Text: Thomas P. Beyer, “Edgar Allan Poe — A Tribute,” Methodist Review (Cincinnati, OH), vol. 95, July 1913, pp. 536-543

[page 536:]

ART. III. — EDGAR ALLAN POE — A TRIBUTE

In the year of grace eighteen hundred and nine some mighty babes were born: the two greatest statesmen of the age, Lincoln and Gladstone; the epochal scientist Charles Darwin; the world-musicians Mendelssohn and Chopin, and four poets: the Englishmen Tennyson and FitzGerald, the American Holmes, and that child of no race nor age, sprung from beauty and passion and destiny, “out of space, out of time,” Edgar Allan Poe.

A century usually suffices to place a man where he belongs, discovers the fool or recovers the prophet; envy rarely outlives a centennial, sneers lose their edge, detraction slinks ashamed from the field; but so far America has yielded the most careful, grudging inches of approval to Poe. At his death he was “not without honor” among other peoples; to-day he is almost so at home. Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow were patriots in their verse and flattered us into early enthusiasm; Whitman frankly exposed our crudities as well as our colossal and elemental virtues, and we resented whatever was unpleasant; Poe, poor Poe, was only a citizen of the republic of art and never made the eagle scream, so we have agreed to give him the icy stare, excusing ourselves, of course, by the reflection that he “got drunk.” A few years ago we denied him a place in our Hall of Fame, and more recently managed to squeeze him in against virtuous protest of prude and Philistine. Let us go to with our middle-class Pharisaism and try to introduce into our judgment of him a little Christian tolerance, or, failing of that, some slight modicum of common sense. I wish to confine myself to two themes: first, a reply to the charges he has been damned for, and, second, a tribute to the positive in him.

Poe was a drunkard and a dope fiend; he was unmoral and immoral; he was a trifler in love and a dawdler in the universe; he had a slice of something called “genius” which kept him from absolute starvation and enabled him to write “The Raven” while coming out of a delirium tremens — these are some of the lies and inanities we have all heard, started by his biographer, Griswold. There ought to be a law on biographers. Some of these charges [page 537:] are too ridiculous to notice. Only a year ago, a public reader declaimed “The Raven” with a thick and boozy articulation, lurching and leering as he defiled such lines as

When Poe's interpreters commit such atrocities, what can be expected of the others? No poem has a more rational development nor more careful workmanship than “The Raven,” and I could sooner be persuaded that Bryant wrote “Thanatopsis” under the influence of hasheesh than that Poe's “Raven” was a red one. To be sure, there was a strange unknown x in Poe's genius besides the known a, b, c, of hard work, but to call this x “gin” is nearly as rational as to maintain that, because Dickens liked to have his pet cat with him in the study, the cat must have taken the pen in his chops when no one else was around and written The Cricket on the Hearth.

Poe's father was a ne’er-do-well, a poor attempt at lawyer, and, if accounts be true, a worse excuse as actor; his mother an actress of English birth, who was able to keep the family pot boiling more by vivacity of manner and personal charm (on the stage, mind you) than by histrionic talent. Edgar, the second of three children, was born early in 1809, in Boston, by chance. I say “by chance” not carelessly nor with levity. Boston, with its beans and cold-storage intellect, is a strange enough birthplace for this starry genius; but note: January 19 and February 19 have both been given as the date of his birth, and while one of them is probably correct, the claim of neither is convincing, particularly if internal evidence alone were relied upon. Records show that Mrs. Poe played on the public stage on January 12 and 20, 1809. The records of the next month show that she appeared on February 13 and 24. In the matter of his birth, then, the fates fought against him with their fatal weapons of heredity and environment. Left an orphan and adopted by a rich planter who pampered him, made him a toy, gave him a “gentleman's education,” hoisted him to the wine-table to sing and recite for the entertainment of his boozy guests, sated and poisoned by adulation for his beauty and precocity, unguardianed in an English school, [page 538:] unrestrained at the University of Virginia and abroad for a year — heaven knows where — and then West Point — what wonder that, in an age when all men of parts in society prided themselves on wine-bibbing, Poe sometimes drank too much? The real wonder is that he escaped the pits, digged by his friends, long enough to accomplish his immortality.

may sound weakly futile, but it was true. Poe did not get a square deal. Is not this sufficient explanation, brother, sister? The other day, at the close of a few weeks’ study of Poe, a student asked if we didn’t “have to discount everything Poe wrote because he drank.” This is a not uncommon case of muddy ratiocination and inverted sympathy. If I thought this view a just one, that is, that genius is handicapped by sobriety, I should be willing to barter all my temporal happiness for a quart of Poe's whisky. But a truce with explanations. We might say for him, as a later poet said for himself,

What is there positive about Edgar Poe? What is there great ?

