Text: Anonymous, “The Satanic Streak in Poe's Genius,” Current Literature (New York, NY), vol. 48, no. 1, January 1910, pp. 93-96

[page 93, continued:]

THE proud and sinister features of Edgar Allan Poe may well remind the imaginative beholder of Milton's Lucifer. His chief sin, like Lucifer's, was intellectual pride; his one obsession, the beauty of corruption. Like the Lucifer in Marie Corelli's “Sorrows of Satin,” he held a peculiar fascination for women. Professor Woodberry, in his “Life of Poe,”* dwells upon [column 2:] the “magical” character of the poet's voice. He appealed to sentimental women by his figure, his history and his actions, and to kind-hearted women by his suffering. Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, one of the poet's loves, in a poem unearthed by Eugene L. Didier† describes his portrait in words that suggest the prince of Darkness as Hauff and Hoffmann have visioned him.

His eyes were calm

They were

Mrs. Whitman's plaint for the departed poet thrillingly suggests Coleridge's “maiden wailing for her demon-lover.” Poe himself believed in demons. He was afraid of going out in the dark for fear of invisible and malevolent presences. Like Swinburne's heroes, “marked cross from the womb and perverse,” [column 2:] his life was one long reiteration of failure. He was thwarted in everything he attempted. Whenever he soared heavenward, he fell. An inexplicable gloom oppressed his life like a nightmare. In the olden days people would have said that he was possessed by the devil. And it is more than coincidence that the arch-priest of literary diabolism, Charles Baudelaire, author of “The Flowers of Evil,” was his first disciple and prophet in Europe.

Fantastic as this conception of Poe may seem, it is borne out in fact by Professor Woodberry's sane and scholarly, if somewhat unsympathetic, biography of the poet. “If,” declares the Professor, “it be the office of poe- try to intimate the divine, it must be confessed these works of Poe intimate the infernal; they are variations struck on the chord of evil that vibrates in all life, throbs of the heart of pain, echoes of ruin that flash up from the deep within deep, the legend, pean, and ritual of hopeless death. They belong to the confusion of a superstitious mind, the feebleness of an unmanned spirit, the misery of an impotent will.” The theme of his master lyrics, with the single exception of “Israfel,” is ruin; in the larger number of his best [page 95:] poems, the special case of ruin which he declares the most pathetic of all the death of a beautiful woman.

“It is no concern that the treatment was radically different, so that in each instance a poem absolutely unique was created; the noteworthy fact is that Poe's genius was developed in its strength by brooding over a fixed idea, as the insane do, and when, under great excitement, some other mode of expression was imperative, it was found only in such objective work as the marvelous allegory of ‘The Conqueror Worm’ or in such spirit-broken confession as that other allegory of ‘The Haunted Palace,’ which in in- tense imaginative self-portraiture is scarcely ex- celled in literature. The secret life, the moments of strongest emotion, the hours of longest reach, implied by such motives as these, make that impenetrable background of shadow against which in these poems the poet stands relieved forever, — the object of deep gloom, whether his sufferings were real or imaginary, inevitable or self-imposed, the work of unregarding fate or the strict retribution of justice.”

The same note as in the poems is sounded in the prose of the poet, notably in his “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesques.” Two of these, “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” are in his prose what “The Raven” and “Ulalume” are in his poetry, his richest imaginative work. He expended his spirit on them; they mark, Professor Woodberry thinks, the highest reach of the romantic element in Poe's genius. His mind dwelled steadily in the haunted borderland, upon the verge, but not beyond, the sphere of credibility. The absorption of his imagination in the preternatural was not more extraordinary than the monotony of his themes. In plot, we are told, “Ligeia” is the same as “Morella,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” the same as “Berenice.” Poe's Lady Ligeia has no human quality. Her aspirations, her thoughts and capabilities, are those of a spirit, the very beam and glitter of silence in her ineffable eyes belong to a visionary world. She is the maiden of Poe's dream, the Eidolon he served. Upon this story he lavished all his poetic, inventive, and literary skill, and at last perfected an exquisitely conceived work, and made it, within its own laws, as faultless as humanity can fashion.

“He did not once lapse into the crude or repulsive; he blended the material elements of the legend, the mere circumstance and decoration of the scene, like married notes of a sensuous accompaniment, and modulated them with minute and delicate care to chime with the weird suggestions [column 2:] of the things above nature, until all unites and vanishes in an impression on the spirit, in an intimation of the dark possibilities that lie hidden in the eternal secret, adumbrated in the startling event when the raven hair of Ligeia streams down beneath the serpentine flames of the writhing censer, and her eyes open full on her lost lover, as they stand embosomed within the wind-swayed golden hangings whereon the ghastly and sable phantasmagoria keeps up its antic and ceaseless dance.”

