Text: Percival Pollard, “What Literature Owes to Edgar Allan Poe,” New York Times (New York, NY), January 10, 1909, p. 46

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Acclaimed as the Transcendant Poetic Genius of America by European Critics, His Countrymen Do Him Tardy Honor on His Centenary.

By PERCIVAL POLLARD.

WHEN Georg Brandes was asked, something over ten years ago, what external influences he deemed paramount in French literature, he put first the name of Edgar Allan Poe.

He added, as lesser influences, the names of Tolstoy, Dostoiewsky, Heine, and Shelley.

Remy de Gourmont, answering the same question at. the time, said: “Browning and Pater, and, above all, Poe. Poe, through his son Mallarme.”

That was ten years ago. Since then our own James Hunker gave definite pedigree wherein many the most vivid figures in one group of French writers were shown to descend a directly from Poe. Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Verlaine, Huysmanns — all these came Immediately from that strange Southern saturnine solitary whose centenary we are about to celebrate, Streaming to every corner of European culture could be traced the rays from that fantastic and amazing genius whom the Devil and Dame Chance bred In America. If, concluded Huneker, we have no great school of literature in America, we can still point to Poe as the progenitor of hair a dozen Continental literatures.

To have stayed at home here in America, however, no matter how eagerly one read the, most iconoclastic of critics, never meant any such vivid illumination upon the influence of Poe abroad as an actual visit there. One had only to browse the most superficially in the critical corners of France, of Germany, and of England to note that, as far American literature went, for these people it held only one name: that of Edgar Allan Poe.

Vogue of Poe in Germany.

In Germany alone I have found quite many of his artistic sons as Mr. Haneker and Remy de Gourmont found France. The Orchid Stories of Gustav Meyrink are Poe in modern fusion; and you may find the life of Poe written with the most superficial variants in Arthur Holitscher's Der Vergiftete while some sides at this strange and bizarre genius of ours have been treated in the Stilpe Otto Julius Bierbaum.

Enough of testimony. The fact hardly needs it; wherever you go in the Continent of Europe you will find it proved; they know only one American man of letters — Poe.

In short, we here in America have come but slowly and half-heartedly to conclusion that Europe reached several decades since. For purposes of celebration, our courage propped by our numbers and the contagion of being members of a crowd, we are about to do all possible honor to the name of Poe. We shall be magnanimous; we shall forgive one another the many little cowardices of the past and join pompously in solemn appreciation of one the rumor of whose genius seems somehow, too true to be dented. Whatever we may have said against the man's name in the past, we shall forgive one another. Since posterity has in some curious and unexpected manner done its work without consulting us — who had imagined ourselves as quite properly playing the part of posterity — well. we shall have to pretend that we agree with her. So we are to be seen putting an important face, upon this business of emphasizing the fame of Edgar Allan Poe by solemn centennial celebrations. Much spilling of ink, many professorial gentlemen in earnest conclave, even a bust or so, or a statue — yes, with the poet safely dead these hundred years, and Europe determined to, remember him, we shall certainly have to go through with the thing to huzza for him just as hoarsely [column 2:] as if, forsooth, we had always belleved in the man and recognized his artistic stature.

Even in Baltimore there will be celebrations.

In Baltimore, where, I may assure you from personal observation, that not one man in ten thousand knows — or knew until this centenary business began! — that Poe was buried in the town, or that he had ever lived, or that he had done his dying there. The fame of terrapin and of whisky, I think, has somewhat obscured in the Maryland town the poor little flame that leaped into that air when our only great American poet died there.

There are so many, many points of view in the world. There is a garrulous old friend of mine, for instance, who vows that he once spent days In Pittsburg — while they filled him with statistics on steel and coal and Carnegie — without finding one human being who had heard of Ethelbert Nevin. It was my friend's point of view that there was more credit to Pittsburg in Nevin's existence than in all the millions ever amassed.

What are Halls of Fame?

But halls of fame are largely built by press agents and by prejudice. Save in these present celebratory moods, after all, the consensus of American opinion is in favor of the steel, the coal, the Carnegies, the whisky, and the terrapin.

Let us return, however, to our mood. The moment and the mood are compelling; it is our opportunity for saying, even here in New York, where we have had our doubts about Heine and a statue of him, all that is. possible in favor of the brooding Heine, who once lived in Fordham, out for whose name there was not so long ago no room on the heights above the Hudson. It was here in New York that a friend of mine from Baltimore gave me not long ago a little lesson. I had been remarking upon the whisky and the terrapin, and upon the fact that of what lay in Westminster churchyard his town was largely ignorant.

