Text: Louis J. Block, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Sewanee Review (Sewanee, TN), vol. XVIII, no. 4, October 1910, pp. 385-403

[page 385:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE

The literature of this country is not very old, only a century or so, and in the life of a literature that is a mere trifle. The great literature of the mother country was to us both a help and a hindrance; apparently we could have made a start where we had left her, and side by side with her home-staying sons could have carried on the traditions and proceeded to the next expression of national life and thought; in reality, however, we found that we could do nothing of the kind.

The wolf had to be kept from the door, both metaphorically and literally; the severe winters had to be made tolerable and even profitable; the savage had to be met and either overcome or placated. The revolving years brought new hopes and new ideals; as the land began to respond with plenteous harvests and the villages grew to brave and hospitable cities, the denizens of the rising republic found that an inner alienation from the maternal consciousness had appeared like a strange and portentous sun upon their intellectual horizon.

Moreover, the days which had been more or less silent and inarticulate were not found effectless; the tongue had grown inelastic and the speech had become less spontaneous and vigorous. Somehow, also, the things which the motherland was doing, though not devoid of fascination and certainly deserving of admiration, were after all not exactly the kind of effort which appealed strongly to the young and awakened generation, In the mind of the daughter there had occurred a remarkable concentration of interests which made much that the motherland undertook [page 386:] somewhat foreign and even grotesque. The narrowness which was consequent upon a life devoted to quite material concerns and far removed from the influence of the academic spirit gained perhaps in depth and strength what it lost by the absence of divergent and alluring claims in various radiating directions. There may be found a certain goodness in provinciality of tastes and labors.

After all, it does not seem to take so very long to make a new type of manhood, and to introduce into the world-series a new scheme of nationality which contains within itself those elements of original effort which cannot find fair and free play in the conditions at a given time in the ascendency. The history of the United States is the history of a constant succession of revolutions, and with us the price of liberty has been the unceasing and sleepless vigilance, without which no great results can ever be achieved.

The new man appeared and made himself felt by the assertiveness which was by no means his least salient characteristic. He found new worlds to conquer, and he had the courage and the self-confidence which mean victory. He had the high sense of responsibility which came to him from his Puritan antecedents, and he had the widening outlook which demanded free play for every form of human belief and opinion. He asked for himself unlimited opportunity of growth and development and he was ready to concede the same privilege to others. He came in contact with all sorts and manners of men, and the distinctions which have been so persistent and so terrible in the past had small validity for him. Opportunity, largeness of effort, recognition, and an open road, security and equality of achievement, were to be the inalienable rights of all men.

But this new man had to arise into a distinct consciousness of himself, into a real understanding of the part he was to play in the life-drama proceeding around him, and at least into an apprehension of the significance of that life-drama in its varied aspects. He was to become aware of issues and consequences larger than his own limited experience, and feel that he was a participant in activities that meant success or failure to a whole nation. He was to be the mouthpiece of ideas that were urgent forces in the [page 387:] great world about him, and he held somehow in his grasp a consummation that was of grave importance to mankind. He had a work and a message that he perceived to be either latent or evident in the minds and hearts of the men and women of his nation and period, and he therefore had something decisive to say, to which all others would gladly listen. And so our literature began.

The literature of this country may, perhaps, be said to have had three stages, not counting in the literary activity, such as it is, which is now asking the attention of readers. The material of the earliest stage was serious and stately to the last degree; there was nothing light or frivolous about it; the men who had time to write felt strongly the burden of this visible world, and expressed it with full apprehension of its magnitude and enormity. Theology presented in their writings some of its gloomier aspects, history felt the full responsibility of its need of accuracy, unvarnished and unadorned, and poetry found place only for the destiny of nations and the ways of God with Man. Lowell has said that Wigglesworth's Day of Doom was the “solace of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by which it was conned, perhaps adding a livelier relish to its premonitions of eternal combustion.” There were lighter efforts here and there; there was the attainment of beauty and eloquence in many places; but the preponderating tone and labor were serious, profound, and utilitarian.

