in prose and poetry, are themselves the most perfect sp of that standard that have ever been penned in the English language.

No summary of the services performed [column 2:] by Poe for American literature in the past and no estimate of their value upon the literature of the American future are complete, or in fact, are even intelligible without an analysis of the strange, sad problem of his life and character, and of the condition of American letters at the time he entered on his mission. Of this strange, sad problem, the saddest and the strangest in all the annals of literature, there is not room in the narrow limits of a newspaper article for even the skeleton of an analysis. It is sufficient to say that he lived before his time. He was a score of lustrums too soon. A fiery comet, blazing in erratic splendors across the firmament of a darkened age, the laws of his being were as little understood by his contemporaries as were those of the celestial wanderers in the centuries gone. Hence the strange fact that Poe, alone of all great American authors, has had no imitators. Parodists he has had in plenty, genuine disciples none. The mantle of the ascending Elijah found no Elisha worthy to wear it. He left none behind him with vision bright and strong enough to discern the fiery chariot and the horsemen thereof. But time, “time the tomb builder, but that also maketh all things even,” has at last brought to a stand the ebb of that tide whose flood shall carry the Poet of Ulalume and Ligeia to his rightful place in the appreciation and the understanding of his countrymen. The nearest approach to a correct solution of the problem of Poe's life and labors that has ever been given us, albeit it is wofully far from the true answer, is Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman's splendid essay in the May Scribner. It is not Mr. Stedman's fault, rather his misfortune, that he misapprehends the key to the riddle, and that failing to unlock the door which shall let us into the sacred adytum where the mystery stands ready to be revealed, he gropes on the threshold in the vain fancy that the secret is patent to his gaze. We can afford to wait to know Poe fully, since only a score and a half of years have brought us from the brilliant but diabolical calumnies of Griswold to the kind, acute, philosophical though erroneous analysis of Stedman.