Text: John Phelps Fruit, “A Young Man of Genius: A Dreamer,” The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (1899), pp. 5-20

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THE specific question of our theme is not what Poe's poetry is in kind, but what it is in itself.

That the “soul is form and doth the body make” points to the mind-content of poetry as of fundamental importance in our study. But we must remember that with the artist the soul-form is first in time, and the body-form after; while for the interpreter, the body-form comes first, the symbol of the soul-form. To get into the soul through the body requires thoroughly sympathetic study. There must be a nestling into the brain and heart of the poet, and par ticularly so in the case of a poet so subjective as Poe.

Fortunate for such a study, poets are born, but not born full-grown; they grow in wisdom and knowledge. Through their apprentice-work, therefore, we find an easy access to their mind and art.

Poe was turned eighteen when he published in 1827 the firstlings of his muse in a thin volume of forty pages: Tamerlane and other Poems (W. 80). By the time, how ever, he was eleven, he was “known as a versifier in both a gallant and a satiric vein” (W. 20; 1:7), but where are his verses to the little girls of Richmond, and where is the English ode to the retiring Master Clarke?

If the poems of the edition of 1827 were written, in any sense, in 1821-22 (W. 31), as he would have us believe, they must have been re-cast to include his reflections on [page 6:] some crucial experiences that came to him in the years between 1823 and 1827 (W. 23; 1:9).

We can almost say he “lisp’d in numbers.” In 1827 he was little more than a “grown up” boy, shy and reserved (W. 25).

What thoughts did he play host to at this age in his moments of reverie? There is one short poem of this volume entitled, from its first line, The Happiest Day, The Happiest Hour (10: 121), that contains in a superlatively indefinite way what lie further explicated and amplified. The first stanza is, —

His attitude is that of a man whose life has been full of Delays of bitter experiences, and who has settled down to despair. He looks back to the past with a longing that the best has been, instead of having faith that “the best is yet to be.” With a “seared” and “blighted” heart he gazes upon a bright spot in the bygone days. His highest hope has been dashed to earth. That hope was of pride and power. How indefinite! The hope of power has vanished long ago, and then as if ravished with reminiscent splendors he breaks out, —

and says no more than —

This is telling us nothing. What “visions”?

Spurning pride, he says, —

and breaks off this tirade with — “Be still, my spirit!” [page 7:]

What does he mean by the venom of pride? What, by another's inheriting it? What, from the retrospect, is the conclusion as to the whole matter? This, —

Strange, that a man could repudiate his brightest, happiest hour as worth living again! Strange contradiction, to call that his happiest hour back to which he would not fly with winged feet! But he has his reason, and thus it runs, —

It is a strange philosophy to postulate a causal connection between pleasure and pain. Just as well say that day causes night. A stranger thing yet is that his soul knew well that essence, knew it was powerful to destroy, and yet could not forearm himself. This must be his notion of Fate that he rings the changes on so much. He does not confess weakness of will. Too proud for that. He seems to claim an acumen that penetrates the mere outwardness of things to look upon their inviolable natures. He beholds now the nature of his own soul, and now the nature of its mundane environment, and reckons with all the convincing (to himself) power of pure intuition, that he is elected to damnation. A man in this state of mind has “the human thirst for self-torture” his “crown of sorrow” — no, not crown, but luxury (6:45) — “is remembering happier things.”

It may be suggested here that if Poe had announced a theme for the whole body of his poetry as the Epics do, it [page 8:] would appropriately be, “I sing the luxury of sorrow.” This would call for a man with his face towards his own past, brooding over its promises dashed to earth, and feeling himself mocked by Fate. He really rejoices that he is counted worthy to suffer these things, and so writes him self down a hero, that he, in the clear light of the situation, endures, when to slip the leash of the flesh were far easier.

Does this mean Poe? They are thoughts and sentiments coined thus early by him for currency. They tell his Artheme. It remains to be seen how far he became in fact his own proselyte.

There is one thing to note in our study of this volume of 1827, namely, that the envelope, so to term it, of Poe's thought is a personality. This pronominal person speaks in every poem; every poem is therefore, in a sense, a dramatic monologue.

Tamerlane (10:196), the important poem of the edition of 1827, is an exhaustive explication, in the farm of a story, of that we have been considering. The theme of it is, Tamerlane's happiest day and its consequent sorrow.

Poe, in his notes to the poem, confesses that he has taken “the full liberty of a poet,” with the historical Tamerlane, begging, in one instance, the reader's pardon for making “a Tartar of the fourteenth century speak in the same language as a Boston gentleman of the nineteenth” (10: 213). So we are not to trouble ourselves about the historical Tamerlane.

