Text: Lang Andrew, “The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe,” The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.), 1882, pp. xiii-xxvi

[page xiii:]

THE life of Edgar Allan Poe is, fortunately, a subject that but little concerns readers of his poetry. As far as the events of his career illustrate the enigmatic character of his genius, we have, perhaps, a right to inquire about them. We may imagine that from parents of semi-Celtic stock and artistic profession he inherited his genius, and that his pride and perversity came from his training by a wealthy in judicious foster-father. But the legend or myth of his errors and misfortunes, so often told and retold by posthumous malice or by too fond indulgence, is really no affair of ours. Poe's career is still a logic that excites controversy in America. The spite of his tirst biographer, Griswold, was begetting a natural reaction when Mr. Ingram published his “Edgar Allan Poe” (London, 1880), and unwittingly stirred up the hatred of surviving scandal-mongers. Men are alive who knew Poe, and who suffered from his scornful criticism. To find their dead enemy [page xiv:] defended by an Englishman excited their spleen, and, for other reasons, fairer American critics were not conciliated. The defence of this luckless man of genius is not, and cannot be, a wholly successful one. The viler charges and insinuations of Griswold may be refuted, but no skill can make Poe seem an amiable or an ascetic human being. It is natural that admirers of a poet's genius should wish to think well of the man, should wish to see him among the honourable, gentle, kindly, and wise. But Poe wanted as a man what his poetry also lacks; he wanted humanity. Among the passions, he was familiar with pride, and with the intolerable regret, the life-long desiderium which, having lost the solitary object of its love, can find among living men and women no more than the objects of passing sentiment and affectionate caprice. Love, as the poets have known it, from Catullus to Coventry Patmore, love, whether wild and feverish or stable and domestic, appears to have been to him unknown. And by this it is not meant that Poe was not an affectionate husband of his wife, but that the stronger part of his affections, the better element of his heart, had burned away before he was a man. He knew what he calls “that sorrow which the living love to cherish for the dead, and which, in some minds, resembles the delirium of opium.” His spirit was always beating against the gate of the grave, and the chief praise he could confer on a woman in his maturity was to compare her to one whom he had lost while he was still a boy. “For [page xv:] months after her decease,” says Mr. Ingram, “Poe . . . would go nightly to visit the tomb of his revered friend, and when the nights were very drear and cold, when the autumnal rains fell, and the winds wailed mourn- fully over the graves, he lingered longest and came away most regretfully.”

The truth of this anecdote would be more important for our purpose than a world of controversies as to whether Poe was expelled from school, or gambled, or tippled, or why he gave up the editorship of this or that journal. We see him preoccupied, even in his boyhood, with the thought of death and of the condition of the dead. In his prose romances his imagination is always morbidly busy with the secrets of the sepulchre. His dead men speak, his corpses hold long colloquies with themselves, his characters are prematurely buried and explore the veiled things of corruption, his lovers are led wandering among the hic jacets of the dead. This is the dominant note of all his poetry, this wistful regret, almost hopeless of any reunion of departed souls in “the distant Aidenn,” and almost fearful that the sleep of the dead is not dreamless.

Thus Poe's verse is so far from being a “criticism of life,” that it is often, in literal earnest, a criticism of death; and even when his thoughts are not busy with death, even when his heart is not following some Lenore or Annabel Lee or Ulalume, his fancy does not deal with solid realities, with human passions. He dwells in a world more vaporous than that of Shelley's “Witch of Atlas,” in a region where dreaming cities crumble into fathomless seas, in a fairyland with “dim vales and shadowy woods,” in haunted palaces, or in a lost and wandering star.

