Text: George Edward Woodberry, “The Poe Centenary,” in The Torch and Other Addresses, New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920, pp. 323-326

[page 323:]

THE POE CENTENARY(1)

We are gathered here to do honor to genius. One name is on our lips, one memory is in our hearts — that of Edgar Allan Poe. Sixty years ago five mourners stood round his grave; today in five great cities of the nation, and elsewhere, men gather, as we do here, by scores and hundreds, to commemorate his birth. It is because genius, once born into life, is indestructible; it is safe alike from any stroke of earthly fortune and from time's attack, it is the immortal vigor of the race. Mendo not willingly let the memory of it die; men protect its memory, and this is singularly true of Poe. No American name in literature is, I think, so warmly cherished. It is a pleasure, too, to recognize American genius, and today it is an added grace that Poe was a child of the South. He was, nevertheless, both in his genius and his life, remarkably free from locality. It has not been sufficiently observed hitherto, I think, that more than any of his contemporaries Poe occupied a central position in his generation; he was better acquainted with the literary product of the time, and both by his residence and his letters was in touch with a wide area of the country. He had lived in Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, and had repeatedly visited New England, and his correspondence reached Cincinnati, St. Louis, Louisville, Tennessee and Georgia. More than the others, he had national range.

Poe was a Southerner by his breeding; he was an American by his career; he was a citizen of the world [page 324:] by his renown. It was a distinguishing trait of his personality that when his first tales were hardly dry from the press, he was already negotiating for publication in England. He always belonged in spirit to the larger world. The adventurous sense of it was his cadet dream of joining the armies of Poland when he left West Point. The literary stamp of it was that in the first lines of his criticism, unfledged critic that he was, he set up a standard, not that of the leisured hearth of Virginia or the newspaper offices of New York or the parlor coteries of Boston, but the standard of all the world; and though he contracted opportunism, that was only the wear and tear of practical life on a fine ideal.

But it is not enough to be a critic. No critic ever had his hundredth birthday celebrated. Poe was from his youth an all-round man of letters. One trait which peculiarly wins the respect of his fellow craftsmen, I think, is that he never was anything else but a man of letters. He never earned any money except by his pen. He labored twenty years; for four of these he had a salary as an editor, and a dozen times he spoke from a platform; otherwise he was an unattached writer and lived from day to day. I have no manner of doubt he was sincere in saying that in thus adhering to his profession he cheerfully bore poverty. His profession pauperized him. Is it not startling to think that we are gathered here, in a city which is the shrine and throne of gold, to do honor to a man who was a beggar all his days? It is a striking tribute to true values. I make no complaint of fate. Literature dedicates her sons to the vow of worldly sacrifice. It has been so of old time. He was not chosen to be poor more than the others were chosen. Hawthorne and Emerson and Poe [page 325:] — the three most brilliant men in our literature -all led meager lives, but Poe alone was the perfect victim. Poe not only lived meagerly; at times he starved. Poverty is a terrible foe; it is thorough in its work on men and nations; it kills. What a victory it is of the spirit over its life, of the spirit that makes for immortality through all disguises of human wretchedness — that we have today in our minds and hearts, out of Poe's meager and starved life, poetry, romance, the imagery that fades not away! It is true that there is that in it which terrifies; here is the legend and superscription of pain and death; his music is the requiem of the soul that breathed it forth. But his, too, is praise. Poe made of his fate his victory; and, for the victim of life, that is the master-stroke. We “bid fair peace be to his sable shroud.”

It is fit now, though late, to bring the laurel to him who first sent the dark green leaf across the sea to Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, and among ourselves brought it to Hawthorne and Lowell in their obscure years. And he has more to grace his memory — that which all men value, the kindly recollection of those who were most nigh him. Poe won the laurel and the marble; but the mortal flower upon his grave is this — that he endeared himself to his friends. He had many friends. He had the best. There was no truer gentleman then alive than Kennedy, who to the honor of Baltimore befriended his early manhood. There was no more kindly colleague than Willis , who gave him his hand in New York and never drew it away. There were no warmer comrades for mates in life than Thomas, Halleck and Burr. Poe had also that power which is one of the singularities of genius -the power to let [page 326:] the soul shine on all. His office-boy idolized him; children suffered him to play with them; and every wayfarer who touched his hand or had speech of him on his wandering road, seems to have remembered the light of that day forever.

Such are some of the thoughts that rise in me on this occasion. I seem to share them with you. These traits of fortune and of character to which I have alluded, belong to humanity, and link genius to the understanding hearts of men; but genius is itself the most revealing force of the soul; its manifestations are revelations of our nature. The genius of Poe was one of the manifold forms of humanity; else it were hot genius; but that man who would speak rightly of him must, in his vision of human nature, have room and marge enough to know that the spirit of life is Infinite in its flowering, that the Shepherd of us all has many folds.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 323:]

1 Copyright, 1910, by The Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences.