Text: Anonymous, “Recent Works on Poe,” Scribner's Monthly, vol. 21, no. 4, February 1881, pp. 641-643

[page 641, column 1, continued:]

Recent Works on Poe.*

MR. STODDARD'S recently published selections from the writings of Edgar Poe contain all of Poe's poems worthy of retention, the best of his tales and sketches, and enough of his critical essays to give the general reader an idea of the singular acuteness of his literary judgments when unbiased by personal feeling. The accompanying life of the poet is enlarged from the memoir prefixed to Mr. Stoddard's edition of the poems published in 1875. It contains, however, much new material, and in special several of Poe's letters, now first presented. Mr. Stedman's valuable critical article on Poe, contributed to the May SCRIBNER, has been reprinted in elegant shape by

Houghton, Mifflin & Co., so that the latest utterances on the subject, both in biography and in criticism, are now simultaneously before the public. [column 2:] It can hardly be said that these two publications do much toward modifying the already very distinct impression made by Poe's peculiar genius. And yet they were not uncalled for, since they settle — it may be hoped finally — many mooted points in his career, both as a man and as an artist.

Poe's life has usurped an undue share of attention, considering how unrelated it was to his literary work. The latter occupied a sphere more remote from the real world than is usual even in the writings of the most “idealistic” poets. Mr. Lathrop, in his comparison of Poe with Hawthorne, has pointed out how un-American the former was; how little root he struck in the soil. His creations were like the blossoms of an air-plant. Even where they sprang from an actual experience, as in the lines “To Helen,’ or the little poem “For Annie,” he translated the experience into that realm of weird creatures and unearthly landscapes which was the true home of his imagination. In Philadelphia or New York he was always a stranger. His mind had

The reason why so many memoirs of Poe have been written is to be found in the inaccuracy and malignity of Griswold's famous life. This was at once attacked by Graham and Neale, and the controversy thus started has raged ever since. Many obscure points have been thereby cleared up, such as the date and place of the poet's birth, the real manner of his death, the exact nature of his relations with Mrs. Whitman, etc. Griswold has been convicted of many errors of fact; and yet, in spite of the generous women who have rushed to Poe's defense, and of the laborious biography of his latest rehabilitator, Mr. Ingram, the essential features of his character remain much as Griswold left them.

It can hardly be denied that Poe was personally a very poor creature. He was thankless, vain, quarrelsome, and insincere. He had some fine, winning traits which made a few women love him, but he was one whom no man could trust or respect. Mr. Stoddard claims in his preface to have written “generally without a word either of praise or blame; for whatever else might be said of his memoir, he was determined that it should not be called controversial.” This boast he fairly, maintaining an attitude of cold impartiality, and certainly not erring through excess of sympathy with his subject.

But whatever may have been the short-comings of Poe's life, the world willingly forgets and forgives. It knows that the order and harmony of the poet's verse have often no correspondence in his acts ; that the ethereal quintessence of genius is lodged sometimes in the coarsest vessels, and sometimes in vessels sadly frail and broken. Has not the world forgiven Byron? And after all, what has it to forgive? — it remains so vastly in the poet's debt! It seems, therefore, a kind of ingratitude to recall the failure in living of one whose thinking has become part of the intellectual experience of the race.

Mr. Stoddard gives us suggestive glimpses of the [page 642:] literary background against which Poe's figure is projected. Those were the days of Graham, and Godey, and of the annuals; the days of the Kennedys, the Hoffmans, and the Sigourneys; when the “North American Review “ paid its contributors two dollars a page; when General Morris wrote songs for the “New York Mirror”; and Mr. Richard Henry Wilde wrote sonnets for the “Southern Literary Messenger.” Does not all this read like ancient history? Poe slaved as an assistant editor for a salary of ten dollars a week. Willis was the only writer who made a comfortable income by his pen. The reading public was still small. There was no stimulating criticism. A new book was greeted with indifference by the public, and with feeble, indiscriminating praise by the reviews. Hard, surely, was the fortune of the bard born into such an environment. In reading the career of Poe, one is reminded of another American poet who suffered in the same way from an uncongenial milieu. We allude to Percival. The two men were quite unlike in character, and of totally unequal genius. Poe is as sure to be remembered as Percival to be forgot- ten. But they were alike in the bitterness of their reaction against their environment; in the injurious effect upon them of the atmosphere of their generation, at once relaxing and chilling. They both wrote, as it were, in vacuo.

How much more bracing is the air of literature to-day appears on comparing Mr. Stedman's little book with Poe's own critical writings. The latter was alternately engaged in attacking his rivals with jealous ferocity, and in puffing some third-class obscurity into notice.

The former, with much less than Poe's natural sagacity, brings to his task a sense of responsibility which makes him, in the end, the better critic. If his criticism seems the result of a nicely trained taste rather than of original insight, it is nevertheless just and delicate throughout. It applies largely — though by no means exclusively — to matters of technique, as might perhaps be expected from the nature of his subject, and from the fact that he is himself a conscientious literary workman. Poe's art — at least as a poet — was minute, and invites minute discussion.

It may be worth while to compare Mr. Stedman's judgments with Mr. Stoddard's, where they touch the same points. Criticism, it is to be feared, can never become an exact science. It always brings up against some such maxim as “De gustibus non est disputandum.” Here are two poets writing of a third, and reaching, perhaps, a general agreement; but in details the subjective element comes in and defeats consent. “If ‘Annabel Lee’ and ‘For Annie,’” writes Mr. Stoddard, “possess any merit other than attaches to melodious jingle, I have not been able to discover it.” On the other hand, Mr. Stedman says of “For Annie”: “For repose, and for delicate and unstudied melody, it is one of Poe's truest poems, and his tenderest.” And he pronounces “Annabel Lee” “a tuneful dirge, the simplest of Poe's melodies, and the most likely to please the common ear.” He adds that it was written with more spontaneity than others of Poe's [column 2:] lyrics: “The theme is carried along skillfully, the movement hastened and heightened to the end, and there dwelt upon, as often in a piece of music.” Still greater is their divergence of opinion touching “Ulalume,” that fantastic requiem which the poet wrote shortly after the death of his wife. Of “Ulalume “ Mr. Stoddard writes as follows, after calling it

“the most singular poem that anybody ever produced in commemoration of a dead woman”: “I can perceive no touch of grief in it, no intellectual sincerity, but a diseased determination to create the strange, the remote, and the terrible. * * * No healthy mind was ever impressed by ‘Ulalume.’” On the other hand, Mr. Stedman says: “It is so strange, so unlike anything that preceded it, so vague and yet so full of meaning, that of itself it might establish

new method. To me it 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 had left him alone with his own soul.”

We think that the subtler interpretation is here the truer one. Is there any touch of grief in “Lycidas”? Poe was incapable of writing a simple, direct expression of a personal sorrow, such as Burns wrote, e. g., in his lines “To Mary in Heaven.” As Milton's pastoral machinery keeps his emotion at arm's length, so with Poe: the strangest form which his imagination imposed upon his utterance grew to be his instrument of expression — his violin. In the preface to his third volume of poems, he says that “a poem is opposed to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.” This is one of the cases in which he limited his definitions by his own practice, and “Ulalume” is his extremest example of indefiniteness.

Apropos of “Ulalume,” Mr. Stoddard objects to Poe's abuse of the refrain — or, as Mr. Stedman prefers to call it, the “repetend.” “The gain of a single word and the variation of a single thought are hardly worth such repetitions as these”:

Here again Mr. Stedman would seem to take issue with his brother critic. He instances, as an example of the employment of the refrain with “novel and poetical results,” the following lines from “Ulalume”:

Our memories were treacherous and sere.”

So far as the instances here quoted go, we agree with Mr. Stoddard. The trick becomes distasteful in its excess, and has been wittily compared to the arithmetical process of “carrying one” from the line above. But we would not willingly relinquish the masterly employment of this effect in “The Raven,” nor that lingering echo in which the music of “ Annabel Lee “ expires —

After what Stoddard says of the “jingle” in “For [page 643:] Annie” and other pieces, it seems incredible that he should hold up “The Bells” as the most perfect example of Poe's “power of words.” We must strongly dissent from his estimate of this poem, as well as from Mr. Stedman's, which seems equally high. “The Bells” has always impressed us as one of Poe's most artificial lyrics: the mechanical effect is carried beyond permissible bounds. It is the converse of those imitative abominations in “The Battle of Prague,” and similar performances, which strive to set the boom of artillery, the noise of water-falls, etc., in the place of purely musical ideas.

Yet there can be no question that Poe was one of our finest versifiers. That his devices were somewhat transparent, and admit easily of parody, is no objection to them. He carried them even into punctuation, as witness his fondness for the parenthesis:

We think Mr. Stedman is perfectly right in his preference of “Israfel” over any other single poem of its author. He deserves thanks, too, for saying a good word for “The Sleeper,” which is certainly Poe's most characteristic thing, though by no means his best. Those who like to taste the extreme flavor of a poet — who find something in “ The Idiot Boy “ which they miss in the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality” — will feel what we mean when we say that we would lose any other one of Poe's poems rather than “The Sleeper.”

In what Mr. Stedman has to say of Poe's prose writings he is equally sympathetic, and careful to do exact justice. It must be confessed that Poe's rank as a prose classic will depend in the future upon almost as slender a basis as his poetic fame. Only some dozen or half-dozen of his tales will stand the wear of time. His humorous tales are even now melancholy reading. In this kind he attained at most the grotesque. His ingenious analyses, like “The Gold Bug” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” will always have an interest as puzzles. His tales of fear and of the supernatural still retain their fascination; but even here there is an alloy of baseness : the terrible is mixed overmuch with the horrible — i. e., with the physically repulsive. Poe's great inferiority to Hawthorne in spiritual depth and fineness — which Mr. Stedman points out — is of course obvious. The critic's allusion to his author's display of learning, and his fondness for mystifying his readers, reminds one of Colonel Higginson's confession that he had once looked in vain through Tieck to find that “Journey into the Blue Distance” to which Poe refers in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

We fear, from Mr. Stedman's use of “transcendental” in the following sentence, that he is one of those who use this word loosely: “His artistic contempt for metaphysics is seen even in those tales which appear most transcendental.” But for this we are willing to blame, not any particular critic, but rather the wretched state of our whole critical nomenclature. Who is not tired unto death of critical [column 2:] talk about “realism” and “idealism” — both of which words have in philosophy a precise meaning, in criticism none; about “melody” and “harmony” — misleading analogies imported from music; or the “preraphaelite” and the “picturesque” — equally misleading terms from a sister art? We read with grief that Mr. Bryant had suggested for the Poe monument at Baltimore an inscription containing that odious piece of literary slang, “word-painting.” And this after Lessing has taught us better; and from one who insisted on having the writers on the “Evening Post” call a hotel an inn! Coleridge's imported distinctions have broken down. Genius is only a higher degree of talent; fancy and imagination are not two faculties but different employments of one faculty (Einbildungskraft); and few metaphysicians will admit any distinction between his famous reason and understanding.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 641, column 1:]

* Edgar Allan Poe. By Edmund Clarence Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1880.

Life and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. By R. H. Stoddard New York: W. J. Widdleton.