Text: Glen Levin Swiggett, “A Plea for Poe,” Poet-Lore (Boston, MA), vol. XIII, ns. vol. V, no. 3, July-Sept 1901, pp. 379-386

[page 379:]

ALL lovers of genuine literature have admired the courage and appreciated gratefully the sympathy of the Poe Memorial Association in their beautiful tribute to America's greatest genius in poetics. Zolnay's bust of Edgar Allan Poe in its classic poise will symbolize forever the vague whisperings of eternal beauty which catch and hold our ear in the sensuously beautiful verse of Poe. To me, as I look upon its proof, there is revealed the same hidden force of sovereign strength and haunting grace that one finds in M. Faguiére's copy of Balzac. Positive criticism of Poe will look always for these two dominant characteristics in any proof of him, plastic or pictorial; for the informing principle of his verse is naught save the directing and marshalling of the wild and haunting romantic memories of his temperament by the classic sprite whose “ glory was Greece “ and whose “grandeur was Rome.” It was not Poe's life that made his poetry, but that intellectual cast of mind and richly endowed temperament, — a blend that shows itself only in an eminently great man of letters. [page 380:]

We cannot envy Virginia this honor, although the wish is father to the thought that it should have been done in a Northern city. Not that one would rob our Southern States of chivalry of an honor to their dead, but that the time was ripe for the setting aside of sectional variance in judging the real merits of this man. One recognizes that, for commercial purposes, geographical lines have been always, and perhaps always will be, tightly drawn, giving origin to a nation's several political parties, without whose honest clash no real progress is possible. But is this true in literature, whose appeal is to the abiding sense of beauty? Unquestionably, no! and therein lies the error of that dogged persistence of certain clans to close the eyes to the marvellous realm of ideal beauty in Poe's verse, vistas of which thrill us with ecstatic delight, the highest and ultimate standard of genuine poetry.

I do not care to quote from Poe's verse: it is not timely here. Suffice it to say that, conforming to the principles of his intellectually derived scheme of poetics, his verse, technically true to his poetics, and woven now under the spell of sunny Venus, now under that of Diana of the moonlight, has made its appeal to all souls that beat in unison with the weird throbs of the sighing nocturne or the plaintive roll of the elements of nature. Poe's life was blasted through his temerity in lifting the veil of Isis. Shall we say he lacked strength of character because he failed to live according to common standards after he stood in the presence of the Deity whose truth is revealed in the skies? Or, sadder yet, shall we judge the quality of his verse through standards of conduct? Certainly not! and yet that is exactly what we have been doing in this country, whether in magazine article or in high school and collegiate courses of American literature.

Strive how we may, we have no well-defined school of literary criticism in this country. Lacking this, we have no school of literature, although it was our opportunity with the advent of Poe's genius to go to school to him and learn the hidden art of verse-making, which has gained for him so wide and generous a following in England and parts of the Continent. [page 381:]

Save sporadic instances, the poets of America, eclectic as they are, lack that soul-piercing struggle of trying to realize the infinite in the domain of beauty. That does not argue that their muse is thin. Quite the contrary. Much of the charm of our verse lies in its eclecticism. The freedom of suggestion and form gives strength and beauty to much of our occasional verse. Poetry, however, to have the permanence of art, must submit to the laws of its being in their totality, and which are often deeper than the mere material laws of prosody. Our poets have failed to see this in Poe, and have left to Europe the pleasurable duty of following in his steps, creating thereby the architectonics which has reared a temple of poetics to enduring fame.

The query of Mr. Edmund Gosse in the Critic of a few years ago, why Poe was not honored in this country, together with his arraignment of our neglect of Poe, is so just that one feels it a pleasant duty to quote: “The omission of the name of Edgar Allan Poe from your list of ‘The Best Ten American Books’ is extraordinary and sinister. If I were an American, I should be inclined to call it disastrous. While every year sheds more lustre on the genius of Poe among the most. weighty critical authorities of England, of France, of Germany, of Italy, in his own country prejudice is still so rampant that he fails to secure a paltry twenty votes. . . . You must look to your own house, but it makes one wonder what is the standard of American style.”

