Text: Samuel Bowles, “Edgar A. Poe,” Daily Republican (Springfield, MA), vol. 6, no. 241, October 12, 1849, p. 2, col. 2

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EDGAR A. POE. — The death of a literary man who has made the noise in the world that Poe has, should not be passed by in silence. Mr Poe was born in Baltimore, and died at the age of 38 years. He was, early in life, adopted into the family of Mr Allan, a wealthy Virginian, who sent him to England, where he was fitted for College. He returned to America, and after a course of dissipation, graduated at the University of Virginia. He made some “debts of honor” which Allan refused to pay, and then left his country to take part in the Greek Revolution. When he arrived at St Petersburgh, he found his money and enthusiasm quite exhausted. With some assistance he managed to get home again, when he entered the Military Academy at West Point. Mr Allan died without mentioning him in his will, and he committed himself to authorship for a livelihood. He was, for several years, small critic for Graham's Magazine, and in the meantime wrote a variety of tales and poems. Poe has always, we believe, been looked upon with a certain degree of admiration by Mr Willis. Willis has befriended him in his troubles, and enlisted public sympathy in his in his behalf.

Poe has been called a genius. If he was one, he did not exhibit himself as such in his prose fictions or his poems. His tales and his criticisms have no prominent characteristic, save that of a refined and almost super-mathematical analysis. — The “Murders of the Rue Morgue”, and the “Gold Bug”, will illustrate this characteristic. He delighted to take a fact, real or assumed, and trace back the line of causes and dependencies till he arrived at its fountain. Almost all his tales are constructed in this manner; that is, he wrote everything backwards. His poetry is entirely a different matter. It is a collection of the hugest, most incongruous and unnatural fancies that ever issued from a human brain. In prose, may properly be called sane, in poetry, almost crazy. We defy any one to read carefully any of his poems, without coming to the conclusion that they are the productions of mental disease. His poetry is often musical, and some of its most musical passages cover up the most ridiculous fancies imaginable. To illustrate, we quote a few lines from memory:

Nothing can more perfectly musical, and nothing more absolutely meaningless. One cannot doubt that there was an “opiate vapor” somewhere, dealt out by anybody but the “man in the moon.”

The majority of his poems however are of an entirely different character. They have been thought mystical, and to contain some occult meaning, or moral. It is not so. They are aimless. Ghastly forms and horrid phantoms, out-of-the-way stars in out-of-the-way places,

slimy, crawling, disgusting reptiles; these are the materials of his verse. They are the readily offspring of a mind, vexed with harsh stimulants.

We have nothing to say of Mr Poe's personal character. His best friends had innumerable weaknesses to humor, and faults to forgive. We have but to say that his criticism was almost uniformly harsh and rather than philosophical. As an author of prose he was the last man who should be chosen as a model, and, as a poet, he has left nothing to improve the heart, enlarge the soul, or quicken the exercise of a healthy imagination. His productions will be retained as curiosities rather than treasures, and his name will be yoked with notoriety rather than fame.