Text: Edward Markham, “The Poetry of Poe,” The Arena (Boston, MA), vol. XXXII, no. 176, July 1904, pp. 170-175

[page 170, continued:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE is the most tragic figure in our literary history, and the figure that casts from our shores the longest shadow across the world. He was a great intellect and a sad heart.

He has left one of the two or three most magical and compelling collections of tales written since the Arabian Nights — tales of ratiocination and of mystery, a collection that fascinates us like the Alhambra under moon and cloud, with the dark splendor of its halls, its spacious courts, its lofty pillars, its labyrinthine passages. [column 2:]

He has left us also our first body of significant American criticism: reviews, too often, of nobodies, the ephemera of letters; reviews written in haste to keep the bubble on the pot, yet unpurchasable and inflexible in loyalty to letters. Discussion of these matters would make a long and important paper by itself. But it is of the poetry alone that we must here speak.

Poe, like Gray and Keats, has given us only a frugal volume of verse, and yet like these poets he has left a precious and priceless possession to mankind. American [page 171:] has no one but Emerson and Lowell to contest his poetical primacy.

Poe brought to the art of poetry an acute analytical mind, and a vivid feeling for form, as well as a shaping imagination and a passionate love of beauty. He willed to build his structure of verse upon poetic laws as exact as those that swing the planets in their orbits. He has the distinction of being the only American who, like Coleridge and Wordsworth in England, and Burger in Germany, had a definite theory of poetry and rigorously followed it.

Poe declares that the origin of poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder Beauty than Earth supplies — that poetry itself is the imperfect effort to quench this immortal thirst. He defines the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty, and avers that the sole arbiter is Taste, which stands between Pure Intellect and the Moral Sense. That pleasure, he says, which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived from the contemplation of the Beautiful. Only in the contemplation of Beauty do we attain that elevation of the soul which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, and from Passion, which is the excitement of the heart.

The fervors of passion, or even the lessons of truth, may go into a poem; but they must be toned down in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and real essence of the poem. It goes without saying, then, that Poe stood for “art for art's sake,” that he set his face inflexibly against the heresy of “The Didactic.” He would not have it that the ultimate object of poetry is truth, that every poem should preach a moral. Poe was certainly right: a poem built in beauty is its own excuse for being. For the soul is enlarged not so much by mere knowledge or bare skeleton of truth, as by by [[sic]] the dilation of the imagination. The path through beauty is the most direct path of ascension to the Divine. [column 2:]

This lofty and noble conception of poetry was doubtless in the mind of young Poe, however dimly, when in 1827 he issued his first trembling little volume of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems — a volume attempted again in 1829, and finally in 1831 republished with many deft touches of the revising tool.

The long poem “Tamerlane” shows, as in Marlowe's case, that the lean of the young poet's soul was toward vastness and splendor. The manner of the poem is dominated by Byron, that plunging planet that was then disturbing the poise of so many lesser luminaries in the poetic sky. “Al Aaraaf,” a dullish story of a purgatory, placed on Tycho Brahe's wonderful lost star, suggests the specious learning and the forced sentiment in “Lalla Rookh.”

In Poe's 1831 volume we find “Israfel,” “The Doomed City,” “To Helen,” “Irene,” and “The Pæan,” — poems that were revised in the course of years and are now known as “Israfel,” “The City in the Sea,” “To Helen,” “The Sleeper,” and “Lenore.”

Around the last three of these poems hangs the darkness of the most tragic event in Poe's early life, the death of Mrs. Stanard, the mother of a school-boy friend. When young Poe first met this lovely woman she took him by the hand and spoke to him in tender words of greeting and sympathy. We are told that he was so penetrated by her gracious words that he was deprived of the power of speech, almost of consciousness, and that he returned home in a dream, hearing the voice that had made the desolate world so suddenly beautiful. She became the comforter of his boyish griefs and the Helen of his early song. When she died his heart was inconsolable, and found voice in “The Sleeper,” a poem drenched with the mystery, the ethereal beauty of a summer night. Forever the beautiful dead lies there tranced in silentness and perfect peace.

In “Lenore” Poe speaks again of the beloved dead. It is not a homely cry of [page 172:] the heart, but a burst of martial bugles. Amid the perfections of this poem, however, is one inexcusable blemish, a bald phrase of the prose man — “And when she fell in feeble health.” Here is a mud-ball stuck upon the radiant front of the rainbow. But even this flaw is half forgotten in the stately repetends and musical marches of the poem. In “Lenore” the poet no longer peers and wonders. From a height of exultation he hurls down defiance upon the grim warders of death:

“Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,

But waft the angel on her flight with a Pæan of old days!”

