Text: Richard Henry Stoddard, “The Genius of Poe,” Works of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Armstrong, 1884, vol. I, pp. iii-xiv

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BEFORE a man of genius can be understood, his life and his work must be studied, and their relation to, and dependence upon, each other determined. The success, ful prosecution of this study demands two faculties, one being that which is possessed by the biographer, whose business is to recover the truth of whatever he purposes to relate, the other, that which is possessed by the critic, whose business is to discover the value of whatever he purposes to examine. These faculties, particularly the latter, are exercised in two methods; the analytic, which detects and separates the component parts of what it scrutinizes, and the synthetic, which re-combines those parts into a consistent and harmonious whole. Nearly thirty-five years have elapsed since the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and his Life may now be said to be written. If he was misunderstood while alive (of which there is no evidence), he is not misunderstood to-day, for what with [page iv:] Dr. Rufus W. Griswold on the one hand, and Mr. John H. Ingram on the other, a consensus of conclusions has been reached which is not likely to be disturbed. He belonged to the bright, but blasted brotherhood whose faults the world agrees to condone, partly because of the gifts which accompany them, and partly because of the misfortunes which they entail. There is that in men of genius which differentiates them from their fellow mortals, and which, if the source of their strength, is also the source of their weakness. It is the individuality which distinguishes genius, and which either governs it, or is governed by it; governs it, in men like Burns and Byron, and is governed by it, in men like Shakespeare and Milton. Whether it is restrainable by the will depends more upon the temperament than the will, for a weak will always succumbs in the end to a strong temperament. The character of Poe was as unlovely as the conduct to which it impelled him was willful. How much of his character was inherited we can only conjecture, so little is known respecting his parents; but whatever it may have been in the beginning, and might have become later, it was ruined by the indulgence of his foster-father, Mr. Allan. The spoiled child was the father of the spoiled man.

The reputation of Poe is based upon three different manifestations of his genius, — upon his poems, his stories, and his criticisms. He began to write poetry in his boyhood, and, like all boy poets, he imitated the authors whom he admired, and of whom the most renowned [page v:] was Lord Byron. He was captivated by the spiritual gloom of Byron, whose misanthropy he assumed, and whose despair he fancied he felt. It colored his earliest printed lyrics, which would be melancholy reading if they were sincere writing, and it stimulated him in the conception of Tamerlane, in which he reproduced as well as he could the movement of Byron's narrative verse. That a new poet had appeared could not be said before he had published his second volume, which attracted little or no attention, though it contained the perfect little poem, To Helen, and the first drafts of Israfel, The Sleeper, and The City in the Sea. This volume authenticated his genius, his originality, and the class of subjects in which he was to excel. Its range was narrow, but within that range it was imaginative, and there was a promise of beauty in it which was not fulfilled by his later work. It belonged to the school of romantic verse, and the chief impression it left upon the mind was a feeling of melancholy. This feeling may have been created for poetic purposes, or it may have been the natural expression of his genius. Whether he himself could have determined which it was is doubtful, so inseparable in him was the man and the artist. From the beginning he was a poetic artist. He had made up his mind that poetry consisted of such and such elements, and that they must be molded to such and such ends. He was as certain of his theory and practice as Wordsworth of his theory and practice, and it need hardly be [page vi:] said that his theory, like Wordsworth's, was often contradicted by his practice. The didacticism which runs through Wordsworth's poetry, and which was probably in Mr. Arnold's mind when he defined poetry as a criticism of life, was worse than a crime in his eyes; it was a blunder which he would never overlook or forgive. His definition of poetry was, that it is The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. “ Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth. A few words, however, in explanation. That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement, of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the heart. I make Beauty, therefore — using the word as inclusive of the sublime — I make Beauty the province of the poem, simply because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring as directly as possible from their causes: — no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation in question is at least most readily attainable in the poem. It by no means follows, however, that the incitements of Passion, or the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of Truth, [page vii:] may not be introduced into a poem, and with advantage; for they may subserve, incidentally, in various ways, the general purposes of the work: — but the true artist will always contrive to tone them down in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the poem.” Whether Poe's theory of what poetry should be is the correct one need not detain us here; what concerns us is his practice, and the result that he produced by it. What is the effect of his poetry, and what is the impression that it leaves in the mind? If an answer to this question were demanded of the readers of Tennyson and Keats, respecting their poetry, the answer would instantly be, — the Beautiful. This is not — cannot be the answer of Poe's readers respecting his poetry, unless their definition of the Beautiful differs from that which is generally held by cultivated minds and sensitive spirits, and unless they have submitted themselves to the spell of his dark and powerful genius. The poetry of Poe is characterized by certain qualities, which are not easily separable, and are rather to be felt than described; they are remote, elusive, pertaining to another world than this and another existence than our daily humdrum lives. He transports us to a visionary region, inhabited by shadows, and haunted by a sense of danger. Oppressed by all we see, or think we see, we are the prey of invisible terrors. It is as if we were in a world which had been destroyed; a purgatory from which there is no escape except into hell. [page viii:]