The poem opens with Tamerlane upon his death-bed. He is not, necessarily, old, but bowed down to death in sorrow and in shame. He calls for a friar that he may make a confession, but not with the purpose or hope of being shriven. He says, — [page 9:]

He had not thought, until things were growing dim around him, to tell the secret of his shame and sorrow to any ear, except perhaps to the ghostly ear of that one whom he made in life, —

He is not to blame, his destiny has not been altogether in his own hands, hence he must confess.

He says that he inherited the hated portion which has scorched and seared his heart with a pain so intense that not even hell can make him fear again. That portion was a concomitant of the power and fame and worldly glory bequeathed to him, and it circled his throne as a demon-light.

This is the prologue. The rest of the poem is a feeling retrospect, tracing the genesis and growth of that pride — “unearthly pride” — that caused his fall. He begins so aptly and so significantly with a wail for the past, “I have not always been as now.”

He narrates that he first drew life in mountain air, and that his brain drank the venom of “the mists of Taglay,” when, after victory with chamois, he felt himself

After dream and storm, a strange light broke upon him, steeping his soul in mystery; he found himself no longer a child of nature; his passions were born, and he realized himself their bond-slave. Hard and tyrannical as men [page 10:] deemed him innately to be in boyhood, “his iron heart in woman's weakness had a part.” He has no words to tell “the loveliness of loving well.” It is enough that the magic empire of that flame has fixed his soul, by what it lost for passion, unforgiven, upon the perilous brink of death. In his words, —

But he left it to follow, adrift, the fickle star of ambition. The hallowed memory of the years in which they grew in age and love together, came to him as the perfume of strange flowers known long ago, recalling sweet associations of life and love.

“She was worthy of all love!” — but ambition drugged his spirit and bade it dream of crime. A backward glance at those ecstatic days made them seem the enchantment, the strife of some evil demon that mocked him with brightest hopes to desert him at last to a broken heart. She whom he loved with divine passionateness became “the nothing of a name.”

At this point in the story Tamerlane moralizes, and that so significantly, that his own words should be studied. The passage runs thus, —

Take note of how much he makes of the energetic might of the high spirit to probe the meaning of “these pictures of Time.” What a depth and a stretch of insight to know the fate one will inherit! What does the future hold for such a soul? The misery of revealed destiny. A self-constituted martyr to fate, the chief market of his time is given to pictures of blighted hopes and horrible imaginings. And then he was proud; pride ruled his will. Pride and power, and power and pride, mingle themselves to make his theme.

He called himself a cottager when he sat on the throne of half the world, and murmured at his lowly lot. That kindling thought would have passed as dew before the morning sun, had not the beam of beauty come to oppress his mind with double loveliness.

The two walked together on the crown of a high mountain from which they looked down upon the dwindled hills, and bowers, and gushing rills, embracing, as in fairy bound, two hamlets, — their own, peaceful and happy.

At this moment came the suggestion that wrought all his woe, —

At this happiest hour came the thought to leave her, while both were young, to follow his high fate among the strife of nations. To gain an empire for a nuptial dowry — a queen's crown — was the secret thought that, with her own image, filled his fond breast. He pictured her silent, deep astonishment, when, after a few fleeting years, he returned, gilded with a conqueror's name, to claim her for his bride and queen.

This thought became an ideal to be attained forthwith and at any cost, so at noon of a bright summer's day, while she lay sleeping in her matted bower, a silent gaze was all the farewell he took of her; he was afraid to wake her; afraid to tell her of a feigned journey; afraid to trust the weakness of his heart to her soft thrilling voice, lest her eloquent love detain him from the grand conquests he had planned for her, so he hurried madly away, bounded eagerly away, to the field of conflict.

Then comes a bit of reflection beginning, —

and the narrative transports us to Samarcand, the queen of earth, and to Timur her sovereign! But what has he now, who once had all? He says, —

He warns the friar that it is not worth the while to re-tell the story of how his proud hopes, by deeds of might, clambered to a throne, — the world knew it well, but at [page 13:] that moment of highest power, with eyes still on pomp and power, his heart was far away in the valleys of wild Taglay — in his own Ada's matted bower.

After the conflict and his high conquest, he lingered not long in Samarcand, but set out in a peasant's lowly guise to seek his long abandoned home. In these words he closes, —

Does not this finale make a sweet morsel of sorrow? The conception of “a passionate spirit, deeply feeling the silent tone of its own self-supremacy, feeling by innate right the mystic empire and high power of Genius,” — the conception of such a spirit entangled by Fate, through love, in the meshes of his pride and power, is the sum and substance of Tamerlane.

In some stanzas on the reply of Nature to our intel ligence (10: 122), the speaker takes a backward look to youth, where he knew one gifted with secret communing with Earth from his life-dawn; his

and yet there was a mystery as to what had power over his spirit in the hour of its greatest fervor. Some demon of ill, as suggested in Tamerlane?

