Text: Herman Schefauer, “The Baiting of Poe,” Overland Monthly (San Francisco, CA), vol. 53, no. 6, June 1909, pp. 491-494

[page 491:]

SINCE POE must remain permanent and not an ephemeral figure of fame, the recent revival of agitated interest and something of the old animosity produced by his anniversary, is to be considered of special and peculiar significance. The echoes of the dispute are still rolling across the world of English literature. It is only within a few days that the bitter and petulant rivulets of certain misprizing reviewers of Manhattan have reached this serene sea in the West, or the eulogies of Europe found answer in these Sierras. In London, the sardonic Shaw mingles with praise of an American poet, acrid, perhaps deserved, satire on ourselves.

When the little men of a day attack the crowned Olympian figure of all Time, irony and pathos have their share in the unholy spectacle. It was perhaps not unfit that out of the harsh and clamorous canyons of darkest New York, voices decrying the greatness of Poe should have been raised, when the soundest and most reverent culture of all the older lands of art was united to do him honor. The cheeks of future generations of New Yorkers will blush often ere it be forgotten that their city once denied Poe his place among American immortals. I myself blush for the present generation when I think of a tiny monument to him which now stands, dusty and oblivious, in a dark corner of the Metropolitan Museum. This neglect, however, may not be inappropriate for the chief city of a land which can boast no single worthy monument erected to its greatest singers. In the case of Poe, he was denied bread when alive and a stone when dead.

My chief concern in this article is with Mr. Bliss Carman, whose patronizing attitude toward Poe is rich with a subtle [column 2:] humor whereof Mr. Carman seems scarcely to realize the deadliness. Strangely enough, when this light and graceful piper of Pan, whose “wood-notes wild” have, indeed, more than a common sweetness, laid aside his familiar instrument, and with a tutorial accent, gravely assumed the critic's rod, he became instantly, hopelessly and all unconsciously, a pipe through which not the Breath of Pan but all the winds of Philistia blew their most hackneyed tunes. Consciously, of course, Mr. Carman would be fair and just, coldly dispassionate and delicately discriminate. He would have us know that, come what may, he will not permit himself to be awed by any spectre of fame haunting a great name. And so, with a blindness imposed by the revenging gods themselves, he trips over truths he has himself maintained, and has his tongue beguiled into uttering most unhappy contradictions. With ears stunned by the Boeotian hubbub of New York, he is unable to hear in his later years the immortal strains that held him spell-bound in his youth. Surely Mr. Carman could not have “learnt in suffering” what he has “taught in song,” if he has not come to know that only in youth do the full beauty and feeling of another's song compel our souls to the truest worship. Has he never really felt that he has so often expressed so well, that the rust of metropolitan sophistication is ruinous to the sensitive organ of poetic response? Have long years of magazine versification, and all the empty jargon of current criticism, and the debased levels of popular taste, so wrought upon him that he is no longer able to measure Poe by the universal and eternal standards which Literature commands its critics to uphold? That were lamentable, indeed, and in the case of Mr. Carman particularly lamentable for the poetry he hopes may thus be judged.

The very beginning of his article contains [page 492:] a confession sufficient to cancel all claims Mr. Carman may have as a critic of Poe. Years, evidently, have elapsed since he has read his Poe, and he cites his disappointment as in the nature of an ingenuous discovery of his own. That is a damaging confession. For that American poet to whom the poems of Poe are not as familiar as his own, is entitled to but scant consideration when attempting to sit in judgment upon what is to him “merely a name.” Our critic is surprised that he can no longer admire, his appetite for Poe is jaded, and Poe himself seems only an immature schoolboy to one so sick with civilization as Mr. Carman. In words than which any more fathomless plebeian in point of view have never been uttered by a son of song, he writes, in applicably comparing Poe's imperishable and ethereal creations to useless lumber.