He led me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a goal most rarely reached by the accustomed townsman here. He showed me all that magnificent place held In the way of a statue of Poe, a mean littie bust of him, tucked shamefacedly away, Shall I tell you where it stood? I put it in the past, since, tor all I know, under cover of this present celebrative mood, they may have moved It Into some sort of limelight, where the laurel may not seem so out of, place. It stood well, in a gloomy corridor down which one went if one were minded to wash one's hands, there stood that bust of him who wrote The Raven.”

In short, throughout America it has taken us all these years to overcome the New England blight on Poe even to the point where we can assemble in celebration of his centennial. The artistic nations knew him, lot these many years, as our only poet; but we listened still to the contemptuous concordance on the refrain, Oh, you mean the Jingle Man and to the ghouls who found rum and riot wherever they grubbed in Poe's life.

The New Englanders gave us sneers about Poe, and they themselves are now merely a convention that will die when the last New Englander has disappeared before the Celt and the Calabrian. Baudelaire, who also had given Wagner to Paris, gave Poe to Europe: and so will himself live while Poe does. Poe sang himself into the soul of Swinburne: Griswold, compared with the memory we keep of the “Hymn to Proserpine.” is nothing but the image of a swine rooting amid offal.

This is the place for revival of all those old New. England sneers. Yet [column 3:] even Henry James, who is not strictly to be accounted a New Englander, who is, in fact, like Poe himself, though in less degree, an artist of international rather than merely American appreciation, declared once in an essay upon Baudelaire that the latter's serious belief in Poe was genuinely to be deprecated, added that an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection,” and concluded that as between Baudelaire and Poe, Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two well as the greater genius.”

Note, firstly, Mr. James's remark about primitive reflections.” Surely It goes rather ill with the fact that today Poe is admitted the father of the entire Parnassian group of writers in French and German, writers whose artistic sophistication is such that their enemies long ago exhausted all epithet in calling them decadent! These men who pursue art so closely that they are accused of spinning impossible theories and practices as artiste; all these are primitive No, Mr. James, you did not know your, cosmopolis, when you wrote that line about Poe.

And as for Mr. Brownell, a current calamity in criticism, he had only made Mr. James's argument more meticulous.

Chiefly, however, let me stress the admission that Poe was a genius. For they all admitted that. Every man Jack of them, from New England, or from New York, whether their hands were still mucky from the filth they had been heaping on Poe's memory, or whether their only protest against the Poe notion of art for beauty's sake” had been the publishing of a periodical strictly for the dollar's sake. Yes, they all said he was a genius. Sometimes, like Ario Bates, they admitted Poe's failings with pious regrets, in this style: Unhappily lacking any ethical stability * * * a halo of inebriety too often encircles his head; yet at his best he moves us by the mysterious and Incommunicable power of genius.”

Poe's Genius Never Denied.

Yes, it must be genius; it must be some strange, lambent, inexplicable immortal flame to sear itself into the ethical stability of an Ario Bates.

No, they have never denied his genius.

They called him almost everything from plain liar and thief to drunkard. He does not seem to have been much of an equestrian, or I am sure they would have said he was a horse thief. But the chief chorus was the one that made him out a drunkard. From those premises these good people achieve, somehow, the conclusion that he was not a fit person to be allowed to pose as a great American poet. Rum, riot, and rhyme, these worthies would have said, had they known how, were what Edgar Allan Poe typified. Phrased otherwise, and, according to the gospel of our greatest humorist, it was simply the old story of A pity he drinks!

Yes, he undoubtedly drank.

The extraordinary thing is that the artistic nations of Europe made of him a gigantic figure, in spite of his drinking: a figure behind which our whole continent dwindled Into nothingness. He drank: yet, artistically, for Those Others, he loomed as the one splendid artist in creation and in criticism. our country had produced.

There has never been any need to deny his drinking. Medical gentlemen have cast themselves upon the problem: [column 4:] have declared that he was a victim of a disease manifesting itself In drink: that, in vulgar phrase, he was more to be pitied than censured. That the world in general should recognize inebria and dipsomania as d’ apart; that they should be treated scientifically, not brutally on the ap. proved Bellevue method. Meanwhile it was on the Bellevue method that they treated him that fatal night in Baltimore, so that he died of his drinking. In short, it was Edgar Allan’ Poe, in life and at its end, that he harmed when he drank. Whom else did he harm?

Verlaine, in a fury of drink, shot at his: all too intimate friend, Rimbaud, and was thrown into a Beigian prison for it. Vilion, if we are to believe the legends, was many sorts of a brigand. These did do harm to others. But what did poor Poe do to others — if we are to inquire at all into regions beyond his was not as a speck to the harm he did himself by his fondness for liquor?