The Dutchman has not usually been credited with an overplus of lightsomeness and imagination; nevertheless he has not held to his opinions with too great strenuousness, and he has an abundance of cheerfulness to spread over the events of his life and career. And so in the Middle States a break could be made from the solemnity which overhung the skies of Puritanic New England. The heroic career of the hunter and the scout could be studied at first hand, and the essential humanity of the Indian rise into the knowledge of the onlooker and student.

Also the old world across the sea might now be studied with the mind of the new. The story-teller might find subjects near at hand, and the poet begin again his celebration of laughter and tears. And so Cooper and Irving and Halleck and Brockden [page 388:] Brown and the wits of Hartford could bring once more into the domain of literature the subjects and treatment which had before been conspicuously absent.

But all that, on the whole, was superficial; a deeper consciousness and a more real significance had to be reached. The national life and thought were coming into a comprehension of themselves in the premonitions of a great struggle near at hand. The schism which has had so immense an influence on art and life was clearly discerned; the two great antagonists were marshalling their vast array; the two social systems, with their differences, opposite implications and activities, were growing gradually aware that one or the other must be made subordinate. The vision of a single great state, inclusive of many and varied lesser political constituencies relatively independent and yet freely subordinated to an encompassing and invigorating whole, rose distinct and splendid above the horizon; a feeble and easily shattered league of warring nationalities recalled all the dark trials and somber eventualities of the past, from which the beneficent ocean separated the republic.

And so the third and great stage of literature comes to pass as an inevitable historic process. It has all the marks of real greatness. It is not a local movement, it is genuinely and really national; it is the expression of the deepest thought of the period; it is wide enough to cover the whole field of thought both in literature and politics; it connects itself with the best that is going on in other lands. The men who engage in it are not merely littérateurs, they are remarkable in various forms of activity; they are teachers, and ministers, and doctors, and diplomats, and statesmen, and citizens; they recognize fully that literature is a form of life; and it becomes ennobled the more the best aspirations and the highest ideals of mankind use its alluring forms for their revelation and investiture.

I am quite sure that the illustrious figures of that period will lose nothing by comparison with the great men of other lands. It has become somewhat the fashion to disparage them and to find them lacking in this or that excellence which is assumed to be characteristic of the work of to-day, but the demonstration has usually been made from some special point of view of [page 389:] the critic, and the object of the criticism has not fitted well into a narrow and abstract theory. All literatures must be studied as a part of the great historic process of the world, and the just understanding of a man or a system emerges when the relation to that encompassing process is discovered.

The new aspects of nature in a new land found the eyes which could appreciate them and the voice which could express them; the serenity and dignity of Bryant culminate in a restudy of Homer which in good measure has the freshness and vivacity of the original. The student desirous of nourishing himself at all literatures has no more engaging and unsparingly energetic guide than Longfellow. When we now read of him as the second-rate lyrist of the domestic and the commonplace, we need only remember his wide and extensive scholarship, his translation of Dante, his large and finely-conceived Christus, and the amazing tour de force of the Hiawatha, in which the nature-epic of a people capable only of short and fragmentary bits of poetry, is made into a rounded whole, comparable to the Finnish Kalevala. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the fine and subtle doctor, with a curious fancy for the occult and subterranean sections of the human consciousness, indulges in the lambent play of his wit and his pathos about all the great themes that were agitating the minds of men. And Lowell, the gifted and the versatile, — humorist, diplomat, democrat, wonderful in prose and in verse, — has written for us the great odes with subjects noble and gracious, expressing the memories of the great past, the depths of the grandest of friendships, the sacrifice of youth for the love of country. The moral indignation of Whittier has lost nothing of its lightning flash, and our later story-tellers, after all, find themselves put to sorry straits to surpass Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance. We still sit at the feet of Emerson, the liberator and the prophet, whose poetry has a ring above that of Wordsworth, and whose prose is the highest, completest expression yet given of the American Idea in all its heights and depths, in its wealth and consistency, in its freedom from the conventional, in its acquaintance with the entire field of thought, in its wonderful mingling of theory and practice.