Not only was Poe's practice thus limited, but his theory of poetry was scarcely more extensive. He avowed that “melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.” This preference was, doubtless, caused by Poe's feeling that melancholy is the emotion most devoid of actual human stuff, the most etherealised, so to speak, the least likely to result in action. Poetry he defined as “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” and beauty was in his eyes most beautiful when it was least alloyed with matter. Thus such topics as war, patriotism, prosperous love, religion, duty, were absolutely alien to the genius of Poe. He carried his theory to the absurd length of preferring Fouqué's “Undine” to the works of “fifty Molières.” There is no poet more full of humanity than Molière, and no creature of fancy so empty as Undine, a sprite who is no more substantial than a morning shower, a vapour more evanescent than [page xvii:] a solar myth. Poe, who liked the melancholy moods of this waste-watery sprite better than all the mirth and tenderness and passion of the Mascarilles and Alcestes, the Don Juans and Tartuffes, was also of opinion that no poem could be long. The “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” he thought, were mistakes; they carried too heavy a weight of words and matter. When examined, this theory or paradox of Poe's shrinks into the commonplace observations that Poe preferred lyric poetry and that lyrics are essentially brief. In considering Poe's theory and practice, we must not forget that both were, in part, the result of reaction. American literature then intended to be extremely moral, and respectable, and didactic, and much of it was excessively uninspired. Poetry was expected, as she so often is expected, to teach morality as her main duty. We have always plenty of critics who cry out that poetry should be “palpitating with actuality,” should struggle with “the living facts of the hour,” should dignify industrialism, and indite pæans, perhaps, to sewing-machines and patent electric lights. Poe's nature was essentially rebellious, scornful, and aristocratic. If democratic ecstasies are a tissue of historical errors and self-complacent content with the commonplace, no one saw that more clearly than Poe. Thus he was the more encouraged by his rebellious instinct to take up what was then a singular and heterodox critical position. He has lately been called immoral in America [page xviii:] for writing these words: “Beyond the limits of beauty the province of poetry does not extend. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or the conscience it has only collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally, upon either duty or truth.”

To any one who believes that the best, the immortal poetry, is nobly busied with great actions and great passions, Poe's theory seems fatally narrow. Without the conceptions of duty and truth we can have no “Antigone” and no “Prometheus.” These great and paramount ideas have always been the inspirers of honourable actions, and by following them men and women are led into the dramatic situations which are the materials of Shakespeare, Eschylus, and Homer. There is an immortal strength in the stories of great actions; but Poe in theory and practice disdains all action and rejects this root of immortality. He deliberately discards sanity, he deliberately chooses fantasy for his portion. Now, while it is not the business of poetry to go about distributing tracts, she can never neglect actions and situations which, under her spell, become unconscious lessons of morality. But, as we have said, Poe's natural bent, and his reaction against the cheap didactic criticism of his country and his time, made him neglect all actions and most passions, both in his practice and his theory. When he spoke of Keats as the most flawless of English poets, and of Mr. Tennyson as [page xix:] “the noblest poet that ever lived,” he was attracted by that in them which is most magical, most intangible, and most undefinable-the inimitable and inexpressible charm of their music, by the delicious languor of the “Ode to the Nightingale” and of the “ ‘Lotus-Eaters.” These poems are, indeed, examples of the “rhythmical creation of beauty,” which, to Poe's mind, was the essence and function of poetry.

As to the nature of Poe's secret and the technique by which he produced his melodies, much may be attributed to the singular musical appropriateness of his words and epithets, much to his elaborate care for the details of his art. George Sand, in “Un Hiver à Majorque,” describes a rainy night which Chopin passed in the half-ruinous monastery where they lived. She tells us how the melodies of the wind and rain seemed to be magically transmuted into his music, so that, without any puerile attempt at direct imitation of sounds, his compositions were alive with the air of the tempest. “Son génie était plein des mystérieuses harmonies de la nature traduites par des équivalents sublimes dans sa pensée musicale, et non par une repetition servile des sons extérieurs.” In Poe's genius, too, there was a kind of pre-established harmony between musical words and melancholy thoughts. As Mr. Saints- bury points out to me, though “his language not unfrequently passes from vagueness into mere unmeaningness in the literal and grammatical sense of it, yet it never [page xx:] fails to convey the proper suggestion in sound if not in sense. Take the lines in ‘Ulalume:’ —

