Text: William P. Trent, “Introduction,” Poems and Tales (1897 and 1898), pp. v-xvi

[page v, unnumbered:]

INTRODUCTION.

THE position occupied by Poe among American authors is in many respects unique. He is generally regarded by foreign critics as, on the whole, the most original and important writer this country has produced; yet it was possible a few years ago for thirty aspirants for literary fame to be named ahead of him in a popular ballot instituted by one of our leading critical weeklies to determine the “Best Ten American Books.” He has long had enthusiastic admirers among his countrymen, but he has had an equal or greater number of detractors. Until a quite recent period the two men who had done most to extend his reputation were a Frenchman and an Englishman respectively. Some of our best critics and historians of literature have been either positively hostile to him or else exceedingly chary of their praises; the facts of his life have been laid bare by us with little sympathy; and there are still many cultured persons to be found among us who would affirm that Lowell treated him with perfect justice when he wrote in the Fable for Critics: —

Which are right, the friendly or the hostile critics? and how shall we account for their discordant judgments? No answers to these questions can be obtained until we have made a brief examination of Poe's life and works.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809, his father being an actor of good Maryland descent, his mother an actress of English extraction. The father died within a year or two and the mother before the end of 1811. Poe, with his elder brother William and his younger sister Rosalie, was left destitute in Richmond, [page vi:] where the little family had been for some months objects of charity. The three children were all adopted by kind persons, Edgar being taken by Mrs. Allan, the wife of a wealthy tobacco merchant. For some years things went well with the boy, who was much petted at home and in the pleasant social circles of the small city. In 1815 the Allans went abroad, and Poe was put to school in England at Stoke Newington. Five years later the family returned, and the boy was again sent to a Richmond school, where he showed considerable linguistic and poetic ability. He gave evidence also of his shy, sensitive nature and of his predisposition to cherish morbid passions; for the first of his “Lenores,” a married lady who had been kind to him, dates from this period. It was no healthy-minded youth who would visit nightly for months the grave of a woman twice his age.

In February, 1826, Poe entered the University of Virginia, which had just been opened under Jefferson's auspices. He remained for nearly a year, obtaining some distinction for his scholarship, but spending a good deal of time either in card-playing and in drinking, or else in taking long solitary tramps into the surrounding country. He alternated between recklessness and moodiness, the former laying him under the burden of heavy gambling debts, the latter confirming him in unsocial, eccentric habits. At the end of the session Mr. Allan refused to pay for his ward's losses at cards, and at once placed him in his own counting-room. The disgrace of his unpaid obligations, the irksomeness of his new employment, and the waywardness of a certain young lady's affections, drove the romantic youth to think of flight. He got to Boston in some way, and there, on May 26, 1827, enlisted in the army as Edgar A. Perry. He served first at Fort Independence, and in the summer transferred his allegiance from Mars to Apollo by publishing under the pseudonym “A Bostonian” a tiny volume entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems. In the autumn he was sent to Fort Moultrie, [page vii:] near Charleston, and a year later to Fortress Monroe, in Virginia. The Allans having heard of his whereabouts, and Mrs. Allan being on the point of death, he was called to Richmond, bat arrived too late to see her. Mr. Allan then provided a substitute for him and secured him an appointment to West Point, where he entered on July 1, 1830, after he had previously published at Baltimore a slightly enlarged volume, this time under his own name, entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems.

For a few months Poe's record as a cadet was fairly good, but in January, 1831, he deliberately neglected all duties for a fortnight, and was therefore court-martialed and dismissed. Mr. Allan had married again and he realized that he had little to expect from that quarter; he was eager to make a start in life, and the restraints of discipline galled his spirit He went immediately to New York and there published, again under his own name, a volume of Poems (1831) which was dedicated to his fellow cadets. The collection consisted of old pieces revised and of a few new poems, among the latter being Israfel and the lovely lyric To Helen.

With his dismissal from West Point Poe's life as a wayward youth ceases and his more saddening career as a wayward man begins. Up to this point he had had escapades, but he was now about to enter upon the world of men in which escapades are not possible, simply because one is not permitted to escape from the consequences of recklessness when one is coping with the grim forces of life. As we look back on it all now, we can see that his chances were desperate. He was brilliant and ambitious, but he was also morbidly sensitive and morally weak. He had doubtless inherited some deplorable qualities, he had certainly developed others through his early experience of the extremes of luxury and hardship. Perhaps no individual had dealt harshly with him, but fate had. The pleasant society of Richmond might have made a well-todo conservative gentleman out of another nature than his; [page viii:] the English scholars in Jefferson's first faculty might have trained up a worthy successor to themselves; even the rough experiences of the barracks might have had a sobering effect — hut alas! not on Poe. Yet are we prepared to judge him as always faulty and not sometimes wofully unfortunate, and are we not at least hound to extend to him throughout his wayward career our heartfelt sympathies?

