Text: Various, “Chapter 08,” The Book of the Poe Centenary (1909), pp. 191-210

VIII

IN THE MINDS OF MEN

It is not so easy to give a true estimate of Poe's mission. He was a man of the imagination, and he did a great deal towards rousing the imagination of New Englanders. He was a literary pioneer. It meant a great deal in his day to build a poetical hunting lodge; the temples of literature had to follow. I am not acquainted enough with America to feel the specifically American elements in him; he is rather a Coleridge, separated from his English surroundings and transplanted on Massachusetts soil; a Coleridge without a Wordsworth at his side, without a Napoleon to fight with, but in a colonial country, vast and peaceful and still in the making. A German will always feel reminded of E. T. A. Hoffman, for, like him, Poe was one of the few inventors that Teutonic literature can boast of, while [page 192:] the fabulistic faculty is more frequent among Romance people. Altogether it has been a good idea of the University of Virginia to celebrate the birthday of an author who is known to the educated of all nations as one of the most fascinating “makers” of America.

I have always been an admirer of Poe, not only as our greatest literary genius, but as a “good, safe, household poet.” Poe is one of the few writers of that day and time whose every line is so clean and free from taint that it can be put into the hands of one's twelve year-old daughter.

If those critics who always insist on judging Poe's work by the side light of morality would take the internal evidences of moral cleanliness found in his work itself, rather than the uncertain evidences of loss of stamina which come to us through manifestly biased tradition, their task would be simpler. When a man's natural inclination towards literary cleanliness is so strong that it cannot be un done by a life of misfortune, poverty, and [page 193:] physical suffering, he should at least be given credit for his better instincts.

In spite of the efforts of all the critics to “place” him in American literature, Edgar Allan Poe continues to be read, admired, and discussed for the marvelous qualities of his verse and prose. There is none like him, and whether we agree with one critical judgment or another, his work will endure as long as the English language is known and read.

I should like to see you presiding in such a high ceremony of enlarging the realm of Poe. And indeed, I should be greatly pleased, to vitalize our relations face to face. As you may easily guess, I am a devoted hanger-on of Poe: and by that I mean that I am one of those who maintain a breathless and eager attitude of suspense and devotion toward the yet unrevealed fulness of grace of our poet's soul. I hope any day for the oracle to speak with finality, and declare the true estate of him [page 194:] whose bright spirit has been beating its way through darkness for a season. In my Hopkins days I was allowed to feel the living in fluence of Lanier, who had already left our planet. Here in Charleston I have learned to know the living influence of Timrod, long since departed. I still look for a day — and it may be tomorrow — when the Poe beyond disclaimer will be disclosed alive and triumphant — an avatar for those who have the faith to wait. More than any one else, Poe represents the South. Rich and poor, shining and dim, passionate in soul yet calling for rights on the dictates of cold reason, the poet, the people and the province still retain a mystery virginal and elusive, but are undeniably endowed with resources, with a proper genius, deep and abiding. The Poe world will some time be no figure of speech, but will enjoy a day and a night of its own, where the greater and the lesser light may beat in splendor against the darkness; and the God of harmony will call it good. Hail to the day! Your centenary celebration cannot fail to awaken for a finer rendition the magic music beyond words that he has left in our keeping. [page 195:]

The reference to No. 13, West Range, reminds me that, upon entering the University of Virginia, I was first assigned to that room and lived in it for about a month. It was a dark, dismal room with a window looking out on the backyard, which was in those days filled with rubbish, tin cans, etc., thrown out from the kitchens of the dining hall, and I was very happy to get as soon as possible a better room over in one of the Dawson-Row houses. The event did not fail, however, to make a great impression upon me, and I re member distinctly the traditions I picked up at the time. Among others, Mr. Wertenbaker told me his usual story about Poe and showed me the registration book where he signed his name.

I have been a lover of Poe's verse since my earliest boyhood and have read almost every book and nearly every article about him, except some of the very recent ones, and his wonderful power over the imaginations of [page 196:] men is still a kind of unaccountable wizardry — I mean that the quality that resides in his verse and in his best prose is like the magic that rises from a strain of really original mu sic. His wizardry does not vanish with the years — at least in my case. To this day, “The Raven” has power to thrill me. Worn, hackneyed, if the critic pleases, there is still some thing in this poem and in “The City in the Sea” and other of Poe's best verse which defies the years.

