Text: N. B. Fagin, “Chapter 04,” The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 1949, pp. 133-159 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 133:]

A QUARTER of a century ago George Moore invited to his home in London two of his literary friends, John Freeman and Walter De La Mare, and proceeded to expound to them his theory of “pure” poetry, which he defined as “something that the poet creates outside of his own personality.”[1] The result of their discussion was an anthology which begins with John Skelton and ends with Swinburne. It is significant that Poe is represented by no less than six poems, a number exceeded only by Shakespeare, Blake, and Shelley. Almost seventy years before Mr. Moore's anthology another British editor, James Hannay, published a volume of poems — all by Poe — prefaced by an introduction in which he stated that, in his opinion, Poe wrote “sheer”poetry, a species which borrowed “nothing from without, as didactic poetry does.”[2] One may question both theories which inspired these seemingly contradictory judgments and yet, as applied to Poe, find them helpful.

According to Moore the outstanding characteristic of Poe's poetry was objectivity; according to Hannay, it is a lack of didacticism. Apparently they are speaking, at [page 134:] least to some extent, of the same thing; and while “pure” and “sheer” are not precisely synonymous, the adjectives represent an attempt to convey the idea that Poe's poetry is not dependent on topicality, morality, opinion, or so-called philosophy. Like music, it is content to merely be. Perhaps we get closer to the meaning of these terms by recalling A. E. Housman's belief that the function of poetry in general is “not to transmit thought” but only “to transfuse emotion.” “The Haunted Palace,” for instance, appeals to Housman as one of Poe's best poems only “so long as we are content to swim in the sensations it evokes and only vaguely to apprehend the allegory.”[3] In short, although it is almost impossible to separate the content and form of a poem — the thing said from the manner of saying it Poe's poetry, at its best, is all form.

The achievement of form is not easy. With Poe the process was a conscious one. There is, as an example, the difference between the formlessness of “Al Aaraaf,” an early “philosophical “poem, and the structural firmness of “The Raven” or “The Bells,” both written in the Forties. Allowing for Poe's propensity to exaggerate when he claimed that he wrote “Al Aaraaf” when he was only ten years old,[4] we must nevertheless accept the poem as having been composed when he was in his ‘teens, when his mind, like that of any talented young poet, was teeming with ideas. His sense of form had not yet matured; his theories of poetry had not yet become crystallized. The poem strives to convey a “meaning “or, what is more likely, a host of meanings. These remain diffuse, unorganized, unsubordinated to the less tangible meaning of the poem as a whole. Twenty years later he has learned to begin with the [page 135:] preconceived effect he wishes to produce, rather than with ideas; he labors to achieve totality of impression, poetic coherence. Form has become his “message” or “meaning,” and “ideas,” as such, are no longer important.

And it is as form that his poetry has had its greatest effect on modern literature. No one who has read the studies of Léon Lemonnier and Camille Mauclair[5] can fail to be impressed with the extent of Poe's influence on French literature; and no less impressive is even such a brief glimpse of his influence on the literatures of other lands as is afforded us by the papers contributed to the symposium sponsored by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore several years ago.[6] All the literary creations of Poe — his poetry, his fiction, and his criticism — have helped to spread his enormous influence, but since, for the moment, I am concerned only with his poetry, it is important to remember that it was “le poete par excellence” whom Paul Valery extolled and that it was the American poet's lyrics which the Russian Valery Brusov hailed as “one of the most marvelous phenomena of world literature,” marvelous because they embodied “an unapproachable high in verbal art.”[7] For another Russian, the Symbolist poet Constantine Balmont, Poe was “the adored singer of songs, the most star-like of all troubadours of eternity.”[8] With less rhapsodic and more scholarly insight, Professor Pedro Salinas, a poet of note himself, attributes Poe's influence on Spanish American poetry to his magic with words and sounds. Poe was the man

And even a carping critic of Poe, our own Ludwig Lewisohn, grants him the possession of one pure gift — the gift of verbal music. “The music of “To One in Paradise/” he remarks, “has an enchantment that no analysis can deaden or destroy.”[10]

But what precisely was this gift? Hundreds of studies have been attempted of Poe's versification, of his rhymes, rhythms, stanzaic forms, his use of consonants and vowels, of tone-color and synesthetic effects;(1) the result has been to leave us, in the main, no wiser than before. Even so subtle an analyst as Paul Elmer More, despite his belief that Poe survived as “chiefly the poet of unripe boys and unsound men,” found himself obliged to resort to such mystic phrases as “pure evocative quality “and “opiate magic “in commenting on certain lines and cadences.[12] It seems impossible, even for the most cautious critics, to escape Poe's “magic,” “music,” “enchantment” or “lulling cadences.”

