Text: Lorenzo Sears, “The National Period of American Literature: X: Edgar Allan Poe,” Saginaw Evening News (Saginaw, MI), February 16, 1900, p. 2, cols. 2-4

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In 1844 a poem appeared which commended Itself to many readers by the mystery and sadness with which it was filled, combined with a certain grotesqueness of fancy and singularIty of phrase which caught the popular ear and pleased the imagination. Its title came to be associated so intimately with the author that “The Raven” was usually the next word after Poe. To this “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells” and “The Lost Lenore” were sometimes added and other poems which, like himself, seemed to belong to some outer world far from the practicality of everyday life and from the usual definiteness of American literature in the first third of the century.

This period was just closing when John P. Kennedy did for Poe what Willis bad done for Bayard Taylor in bringing a writer of promise before the public. The young aspirant had met with both good and ill fortune from the start. He was born in Boston Jan. 19, 1809, but of parents who staid there only long enough to complete a theatrical engagement, wandering off on a southern circuit and both dying within two years, leaving three children to the compassion of such friends as they might happen to find.

Edgar was fortunate in being taken up by the wife of a well to do tradesman of Richmond, himself generous in his treatment of the precocious lad, who soon became the petted showpiece of the family. This was his second misfortune. Five years at an English school were followed by six more of preparation for the University of Virginia in a school at home. In both he was active in athletics, a good boxer and swimmer, with one rival in scholarship, prominent in debates and a versifier of repute, yet without Intimate friends and inclined as a spoiled boy to be imperious, capricious and self willed. At the university the pursuit of knowledge in those days was relieved by punch and card playing for money. His good fortune he managed to turn into evil by contracting gambling debts to the amount of about $2,500, which Mr. Allan, his foster father, declined to pay, and, taking the wayward youth home at the end of the year, he placed him in his own counting room, from which Poe broke loose and went to Boston. He took with him as capital with which to begin life once more in that city at the age of 18 a bundle of short poems, which he persuaded another young man to print in a thin volume of 40 pages, entitled “Tamerlane and Other Poems, by a Bostonian.” During two years in the army and six months at West Point the other poems, including a revision of “Tamerlane,” were composed, to be published in 1831 in New York. Among these were “Helen,” “The Doomed City,” “The Sleeper,” “Lenore” and “The Valley of Unrest.” not all of them as they now appear, but a long stride ahead of his Boston book. The forthcoming power of his weird imagination and the enchantment of his unique diction begin to show themselves. He might truly say:

And he suggests rather than describes:

This is the dreamland, ghoul haunted and demon peopled, where his sad eye wanders, seeing shapes and visions which come only to one who is afflicted with intellectual delirium tremens. Then, again, he would catch glimpses of seraphic splendor and soar to the zenith in his song of “Israfel”: [column 3:]

Then be feels the dragging of the earthly ball and chain and descends to this:

The verse is the type of the poet himself, in whom aspiration was always contending with limitation in bitter strife, like Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good angel and the bad of the Persian myth, and sometimes it must have seemed to him like the single handed warfare of Michael the archangel against the devil.

There will always arise the temptation to join the party of accusers or of apologists so soon as the element of the personal life mingles with the literature which an author has created. How far the balance will list to one side or the other depends in such a case as this upon belief in heredity on the one hand and in the ability of the inheritor of evil bent and bias to strengthen the brain as he grows up and lives on. If, however, a moral weakness to resist be added to strong appetite in the inheritance, it would seem that the child should have large allowances made for an almost inevitable wreck. Perhaps in Poe's instance the lapses into inebriety were not so culpable as the seeming perversity with which he threw away those opportunities and advantages which would have gone far to retrieve a false start in life, for which he was no more responsible than for the good fortune of being born in Boston. Indeed throughout his checkered career he displayed remarkable facility for snubbing main chances. Nevertheless he contrived to live by his pen for 17 years. It is the work of that period more than his manner of life that is of present concern.

It began in Baltimore with winning a prize of $100 offered by a weekly paper for the best prose tale. This was accompanied by a poem which would have taken another prize if two premiums had been allowed to go to one author. The recommendation of the committee of award that he should print such stories as he had on hand was a compensation and gave him an encouraging start with the paper above mentioned: Magazine editorship soon followed, with an apprenticeship in story writing, in which his predilection for grewsome and the mysterious and the melodramatic is revealed in crude colors.

Kennedy, who stood literary sponsor for him, wrote: “This young fellow is highly imaginative a little given to the but his letter of recommendation helped Poe to secure a place as assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, published at Richmond. This in turn furnished an medium of introducing to the public his theory of poetry and prose-writing. fresh examples Any of it, supposition and also of that his compositions were gloomy or mystical because he himself was in a chronic state of depression is corrected by his own statement that pleasure is the object of verse that the pleasure must be subtile and its undertone melancholy as the resultant, chord of all human experiences.

