Text: Alphonso G. Newcomer, “Introduction,” Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Chicago and New York: Scott, Foresman and Co, 1898, pp. 9-27

[page 9:]

Youth.

Edgar Allan Poe was born, the second of three children, at Boston, January 19, 1809. His father was a Baltimorean, the son of a Revolutionary patriot, possibly of Irish descent. His mother was of English birth. Both were members of a theatrical company then playing at Boston. Nearly three years later, by the death of the mother, at Richmond, Virginia, the children were left orphans. Edgar was adopted by Mr. John Allan, a Scotchman who had made a fortune in Virginia in the tobacco trade. He was brought up in luxury, a much spoiled child — petted for his beauty and precocity, amusing himself with dogs and ponies at summer resorts, and declaiming on the table for Mr. Allan's guests while they drank their wine. In his seventh year he was taken to England and put into school in a London suburb, an experience which afterward furnished a setting for the story of William Wilson. Five years later he returned with his adoptive parents to Richmond. At the age of seventeen, a proud, reserved, half-melancholy and wholly self-willed youth, he entered the University of Virginia. There he studied the ancient and modern languages and practiced athletics and the [page 10:] several “gentlemanly” forms of dissipation. He was withdrawn by Mr. Allan for incurring gambling debts. From the tedious routine of Mr. Allan's counting-room he ran away to Boston, published there an anonymous little volume of forty pages — the Byronic Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) — and enlisted in the army under an assumed name.(1) Poe afterward allowed the story to be circulated that during this period he had gone abroad to assist the Greeks in their struggle for liberty, like Byron, and that he had spent part of the time in St. Petersburg. Mr. Allan, discovering his whereabouts, secured his discharge from the army, and obtained his appointment, as a cadet, to West Point. A few months of the severe discipline of that school, however, sufficed for Poe's restless nature, and it is probable that he deliberately brought upon himself the dismissal which followed. He found himself adrift, at the age of twenty-two, with nothing further to expect from Mr. Allan.

Manhood.

Literature presented itself as his most natural vocation. Poe had, indeed, begun to take himself very seriously as a poet before he was twenty, and he had published a second volume at Baltimore while waiting for his cadetship. This volume contained, in addition to a revision of the ambitious Tamerlane and some minor poems, the mystical and scarcely intelligible [page 11:] Al Aaraaf. A second edition, issued at New York shortly after his expulsion from West Point, contained several new poems of real promise, like Israfel and To Helen. But poverty and the maturing of his powers conspired to turn his attention to prose, and his first success of note was made through that medium. In 1833 a Baltimore weekly, The Saturday Visiter, offered a prize of one hundred dollars for the best prose tale submitted. Poe, then in desperate straits, submitted half a dozen. His MS. Found in a Bottle was awarded the first prize. John P. Kennedy, the novelist, who was one of the judges, took a kindly interest in the author, securing him some work in journalism, and probably providing even food and clothing. Poe was then living at Baltimore with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and her daughter Virginia. Two years later he went to Richmond to assist in editing the Southern Literary Messenger, and about the same time married Virginia Clemm. She was a mere child, scarcely fourteen, but Poe, whose reverence for women was his noblest trait, loved and cared for her devotedly through all the vicissitudes of poverty and ill health that ensued, until her death eleven years later, a short time before his own. The inspiration of some of his finest creations — the child lovers of Eleonora, for instance — is to be found in this tender and ill-fated attachment.