Yet it is evident that Poe's critics — both approving and disapproving — are also aware of a quality of cold ness, dryness (the sécheresse to which Barbey d’Aure villy called attention), or artificiality somewhere beneath or above the magic. Sometimes this quality creeps in between lines of great beauty, like little plots of sterile earth in the midst of a green field. Sometimes it permeates [page 137:] a whole poem. During the discussion at George Moore's home Walter De La Mare raised the question of the possible inclusion of “The Bells “in the projected anthology. “A trick! A trick! “cried John Freeman, and the poem was rejected. Such “tricks “are many in Poe's slim corpus of poetic creations. Perhaps that was what Walt Whitman felt when he said that Poe's verses belonged among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling but without heat.[13] Unmistakably, they are the productions of a poet; they are also — and equally unmistakably — the work of a mechanician. Commenders and contemners alike have often observed this duality in the creativeness of Poe, and have commended or contemned to the extent to which they have been able to remember the one and forget the other. More often, however, they have labored under the necessity of explaining the “problem,” of reconciling the two disparate elements, and of effecting a synthesis. In this they have not entirely succeeded.

Paul Elmer More was inclined to accept Poe's own account of the mechanical way in which he wrote “The Raven.” Poe, he reasoned, was a person who combined nervous irritability with rigorous intellectual analysis; hence it seemed plausible that he could “put together “a poem, even one which is deeply emotional, “like a piece of calculated machinery.” Poe's conscious logical analysis, Mr. More believed, “was present with him throughout the whole work of composition to an abnormal degree, now preceding, now accompanying, now following the more inscrutable suggestions of the creative faculty.”[14] This is an appealing theory. Yet a thorough knowledge of Poe's life and character suggests other possibilities no less appealing. The most likely of [page 138:] these is that of Henry Seidel Canby who is convinced that while the theme of “The Raven “came from the poet's deepest experience, its form was nothing but technical trickery. “The Raven,” Mr. Canby insists, “whatever its inception, was undoubtedly tuned up for the show-off of elocution by precisely the methods described in “The Philosophy of Composition.’ ”[15]

2

One may be less positive than Mr. Canby that the methods which Poe described in “The Philosophy of Composition” were in every detail precisely those he used in creating “The Raven,” and still find the suggestion about the technique of the poem illuminating. Not only “The Raven “but the essay as well was very likely “tuned up for the show-off” — not of elocution, in the latter case, but of the powers of ratiocination and artistic logic of the brilliant essayist. Each piece of writing was for Poe a separate performance and had its own laws of effect.(2) The grieving, elocuting hero of “The Raven “remains on the stage, seated in his violet-cushioned chair or standing before the purple-draped windows; the intellectually sharp and defiantly honest hero of “The Philosophy of Composition” — its author, [page 139:] “I” — stays behind the scenes, at least part of the time, but makes himself none the less visible. Both owe much of the effect they know so well how to create — and know that they are creating — to the same lights and shadows among which Elizabeth and David Poe had once lived. Note the gusto and the vocabulary of the following paragraph:

The delivery is quite clearly that of a histrio; and we need not inquire into the source of the images in the culminating part of the monologue. We are back again in the theatre.

And it is here that we can find the most convincing indication that Poe's duality was neither something mystical nor paradoxical, but a typical phenomenon [page 140:] which every talented actor has displayed, whether he has known it or not. A perfect instance has been left us by Feodor Chaliapin in his autobiography. The Russian basso — of whom it was sometimes said that had he lost his superb singing voice he might still have been one of the world's great dramatic actors — was at one time playing Sousanin in A Life for the Tzar; the moment came when he cried out: “I have been ordered to go, and must obey! “and a little later, holding his daughter in his arms, he sang:

Suddenly he became aware that tears were trickling down his cheeks. Chaliapin's comment on this occurrence is instructive:

Chaliapin was one of the geniuses of the stage who think deeply about their art and understand its processes. His own summary of the actor's duality is fully as instructive as his recollection of the embarrassing moment:

It is safe to say that there were always two Poes, one playing his part as poet, as story-teller, or as critic, the other watching him play it. What appeared to Paul Valéry as the combination of “a sort of mathematics with a sort of mysticism” was in reality a form of art which the best stage histrios have practiced since the theatre began. Poe, being conscious of the process involved, and being, in his own way, honest, plainly admitted it, even flaunted it. He brought “The Raven “to its completion, he said, “with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”[18] More over, no one, he believed, could appreciate thoroughly a work of genius who is himself without the constructive ability — “the faculty of analysis” — to get a full view of the artist's proposed effect, “and thus work it and regulate it at will.”[19]

Poe, as his short stories testify, was a master of decor, and this mastery did not desert him when he wrote poetry. In considering the locale for the action of “The Raven” — which is really a little drama, or monodrama, in verse form — he discarded the idea of using a forest or a field, because he felt that “a close circumscription of space” was “absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident.” Such a setting, he knew, had “the force of a frame to a picture.”[20] It was, perhaps, statements like the last one which had led Robert Sully to forming the opinion that Poe had “an eye for dramatic, but not for scenic or artistic effect.” Except in “The Raven,” Sully could find nowhere in Poe's poems [page 142:] a subject for a picture.[21] As a matter of fact, how ever, Poe had an excellent eye for scenic effect; only it was the effect produced by stage scenery. The picture frame he spoke of in his “Philosophy of Composition,” whether he was conscious of it or not at the moment, was the proscenium of a stage, which he immediately proceeded to fill with functional and decorative furniture, properties, and “action” — a door and latticed window for tapping and rapping, a fireplace with the glow of dying embers, rustling purple curtains, a bust of Pallas, “quaint” tomes necessitating a quietly ornate table on which to recline, a velvet-covered chair, a lamp, strange, improbable shadows on the floor, and a rug which would permit tinkling foot-steps to “register.”

It is necessary to recall for a moment the little story about the meeting of the young playwright, Cornelius Mathews, with Poe at the Park Theatre with which I began the preceding chapter. According to Mathews, Poe advised him to incorporate into the play he was then writing a scene showing a raven flitting across the stage over the head of the hero's mother. Mathews rejected the advice, for reasons on which his story is silent. A plausible supposition would be that he may not have found it relevant to his projected play. Poe, however, may have been right and the scene he suggested might have proved very effective. He knew the truth which so many young playwrights only discover, if at all, after much fumbling: that drama has its own logic and relevance. The appearance of the raven — while not so organic a bit of symbolism as Chekhov's sea gull — might have heightened the tone of foreboding and terror. Perhaps it would have been only another “trick,” a product of Fancy rather than Imagination, in [page 143:] the Coleridgean sense. Nevertheless, for a play about witchcraft, it might have been right; it might have added a touch of stage magic.

And it is as the master of just such magic that Poe becomes comprehensible. We may inveigh, as one critic does, against his “glaring defects”; we may call him “vulgar, affected, sentimental, and trite”; we may de scribe his poetic properties as “fashionable furniture and bric-a-brac”; but we are compelled to admit that his “symbolical raven lasts.”[22] And it lasts because the poem is precisely what W. C. Brownell, another of Poe's severe critics, once called it: a star performance.[23]

3

No less lasting have been the symbolical bells. Admittedly the most “mechanical “of Poe's poems, “The Bells “has been generally accepted as an experiment in onomatopoeia, an experiment so successful that Stoddard, who was usually no more friendly to Poe than Brownell, was moved to declare that he considered this poem the most perfect example of Poe's power of words, “if not, indeed, the most perfect example of that kind of power in all poetic literature.”[24] Another editor called it a “melodious onomato-poem, the most perfect imitation in word, sound, and rhythm, in suggestion, in exquisite mimicry, of its theme ever written.”[25] The encomiums have been many and fervid. And so have been the detractions.

The latter have been confined mainly to pointing out the poem's lack of substance and the artificial manner in which it was conceived and executed. The story of its origin, at the home of Mrs. Shew who suggested the [page 144:] then ringing bells of the neighborhood as the subject of a poem is too well known to need repetition here. Poe immediately wrote the first draft, which he later revised and enlarged. The structure, consisting of four stanzas, each centering around a particular set of bells — the silver bells of sledges, the golden wedding bells, the brazen alarum bells, and the iron bells of death — is simplicity itself. In fact, it is so simple that some thirty years ago an English professor proved to his own satisfaction that high school boys, using an arithmetical formula, could construct a poem on the same subject presumably no worse than Poe's.[26]

What the professor failed to see is that even though his opinion that “The Bells” is a mechanical, “head made “poem be true, no boy, unless he be dowered with the gifts of a Poe, could have created it or anything like it. Mrs. Shew may have suggested the subject, she may even have written (as she claimed) the first line or two, but it takes more than a subject to produce a poem. Moreover, there is ample evidence to justify the belief that the idea of using bells as a subject was in Poe's mind long before Mrs. Shew felt inspired. There is Woodberry's suggestion that a passage in Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme, published in 1836, supplied the spark. There is Poe's own statement to his friend F. W. Thomas that Dickens's Chimes furnished the “final inspiration.” And, then there is the possibility that the many poems on bells which appeared in the periodicals of the day may have started him off.[27] A poet's mind is a dark, mysterious reservoir. It took John Livingston Lowes years of research to trace the ideas that gave rise to a few of Coleridge's poems, and it is still doubtful if The Road to Xanadu, in which Mr. [page 145:] Lowes so brilliantly set down his findings, exhausts all the clues.

But whatever ideas may have inspired “The Bells,” or whatever ideas it may have acquired during composition and successive revisions, the poem shows remarkable craftsmanship. If sound be its outstanding characteristic it is certainly more than sound imitative of other sound. Undoubtedly it was written — like all of Poe's poems — to be read aloud. His ear was extraordinarily sensitive and it heard every word he wrote, both prose and verse. Verse, however, was more important, because, by his own confession, poetry with him was not a purpose but a passion.[28] His criticism of the poetry of other writers may sometimes have been excessively minute, almost petty, but his sensitive response to rhythm, to the melodious line and the musical phrase cannot be questioned. For him music was a prime quality in poetry; he believed this to such an extent that he deplored the very necessity which obliges the poet to use words at all; and he appreciated verse only as “an inferior or less capable Music.”[29] Since, however, the necessity does exist, he arrived at the more dignified and facesaving definition of the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.

The word “rhythmical” was the core of his definition. It is not surprising therefore to find that metrics should have been so vital and constant a subject for his study and speculation. Early in his career — in December, 1835 — he boasted to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker that he had made prosody, in all the languages which he had studied, “a particular subject of inquiry.”[30] Iambs, trochees, dactyls, anapests, spondees, long vowels and short vowels, alliteration and assonance, and medial and [page 146:] terminal rhymes were, for him, more than devices for adornment, more than mere frills; they were means by which the poet approaches as closely as possible to music. He envied the old bards who perfected their verses by reciting them or singing them as songs.[31] And although, as I have already noted in this book, such “modern” young men as Basil Gildersleeve and John Esten Cooke were unfavorably impressed by his emphasis of rhythm in public readings of his poems, the rhythm is there and is undoubtedly a major reason for the innumerable musical settings to the poems that have been created by composers great and small, including Rachmaninoff, MacDowell, Lazare Saminsky, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Joseph Holbrooke, and John Philip Sousa.(3)

While men like Gildersleeve and Cooke failed to appreciate Poe's stressing of the rhythm of a poem in his own reading, Poe on the other hand found the slighting or, worse, the ignoring of rhythm in the reading of others equally objectionable. He complained to Miss Susan Archer that he had never heard “The Raven” delivered correctly, even by the best readers.[34] Very likely he would have approved of Vachel Lindsay's rendition of the poem. The author of “The Chinese [page 147:] Nightingale,” “The Congo,” and “The Kallyope Yell” was in certain respects a kindred spirit of Poe's, a trouba dour for whom words had musical meaning. Further more, he liked verse “where every line may be two-thirds spoken and one-third sung, the entire rendering, musical and elocutionary, depending upon the improvising power and sure instinct of the performer.”[35] Lindsay, like Poe, was richly endowed with the gifts he demanded of “performers “of poetry. I was once fortunate to hear him recite not only “The Raven “but “The Bells” and “Annabel Lee” as well, and I remember thinking at the time that the poems had suddenly acquired melodic qualities which my own mute reading had utterly failed to apprehend. A superb tintinnabulator himself, Lindsay found in Poe's bells, for instance, variations of tone and modulations of meaning which made Rachmaninoff's effort to translate the poem into pure music explicable. Here was an eloquent and clear demonstration of the rightness of Poe's ear in increasing — in revision — the number of “bells” from four to seven. And here, also, one began to understand what so shrewd a dramatist as George Bernard Shaw had meant by his assertion that “The Raven,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee “were as fascinating at the thousandth repetition as at the first.[36]

