Text: Anonymous, “The Life and Poetry of Edgar Poe,” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal (Edinburgh, UK), vol. XIX, ns. no. 478, February 26, 1853, pp. 137-140

[page 137, continued:]

THE LIFE AND POETRY OF EDGAR POE.

AMONG the results of that spirit of enterprise which has brought us into intimate connection with the other nations of the earth, a more extended knowledge of literature is certainly not the least interesting. The triumphs of science and human energy, which have done so much to change our ideas of distance, and to give us ample opportunities of becoming acquainted with the remote portions of the world, have had an effect in widening the circle of readers to such a degree, that authors may now be said to write, not for those of their own country merely, but for a world-wide public. This is especially the case in regard to those who, though separated from us by the mighty ocean, use the same language, and give expression to ideas very similar to our own. The extent to which our knowledge of American literature has increased within the last few years, is one of the most striking illustrations that could be adduced of the manner in which free communication between nation and nation contributes to the general diffusion of enlightenment, and the cultivation of an elevated taste. As may easily be supposed, our transatlantic cousins have hitherto profited most by these benefits. Their literature and art are little else as yet than reflections of our own; but we have, nevertheless, obtained some return for what they have derived from us, in the works of the more recent American authors — works which are now beginning to exhibit greater originality, and indicate the formation of what will in course of time be worthy of being considered a national literature. The poets and novelists are leading the van in this intellectual progress; for it is obvious that the specimens of American poetry with which we are now more or less familiar, evince a far higher order of genius, and more remarkable characteristics of originality, than anything of the kind which the poets of the New World formerly produced. ‘They are distinguished by a greater degree of freshness, by a more delicate sense of the beautiful, and a higher tone of feeling; and although a great poem, in the true sense of the term, has not yet reached us from the other side of the Atlantic, not a few remarkable ones may now be pointed to in the works of such men as Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, and Poe. While the first two of these are now nearly as familiar to the lovers of poetry among us as they are in their own country, the others, equally worthy of notice, are by no means so well known as they deserve to be. Poe, as a writer of more than ordinary power, and as one who has evinced far more originality than worthy of [column 2:] attention; and we therefore propose, in the course of this article, to present our readers with an outline of his strange, sad history, and a few selections from such of his poems as are most remarkable.

Three volumes of poems, tales, essays, and criticisms, recently collected and published in America, contain the contributions of Edgar Allan Poe to the periodical literature of his country, and form the sole basis upon which his reputation as a writer rests. Very recently, his poems alone have been republished in England, with a brief prefatory essay, in which his merits as a prose-writer are scarcely even referred to, while the moral of his life is obviously mistaken. From a biography prefixed to the New York edition, we are enabled to form an estimate of his personal character, such as his works do not afford; and we doubt if the records of human wretchedness and frailty can yield anything more painful, than the facts upon which that estimate is founded. Mental philosophy will scarcely enable us to account for the consistency of a fine sense of the beautiful, both in physics and morals, with an extreme practical demoralisation; but that it did exist in the case before us, as in many others, there is no room to doubt; for never, we believe, was genius allied to vice in its grosser forms more apparent than in the career of Edgar Poe. Unhappily, circumstances of the most unfavourable kind surrounded him at his very birth, for both his parents died while he was a mere child, leaving him little else than the dangerous inheritance of strong passions and a restless disposition. His lot, in a worldly point of view, was by no means a hard one, however, for at his father's death he was adopted by a gentleman of ample means and a kindly heart, who strove with true paternal solicitude to guide and control the wayward boy. His efforts were unavailing; for no sooner had Poe returned from England, where he had been taken by his foster-father for the purpose of obtaining the advantages of a liberal education, than he entered upon the course of recklessness and dissipation which ended only with his life. Expelled from an American university, he returned home to repay his guardian's kindness with insults and ingratitude of the worst description, and subsequently set forth on a Quixotic journey to join the Greeks in their struggle for independence. Greece he never reached, however, but was picked up a wandering beggar in Russia, and sent back only to be cashiered from a military establishment into which he had been admitted by influence of no ordinary kind.

We next hear of him as a private soldier, then as the successful competitor for a prize offered by an enterprising publisher for a tale and poem, and again as a miserable and half-famished writer for obscure periodicals. Poe's genius was not such as to remain long in obscurity, and accordingly his writings speedily brought him into notice, and procured him lucrative and honourable employment. For a time he seemed to have overcome his evil propensities, and to have resolved upon a new course of life. He married a young, beautiful, and gentle wife — ‘The Beautiful Annabel Lee’ of his touching and exquisite lyric. He surrounded his home with all those refinements which a highly-cultivated taste could suggest and a moderate income allow. In his humble yet poetical home, he appeared to those who knew him best to have begun that career of high endeavour for which his genius was so well fitted, and to have entered upon a course which [page 138:] would soon lead to fame and fortune. A few months, however, and all this was at an end. His employers were compelled, reluctantly it is believed, to free themselves from a connection with one whose power they appreciated, but whose irregularities and apparent insanity were continually the source not only of annoyance, but of great pecuniary risk; for Poe's antipathies, always violent, were rendered tenfold more so by intemperance, and he seldom scrupled as to the means of giving expression to them. After continued periods of dissipation, intervals of sobriety and great labour occurred. There were times of remorse, and often of brilliant achievement. Let no one deem such language misapplied in the case of one who was as yet only a writer of fugitive papers for ordinary periodicals. The periodicalism of America has fostered all its best writers; and there, not less than with us, do we find the highest evidences of intellectual strength in what is designed to last only for a few days. The nature of many of Poe's contributions was, however, enduring; they bore the impress of genius; and twenty years

hence, the best of them will probably be much more familiar to English readers than they are now. These were thrown off with amazing rapidity, considering their character, at a time when, after his settlement in New York, all who admired them, and were interested in their author, deemed that he had entered upon a new and purer course of life.

This hopeful period, however, was soon at an end. In two years after, his wife, whom he seems to have really loved, died in abject penury, and he had once more plunged into the wildest excesses. Desperately depraved, reckless, and mad, he still, at intervals, astonished his countrymen with some new proof of his genius. The literary circles of New York were always open to him in his sober hours; and even in his worst days, he lacked not the self-sacrificing devotedness of woman. The mother of his dead wife clung to him, hoping against hope, caring for him, screening him, and, amid all his self-abandonment, watching over and seeking help for him. Occasionally it would seem as if this tenderness and solicitude had brought back Poe to a sense of shame. He again turned earnestly to his pen; and in 1848, produced Eureka, a work to the composition of which he brought his capacities obviously in their most complete development. It is a prose poem on the cosmogony of the universe, a work of rare power, and the effect of which in America was beyond anything that had been experienced for years. It greatly increased the number of Poe's admirers, among whom was a lady spoken of by his biographer, as ‘one of the most brilliant women in New England.’ Whether from sufficient cause or not, the name of this lady and that of the admired but wretched poet were frequently associated, and it was hoped that their expected union might have a beneficial influence upon his character. This, however, did not take — Poe, in a fit of almost incomprehensible brutality, ving obtruded himself, designedly it was thought, upon a circle of her friends, and in her own presence, in a state of wild inebriety. Another, and the last, temporary reformation followed this occurrence. He once more gave evidence of a determination of amendment — spoke with unaffected horror of his past life, and became jealous of seduction into his former courses. Temptation assailed him, however, at an unguarded moment, while on his way to accept of an honourable invitation from a literary institute, and he fell never again to rise. After days of dissipation and madness, he died in hospital of Baltimore, in October 1849, at the early age of thirty-eight.

The moral of this melancholy history lies upon the surface. Dark sometimes, dreadfully dark as is the page on which are written the records of genius, we know of nothing more sad and painful than this, for never, we believe, was the poetic gift allied with so [column 2:] much that was essentially depraved. It is more than doubtful whether the daring recklessness, the wild licence with which men like Poe sported with the responsibilities of life, have not done far more for Satan, than in their highest and purest works they have done for man. And yet the poetry of this poor inebriate is free from aught of that viciousness which marked his life; for the most part, it is the mournful wail of one whose natural endowments were never called into play without uttering unconsciously deep and touching sorrow over the wreck of the spirit of which they formed a part. It is the sad dirge-like music of those moments which were pauses in a lawless life — a strain in which the agony of remorse seems to thrill with all its intensity, or to grasp at strange quaint fancies, and force them to interpret things it dare not distinctly utter. And thus much that Poe has written, is auto-biographical in a stricter sense than poetry of a strongly subjective character generally is. Draped in the sombre or the flaming garments with which his imagination invested them, we see the poet himself, and all his mocking or upbraiding thoughts, wandering wildly through the melancholy numbers. There is a deep and beautiful tenderness, too, in some of his lyrics, as witness the exquisite poem of Annabel Lee — the expression of his sorrow for the death of his gentle wife.

This strain of sorrow is only equalled by those in which the poet mourns over the wreck of his wasted life. Amid all his wild excesses, and his self-outlawry from the amenities of social existence, he had no more severe censor than that which spoke from within his own soul. This is strikingly manifest in the poem, entitled The Haunted Palace, and especially in the following stanzas of it: —

While Poe's genius was necessarily infected by the depravity of his life to the extent of a misanthropical faithlessness in man, his poetry, from the circumstance of its being so strictly subjective, is less unhealthy than his prose. The utterance of his own self-knowledge is, moreover, always too passionate to be deemed insincere. His tales and sketches are often pervaded by the horrible, to an extent which is only saved from being repulsive by the power of imagination and the strength of the reasoning faculty displayed in them; but in his poems there are almost always glimpses afforded of a ruined beauty, and an analytic treatment of emotion, sufficient to give them a moral tone. He seems, as it were, to have preserved the latter sacred to the expression of his own sorrow, for that the phantom of the past rose up before him with awful, soul-subduing clear, we think, from many of his best poems. The Raven is the most remarkable proof of this; and when we know that it was written during what might be considered the longest of those periods of sober earnestness, strong thought, and incessant labour which occurred in his brief career, we are at no loss to discover, that what seems fanciful and almost amusing to the ordinary reader, had a deep and terrible significance to the unhappy poet. This remarkable poem, which occupies, we think, the most prominent position among the originalities of American imaginative literature, is much too long to be quoted by us in its entirety, and not a little of its peculiar charm is necessarily lost by its unity of strong emotion being broken up. Suffice it to give a mere outline of the poet's reverie broken by the tapping at his chamber door, and the subsequent colloquy with the ‘stately Raven of the saintly days of yore’ — a meet emblem of the dark shadow of his own worse than wasted life which conscience summons up before him.

We are disposed to believe that even these verses, detached as they are from the poem, and affording only an imperfect idea of its effect as a whole, indicate more than ordinary power. It is certainly unique in American literature, as much so as the Christabel and Ancient Mariner of Coleridge are in our own; and unquestionably a poetical reputation has been earned by things that will not bear comparison with it for a moment, even in point of artistic construction merely, for there is a wonderful harmony between the feeling and the rhythmical expression. The peculiar irregular music of Poe's poetry is not the least striking proof of its original character. Style may always be imitated within the ordinary limits of mere versification, but that structure of rhythmical cadence which takes its form from the things expressed, is peculiarly the work of genius. Poe has carried this to an extreme in certain strains of inner music, so to speak — poems which have arranged themselves within the author's fancy both as to the thought or feeling and the rhyme; but the former being obscure, the latter is to a great extent unintelligible, and in some instances discordant. Some stanzas from a piece, entitled The Bells, will suffice to illustrate the

power he shews in maintaining the completeness of the harmony between the idea and its expression:

This is an achievement in versification which even Southey, curious and studiously desirous of excelling in such things, has not equalled; it greatly surpasses most of his efforts, indeed, inasmuch as the imagination evinced in the last stanza we have quoted surpasses mere feats in rhyme.

We have already said, that Poe's poetry may be regarded as in a very special sense the expression of his own self-consciousness. Wild and melancholy as is its general character, there are a few strains which shew that the spirit of the wretched poet was sometimes visited by dreams of surpassing beauty — glimpses of purity — of passionate yet exalted love, and of a higher

faith than that of his ordinary life even at its best. It would seem as if in these his genius vindicated itself by a protest of beauty against the gloomy broodings of a disquieted conscience or the frenzied excesses of a vicious life; and yet the beauty ever wears the hue of sadness.

The prose works of Edgar Poe are for the most part susceptible of being accounted for on the principle we have already hinted at — namely, that which places them in a completely different light as regards their author's own being from the poems. They are of two classes — those in which a strong yet gloomy imagination creates consistently with its own nature, exploring the deepest depths of the horrible; and those in which a keen, clear intellect is more predominant than imaginative power. The combination of these two characteristics in the works of a single man, must ever infer no ordinary degree of intellectual strength: in the works of such a man as Poe, it is somewhat extraordinary. Let the reader turn to his singular sketch, entitled The Purloined Letter, or to some of his criticisms, after reading such things as The Fall of the House of Usher, or The Cask of Amontillado, and he will find it difficult to believe that the acumen, the clear, vigorous reasoning of the former, could ever have proceeded from a man of such a wild and morbid imagination as is evinced in the latter. Such, we are told by his biographer, was Poe's success in combining both these characteristics by admirably sustained argument on imaginary evidence, and in a supposititious case, that many of his readers could not be persuaded of its fictitious character. And yet we have seen what was the nature, the life, and death of this sad wreck alike of genius and humanity. Judging from the works he has left, Poe is unquestionably the most original [column 2:] imaginative writer America has yet produced. There is not a line in all his poetry which suggests the idea of imitation; and nothing in his prose — if we except his wilder tales, which are like so many refinements on the gross horrors of old German romance — to which we could adduce a strict parallel.