It was quite inevitable that in a movement of this kind there should appear a man who would find himself fascinated by the form itself of his art, who would care little, — perhaps thereby narrowing and partially defeating himself, — for the content and substance of such message as he had to bring, but supremely for the manner in which he was to present it; who would have a remarkable love for the technique of his work; and who would carry finish and artistry to a point not readily attained by his compeers. It is quite extraordinary what marvellous effects can be produced by the player through the varied and successful manipulation of the exterior form of expression with which he has to deal. He has at his disposal an infinitude of resources, and he can build from them fantastic pagodas or impressive temples, quite sundered from attempts to fill these with an ideal content. He is the artist simply, and he will in his best moments make combinations which will have perennial charm and allurement.

Now Edgar Allan Poe seems to have been preeminently a man of this type. He had small interest in the great questions which disturbed the minds of his fellow-workers in the field of literature. The events which were taking place about him, and which held consequences so far-reaching and momentous, made no abiding impression on him. The creation of a haunting melody or of an overpowering effect in prose gave him a task to which he was temperamentally inclined and to which he was willing to devote arduous and consecutive labor. It is a singular mistake to make about him that he was irregular and erratic in his work; he was really an indefatigable worker, and no man ever lavished upon his writings a more consistent or patient devotion, correcting and refining until the perfect and enchased gold reflected every vagrant play of the sunshine.

He had a trying time of it in his life, and he seems still to be pursued by the furies who fastened upon his memory soon after his unfortunate taking off. Griswold's strange and unparalleled biography, which assailed him with every manner of malicious misrepresentation, appears still to have force enough in its dead remains to subject him to a kind of criticism seldom attempted in the case of other men. He was by no means [page 391:] the only member of the genus irritabile who allowed the intoxicating bowl occasionally to rob him of his wits, but in the case of the others the fault has long since been condoned, and the work they have left has been appraised irrespective of their own shortcomings. No one has been more unfortunate than Poe in those who have attempted to tell his story to mankind and set him right before a world which should appreciate him at his real worth. The refutation of misrepresentations has obscured the effort to relate his simple annals, and one of his latest and in some respects one of his best biographers, Mr. George E. Woodberry, makes a final disposition of him that is certainly disheartening. It is surely time now to relegate all that misery into the subordinate place to which it belongs, and to get a view of the man as he was in the exercise of his remarkable powers and in his assured successes. One tells the life of a great man very ill if one lays the chief stress upon his aberrations and leaves only half-heartedly touched the things which legitimately give him a place in the memory of his fellows.

Even the partisans and defenders of Poe have likewise done him serious injury. They have mistakenly endeavored to give him a place which it was quite impossible for him to occupy. Too much and too extravagant praise is quite as unfortunate as malevolent misrepresentation; in fact, the latter occasions a certain rebound, while the former leads to an attempted readjustment, which generally goes too far in the undesirable direction. Both have occurred in the case of Poe. The French symbolist poet, Mallarmé, whose literary output is very small, gave up his time and attention to the translation of The Raven; he calls Poe one of the greatest men of genius of all time; Baudelaire made a translation of the tales, on which he expended the best of his art, and wrote an appreciation which Victor Hugo would not have disdained; Mr. Edmund Gosse in England speaks of him as the first of American writers, a verdict which leaves us wondering exactly what is meant by a great writer, and how far the critic is familiar with books produced on this side of the dividing ocean.

Then again Poe is a very unequal writer. His manner of life precluded the quiet and assured creation of works which should [page 392:] each represent the best that could be made of the material employed. It is here no doubt that a man's life plays into and around the task he has set for himself. The sad sincerity, which Emerson notes as one of the indispensable conditions of the results achieved by the masters, was wholly out of the question for Poe. Dependent upon his pen for his daily bread, apparently finding it difficult to content himself with any position very long, anxious, on the one hand, to do something which he could honestly call good, and forced, on the other, to get his matter.into the hands of the printer as quickly as possible, he fell back on the doubtful resource of writing for the moment, and then of subjecting his piece to endless subsequent criticism and alteration, in the hope of attaining that perfection of form which was to him infinitely desirable. The result, of course, is a body of writings which requires winnowing and selection, which demands a large amount of rejection, but which will, I am sure, present a number of ultimates quite the best of their kind.

Moreover, he had the foible of omniscience. Not satisfied with cultivating the field that was assuredly his own, he tried his hand at all sorts of devices and expedients. The whole course of history lay outspread before him, and he made forays in many and various directions. Egypt and Venice and Hungary and Greece, the mountains of the moon, the bottom of the sea, the Inferno, the occult, the subliminal, the paradises of a misunderstood Swedenborgianism, all called to him from the vasty deep, and he attempted responses. A great deal of it was not his métier at all, and the results have not been altogether conducive to the elevation and purification of his fame. This again makes it necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff, and another Matthew Arnold, who will do for Poe what Arnold did for his forerunner and master, Wordsworth, is now to be discovered

Poe has written a tale called The Imp of the Perverse, in which he makes a good deal of the way an entirely unaccountable impulse takes possession of us, prompting us to do precisely the opposite of what our reason advises, and misleading us into an impassable jungle of follies and misdeeds from which extrication, in his tragic putting of his theme, is out of the question. The conception [page 393:] is not to be taken too seriously and it is altogether improbable that Poe meant it other than as one of his tours de force, which have afforded his critics, and even his well-wishers, so much ground for objection. Mr. Swinburne somewhere speaks of the “subtle humor of scandalising,” and he has made considerable practice of the art in his vigorous assaults upon the arch-enemy, Philistinism. He has not, any more than Poe, escaped the indignation, righteous and invidious, of the precisian and the upholder of the conventional. Both men have been accused of insincerity and premeditated mystification, just as Browning has been charged with intentional obscurity. In his Philosophy of Composition, Poe has been said to have conjured up out of the depths of his imagination the way and method in which The Raven was composed. In effect, Poe is only setting up a strong plea for unity of tone and concurrence of all elements in the climacteric point of the composition, and he shows how he sought this end in his poem. The lesson is a good one in the art, and the genuineness of Poe in his best lyrics and tales need no longer stand on guard in defence of itself.

In the best of his stories he attains a simplicity and a dignity which make them models of their kind. It is not a difficult thing to extract from him here and there specimens of a furious extravagance, against which the charge of mere scene painting might readily be made. His tendency, however, was in reality away from the wild splashing of his canvas with color, and the gray atmosphere of the morning, the cool freshness of the early spring, were more consonant with his temperament than the fervors of June or the rich and gorgeous hues of a New England fall. The tenor of his mind was more toward music than painting, and the Muse who presided over the particular peak of Parnassus which he called his own, and where, listening to the echoes, he heard his poems, and then translated them into earthly speech, was a sober-vested virgin who did not cultivate exclusively the roses and raptures of passion. Indeed, throughout his poems and stories there is a singular reticence, a marked restraint and self-governance, which one would hardly expect in a man of his bringing up and antecedents. [page 394:]

