Text: Anonymous, “The New and the Old Edgar Poe,” The Critic (New York, NY), vol. VI, January 31, 1885, pp. 50-51

[page 50, column 1, continued:]

The New and the Old Edgar Poe.*

IN RISING from a perusal of Mr. Woodberry's new biography of Poe, one is touched with a feeling of profound regret that so little can be said in extenuation of Poe, so little be taken away from that legend which is fast becoming a légende des siècles. Most of us had a hopeful feeling that, while the eulogists of Poe might be over-eulogistic, his foes had undoubtedly been over-fiendish. Since the time when Griswold, the executor (and executioner) of Poe, had spewed out his intolerable poison on the grave of the poet, there had been a steady reaction in favor of the gifted and erring Virginian’ (as he called himself). England and France had taken up the cudgels in his defence. Women had flown to his assistance in volumes of voluble reminiscence; and one biographer after another emptied his ink- horn helpfully over the bespattered memory of the singer of Lenore. There seemed to be a possibility, not only that seven cities would dispute over the honor of having been his birthplace, but that, robed as an archangel in garments of spotless white, he would roam the Elysian fields of letters, and be handed on from generation to generation as a paragon of excellence in every shape and form. Barring the one lurid memoir of Griswold, all the light that had flashed upon him had flashed from Heaven. The image wandering on the Night's Plutonian shore was as shining as apotheosizing friends could wish-garlanded, benignant, immortal.

But here is a patch no bigger than a man's hand which has suddenly overspread the whole heavens — a grain of sand that lies in the lens and obscures the star. Mr. Woodberry, delving in former biographies, sketches, and recollections of Poe, working over the lifeless Lives (so-called) of the poet, engaging in a vast correspondence with his surviving contemporaries, men, women, and children, exhuming old loves and antiquated sweethearts, digging among forgotten files of Grahams, and Sartains, and Godeys, and Literary Messengers, with a dozen or two more of long-mummied monthlies, weeklies, and annals, has contrived with vast labor to construct what must hereafter be called the authoritative [column 2:] biography of Edgar Allan Poe — a biography which corrects all others, supplements all others, and supersedes all others. Here for the first time we have every essential fact connected with Poe's career plainly and unmistakably set forth, in its proper place, in logical sequence, and with luminous distinctness. A splenetic Prometheus with Eschylean backgrounds, — such is the phantom of the fallen archangel whom but a moment ago we saw wandering shining and immortal on the shores of the Styx. The popular impression-barring the mythopoeic idealizations of friends that Poe was a compound of genius, insanity, opium, trembling delirium, and temper, is supported from beginning to end of this biography, and with such graphic detail, cumulative force, and undeniable truth, that the archangel vanishes at once from his love-lorn Styx, and his place is taken by a figure beautiful indeed, but fallen and full of a common earthliness.

There is no face — certainly no story — in all literature more tragical, more unheavenly. The thirst for drink meandering like a line of fire from one end of Poe's career to the other; the bitter temper involving itself in a thousand contradictions toward friend and foe; the all-swallowing. egoism that burnt its perpetual taper day and night before the shrine of Self; the envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness of a vindictive career,-all these come out page by page, not on a mission of malice, but as the sculptured lines of an actual portrait, leering and livid as it may be, counterbalanced by great excellences to be sure, but for all that the true and perfect likeness of the man Poe. Poe was not wilfully wicked, but his wretched diseased body and his ill-balanced mind continually urged him to do things that were questionable, mischievous, bad, or dishonorable. He was ruled by his own Imp of the Perverse as few men had ever been ruled before; and after rearing beautiful structures in prose and verse, it was his delight, as in his notorious ‘Philosophy of Composition,’ to try and pull them down, trace them to some absurd starting-point, or cover them with ridicule. In his criticism of Poe's personal faults, Mr. Woodberry does not appear to go a step beyond the evidence. He has patiently and intelligently weighed every fact that could cast light on his subject, published for the first time much manuscript correspondence about Poe, or between him and his friends (including the Lowell correspondence, if we are not in error), dispelled much legendary mist that had gathered round the poet's early years, unearthed from official sources numerous facts about his career at West Point, and reshaped his incongruous life — story in an artistic and harmonious form which renders it agreeable in the extreme. We cannot say of it any longer that it is a torso Belvedere, beardless, limbless, lifeless. Every page is full of the pathos and the tears, the guilt and the genius of this unhappy man. If Poe was for one moment of his agitated existence out of the ‘valley of unrest,’ it does not appear from this biography. His own career was a ‘fall of the house of Usher’ more mysterious and pathetic than that in which he depicts the downfall of the doomed family.

