Text: Sherwin Cody, “Poe as Critic,” Putnam's Magazine (New York, NY), vol. 5, no. 4, January 1909, pp. 439-440

[page 438, continued:]

THOUGH in his own day his chief repute was that of a critic, he has since been unsparingly condemned and sneered at. Lowell refers to him, in “A Fable for Critics,” as

— the fudge, no doubt, being his critical lucubrations. Stedman said, “There could be few things farther [column 2:] apart, as respects learning, elevation, ease and quality of style, than the masterly essays of Lowell and [Poe's] critical sketches; but Lowell is a scholar, wit, and thinker ranging at large, and Poe the bantering monitor of his own generation.” Stoddard says: “It was the fashion while Poe was living to call him a critic, a delusion which never could have obtained in a country where the principles of criticism have been studied, and the practice of criticism cultivated. He had an acute mind that was penetrative in trifles [page 439:] and that delighted to detect discrepancies, but not a mind that could rise to and grapple with principles.” Even Professor Trent, in his history of American literature, in which he gives Poe the highest place among Americans, says: “The miscellaneous prose works of Poe, including his lectures, essays and other critical writings of whatsoever form, are important to the student of his mind and art. Their intrinsic value, however, is comparatively slight.”

Any one who turns over the pages of the ordinary editions of Poe's works and glances cursorily at his so called “Criticisms,” as collected and edited by Griswold and copied by subsequent editors, will be forced to agree with these opinions. Little appears but ephemeral journalism — clever enough as journalism, but hardly worth reprinting. Apart from the crudity of these critical notices, Poe's violent prejudices against the New England school of writers, and his attacks on them, seem to force us to take sides, and we find ourselves left to choose between him and all the other writers and critics of America.

Most of us understand criticism to consist in estimating the literary merit or demerit of writers. Any one who gives us a fair, placid judgment, with sympathetic illumination of points we had before felt but dimly, we unhesitatingly accept as a first-rate critic. Measured by such a standard, Poe was the worst of critics, for he was almost totally lacking in that sympathy which can interpret to the ordinary mind the literary work of another. He had sympathy neither with the common reader, nor with the writer who appeals to the common reader.

There is, however, inbedded in the mass of ephemeral journalism which Poe wrote, anonymously and hastily, from week to week, to earn his scanty living, a mass of analysis of the cardinal principles of literary construction, which the present writer believes will be found of equal importance in American literature with his stories or his verse. His works [column 2:] of fiction and his poems were given to us in a state of detailed literary perfection unsurpassed by the work of any other writer in English literature. Circumstances did not permit Poe to bring his critical work to the same perfection. In his “Marginalia” he began to pick out some of the fine paragraphs; but he made no attempt to arrange them in logical order. The critical world was against him, and there was no incentive to perform this vast labor of selection and perfection as he had performed it upon his stories and poems. Yet that which is in a man must come out, and even in the most hasty compositions of daily journalism it will find a more or less adequate expression.

Poe's literary creed has been an accepted tradition with a small class; but it has come down to us almost wholly as a tradition. We had “The Poetic Principle’” — a lecture filled with selections for elocutionary display; “The Philosophy of Composition,’‘ which no one knew whether to take seriously or not; and a few rambling notes. Yet we are told that Poe was the begetter of the fetish, ‘”“Art for Art's sake,’‘ and of some other notions taken up and made much of only by the so-called ‘” Decadents’‘ — chiefly French. No volume of Poe's essays apart from his collected works has ever appeared, and no one has attempted to put in order Poe's opinions as expressed in writing by himself.

The fact is, Griswold's volume of “Criticisms” was nothing more than a collection of Poe's most sensational journalistic remarks about other writers whom he either disliked or wrote about for purely journalistic purposes. Poe would not have dreamt of putting it forth as part of his collected works. It was as unjust to his reputation as a critic as Griswold's “Memoir” was unfair to his personal character. The facts in regard to Poe's life are now fairly well known, and they are known to be widely at variance with the statements of Griswold. The facts in [page 440:] regard to Poe's “Criticisms” have yet to be made known; but when they are known, Griswold's selections will be dropped as completely as his “‘ Memoir”’ has been, and we shall have instead a volume of the most penetrative and thorough analysis of the fundamental principles of the highest artistic creation that any modern writer of genius has given us; and among the ancients we shall look in vain for the like except in Greek literature.

In the first place, thanks are due to Professor Harrison for giving us in the Virginia edition a fair collection of Poe's journalistic writings. Griswold picked out the sensational, the disagreeable and worthless bits. His selections did not by any means represent even the poor average of Poe's pot-boiling efforts. That fair average we find in Professor Harrison's edition; and we have something like a fair range to choose from: we find many excellent things we had never heard of before.

But this is like crude ore. The gold is there, but only an expert could find it among the shale and quartz and clay. Having heard the tradition of Poe's ideas of literary art, I set out for confirmation of them in his critical writings, feeling quite sure that Poe could not have had the guiding principles that he did without giving expression to them in some way when he wrote about men and books. [column 2:] I found comparatively little that was new in regard to poetry. What Poe says on that subject is interesting, but it is not vital, and other men have spoken better. It is in regard to the powers of prose that we might expect something from Poe, for he was a master of prose who used that medium for the expression of his deepest thoughts and most beautiful conceptions. His conviction of what might be done in prose is even higher than its realization in his own stories.

This conception of fiction as a high and fine art has been elaborated in detail in a series of reviews, and in fragmentary paragraphs scattered through other reviews, which, when presented in a body, form the most detailed, penetrating, and authoritative text-book on the principles of the construction of modern fiction anywhere to be found, even among the admirable writings of this kind in which French literature abounds.

The standards of modern novelists are exceedingly low; the standards of Dickens and Thackeray were not very high — not nearly so high as those of George Eliot; the notions of Balzac, despite the width of his range, do not appeal to English readers. The future of novel-writing is before us, not behind. It is fifty years since Poe died, and yet we are hardly abreast of his conceptions. Perhaps, however, we are now better prepared than ever before to let him lead us.