The minute delineation of humanity which is characteristic of the fiction of to-day had not dawned upon Poe, although he was the forerunner of the vague and mysterious suggestiveness which belongs to certain schools of recent poetry, and some of these have recognized their obligation to him. Yet it is to be remembered that he was able to give to some of his creations the permanence which makes them a part of the common speech and consciousness of men. He had quite enough humanity to delineate certain problems of the moral life in such form as to gain for his presentations general currency and transmission to successive generations. A Dickens or a George Eliot peoples the world around him with new and vivid personages who ingratiate themselves into the endless regard of mankind, and who are endowed and re-endowed with life by series after series of readers. Poe worked in a different sphere and with different material; he dealt with moods, with aspirations, with obsessions; he was not always on the hunt for the bizarre and the abnormal; and in his real and lasting successes he gives a large typical delineation of a genuine experience which is human and significant and impressive. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has passed into a proverb. The character goes straight back to Poe, and is no whit more germane to life and thought than Poe's works, which are responsible for his coming into existence. The thorough working out of an experience, vital and profound, may be just as human as the creation of a Tito Melema or a David Copperfield, and it has again and again proved a lasting addition to the precious things which mankind puts into its treasure house.

In his youth Poe fell under the influence of Byron, and the effects of this study remained with him always. The latter's Manfred has some inexplicable reason for complete dissatisfaction with life; he is put under the enigmatical dominion of a strange imprecation; he communes with spirits and witches, and finally makes a pilgrimage to the underworld in the pursuit of a phantom who appears in a woman's form and dooms him to eternal remorse and isolation. The story made an indelible impression on Poe, and it appears and re-appears in his productions. That he should be attracted to Coleridge was quite inevitable, [page 395:] and in his critical writings he seems to have followed in Coleridge's footsteps. The philosophy, however, which Coleridge had brought from Germany was not much to his liking; it savored altogether too greatly of the transcendentalism then at its height in New England, which was Poe's abhorrence, and on which he expended his wit and satire. He can hardly be said to have had any sort of comprehension of it, and his amazing abuse of Carlyle displays some of his own singular limitations. His indebtedness to Moore also is considerable, and the luxurious scenery of Lalla Rookh found a ready response in him. His relations to the literature of France and Germany are not easily traceable, although the weird stories of Hoffman are not unlike his own, and his prose poem, Eureka, seems to hark back to some French writers of the skeptical and materialistic school. He reached his literary independence quite early, however, and his distinctive note and quality are soon recognizable.

The story of his life can be briefly told. The Poe family were of some distinction, and the father was regarded as making a mésalliance when he married an actress. Mr. Barnett Wendell attributes some of the poet's characteristics to the roving habits of his parents, but they died when he was two years old, and the boy was then adopted into the family of Mr. Allan, a man of wealth in Richmond. The same writer might perhaps have found an equally strong and veracious tendency in the direction of Puritanism, since Poe was born in the city of Boston. He was taken to England, and his school days there were a great success and left in his mind some strong and agreeable memories. On his return to this country he was placed in the University of Virginia, which recently held celebrations in his honor, but his career here can hardly be called a satisfactory one. While at the University he published his first volume of poems, which makes plain how assiduously he had read his Byron and his Moore. The book was received with no high degree of appreciation, but it showed, certainly in a few poems, that a writer had appeared who was to be reckoned with. He entered West Point, but the life was not such as to comport with his restless and freedom-loving disposition, and he left it under a cloud. The Allans threw him on his own resources, and his literary career began. He [page 396:] married a cousin, and his life with her and her mother is an exhibition of constancy and nobility in complete contrast with the usual representations of him. He lived now in Richmond, now in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, engaged in all sorts of work for periodicals and magazines, and earning a scant and precarious livelihood. He published his stories under the name of Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque. During his stay in Philadelphia, he held the editorship of Graham's Magazine, an important and remunerative position, but this, like other places, he lost in some unaccountable way. The publication of The Raven made him famous on two continents. While they were living at Fordham, near New York, his wife died, and a few years later, on returning from Richmond, where he had been cordially received by his friends, he came to his strange and unhappy death in Baltimore. He was yet a young man, in the full possession of his powers, and should have had his best work all before him.

This is all in marked contrast with the habits and lives of his contemporaries. He had friends, advisers, opportunities. He was indefatigable, ardent, and a littérateur to his finger tips; he has left a considerable body of work; but a life so unsettled, so irregular, so subject to vicissitude, has made its impression upon his productions. In an older and more sympathetic community, things might, perhaps, have been different; he had the excellences and the defects of his qualities; he was par excellence the artist, dominated by his temperament, and living in an atmosphere not wholly congenial to a man of his type.