“Bring these old furnishings out into the light of day some fresh morning, set them up on the veranda where the sun of common sense and the air of life can get at them, brush away the dust of sentiment, regard them without flinching, and ask yourself to say honestly what good they are to you, after all.”

And these awful words were not written by a car-driver nor a policeman, but by a poet! We have heard these phrases applied to poetry before. “Common sense,” “the air of life,” “what good are they?” — they are the same old billets hurled by indurated Ignorance at what it has not brains to comprehend nor soul to feel. But for Mr. Carman to use them! He would also have us “brush away the dust of sentiment,” and “regard them without linching.” Very brave and ruthless, indeed, these words, and obviously written in defiance of the fact that reverence and sentiment in the reader are qualities without which no poetry can thrive. Likewise, he is tempted into comparing Poe with Shelley — an unfair and entirely futile habit possessed by certain critics. We know that a ruby is not a diamond, that a rose is not a lily, nor a skylark a nightingale, but we are not permitted to know without quotation that one poet is not like another. It is human, perhaps, to draw comparisons, to seek a staff to lean on, a scale to measure by in the unsteady and nebulous world of literary [column 2:] criticism, and yet if this barren method should be avoided in the estimating of any poet, it should emphatically be in the case of Poe. Mr. Carman seems unable to disentangle his judgment from the taste of the time, from the sterile desert of the day in which he lives, though one might have fancied him warned by that solemn inscription cut in granite above the portals of the works of Edgar Allan Poe: Out of Place, out of Time. He would wrench that dark-winged celestial sprite to fit into a modern apartment house, expect his unearthly flowers to bloom in the hectic zephyrs of steam heat, and his songs be heard amidst the uproar of the Elevated, or align themselves pleasantly to the hysterical philosophy of a false and inane cheerfulness or the miasma of occultism affected by a nerve-harried and most unhappy people, or whatever else Mr. Carman calls “life.” His cold, metropolitan eye scans the simple words and phrases in the poet he is called upon to review, and deaf to their palpitant music and immune to their magic and charm, he finds no “great lines,” no subtle conceits, no precocity nor adroitness of phrase, no sylvan pseudo-simplicity practised by the clever minstrels of 1909. Though he may retort with “de gustibus,” etc., I am moved to express regret for Mr. Carman if he do not respond to the indefinable power that arises like some exquisite perfume out of Poe's simplest pieces to work its will poignantly upon your emotions and haunt you with melody till you die or fall into atrophy. Does our critic really think that poetry has anything in common with the preposterous definition given it by Arnold, “a criticism of life?” — or much in common with any definition? If the poet has been able to arouse our emotions, he has achieved his greatest and most ultimate purpose. It is through the exaltation or depression or stirring of the emotions that the poet works upon mankind — whose heart-strings are his lute. The few supreme masters of poetry, in addition to the gift of song, possessed also the gift of an exalted wisdom, but without their seizure upon our hearts, their thoughts had never reached our heads. In other words, where poet and philosopher combine, the latter is potent only through the former. Poe [page 493:] was not a philosopher, but a faithful and incorruptible priest of Beauty. He that creates a new strange world for us to wander in and touches new chords in the lyres of our souls and sensations, and adores Beauty in a new speech is, as a poet, of immeasurable significance to the literature not only of his land, but of the world. There are other worlds beside the familiar and apparent one, even though we cannot behold them till some poet as demiurge strikes them into being.

There be critics who resent Poe's international honors as a poet because of the few short poems the genius found peace to write. They do not realize that not in his verse alone, but in the entire body of his work does the essentially poetic reside and exert its influence, and draw the world to worship.