As Mr. Gosse says, it is a question simply of prejudice and a standard of taste. No one will ever accuse the most generous nation in the world of niggardliness and stint of praise where its standards permit it to see a genius or a hero. Not only have the exceptional merits of our Admiral Dewey, who is now a public character, won for him just honor abroad, but in his native heath (if a sailor may be said to have one) he is the recipient of the untold sane and foolish praise of an impulsive populace. That we are not governed by the caprice of a mob in our recognition of him is shown by us in our praise for naval merit, whether of his contemporaries or those linked with him as stadia in our national progress [page 382:] on the seas. The statement is self-evident, and will be confirmed by every man who reads ashe runs. Can our failure, then, to see the real greatness in Poe be due to aught else save the ringing truth in the severe stricture of Mr. Gosse? In my opinion, it cannot be. Prejudice alone will account for the contempt, strong as that word may be, of many an American man of letters for Poe, although this root of evil in criticism may not be apparent in their dislike.

From a recent number of the Sewanee Review, where the writer commented at some length on the above citation from the Critic, I write as follows: “It is too recent yet to say to what extent Americans of taste, to whom Mr. Gosse appeals, have responded to his message. There are signs, however, of an awakened interest which we cannot mistake. Scarcely a number of our better literary magazines is now appearing without some direct or indirect reference to the chief poet of the South. The sad and unutterable feelings that play such havoc with one's ease of soul as one tries, with Poe, to apprehend the spirit of supernal loveliness, may be, as he says, limited to souls fittingly constituted. If this be true, there is as yet no danger of a Poe cult. The critical canons of healthy sentiment do not permit us to see poetic beauty unless it conform to their standards, which cannot be applied to men like Poe and Verlaine. The latter demand lovers and critics whose hearts will respond to the sheer beauty of their song. It is not necessary to respond in toto to the poet's mood; but there is a law of temperament stronger than the conventional canons of criticism that demands that he be loved in his way.”

We need poet-critics in judging the literary work of men like Poe; men who, though they may lack the divine-given power to create, possess in fair degree the ability equally divine of recognizing, in literarum caritate, genuine poetry. That we are not charitable in American letters must be the sole explanation of our inability to grasp the higher truth and greater beauty of Europe's Bohemian men of letters. We have looked too long upon our so-called New England school as leaders, and have, in consequence, [page 383:] associated right thinking with right living in the field of letters. Would that it were so! But, since it is not, must we, through our Puritanic standards, shut out those keen intellectual and soul delights which come from reading Goethe, Burns, Byron, Poe, Lenau, Verlaine, Mallarmé?

It were better, perhaps, if we banished all biographical reference to our modern men of letters in reading their prose or poetry, as the most of us do in the presence of the ancients. For how many a person of uncompromising attitude toward Poe has not stood in ecstasy before some of the masters in the European galleries, whose very blush would have rivalled the God-stolen glory of color which they were worshipping in rapturous awe if they but knew the secret of those lives interpreting Divinity in their pictures! For once these persons were ingenuous, thanks to their ignorance; and the adage is as pointed as ever. If one could see the possible bliss in reading Poe, out of his environment, all future reference to the frailty of his flesh would be forgotten; and, I am sure, we should add another great poet to our comparatively small list or at least we should make him the prince of minor poets.

