Text: George L. Knapp, “Poe,” Lippincott's Magazine (Philadephia, PA), vol. LXXXIII, whole no. 493, January 1909, pp. 74-81

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GENERALLY speaking, the history of American literature has been singularly peaceful. But Poe, and in a later day Whitman, have been storm centres which have almost made us forget the summer calm of our literary landscape. It is not so much that the facts of Poe's career are in dispute; though the record leaves something to be desired in the way of authenticity. It is rather that those facts are viewed through the spectacles of prejudice; spectacles now rosy with affection, now green with envy, but never by any chance colorless. One biographer dwells on the testimony of Willis, that Poe was the gentlest gentleman who ever did hack work in a newspaper office; and treats us to long descriptions — usually written by women — of the poet's remarkable beauty, his charm of manner, his old-world courtesy. Another lingers with loving malice over the fact that other men paid Poe's tailor bills, that he reprinted his old articles and poems as new ones, and that he had been known to sleep off his potations on the sawdust-covered floor of a low-class bar-room. One tells us at length of Poe's undeniable love for his wife; and another of his equally undeniable efforts to marry some wealthy woman — any one would do — during the days of his widowerhood. That Poe was a great and a morbid genius the world is fully agreed; and it is agreed on very little else concerning him.

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The greater part of Poe's life history is an oft-told tale, but one that seems to gather fresh interest with each retelling. That he was born in Boston, in 1809, the son of a worthy actress mother and a worthless, well-born father; and that a little more than forty years later he was picked up unconscious in a Baltimore slum and taken to a hospital to die, are items in the mental furniture of millions. The death of his mother before his third birthday; his adoption by John Allan, a shrewd Scotch merchant settled in Richmond, Virginia; his admission to and expulsion from West Point, are likewise common property. It is not so well known that prior to his West Point experience he served two years in the regular army under an assumed name, that he won a non-commissioned officer's place by good, steady work, [page 75:] and that he was reported by his officers to have no bad habits whatever. Every one knows that through a considerable part of his life Poe was a periodical drunkard; not so many are aware that he was a confirmed user of opium. The memory of his stinging criticisms has outlasted the life of the critic — and usually the reputation of the criticised. His stories are still acknowledged masterpieces of plot and workmanship; and the place where “The Raven” is unknown is a place where the English language has not penetrated. Also, Poe was the first American author to gain an international reputation of any value. All these things and many more are known to all who care to interest themselves in Poe. One would think that on so broad a foundation of fact it might be possible to rear a consistent estimate of the strangest character; but such has not been the case.

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For the great, obvious fact of Poe's life and work was the morbid, oppressive, horror-shadowed nature of both. His indeed the light that never was on sea nor land; but his as well the phantoms of strangeness and loathing that come up through the ivory gate. It was something deeper than mere melancholy; something immeasurably more genuine than the gloom which Byron coined into trade dollars for literary export. Poe's is a dark, unwholesome habit of mind that shows in all his best work; and is so much a part of him that, with few exceptions, when you miss the morbidness, you miss the genius as well. This is the riddle that must be solved before one can properly appraise the man; and so far, no one has offered a solution that any great number of persons seem inclined to accept.

Yet to my mind, the solution is a curiously simple one. The secret of Poe's jaundiced outlook on life is not his drunkenness nor his opium eating, neither his strange genius nor his undeniable selfishness. It is rather that his temperament and genius and vices combined with the society in which he was placed to shut him off from his fellows, to make him a creature apart. Poe's was the morbidness not of liquor, but of loneliness; not of opium, but of isolation. And that is the worst and most hopeless morbidness of all. Once let the vitalizing stream of human life be walled off, and the clearest waters of thought gather into stagnant and unwholesome pools, where creeping things breed and flourish, and where shapes of fear and foulness haunt the shades. I may add in passing that it seems to make little difference how slight or how massive the barrier may be, if the prisoned individual admits his separation. The abnormality which isolated Poe was trifling compared to that which made Oscar Wilde a prisoner in a haunted cell. Yet “The Fall of the House of Usher” is as great and as morbid as [page 76:] “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”; “The Conqueror Worm” is as demon-shadowed as “Salome.”

