Text: Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Swinburne on Poe,” New York Tribune (New York, NY), vol. XXXV, whole no. 10,814, November 27, 1875, p. 4, col. 5

[page 4, column 5, continued:]

SWINBURNE ON POE.

The following letter from the poet to Miss Sara S. Rice, the director of the Poe Memorial received in Baltimore too late to be read at the dedication of the monument. It indicates the sympathy of genius with genius, and it affords another illustration of the high estimate that English critical thought has placed upon the writings of Poe:

SARA S. RICE — Dear Madam: I have heard, with much pleasure, of the memorial at length raised to your illustrious fellow-citizen.

The genius of Edgar Poe has won, on this side of the Atlantic, such wide and warm recognition that the sympathy, which I cannot hope fitly or fully to express, in adequate words, is undoubtedly shared at this moment by hundreds, as far as the news may have spread throughout not England only but France as well; where, as I need not remind you, the most beautiful and durable of monuments has been reared to the genius of Poe, by the laborious devotion of a genius equal and akin to his own: and where the admirable translation of his prose a fellow-poet whom also we have to lament before his time — is even now being perfected by a careful and exquisite version of his poems, with illustrations full of the subtle and tragic force of fancy which impelled and molded the original song: a double homage, due to the loyal and loving cooperation of one of the most remarkable younger poets and one of the most powerful leading painters in France — M. Mallarmé and M. Manet.

It is not for me to offer any tribute here to the fame of your great countryman, or dilate, with superfluous and intrusive admiration, on the special quality of his strong and delicate genius — so sure of aim, and faultless of touch, in all the better and finer part of work he has left us.

I would only — in conveying to the members of the Poe Memorial Committee my sincere acknowledgment of the honor they have done me, in recalling my name on such an occasion, — take leave to express my firm conviction that widely as the fame of Poe has already spread, and deeply as it is already rooted, in Europe, it is even now growing wider and striking deeper as time advances; the surest presage that time, the eternal enemy of small and shallow reputations, will prove in this case also the constant and trusty friend and keeper of a true poet's full-grown fame.