It is true that we do not have the technical background necessary as yet to a full appreciation of Poe, Baudelaire, Swinburne, or the French Neo-Romanticists, notably Verlaine. Where poetry and its study, poetics, is not neglected entirely in America, Whittier and Wordsworth reign supreme as the world's greatest poets. This may account, in part, for the limited reception of Poe's ilk by the hoi polloi; but the inference is unfair toward our critics and men of letters, whether professionally engaged or otherwise. If there is to be a bone of contention, it is to the latter that it must be thrown. They must condemn Poe for failing to do what he professed, limited as that field may be; or, accepting, must give him the praise and love which Europe has sent after him into eternity. The very essence of his poetic principles, by a strange coincidence, in all justice demands this. “Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle,” he says, [page 384:] “by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of time, to obtain a portion of that loveliness whose very element, perhaps, appertains to eternity alone.’ And is not this what every soul, conscious of its mission, tries to do? The only difference between the even flow in literature and the few who stand out salient is that the latter have been able to see, and, seeing, have given form and content to these visions of no time and space that win our intellect and hold our emotions. This is the key to those subtle flashes that strike us so often, full in the face, on reading those mighty Titans, Victor Hugo and Rudyard Kipling, — with the former especially, whose theory of the grotesque in art is related so closely to that of Poe.

In the face of this it seems to me almost sacrilegious to accuse Poe, wantonly and with levity, of an inordinate love of the morbid. With Poe it was as with all men who read the riddle of the Sphinx, but not what the world seemed to Goethe or to Schiller when they wrote ‘Werther’ or ‘Die Rauber.’ There is a wide margin between sentimental soul depression and the buoyancy of delight in sadness. When terror becomes a “tremulous delight,” les frayeurs nocturnes are, like Hungarian rhapsodies, an infinite source of the sweets of sadness. The latter phrase may be called aptly a confessed principle of Poe, and has informed the present French school in their efforts to centralize the threefold aspirations of music, painting, and poetry.

In their desire to realize spiritual joy, M. Paul Adam says, “The joy of art is not gayety: the joy is grave, harmonizing with all the manifestations of living.” There is no artistic contradiction there, only one of those striking sentient paradoxes similar to that which Goethe symbolizes in Mephisto, or to that of the so-called æsthetic poetry, whose theme is in seeming contradiction to its aspirations. It is the higher light which we struggle to apprehend in esoteric religious cults, something akin to the delirium of beauty which held the monk of the Middle Ages in moments of rapt vision. This is not the common possession of mankind; and yet it is the animating principle, conscious or otherwise, [page 385:] of our genuine poets, taking rank according to their ability to express this unseen. Full of scenic anachronisms as William Morris's writings are, I wonder if the presence of the unseen Host in ‘Guenevere’ or ‘Jason’ does not lend greater beauty to England's landscapes therein portrayed than Wordsworth's objective pictures. There is, it is true, great ideality in the charming bits of scenic description of Wordsworth; but they cannot make their appeal to that unformed, nameless unit of all the senses which apprehends an object only in its totality, as do the beatic lines of Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, or the pictorial dreams of Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes.

To admit unqualifiedly the genius of Poe is to understand with sympathy the efforts of these men, to whom, as well as to Goethe, Hugo, Baudelaire, Leopardi, Verlaine, Poe stands so closely identified, not only in the quality of his emotion, but in the technique of his verse.

The influence of Poe's prose tales in recent letters is quite marked. A notable example in England, perhaps, is Mr. Conan Doyle. In France, however, from Gautier to the present there is ample evidence that its raconteurs have gone to school to Poe, whose rare powers of narration of a single incident or striking episode, spun with the painter's instinct, will give him always a leading rank among short-story tellers. It is in poetics, however, in its narrowest field, that Poe excels. And this, too, not solely because of the beauty of his verse, but through the artistry of its form consciously derived. The graphic moods of Poe were not simple poetic impulse, as with Keats; but like those higher artists, Goethe and Hugo, he bared so subtly his soul by certain well-defined processes that he plays at will upon our feelings, producing the effect which he desired.

Confessional poetry of the present age is generally mawkish, save where one plays those minor chords which hold the ear in caressing concord. To this chain of verse, wedded to weird melody, from Tieck through Coleridge, Hugo, Baudelaire, to Swinburne and Verlaine, Poe is inseparably linked, and, through the [page 386:] music of his syllables and the rich suggestive hues of his verbal soul painting, stands as immediate source to those whose consummate art is the aspiration of recent poetics.

G. L. Swiggett.