Text: Anonymous, “[Review of Andrew Lang's edition of Poe's poems],” Academy (London, UK), vol. 21, no. 523, May 13, 1882, p. 335, cols. 1-3

[page 335, column 1, continued:]

CURRENT LITERATURE.

The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. With an Essay on his Poetry by Andrew Lang. “Parchment Library” Edition. (Kegan Paul, Trench and Co.) What we feel upon reading this highly suggestive Preface is mainly surprise [column 2:] that there should exist upon the part of the critic in relation to his subject so much subtle intellectual with so little positive poetic sympathy. ithin “the dim vales and shadowy woods,” the vaporous caverns, the death-chambers, and the sepulchres which the genius of Poe inhabits, Mr. Lang's happiest utterances have an uncertain sound. What he writes on Poe's artistic method (as also what he quotes from Mr. Saintsbury on the same point) is harmoniously and admirably done. What he says of Poe as a man is wholesome and robust, although, indeed, we find it hard to follow him when he tells us that of “love such as the poets have known it from Catullus to” — well, “to Coventry Patmore,” Poe knew nothing. Where Mr. Lang is chiefly at fault his error comes of an entire lack of sympathy. We think he has missed the fundamental thing in Poe, and that is Poe's art of personification. A tendency to personify every emotion and all natural phenomena displays itself in the poet's earliest verse. He tells us that he can hear the darkness, that he can hearken to the murmur the grass makes as it grows, can interpret the language the waves hold to the sand on the sea-shore, and can hold converse with the wind. Love alone, or almost alone, among the passions proper to poetry had been, down to Poe's time, personified by all the poets; but he projects in concrete shapes every human passion, all the workings of the intellect and all the stirrings of sense. At the outset, this tendency to personify whatever emotion other poets had been content to leave in its vague and abstract condition was a conscious thing on Poe's part, but as his art developed it became an unconscious impulse and a part of his craft, until at length he cared neither to explain his personifications nor account for them. They became an essential element of his poetry, and the sole arbiter in his use of them was taste, It was at this period he alleged that with “intellect or conscience” poetry such as his had only “collateral relations,” and that it had “no dependence, except incidentally, upon duty or truth.” It was not that Poe's poetry became even less didactic than at first, but that it became even less directly and avowedly didactic. Moral promptings remained, but they took the shapes which beauty found for them. With visible finger they pointed no lessons; as Mr. Lang says, they distributed no tracts; but they were no less surely there for those who had eyes to see them as they lay hidden within the veil the poet wove for them. Mr. Lang seems to say that Poe's poetry was neither moral nor unmoral; that it held itself aloof from nature; that it was the result of the reaction against the “excessively uninspired” American literature which, in the poet's day, was intended to be extremely respectable, to “palpitate with actuality” and “struggle with the living facts of the hour.” This is missing the important point. Poe has, within his limits, as much actuality as Longfellow; he has as much life and human fire. If his poetry was the result of a reaction against American literature, the reaction was not provoked by the circumstance that literature was busied with the teaching of moral lessons, but because it was ‘’ excessively uninspired.” Poe brought inspiration, and brought it in such excess as sometimes to seem to leap quite out of the world of realities into a realm of his own imagining, where few might follow him, and whence fewer still might bring lessons or lore. But for him there was ever a fundamental basis for every poem, a basis in real life, and there exists not a line more in Poe than in the most direct and self-conscious writer of which it may, in fairness, be said that it is ‘'sense swooning into nonsense,” or that it “scarcely pretends to remain within the limits of the poetic art, and attracts or repels [column 3:] by mere sounds as vacant as possible of meaning.” Poe was a master of metrical arts, but let us not be so dominated by his music and so indifferent to his thought as to believe that he ever appealed “more to mere sensation than to any emotion that can be stated in words.” Once grasp his art of personification, and “Ulalume” is not a whit more enigmatical than the “Raven” or either of these than the “Dream within a Dream.” Mr. Lang despairs of attaching any rational meaning to the first-mentioned of these poems, and is content to ask no more from what Mr. Henry James calls the “valueless verse” than the vagueness of exquisite music. Read from the right side, nevertheless, “ Ulalume” has indeed, as the essayist properly says, an “excuse for its existence,” and is perhaps the weightiest of Poe's poems in significance. It is Memory, Dead Love, and Living Love personified. In other words, it is a picture of the poet left alone with his soul upon the death of his life's love, and finding himself, after a long night of sorrow, tempted by an unworthy passion, which he follows, in defiance of all that is best in him, until confronted, reproached, and stopped by the ineffaceable memory of the nobler love he has lost. What authority has Mr. Lang for his last line of “Annabel Lee”?

is scarcely better than by the sea-side would have been.