There is nothing in Poe's poetry which indicates that it was written from the heart, — no feeling which would have broken the heart it burdened if it had not wreaked itself on expression. There is a simulation of emotion in it, but the emotion is as imaginary as the method by which it is sought to be conveyed is artificial. The heroines of Poe — his Lenores, Annabel Lees, Ulalumes — are not women, but abstractions, which elude even the eye of imagination. They have neither form nor pressure. Natural description, as such, there is none in Poe, whose landscapes are generalities rather belonging to cloud-land than earth. His sense of form was good, but seldom to be depended on at first ; if he reached the perfection for which he strove it was only after repeated trials and failures. No poet who wrote so little ever re-wrote that little so often, and so successfully. His critical faculty was more sure of itself in correction than in composition. He clearly estimated his powers, and what he could accomplish by them. He knew — none better — their limitations, and their want of fertility within those limitations. His mind was neither opulent nor prodigal; he was acquainted with his resources, and very careful in drawing upon them. They must have been nearly expended before his death, or he would hardly have set afloat so many false notes. It is difficult to believe that he was in earnest when he penned the jingling melodies of Annabel Lee, for to be in earnest with work like that would betray a disordered intellect. Still worse is the [page ix:] rhythm of Ulalume, which is the insanity of versification. If these pieces affect their readers, as it is claimed they do, it is because the matter is superior to the manner. They are imaginative, — the one quaintly, the other strangely and darkly. The gloom which characterizes the poetry of Poe differs from the gloom which characterizes the poetry of Byron as the atmosphere in which a landscape is steeped differs from the landscape itself. It is felt rather than found in words, and is intellectual rather than moral. One feels in reading Byronthat it was a relief to him to rail and to rave, — a relief to his mood if not his mind, — but one never feels this in reading Poe, to whom no relief appears possible. It is not his heart which has suffered, but his soul, his soul which is overshadowed by a mysterious sorrow, and is enamored of darkness and death. The bitterness of Byron was health itself when compared with the sick fancies of Poe. There can be no comparison between the two as artists, for except by chance, and at rare intervals, Byron was not an artist. He felt his work strongly, and dashed it off hurriedly, depending on his inspiration and not his composition. The pencil with which Poe traced his dark designs was a delicate one, and its lightest touch was effective. He divined singular effects and methods of producing them, combined them with great skill, and subordinated all to the harmonious whole at which he aimed. If the impalpable could be painted, he would have painted it ; as it was he had to content himself with suggesting it. No modern [page x:] poet, except Tennyson, is so subtly and strangely suggestive.

These qualities, which are distinctive of the verse of Poe, are not attributes of the Beautiful, which he declared was the aim and end of poetry. It follows, therefore, that his verse is not poetry, or rather it would follow if we were to accept his definition as the true one, and test his verse by that alone. We refuse to do so, however, partly because we feel that the definition is too narrow, but more because we do not believe that poetry can be defined at all. If Poe ever quickens the sense of loveliness it is in the hinted description of the garden in the lines To Helen (“I saw thee once — once only — years ago ”), and in The Sleeper, a late and an early poem in which the Beautiful is nearly attained. He affects different natures differently, and, unlike many poets, he affects all who are capable of being touched by poetry. To the multitude who enjoy the cheerful optimism of Longfellow and poets of his class, he is gloomy and hateful; to those who are predisposed to melancholy, he is the melodious laureate of dead hopes; to those with whom poetry is an art, and not a feeling, he is at once attractive and repulsive; a gifted creature with a morbid personality, clinging to the weakness which is its wretchedness, and the madness which is its death.