That career must be very briefly treated here. He settled first in Baltimore, where he tried in vain to get steady work, but where he found firm friends in his father's widowed sister, Mrs. Clemm, and her fragile young daughter, Virginia. His first bit of good fortune dates from October, 1833, when he won a prize of a hundred dollars by his story entitled the MS. found in a Bottle one of a series of such compositions called Tales of the Folio Club. Better still, he secured the friendship of the distinguished lawyer and writer, John P. Kennedy, who helped him to get employment in connection with The Southern Literary Messenger, which Mr. Thomas W. White had just established in Richmond. After contributing to this magazine for a short time Poe was invited to become its assistant editor. It was an excellent chance for him, since White was a good business man and was making a success of his venture, and Poe was unquestionably well qualified for editorial work. It was not long, however, before White discerned his assistant's failing, and on the premature marriage of the latter with his young cousin Virginia, the kind-hearted publisher wrote him a letter which sufficiently disposes of those enthusiasts who would have us believe that Poe was through life the object of unjust censure. “No man is safe,” wrote White, “that drinks before breakfast.” No man — much less a morbid genius who had already known the ups and downs of life and had just made an impracticable marriage.

The end soon came. Poe rendered the magazine famous, especially by his tart criticisms, but by January, 1837, his [page ix:] connection with it was severed. Then he removed to New York, where, a year later, the Harpers published his longest bat little successful story. The Narrative of Arthur Grordon Pym. After this he went to Philadelphia, where he resided for six years, subsisting as a contributor to magazines, a hack writer to booksellers, and a casual editor. He put together a manual of conchology, — not with entire credit to himself; he edited The Gentleman's Magazine and was discharged for negligence caused by drink; he tried to start a periodical of his own; he edited Graham's Magazine and was again forced to resign. All this time he was writing some of his masterpieces, — Ligeia, Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue; he had fairly established his literary reputation, he had won friends who admired both his talents and the quiet dignity of his sober hours, he had two women devoted to his welfare; but he was plainly sinking deeper and deeper into the mire on account of his inability to combat his besetting sin. It is wrong to be too severe upon him, but it is foolish to maintain that he was an ill-used and maligned man.

In the spring of 1844 Poe and his family, of which his mother-in-law Mrs. Clemm was the beneficent, guiding spirit, determined to try New York once more. Poe still believed in his own genius and in his ability to found a magazine that would make his fortune, nor would he have reckoned without his host could he but have controlled his craving for opium and drink. His Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque, issued in 1840, had won wide commendation, most of the leading American writers of the time were his friends, and the public was certainly subscribing eagerly to all sorts of journals. He had wider connections probably than any of his rivals, for he was well known in the South through his relations with the Messenger. What he needed was capital and character, but it was as hard then as it is now to get the former without the latter. He was therefore condemned still to live by his wits, and he was glad to [page x:] form a connection with N. P. Willis, who was then editing the Mirror, in which journal the immortal Raven first appeared on January 29, 1846. He became at once the literary success of the day, his reputation grew steadily abroad, especially in France, new collections of his tales and poems were issued and admired, and last but not least he obtained a definite salary as co-editor of a new weekly, The Broadway Journal. But his habits led to a quarrel with his partner, Briggs, and after trying to run the paper for a while himself he was forced to abandon the enterprise and to postpone his brilliant schemes. Meanwhile he contributed to various magazines, often revamping old work, and lectured, and read his own poems with some success when he did not, as at Boston, try to palm off a youthful effusion upon his audience and then laugh at them in an ungentlemanly way. He began now to make enemies not only by such practices as these, but by indulging in indiscriminate attacks upon his contemporaries. He actually singled out the gentle Longfellow as an audacious plagiarist, — suspicion was a bane of Poe's nature, — and in his articles entitled The Literati he ridiculed many a small writer who now lives only in the pages of his adversary's critical writings. Yet Poe could solace himself for his unpopularity with the men by forming friendships among the numerous poetesses with whom America was then infested. He wrote most gallantly about their verses, and they repaid his attentions, in several cases, with a sort of platonic devotion. But in the midst of his struggles with poverty, his literary quarrels, his mild dalliances with femininity, a great shock came to him. His child-wife, whom he had loved with real tenderness and whom he had been condemned to see pining away in poverty and, we cannot doubt, distress of mind, finally died on January 29, 1847. His heart was deeply smitten, his body was weak from illness, his pride was wounded by the appeals that had been made for public charity; but his will was indomitable, and he wrote away at Eureka, a pathetic failure, and even dreamed once more of establishing his magazine. [page xi:] It is to this period that we owe Ulalume and The Bells, but even the lover of these poems, provided he is also a lover of Poe, the man, might well wish that the poet had followed his young wife speedily to the grave. The fact may as well be admitted that in the short time that elapsed between his wife's death and his own, Poe deteriorated rapidly, not merely with regard to his propensity to drink, but also with regard to his conduct with women, which cannot be described as other than maudlin. He seems to have been making love to at least three, either contemporaneously or in very quick succession, and the history of his engagements, to which some people have attributed pecuniary motives, his relapses into drinking spells, his wild regrets and expostulations, is painful in the extreme. It may be read elsewhere, but we may here set down to his credit the fact that feminine sympathy had been always a necessity to him and that women gave it him on slight provocation. It is time, however, to draw the curtain, and as we do so, we see the poor battered waif of Fortune and of Folly lying in the hospital at Baltimore writhing under the effects of the delirium induced by a long debauch, and passing away from the turmoil of earth amid the peace of an early Sabbath morning (October 7, 1849). What irony! we are tempted to exclaim; but after all it is not the irony of Poe's life that has the deepest lesson for us; it is its pathos, its ineffable sadness. Irony chiefly emerges from a comparison of the conflicting views men have taken of that life. To deny that it was worthy of condemnation on the one hand, and to treat it without sympathy on the other, might certainly serve to make us ironical as to the possibility of one finite man's taking adequate measure of the character and career of another.