His first venture in journalism was getting to be fairly prosperous and full of promise for the future when one or another of his evil genii interrupted his devotion to it and he threw away a most important opportunity in that it was his first one. Has he kept on with this enterprise as he began, everything in the way of the periodical literature of the day would have been open to him. Instead, he abandoned the Messenger and Richmond for Philadelphia and irregular contributions to this paper and that. “Ligeia,” Haunted Palace,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” some “Literary Small Talk” and book notices, with a textbook on conchology, belong to this period. His stories soon amounted to 25 in number and were published as his installment of prose. The same characteristics are prominent as in his verse, but even more pronounced. He deals with the realm [column 4:] of the improbable bordering on the impossible. To this he sometimes gives the appearance of likelihood by attempts to account for his invented occurrences on scientific principles. He also employs a direct and explicit style, in itself carrying an impression of truth, but it is only to give reality to shadows and the similitude of fact to that which in the nature of things could not be. As in his verse, the titles of his prose tales are full of dark suggestion and the fascination that goes with it. “The Facts In the Case of M. Valdemar,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” “The Black Cat.” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Mark of the Red Death,” “The Murders In the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie these and others like them are suggestive of enigmas, disasters and crimes. They are dark complexioned themes, shadowy with twilight forms gliding on unholy errands. They give glimpses of an outer limbo where the inhabitants of another world hover on the borders of this with fell intent or sad reminiscence.

The stories themselves fulfill the promise of their titles. They reek with horrors, Delusions that prove fatal, remorse that follows involuntary crime, tombs that are prisons, vaults for those who cannot die, low hanging clouds, starless gloom, trees swaying in windless air, cold, slimy walls, vermin, haunted dungeons. despair and death — these are the lurid points in a symphony of black and red. Sometimes, as in “The Domain of Arnheim,” there is lavished a profusion of oriental color — melodies, odors, shrubberies, birds, flowers, silver streams, pinnacles and minarets flashing in red sunlight, the phantom architecture of fairies. But oftener the tone of the picture is like this:

Poe has had numerous imitators, especially in the line of the detective story, who have shown at least how dangerous it is to walk the narrow way which he chose to tread and by his careful steps keeping himself from toppling over into the depths of ludicrous pathos. Such followers have not been born to be mystics, alchemists and jugglers in the black art, like Poe, in whose mind, as in the seven chambers of his Prospero's castellated abbey, there stalked a multitude of weird dreams in the carnival of “The Red Death.” But if one wishes now and then to get far out of the highways of literature into the land which lies next to the unseen and the unknown, whither only one or two in a century have gone and returned with even a plausible account of what they have seen, then this gloomy, wayward, but second sighted spirit will be the most satisfactory guide.

No man has been so diversely understood and therefore abused and lauded by turns. Almost everything has been charged upon him except immorality and unkindness” to his family. Possibly if his biography had never been written, pecially by Rufus Griswold, and his works published without comment they would now be rated more nearly for what they are worth. Above all, if his slashing criticisms of contemporaries had never been: printed the opinion of him which hisfellow authors naturally formed would have been more just, for it was as a critic that he was most notorious in his time. In scarcity of home-born judges and in the hatred of foreign censorship upon the early writers of the century Poe himself saw that there was a vacancy to be filled and believed that he was the man to fill it. Aside from a certain bitterness acquired with what he was pleased to consider his hard luck in life his teachers in criticism were of the British school of a hundred years ago, of whom only an occasional imitator can be found at the present day. But in Poe's time the later and better mode had not appeared. Accordingly he setup one and put down another, following his own likes and dislikes. Bryant was declared to be a genius. Longfellow without originality. His soul revolts at any depreciation of Bayard Taylor's poems, but he says that Cooper is remarkably inaccurate as a general rule. Commending Hawthorne in essentials, thinks that his “monotone” will deprive him of popular appreciation and that William Ellery. Channing has been inoculated with virus from Tennyson and Carlyle. Those sometime neighbors of his, “The Literati of New York,” some of them his benefactors, are served freely with his opinions about themselves. Willis, who did him many good turns, is told that, whatever may be thought about his talents, he has made a good deal of noise in the world; that he has failed as an essayist and has by no means the readiness which the editing of a newspaper demands and that vacillation, is the leading trait of his character — as, the critic, ought to have added, ingratitude is of mine. If he could say these things of one who had found a place for him in the days when he was wandering from magazine to journal and from the newspaper office to the street, what might not be expected to fall on those who had placed him under no obligations to themselves? That depended upon his caprice and this in turn upon his spirits. and these again upon circumstances over Which he is said to have had no control and with which an outline of his literary career has little to do if the Anal product was not affected. It is this sum of his that work has a in value poems, of stories its and criticism own for those who will appropriate it without too much consideration of what one and another assert for or against one of the ablest and most original of American authors. It is time to estimate him by his works alone.