The University of Virginia does well to commemorate the birthday of this poet. Now that the lapse of time has reduced the insignificant and petty details of his life to their true proportion beside the measure of his poetry, and softened the horror of the correct classes at his lack of respectability, that fantastic and romantic genius shows himself in all his rarity. His qualities, which would have been extraordinary anywhere, are altogether extraordinary for the America of his date. Why one who was in many ways disadvantageously [page 197:] circumstanced for the development of the art of poetry should have been the first to realize to the full the possibilities of the English language in rhyme and alliteration is not easily explicable. It is a matter of curious conjecture whether his achievements in verse would have been the same if the five years of childhood spent in England had been extended to adult life. That “unmerciful disaster” hindered those achievements from being carried further, must be an endless regret to lovers of poetry.

Nothing that I could say could add to Edgar Poe's fame. So far as Europe is concerned he is secure of his immortality. I believe myself that he will live as a poet rather than as a prose writer; but that he will be remembered as a genius, a creature apart, one of those rare beings whose power constitutes a privilege, I have no doubt whatever, I rank him, in the quality of his gift, with our John Keats. [page 198:]

Whatever may be said of Poe — and hardly any writer has been so praised and so criticised — his service to letters has been immense. It seems to me that the chief bases of his fame are his original type of imagination, which awakens and challenges that faculty in his reader; his intense intellectuality, and the opulence of his rhythmic resources. If his work does not have the close touch with real life which is an essential of great writing, he has created a realm of his own, in which he detains us by a sort of mesmeric power, till we find ourselves “moving about in worlds not realized.” If his voice has not the diapason of Emerson, — if it is not the vox humana of our more philanthropic day; if his theory of beauty in literary composition leaves out of account the beauty of conduct, nevertheless, he has been for fifty years, and still remains, an important and vital influence in poetry, fiction and criticism. His name was long ago indelibly inscribed in the world's Hall of Fame. [page 199:]

* * * The greatest of American poets — one of the greatest, in my judgment, of the English speaking race, “Time at last sets all things even,” and Poe's alma mater is to be congratulated upon the fact that tardy justice has slowly but surely determined his rightful place in the world of letters as a genius of the very highest order. The University of Alabama has a special interest in Poe's centenary from the fact that one of the first professors in this institution, the late Henry Tutwiler, was a fellow student of the poet at the University of Virginia. While the earnest, diligent student — intent upon appropriating during his college course as much as possible of the world's learning — had little in common with the erratic child of genius, whose imagination was even then perhaps “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” still Dr. Tutwiler cherished, throughout his long life, a lively recollection of the youthful escapades of the poet while they were college mates at Charlottesville. [page 200:]

The University has every reason to be proud of Poe's relation to it. I am sure that he was more influenced by the atmosphere of the University than many people have thought. It is very significant that a Southern University should place such emphasis upon literary work as you do in this celebration. It ought to serve to call renewed attention to the importance of high art in the lives of our people.

I have always felt America's two greatest poems were Poe's “Raven” and Bryant's “Waterfowl.” Starkweather's word is a good one:

I have the profoundest admiration for Poe; and his influence on European literature has been enormous. So I hope I may say what I feel, that we are stifling ourselves with literary anniversaries. I begin to think that English literature is dead, and to wish that I was not a professor of it, when I see all this monumental stonemason work engrossing the time and attention of literary men year after year. Have they nothing worth saying for itself that they must search in the calendar and speak when the clock strikes? We have Johnson, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, on hand in England — new season's goods for the window to get the reluctant public drawn in. It is all very illiterate. But if ever a centenary was warranted, yours is, — in Virginia, and to commemorate a poet who was barely recognised while he lived. Pious deeds are good; and I should love to see Virginia in its daily life; though I prefer to honor Poe by reading him. [page 202:]

On the occasion of my visit to the University last summer I found no place on your campus more interesting than room No. 13, West Range. I am delighted to learn that, by making this a “Poe Museum,” it will become a more attractive literary shrine. It is especially gratifying to know that the great University of Virginia, the alma mater of men of letters as well as statesmen, will commemorate in a fitting manner the literary services of perhaps the most talented, certainly one of the most original, authors connected with its history.

I have known and loved the poet from my first acquaintance with him in my college days, sixty years ago. The pocket edition of his poems published by Middleton [[Widdleton]] (New York) in 1863, has often been a favorite companion of mine in travel by sea and on land; and, though I have the recent 1903 edition of his complete works in five volumes, [page 203:]

I still feel a particular love for that little book, so frequently read and reread, and associated with so many delightful memories. “Annabel Lee” became fixed in my memory when it was first printed in 1849, and I can never forgot [[forget]] how its tender music and sentiment first moved me.

