Text: Barrett Wendell, “Edgar Allan Poe,” A Literary History of America, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901, pp. 204-218

[page 204, unnumbered:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE

IN April, 1846, Edgar Allan Poe published in “Godey's Lady's Book” a considerable article on William Cullen Bryant. In the six following numbers of the same periodical, whose colored fashion-plates are said to have been highly acceptable to the contemporary female public, appeared that series of comments on the literary personages of the day which has been collected under the name of the “Literati.” The personal career of Poe was so erratic that one can hardly group him with any definite literary school. It seems, however, more than accidental that his principal critical work concerned the contemporary literature of New York; and though he was born in Boston and passed a good deal of his life in Virginia, he spent in New York rather more of his literary years than anywhere else. On the whole, then, this seems the most fitting place to consider him.

Erratic his career was from the beginning. His father, the son of a Revolutionary soldier, had gone wrong and brought up on the stage; his mother was an English actress of whom little is known. The pair, who chanced to be in Boston when their son was born, in 1809, died when he was still a little child. At the age of two, he was adopted by a gentleman of Richmond, Virginia, named Allan, who soon took him to Europe, where he remained from 1815 to 1820. In 1826 he was for a year at the University of Virginia, where his career was brought to an end by a gambling scrape, which in turn brought almost to an end his relations with his adopted father. In 1827 his first verses were published, [page 205:] a little volume entitled “Tamerlane and Other · Poems.” Then he drifted into the army, and a temporary reconciliation with Mr. Allan got him into the Military Academy at West Point, from which in 1831 he managed to get himself dismissed. After that he always lived from hand to mouth, supporting himself as a journalist and as a contributor to numberless periodicals which Aourished in his day and have long since disappeared. The unedifying question of his personal habits need not seriously concern us. Beyond doubt he was occasionally drunk, and he probably took more or less opium; at the same time there is no evidence that he was abandoned to habitual excesses. His “Manuscript found in a Bottle,” published in 1833, procured him for a while the editorship of the “Southern Literary Messenger,” published at Richmond and for many years the most successful literary periodical of the South. In 1835 he secretly married a charming but penniless girl, a relative of his own; he married her again openly in 1836. In 1839 and 1840 he edited the “Gentleman's Magazine” in Philadelphia; from 1840 to 1842 he edited “Graham's Magazine” in New York; his general career was that of a literary hack. In 1847, after a life of distressing poverty, his wife died; two years later Poe himself died under circumstances which have never been quite clear. He had certainly alleviated his widowhood by various flirtations, and it is said that he was about to marry again. The story goes that he was passing through Baltimore, either on his way to see his betrothed or on his way from a visit to her. In that city an election was about to take place; and some petty politicians in search of “repeaters” picked him up, got him drunk, and made him vote all over town. Haying thus exhausted his political usefulness, they left him in the gutter from whence he found his way to the hospital, where he certainly died.

Born fifteen years later than Bryant and dead twenty-nine years earlier, Poe, now fifty years in his grave, seems to [page 206:] belong to an earlier period of our letters; but really, as we have seen, Bryant's principal work was done before 1832. At that time Poe had published only three volumes of verse; his lasting prose came somewhat later; in fact, the permanent work of Poe may be said to coincide with the first twelve years of the Victorian epoch. In 1838, the year of “Arthur Gordon Pym,” Dickens was at work on “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby;” and Carlyle's “French Revolution was a new book. In 1849, when Poe died, Thackeray's Vanity Fair” and the first two volumes of Macaulay's “History” had lately appeared; Dickens was publishing “David Copperfield,” and Thackeray “Pendennis;” and Ruskin brought out his “Seven Lamps of Architecture.” Had Poe survived to Bryant's years, he would have outlived not only Bryant himself, but Emerson and Hawthorne and Longfellow and Lowell, and indeed almost every literary contemporary except Holmes.

The very mention of these names is enough to call to mind a distinction between the career of Poe and that of almost every other American whose literary reputation has survived from the days when he was writing. The men on whom we have already touched were socially of the better sort, either by birth or by achieved position. So in general were the chief men of letters who made the Renaissance of New England the most important fact in American literary history. Poe, on the other hand, was always a waif and a stray, essentially a Bohemian. There was in his nature something which made futile the effort of that benevolent Virginian gentleman to adopt him into the gentler social classes of America. In his lifetime, then, Poe must have seemed personally inferior to most of his eminent contemporaries in American letters. Yet now that all are dead, he begins to seem quite as important as any. In 1885 Mr. William Minto, writing of him in the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” called him “the most interesting figure in American literature.” Superlatives, of course, are [page 207:] dangerous; and Poe's writings could never obtain such general, uncritical popularity as Cooper's; but, to turn only to the bibliography in the last volume of Stedman and Woodberry's admirable edition of Poe, it appears that between 1890 and 1895 there were at least ten translations from his works into various foreign languages, among others Swedish, something which looks like Bohemian, Italian, Danish, and South American Spanish. Certainly among the literary classes of Europe no American author has attracted more attention than Poe, v whose influence still seems extending.