Poe's friends have a less difficult task in defending his works than they have in defending his life, but they have still much to do for him in the former regard. The full importance of his position in American literature has never been widely appreciated, for several reasons. The enmities [page xii:] he made and the irregular life he led have blinded many readers and even some critics to his great merits as a literary artist; the predominance of the New England school with its leaven of puritanism, against which he strove continually from both sectional and temperamental reasons, has militated against even a partial acceptance of the artistic principles for which he stood and stands; finally the general remoteness of his themes from common life has naturally limited both the force and the scope of his appeal to a people not remarkable for their cultivation of the imagination. The result has been that Poe lives for many Americans as the bizarre genius who wrote The Raven and three or four other curious poems, together with about half a dozen uncanny tales that one would do well not to read alone at midnight.

The reverse of all this is true of Poe's readers abroad. They have little or nothing to do with his quarrels and his irregularities; they hardly know, except in 7England, what puritanism means; they have inherited more or less cultivated imaginations, and they are always on the watch for whatever will bring them new sensations. It is no wonder, then, that they welcomed Poe's work eagerly, and that they continue to relish it, nor is there much reason to doubt that the view they take of his genius is the one that is destined to prevail in the poet's native land.

For whatever may be said as to the narrowness of Poe's genius, — if a genius can be called narrow that has exerted itself powerfully in the spheres of poetry, romance, and criticism, — it cannot be safely denied that he is the most original of our poets, save Whitman, and the most artistic of them all. He has extracted from a difficult language melodies precisely similar to none, and rarely surpassed. He has obtained a mastery, not yet paralleled, over certain legitimate devices and resources of his art. He has developed a few powerfully moving themes with a psychologic insight and a sureness of artistic touch that cannot be safely faulted. He has set before the capable [page xiii:] imagination visions of beauty that are none the less charming because they have their setting, not on earth, but in ethereal regions where he alone has lived and mored. He has contributed to the poetry of the nations verses that have appealed both to the heart of the populace and to the soul of the artist. Of no other American poet can all this be said, and although the scant body of his poetical work prevents us from regarding him as the full equal of such British masters as Byron and Wordsworth and Tennyson, we should at least be proud that his position as a classic is likely to be as undisputed as theirs.

