Text: Van Wyck Brooks, “Our Poets, Part IV,.” America's Coming-of-Age, New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915, pp. 56-64

[page 56:]

IV

So much is necessary to give ‘Poe what-he badly needs, a naturalistic setting: Poe himself, who emerges from this New York of his time like a wreck at sea with its black spars etched against a sort of theatrical sunset. Ironical and sinister as he is, he is by no means “ out of space, out of time,” if by space we mean New York and by time the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The little imitation Byrons who swarmed about him wrote of haunted Gothic castles, Poe wrote the House of Usher; Bianca, Giordano, Ermengarde, Elfrida, Asthene, Zophiel were the human properties of their prose and verse, scarcely to be distinguished from the Madeleines and Eleanores, the Eulalies and Annabels, the Israfels and Al Aaraafs of Poe [page 57:] they also lived in a world of moan and a world of moonlight; madness, irreparable farewells, dungeons, assignations, premature burials, hidden treasures, exotic musical instruments, prophetic night birds — these things were of the time and very particularly, since New York provided them with an additional unreality, of the place.

Poe took this bric-a-brac seriously — that is always a distinction and it is Poe's distinction. ‘The tacit conventionalities of the romantic epoch became in him objects of a fierce intellectual concentration. In the comfortable safety of good and abundant food, friendly talk, substantial occupation, his contemporaries amused themselves with spectres, Oriental mysteries, hasheesh, and madness: Poe was the delirium which followed. He was a Byron without scope of action and without purging emotions.

(Superficially at least he was not conscious of being out of his element. In those critical essays in which he is so accessible and so honest and has so many disagreeable things to say [page 58:] about his contemporaries it is never the false taste, never the epoch which displeases him.] He likes The Dying Rosebud's Lament by Mrs. Fanny Osgood; what irritates him is bad grammar, bad rhymes, and plagiarism. «Nor is there the least indication that he thought America provincial, or bourgeois, or depressing to a man of talent.) That indeed is an element in the strength of all the American writers of the old school; an instinct of self-preservation kept them at home in spirit; so much of the missionary element was of the texture of what they had to say that a tinge of the cosmopolitan would have neutralized their best effects, would have rendered them personally, as it has certainly rendered Lowell, a little characterless, a little indistinct. But it is a rather disconcerting fact in relation to the theory that Poe is a kind of supersensual enigma, who might have lived with equal results in Babylon or Sioux City. At his second-best, in prose and verse, he is precisely at one both in tone and execution with his intellectual surroundings. At his [page 59:] best it is this outworn bric-a-brac which is transfigured, just as the suburban bibliolatry of England is transfigured in the drawings of Blake. |The important thing is to consider what this bric-a-brac is transfigured into, and why, and what it means.

Since the days of the alchemists no one has produced more than Poe the effects of damnation, no one has been more conscious of being damned. In his pages the breath of life never stirs: crimes occur which do not reverberate in the human conscience, there is laughter which has no sound, there is weeping without tears, there is beauty without love, there is love without children, trees grow which bear no fruit, flowers which have no fragrance, — it is a silent world, cold, blasted, moon-struck, sterile, a devil's heath. Only a sensation of intolerable remorse pervades it.

Poe is commonly called unreal; it is justly said of him that he never touches the general heart of man, that perhaps of all writers who have lived he has the least connection with human experience.’ Nothing is more sinister [page 60:] about Poe, for instance, than his tacit acceptance of common morals; you might even say that he is rigidly conventional, if you did not feel that he is conventional merely because the moral world no more exists for him than it exists for a black stone. If you could prove a vicious motive in him, as from certain points of view you can prove a vicious motive in Baudelaire, you might, even in that, establish some fusion between him and the common reason of humankind. Orchids are as much a part of the vegetable kingdom as potatoes, but Poe is an orchid made out of chemicals. Magic is always so; it has the sinister quality of a force operating outside nature, without any relation to human values.

No European can exist without a thousand subterranean relationships; but Americans can so exist, Americans do so exist. | Edison, for example, resembles Poe as a purely inventive mathematical intellect and with Edison, as with Poe, you feel that some electric fluid takes the place of blood;, you feel that the greatest of inventors cannot [page 61:] be called a scientist at all, that his amazing powers over nature are not based in any philosophical grasp of the laws of nature, that he is in temperament a mechanic rather than a philosopher. | His faculty is to that of Darwin, for example, what fish is to flesh, — to the philosophical animal man he is more incomprehensible; and for all the beneficence of his faculty he is himself a kind of prodigious salamander.| Poe is a mechanic of the same sort. He has discovered in literature the chemical secret of life. He has produced chemical men, chemical emotions, chemical landscapes; in Eureka he has produced even a chemical philosophy so much like real philosophy that until you try to feel it you will never guess it the most sterile of illusions. For this reason the highly colored effects that light up his tales and his poems are lurid and metallic. The sinister greens and reds and yellows are not, you feel, the flames of honest wood and coal.

To explain all this it is not enough to say that he had a spectral nature, that Emerson [page 62:] and Jonathan Edwards and Hawthorne had spectral natures, that theosophy and Christian Science suggest that this quality is a typical American quality. So much is probably true, but more is required; and to approach Poe is to approach those mysteriously fascinating thaumaturgic elements in nature which are responsible for most of the fraudulent science in the world. One treads warily on the outer edges of psychology, and\I suppose it is not accurately known what forces of the mind were involved in medieval witchcraft, in alchemy, in the conception of Mephistopheles. But certainly to the Middle Ages the intelligence in and for itself was felt to be a maleficent force: Mephistopheles himself in the old legends is nothing other than pure intellect, irresponsible and operating independently of life. Necessarily therefore to him faith, love and hope are illusions, and he is the negation of the soul. Above all, it is the secret of creating life for which in the medieval imagination souls were bartered to the devil: one obtained the power of competing [page 63:] with God at the price of a perpetual consciousness of one's own damnation. These are dark ways; but one emerges into the region of knowledge when one affirms that, by their mental twist, witches and alchemists were not convicted by society any more than they were convicted in themselves of having done the unpardonable and the irreparable. And certain it is that Poe experienced in his own imagination this power and this damnation. His haunted face, his driven life, the barren world which he has built and peopled, the horror of his accustomed mood, the inextinguishable obscure remorse that broods in him unite in this fact.

The power he still exerts is an hysterical rather than a literary power, and who can say what it signifies? But one thing seems true, with regard alike to witchcraft, alchemy, and Poe, that the mind can work healthily only when it is essentially in touch with the society of its own age. No matter into what unknown region it presses, it must have a point of relativity in the common reason of its time [page 64:] and place. Poe, having nothing in common with the world that produced him, constructed a little parallel world of his own, withered at the core, a silent comment. It is this that makes him so sterile and so inhuman; and he is himself, conversely, the most menacing indictment of a society which is not also an all-embracing organism.