Fifty years after his death, then, we find his reputation familiar throughout the civilised world; and such a reputation obscures the fact that in life the man who has won it was of doubtful repute. The accident that his first published work bears almost the same name as that of the first tragedy of Christopher Marlowe suggests a real analogy. Poe and Marlowe alike were men of extraordinary power and of reckless personal habit; alike they produced work which will always enrich the literature of the language in which it was written. In their own times, however, neither was an admirably solitary man of genius; each was only one of a considerable group of writers, now mostly forgotten but undeniably more presentable than the artists whom time has proved greater. Both, after troublesome, irregular careers, died miserably in public places; it is only as each has receded into tradition that his earthly immortality has become assured.

The historical position of Poe in American letters can be seen by glancing at his already mentioned papers, the “Literati.” These, we remember, followed in “Godey's Lady's Book” on a lengthy criticism of Bryant. It is worth while to name the thirty-eight persons, then mostly living in New York and certainly contributing to the New York periodicals of the moment, whom Poe thought considerable and interesting enough for notice. Here is the list: George Bush, George H. Colton, N. P. Willis, William M. [page 208:] Gillespie, Charles F. Briggs, William Kirkland, John W. Francis, Anna Cora Mowatt, George B. Cheever, Charles Anthon, Ralph Hoyt, Gulian C. Verplanck, Freeman Hunt, Piero Maroncelli, Laughton Osborn, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Ann S. Stephens, Evert A. Duyckinck, Mary Gove, James Aldrich, Thomas Dunn Brown, Henry Cary, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Sarah Margaret Fuller, James Lawson, Caroline M. Kirkland, Prosper M. Wetmore, Emma C. Embury, Epes Sargent, Frances Sargent Osgood, Lydia M. Child, Elizabeth Bogart, Catherine M. Sedgwick, Lewis Gaylord Clark, Anne C. Lynch, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Mary E. Hewitt, and Richard Adams Locke. In this list there is one name which we have already found worthy of a glance, — that of Fitz-Greene Halleck. There is another which we have mentioned, — that of Evert A. Duyckinck. There are two at which we shall certainly glance later, — those of N. P. Willis and Sarah Margaret Fuller. And there are two or three which we may conceivably mention, — those of Mrs. Child, of Miss Sedgwick, of Lewis Gaylord Clark, and of Charles Fenno Hoffman. The very names of the other “Literati” are mostly forgotten: they lived; they flourished; they died; and they are so thoroughly buried, some in the pages of Griswold or of Duyckinck, that even such generous editors as Stedman and Hutchinson have found no room for mention of a full sixteen of the thirty-eight. It seems almost cruel to disturb the peace of such untroubled, untroublesome dead.

Our chief reason for recalling these forgotten people is not to remind ourselves of what they happened to be publishing when Poe's best work was done; it is rather to point out why a considerable part of Poe's best work has itself been forgotten. His critical writings, collected in the sixth, seventh, and eighth volumes of Stedman and Woodberry's edition of his works, are the only ones in which he shows how he could deal with actual fact; and in dealing with actual fact he proved himself able. Though some of the facts he dealt with, however, [page 209:] were worthy of his pen, — he was among the first, for example, to recognise the merit of Tennyson and of Mrs. Browning, — most of them in the course of fifty years have proved of no human importance. For all this, they existed at the moment. Poe was a journalist, who had to write about what was in the air; and he wrote about it so well that in certain aspects this critical work seems his best. He dabbled a little in philosophy, of course, particularly on the æsthetic side; but he had neither the seriousness of nature — spiritual insight, one might call it, — which must underlie serious philosophising, nor yet the scholarly training which must precede lasting, solid thought. What he did possess to a rare degree was the temper of an enthusiastic artist, who genuinely enjoyed and welcomed whatever in his own art, of poetry, he found meritorious. No doubt he was more than willing to condemn faults; whoever remembers any of his critical activity, for example, will remember how vigourously he attacked Longfellow for plagiarism. We ought to recall with equal certainty how willingly Poe recognised in this same Longfellow those traits which he believed excellent. Poe's serious writing does not concern the eternities as did the elder range of American literature, nor yet does it touch on public matters. True or not, indeed, that grotesque story of his death typifies his relation to political affairs. His critical writing, all the same, deals with questions of fine art in a spirit which if sometimes narrow, often dogmatic, and never scholarly, is sincere, fearless, and generally eager in its impulsive recognition of merit.