But Poe was more than a poet; he was also a writer of imaginative prose fiction for which every claim can be made that has been made for his poetry, save only with regard to style. Poe was not a poet of sustained imagination, and just so he was neither a great novelist nor a great romancer. He cannot be coupled with Fielding or Scott any more than he can be with Milton. But at times he was a supreme master of the lyric impulse, and in prose fiction he was likewise master of the situation and the mood. He had no genius for narrating events, and if he had by any means succeeded in creating real characters he would never have been able to set them in motion. Hence it is idle to compare him with Hawthorne and Cooper, but in his own sphere of the weird situation and mood he is unrivaled, and, as with his poetry, he has been fortunate in being able to give the world at large just what it wanted and what it will probably continue to want. It is no disrespect to Cooper and Hawthorne, who have many other claims upon posterity, to hint that the Indian and the early New Englander may hereafter be less interesting than they are to-day; it is almost certain that the mysterious mansion of the Ushers, the death chamber of the Lady Rowena, and the seven gorgeous ballrooms of the Prince Prospero will never lose their sinister fascination. Poe then has been fortunate as well as great, but he has also been wonderfully versatile. Besides his weird prose-poems [page xiv:] he has given us the most intense portrayals of the morbid conscience in literature, and some of the most remarkable descriptions of tragic situations; he has made successful excursions into the vague border-land between the known and the unknown, between science and speculation; he practically invented and has since dominated a whole department of fiction, that of the analytic solution of mystery, better known as the detective story; and finally he has carried to the verge of human capabilities — perhaps, let us confess it, of inanity — that tour de force of the fancy known as the extravaganza. His work in these several spheres has not been uniform, but it has been sometimes very great. American literature would be much the poorer had not Poe written The Black Cat, The Assignation, The Cask of Amontillado, A Descent into the Maelström, The Gold-Bug, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Purloined Letter. It is the quality of his fiction, however, not its range, that has done most to secure its wide acceptance, and that quality, except with regard to style in its technical sense, will be faulted only by those uncatholic critics who object to every theme that does not lie well within the borders of the real and the tangible. So far as technical style is concerned, it must be confessed that Poe does not show great mastery of language except in such weird prose-poems as Usher and Shadow. From this point of view his prose is distinctly inferior to his verse. He was a poet by nature and training, and in his own special sphere was a master of diction, but he was never sufficiently the real man of letters to attain the precision and beauty of a distinguished prose style. For his culture, let us frankly admit it, was superficial, and his critical faculty, in spite of the analytic character and sheer force of his intellect, was strangely limited. He lives as a critic to-day simply because, with his true literary ideals and his intense personality, he was a power for good in provincial America half a century ago. He lashed about and caused much pain both to himself and to [page xv:] others, but he did good, and hence his position is secure in the history of American criticism. As literature, however, his critical work is dead, and in those of his prose writings that are immortal it is the heaven-born genius that we seek, not the trained master of language. But in his poetry the only limitation to his supremacy is the limitation set by Providence upon the range of his inspiration.

Little more need be said, for it is obviously idle to attempt to account for a genius like Poe, and it is perhaps equally idle at present to try to bridge over the chasm that separates his lovers from his detractors. Men will long continue to dispute about his life, and they will not cease to assert or to deny his greatness. It is of the very essence of his life and his genius that they should excite partisanship pro and con. But it is equally true that it is of the essence of sound criticism that, as the years go by, we should be able to judge more and more dispassionately the men and works of the past; and we may at least hope that our grandsons will be more agreed as to Poe's merits and demerits than we are. Meanwhile, it is open to his admirers to set forth, as in the preceding pages, the faith that is in them, and it is the duty of every candid student to see to it not only that the claims made are duly weighed, but also that his own personal idiosyncrasies of taste are previously chastened and controlled. For surely it is better to admire than to disparage, since the wider our literary and artistic receptively becomes, the more certain we shall be of attaining to pleasures that are both pure and lasting.

 

NOTE. The student who desires to continue his work on Poe should try to obtain the complete Works in ten volumes published a few years since by Messrs. Stone and Kimball, under the editorship of Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman and Professor George E. Woodberry. This edition gives the latest text (which is followed in these Selections through the courtesy of the publishers) together with an altogether admirable critical apparatus of introductions and notes. The memoir and the scholarly [page xvi:] notes are due to Professor Woodberry, while Mr. Stedman contributes three essays introductory to the tales, the criticism, and the poems, that are remarkable for their sympathy and critical acumen. The edition, which is the only complete one, is now published by Messrs. Herbert S. Stone & Co. From every point of view it is worthy of Poe, and is a credit to both editors and publishers. In addition the student should consult Professor Woodberry's scholarly and authoritative life of Poe in the American Men of Letters series.

It has seemed well not to attempt to follow Poe's punctuation in the tales included in these Selections, but to adhere to modern usage. His words, however, have been scrupulously retained even where, as on page 63, line 20, they result in faulty grammar.