It may have been that his mind was wrought to ecstasy by the moonbeam that hung over him at that hour, and which was fraught with more sovereignty than ancient lore has told; or it may have been the unembodied essence of a thought.

The unembodied essence of a thought may pass over us as the quickening spell of the dew of night-time over the summer grass. It is not necessary that this mysterious power have association with rare or uncommon objects, but it does come really more effectively from things that lie each hour before us,

It is this strange amid the common that is Poe's germ idea of beauty. Later he quoted, frequently therefor, the more definite expression of Lord Bacon's, “There is no exquisite beauty which has not some strangeness in its proportion” (6:317). But the last stanza of the poem with regard to this strangeness in the common reads:

While the singer in The Happiest Day, and in Tamerlane, sings his own sorrows, and we gather from his reflections, [page 15:] cast in with the current of the song, that he estimates him self a genius, yet in the first stanza of this third poem he is modest enough to say that in youth he had known “one.” — a genius, certainly; because with him the Earth —

but in the second stanza the third personal pronoun is dropped and such expressions as “my mind is wrought,” “I will half believe,” tell who that “one” is.

The words “throne” and “crown” have the mind, in the above last stanza, to recur to Tamerlane in his career and fate.

This privileged character is doomed by the pride of his own high-toned spirit to destruction, so far as the gospel of Faith is of any avail, but the good tidings of Beauty save him to life and Heaven.

Thus far we have Poe's conception of a young man of genius. His life-creed is fixed by what he imagines to be the high tone of his spirit. The poet transports the young man, who is the monologist of this volume of 1827, to a point in time beyond youth, presumably to an age ripe with “old experience,” from which he is made to look back upon his youth to moralize on life and fate. His reflections are upon youthful experiences, and no experience from after youth till the moment he retrospects is dwelt upon. To illustrate, in Tamerlane, he returns to his “long-abandoned” home, but the events between his slipping away to the wars and his return are dismissed as “a tale the world but knows too well.”

This creature feels himself an aristocrat by favor of God, and is vouchsafed revelations, not in terms the fool can understand, but given in beauty. Thus isolated by natural endowment from the present, and with too keen an insight [page 16:] into the To Be to admit the rosy hopes that obliterate the past, he naturally keeps company with gloomy thoughts.

There are four or five other poems of 1827 that are characteristic as thoughts and sentiments of this young man. The dominant idea is that of a waking thought, — from the dreams of youth. The dream was so bright, the reality so dull and disappointing.

In A Dream (10: 134) he says, —

In the verses entitled Dreams (10: 125), we have the same retrospect and same thought, —

Then these lines, —

And again, —

A strange light broke upon Tamerlane and steeped his soul in mystery, and he was not as he had been, a child of Nature, but under the tyranny of new-born passions that brought him to sorrow.

The final stanza of this poem is characteristic and reads,

In the poem Imitation (10: 227) there is the same looking back upon his youth as a mystery and a dream.

That dream was fraught with a wild, waking thought of beings that had been; the vision on his spirit disenchanted him, bitterly disappointed him, and he concludes, —

What was that thought? Perhaps it is suggested in The Lake (10: 225), where he reminds us that it was “in youth's Spring” that he found a spot that was lovely for its loneliness. It was a wild lake bound round with black rocks and tall towering pines. His “infant spirit” would sometimes wake with terror of this lone lake, and —

This is a skilfully graduated approach to the thought of suicide as expressed in these lines, —

Another poem, Visit of the Dead (10: 226), strikes one as the sequel, in thought, to The Lake. The attitude is of one who seriously contemplates seeking his grave in that dim lake, and is speculating with himself about it. So momentous is the question and so intense the feeling that, as from out a cloud of solemn revery, he whispers to him self as a second person.

He means that when he stands on the brink of that dark flood his soul will find itself alone, that not another of all the earth will be there, that the cause of the deed will be unknown, because none will be near to pry into this hour of secrecy. But, —

Why be still? To get courage?

The next line is most significant, —

As much as to say that, though the forms of thought are fleeting, the influence of these forms abides always. The same idea is expressed in Tamerlane, —

The poem concludes with the further encouragement that “the breath of God,” which is “the summer breeze,” will leave the mist upon the hill unbroken, and that shall charm him as a token and a symbol of the secrecy that shall be in him.

This is a most fitting climax in the thought, and in the expression of the thought, of this young man of genius, the monologist of the edition of 1827. [page 20:]

Poe's conception of this character is quite complete: he has genius, and though he does not call him a poet, he makes him sing so that is to be granted; the accidents and incidents of his life furnish him a theme, — The Luxury of Sorrow; and aback of all and essential to all, he is a Platonist.