Assuredly no poetry is ever such “only by virtue of its metre.” Between poetry and verse the same sharp distinction should be drawn as between literature and journalism. Is it to his “world of perplexed and harried men and women” that Mr. Carman expects the poetry of Poe, or any poetry, to appeal? Poetry is dead for the persons who would devour it when in full flight through the maddening subway, or dining at Babylonian restaurants, or when passing out of their luxurious cubicles into the hands of the nerve-specialist, or rather are they dead to it. It ought to be apparent that the voices of the most salient poets of our land are drowned by the jingling of the currency which this reviewer somewhat significantly uses as a simile of a test for Poe's genius. Poe's poems could not be coined into the drachmas of “success.” Were he to appear to-morrow there would not be wanting gentlemen-critics to lead a mob to hang him. When some neglectful Bliss Carman of the future unearths for himself the charming lyrics of the Bliss Carman of the present, may he equip himself with a more catholic standard and a richer sympathy than seem to abide within the breast of our critic of the snows. For, apart from all questions of present or personal taste or freedom of expression, the living poet of to-day has a duty towards the art of this dead poet of unconjectured time, whose deathless labors should be our proudest [column 2:] heritage and our purest, most precious gift to the literature of the world.

Mr. Carman manifests some conscience-stricken sense of this truth in his concluding paragraph, and so seeks to detract from his detraction. And yet his judgment and good intention go to wreck once more as he ends his article by invidiously setting the work of the worthy but mediocre Boner beside that of the master he so reverently praises.

There is matter for rejoicing, however, in the absence of any attack upon Poe's morals in Mr. Carman's depreciation. For that, he is warmly to be commended, and is rewarded by being saved from unpleasant association with the shriveled intelligences who are ever eager to disparage the work of a poet because of the poet's human delinquencies. To such minds, Byron, the rake, and Villon, the thief, and Marlowe, the roysterer, and Goethe, the gallant, must always destroy all that is great or beautiful in their works. For them, the private man annuls the public master. They cannot forget nor forgive that the unhappy Poe was intoxicated at times. Mention Byron and they will instantly think or comment on his debaucheries, and — would you believe it? — read him chiefly because of this unworthy interest. The puritan mind, and in particular the feminine, with its inability to pass beyond the personal, are not, I fear, those who sin least in this respect. To the ears of a true, unclouded critic, enlightened with a sense of the universal and historic in art, the strains of Nero's voice and Nero's lyre would prove not less sweet amid the burning of Rome, nor Victor Hugo's exalted genius not less sublime though all the charges that were brought against him in “The Black Star” by Leon Daudet were true. But such a critic would be superhuman, and so our most impartial judgment must yet remain forever obscured and distorted by the mists of prejudice and predilection.

To conclude, and to make a contrast with the niggard recognition and ungenerous attitudes of Poe's critics in Poe's own land, it will prove illuminating and profitable to quote from the authoritative “Standard” of London, a passage in an article by Ethel Talbot, one of the youngest and most gifted singers of England. [page 494:] Let the simple words of this child — for she is little more — addressed to the English public as an encouragement to the reading of Poe, serve as an example to those who would still further blight his fame and influence for beauty in a land where, thanks to the public schools and the newspapers, imagination is slowly ebbing to its death.

“It is true that, to read Poe with full appreciation, there is need for a certain listlessness of mood; not always would his rhythmic melodies make their accustomed appeal; this same thing is true of almost every individual poet. Any hour and any mind is good enough for the little masters that need neither the seeing eye nor the listening ear, being in themselves echoes; for the many others — they, too, have each their mood and their one hour dedicate. It is not desirable to attempt Poe in the throes of a black melancholy, and too broad a wakefulness to the light of common day will raise a barrier, as of a brazen shield, against the charm of his intangible music. The most perfect mood is a fugitive mental weariness that is neither sorrow nor longing; when you come then to Poe the lassitude gives way before the soothing sweetness of his unforgettable melodies.”

That is most excellent advice for realizing the keenest pleasure from Edgar Allan Poe. I trust that it may prevail upon Mr. Carman and induce him not to commit ruthless havoc among the treasures of his youth in the store-house of his mind. For it is certain that by following it, our poet-critic, whose own name is so charming, will discover that Poe, after all, is something more than “merely a name.”