Text: William Aspenwall Bradley, “Edgar Allan Poe's Place in Literature,” Book News Monthly (Philadelphia, PA), vol. 25, no. 12, August 1907, pp. 789-792

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FROM being its black sheep Poe has long since incontestably become the ewe lamb of American literature. With the possible exception of Emerson and Whitman he is the only writer we have produced of whom it may be said that he is unique, that he is possessed of a positive original genius, and that he has contributed directly to the general development of modern literature. European recognition has been an important factor in the establishment of his reputation in this country. Instead of Poe's having awaked one morning to find himself famous, it may be said that it was America herself that perceived one day, with a sudden start, how much of her glory, in foreign eyes, lay in the fact [column 2:] of her having given birth to the author of “The Raven” and of “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.” Since then there has been a wild scramble to render tardy recognition to the slender, dignified, threadbare man who had tramped the streets of so many American towns in his solitary struggle with poverty and his own vices.

In a sense we may say that no man was ever so fortunate in his life as Poe, since all that he suffered has been returned to him a thousand-fold in sympathy and commiseration. Whereas these were few, when he was alive, who did not make him feel the weight of their condemnation, now to condemn, even in the mildest terms, those acts of Poe's [page 790:] life which seem most deplorable is for the critic to stand himself condemned as the wanton vilifier of a great man of genius.

And it is the same with his work. Received with scant praise and much ridicule when it appeared, it is now not enough to pay tribute to its consummate ingenuity, to the surprising success of its art in producing an effect of nature by means of the most elaborate and subtle artifices. One must do more than this. One must almost admit Poe to a parity with Shakespeare as a great master of imaginative art. In the face of such ignorant and idolatrous adulation, which has as its basis a perverted provincial patriotism rather than any appreciation of that for which Poe really stands in letters, and which is so like that which aroused the derision of Poe in his own day, poisoning his pen with invective and sarcasm — in the face of this, we repeat, it is not easy at times to keep from going to the opposite extreme, and from experiencing a sense of relief in so frank an expression of disapproval as that of Mr. Henry James when, in his essay on Charles Baudelaire, he wrote: “With all due respect to the very original genius of the author of the Tales of Mystery, it seems to us that to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one's self. An enthusiasm for Poe [column 2:] is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

Such a reminder of the limitations of a man whose preoccupation was profoundly with the mechanical side of his art to the exclusion of all moral or intellectual significance, who took a puerile pleasure in mystification, and who loved, with the vanity of a Cagliostro, to adopt the cheap allures of the charlatan, is most salutary for ourselves, as well as being far safer for the permanent reputation of Poe. It is well to realize that his esthetic theories are in large means the characteristic product of the shallow spiritual soil from which they sprang, and that there is in his art something closely akin to that aptitude for mechanical invention in which the creative genius of our race has so far seemed to find its most complete expression.

At the same time, however, one does not like to leave Poe on this word. That he had a passion, and a pure passion, for beauty, so far as he understood and perceived the implications of that word, is undeniable. He helped us to form a new ideal of beauty, and to indicate new ways, widely remote from the old, in which the eternal desires might be fulfilled. He narrowed the scope of romantic lyricism to the point where it utterly loses its generally human appeal, but he deepened and [page 791:] intensified its magical charm by the subtleties of an art that seemed endowed with an almost preternatural power to divine the secret moments when the soul swoons with an exquisite perception of its dependence upon the senses.

In the short story he did even more. Here, indeed, may it be said that he invented a form. If any one disbelieves this let him read the old Blackwood stories which Poe parodied so successfully.

He took these long, rambling, anecdotal narratives, and out of them he evolved what is nothing more nor less than a prose lyric. It is not only that Poe shortened and organized the form of short story; he found a way of intensifying the sensation which is its essence. Before Poe a [column 2:] writer sought this sensation in some mysterious crime or in some strange sequence of external events. Poe, however, found an entirely new field in the soul itself, though not, indeed, before he himself had exhausted and given its final form to the story of analysis and induction. He was: the first modern writer to find an artistic value in hallucinations and in other morbid states of the mind and senses. It is of course true that from psychology he often descends to physiology, and for terror substitutes crude carnal horror. His taste was not always sound in these matters; but it is perhaps not so much bad taste as intense curiosity in the occult problems of the soul's relations to the body that is responsible for such lapses [page 792:] as we find in a story like “The Strange Case of M. Valdemar.” This curiosity constitutes the most permanent philosophical interest in Poe's stories. It raises the best of them high above the level of simple sensations into a region of highly spiritualized emotion. Perhaps the farthest reach of all is in those wonderful symbolical phantasies in which metaphysical meditation upon the mysterious destiny of the soul in life and death, in time and eternity, is rendered through poetic forms of the most exquisite imaginative texture, and in a language which has never been surpassed for an almost musical quality of suggestion.

A word may be said here of the influence of Poe, which has been far-reaching. His work announced and held in germ most of the later phases of romanticism as they have been developed and perfected by the esthetic school of French poetry. There was already much of Gaelic precision and subtlety in Poe's own mind, together with an inclination to theorize upon art and to analyze the bases of its appeal that is far more French than English. Poe came to the attention of Baudelaire at a time when French literature was almost completely summed up in the immense genius and activity of Hugo. The author of Fleurs du Mal was quick to see the new opportunity offered by the American writer for a movement of reaction against the school of Hugo. He saw that, while retaining the romantic spirit, it was possible to revive the classic forms of French art, and to blend the two things, romanticism and classicism, in a new and profoundly moving poetry in which the element of strangeness, inherent in the former, should be deepened and intensified by abandoning the free, inspirational style of writing, and cultivating a manner based upon rigid economy, the savant choice of words, and the closest, tightest texture of phrase.

It is curious and suggestive, however, to note that while Baudelaire so greatly admired Poe's theories, and did his best to adopt his principles of composition, he never wholly understood one essential idea which underlies Poe's [column 2:] whole esthetic system. Poe had said that poetry had nothing to do with morality. What he meant was that, in our later artistic language, a poem should be unmoral. But of unmorality in art Baudelaire had no conception. Not to be moral meant for him but one thing, and that was to be immoral. Hence, in Poe's theories Baudelaire found apparent license for the development of a mood of anti-morality, which was to lead, historically, to the rise of neo-romanticism. Indirectly, therefore, Poe is responsible for a school with the spirit of which, at least, he had nothing in common. It is not, really, until we reach Stéphane Mallarmé that the main drift of Poe's influence is distinctly felt, and that an attempt was made to found, upon a scientific basis, a veritable school of essentially esthetic poetry. Gustave Kahn, author of Les Palais Nomades, is, perhaps, the principal inheritor of this later tradition which to-day bids fair, it must be admitted, to end in poetic sterility. That this must inevitably have been so, from the very first, seems to us indisputable. There is, as we have already hinted, a certain shallowness in Poe's abstraction of poetry as pure spiritual essence, something that betrays an insensibility which is the very antithesis of that mood in which poetry is forever felt as a natural need and solace of mankind. The school of Poe is deficient in deep poetic sensibility; it dazzles with a dry light, but it does not stir or warm; and ultimately it fatigues and repels by its very brilliance, by the exclusive demand which it makes upon the mentality of the reader. There is no more future in such a poetic discipline than there was in that which was brought to so high a pitch of point and intention by Cowley in the seventeenth century. The future is rather for that poet, who, like Milton, will see in poetry not primarily an art at all, but the greatest instrument known to man for the release within himself, through the power of the imagination, or that yearning for an ideal interpretation of the facts of nature and experience which is the very motive force of life itself.