In the first place, no other American writer — perhaps no other modern writer — is so eminently distinguished for both verse and prose forms. The work of two more favored Americans might be cited in opposition, Lowell and Emerson. But Lowell, that many-sided man, has nothing in all his volumes that takes such powerful hold in any way as “The Masque of the Red Death” or “The Gold Bug” does in its particular way; and as for Emerson, the Exquisite Transcendental, he can hardly be said to have had a prose style at all. He has sentences — such sentences! But each one, he admitted, was “an infinitely repellent particle.” That Poe excels all English writers since Milton in the equality of his artistry in both great forms of expression is only sober, undodgeable fact. Here is the true matter for wonder in the man. In poetry [page 539:] he was a worshiper of beauty. He had his own definition of a poem, his own conception of its proper and highest subject, and, whether right or wrong, he walked his narrow way with the high devotion of a priest. A poem must be short, he thought; and so it must, a lyric poem. Its true sphere is beauty, not truth nor even passion. Here, it must be objected, we “wear our rue with a difference.” He urges, further, that there is always an element of sadness in the intensest beauty — in which he is triumphantly right. So, he coneludes, the best theme is that which combines the dearest beauty and the keenest sadness — the death of a beautiful woman, And who can successfully combat him? At any rate, he believed it, and acted on it, than which a man can do nothing higher, Consequently all his great poems have this ideal motive: “Tamburlane,” “To Helen” (the first poem of that name), “The Sleeper,” “Lenore,” “The Raven,” “Ulalume,” “Annabel Lee,” and, in an inverted form, even “For Annie.” There is something moral and tonic in the way he trod proudly and silently his narrow, lonely path, which he believed the highest, never turning aside to pluck gaudy flowers that might have sold for more in the market place, never prostituting the “most high” within him. He was not one who studied demand and manufactured the requisite supply. At least, right or wrong, he ‘believed in his theme, and did with it all that was possible of human art.

In poetry, then, he worshiped beauty; and so his poems are never definite and indubitable; always shadowy and suggestive. In prose he worshiped intellect, and when he desires he is as lucid as light. That the same man wrote “Ulalume” and “The Gold Bug,” “Lenore” and “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym” or “The Purloined Letter,” that the poet of “The Raven” wrote without laying down his pen that marvel of critical analysis “The Philosophy of Composition,” is one of the miracles of literary history. A recent scrutiny of his eight or nine volumes of criticism and essays convinces the writer that the logic of literary analysis was never driven in America by more careful processes to surer conclusions. His premises are sometimes impeachable, to be sure, but his logic, never. Poe, then, the visionary forger of vague and terrific imagery in verse and prose-poems, is Poe the critic, the [page 540:] champion of cold induction, inerrant logic, and, most wonderful of all, he is Poe the teller of tales as realistic in sober fictions as any of Swift's or DeFoe's. To one acquainted only with his poems the detective and adventure stories seem anomalous. The mind that conceived the wonderful City in the Sea, that city of

of

could rival in gravity of verisimilitude the author of Gulliver's Travels or The Apparition of Mrs. Veal. His account in the New York Sun of a transatlantic trip in a balloon was taken as seriously as was ever The History of the Plague in London. In his “detective stories” Poe's analytical genius shines brightest. They begot Conan Doyle, Robert Chambers, and Jacques Futtrelle. Poe created the “detective” story, and his imprint is found on almost every one written since. Not only are his plots worked over, but in the main characters of a half dozen prominent writers one cannot blink the resemblances to his immortal Dupin and the prefect of Parisian police. In the same way The Gold Bug has fathered all subsequent cipher stories. When the criticism was made at the time that the unraveling of the cipher was really no test of original analytical ability, since he had made his own puzzle, he promptly answered his critics ‘by taking the first installment of Barnaby Rudge, then appearing in serial form, and forecasting the whole plot from that small beginning.