Vachel Lindsay knew how to read Poe's poems because they were both bards in the ancient tradition by which verse was transmitted orally. We who have become accustomed to reading only with our eyes miss much of the sensuous beauty which resides in the sound of words, just as Poe, were he alive today, would miss the visual appeal of the typographical subtleties in much of modern poetry. Very likely he would consider the [page 148:] spatial pyrotechnics of e. e. cummings — the broken lines, the jagged patterns, the erratic use of small and capital letters, and the telescoping of words — mere “tricks.” Not that Poe was completely unaware of the value of visual appeal in printed verse. He was too good a magazinist for that. Half a century ago Professor Fruit called attention to Poe's revision of “Lenore.”[37] The first version, published in 1831 as “A Paean,” employed a short lyrical measure completely unsuited to the idea of a slow dirge. A revised version, the “Lenore “of 1843, began with the following stanza:

Two years later this stanza became:

“Here,” Professor Fruit remarked, “one can test what effect the form of the verse upon the page as presented to the eye has upon the reading.” The revision shows that by 1845 Poe had learned from his journalistic experience that the spatial appearance of a poem added to its appeal. The substitution of a flowing, dignified line, suited to the solemnity of the theme, for a choppy, irregular line indicates the measure of Poe's technical growth. But Poe's basic appeal to the ear remains, for it is significant that the revised stanza has no run-on lines at all and that the pauses at the end of each line are heavily punctuated.

One is therefore still justified in saying that, were Poe alive today, he might fail to perceive the value in Cummings's typographical arrangements. But he would hardly fail to recognize Cummings's excellent lyrical ear. For Poe was above all a lyrist in the ancient sense of oral tradition. If his poems, for some of us, fail to come alive it is because we have lost the art of uttering poetry. A recent scholar has remarked that “The Bells “must be read mainly in sounds and tempos and that the poem is therefore modern. In the next breath, however, he asks: “But where is such reading learned?”[39]

Certainly “The Bells” does not make of Poe a jingle man. If it — and “The Raven” as well — appears to be neither profound nor “significant” philosophically or sociologically, it is significant artistically. The poem has structure and tension and builds up, incrementally, to a crashing climax which is psychologically sound. For Poe [page 150:] was not alone in hearing the merry bells of winter sports or the happy bells of love finally replaced by the tolling, tolling, tolling bells of death; all of us have had intimations of mortality; and all of us sometimes

In the end, all the bells have merged in the tolling menace; the cycles are completed; sound has, imperceptibly, become substance. And Poe's poetic devices, including the repetitions and refrains, far from being merely adventitious, are now seen as part of the substance.(4)

4

Other, and major, parts are structure, imagery, and a strangely suggestive symbolism which has made him in the clever phrase of Karl Shapiro — “the Lenin of the Symbolists.”[41]

No better example of lucidity of structure is needed than “The Conqueror Worm.” The poem has five stanzas which correspond roughly to the five acts of a play.[42] The dramatic line is unmistakable. The first three stanzas contain the exposition — the where, when, and who — and prepare us for the climactic entry, in the next stanza, of the villain, the Conqueror Worm, or, as Poe ironically calls him, the “hero.” The closing [page 151:] stanza contains the denouement with choruses, as in Greek tragedy, lamenting the conquest of Man, and the Doctor, as in medieval morality, summarizing the significance of the play. The appropriateness of this structure is obvious, since the basic theme of the poem is the very old one that man's life is like a play which is over when Death has conquered.(5)

The imagery of the poem is at once vivid and tantalizingly indefinite:

Presumably this is a play within a play. We see the angel throng, the winged scene-shifters, the mumbling mimes; but we see no features, no outlines of forms, no colors of dress or scenery; nor do we hear a single word. The concrete orchestra breathes abstract music; the “vast” stage hands flap synesthetically. The vividness [page 152:] is muted, Strindbergean (as in To Damascus and A Dream Play), stylized. And the mood, in spite of the “gala “night, is hushed, full of low, liquid alliterations, expectant like the breathlessness in a theatre just before the curtain goes up on a serious dramatic presentation.

The indefiniteness of Poe's imagery was as deliberate as his structure and verbal music. Again and again his prose writings reiterate that indefiniteness is an essential element of good poetry and good music. “Give to music,” he argued, “any undue decision — imbue it with any very determinate tone — and you deprive it ... of its ... intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its dream-like luxury: — you dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic in which its whole nature is bound up. ... It then becomes a tangible and easily appreciable thing — a conception of the earth, earthy.”[43] He praised Tennyson for “deliberately proposing to himself” — in such pieces as the “Lady of Shalott” — a “suggestive indefiniteness” in order to produce an effect of “vague definiteness.”[44]) For similar reasons he praised George Pope Morris as “our “best writer of songs.[45] That Poe's theory may not have been completely original with him does not alter the fact that he made it his own, that it suited his temperament and his genius, and that he illustrated it in his own practice with poems of power and beauty.

It is significant that in the first version of “The Conqueror Worm” he had written “A Mystic throng” instead of “An angel throng” (line 3) and “vast shadowy things “instead of “vast formless things “(line 13).[46] These adjectives which first sprang to his mind are more descriptive of his conceptions than the latter, less literal substitutions. In a style which in our [page 153:] century has come to be known as “expressionistic” — especially as applied to drama — Poe peopled his stage with veiled, shadowy figures, with troops of Echoes and “evil things, in robes of sorrow” (“The Haunted Palace”), with ill angels and ghouls (“Dream-Land”), and with dim “nothings which were real” (“Tamerlane”). Even his protagonists or featured characters remain indistinct, like the gallant knight seeking Eldorado. All we know of him is that he started out “gaily bedight”; and all we know of the one person he en countered on his way is that he was a pilgrim Shadow.

The bright flash of “gaily “with which “Eldorado” opens is, like “gala “in the opening line of “The Conqueror Worm,” a characteristic color-note, a sort of preludal flourish which lightens and at the same time intensifies the somberness soon to follow. Metaphorical lines such as

in spite of their vividness of color, actually serve similar purposes: they are suggestive and preparative rather than descriptive. They also, of course, exist in and for themselves. For while the specific purposes of poetic imagery, structural and tonal, are only a matter of inference, its effect at any given point is immediately apparent. “Who shall say,” inquires an investigator of Poe's use of color words, “whether a poet uses a given color in his poem because of metrical exigencies, because of the euphony of its name, because of personal liking for the color, or because descriptive accuracy demands it?”[47] [page154:]

Any or all of these reasons may have influenced Poe's choice of color and image, but, in his case, there is an additional reason that must be mentioned: it is the demands of his symbolic pattern. Many of his poems — and they are among the best are allegories, although they hardly ever imply the simple preachment usually associated with this type of poem. Their themes — as in “The Conqueror Worm,” “The Haunted Palace,” and “Eldorado” — are simple enough, but the poems them selves, as artistic creations, are subtly intricate. They suggest levels of meaning which no paraphrase, no mere statement of theme or “message” can convey. To translate a Poe poem into prose is to destroy it. Structure, cadence, and image merge into an atmosphere, a climate of idea and sensation which transcends the various elements that compose the poem. This is as true of his subjective lyrics — “To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume” — as of his more objective allegories. Whether “Annabel Lee” is an elegy on the death of Virginia or on the lost love of Elmira[48]; whether the “bleak December” of “The Raven “is an allusion to the death-month of Poe's mother and the “sere October” of “Ulalume” is a prophetical naming of his own death-month[49]; whether the imagery of “The Conqueror Worm” (“full as it is of theatre memories, — mimes, puppets, shifting scenery, funereal curtains, phantom forms —”) reflects Poe's childhood memories of the burning of the Richmond Theatre in which his mother had played just before her death[50]; whether in “Eldorado” Poe writes “of the search for the golden land as the quest of human happiness”[51] or of his vision of death[52] — these are conjectures and problems which hardly affect either the content or the form [page 155:] of the poems.(6) We should do better to hark back to a critic of Poe's own day who, a few months after the poet's death, published a brief article with the happy title “Mere Music.” In it he recognized that American literature had “at last” produced Poe, “who writes poems that move us deeply, but in which the meaning is only hinted at, and even that sometimes so obscurely that it is impossible to find out an unbroken connexion; but there is always an evident design, and an extremely artistic construction.”[54] These are qualities that should suffice.

In our own day, Edward Shanks has found the reading of “Ulalume” a peculiar and exciting experience, although he has been unable to discover, afterwards, that it has also been an intellectual experience. This, however, as far as he is concerned, does not matter. The value of the poem to him is in the sensation of “spiritual disturbance deepening to dismay and terror” which it generates in the reader. Nor is he concerned with the possibility that the poem might be autobiographical. Ulalume,’ “he says, “is as much and as little auto biographical as a nocturne by Chopin.”[55] This is not the view held by professional exegesists. Professor Pattee, for instance, builds up a reasonable explanation of the meaning of the poem. “Ulalume” is “a sob from the depths of blank despair it is an expression of Poe's sorrow over his failure to obtain the love of Mrs. Shew, at a time when he was lonely and desperate.[56] This may be perfectly true.(7) Just as Edwin Markham's [page 156:] guess that the poem is “a deep drama of temptation and memory” may be true.[59] Yet no poem can be said to possess virtue only because it originated in grief or joy, no matter how genuine or — to echo Wordsworth — powerful the feeling. Mr. Pattee believes that “Ulalume” is a “spontaneous” poem; in this he is wrong. Willis was closer to the truth when he called it “a curiosity in philologic flavor,” a “skilful exercise of rarity and niceness of language.” It is of course more than that; but it is hardly an artless, spontaneous effusion. Its pattern is too complex and its effect too successful to have been achieved by inspiration only. Whatever its meaning — and perhaps, like all good poetry, it has a multiplicity of meanings — its craftsmanship, faulty as it is in spots, is indisputable. Lafcadio Hearn once suggested that the poem contains elements of madness, but he was discerning enough to suggest also that the madness was intentional.[60] At any rate, in “Ulalume” we have once again proof that Poe — and he alone — had the skill to combine darkly colorful and rhythmical words, extravagant and terror-striking images, and haunting repetends into a type of poetry from which we derive a special — if morbid — pleasure.

5

Edward Shanks's reference to Chopin in connection with Poe brings to mind the concluding paragraph of Professor Kent's introduction to Poe's poems:

The acknowledgment of Poe's poetic genius has taken many forms. The Symbolists paid tribute to his poetry because of its closeness to “our sick souls”[62]; perhaps they remembered and accepted his own famous statement that the terror of which he wrote was not of Ger many but of the soul.[63] But, for that matter, even D. H. Lawrence, no great admirer of Poe's verse — he thought it mechanical, facile, secondary and meretricious — accepted its author as “an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul.”[64] A greater English poet than Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, declined to discuss Poe's soul but preferred to pay tribute to him for having been “the first to realize to the full the possibilities of the English language in thought and rhyme.”[65] A combination of both appreciations, of Poe's services to the soul and to the English language, has been expressed by William Carlos Williams. “With Poe,” he says, “words were figures; an old language truly, but one from which he carried over only the most elemental qualities to his new purpose; which was, to find a way to tell his soul.”[66]

It is possible, however, that those who have undertaken to deflate Poe, or to enter reservations in their acceptance of him, have come almost as close to the truth as those who have whole-heartedly championed him. Parrington found him a poet, although one who lacked ideas.(8) The most violent deflator, Yvor Winters, finds [page 158:] Poe obscure, uneven, without taste, and a bad stylist. Yet he is obliged to admit that “The City in the Sea” has admirable description and “an intense feeling of meaning withheld/’ that at least the physical material in “The Haunted Palace “has allegorical significance, and that “Ulalume” is “an excursion into the incoherence of dream-consciousness.”[68] All of these comments are neither without relevance nor without validity.

What, it seems to me, both the accepters and rejecters, whole-hearted or partial, have overlooked is the special nature of Poe's poetry. Shaw, who deplores Poe's aloof ness from the common people, his placing of grotesques, madmen, and gorillas” in his theatre,” instead of ordi nary peasants, citizens and soldiers, — Shaw nevertheless feels that Poe is great, and that he is great because of his aloofness, because “his kingdom is not of this world.”[69] This becomes clearer and more pointed when one recalls the insistence of James Branch Cabell — a fellow Virginian of Poe's — on the right of an artist to turn his back upon a world which does not suit him and to create another one, more to his liking. He credits Poe with having created his own private kingdom — a sort of Poictesme — “an impressive, a preternatural, and a laughterless kingdom.”[70] Whether the kingdom Poe created in his poems was more to his liking is hard to say, but presumably he felt more at home in it. And one gains nothing by arguing with the vagaries of taste.