The story of Poe, first and last, is a melancholy [page 12:] one — a story of benefits received but ill-requited, of endeavor constantly self-thwarted, and of physical and moral weaknesses inadequately coped with. He never had any measure of real prosperity. His wilful and erratic temperament, further perverted by his more or less frequent yielding to the temptations of liquor and opium, made any continued effort impossible. One career after another was opened to him only to be closed again; one enterprise after another was undertaken only to fail or be abandoned. The eighteen months at Richmond were followed by seven years at Philadelphia, where he edited successively The Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine. In the editorship of the latter he was succeeded by Rufus W. Griswold, who became, after Poe's death, his hostile biographer. This was the period of his greatest productiveness. In 1838 was published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a fantastic and horrible but professedly realistic sea tale. In 1839 appeared Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Through this period, too, must have been written many of the poems that were published in the volume of 1845, The Raven and Other Poems. In 1844 he went to New York, and finally took up his residence in a cottage at Fordham, on the outskirts of the city. There, in January, 1847, his wife died, and he followed her body to the grave wrapped in the military cloak that had been her last coverlet [page 13:] against the winter's cold. A severe illness succeeded, from which he recovered physically; but the Poe of the remaining two years was scarcely the same man, — the wreck of a wreck, though able yet to compose such monodies of madness as Eureka and The Bells and Ulalume. The end came tragically. He was returning to New York from a visit to Richmond in the autumn of 1849, when chance brought him and election day together in the city of Baltimore. He was found in an election booth, intoxicated, or drugged, or both, and was taken to a hospital where he died in a delirium several days later.

His Character.

Immediately men's fancies began to play with the memory of the erratic genius, and a process of myth-making began which has gone on for half a century, transforming Poe into a kind of superhuman creature, angelic or diabolic according to the prejudices of the mythmaker. The mere seeker for facts is everywhere met by such maundering as that of Griswold, who, shortly after Poe's death, described him as one who “would walk the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayer,” or who, “with his glances introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, would brave the wildest storms, and all night, with drenched garments and arms beating the winds and rains, would speak as if to spirits [page 14:] that at such times only could be evoked by him from the Aidenn.” It is almost impossible now to get behind this veil of tradition and see the man Poe face to face as his fellows saw him, a desperate struggler for his daily bread. Even with the clearest light, so complex a character as his would be hard to analyze and still harder to judge. We must admit that, with all his genius, he was morally delinquent on many counts. He lacked a fine sense of honor. He had no adequate conception of a man's duties either to himself or to his fellows, and though many stood ready to befriend him, he lived in spiritual solitude, the friend of no man. He did not exactly lack will, as has been so often said, for he acted vigorously through his short life; but he seemed not to recognize any specific moral ends toward which a man should bend his activity. He was full of contradictions. Though possessed of a keen, cool, logical mind, he was always toying with speculations that sober science repudiates. His exalted dreams of purity and goodness were in strong contrast to the perversity of his deeds. It is doubtful whether he knew the meaning of the word morality, and the judge of his character must feel that if there be such a thing as a man who can do evil deeds without being himself evil, Poe was that man. At any rate, between his admirers and his detractors one may most safely take the middle ground that his was not a case for either praise [page 15:] or blame, but only pity. Heredity and training were against him, the very conditions of American life were adverse, and the tragedy of his career is best remembered in sorrow. After all, his works are our permanent possession, and the highest of them were touched only with the misery and pathos of his life, never with its dishonor.

Minor Prose.

Poe's work as a journalist and critic does not call for much comment. In the circle of his authority he came to be well known and feared; and the independence of his views and his frankness in expressing them did a real service to the profession of literary criticism in America, which had degenerated into mere idle compliment and mutual admiration. But his critical method was not the method of calm inquiry which sets up standards and judges fearlessly and honestly by them. He was fearless enough, but unfair. He had critical acumen and exquisite literary sensibilities, and so long as he depended on these he did well. He knew the marks of genius; a Tennyson or a Hawthorne, even though unknown to fame, was immediately known to Poe. But his foolish prejudices and personal jealousies often rendered his judgments worthless. A man who could write an article on Longfellow and Other Plagiarists was not likely to carry with him either sympathy or conviction. He was too extravagant and too fond of the sensational. The charge of literary theft in particular he liked to make, [page 16:] though he rarely proved anything more than a measure of indebtedness which the authors themselves would have been ready to acknowledge. Efforts have since been made to show that he was himself not innocent of plagiarism. But these efforts have succeeded scarcely better than his own. That he should have gone to Macaulay's Warren Hastings instead of to an encyclopædia for a description of the holy city of Benares, which he needed in his Tale of the Ragged Mountains, counts for little. And as for the many striking parallels between his poems and those of a certain Dr. Chivers, of Georgia,* the only conclusion an impartial student can reach is that Chivers owed far more to Poe than Poe ever owed to Chivers. Probably Poe has been the least “influenced” of all melodious poets since Spenser.

