Text: Thomas Ollive Mabbott, “Introduction,” Selected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Macmillan, 1928, pp. xi-xv

[page xi:]

“NEGLECTED, I shall be doubly ambitious, and the world shall hear of the son whom you have thought unworthy of your notice.” With these words Edgar Allan Poe told his disapproving foster-father of his determination to make a name for himself in the world of letters. And in them the reader today finds a prophecy of his life and of his poetic career. His forty years of eager living knew both their ambitious and their unworthy hours; and the poetry which the world admires is not without its limita- tions. Poe was himself conscious of his poetic gifts, even before they had fully manifested themselves; and he would have said his limitations were those of what he called the poetic art. In his tales and poems he had achieved his ambition and he left them to the world along with the memory of his broken life.

The faults of the man and the mistakes of his life have been discussed and explained or condemned over and over again. They do not necessarily affect in any way our de- light in his poems or our estimate of their worth. Poe's object was to obtain release from the sorrows of life through his song, and he did not regard his personal misfortunes as something that he must take with him into the realms of the imagination. The poetry has long out- lived the errors of his mortality.

Nevertheless the reactions of readers to Poe's poetry are often dependent on their knowledge and opinion of the man himself. Some persons have always found him a most appealing figure. He was unfortunate and they like to weep over him; and they try to sentimentalize him, in some cases to deny his faults as the calumnies of [page xii:] his enemies. Others have a thorough dislike for the man, which they extend to his verse. Every vivid personality annoys some persons. And self-conscious genius is not easy to get along with when accompanied by a desire to rebuke pretentious claimants to like powers, and by a gift for saying bitingly true things. If you dislike Poe because you are a cheerful soul, and, like Emerson, can see nothing in “The Raven” — are not interested in the dark side of the imagination, or inexperienced in romantic discontent — you are out of sympathy with Poe's art, and may as well lay this book down, since, after all, every man to his taste. If you dislike him because after a thorough consideration you find him not the kind of man you can sympathize with; again, do not bother with this book. But if you are out of sympathy because you think that he wrote while drunk, or beat his wife, or was cruel to his cat, or is too much slobbered over by certain writers who have printed their views about him, then give him a chance to appear through his poems, as he really was, with a little of Time and Space (under the forms of America and the years 1827-1849) rubbed away by the more lasting qualities of his Art.

During a good many years I have read almost every- thing which seemed significant about Poe, (and much that was not), and I have examined a great many documents and books, trying to preserve an attitude of tolerance, of open-minded desire for the truth. And if I feel a genuine respect and friendly feeling for the man, it is not because I am unaware of his faults. In the first place he did not write while he was drunk. But he was often drunk, when not writing. And in the second place, even though he wrote a story about a man who was cruel to his cat, and murdered his wife — he himself was the affectionate husband of an invalid but kindly cared-for wife, and the [page xiii:] master of a healthy animal named Catterina, for years after the publication of “The Black Cat” for which the two may have served as models in some slight degree.

One point the modern reader should remember about Poe. He came at the end of the Romantic School of Poets, and at the beginning of the Victorian School; he was in a sense a follower of Byron, but he was the leader of Rossetti. And he belongs to no school which we recognize as such today, but rather to what we call a period of transition. Yet there were many writers whose aims were not so different from his; and those who know the minor poets who went before him, Kirke White and Edward C. Pinkney, the minor poets of his own day, Letitia E. Landon, George Darley, Maria Del Occidente — or Thomas Hood's serious verse will see Poe not as an amazing phenomenon, unexpected, strange, and out of his time, but rather as a member of a group whose other members he vastly ex- celled in power, so that his light was not extinguished when theirs was swallowed up in the glare of Tennyson and Browning which astonished the second third of the nineteenth century.

Poe's early work parallels closely that of the followers of Byron, his later work has analogies to Hood. But both the followers of Byron, and the minor contemporaries of Tennyson sought to perfect a most difficult style — the sublime, or unornamented style, until an admiration for Shakespeare led them to archaism, when they found the sublime too rarefied an atmosphere to support their feeble wings. Poe, on the other hand, had great power, and a very much restrained admiration for the Bard of Avon. He did not attempt to produce dilutions of Shakespeare because he could produce poems in which matter and melody alone captivated, and extraneous decoration was kept at a minimum. [page xiv:]

True, he suffered occasionally from apparent obscurity — but unlike some of his followers, he had, I think, always a full conception of what he meant to say. And if certain critics have gone about boasting of the meaninglessness of Poe's poems, they show rather their own than the poet's inability to comprehend. In most cases I feel that further study would lead these critics, even the gentleman who styled To Helen “a pretty trifle,” to comprehension.

However, I am not sure that Poe regarded this apparent obscurity as a blemish. Therefore, while sympathizing deeply with those who desire the fullest annotation to the poems-so deeply that I am at work upon a complete annotated edition of all Poe's Writings — yet in this volume, I have sought rather to give the poems as Poe himself left them, or nearly so, adding only an occasional note on some point conceivably of real interest to the modern reader. A textual note at the end, and the notes in the table of contents record my sources, and the liberties I have taken with them — meanwhile, if the modern reader prefers to skip both, he may be assured that everything in the text is Poe's save what is enclosed in brackets, that the “Selection” includes every poem upon which Poe placed a stamp of approval when he issued his own selection “The Raven and Other Poems” in 1845 — and at least one version of every poem he ever published over his own name. I have grouped the poems, however, in my own fashion, giving first, in roughly chronological arrangement the greater poems of the poet's matured genius. In the second group are given youthful poems, rejected poems or widely varying earlier versions of poems, a jeu d’esprit or two and such album verses as seem most valuable. The omissions consist of early versions which are interesting only to the scholar — scraps of verse attributed to Poe since his death with varying degrees [page xv:] of probability (the exclusion of such pieces does not argue for or against my acceptance of their authenticity, which I plan to discuss at another time) and the imperfect play “Politian.”

Everything has been included of Poe's upon which his poetic reputation may really be said to rest. Of that reputation many critics have spoken of their comments only two or three have been selected as important enough to add to the few notes which accompany the poems. But ere we leave the critics, it may be pointed out that the acceptance of Poe has been very widespread, and that the worst charge against his work — that it is mere sound and fury, signifying nothing — seems amply refuted by the success of the poems in many tongues and among many peoples. Byron, Poe, and Whitman — a strange group — all perhaps more loved abroad than at home, have, I think, the greatest influence of poets of the modern English language on the readers of other lands today.

Some of us as we read the two earlier of these poets, are like the Duc de l’Omelette in Poe's story, who “could not help imagining that the glorious, the voluptuous, the never-dying melodies which pervaded that hall, as they passed filtered, and transmuted through the alchemy of the enchanted window-panes, were the wailings and the howlings of the hopeless and the damned.” Yet this transforming of the terrible into the beautiful, this turning of “infernal agonies” as Sir Philip Sidney says, “into a beauty divine,” if it be not, as Poe sometimes thought, the chief function of the poet, is certainly one of his functions. And if the beauty be indeed divine — who shall ask from what soil the lily spring, if it is indeed “the plant and flower of light?”

THOMAS OLLIVE MABBOTT