The special world of Poe's poems, the world from which he drew so much of his luxurious decor and strange images and sonorous phrases, was the theatre, a [page 159:] theatre which he partly remembered and partly created and in which he himself was the playwright, actor, regisseur, scene-designer, and, to a large extent, audience. Edmund Wilson has cautioned us that “the psychology of the pretender is always a factor to be reckoned with in Poe “and that, “though his mind was a first-rate one, there was in him a dash of the actor who delights in elaborating a part.”[71] The elaboration of parts for himself to play and the imagining of a stage upon which to play them are perfectly clear. In all his poems there is the more or less remote glitter of stage ornamentation, the rising and falling rhythm of stage eloquence, and the startling impact of stage climaxes. Sometimes the illusion is so perfect that we get the glitter of precious stones, the eloquence of exquisite music, and the impact of genuine emotion. Sometimes, when the light wavers, the illusion fades and we perceive the glint of tinsel and hear inflated rhetoric and hollow words.

But poetry, too, has many mansions. In them many distinctive voices have spoken: those of Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, ... and Poe.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 136:]

1 “... his employment of synesthetic effects has extended the sensuous appeal of poetry beyond any other device adopted, perhaps, in its history ... it took genius to see the advantages of deliberately mixing [sense impressions], so that one could write of the ‘grey rumble of the dawn’ or the ‘yellow cry of the beetles.’ ” — Oscar Cargill.[11]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 138:]

2 Horace Gregory has called attention to another essay, “The Poetic Principle,” which Poe used as a “lecture “or public performance. “It can be said that the lecture itself resembled a series of delicately timed dramatic entrances and scenes, each bringing to a close its moment of suspense by the recitation of an unfamiliar piece of verse. ... Between the silent pauses of surprise — and perhaps an approving handclap from his audience — one almost hears Poe's apologie pour mon vie ... though I suspect that Poe's eloquent use of ... passionately abstract terms bewildered the ladies and their gentlemen who heard them. I am nearly certain that his utterance flattered their ability to understand and to applaud them...” — Partisan Review, May-June, 1943.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 146:]

3 The late Miss May Garretson Evans discovered 219 musical settings to poems by Poe. The five top-ranking poems, judging by the number of settings they have inspired, are: “Annabel Lee” — 32; “Eldorado” — 28; “The Bells” — 22; “The Raven” — 18; “To Helen” — 15.[32]

Poe's influence on composers of music has also come from another source than his poems and stories. His theory of deliberate and calculated procedure in the creation of a poem has affected at least one world famous modern composer: “As a matter of fact, as regards musical technique, my teacher has certainly been Edgar Allan Poe. To me the finest treatise on composition, certainly the one that has influenced me the most, is Poe's essay on the genesis of a poem.” — Maurice Ravel.[33]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 150:]

4 Four years before the publication of “The Bells “Poe wrote a review of Elizabeth Barrett's The Drama of Exile. One sentence in it read: “The thoughts ... belong to the highest order of poetry, but they could not have been wrought into effective expression, without the instrumentality of those repetitions — those unusual phrases — in a word, those quaintnesses, which it has been too long the fashion to censure, indiscriminately, under the one general head of ‘affectation.’ ”[40]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 151:]

5 Poe found the symbol useful again in his short story, “The Premature Burial”: “the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 155:]

6 Poe himself indicated, succinctly and forcefully, the irrelevance and futility of such critical considerations: “Every work of art,” he wrote in a review of Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith's poems, “should contain within itself all that is required for its own comprehension.”[53]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 155, running to the bottom of page 156:]

7 Although there is considerable evidence tending to prove that the [page 156:] poem was written much earlier.[57] It is for this reason that Lauvrière offers the fanciful suggestion that the poem expresses Poe's despair “on the anticipated death of Virginia.”[58]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 157, running to the bottom of page 158:]

8 In this connection another view is to the point: “It may be argued that his poems do not submit readily to analysis; yet ideas are there, [page 158:] nevertheless, for those who will take the trouble to seek them. His manner of presenting them may be made a subject of debate, but their presence in the poems is an indisputable fact.” — Floyd Stovall in Studies in English, The University of Texas Bulletin.[67]