Text: Edgar Fawcett, “Poe as a Poet,” Literary World (Boston, MA), vol. XIII, no. 6, March 25, 1882, pp. 96-97

[page 96, column 3, continued:]

A RECENT article in the Pall Mall Gazette stoutly disapproves one of Mr. Henry James Jr.'s statements, written several years ago and found in his admirable critical volume, French Poets and Novelists, to the effect that Poe was the author of “very valueless verse.” Mr. James alludes to Poe's metrical work in general, without specification or reservation, and incurs, in consequence, the reproaches of the English journal. I remember, on meeting the American critic's rather laconic condemnation, that it struck me as a somewhat daring posture toward a clique who have for years rhapsodized over the poetry of Poe; for Mr. James, though always a brilliant critic, has usually been a cool-headed one, flinging down no belligerent challenges himself, and employing no specially sharp spear on which to lift up the gauntlets of others. But like most men whose criticism is seldom audacious and always acute. Mr. James seems to have taken the needed chance of denouncing an empty poetic method and an over-praised literary artificiality. The Pall Mall Gazette thinks otherwise, however, and declares that he has committed a grave error. The adverse assertions of that journal, briefly summed up, are these: First, that the poetical force of Bryant, Mr. Longfellow, Dr. Holmes and Mr. Lowell is comparable to the “extraordinary gift of style” belonging to Poe. Second, that though Poe was not a man of much weight of character or even originality of intellect, he still possessed (in his verse) “a power of saying things as they were never said before and so that they can never be forgotten.” Third, that in his peculiar novelty of manner, no American poet has so much as approached him, and that his verse, “like a rose-petal in a drop of glycerine,” will “never actually decay,” “though bound to decay because of its ephemeral and disconnected condition.”

The scientific chaos suggested in the last-quoted clauses I leave to the astonishment of any precise thinker who may choose to run and read. That Mr. Bryant, Mr. Longfellow, Dr. Holmes or Mr. Lowell have not lifted themselves far above the trifling jingle of Poe's verse, is a question simply to be considered by those who have any regard for sincerity when placed against attitudinizing. These pure and noble writers are not to be named in the same year with Poe. His prose is remarkable, astonishing, strongly fanciful, though never richly imaginative, like Hawthorne's. He is great in prose, though not great in the first degree. He [page 97:] alarms, shocks, depresses, horrifies, but he never (or rarely) quickens to high flings of feeling or deep descents of suggestion. His work in prose will live, as it deserves to live, but not because of any except second-rate qualities. Even in The Fall of the House of Usher he never rises above theatrical terrorism. As regards Poe's “weight of character,” it is time that oblivion came with her pitying quietus. As regards his “originality of intellect,” volumes might still be said. That he possessed the power, in his verse, of saying things “as they never were said before,” is most unquestionable. There are few bits of verse more ludicrous than his Ulalume, except, perhaps, Bret Harte's parody of the same poem. The Raven is a mournfully thin bit of commonplace, done into rhyme that entices the ear and almost insults the intelligence. The Bells is a mere wanton abuse of linguistic harmonics. Annabel Lee is so absurd a mass of melodious nonsense that its very name ought to be a warning to unborn poetasters. And yet the Pall Mall Gazette presumes to say that no American poet has approached Poe in the “extraordinary gift of style.” What style did he have, except a tangle of meaningless mannerisms? The same writer goes on to state that Mr. Tennyson has borrowed from him. Where has Mr. Tennyson done so? In what one of his self-contained, beautiful, and artistic poems has Mr. Tennyson aped such wild phrases, such incontinent epithets, as everywhere abound in Poe's hectic, shallow, and trivial verse? Of style, Poe, in his metrical work, had positively none. He was inflamed with the ambition to be poetic and the craze to be eccentric. He employed adjectives that were senseless, a measure that for the most part was tiresomely vulgar, and a trick of void verbal conceits that no unbiased man of letters can regard with anything except contempt. He had no “style,” but he employed, for the most part, a silly artifice. And it is time that the vapid inanity of his “poems” should be pointed out to those who blindly adopt the shibboleth of certain prejudiced spokesmen.

I scarcely know of a single instance in which Mr. James has chosen, as a critic, to treat the works of living writers. Here he has shown a part of that keen good-sense which has made him unpopular as a novelist among all clamorers for gushing sentimentality in the place of honest feeling, and for factitious romanticism in the place of spontaneous candor. But the virtue of good-sense is frowned on at present; it is denounced as unsympathetic coldness. Because Mr. James is keenly analytic he is denied, the right of being — esteemed human, or even humane. And yet it seems to me that today no living writer of English fiction maintains so fine an equipoise between the folly of over-expression and the dryness of forced self-restraint. With a diction ample and luminous as that of Macaulay, he unites a sense of character-drawing for which it would be difficult in all letters to find a rival power. Naturally he possesses repose; all great artists possess that. Just now it is called frigidity; in a few years it will be called the native grandeur of a great style. No one, it seems to me, was better fitted than Mr. James to pierce the absurdity of Poe's so-called “poetry.” It appears quite in the logical way of things that he who wrote The American, Roderick Hudson, and The Portrait of a Lady should waken us to a [column 2:] recognition of how tame and meretricious are Annabel Lee, The Bells, and Ulalume.

EDGAR FAWCETT