Many curious details of Poe's complicated monomania come out in the course of his biography. One was his inveterate belief that nearly every one of his literary contemporaries was a thief. Was the writer a thief? was the question he usually put when he sat down to Christopher-North (if we may compound a verb) a man or a reputation. ‘Mr. Bryant is not all a fool. Mr. Willis is not quite an ass. Mr. Longfellow will steal, but perhaps he cannot help it (for we have heard of such things); and then it must not be denied that nil tetigit quod non ornavit.’ (p. 156). And yet with these pronounced and characteristic opinions, Mr. Woodberry finds that nine-tenths of his verdicts are favorable, and many are even flattering. He confined, his criticisms to searching restlessly for originality in his subject, whether of idea, form, construction, or handling; and if he failed to find it, he often became vituperative, blustering, [page 51:] or scurrilous. He detested the transcendental dialect of Margaret Fuller and Emerson, but recognized in Hawthorne a kindred and lofty spirit. The women poets of the day flocked around him like honey-bees, and he fed them impartially with praise from Hybla. His amours with these rhyming and scribbling nymphs would fill another volume — and a highly entertaining one — in the series of Scriptores Erotici. They were purely literary and celestial as long as he had a wife and did not descend to particulars; but toward the end of his life he seems to have been carrying on passionate and voluminous correspondence with three or four of them simultaneously.

Mr. Woodberry analyzes with rare justness and acumen the various phases and aspects of Poe's progressive compositions, his crescent mastery over form, his ever-progressing advance toward perfection in the evolution of his skill as a story-teller. A poem was with him often at the start a mere larva, transparent and impalpable, like a honey-comb through which the sun shines; but again and again he returned to it, filling it with riches and with sweetness till it ran over or exhaled a scent of immortality. Every year of his life he became a finer and finer artist, showing accretion of talent, growth, and increasing originality. Narrowly limited as he was, and hide-bound by his theories of composition, he worked within his limits as deftly as those Orientals who carve ball within ball, till the involute ivory seems to lose itself in its own bony labyrinths. That he was the inventor of the short dramatic loveless tale is now admitted, and that he has never been excelled or even reached in this and in the harmonic architecture of his verse, with its imponderable rhythms, its aërial cadences, its dying and reverberating refrains, is the universal verdict of his age. His spirit inhabited a spectral infinitude where there were landscapes floating beneath sunken moons or looming in leprous sunlight, and from these he caught — not airs of Arcady, or oaten humors of Theocritus — but sounds eery and intangible, blown from off his ghostly moons or imprisoned in his dank valleys. These he wove into his verse till it became a thing ‘mystic, wonderful’ — a ladder of strange sounds up which climbed still stranger bodings, incubations of dream-land, thronging seraphs beautiful and malign, sprites from spirit-land broken-hearted, atoms of that immeasurable populace which peoples the furnaces of the Inferno, evil angels from outer lands the smoke of whose torment ascendeth forever.

Another phase of his monomania was his uncontrolled habit of advertising himself in season and out of season, reprinting his own poems and stories time after time in different journals, revamping his old criticisms in the shape of ‘Marginalia’ or ‘Notes and Criticisms on American Writers,’ or even sending in to obsequious editors laudatory notices of himself and his works. Though he was an ingenious mathematician, an unrivalled disentangler of cryptographs, or cyphers, a dabbler in pseudo-science, astronomical or mesmeric, Mr. Woodberry proves conclusively that he was a mere charlatan in scientific knowledge, that his ‘Eureka,’ upon which he based his abiding fame, is full of ignorance of the most elementary principles of physics, and that his affectation of learning displayed in far-fetched quotation was a mere pretence, hardly skin-deep.

Still all this does not preclude the existence of high genius in Poe. His critcisms [[criticisms]] of his great contemporaries have in almost every case (save that of ‘Sartor Resartus’) been justified by time. His monomania on the subject of plagiarism may be forgiven in view of the disgraceful appropriations of the early imitative American school. And as the child of Coleridge, connected by subtle affinities with Jean Paul, the apostle of mythical æstheticism, the poet of dreams, the landscapist of kindred spirit with Burne Jones and Rossetti, the creator of the ratiocinative, grotesque and arabesque tale, we may dismiss him and his sorrowful story to that whispering corner of the Temple of Fame over which are inscribed the words: ‘Sunt lachrymæ rerum.’

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 50, column 1:]

* Edgar Allan Poe. By George E. Woodberry. $1.25. (American Men-of-Letters.) Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.