Text: Killis Campbell, “Poe's Indebtedness to Byron,” The Nation (New York, NY), March 11, 1909, pp. 248-249

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:

SIR: A recent book on Byron's vogue and influence in America dismisses Byron's influence on Poe with less than a page. Poe's editors and biographers have, with few exceptions, made more of the matter, and some of them have held that Poe was in his earliest volume of poems — the famous little edition printed at Boston in 1827 — pretty completely under the Byronic spell. Prof. G. E. Woodberry, for example, asserts in his life of Poe that “Tamerlane” is thoroughly Byronic, and implies that the rest of Poe's first volume was largely modelled after Byron. Two other distinguished editors of Poe, E. C. Stedman and R. H. Stoddard, have even ventured to specify the works of Byron that most influenced two of Poe's poems: Stedman in one of his essays on Poe proclaimed “Tamerlane” a “manifest adumbration of ‘The Giaour’”; and Stoddard has pointed out that parts of “Al Aaraaf” evidence an acquaintance with Byron's “The Deformed Transformed.” But no student of Poe has taken the trouble to look into the matter of Poe's indebtedness in detail or with any attempt at exhaustiveness. Such an attempt must have made it clear that Poe's indebtedness to Byron extended considerably [column 3:] farther than has heretofore been held. It is revealed not alone in the volumes of 1827 and 1829, but also in the volume of 1831, and in some of the fugitive poems that appeared even later. Furthermore, it involves not only the reflecting of some Byronic mood or the imitation of Byron's general method and style, but also, in several cases, the borrowing of Byron's themes and, in a few instances, the appropriation likewise of his language.

“Tamerlane” not only adumbrates “The Giaour,” as the critics have pointed out; but it also resembles Byron's “Manfred.” For “Manfred” has all the significant motives which “Tamerlane” and “The Giaour” have in common; and possesses, besides, in its hero, a better prototype of Poe's hero than does “The Giaour.” Moreover, there is a rather close parallel both in phrase and in situation between a passage in “Manfred” (iii, 1, 66-78), the prologue to Manfred's confession, and the opening lines of “Tamerlane” (1-12). Besides “Tamerlane,” there are in the volume of 1827 five brief personal lyrics in which Poe sings, in the manner of Byron, of his own joys and sorrows, of his youthful pride and ambitions, and of subsequent disappointment and despair. These are: “Dreams,” “A Dream within a Dream,” “A Dream,” “The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour,” and “Stanzas,” the last on the list taking its cue from a mystical passage in Byron's “The Island” (Canto ii, Stanza 16), which Poe uses as the motto of his poem. And in the volume of 1829 there is one other lyric in the same strain as these, the piece there called “Preface,” but known in the edition of 1845 as “Romance.” Still later poems which strike the same notes are “To One in Paradise” (1835) and the sonnet “To Zante” (1837). Sundry other poems in these early volumes deal with themes or situations that put the reader in mind of themes or situations that Byron had also handled. The lines “To —— —— ” (beginning “I saw thee on thy bridal day”), now usually interpreted as referring to Miss Royster's marriage to Mr. Shelton, will remind one of the partial likeness between Poe's love affair with Miss Royster and Byron's with Mary Anne Chaworth, and will recall Byron's numerous verses on his unhappy passion. Two other early poems with the exasperating title “To “ beginning, respectively, “The bowers whereat in dreams I see,” and “I heed not that my earthly lot,” are also Byronic, the latter of the two presenting a situation analogous to that of Byron's lines, “And Wilt Thou Weep When I am Low?” “The Lake,” with its wild setting and its mention of suicide, finds a parallel in the situation in “Manfred” (i, 2), where the hero of that drama contemplates suicide amid similar environments. Another distinctly Byronic piece is the blank-verse description of the Coliseum, a subject that Byron had twice dealt with — first in “Manfred,” and later in the fourth canto of “Childe Harold.” And there is some similarity in context between Poe's fantastic verses “To the River —— ” and Byron's “Stanzas to the Po.”