At what period of his tumultuous career Poe began to write stories his biographers have not discovered, but it was probably not until after Mr. Allan had discarded [page xi:] him. There is an interregnum in his life between the publication of his second volume of verse in New York, in 1831, and his appearance in Baltimore in 1833, in which he is believed to have lived, or tried to live, by his pen, and in which he is known to have copied six stories in a small quarto bound book. They were experimental as compared with those which he wrote a little later on, the experiment being in the method of Defoe, the first and greatest master of the English school of realistic story-writers, and two which are known to have been among them, A Descent into the Maelström, and MS. Found in a Bottle, are fair examples of Poe's early manner. The method he employed was the only one that would convey the impression he sought to convey, for it is the only one through which fiction can be palmed off as fact. It depends for its success on the accumulation of details, and the order in which those details are grouped, the use of both in the art of the story-teller being to authenticate his story. If it were not the truth he is telling us (we say to ourselves), he would not be so careful in the telling. His precision may be a little tedious, but it is important, no doubt, in its bearing on what is to come. It is by such means as these that our credulity is imposed upon, and the sheerest invention accepted as absolute verity. Poe never departed from the method of Defoe, but he carried it farther than Defoe, for he carried it from the level tract of prose into the highest region of poetry, from things which might have [page xii:] happened, though they never did, to things which could not have happened at all, though he contrived to fool the imagination with them. His imagination was as calculating as his method, and both were mathematical.

Beginning with what may be called realistic narration, Poe soon adventured into the dark borderland of mystery, and, like all young explorers, he went too far at first. He went too far when he wrote the confession of a madman in Berenice, as he went too far in another direction when he wrote The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar. Whether madness be a fit subject for art, may be doubted, but if it be, it would certainly attach to characters who can awaken pity and compassion, and to incidents and catas trophes which are pathetic and not repulsive. Madness, as delineated by Shakespeare, is a tragic misfortune; as delineated by Poe it is a horrible crime. His madmen were all criminals before they were madmen. The stories in which they figure affect us like a nightmare while we read them, affect us until we ask ourselves if we, too, are not mad. The power of such writing is certain; its use, its good, its sanity, are not so certain. But whatever may be thought of it, it is a province of story-telling in which Poe has no equal. A realist in his method, he was so far an idealist in his conceptions that he cannot be said ever to have drawn real people, or painted real life. The beings of his mind are not of clay. There is a shadowy likeness among them, his heroes being for the most part high-born and romantic, and his heroines [page xiii:] singularly beautiful. Victims of a diseased imagination, they lead visionary lives, and are doomed to an early death. The world which they inhabit is one to which dreams alone can admit us — a world which no man ever saw — remote, phantasmal, mysterious, where everything is strange, so strange that Death has ceased to be a terror, and Beauty is a sick loveliness swooning away in atmospheres of melancholy.

Poe's most remarkable achievement in the region of the supernatural is The Fall of the House of Usher, which occupies the same gloomy eminence in prose fiction that Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came occupies in romantic poetry. It is of imagination all compact, an imagination which reveals the secrets of the heart, the dark places of the soul. Equally remarkable and rememberable, though for different reasons, is William Wilson, a profound study of a wayward nature, of which he was in a certain sense the original. Related to the class in which these stories belong are others like The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and The TellTale Heart, which are so sinister as to be shocking. Another class, which may be described as stories of ratiocination, was diligently cultivated by Poe, whose success therein, in The Murders of the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, and The Gold Bug, was more highly estimated forty years ago than it is to-day, when the open secret of their construction which he alone appeared to possess is now the property, or one of the properties, of [page xiv:] sundry English and French story-tellers, like Collins and Du Boisgobey. There is nothing in English literature with which the stories of Poe can be compared, and nothing in American literature, except the stories of Hawthorne, which are always as imaginative as those of Poe, and occasionally as dark in texture. If Hawthorne's master was Tieck, as Poe declared, the master of Poe, so far as he had one, was Hoffmann. But given his genius, he did not need a master long, if at all. It was his glory and his misfortune to be unique.

It was the fashion while Poe was living to call him a critic, a delusion which could never have obtained in any country where the principles of criticism had been studied, and the practice of criticism cultivated. He had an acute mind that was penetrative in trifles, and that delighted to detect discrepancies, but not a mind that could rise to and grapple with principles. He judged everything by his individual preferences, which were temperamental rather than intellectual, and to fail to satisfy these was to fail entirely. He had no reverence for the great names of antiquity, and he was unjust to most of his contemporaries. What Pope was to the victims of the Dun-tad, he was to the poor Literati of America. Vœ victis!

R. H. STODDARD.

THE CENTURY,

New York, May 5th, 1884