Text: Various, “Chapter 03,” The Book of the Poe Centenary (1909), pp. 11-14

[page 11, unnumbered:]

SUNDAY evening Dr. William A. Barr, of St. Paul's Church, Lynchburg, Va., preached in the University Chapel on the text “Whosoever would become great among you shall be your servant,” his thesis being that a man is great in proportion to his loyalty to his highest visions. He made the following reference to Poe:

I believe that the true Poe was an example of the very kind of greatness I have described. The possession of genius alone does not make men great. It is the character back of genius. And Poe was consecrated through all his life to his vision of beauty and truth. He held to it with a tenacity that would not be daunted and much of the apparent vagabondage may be of the kind that Christ enjoined upon his first disciples when he told them that if one city [page 12:] would not receive them, to shake its dust from their feet and go to another. But after all, wherein consists Poe's great moral delinquency? From all that is known of his life and work he was pure as the snow, and may well stand as a rebuke to the modern literary horde who appear to suppose that to be interesting they must be salacious. Then as to his relations in life, whether as ward, as husband, or as son to the mother of his beautiful Annabel Lee, he appears to have fulfilled these relations with tenderness, fidelity and love. If it be true that he had an infirmity of temper, it is also true that some of the most illustrious saints in history have spent their lives in a struggle with the same infirmity. And so at last his moral delinquency seems to be reduced to a single failing and this but on occasions when he indulged too freely in the cup. According, however, to his own explanation, this was the result of a nervous condition into which his constitution at times fell. It is fair to accept his explanation in the light of the modern view that this failing is at times the result of disease and for this to give him our compassion. [page 13:]

We have a pen picture of Poe by N. P. Willis, in whose employ he spent a number of months. It concludes with these words “Through all this considerable period we had seen but one presentment of the man: a quiet, patient, industrious and most gentlemanly person, commanding the utmost respect and good feeling by his unvarying deportment and ability.”

I submit that a man who could have appeared to Mr. Willis day after day and month after month in this light could not have been so bad. And yet we are obliged to admit an unspeakable pathos in his short and checkered life and above all in its end. Whether, as has been maintained, he was drugged, or whether found in a helpless condition through his own failing, it is unspeakably sad that this fine genius should have been used by a set of political thugs and left to die like a dog.

In looking back upon Poe's career, I recall the words of Carlyle, written with reference to the poet Burns:

“Alas, his sun shone as through a tropical tornado; and the pale shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon! Shrouded in such baleful vapors, [page 14:] the genius of Burns was never seen in clear azure splendor, enlightening the world. But some beams from it did, by fits, pierce through and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient colours into a glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears.”