At last, in his “Helen,” the dead woman becomes to the poet the eidolon of supernal beauty:

The poem contains two superb lines, where all are beautiful. In the early form of the verses, the two lines ran thus:

This mediocre couplet was afterward transfigured into

two mighty lines that compress into a brief space all the rich, high, magnificence of dead centuries. The change of a few words and what a chasmal change in the sound and splendor of a line! Poe never surpassed the serene exaltation and divine poise of this poem. It shows his passion for a crystalline perfection. Save for a false rhyme and a dubious phrase or two, the poem is perfect, inevitable, having the careless ease of a young lily swaying on the stem. In its wandering music and flower-like freshness of form, it stands with the deathless lyrics; with “Tears, Idle Tears,” “Rose Aylmer,” and the rest. [column 2:]

“The Raven,” written many years later than these early lyrics to beauty and death, is the final threnody in memory of his lost Lenore, once the queenliest dead, but now elected to live immortally young in his somber palaces of song. “The Raven” has gone into the languages of many nations as a requiem of imperial affliction, a poem that takes rank with the unworded and unearthly harmonies of “The Dead March in Saul.”

How did it spring into existence, this in a work of genius frequently rises from structure of mystery and grief? The idea some chance word or incident that falls into the artist's life, — the remark of a friend, the look of a face. Genius is the power to take a hint. Whence did Poe get the idea of the Stygian raven of his poem? Perhaps from the raven in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge.

Poe is known to have made a magazine-study of this novel, suggesting a better use of the bird as a character, saying: “The raven, too, might have been made more than we now see it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby. Its croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama. Its character might have performed in regard to that of the idiot, much the same part as does in music the accompaniment in respect to the air.” — Here Poe outlines a use of this “ungainly fowl” which later on he actually makes in his famous poem.

The early poem “Lenore” is the first study of the Raven thesis, and in it we find the sonorous name Lenore, a name which may have been wafted to his mind from Burger's ballad of “Lenore,” which had attracted the attention of England in the early years of the nineteenth century. Doubtless Poe found the suggestion of his meter in Mrs. Browning's “The Courtship of Lady Geraldine,” where we find a line —

which sounds strangely like one of the lines in “The Raven.” But the originality [page 173:] of Poe's poem is not shaken by the critics, who have sifted the world to find its sources. What he borrows becomes bone of his intellectual bone. Casual borrowings by a poet are justifiable, when they are assimilated, when they suffer a sea-change into a rarer beauty. If he finds brick he must leave it marble.

Some of the phrasings of the poem, such as “Sir, said I, or madam”; “little relevancy bore”; “the fact is I was napping” — such colloquialisms seem to disturb the austere tone of the poem. But I would not wish these oddities removed. These colors of everyday, these glints of the grotesque, flashing upon the back- ground of the poem, help to heighten the final impression of tragic mystery. Nor need we be concerned greatly that the poet says that the shadow of the raven “lies floating on the floor,” when the bird is described as sitting on a bust above the door, and presumably above the lamp. Such flaws serve to shake a little the verisimilitude and strict organic unity of the poem. But they do not disturb its extraordinary elevation and somber beauty.

In the “Philosophy of Composition,” Poe gives his own statement of the laws and processes which he claims to have followed in the composition of “The Raven.” He makes the work of construction appear as simple as fence-building. His explanation, at first blush, sounds forced and inadequate, a mere riot of mystification; and yet there be may a measure of truth in the explanation, seeing that Poe had a highly analytical mind and a strict theory of poetics. It was natural to the man to attempt to balance the wings of his imagination with the weight of his intellect.

However all this may be, it is clear that his explanation does not explain the core of the matter: the secret of the secret is not disclosed. He does not tell us where he found the music, the fire, the shaping imagination. So after all is said, we can still call “The Raven,” not a thing of rule and recipe, but a creation of the true frenzy, that carries a cry of the heart. [column 2:]

There are noble lines in “The Raven,” but great lines, and even great passages, are not the chief test of a poem. The final test of a poem is its total impression. And the total impression of “The Raven,” with its weird beauty and sustained energy, is deeply, nobly serious. In spite of all critical assaults, the poem stands secure in its dark immortality-safe among the few remarkable poems of the world.

The “Haunted Palace” was in Poe's day the subject of a hot controversy, many believing (Poe leading the host), that Longfellow had taken from this poem his idea for “The Beleaguered City.” Others again affirmed that both poets had got their inspiration from Tennyson's “Deserted House.” Poe's poem is an allegory of a mind in ruins, a poem terribly beautiful, whose words seem to come in stately batallions, with bugles blowing. It tells of a splendid palace:

“The Haunted Palace” is a sermon, but it is one where the poet furnishes only the text: the reader supplies the sermon. The poem ends with two powerful lines:

“Israfel,” another of the lyrics descended from his youth, is full of the rush of silver phrases, the careless music of a young god.

It is ungracious, perhaps, to cavil at a dint in this lyric gold; but it does seem that the second stanza jars upon the high harmony of this song:

Certainly the word “even” is an ineffectual rhyme; and the remark concerning “the enamored moon” blushing with love has the ring of sentimentality instead of sentiment. It is the paint of emotion, not the fire. One is sensitive to these defects since the poem, as a whole, is tremulous with a beauty wilder than the beauty of Earth. Here is no thought of the loved and unreturning dead, no mood of inconsolable memories. The soul is thrilled as with a rush of raptures from a rift in the delicate sky of morning.