Poe's best criticisms of a general nature are his essays on The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, though both must be read guardedly. One of the theories laid down in the first, that there can be no such thing as a long poem, may be supported only by assuming that there is no poetry but lyrical or emotional poetry. The second essay is occupied with an explanation of the mechanical way in which The Raven was constructed — a very entertaining explanation, but one that no one who knows Poe or who knows poetry will accept as final. Still, Poe's contributions [page 17:] to the literature of æsthetics and criticism are very considerable. On the other hand, his so-called scientific or philosophical works, Eureka and the rest, are worthless. He liked to make a great show of learning by all sorts of obscure references, but he had little real scholarship, and though he was a subtle analyst he was not a profound reasoner. Of course, his real greatness lay in his imaginative work — his tales and his poems.

The Tales.

The tales may be said to constitute a distinct addition to the world's literature. From time immemorial there have been tales in prose and in verse, tales legendary, romantic, and humorous, but never any quite like Poe's. How difficult it is to find any derivation for them may be seen from the fact that the writers most commonly mentioned as having given some direction to Poe's genius are Defoe and Bulwer! Godwin and the German Hoffmann would be nearer the mark, yet very distant still, “Bizarre” and “terrific” are the words which Kennedy in his helplessness applied to the tales; and the words represent fairly the first impression which they will always make, for the two qualities of strangeness and power are to be found in nearly all. A few are grotesque only, but they are among the weakest and are seldom read. Perhaps we may venture to divide the important ones, according to their dominant motives, into [page 18:] analytical tales, allegorical or moral tales, and tales of the supernatural.

The analytical tales are tales embracing situations that call for the acutest exercise of the human reason — the unravelling of a mystery, the detection of some obscure law of nature, or the achievement of some difficult feat by the resources of science. The Gold-Bug is one of the best of this type. It has in it a strong element of adventure, but that Poe's chief interest did not lie in this is shown by the fact that the climax of the story is not the finding of Captain Kidd's treasure, but the deciphering of the cryptogram through which the treasure was found. Other writers of such stories, Jules Verne, for instance, in his Journey to the Centre of the Earth, invert this order. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, and The Purloined Letter are all what we should call “detective stories, and are the forerunners of many stories of their kind from sensational novels up to novels of elaborate mystery and skill like Wilkie Collins's Moonstone. To be convinced of Poe's influence in this field one needs only to read his Purloined Letter and then A Scandal in Bohemia in Dr. Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Several of the analytical tales have subsidiary elements of interest, notably horror in the baboon murderer of the Rue Morgue, an element which Mr. Kipling, with questionable art, has ventured [page 19:] to make the sole theme of his gruesome Bimi. Among the tales of adventure with a background of semi-scientific speculation are Hans Pfaall (the story of a trip to the moon), MS. Found in a Bottle, and A Descent into the Maelström. In the two latter, however, the interest of mere ingenuity is overshadowed by the interest of the narratives themselves, enriched, as they are, with all the resources of Poe's imagination. It may well be that the wild fancy of a descent into the maelström grew primarily out of a mathematical theorem concerning the action of cylinders in a vortex, but the qualities that give that tale its distinction and its power are higher than this. It is in the descriptive passages, where subtlety of analysis gives way before the splendor and majesty of the pictured scenes, that one must look to find the real genius of Poe.

The allegorical tales, comparatively few in number, are weakened in point of art by their moral intent. William Wilson is an allegory of the two-fold nature of man-of the conflict between the upward tendency to good and the downward tendency to evil. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is another story with the same theme. But William Wilson, though written in a flowing style and with patient, deliberate art, is not a great tale. The moral is crystallized, not held in solution. What should be the undermeaning is on the surface: the tale [page 20:] yields to the homily. We note, too, an incongruous mixture of things real and things unreal. The details of the background are faithfully given only to be completely lost sight of again: they are not organic. Hence the story, as a story, fails. The Black Cat is much better and is, indeed, one of Poe's best known tales. It is possible to read it and scarcely perceive the underlying motive of the accusing conscience. Its only weak point is one common to all the tales — a lack of characterization. Poe's characters are never real human beings, and no matter what atrocities they commit or what agonies they suffer, we feel neither disgust nor sympathy; we are moved purely by the abstract horror of the situation. Poe lacked the tear-compelling power which even a caricaturist like Dickens possessed. But for naked horror The Black Cat is hardly to be surpassed. It certainly produces an effect, and that, Poe declared, was the main object in most of his tales. The Man of the Crowd and The Tell-Tale Heart are also tales of conscience, though less distinctly allegorical. The Masque of the Red Death is allegorical, but without moral significance, — the fear it symbolizes is purely physical. But this is another of Poe's most successful fantasies, at once gorgeous and spectral, ridiculously impossible yet awfully real.