No; the answer to those who only yesterday said Drunkard!” when Poe a name was mentioned — though now with the votive offerings and incense in the air, they are as humbly devout as only Pharisees can be — is the answer that Lincoln made when they told him of Grant's fondness for whisky. Yes, if only one could find some of that brew of Poe's and ladle it out to our latter-day American poets! All this, of course, only by way of logically following out the Illogic of these who pretend that what a man drinks or whether he drinks has anything whatever to do

The Hospital in Literature.

What a wonderful chapter of literature it is, the one that might be headed In Hospital! The literature that has come from minds who have fought with devils of one sort or another; and the literature that has touched bodily and spiritual Imprisonment, asylums, and hospitals. What a list it We see Stevenson propped up in pillows writing gayly of Pulvis et Umbra; Verlaine with halt his life spent in a hospital; Lamb disappearing now and then beneath mental darkness; Henley hymning the sensations of the surgical ward; Wilde producing, in prison, his gospel of pity, Baudelaire spending his last year as a paralytic in a Paris hospital; Wainwright, In prison for poisoning: Heine, on his straw mattress, maliciously prompting the Almighty on forgiveness; and Ernest Dowson, whose singing was as inevitably interrupted as Poe's by defeat from drink.

Ernest Dowson's story is as if it were that of Poe's over again, save that his talent was but a small echo of Poe's flare of genius. What was Dowson's finest poem, Last night, ah but the music of Poe sung by I an artist of far Impurer fibre? Arthur Symons said a trenchant thing, writing of Dowson, when he pointed out the pitiable amount of joy that dissipation had meant for Dowson; how he had ever descended into those waters of oblivion only to return wanly to his work, forgetting that riot utterly: and how in his work itself there was nothing of riot's personal appeal; a distinc tion. to be insisted on “if only for the benefit of those young men who are convinced that the first step toward genius is disorder.” The finest line in poetry, to this same Dowson, was Poe's the viol, the violet and the vine” passage. I find it interesting to compare with [column 5:] that wonderful assonance of vowels the lines from Verlaine: “Les sanglots long Des violons De l’automne.” Next to Poe, Verlaine is the only are tist who has so nobly employed the music of sheer vowels. Note the in the Poe line, the in the Verlaine.

In all these three, in Verlaine, in Dowson, and in Poe, their fever called living went the way of drink, disease, and death; their poetry went as the sparks fly. Of them all, only Verlaine confessed when I feel unhappy I write melancholy verse; there is no other method in me.” Poe, in his Creed upon the Poetic Principle, added the spirit of Melancholy to those of Taste and Beauty; but in his actual art there is so much perfection of form that it overshadows any trace of disease.

No, he drank; but that is nothing. Here is the great sin he committed: He was not a gay drunkard.

Vine Without Viol or Violet.

As a roysterer Poe was a failure. I doubt if he had an easy knack in barroom acquaintances; it is sure he did not know how to make canny commercial use of them. In his association with the vine there was none of his own viol or his violet.

It the muse of Theodore de Banville wore only roses in her hair, Poe's was bedecked with cypress, rosemary, and rue.

“An archangel, slightly damaged.” said Lamb of Coleridge. Say sadly drunken,” and you have Poe.

De Soissons averred of Verlaine's lite that it was full of disorder, storms, physical sufferings, and poetry.” In that Verlaine but reproduced the greater poet, Poe.

For, always remember that point: [page 6:] Poe's life was full of poetry. Ah, if by filling people with drink we could only get such poetry from them! How easy! Such poetry as induced Edmund Gosse to write of Poe that he was the Piper of Hamelin to all later English poets. From Tennyson to Austin Dobson, there is hardly one whose verse music does not show traces of ace's influence. To impress the stamp of one's personal on a succeeding generation of artists, to be an almost (although not wholly) flawless technical artist,” that was what our sad drunkard managed to be.

No, he was not gay in his cups; but he could write poetry and about the theory and practice of poetry with a correctness for form that should have taught sense to some of those who kept calling him a drunkard. Surely, we are not still in the unsophisticated stage of art which holds that what a man drinks or eats affects his art? Some arts allow of this, perhaps; certain rhapsodies of prose rhetoric might be attempted by the maudlin; but not music and not metre. Those are ruled by too tight laws. The persons who said those things about Poe can never have examined the wonderful crystal technique of his verse. Try, if you will, to write that sort of thing while “Inspired,” or yet the brilliant essay in which he posed his theory of the lyric, of art for beauty's sake, and of the poetic formulas In general.