Take, for example, a stray passage from the “Literati,” — his enthusiastic criticism of Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood, a lady whose work never fulfilled the promise which Poe discerned in it: —

This passage deserves our attention both as containing an unusually good fragment of the long-forgotten poetry produced in New York sixty years ago, and as indicating the temper in which Poe approached contemporary literature. To his mind the only business of a poet was to make things of beauty. If in what professed to be poetry he found ugly things, he unhesitatingly condemned them; if he found anything which seemed beautiful, nobody could welcome it more eagerly. His enthusiasm, indeed, often led him into superlative excess; in the case of these pleasantly pretty lines of Mrs. Osgood's, it certainly did so; but if we neglect the superlatives, we can admit that what he felt to be beautiful was at least good, just as what he condemned was almost always abominable. However meretricious, — and surely there are aspects enough in which he seems very meretricious indeed, — Poe really loved his art; and whatever his lack of training, he had a natural, instinctive, eager perception of beauty. This, too, he set [page 211:] forth in a style always simple and clear, always free from affectation or mannerism, and always marked by a fine sense of rhythm. All these merits appear saliently in those portions of his work which deal with actual fact.

When it comes to his philosophical writings, the whole thing seems more suspicious. As everybody remembers, one of Poe's feats as a journalist was to publish a successful hoax concerning the passage of the Atlantic by a balloon, in which, along with other persons, the minor novelist, Harrison Ainsworth, was said to have journeyed from England to the Carolinas. The tendency to humbug typified by this harmless journalistic feat was deeply characteristic of Poe. When you read such papers as his “Poetic Principles,” his “Rationale of Verse,” or his “Philosophy of Composition,” it is hard to feel sure that he is not gravely hoaxing you. On the whole, he probably was not. In his work of this kind one feels intense ingenuity and unlimited scholarly ignorance. One feels, too, more and more constantly, that his temper was far from judicial. The man who would set forth a lastingly serious study of poetry must do so with deliberation, weighing all questions which present themselves, and arriving at conclusions slowly and firmly. It is one thing to delight in what is good; it is quite another critically to understand the reasons for such pleasure. The former power is a matter of temperament; the latter is rather one of thoughtful scholarly training. The traits which make Poe's occasional criticisms excellent are only swiftness of perception and fineness of taste; these are matters not of training but of temperament.

Temperament, indeed, of a markedly individual kind is what gives lasting character and vitality to the tales and the poems by which he has become permanently known. Both alike are instantly to be distinguished from the critical work at which we have glanced by the fact that they never deal with actualities, be those actualities of this world or of the next. Poe's individual and powerful style, to be sure, full of what [page 212:] seems like vividness, constantly produces “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith;” but one has only to glance at the attempts to illustrate his work in the excellent edition of Stedman and Woodberry to feel the full resurgent rush of suspended disbelief.

Take, for example, a passage which has been chosen for illustration in “The Fall of the House of Usher”: —

Compare with this the grotesque picture at the beginning of the tale in Stedman and Woodberry's volume. The trouble is not chiefly that the draughtsman, however skilful, has not been gifted with genius, nor yet that he has so far departed from the text as to depict a man who has just sprung “furiously to his feet” pensively seated in a very uncomfortable armchair; it is rather that fictions even so vivid as Usher and the Lady Madeline and the unearthly house of their doom are things which no one can translate into visual terms without demonstrating their unreality.

It is just so with Poe's most familiar poems. (“The Raven” cannot be credibly visualised, any more than the uninspired draughtsman who tried to compose a frontispiece for the poem could make the lost Lenore anything but ridiculous. The picture which illustrates “Annabel Lee,” in its attempt at realism, brings out the trait more clearly still. And take the opening stanzas of “Ulalume”: — [page 213:]

You can hardly read this over without becoming conscious of two facts: for all the vividness of impression there is no actuality about these images; and yet there hovers around them a mood, a temper, an impalpable but unmistakable quality, which could never have emanated from any other human being than Edgar Allan Poe.

This individuality of his is hard to define. One or two things about it, however, seem clear. In tales and poems alike he is most characteristic when dealing with mysteries; and though to a certain point these mysteries, often horrible, are genuinely mysterious, they reveal no trace of spiritual insight. They indicate a sense that human perception is inexorably limited, but no vital perception of the eternities which lie beyond it. Excellent in their way, one cannot but feel their way to be melodramatic. The very word “melodramatic” recalls to us the strolling stage from which Poe almost accidentally sprung in that Boston lodging-house ninety years ago. From beginning to end his temper had the inextricable combination of meretriciousness and sincerity which [page 214:] marks the temperament of typical actors. Theirs is a strange trade, wherein he does best who best shams. At its noblest the stage rises into tragedy or breadthens into comedy; but in our century it has probably appealed most generally to the public when it has assumed its less poetical and more characteristic form of melodrama. Poe, at least temperamentally, seems to have been a melodramatic creature of genius.

For genius he certainly had, and to no small degree in that excellent form which has been described as an infinite capacity for taking pains.” In his tales, now of melodramatic mystery, again of elaborate ingenuity, one feels not only that constant power of imagination peculiar to him; one feels also masterly precision of touch. Take, for example, a familiar passage from “The Fall of the House of Usher”: —

Here we chance to have side by side his prose and his verse. It is hardly excessive to say that as you read both over and over again, particularly if you read aloud, you will feel more and more that almost every vowel, every consonant, and more surely still every turn of rhythm which places the accent so definitely where the writer means it to fall, indicates not only a rare sense of form, but unusual technical mastery.

They indicate more than this, too. Whether the things which Poe wished to express were worth his pains is not the question. He knew what they were, and he unfeignedly wished to express them. He had almost in perfection a power more frequently shown by skilful melodramatic actors than by men of letters, — the power of assuming an intensely unreal mood and of so setting it forth as to make us for the moment share it unresistingly. This power one feels perhaps most palpably in the peculiar melody of his verse. That “Haunted Palace” may be stagey as you like; but there is something in its lyric quality — that quality whereby poetry impalpably but unmistakably performs the office best performed by pure music — which throws a reader into a mood almost too subtle for words. A morbid mood, to be sure, this of Poe's, and perhaps a meretricious; plenty of things may be said against it; but the mood is distinct from any other into which? literature has taken us.

A little while ago we reminded ourselves of a certain analogy between Poe's career and that of Marlowe, the Elizabethan tragic dramatist, who came to his end just as [page 217:] Shakspere's serious work was beginning. Between Poe's work and Marlowe's there is another analogy which has historically proved more characteristic of literature in America than in England. Marlowe's life, like Poe's, was ugly, sinful, and sordid; yet hardly a line of Marlowe's tragedies is morally corrupt. For this, indeed, there was good reason. Marlowe chanced to belong to the period when English literature was first springing into conscious life, with all the force of unhampered imaginative vitality. In literature, as in human existence, a chief grace of normal youth is freedom from such baseness as time must make familiar to maturity. In the case of Poe a similar contrast between life and work appears. Here, however, this normal reason for it did not exist. The very fact that Poe's work has been eagerly welcomed by continental Europe is evidence enough, if one needed evidence, that his temper was such as the cant of the present day calls decadent. Now the decadent literature which has prevailed? in recent England, and far more that which has prevailed elsewhere in Europe, is pruriently foul, obscenely alive with nameless figures and incidents, and with germ-like suggestions of such decay as must permeate a civilisation past its prime. In Poe's work, on the other hand, for all the decadent quality of his temper, there is a singular cleanness, something which v for all the thousand errors of his personal life seems like the instinctive purity of a child. He is not only free from any taint of indecency; he seems remote from Aeshliness of mental habit.

In the strenuousness of his artistic conscience we found trait more characteristic of America than of England, — a trait which is perhaps involved in the national self-consciousness of our country. In this instinctive freedom from lubricity, so strongly in contrast with the circumstances of his personal career, and yet to all appearances so unaffected, one feels a touch still more characteristic of his America. It is allied, perhaps, with that freedom from actuality which we have [page 218:] seen to characterise his most apparently vivid work. The world which bred Poe was still a world to whose national life we may give the name of inexperience.

Intensely individual, then, and paradoxically sincere in all his histrionic malady of temper, Poe set forth a peculiar range of mysterious though not significant emotion. In the fact that this emotion, even though insignificant, was mysterious, is a trait which we begin to recognise as characteristically American, at least at that moment when American life meant something else than profound human experience. There is something characteristically American, too, in the fact that Poe's work gains its effect from artistic conscience, an ever present sense of form. Finally, there is something characteristically American in Poe's freedom from either conventional or real fleshly taint. Though Poe's power was great, however, his chief merits prove merits of refinement. Even through a time so recent as his, refinement of temper, conscientious sense of form, and instinctive neglect of actual fact remained the most characteristic traits, if not of American life, at least of American letters.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 210:]

1The italics are Poe's.