Here it would puzzle the most adroit student of words to attach a distinct usual sense, authenticated by lexicons, to ‘immemorial.’ And yet no one with an ear can fail to see that it is emphatically the right word, and supplies the necessary note of suggestion.” As to Poe's management of his metres, one cannot do better than quote Mr. Saintsbury's criticism again. “The same indefinite but intensely poetic effect is produced still more obviously by Poe's management of his metres. Every one who is acquainted with his critical work knows the care (a care that brought on him the ridicule of sciolists and poetasters) which he bestowed on metrical subjects. The Raven,’ ‘Ulalume,’ ‘The Haunted Palace,’ Annabel Lee,’ ‘For Annie,’ are, each in its own way, metrical marvels, and it is not till long after we have enjoyed and admired the beauty of each as a symphony that we discern the exquisite selection and skilful juxtaposition of the parts and constituent elements of each. Every one of these remains unapproached and uncopied as a concerted piece. In The Haunted Palace,’ the metre, stately at the beginning, slackens and dies towards the close. In [page xxi:] ‘Annabel Lee’ and ‘For Annie,’ on the contrary, there is a steady crescendo from first to last, while, in the two other pieces the metre ebbs and flows at uncertain but skilfully arranged intervals. Poe stands almost alone in this arrangement of his lyric works as a whole. With most poets the line or the stanza is the unit, and the length of the poem is determined rather by the sense than by the sound. But with Poe the music as well as the sense (even more than the sense perhaps) is arranged and projected as a whole, nor would it be possible to curtail or omit a stanza without injuring the metrical as well as the intelligible effect.”

To a critic who himself feels that the incommunicable and inexpressible charm of melodious words is of the essence of song, Poe's practice is a perpetual warning. It is to verse like Poe's, so deficient as it is in all merit but lyric music and vague emotion, so devoid of human passion — a faint rhythmical echo among stars and graves of man's laborious life — that we are reduced if we hold the theory of Poe. A critic of his own native land, Mr. Henry James, has spoken of his “valueless verse,” and valueless his verse must always appear if we ask from it more than it can give. It has nothing to give but music, and people who want more must go to others that sell a different ware. We shall never appreciate Poe if we keep comparing him to men of stronger and more human natures. We must take him as one of the voices, almost the “shadow of a voice,” that sound in the temple [page xxii:] of song, and fill a little hour with music. He is not, like Homer, or Scott, or Shakespeare, or Molière, a poet that men can live with always, by the sea, in the hills, in the market-place. He is the singer of rare hours of languor, when the soul is vacant of the pride of life, and inclined to listen, as it were, to the echo of a lyre from behind the hills of death. He is like a Moschus or Bion who has crossed the ferry and sings to Pluteus a song that faintly reaches the ears of mortals.

“Not unrewarded” indeed is the singing, for the verse of Poe has been prized by men with a far wider range and healthier powers than his own.

