Text: Anonymous, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Harvard Magazine (Cambridge, MA), vol. VII, whole no. 62, March 1861, pp. 216-222

[page 216:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE.

As we stand on the border-land which separates youth from manhood, and fasten our gaze upon the stormy world we are about to enter, many strange inconsistencies force themselves upon our attention, recurring again and again, haunting our souls like troubled spirits, and saddening us by the futility of all attempts at explanation. Of these spectres of the mind, the saddest and the most fearful are those which arise when we peruse the lives of those unhappy authors to whom existence was but a burden and a curse. Let him who, charmed by the productions of genius, would tread the path of authorship, first recall to memory the out lines of the life of a Savage, an Otway, and a Chatterton, and the efforts which before appeared so charming will now seem to have been scrawled by fingers trembling from famine, and the moving pages be filled with a terrible interest, borrowed from the aberrations which culminated in the still more terrible deaths of their authors. Let him not turn to the annals of American authorship for relief, hoping that the land which has been the refuge of liberty may also have been the safeguard of genius, for a name will meet him whose epitaph most fitly might have been written, “Miserrimus.”

The world has had men who have achieved rank as high in the lists of fame, but none will contest the place of Edgar Poe in the records of misery.

Yet that he possessed a power of fascination over his fellow-men that was wonderful, no one who has glanced at his portrait — automatic and soulless piece of art as it is — will doubt. The grand and intellectual character of his beauty, the pale, thoughtful face, the high and exquisitely pro portioned forehead, the eyes of that neutral violet-gray tint so seldom seen, all accorded well with his calm, grave manner, in which hauteur was softened by the most delicate [page 217:] sense of politeness, and with the abstracted earnestness of his conversation, which one of his biographers tells us was “at times almost super-mortal in its eloquence. His voice was modulated with astonishing skill, and his large and variably expressive eyes looked repose or shot fiery tumults in theirs who listened, while his own face glowed, or was changeless in pallor, as his imagination quickened his blood or drew it back frozen to his heart.” We can easily believe a friend of his who tells us, that it was in his conversations and his letters, far more than in his published poetry and prose writings, that the genius of Poe was most gloriously revealed.

I do not believe this statement to be exaggerated. Almost all his works were composed in haste ; they are but the off spring of necessity, and but poor and trifling compared to what he would have written had outward circumstances, and more especially had the baneful habit that darkened his life, permitted. The natural direction of his genius was towards poetry, and Pegasus rises not to the heights of song when compelled to minister to earthly wants. The feeling that his talents and genius were thwarted and crushed by disaster — a feeling whose power over a disposition naturally as sensitive and as morbidly ambitious as that of Poe, it is not easy to exaggerate — accounts for that deep melancholy which made him seem, according to one who knew him well, “ save when some fitful pursuit subjugated his will and engrossed his faculties, as though he always bore the memory of some controlling sorrow.” Indeed he himself tells us, it was not in the pursuit of pleasure that he perilled life and reputation and reason. It was in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, — memories of wrong and injustice, and imputed dishonor, — from a sense of insupportable loneliness, and a dread of some strange impending doom. The prophecy thus branded upon his soul in letters of flame was accomplished in his tragical death, — the fitting end to a life which, like the old Greek tragedies, seems but a grand, yet terrible, hymn to Destiny. [page 218:]

I do not intend to speak of Poe's life any further than it may serve to illustrate the several works I purpose to criticise, for its general outlines are too well known to need repetition here, and a fair and copious biography is still a desideratum. All the narratives we have seen are. founded upon that prefixed to the edition of his collected works, and which those well acquainted with him declare to be unfair and unauthenticated. Many of the most injurious statements contained in it have been proven to be totally false. The author of the narrative is said to have been the rival of Poe for the praise and friendship of a distinguished poetess, now dead.

The faults of Poe's character, many of which were owing to the ill-judged indulgence of his guardian in his youth, cannot now affect us ; he suffered far more from them than from any punishment we can inflict ; but we owe him much for the works he has left us. Let us leave him then in the hands of his Eternal Father, in whom we hope he has found peace.

The object of poetry, in Poe's estimation, is to excite by elevating the soul. But all excitements are necessarily transient; hence there is really no such thing as a long poem. The “Paradise Lost” and “Iliad,” for instance, consist of a number of short poems skilfully united. For this reason he considered the idea of the Reviewers, that it is necessary to write a long poem in order to be a great poet, as an absurdity.

The poetic sense he thought to be the human aspiration for supernal beauty. “No mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above, — a prescience of that loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to Eternity alone.” From this view, the cause of that sadness we experience after listening to a grand poem or a magnificent piece of music, which is but another form of poetry, is easily explained. It is our petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, [page 219:] at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.”

Poe's definition of poetry is, therefore, “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty” — not the beauty of the Dionean, but of the Uranian Venus, — the beauty we own “in all noble thoughts, in all unworldly motives, in all holy impulses, in all chivalrous, generous, and self-sacrificing deeds.”

