Text: Anonymous, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Literary World (London, UK), vol. XXXVI, September 2, 1887, pp. 205-206

[page 205, column 2, continued:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE.*

UNLIKE some new editions, this Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe has been fully and carefully revised. It is impossible to read this fresh tribute to the memory of the highly-gifted but unhappy poet without feeling that in Mr. Ingram he has found a sincere and truly sympathetic biographer, who, not satisfied with writing a mere sketch of Poe's life, has shown us “the gradual development of his heart and mind, of his nature as a poet and a man,” and thus “endearing him more to us, while enabling us thoroughly to comprehend him.”

Throughout the whole of his brief career a morbid sensitiveness to affection seems to have been one of Poe's most distinguishing traits, and this marked idiosyncrasy of his character shows itself both in his proud shrinking from all contact with uncongenial natures, in the fidelity of his friendships, and in his passionate and almost fanatical devotion to those who became the objects of his affection. This craving for sympathy characterised Poe's intercourse with his fellows from his earliest boyhood, and what he could not find in his companions he sought for amid the silence of Nature, delighting in solitary rambles in unfrequented spots, where he could freely indulge in his poetical day-dreams.

Mr. Ingram is of opinion that the sad and untimely death of Mrs. Helen Stannard, whose gracious and gentle kindness to the orphan lad filled his lonely heart with “an oppression of joy,” tinged all Poe's writings for years, if not for ever, and that Mrs. Whitman has found a key “to much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet's after life,” and to the many strange and weird fancies that haunted his brain in the “solitary churchyard vigils” at the grave of her who had been the confidant of all his boyish griefs and sorrows.

It was from John Neal, the editor of The Yankee, that Poe received the first words of praise and encouragement in his literary career-” the first faint recognition of his ability to do something meritorious” - and the correspondence thus begun in friendly criticism was continued in a similar sympathetic strain until the poet's death.

Like so many writers of repute, Edgar Poe was wont to portray the workings of his own nature in his writings, and these autobiographical glimpses are especially noticeable in his story of “Berenice,” which Mr. Ingram designates as “an essay of its author's idiosyncrasies.” “Ligeia,” which was the poet's favourite tale, markedly displays that faculty which [column 3:] Mrs. Browning describes as “making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar” by proving the impossible possible. But that gruesome sketch, the “Man of the Crowd,” Mr. Ingram considers, stands forth as a specimen of the author's real genius, displaying to the full “his masterly powers of combined suggestiveness and description.”

It is not our purpose here to enter on a detailed criticism of Poe's writings, but we cannot refrain from quoting the following exquisite definition taken from a prefatory letter to his volume of poems published in 1831: —

A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object, an indefinite instead a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

Some of the sunniest and happiest days of the poet's short and sad career were spent in the little cottage at Fordham, that tiny and simple home made bright by the refined taste and genius of its inmates. But even this haven was ruthlessly intruded upon by an uncharitable and censorious public, “fed by jealous whisperings of curious men, and, sadder still, of jealous women.” The enemies that Poe's pungent and scathing pen had raised around him left him no peace, and their remorseless and unparalleled hostility followed him through life, not ceasing even with his death.

Although Poe's last journey to Richmond was a hopeful one, being undertaken with the object of carrying out “the grand purpose” of his life, the starting of The Stylus, his own special magazine, the poet's sensitive nature seems to have been oppressed with gloomy forebodings, which, alas! were only too well founded-though even now the actual facts connected with his tragic end are still shrouded in mystery.

Mr. Ingram's memoir has, however, successfully accomplished the object he had in view. Without dwelling unnecessarily [page 206:] on the “mythology of scandal” that has grown up around the poet's story, he brings forward authenticated proofs that the obloquy which for so long overshadowed Edgar Allan Poe's moral character and writings was the result of misrepresentations and falsifications, by which his most harmless words and actions were distorted, and he completely refutes Mr. Griswold's slanderous “Memoirs of Poe,” justly characterising them as “a calumnious product of envy, hatred, and malice” against this gifted, but ill-starred child of genius.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 205, column 2:]

* The Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. By John H. Ingram. W. H. Allen and Co. 75. 6d.