Poe said that with him “poetry was a passion.” Yet he spoke of his own verses, in a moment of real modesty and insight, as trifles “not of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself.” They were, for the greater part, composed in the most miserable circumstances, when poverty, when neglect, when the cruel indignation of a born man of letters, in a country where letters had not yet won their place, were torturing the poet. He was compelled to be a bookseller's hack. The hack's is indeed “a damnable life,” as Goldsmith said, and was doubly or trebly damnable when “The Bells” or “Annabel Lee” were sent the round of the newspaper [page xxiii:] offices, to be disposed of for the price of a dinner and a pair of boots. Poe's time was spent in writing elaborate masterpieces for a pittance, and in reviewing and crushing, for the sake of bread, the productions of a crowd of mediocrities. Then came violent and venomous quarrels, which, with enforced hackwork, devoured the energy of the poet. It is no wonder that he produced little; but even had he enjoyed happier fortunes, his range is so narrow that we could not have looked for many volumes from him. He declared that he could not and would not excite his muse, “with an eye to the paltry compensations or the more paltry commendations of mankind.” Thus it may, at least, be said of him, that he was himself in his poetry, though, in writing prose, he often deserted his true inspiration. In his earlier verses he is very plainly the pupil of Shelley, as any one may see who has the courage to read through “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf.” His reputation does not rest on these poems, which are longer than his own canon admitted, but on pieces of verbal music like The Haunted Palace,” “The Sleeper,” “To One in Paradise,” “Israfel,” and the lines “To Helen,” which I have placed at the beginning of this volume. Though this beautiful piece of verse did not appear in the very earliest editions of Poe's poems, he always declared that it was written in boyhood for the woman whose death caused him, in Beddoes’ phrase, “with half his heart to inhabit other worlds.” Poe was well aware that his “Raven,” despite its immense popularity, [page xxiv:] was not among his best works. Indeed, it is almost too clever to be poetical, and has in it a kind of echo of Mrs. Browning, whose verse, floating in the poet's mind, probably suggested the composition. “To Helen,” “The Haunted Palace,” and “The Sleeper,” are perhaps the most coherent and powerful as well as the most melodious of Poe's verses. As his life sank in poverty, bereavement, misfortune, and misery, his verse more and more approached the vagueness of music, appealing often to mere sensation rather than to any emotion which can be stated in words. “The Bells” was written in the intervals of an unnatural lethargy; “Ulalume” scarcely pretends to remain within the limits of the poetical art, and attracts or repels by mere sounds as vacant as possible of meaning. Mr. Stedman says, truly and eloquently, that Ulalume” seems an improvisation, such as a violinist might play upon the instrument which had become his one thing of worth after the death of a companion who had left him alone with his own soul.” The odd definition of the highest poetry as “sense swooning into nonsense seems made for such verse as “Ulalume.” People are so constituted that, if a critic confesses his pleasure in such a thing as “Ulalume,” he is supposed to admit his inability to admire any other poetry. Thus it may require some moral courage to assert one's belief that even “Ulalume” has an excuse for its existence. It is curious and worth observing that this sort of verse is so rare. It cannot be [page xxv:] easy to make, or the herd of imitators who approach art by its weak points would have produced quantities of this enigmatic poetry. Yet, with the exception of Poe's later verse, of Mr. Morris's “Blue Closet,” and perhaps of some pieces by Géraid de Nerval, it is difficult to name any successful lines on the farther side of the border between verse and music. In this region, this “ultimate dim Thule,” Poe seems to reign almost alone. The fact is that the art of hints, of fantasies, of unfinished suggestions is not an easy one, as many critics, both of poetry and painting, seem to suppose. It is not enough to be obscure, or to introduce forms unexplained and undefined. A certain very rare sort of genius is needed to make productions live which hold themselves thus independent of nature and of the rules of art. We cannot define the nature of the witchery by which the most difficult task of romantic art was achieved. Poe did succeed, as is confessed by the wide acceptance of poems that cannot be defended if any one chooses to attack them. They teach nothing, they mean little; their melody may be triumphantly explained as the result of a metrical trick. But, ne facit ce tour qui veut. The trick was one that only Poe could play. Like Hawthorne in prose, Poe possessed in poetry a style as strange as it was individual, a style trebly remarkable because it was the property of a hack-writer. When all is said, Poe remains a master of fantastic and melancholy sound. Some foolish old legend tells of a musician who surpassed all his rivals. [page xxvi:] Hit strains were unearthly sad, and ravished the ears of those who listened with a strange melancholy. Yet his viol had but a single string, and the framework was fashioned out of a dead woman's breast-bone. Poe's verse — the parallel is much in his own taste — resembles that player's minstrelsy. It is morbidly sweet and mournful, and all touched on that single string, which thrills to a dead and immortal affection..