Although taste, the sense of the beautiful, holds intimate relations with the intellect and the moral sense, yet there is a distinction between them which cannot be overlooked, and hence in didactic poetry, if it would be poetry at all, the Truth must be subservient to the Beautiful. The fact that many fine poems, many of Poe's best, for example, are composed of ideas that strike the mind with horror, is no objection to this theory; for there is the same wild beauty in these as in the flash of the lightnings and the roar of the storm.

We should not have dwelt so long upon this theory of poetry, had it not been either so strangely misunderstood or shamefully misrepresented by the majority of critics, who have vilified both Poe and his works.

Poe's poetical works show great, varied, and almost contradictory powers. His intellect was daring and original; his imagination singularly subtle and prolific. His wonder ful power of analysis gave him that knowledge of metre, and of all the resources of rhythm, for which he was distinguished, and which, combined with his delicate perception of the shades of meaning and his wealth of language, enabled him ever to express his thoughts in melody in truest harmony with the idea.

The preponderance of this analytical power, which enabled him to take cognizance of the subtle operations of his mind in the act of composing, has induced many of his readers to believe that his poems are the productions of calm, deliberate labor, proving his skill as an artist indeed, but not his claims to genius, which sings from a necessity of its nature. [page 220:] This criticism applies with more truth, perhaps, to “The Bells,” than any other of his poems. The mere sound of the words throughout this singularly artistic creation would alone suffice to convey the meaning to one ignorant of the language, — a beauty so highly praised in certain well known single lines of Homer, Virgil, Pope, and others. One of Poe's critics unconsciously answered the objections brought against this poem, when he said: “We never read it but we have to rest after each verse to let the reverberations of the ‘Bells,’ in thought, die away

that we may commence the succeeding in silence. There is a strange swing, if we may use the word, in the concluding lines. As they front you on the page, they look redundant and uncalled for ; but read, read aloud, and the voice will naturally, and by identification with the poet, sink and swell, and modulate its tones into mimic peals of joy or alarm bells.”

Another admirer says : “ I was astonished one night in watching a conflagration, and repeating, amid the clash and clang of the alarm-bells, the third stanza of the poem, to find how marvellously the movement of the verse timed with the peals of sound, and how truly the poem reproduced the sense of danger which the sound of the bells, and the glare and mad ascension of the flames, and the pallor of the moon light conveyed. All the poetry of a conflagration is in that stanza, both in sound and sense, and Dante himself could not have rendered it more truly.”

Much of Poe's poetry is not of the kind to be appreciated by the generality of readers. It is too intensely subjective, too singularly ideal. He gives many fine suggestive hints, but few finished pictures. From this very subjectiveness, however, a strong light is thrown upon many traits of his character and incidents of his life.

“Eulalie,” “Annabel Lee,” and “Ulalume “ are the [page 221:] monuments of his love towards is wife. Did any one ever read the last · — probably his best poem — and not feel the wonderous spell wrought by the desolation shadowed forth in those sober and ashen skies, those sere and withered leaves, that dank tarn in the ghastly woodland?

The “Haunted Palace” is allegorical. By the palace, the author typifies his own body, “ the temple of the Holy Ghost,” as the Scriptures express the same idea. “Porphyrogene, the ruler of the realm,” is his soul, truly royally dowered and “ born in the purple” of Genius! The hair is fantastically represented as banners; the eyes as windows; the mouth,

through which came flowing the “ sparkling Echoes “ of his melodies, which glorified the king within. The “ evil things in robes of sorrow “ are the fiends of intemperance, and the senseless babble of the drunkard is fearfully drawn in “the hideous throng “ that from the pale door

The tender melancholy and the wild imaginings with which these poems are filled, are united in the author's prose works with a faculty of truthlike representation as great as that possessed by De Foe. You are fully convinced by his metaphysical hair-splitting arguments, and could swear he had passed through the fearful scenes he describes with such terrible fascination that you are borne unresistingly on, sharing in his terror and his madness.

Through the greater portion of his works one idea, in one form or another appears, — the idea of Death. It was the trembling of his soul in the presence of this idea that caused it to reflect such grotesque and ghostly images. From his youth, this idea haunted him. It pursued him from those dreary nights that found him in the chilly, drizzling rain, [page 222:] lingering over the grave of “Leonore,” “the one idolatrous and purely ideal love” of his boyhood, to the last, when he took refuge in a form of unbelief the most appalling we have met. It is expressed in “Eureka.” He holds that God is merged and lost in the universe he has created, — that ultimately all matter will be attracted into one central sphere: —

“Let us endeavor to comprehend that the final globe of globes will instantaneously disappear, and that God will remain all in all.

“But are we here to pause? Not so. On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution, we can readily conceive that a new, and perhaps totally different, series of conditions may ensue, — another creation and irradiation, returning into itself, — another action and reaction of the Divine Will. Guiding our imagination by that omni prevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief — let us say, rather, in indulging a hope — that the processes we have here ventured to con template will be renewed forever and forever and forever : a novel Universe swelling into Existence, and then subsiding into nothing ness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?

“And now — this Heart Divine — what is it? It is our own.”