Pardon a little digression here on critics. In a recent publication Mr. Howells has put himself on record thus: “Would the best of Poe's tales be accepted now by one of the leading or one of the next following magazines? I am obliged to answer I do not think it would; no, not the best of his tales.” Poor’ Mr. Howells! or else, poor leading magazines! This is boomerang judgment with a vengeance. I wonder whose head was lopped off. Have we copied the copies so long that we care no more for the original ‘ It is hardly possible to take up a magazine these days without finding a story that spells Poe in almost every paragraph. We have, [page 541:] no doubt, improved upon him in some respects ; that is not strange; neither is it strange, I suppose, that, having squeezed the juice from Poe, we should be ready to throw him to the garbage. (I am reminded of the “moderns,” who, according to Jonathan Swift, blamed the “ancients” for stealing their choicest thoughts.) Mr. Howells goes on to say that the “curse of unreality is on his [Poe's] careful plausibility.” Had Mr. Howells read Kipling with a sense of humor he would have remembered

We all know what Mr. Howells means by “unreality,” because we know his conception of realism; and many of us are grateful to an all-seeing Providence that Poe had another definition.

To return: I have pointed out something of positive force — a roundness of intellectual powers that, had they been combined with healthiness of emotion and will, would have left no doubt as to our greatest American man of letters. But I have no doubt some are already thinking, “This is a poor case if nothing further can be said. All this may be true, but how is the world better for Edgar Poe? What has he given us?” Let me tell you.

Byron, Burns, Coleridge, and other weak-willed or misguided poets have been variously compared with Poe. In their lives few parallels can be found — restricted, indeed, to their resort to alcoholic or other artificial stimulants; a means of comparison which if pursued would make half the world kin. For the work of these poets, Byron, Burns, and Poe, there is no common denominator. Byron is blatantly, defiantly indecent; Burns is boisterously — well, ultrahuman, let us say; Poe is naturally and of design as pure in word and suggestion as the cold white moonbeams that fell through the windows of Madeleine's chamber or those that brought dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee. Our whole American literature is Puritanical, almost self-righteously so, and for some natures Puritanism imputes no particular virtue, but in a passionate, warm-blooded lover of beauty we might have expected and condoned something different. Still not one Puritan among them, nay, no poet that ever lived and dealt largely with the beautiful, is so free from the ‘barest hint of impurity. There is no fleshly taint [page 542:] in any single line that Edgar Poe ever wrote. And this is the man whom the American people have chosen to immolate on the fires of their morality! Let that percolate slowly to whatever depth it will go.

We of Saxon origin always sermonize, and I rather think we are right. The first translations into English were sermons and the first original English prose was religious ; our genius is serious. What is the moral? This is the question on our lips, and “art for art's sake” gets short shrift with us. The question of moral tone, then, is an important one. Now the common, flippant habit of dismissing Poe as “unmoral” is unjust and superficial. He is not concerned much with the ordinary penny morality, though he in no way combats it, but the ideal of beauty itself is surely moral.

No doubt to many “Ulalume” is a farrago of nonsense, as it was to the critic Stoddard; but to others it is profound wisdom, and for these Poe wrote. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that this ideal lacks blood, like the poems that embody it. Even for Poe himself it proved a bending reed. On his tragic deathbed, doubly tragic in that it seemed so adventitious, so brutally pathetic — drugged and deserted by a gang of ruffians after they had used him as a “repeater” in the election — his only words, moaned in half-recovered consciousness, were, “Lord, help my poor soul.” It is at such a time that the deepest needs of a man become known to himself. No religion except the religion of art had occurred to Poe during his forty years, but in that moment he was conscious of a soul different from his sense of beauty. His ideal, pursued though it was with devoutness in “a sad sincerity,” failed of the Highest, and so he cannot sit on the cloud-capped heights lighting the world. There was tragedy in him from the beginning. In what he thought his most beautiful poem, “For Annie,” he says, ‘

That was his life, a fever; a tragic fever, a fevered tragedy. I think he realized from the first that it could not be otherwise; he [page 543:] feared inevitable catastrophe, and that his life would be a kind of failure. When he was but twenty he wrote:

What a prophecy! And the pity of it! Under a crushing handicap of hereditament he fought a losing fight, loved his friends, scorned his enemies, followed his star, toiled superhumanly, lived righteously, though weakly sometimes — but lost. And we do not like a loser. Perhaps some day we shall be sufficiently Christian to understand that he who fights a losing fight, predestined to failure, is the only hero. He who enters the conflict with force enough to win need show no courage, indeed, can show none. But the millennium is still afar off, and Poe's life remains, maligned, shadowed, discredited. Here is worthy theme for a great biographer; so far we have had

Thomas P. Beyer