As in “Ligeia” the idea of change is elaborated, so in “The Fall of the House of Usher” the intellectual theme is fear. In artistic construction, Professor Woodberry thinks, it does not come short of absolute perfection.

“The somber landscape whose hues Poe alone knew the secret of; the subtle yet not overwrought sympathy between the mansion and the race that reared it; the looks, traits, and pursuits of Usher, its representative; and the at first scarce-felt presence of Mad- eline, his worn sister-all is like a narrowing and ever-intensifying force drawing in to some unknown point; and when this is reached, [page 96:] in the bright copper sheathed vault in which Madeline is entombed, and the mind after that midnight scene expands and breathes freer air, a hundred obscure intimations, each slight in itself, startle and enchain it, until, slowly, as obscurity takes shape in a glimmer of light, Usher's dread discloses itself in its concrete and fearful fulfillment, and at once, by the brief and sudden stroke of death, house, race and all sink into the black tarn where its glassy image had so long built a shadowy reality.”

Never, Professor Woodberry declares, has the impression of total destruction, of absolute and irremediable ruin, been more strongly given; had the mansion remained, it would seem as if the extinction of Usher had been incomplete. “Doom rests upon all things within the shadow of those walls; it is felt to be impending: and therefore Poe, identifying himself with his reader, places the sure seal of truth on the illusion as he exclaims, ‘from that chamber and from that mansion I fled aghast.’”

The most Satanic of Poe's conceptions, however, Miltonic in its grandeur, is his cosmogony, as expressed in the essay-poem “Eureka.” He himself declared with intense solemnity that the truths discovered in it were of more consequence than the discovery of gravitation.

With a pride more overbearing than that of Lucifer he challenges God. “To the few who love me and whom I love,” he cries, in the well-known preface of the poem, to those who feel rather than to those who think-to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities — I offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true. To them I present the composition as an Art-Product alone: — let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem. What I here propound is true: — therefore it cannot die: or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will ‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.” He quotes Baron Bielfeld's, “we should have to be God ourselves in order to comprehend what He is,” and he immediately adds in a strain that bears a curious resemblance to what the Serpent whispered to Eve: “I nevertheless venture to demand if this our present ignorance of the Deity is an ignorance to which the soul is everlastingly condemned?” After reflection, he boldly took the only road to such knowledge that was left open by this apothegm, and [column 2:] affirmed that he was God, being persuaded thereto by his memories of antenatal and his aspirations for an immortal existence, and in particular by his pride. “My whole nature utterly revolts,” he violently exclaims, “at the idea that there is any Being in the Universe superior to myself.” Surely Milton's Satan himself could have made no more insolent declaration.

In order to prove his contention, he was led to a queer, pantheistic explanation of life. He had derived early in life, Professor Woodberry tells us, from obscure disciples of French philosophes, the first truth that the materialist ever learns the origin of knowledge in experience, and the consequent limitation of the mind to phenomena. At a later period he had gleaned some of the conceptions of transcendentalism from Coleridge and from Schlegel.

The issue from the union of such principles was naturally monstrous and two natured, like the Centaur. Attraction and repulsion constitute Poe's notion of matter; the former is the physical element, the latter is the spiritual element. The repulsion will not increase indefinitely as the condensation of the mass proceeds, but when the process of time has fulfilled its purpose the evolution of heterogeneity will cease, and the attractive force being unresisted, will draw the atoms back into the primordial particle in which, as it has no parts, attraction will also cease. Now, attraction and repulsion constituting our notion of matter, the cessation of these two forces is the same thing with the annihilation of matter, or, in other words, the universe, at the end of the reaction which has been mentally followed out, will sink into the nihility out of which it arose. Writing in conclusion, Poe makes one last affirmation, to wit, that the diffusion and ingathering of the universe is the Deity itself, which has no existence apart from the constitution of things.

Poe's knowledge was limited in stock; he could not generate by mere reflection a Newtonian truth. “That he thought he had done so,” Professor Woodberry asserts, hurling the poet to bottomless, intellectual perdition, “measures his folly. ‘Eureka,” he adds in conclusion, “affords one of the most striking instances in literature of a naturally strong intellect tempted by overweening pride to an Icarian flight, and betrayed, notwithstanding its merely specious knowledge, into an ignoble exposure of its own presumption and ignorance.”

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 93, column 1:]

* THE LIFE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE. PERSONAL AND LITERARY. By George E. Woodberry. Houghton, Mifflin & Company.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 93, column 2:]

† THE POE CULT AND OTHER PAPERS. By Eugene L. Didier. Broadway Publishing Company.