His works may be divided into three sections: Critiques, Stories, and Poems. His prevalent tone of mind had much to do with the success of his endeavors. He wrote some things because his natural idiosyncracy led to such composition; he wrote others because of an intellectual ambition to make his mark in a field to which he was less accustomed; and finally, he wrote others in which his extraordinary endowment united with his highest effort; and the result was a work which ranks among the best of its kind, which the world has accepted, and which seems assured of a long life and a steady admiration.

Among his critiques there is his lecture on The Poetic [page 397:] Principle, in which he unfolds his theory of poetry. He thinks that a long poem is a contradiction in terms, and he asserts that such a poem would never again be written. His prediction has hardly been verified. He thought that a poem longer than one hundred lines has no reason for its existence. Of course, he left out of his theory a consideration of the essential function of the memory. To show that the conception will hardly bear close inspection, we have only to reflect with what increased interest we return to our reading, how the characters and incidents become charged with new meaning as we grow more and more into them, and how the complication intensifies in its impression as we see it more deeply. He says in his lecture: “I would define in brief the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the Intellect or the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever with Duty or with Truth.” Again, he makes this statement in his Philosophy of Composition: “The pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the Beautiful. When indeed men speak of beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect. They refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of Soul — not of intellect or heart — which is experienced in consequence of contemplating the Beautiful. Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem. Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable to a certain extent in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.”

This idea of poetry he carried out in his practice. It seems a narrow and untenable notion, applicable perhaps to the lyric, but only to simpler manifestations thereof: nevertheless it has had a notable career. It was a starting point for the lyric school in France, and reaches its extreme in a poet like Verlaine; it had a decided influence upon the English Pre-Raphaelites, and its echoes can be found in Morris and Swinburne and Rossetti. It really makes the artistic form the main thing, and is indifferent to the content. It makes all poetry vague and hazy and enigmatic. In a way, it emphasizes the musical side of the poem, and leaves its meaning as a subordinate consideration. It makes an abstraction of the emotional reaction accompanying every experience, and attempts to deal exclusively with that. It divorces literature from life and immerses one in a dreamland, where there are only color and darkness and, according to Shelley, the pleasure hid in melancholy gloom. Both in his stories and his poems, Poe exemplified his thought by his work, and he stands here as the forerunner of a host of men who have bettered his instruction. His theory of poetry accounts in some measure for his vogue on the continent of Europe and for the extravagant praise given him by European critics. We may consider the theory as a limiting of the significance of poetry to a single one of its elements, as the forcing of a mere abstraction into a prominence which does not belong to it, into giving to the emotional reaction a place which it could never claim for itself in this field; but it cannot be denied that the view has had a following, and that Poe is distinctly one of its leaders and successful practitioners.

He had a natural bent toward metaphysics, and he has left a singular composition which he calls Eureka. In his introduction to this he calls it a prose poem. The ascription is of course a contradiction of the theory announced in the Poetic Principle, for there he states that prose is the language of truth, and poetry the language of feeling, and inasmuch as the two could only be brought together by making one of them wholly incidental to the other, the Eureka could merely be regarded as having too much truth for a poem or too much feeling for a philosophical discourse. Moreover, to call it a poem is to give up its right to be philosophy. For whatever philosophy may be, — whether it is considered as a temporary synthesis of phenomena, regulated by a logical system which is merely a method of thinking for the moment, to be overthrown by the next unaccountable upheaval of the Unknowable that encircles everything; or whether it is supposed to be a stream of philosophical reactions not capable of being brought into any sort of unity, but disclosing everywhere depths of a remarkable character, and apparently leading to regions beyond, in which [page 399:] we may believe, if we like, for nobody can prevent us from doing so; or whether we regard it as a series of accidental discoveries to which the activities of life give a more or less accidental confirmation, the whole under no circumstances allowing of established and permanent combination; or whether it indeed is a possible erecting of man beyond his purely individual self into the realm of certain and universal truth, — in whatever way we may look at it, philosophy is assuredly not poetry. The Eureka is a mixture of mathematical and idealistic speculations which brings together in one view the varied activities of Poe, and it thus throws light on his intellectual life and artistic practice.

In his Rationale of Verse he stands on surer ground, and it is a subject for which he had every natural aptitude There is no indication that Poe was in any way a musician; he most assuredly should have been; and music might have helped him over many of the difficulties that he encountered. It was left to another Southern poet not unlike Poe in his tendencies, who was an accomplished musician, — I mean Sidney Lanier, — to take up the principles of versification and build them into the most satisfactory and consistent theory that has so far been advanced by any one, but to Poe belongs the honor of first having announced it, and having in the main developed it in its more important aspects.

Certainly the essay on versification is at high-water mark, and has brought order and consistency into a subject which from time immemorial has been a weltering chaos of contradictory rules and precepts. In making versification a section in the theory of music, the right point of view seems to have been attained, and a rationality at once showed itself which had never been found there before.

Poe was a professional critic, and did a great deal of reviewing for the periodicals with which he was connected. He had in him the making of a great critic. The narrowness of his artistic theories kept him within certain limitations, and in the main, his attention seems to have been given to technical matters. He also had the fashion of seeking out salient points, which led to a neglect of the consideration of the whole. But he had the unconquerable courage of his opinions, he had a relentless hostility to charlatanry and pretensions, he was indifferent to popular noise and clamor, and he had the faculty of genuine discernment which gave recognition of the true thing when it rose above the horizon.

In his tales he began with the story of adventure. While he was in Baltimore, in one of his crises of keeping the wolf from the door, he won a prize for his story called A MS. Found in a Bottle. He wrote quite early also his nearest approach to a full-fledged novel, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. These are tales of wild adventure reaching a morbid horror of invention which removes them from general sympathy or appreciation. Then follows the long series of stories which circumnavigate the globe, predict aerial conquest, sailing up to the moon, and descend through the maelstrom into the bowels of the earth. He was deficient in the sense of humor; indeed, one may say, perhaps, that he might have overcome some of the disasters of his life if he could have received them with a wholesome smile; his attempts at the humorous are rather sardonic and grotesque; a great many of these tales leave now a mixed impression; but he reaches the higher levels in some of them. The Ligeia, which he regarded as especially imaginative, is a gloomy story of a love that comes back from beyond the veil in a fashion repellant to most readers; but The Fall of the House of Usher, melancholy and tragic as it is, with the wonderful poem imbedded in it, and William Wilson, the prose rendering of The Raven, show what he could accomplish when he was allowed untrammeled exercise of his powers. In William Wilson he struck the note which we find again and again in his poems. Here is a man who has wasted his life and opportunities, who has not succeeded in the task he has set for himself, and on whom descend death and remorse and irretrievable ruin. One is at once reminded of Byron's Manfred. For The Gold Bug and the Murders in the Rue Morgue the admirers of subtle reasoning will have a sufficient liking. M. Dupin is the king of detectives and M. Valdemar certainly has extraordinary revelations to make.

His early poems show distinctly the models whom he placed [page 401:] before himself. The Tamerlane is Byron, and the Al Aaraaf is Moore. Then he made his usual attempts in various directions. He began a play which he had the good sense to leave unfinished. He did more or less conventional work in the way of sonnets and commonplace lyrics and blank verse. Then there came upon him his theory of poetry which he followed to the end of his days, and out of which arose the poems that make so large a share of his claim to remembrance, and which have occasioned so great a stir in literary history. They are the vague and melodious expression of dominant moods; they are like the music of a dream; they are purposely left mysterious and strange; and most of them play around the theme of a man different from his fellows, having committed the — unpardonable sin, however that may be conceived, — finding himself wandering through unknown regions out of space and time, and having lost by death or misconduct all that he ever held dear. The Raven and Ulalume are characteristic expressions of the mood, and probably no one who has made similar attempts has ever gone beyond these. Among his other poems, Annabel Lee, and the three lyrics set like gems in the three stories are finished productions. Israfel is perhaps his best achievement; The Bells, The Sleeper, The City in the Sea, could belong to no other master.

The following description of the poet a few months before his death is given on the authority of Mrs. Weiss, at whose father's house the poet was a guest in the last days at Richmond: “Erect in stature, cold, impassive, almost haughty in manner, soberly and fastidiously clad in black, to a stranger's eye he wore a look of distinction rather than beauty; on nearer approach one was more struck by the strongly marked head, with the broad brow, the black curly hair brushed back, the pallid, careworn, and, in repose, the somewhat haggard features; but the physical fascination of the man was felt at last to be in his eyes, jet black with a steel gray iris, clear as crystal, restless, ever expanding and contracting as, responsive with intelligence and emotion, they bent their full, open, steady, unshrinking gaze from under the long black lashes that shaded them. To men he was cordial, to women he showed a deference that seems [page 402:] always to have suggested a reminiscence of chivalry, and in society with the young he forgot his melancholy.”

Willis says of him: “Some four or five years since, when editing a daily paper in this city, Mr. Poe was employed by us for several months as critic and sub-editor. Time went on and he was invariably punctual and industrious. With his pale, beautiful and intellectual face as a reminder of what genius was in him, it was impossible of course not to treat him always with deference. With the prospect of taking the lead in another periodical, he at last voluntarily gave up his employment with us, and through all this considerable period we have seen but one presentment of the man — a quiet, patient, industrious and most gentlemanly person, commanding the utmost respect and good feeling by his unvarying deportment and ability.”

The image of the poet comes up before us, reserved, sensitive, exacting, and not readily entering into relations with his fellow men. He needed sympathy, friendship, and understanding; he wanted to do a kind of work which was not easily appreciated by his contemporaries; it was a strenuous and battling time; the antislavery agitation was in progress; the great orators in Congress were pitted against each other; for all that Poe had small regard. He was the littérateur and artist; he wanted to do the most perfect work possible; he had been bitten by the gadfly of perfection, and the one that has been so inoculated must follow the phantasm over land and sea. We may say, no doubt, that the perfection he sought was an insubstanial perfection; that the only perfection worth while is the noblest synthesis of life attainable by man, and clothed in a form which is not a mere externality, but a complete manifestation of that synthesis in every line and point and articulation; but to have announced the principle of perfection was in itself a great service and achievement, and to have given consummate examples of the principle was a work decidedly worth while. The clouds about him have now all been lifted; after all, he fought a good fight and he has come into his reward; a recent French writer, M. Jules Claretie, places him with the great idealists of all times; that may be excessive and probably mistaken praise, but the pendulum is bound to swing in the reverse direction. The main [page 403:] facts of his life are all known, and they have no more than the ordinary importance; they need to be given that subordination which they deserve, and we have no more reason to exaggerate them than we have to exaggerate certain facts in the life of De Quincey or Coleridge; we need to study his writings, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and record him aright to posterity. We need not pay attention to the statement of a brilliant Englishman, Mr. George Bernard Shaw, who says we have had only two literary men, Poe and Walt Whitman; that seems like saying that England has had only two literary men, Robert Louis Stevenson and William Blake. We shall give him the place among the immortals which belongs to him. We shall see him freed from the anguish and torment which were his portion while here, arising erect from them in noble and perennial youth, a figure really austere and perhaps attenuated, but bearing in his hands some gifts, exquisitely fine and finished, which are indeed the very best of their kind. We repeat for him the words of his own hymn:

LOUIS J. BLOCK

Chicago, Illinois.