Browning in “Abt Vogler,” Coleridge in “Kubla Khan,” have built up fair imaginations of tower and dome and minaret, but the wizardry of Poe in his “City in the Sea” has left us the most rare, the most mysterious, of all such ethereal structures. This city in the dim, still, western sea is the thronéd place of Death, where are gathered in long night-times the souls that have passed through the body.

The description of the gloomy light of the lurid waters upon the lofty, pallid walls fretted with garlands of carven stone — garlands of viol, violet, and vine,” is builded up with a curious care that sends upon the mind the sense of the delicate austerities of the Parthenon. Never before has the “palpable obscure” been bodied forth with a more cunning and gloomy imagination, than in this fantasy of a city isolated, accursed, laved by seas “hideously serene,” where from his central tower,

The music of the opening stanza is in Poe's best manner of sonorous metal, blowing martial sounds.” The last stanza gives an example of music muted and retarded to echo the sense, carrying out the idea of the dull tide, the feeble stir, the gradual hissing and bubbling of the slow settling and sinking of the lost and lamentable city.

Poe's “Bells” is the finest example in our language of the suggestive power of rhyme and of the echo of sound to sense. It is hardly credible that the poet who conceived this fantasy with its fine madness, could have written “For Annie,” one of the poems composed in those dark last days when life was stretching before him like a rainy sea. On its constructive side it is a fugue, from which proceeds a haunting music. But what can we say severe enough of the poetry of such verses as these?

Bald definition is the death of poetry. The words in a poem must have mystery around them, space for the play of the imagination.

“Annabel Lee,” perhaps the simplest of Poe's ballads, and one inspired by his lost Virginia, is full of little winds of melody and touches of ideal light. It is a poetical version of his prose idyl, “The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass,”* and it forms the final page of his lyrical ritual of bereaved love. Poe is aloof from nature; he withdraws from actuality into the perilous hollow kindgom [[kingdom]] of Childe Roland of the Dark Tower, into “the dim, deserted courts where Dis bears sway.” Yet each of Poe's poems has a basis in life. Even his “Ulalume” — frailest of cloud-structures — is not pillared all in air, although its mysticism seems stretched to the breaking point. [page 175:] I find momentous meaning in its gray obscurity — a deep drama of temptation and memory. As elsewhere, Poe's habit of personification gives a clue to the mystery. The poem chronicles in symbol the collision between an ignoble passion and the memory of an ideal love.

The poet wanders under the moon with Psyche his soul — Psyche the obscure voice of conscience. He is down by the dark tarn of Auber, in the woodland of Weir, the misty region of sorrowful remembrance. About him are wide, desolate landscapes; above him, drear, ash-colored autumnal skies, all suggestive of the aloneness and desolation of each man's soul in his inward battle. Once before he had wandered here under the cypresses when his heart was hot and volcanic with sorrow for his lost love, but now his memory is clouded.

As the night wanes he beholds the orb of Astarte, the goddess of carnal love. He feels that she is touched by his sorrow,

Psyche protests and urges flight from temptation. The poet persists and quiets her scruples, and the two pass on till stopped by a tomb across the road — the tomb of his lost Ulalume. Suddenly he sees that his temptation has been of the demon. He is confronted and recalled to honor by the chaste memory of his lost love — his love for one wild hour forgotten.

“Ulalume” has been reviled as doggerel run mad, and exalted as a miracle of melody. It is certainly too labored and mechanical to carry emotional conviction. In tone-color it is like some wild improvisation, in a minor mood — some primitive Icelandic musical motif recurring over and over like the wash of surf on sandy shores.

Technically “Ulalume” is a study in the use of the repetend. The two continually-alternating [column 2:] rhymes of each nine-line stanza; the close sameness, yet delicate variation, of the third and second lines, coming in like the sobbing catch of the breath; the lift and beat of the last four lines of each stanza, two of the lines altered but a breve, a shade, a hint, from the other two — all these tonal effects strike upon the ear like the fall and echo of far, faint, murmuring waters in some reverberating granite canyon of the Sierras.

It is commonly thought that Poe's poetry is never touched by moral passion; yet “Ulalume” and the “Haunted Palace” are denials of this tradition. In them we find the poet grafted upon the preacher; but the sermons are strictly subordinated to the austere demands of art.

With all my admiration for Poe's poetry, I cannot help sensing in some of it a smell of the lamp, a tinge of sophistication, a ring of artificiality. Nor can I deny that he is narrow in his sympathies. His poems are lacking in the humanitary sentiment. We look in vain in his writings for any sure support for the soul in the midst of these mortal tears and burdens. He struck from the heart-strings of Israfel a music of the skies; but he failed to strike from his own heart-strings the music of humanity.

Poe's range is narrow, his themes are few. Love, Beauty and Death — these are the springs of his inspiration. He was a poet with a peering eye and a touch of phantasy, a poet in love with frangibility, with evenescence, with the beauty that cannot stay. From all his finer verses break out again and again the sense of the irreparable and the cry of the Nevermore. Piercing sweet are they at times, and wild with all regret and unforgettable while graves and memories are the heritage of man.

EDWIN MARKHAM.

Westerleigh, Staten Island, N. Y.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 174:]

* Eleonora.