A sad dog; yes, there is the whole pity of it: sad, always sad. A solitary, saturnine spirit was Poe's; remote upon the Parnassian heights that spirit dwelt, the while the body descended now and again Into the gutter. Saturnine Poems was the name of Verlaine's first memorable volume; he named it after Poe. Part misfortune and part bile the Frenchman inclosed into that book; music and melancholy alternated in Poe. Ah! if he had only been a merry How the good fellows drunkard! of Pafaff's and its like would have resounded gayly to his glory! Yes, it is a sad thing to be sad, and solitary, and a genius.

For, after all, they never denied — not even the most dismal Bostonian of them all — that he was a genius.

Well, that, too, they say is a disease. The medics, according to the specialty that brings them patients or tame, see all human manifestation in disease form nowadays. Krafft-Ebing found the sexual factor to be the chief influence on aesthetic development and the mainspring of genius. Dr. Gould of Philadelphia only the other day averred that literary character and accomplishment are all dependent on the vision, its normality or abnormality; he ascribed Flaubert's art to eye strain; and because of Lafcadio Hearn's myopia he wrote him down as diseased, as the New Englanders did Poe.

Genius, said my friend, A. G. Stephens a critic who lives in Australia [page 7:] and has not signed any eulogies of American best-sellers — in a fever of the brain, a disease of the pustule.” And he composed a metre showing the scale between Idiocy and Madness. On the line, marked Common Intelligence he placed actors and politicians: on Low Talent he put Corelli and Hall Caine; on the line of Genius he put Shelley and Marlowe, and high up in Genius, where it went toward the black night of Madness, he put Napoleon and Poe.

And there was no other American on that list! Yes, a genius If genius is indeed disease, we have been remarkable in health here in America.

No: let us now, at least on this occasion if never again: even if we relapse again into such cowardice we long displayed in the case of Wilde, where we confused life with art at A time when the Poe instance should well have taught us that other countries are not such admit that Poe was hated not because he drank, but be cause he was not a social drunkard, and, because he was a critic who never minced words. Genius, drink, poetry -put all these aside; put aside, too, the stories that bred, a continental literature; and Poe remains the only critic of letters America has produced in a hundred years. Where is the literary critic to-day, who will add thousands of subscriber to an American periodical as could Poe?

But, half cultured as we think were in those years, art was not the slave of commerce then as completely as it is now. Poe was a critic, not a press agent; there are only press agents to-day. Read Poe's critical chapters and then find why they hated! him.

Poe in American Literature.

Well, we have come well toward sanity if we will stay in our present celebrating mood. For besides Poe there has been no other in America, drunk or sober, so. single in devotion to art, so careless of money, so entirely honest in his literature. We need not, in that clause, discuss the question of his sincerity or his pose as a craftsman; that is as futile a fight as the one touching the actor's art being objective or subjective; it is all relative. The point is that Poe was entirely, without greed or selfishness, a man of letters. We have had no other such.

Abroad they nave admitted this for many years. And after this present occasion we should all try to forget that we ever had any doubts in the matter. Let us be done, in these artistic details, with New England once and for all. That land which, but for the Celt and the Calabrian, would soon be as sterile as its acres has spread over our. land a pall of moral hypocrisy, yet is itself rotten where it is not barren. Go look at some of its faces, read some of those factory statistics, observe some of those village morals, and then, reading the New England attitude toward Poe; and to ward all the continentals, trooped over his path, go laugh yourself to death, if you can keep from cursing!

What now we admit, at long last, that Poe is the only American Parnasian. He drank? True; would he had left for our time some of that brew! He lived loosely with women? Good Lord, was there ever greater proof that the man was blind with genius and with poetry? All these Helens, and Annies, and Annabels — they were unlovely and middle-aged drabs. and yet the man saw them as -Helen, and Annie, and Annabel!

So it is that solitary, saturnine figure we celebrate. Edgar Allan Poe, who did not know how to be a good fellow or to make money, or to, cajole Mrs. Grundy, or ply for hire press agent, but who is the only American whenever the world saw on Parnassus. There he stands, a single, slight figure in our past: splendid to look back on, splendid, and yet sad to consider as daily progress nearer to the deadly levels of commercialism in letters.

Let us be sincere as we celebrate! Let us, for instance as we twine the laurel over long-neglected grave and bust, go also and read what were this man's art beliefs and what his notion of the duty owed to literature. Having: read, let us for the next hundred years apply those beliefs and those notions in the actual conduct of our letters.

For otherwise there will never again be an Edgar Allan Poe in America. Let us not be hypocrites. Lat We pretend, some of us, that it Poe lived to-day he would not have had so bad a time. We lie: he would have worse; the way to day is even harder for those who will not pander to the law of demand.

So, as we twine the laurel let us also read his lesson.