Text: George William Curtis, “[Review of Edgar Poe and His Critics],” Harper's Weekly, vol. IV, no. 168, March 17, 1860, p. 163

[page 163, column 1, continued:]

EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS.

IN reading the exquisitely tender, subtle, sympathetic, and profoundly appreciative sketch of Edgar Poe, which has just been issued under this title, it is impossible not to remember the brave woman's arm thrust through the slide to serve as a bolt against the enemy. The praise and the blame which have been cast upon the life and genius of Poe have been almost fierce and frantic. By how many is he not still regarded as heartless, unprincipled, shiftless vagabond? By how many is he not secretly worshiped and openly extolled as [column 2:] our only great, original poet? And this, at least, is true, that he has exercised more direct influence upon the form of our poetry than any of his contemporaries.

The author of this little book (it has only eighty pages), with an inexpressible grace, reserve, and tender, heroic charity — having a right which no other person has to speak, tells, in a simple, transparent, and quite strain, what she thinks of his career and genius. She omits nothing; she forces nothing. It is no spotless Prince of fairy she delineates; but a fellow-man of ours, greatly gifted, suffering deeply, often from his own faults — stumbling in the dark ways where we all stumble, but still looking for light — not a model man, by an means, but not the fiend and inhuman being he has been so often represented . In the delicate reticence of the book — in its tone of inward music, as if the singer were humming a melody beneath the song she sings — there is a pensive and peculiar charm. But it is not a eulogy. It is a criticism which is profound by the force of sympathy, and vigorous by its clear comprehension. Thus, we shall hardly have a finder statement of Poe's intellectual condition than this:

“Wanting in that supreme central force or faculty of the mind, whose function is a God-conscious and God-adoring faith, Edgar Poe sought earnestly and conscientiously for such solution of the great problems of thought as were alone attainable to an intellect hurled from its balance by the abnormal preponderance of the analytical and imaginative faculties. It was to this very disproportion that we are indebted for some of those marvelous intellectual creations, which, as we shall hope to prove, had an important significance and an especial adaptation to the time.”

It was Poe's mistake and misfortune to wage war upon his fellow-authors. In a series of papers upon the “Literati” he seems like a frenzied East Indian running a muck, with his swift, sharp, glittering crease in hand. But those of us who belong to an epoch just after his — who were not gashed or scored in his wild revels — who have no personal prejudices to appease, and only that charity in our hearts which combined genius and weakness and error must always command — we of the last decade must needs turn these pages with a singular interest and sadness; not without a secret prayer, perhaps, that when our little tasks are ended, and the stained we have left upon so many pages of our books, and our lives are pointed out to public contumely, some hand as firm and gentle as this may pull away the briers to plant rosemary where we lie.