In these several forms of narrative — the detective story, the tale of pseudo-science, the moral [page 21:] allegory — Poe's influence has been both wide and deep. But there is another domain in which his unique genius found a still higher expression and in which he has had no successful imitators. This is the domain of the supernatural. Here belong 3, the tales of Berenice, Morella, Shadow, Poe's own favorite Ligeia, and that tale which critical opinion commonly ranks highest — The Fall of the House of Usher. The motive of the last two is one of the most fantastic and terrible in the field of romance. It is the idea, which seems to have been almost a hallucination with Poe, of the possible life of the spirit, that is, of the thinking, sentient part of man, after the death of the body — not immortality, be it understood, but a temporary prolonging of spirit life by sheer power of will. Yet the motive, gruesome as it is, is saved by the cunning of the artist from being repulsive or ridiculous; for Poe builds up, with unerring skill, his effects of transcendent beauty and at the same time transcendent horror and awe. It would be almost as difficult to say how the effects are produced as it would be to say why a violin fantasia has the power to move or fascinate, but the perfection of the art that produces them is no more to be questioned in the one case than in the other.

The deficiencies of the tales we must grant, though we need not hold the deficiencies to be defects. They contain nothing refreshing, nothing [page 22:] morally uplifting or sweetly humanizing. The sunshine is not the broad sunshine of the fields, — it comes sifted through dense foliage or colored glass. The winds blow from caverns and vaulted tombs. The color on the cheek is hectic, the mirth is hysterical. Everywhere are grief and madness, disease and death. But the æsthetic passion, which supplied in Poe the place of the ethic passion, works a transfiguration, making beauty even out of ghastliness and ugliness. Two or three impressions, indeed, must be left abidingly upon every reader of Poe's prose. First, there is the charm of the language itself, sometimes swift and strong, as in the description of the setting sun that, “a dim, silver-like rim alone, rushed down the unfathomable ocean, sometimes lyric in its melody, as in the description of “Venice, a star-beloved Elysium of the sea, the wide windows of whose Palladian palaces look down with a deep and bitter meaning upon the secrets of her silent waters.” With this goes the fascination of the vivid scenes, ranging from terror to beauty and sublimity. What a picture is that of the spectral crew: — “their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous, and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest.” Or who that has once [page 23:] seen in imagination ever forgets the “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass,” the noble hall “in & dim city called Ptolemais,” the “black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre” by the melancholy house of Usher? Lastly, there is the magic touch, the necromancer's wand, which removes all these scenes into the uncharted realm of the supernatural and invests them with a kind of sacred awe, so that one who has wandered for an hour in the country of Poe comes back to this every-day world like a dreamer and an alien.

His Poetry.

The poetry of Poe's mature years has the same attributes, only it is, as poetry should be, still more ethereal. If we had not come to demand so much of poetry, there could be little hesitation in ranking Poe's with the very greatest in any language. But cultivated readers have fallen into the habit of searching beneath emotions for moral and intellectual stimulus. They want, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, a “criticism of life,” and failing to find that, they are dissatisfied. Now that, Poe cannot be said to afford — life as we know it he scarcely touches at all. But youth, that is always a poet and that knows little of definitions, reads Poe and says, “This is pure poetry.” And the test should satisfy us about Poe and make us doubt our definitions. Beyond all question, whatever Poe lacked — and he lacked many things — he possessed the two fundamental attributes of a poet, melody [page 24:] and imagination, in a supreme degree. They are attributes, too, that speak for themselves, requiring no proof or argument. When The Raven was published in N. P. Willis's Evening Mirror in January, 1845, America knew for a certainty that English literature had another poet to reckon with. The Raven immediately became, and remains, one of the most widely known of English poems; it can be mentioned anywhere without apology or explanation, and there is scarcely a lover of melodious verse who cannot repeat many of its lines and stanzas. Strange it seems that Poe's poetic genius should ever require vindication.