We shall never understand Poe's isolation if we fail to take into account the society in which he was placed. And that is not so easy a task as one might think. Much water has gone under the national bridge since the days when Pittsburg was away out West, and the Declaration of Independence was read each Fourth of July under a flag that sheltered the largest body of chattel slaves in the civilized world. Poe died in the year of the gold discovery in California; his best work was done before the telegraph was an accomplished fact, and while the steam railroad was still an experiment. Even in matters of physical environment it requires a distinct effortto put oneself back in those days and remember that one is still in America; and the changes in the intellectual life of the country have been still greater. There is no more amusing contrast in history than that afforded by the difference between the industrial life of America from the War of 1812 to the Civil War, and the intellectual life for the same period. In the business of conquering a continent, building up a splendid though one-sided civilization, working out a code of government, multiplying inventions, and piling up wealth, we were the most active, the most healthy, the most egotistical people on earth. But in matters of literature and science and art, we stood like beggars, hat in hand before Europe or even the casual European traveller; pleading for a crumb of approval; accepting it, when given, with fawning thanks; and resenting the sharp criticism which came more often to our lot, with declamations in which a sack of nouns was drowned, like kittens, in a river of adjectives. Like most beggars, we were thieves as well; reprinting the books of other lands without either thanks or payment. “As a literary people,” said Poe, “we are one vast, perambulating humbug.” Even the good-humored Lowell felt obliged to tell his countrymen that

Or not caught. Desire sometimes outran performance.

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This was one phase of our mental life in those days; and one can see how it would tend to wall up in brooding loneliness a literary workman like Poe. There were other phases quite as unfavorable. Full justice, I think, has never been done to the art-destroying properties of that sturdy Puritanism which lies at the basis of our national life. We are accustomed to think of Puritanism as belonging only to [page 18:] New England. In reality, it was almost country wide. Puritanism was but one form of Calvinism; and the only sections of our land which were not Calvinistic at the close of the Revolution were parts of Maryland and the tidewater region of Virginia. For the rest, Puritanism, with its iron strength, its unbreakable stubbornness, its priceless traditions of democracy, and its lamentable contempt for the softer things of life, reigned supreme. The attitude of the old, undiluted creed toward all forms of art is told by Hawthorne in the sketch of the “Custom House” with which he prefaces “The Scarlet Letter.” “A writer of story books!” he imagines one of his ancestors saying to another, with reference to their latest descendant. “What kind of a business in life — what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in this day and generation — may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!”

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Such, or very nearly such, were the traditions of five-sixths of our native stock; and in our case tradition jumped with circumstance to render us a stiff-necked, intensely practical, profoundly inartistic people. What place was there in such a society for Edgar Allan Poe? Where weakness was regarded as a crime, and even harmless self-indulgence as at best a venal sin, what charity or understanding could there be for one whose towering genius was ready to tumble in the mire at the slightest push of temptation, and whose aims at best were reckoned rather piffling work for a full grown man? With a continent in the hair-cloth-sofa stage of culture, from which a favored few were graduating to the glories of red plush, what fellowship was there for this worshipper of beauty, whose very opium dreams were filled with visions of a fearsome loveliness? ‘The answer is, none. Had Poe's lines been cast with that group of men who were making a literary oasis in New England, it is possible that he might have been braced to a steadier manliness and a saner ideal — only possible, for his was not a pliant nature. Elsewhere in our.land any real human fellowship was out of the question. We need seek no farther than this for the source of his eerie horrors. To bear the burden of an isolation produced by a defect to which the world imputes no moral significance, is quite hard enough. Milton halted noticeably under the load;and even Beethoven sometimes moved with wearied pace. But to bear the burden of an isolation produced by traits to which the world attaches the stigma of damning sin — that is a task which no human being ever performed and kept his perfect sanity.