Thirty-three years ago, when I was endeavoring to make some opening in literature, I horrified and almost enraged a magazine editor of great note by sending him an essay tending to show that Poe, with all his faults, was “of the first order of poets.” I am of the same opinion today.

Professor Erich Schmidt, University of Berlin:

Von Edgar Allan Poe hab’ ich schon in jungen Jahren starke Eindriicke empfangen und bewundere in seinen Werken die seltene Vereinigung der kiihnsten Phantasie mit dem scharfsten Verstand. [page 204:]

As time passes, the conviction grows that Poe had the fire divine, and the mere survival of his scanty and incomplete work shows it to be of the first quality. It seems a sort of reparation for his melancholy and unfortunate life that the world which once used him very ill should now be eager to do him honor.

1st es mir auch nicht moglich, unsere Universitat an Ihrem Festtage pers6nlich zu vertreten, so gereicht es mir doch zur hohen Ehre, als Marburger Professor der Englischen Philologie, unsere schriftlichen Gliickwiinsche senden zu diirfen. Ich werde des Tages in meiner Vorlesung oder in der Sitzung des Englischen Seminars gebiihrend gedenken und so den Marburger Studenten der Englischen Philologie ins Gedachtnis rufen, was die gebildete Welt dem Genius des Dichters der “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” und des “Raven” schuldet. [page 205:]

South Carolina, where Poe once resided and the scene of “The GoldBug,” gladly joins hands with his alma mater in honoring his memory. In doing so, we believe that we are not only ratifying an act of public justice, but honoring this University and the South, which gave his radiant name to the nation.

We can never discharge the unpaid debt which the whole country owes to Poe for our (Esthetic declaration of independence, for he was our prophet of beauty who led us willy-nilly out of the wilderness of philistinism, puritanism, and provincialism. The chief causes of the failure in America to recognize earlier the great worth of Poe, have been, in my opinion, the challenge of his strange and abnormal personality, the hostility aroused by him as our first searching and authoritative critic, the challenge to the literary pharisees of the North of his aesthetic literary creed, and closely, though perhaps unconsciously, associated with the foregoing causes, a certain vague though deep-seated sectional prejudice. Happily such hindrances [page 206:] to a just appreciation are but local and temporary, and will soon, I believe, actually accelerate the crowning and apotheosis of Poe. Meanwhile, foreign criticism has hailed him thrice-laureled victor in his chosen lists — criticism, song, and story — and his fame is safely enshrined in the Pantheon of Southern hearts.

Der Universitat von Virginien spreche ich zur Feier von Edgar Allan Poe's hundertstem Geburtstag meinen Gliickwunsch aus. An der Feier, die einem der Groszen im Reiche eigenartiger Phantasiebegabung, einem Er schlieszer ungekannter Tiefen des Seelenlebens, einem Dichter von seltenem Formtalent, einem Meister unter den Erzahlem aller Volker und Zeiten, einem der starksten Anreger neuer Kunst gilt, nehme ich im Geiste Teil, und wurde ihr gern personlich beiwoh nen, wenn es mir moglich ware.: [page 207:]

Ich danke vielmals für diese Ehrung, und ware gerne dazu erschienen, um so mehr als ich Poe als Dichter ftir origineller und damit bedeutender als Longfellow betrachte, und damit für den ersten Dichter Nord Amerikas erklaren mochte.

I wish very much it were possible for me to join with you in doing honor to the memory of one who is so certainly the greatest of American poets, and always and for all lands a great lyric poet. But the Atlantic is very wide, and therefore I can only send my thoughts and my good wishes to you in Virginia.

I thank the University of Virginia for the honor of its invitation, and regret that time and space oppose themselves to my desires to pay honor to the memory of so great a creative artist as Edgar Allan Poe. In verse [page 208:] he created new poems and new rhythms, in criticism he created new methods of analysis, in prose he created the romance of horror, of treasure-adventure, and of criminal mystery. He is one of the few masters of the short story, and the true father of Sherlock Holmes. While nobody has been able to imitate his poetry, his prose has created a school in France, in Germany, and in England, to say nothing of literatures less known to me. The University of Virginia may well celebrate the birthday of the adopted Virginian who ranks as the most original of the, authors of America.: [page 209:]

GREETINGS

Mr. Albert E. Davis, the Poe Cottage at Fordham:

Dr. Ira Remsen, Johns Hopkins University:

Authors’ Club, London:

Dr. George A. Wauchope, University of South Carolina:

Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University:

Chancellor Henry M. McCracken, New York University: