Text: Anonymous, “The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,” Pall Mall Gazette (London, UK), vol. XXXV, whole no. 5268, January 14, 1882, p. 5, cols. 1-2

IN his prefatory essay to this pretty little volume Mr. Lang has very all wisely avoided all discussion as to the personal merits or demerits of Edgar Poe as an American citizen. His is certainly a case in which the critical method of M. Taine is out of place, and in which, indeed, the practice of that method has led a score of writers wrong. Moreover, the attempt to whitewash Poe — to make him appear one of the more gentlemanly and agreeable men of genius — has hitherto as signally failed to paint him as a kind of devil had already done. Mr. Lang very pertinently says: — “The viler charges and insinuations of Griswold may be refuted, but no skill can make Poe seem an amiable or an ascetic human being.” His poetry is so small in bulk, so narrow in scope, so monotonous in interest, that it does not need any side lights thrown from the vicissitudes of the poet as a man. Bearing this in mind, Mr. Lang and Mr Saintsbury, for the latter contributes some most acute and valuable criticism, have, it appears to us, said almost the last word on the purely literary side of Poe's poetry in an essay that bears and will repay very careful study. Perhaps the only thing of importance left unsaid is a recognition of Poe's very position in the history of curious that chaotic and ill-digested body of writing, American literature. It is particularly irritating to the Americans to be told that after so many generations of accomplished and vigorous writers, the poetry of Edgar Poe still remains the most individual poetic product to which the United States have given birth. This is very annoying, and they escape from it by a direct negation — Mr. Henry James, the typical literary American, even venturing to speak of Poe's “very valueless verses.” Such men as Mr. James ask us if we are sincere in preferring these light tones of music to the intellectual force and severity of Bryant, to the humanity of Longfellow, to the wit of Holmes and Lowell. To this there seems an answer which will hardly satisfy any but those who have made poetry their study. These will have perceived that in the history of the world what has really preserved the memories of writers of verse has not been intellectual force, or the clear expression of love and pity, or even wit, but a certain indefinable felicity of style, a power of saying things as they never were said before, and so that they can never be forgotten. It is a very remarkable thing that Edgar Poe, who was not a man of much weight of character, or even originality of intellect, yet happened to possess, to a very high degree, this extraordinary gift of style. In this no American poet has so much as approached him, and it is probable that this will preserve his verse, like a rose petal in a drop of glycerine, bound to decay because of its ephemeral and disconnected condition, yet never actually decaying.

Here in England, where every unprejudiced thinker must admit that poetry has flourished since the beginning of the century far more than in America, Edgar Poe has taken his place as one of the fashioners of style. Whether his influence has been altogether beneficial may perhaps be a matter of reasonable doubt. But his influence is not to be doubted. Long ago Mr. Tennyson came under the sway of his music; Mr. Matthew Arnold, in the “New Sirens,” and Mr. Rossetti, in more than one piece of structural melody, have felt it; Mr. Swinburne, though he has so thoroughly conquered the notes and made them his own, would scarcely have begun as he did without “Ulalume” and The Conqueror Worm.” But the English writer who has most closely resembled Edgar Poe in his mournful and mortuary though he wore his rue with a difference, was the last Mr. Arthur O'Shaughnessy, whose “Fountain of Tears” and “Barcarolle” threw more light on the structure and value of Poe's verses than pages of the cleverest criticism. In France, where the cadence and the verbal felicity were lost, the influence of Poe, which was so strong for a little time, seems to have faded away. We do not hear now of the gentleman who was spending years and years on a translation of “The Raven,” and whose version was expected by his friends to be a greater masterpiece than the original. Baudelaire's beautiful paraphrases and commentaries, in which he managed, while retaining the essential characteristics of Poe's work, to infuse a strong quality of his own, will always be of interest to students of literature/

We are not quite sure that Mr. Lang has done justice to the moral force of two of Poe's lyrics, “The Conqueror Worm” and The Haunted Palace.” These have always seemed to the present writer among the strongest of his writings, the second particularly, perhaps it we had the good fortune to meet with it first in the place for which was [column 2:] written, the thrilling close of the story of “The House of Usher.” Mr. Saintsbury has some excellent remarks on the structure of these poems, but we do not gather that either critic has noticed the humanity of them. The allegory may seem a little obvious now; it is a curious thing that when “The Haunted Palace” was written, and for a long time afterwards, no one seems to have guessed that it was anything but a fantastic fairy landscape, certainly not that it revealed the despair and remorse of the writer himself. These two pieces, -and The Conqueror Worm approaches very closely to the borders of melodrama, -are the only instances in his poetical work of that analysis of horror and suffering with which Poe fills his romances, unless, indeed, we include “The Raven” in this category, a poem for which we share Mr. Lang's impression that its value has been exaggerated. In these his experience certainly gave him something to say, and the sincerity and value of these pieces greatly diminishes if we are to hold him, with his latest biographer, to have been the most faultless of mankind.

The original editions of Poe's poems are now excessively rare. Mr. Lang has not been able, in this country, to meet with any text earlier than that of 1845. He has restored the American spelling, with an appeal to Americans to preserve the English spelling in American republications. In one case, where Poe himself says that certain pieces of his are “printed verbatim, without alteration from the original edition,” his latest editor quaintly adds, This statement is incorrect.” The volume, which is one of the very charming series called “The Parchment Library,” is printed on fine paper, and in a type that, though small, is in itself clear and good. The frontispiece is a raven, stepping into the poet's window, “with many a flirt and flutter.” Mr. Linley Sambourne, however, was not justified by the text in representing this sinister bird as tearing a folio to pieces in the act of entering.

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* “The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.” With an Essay on his Poetry by Andrew Lang. Parchment Library. (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co. 1882.)