Among his contemporaries, Poe had three titles to celebrity: his critiques, his poems, and his stories. The first are known to us mainly [page 78:] by the tradition of their cutting savagery. The modern who takes the trouble to read these much discussed articles will usually find himself agreeing with the critic's judgment; but wondering what there was in the case to make the judgment worth passing. Poe never learned that it is a waste of lather to shave an ass. Yet all his critiques are not of this kind. Poe was the first to discover the genius of Hawthorne; the first to hail Longfellow as the foremost of American poets — this in spite of his foolish charges of plagiarism against that kindly man. Poe picked Tennyson as the greatest poet of the day; he championed the merits of Dickens and George Eliot when these authors were almost unknown; and his estimate of the scope of Dickens's powers has been confirmed by time.

When we turn from Poe's critiques to his imaginative work, we pass from cleverness to genius at a step. Here his lack of “ scholarship,” that prized possession of those who sit in the grand-stand and tell how the game should be played, was a help, rather than a hindrance. He has literary faults, even here; but they are not vital ones. He mars some of his best passages by the introduction of seraphs and Psyches and eidolons and other needless things. His heroines always have a beauty suggestive, to the modern reader, of the tubercle bacillus; his heroes are high-born misanthropes; his surroundings are tarns and castles and perishing domains. In a word, though not of the world, he could not wholly escape its influence;for these things were reckoned in Poe's time the indispensables of art. They had a number of queer hallucinations in those days, when you stop to think of it. They even imagined that Fenimore Cooper wrote English, and that William Gilmore Sims [[Simms]] produced literature.

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To many people, Poe is the poet of a single poem, “The Raven.” His really great verses, indeed, are remarkably few; but I think there are several which surpass the rather artificial perfection of this the most famous of the list. “The Haunted Palace” has always seemed to me the foremost of Poe's poems, with “The Bells” a close second; and only after “The Conqueror Worm” and “The Sleeper” had received their due would I turn to the bird of ill omen, on the pallid bust of Pallas, just above the chamber door.

Poe defined poetry as the rhythmical creation of beauty; and he held himself rigorously to that standard. Measured by this test, he would be the greatest of American poets; with Keats and Tennyson and Shelley as his sole superiors in the language. But I do not think any one but Poe ever seriously accepted that definition. It measures “Kublai Khan” perfectly; and “The Lotus Eaters,” and the “Ode to [page 79:] a Nightingale,” and most of “Prometheus Unbound.” But will any one pretend that it can be stretched to cover “Childe Harold,” or that it even hints at the philosophy and insight and melody and majesty that make up “Othello” and “Macbeth”? Yet, faulty as was the definition, one cannot help wishing it had found a wider acceptance. If Browning had been convinced that poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty, what quarrels and headaches and jawaches we should have been spared! It would have helped still more if some other missionary could have made Browning believe that poetry is the rhythmical expression of sense.

Poetry, I take it, is the articulate language of the emotions; as music is their inarticulate language. Doubtless this, too, is a faulty definition; but it is better than none. The emotion may be the love of sheer beauty, as with Keats and Poe. It may be the love of intense action, as with Scott; or of struggle, as with Byron; or of masterful power, as with Kipling. It may be the fiery complex of loves and hates which we find in Shelley; or the greater, calmer, and more ordered complexity of Shakespeare. It may ask — and seek to answer — the question of the ages, as does Job; or tingle us with its daring defiance, as does Omar Khayyam-Fitzgerald. So long as the emotion gives the key-note and moulds the style of the work, that work is poetry. Poe touched but one string of the world harp; and that only to melodies of the churchyard. He was a musician's poet; his faults and virtues are the faults and virtues of music; as witness his over-use of the refrain. To me, he is more like Chopin than like any man of letters whatsoever. But within his narrow range Poe was technical master of his art. He never wrote a poem to compare with “Sir Launfal”; but he would have starved sooner than send forth lines like “Earth gets its price for what earth gives us,” or “Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold” — lines that splutter and sizzle like coffee spilled on a camp-fire.

And this technical mastery is yet more in evidence in the best of his short stories. The flawless literary workmanship, the balanced sentences which somehow are never monotonous, the perfect unity of plan and singleness of effect which are shown in a dozen of Poe's tales have never been surpassed. They may deal with utter impossibilities — but you never feel this while reading them. The intense horror never goes far enough to produce the revulsion of disbelief, the suggestion is always kept a suggestion; and when you reach the climax of “Ligeia” or “The Tell-tale Heart,” you feel that you have been an eye-witness to the terrors set forth. The only time Poe scores a failure is when he tries to be humorous; and then he scores very bad failures indeed. Humor implies sympathy with one's fellows, and that quality was very [page 80:] nearly left out of Poe's make-up. He despised most of his contemporaries, and was totally indifferent to the rest. The only persons he ever loved were his cousin-wife and himself; and the second-named passion began earlier and lasted longer than the first.

Leaving out the abortive “grotesques,” Poe's tales, like ancient Gaul, may be divided into three parts. There are those which for want of a better word we must call the romances: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “Ligeia,” and many others. There are the studies of monomania: as “The Tell-tale Heart” and “The Black Cat.” There are the stories with a scientific basis: as “The Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Gold-bug,” and the three detective stories. These last have been the subject of many acrid and amusing debates. It is charged that Conan Doyle modelled Sherlock Holmes on the lines of Poe's Frenchman, Dupin; and that the whole spring of the tales whereof the cocaine-using Londoner is the hero may be found in Poe. I believe the charge to be equally true and unimportant. If one does pleasing work in an acceptable fashion, why should it be counted a reproach that he learned his trade under a competent workman? To my mind, Poe has few greater claims on modern gratitude than that of being literary grandfather to “The Five Orange Pips,” “The Priory School,” “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” and “The Second Stain.” I do not include “The Dancing Men.” For this particular tale to be found in the possession of one who had read “The Gold-bug” seems less a case of inheritance than of larceny.

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The studies in monomania have never, I think, been equalled; not even by Maupassant. That bit in “The Tell-tale Heart” which describes the long terror of the old man sitting up in bed, trying to persuade himself that the noise he had heard was not at his chamber door, is one of the most fiendishly perfect things in literature. But I believe that Poe reached the climax of his powers in his romances. “The Pit and the Pendulum” alone would have made the reputation of a lesser author; the weird yet ordered horror of that tale haunted my boyhood dreams for months. Yet if I could save but one of Poe's works from destruction, that one would be “The Fall of the House of Usher.” That is a tale as near to absolute perfection of its kind as human wit can either perform or appreciate. Study it over and over, pick it to pieces in anywise you will; the wonderful mastery is still there, showing ever brighter the longer you look. By the way, Debussy is writing a symphonic poem on that theme. It should be well worth hearing.

And as if to burn redder the mark on this man's brow which sets a When Pheebe Looks [page 81:] him apart, these tales in which his genius rises highest are likewise those in which his craft of ghastly dissection outstrips anything of the kind in literature. Other men have written tales of horror. Kipling, in his “ End of the Passage,” takes you through a house of chilly terror as real and fearsome as anything ever fashioned by Poe. But somehow Kipling never lets you forget that just without the enchanted walls is a world where the sun is shining, and where men and women are working and making love in healthy human fashion. Poe gives you no such relief. In his tales of horror the charnel house does not merely dominate the landscape; it is the landscape. The ghoulishness of Kipling is incidental; that of Poe is inherent.

A great, a wonderful, a morbid genius; that, at the last as at the first, is one's judgment of Poe. We may mourn for his wasted life, but not for his early death. The best of him was dead already. The flawless taste had failed; the unrivalled craftsmanship was lost; the jingle of “For Annie” had followed the melody of “The Haunted Palace”; “The House of Usher “ had given place to the transcendental folly of “Eureka.” Whiskey and opium had done their perfect work. The evil things in robes of sorrow had finished the ruin of the monarch's high estate; it was but the husk of greatness that was borne to the hospital on that night in the lonesome October of sixty years agone. The symphony was over; it was time for the leader to go. It was best, it was kindest, that the mumming should cease with the music, that the score of the haunting harmonies be intrusted to the world's safe keeping; and the rest be left to grow