But the most interesting examples of Poe's indebtedness to Byron are furnished by two poems not so far mentioned. These are his juvenile production entitled “Spirits of the Dead,” and the remarkable dream-fantasy, “The City in the Sea.” The first [page 249:] exemplifies a sort of borrowing that Poe indulged in, so far as is known with certainty, in only one other of his poems, “Al Aaraaf,” in the first part of which he incorporated, with slight modifications, several passages culled from “Lalla Rookh.” Poe's “Spirits of the Dead” is largely a piece of mosaic, a patchwork made up of words and ideas drawn from a passage in Byron's “Manfred,” the memorable incantation at the end of the first scene of the first act. The most striking parallel appears in the following couplets:

the first being lines 19 and 20 of Poe's poem — the other, lines 13 and 14 of Byron's. Other resemblances are less striking, but can hardly be held to be accidental. In the concluding stanza of Poe's “Spirits of the Dead” —

there is pretty close agreement, both in thought and in expression, with lines 7 to 10 of Byron's poem:

There is also some resemblance, though only in thought, between lines 11 and 12 and 15 to 18 of Poe's poem and lines 37 to 40 of Byron's poem. Byron's incantation comprises seventy lines; Poe's lyric, less than thirty. But the two have three rhymes in common, and there are in Poe's poem no less than fourteen lines that find some visible correspondence in Byron's.

The indebtedness revealed by “The City in the Sea” is less obvious than that seen in “Spirits of the Dead,” but is, I believe, none the less real. In its imagery and in its melody, “The City in the Sea” puts one in mind of Coleridge, and it may well owe something to “Kubla Khan.” But for the general situation with which the poem deals, it is my belief that Poe was indebted to Byron's melodramatic lines entitled “Darkness.” Byron's concern in “Darkness” is to picture conditions on earth as they will be on the last day of the world's existence. Poe also appears to be concerned with the end of the world — not, however, with terrestrial conditions on that dread day, but with the destruction of death and hell, of which the apostle writes in Revelation. In painting his weird picture, Poe probably went for some of his details, as Byron had done before him, to the Scriptures, but he appears to have borrowed from Byron's poem two of his most impressive situations: the extinction of all light in the heavens, and the utter stillness of the winds accompanied by supreme calm upon the waters everywhere. The first is depicted in Byron's poem in these lines: The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

and in Poe's poem in these:

The second situation Byron presents thus:

The corresponding situation in Poe is presented thus:

There are no verbal agreements between the two poems, but the general resemblance seems to me too close to be traced to accident.

Such other resemblances between Byron and Poe as I have stumbled on are less obvious or less noteworthy than those already mentioned; and it may be that most of them are nothing more than coincidences. I submit them, however. since their cumulative evidence may be worth something. First in order of time is the line from the concluding section of “Al Aaraaf”:

which is perhaps a reminiscence of the sixth line of Byron's “Darkness”:

In Poe's “Irene” (the earlier form of “The Sleeper’) occur these lines:

the first two lines of which will recall the following couplet from the incantation in “Manfred,” already mentioned as the source of Poe's “Spirits of the Dead’’:

And the third line in the same passage finds a parallel in these lines from “The Giaour” (945-948):

Finally there is some resemblance between the exquisite song of Nesace in the second part of “Al Aaraaf,” beginning:

and the Stranger's incantation in the first scene of Byron's “The Deformed Transformed,” which begins with the words:

Stoddard a good many years ago called attention to the resemblance between Nesace's song and another lyric in “The Deformed Transformed,” beginning:

but the resemblance to the Stranger's lamentation [column 3:] is closer both in movement and in substance.

Other instances of Byron's influence doubtless remain to be pointed out, but these are sufficient to warrant certain general conclusions as to Poe's indebtedness. With reference to the period of Byron's influence, it may be said that Poe was most under the Byronic spell during the half-dozen years just preceding 1830, and that this spell was not entirely broken before 1837. With reference to extent, it is safe to say that Byron's influence is reflected in two out of three of the poems printed before 1840, and hence in almost half of all the poems that Poe wrote. In some cases, this influence is, as always with the influence of Coleridge, vague and impalpable, but in others it is both substantial and easily perceived. The works of Byron to which Poe owed most appear to have been “Manfred,” “Childe Harold,” and “The Giaour.”

KILLIS CAMPBELL.

University of Texas, Austin, February 20.