It is true, the product is meagre. The Raven, The Bells, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Haunted Palace, The Conqueror Worm, Israfel, To Helen, To One in Paradise, The City in the Sea — one can almost count on the fingers his great poems. But that is true of many notable poets, even where the product is large. Poe's trash (certain stanzas, for instance, in For Annie) is very sorry trash, but there is not a great deal of it, and there is practically no mediocre verse. What is good touches the high-water mark of excellence.

And its quality is unmistakable. Its appeal is to the sentiment of Beauty — the one appeal which, according to Poe's theory, is the final justification of any poem. Language is made to yield its utmost of melody. From words, even from [page 25:] letters, one might say — for Poe actually fabricated words whose sounds would suit his purpose — effects were wrested such as had never been wrested before.

This is haunting music, though here again, as in the tales, if we seek to know precisely how the effect is secured, we are baffled. The ordinary devices of alliteration, refrains, and repetends, are freely used, but no mere resort to those devices can parallel the effect. The truth is, the verse is not only haunting, but haunted. In it is the strange, unearthly imagery, and over it is the spectral light, that only Poe's imagination could create. To a beauty of language, by its very nature as indescribable as music, is added a weird enchantment of scene that vanishes before any attempt to reclothe it in other words. Analysis and criticism are helpless before this final achievement of Poe's art — the creation of that “supernal loveliness” which, he declared, it is the struggle of all fit souls to apprehend.

Beyond this we may scarcely go. There are [page 26:] dark hints of other things in Poe's poetry. The Raven of his dreams is, in the words of Mr. Stedman, “an emblem of the Irreparable, the guardian of pitiless memories.” The Haunted Palace and the Conqueror Worm have a direct and almost frightful allegorical significance. And what music may not come from the lute of Israfel, what hopes are not barred by the legended tomb of Ulalume? But we gain little from tho study of these things, indeed we almost resent any covert significance. For of Poe's poetry, as of his highest prose, it must be said that it makes almost no moral appeal. Nothing is conceived on a moral plane. He has nothing to teach us — no mission, no message. But the sounds and the visions remain, the poet's mastery over the secrets of the terrible, the mysterious, the sublime, and the beautiful; and we may well rest content to listen without questions to the wild measures of Israfel's lute, to gaze awe-stricken upon the City in the Sea, or to pass speechless by the dim lake of Auber and through the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Poe's Position in Literature.

Thus Poe's genius stands out, alone and incommensurable, like one of those solemn mountain peaks which, in Arnold's fine phrase,

Only two other American writers, Longfellow and Hawthorne, have brought to their work the [page 27:] same kind of consecration, the same steadfast devotion to the principles of pure art; and only one of these was the equal of Poe in Position in original power. But even Hawthorne, with all his originality, is a fairly deducible product from the inheritance to which he was born and the conditions among which he lived. Poe's genius was really of no land or clime. Some sort of prototype, indeed, might be found in Coleridge, in reading whose poetry Poe declared that he trembled “like one who stands upon a volcano, conscious, from the very darkness bursting from the crater, of the fire and the light that are weltering below.” But Poe was Poe. We may account for Longfellow, for Hawthorne, for Emerson; but the individual note, the “inexpressible monad” which evolutionary science itself as yet fails to account for, was peculiarly strong in Poe, and we are virtually compelled to leave him underived. Abroad he has long been considered as a creative writer of the first rank. It is to the shame of Americans that they have seldom been able to take quite his full measure; but our best critics have been instinctively attracted to him, and it is worthy of note that his works have lately been honored with a scholarly and fairly definitive critical edition — an honor which, not to consider statesmen, like Franklin, or the early historians and theologians, has fallen to no other American man of letters.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 10:]

1Woodberry's Poe, American Men of Letters Series.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 16:]

1Joel Benton: In the Poe Circle.