January 19, 1809—Born at Boston, Massachusetts. December 8, 1811—His mother died at Richmond, Virginia. 1811—[Edgar Poe adopted by Mr. John Allan]. 1816—Brought to Europe, and placed at school in Stoke Newington. 1821—Returns to the United States. 1822—Placed at school in Richmond, Virginia. February 1, 1826—Enters University of Virginia. [Signs matriculation book, 14th February 1826]. December 15, 1826—Leaves University of Virginia. 1827—“Tamerlane and other Poems” printed at Boston. June? 1827—Departs for Europe. March, 1829—Returns to Richmond, Virginia. 1829—Publishes “Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems,” at Baltimore. July 1, 1830—Admitted as cadet to West Point Military Academy. March 6, 1831—Dismissed the Military Academy. March, 1831—Publishes “Poems,” New York. Autumn, 1833—Gains prize from Saturday Visitor (Baltimore). December, 1835—Editor of the Southern Literary Messenger (Richmond, Virginia). May 16, 1836—Married to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, at Richmond. [Virginia C. born August 13th, 1822]. January, 1837—Resigns editorship of Southern Literary Messenger. 1837–8—Resides in New York. July, 1838—“Arthur Gordon Pym” published, New York and London. Autumn, 1838—Removes to Philadelphia. July, 1839—Editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, Philadelphia. 1840—“Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” published, Philadelphia. 1840—“The Conchologist’s First Book” published, Philadelphia. June, 1840—Resigns editorship of Gentleman’s Magazine. January, 1841—Editor of Graham’s Magazine, Philadelphia. April, 1842, Resigns editorship of Graham’s Magazine. Spring, 1843—Gains $100 prize for “The Gold Bug.” Autumn, 1844—Sub-editor of the Evening Mirror, New York. January 29, 1845—“The Raven” published in Evening Mirror. February 28, 1845—Lectures in New York Historical Society’s room. March 8, 1845—Joint-editor of the Broadway Journal. July, 1845—“Tales” published, New York and London. July, 1845—Sole-editor of the Broadway Journal. November 1, 1845—Proprietor of Broadway Journal. November, 1845—“The Raven and Other Poems” published, New York and London. Winter, 1845—Lectures at Boston Lyceum. December, 1845—Broadway Journal disposed of. February, 1846—“The Literati” begun in Godey’s Lady’s Book. June 23, 1846—Evening Mirror publishes libel. June 28, 1846—“Reply” to libel in Philadelphia Saturday Gazette. Summer, 1846—Removes to Fordham. January 30, 1847—His wife dies. February 17, 1847—Gains libel suit against Evening Mirror. February 3, 1848—Lectures in New York Historical Society’s room. Summer, 1848—“Eureka” published, New York. Summer, 1848—Richmond, Virginia, revisited. Summer, 1848—Lectures at Lowell, Mass., and Providence, R. I. October, 1848—Betrothed to Mrs. Whitman. December, 1848—Engagement with Mrs. Whitman broken off. June 30, 1849—Departs for the South. Autumn, 1849—In Richmond and neighbourhood. October 7, 1849—Dies at Baltimore, Maryland. November 17, 1875—Monument Inaugurated, Baltimore.

Personal

  Dear Sir—Poe did right in referring to me. He is very clever with his pen—classical and scholarlike. He wants experience and direction, but I have no doubt he can be made very useful to you. And, poor fellow! he is very poor. I told him to write something for every number of your magazine, and that you might find it to your advantage to give him some permanent employ. He has a volume of very bizarre tales in the hands of ——, in Philadelphia, who for a year past has been promising to publish them. This young fellow is highly imaginative, and a little given to the terrific. He is at work on a tragedy, but I have turned him to drudging upon whatever may make money, and I have no doubt you and he will find your account in each other.

  Edgar A. Poe (you know him by character, no doubt, if not personally), has become one of the strangest of our literati. He and I are old friends,—have known each other since boyhood, and it gives me inexpressible pain to notice the vagaries to which he has lately become subject. Poor fellow! he is not a teetotaller by any means, and I fear he is going headlong to destruction, moral, physical and intellectual.

  He really does not possess one tithe of greatness which he seems to regard as an uncomfortable burden. He mistakes coarse abuse for polished invective, and vulgar insinuation for sly satire. He is not alone thoroughly unprincipled, base, and depraved, but silly, vain, and ignorant,—not alone an assassin in morals, but a quack in literature. His frequent quotations from languages of which he is entirely ignorant, and his consequent blunders, expose him to ridicule; while his cool plagiarisms, from known or forgotten writers, excite the public amazement. He is a complete evidence of his own assertion, that “no spectacle can be more pitiable than that of a man without the commonest school education, busying himself in attempts to instruct mankind on topics of polite literature.”

  My Dear Heart—My Dear Virginia—Our mother will explain to you why I stay away from you this night. I trust the interview I am promised will result in some substantial good for me—for your dear sake and hers—keep up your heart in all hopefulness, and trust yet a little longer. On my last great disappointment I should have lost my courage but for you—my little darling wife. You are my greatest and only stimulus now, to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory, and ungrateful life. I shall be with you to-morrow [illegible] P.M., and be assured until I see you I will keep in loving remembrance your last words, and your fervent prayer! Sleep well, and may God grant you a peaceful summer with your devoted Edgar.

  Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore on Sunday, October 7th. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it…. His conversation was at times almost supra-mortal in its eloquence. His voice was modulated with astonishing skill, and his large and variably expressive eyes looked repose or shot fiery tumult into theirs who listened, while his own face glowed, or was changeless in pallor, as his imagination quickened his blood or drew it back frozen to his heart. His imagery was from the worlds which no mortals can see but with the vision of genius.—Suddenly starting from a proposition, exactly and sharply defined, in terms of utmost simplicity and clearness, he rejected the forms of customary logic, and by a crystalline process of accretion, built up his acular demonstrations in forms of gloomiest and ghastliest grandeur, or in those of the most airy and delicious beauty—so minutely and distinctly, yet so rapidly, that the attention which was yielded to him was chained till it stood among his wonderful creations—till he himself dissolved the spell, and brought his hearers back to common and base existence, by vulgar fancies or exhibitions of the ignoblest passion. He was at all times a dreamer—dwelling in ideal realms—in heaven or hell—peopled with the creatures and the accidents of his brain. He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayer (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned, but) for their happiness who at the moment were objects of his idolatry;—or, with his glances introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms; and all night, with drenched garments and arms beating the winds and rains, would speak as if to spirits that at such times only could be evoked by him from the Aidenn, close by whose portals his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjected him—close by the Aidenn where were those he loved—the Aidenn which he might never see, but in fitful glimpses, as its gates opened to receive the less fiery and more happy natures whose destiny to sin did not involve the doom of death.

  They now appreciate him and will do justice to his beloved memory. They propose to raise a monument to his memory. Some of the papers, indeed, nearly all, do him justice. I enclose this article from a Baltimore paper. But this, my dear Annie, will not restore him. Never, oh, never, will I see those dear lovely eyes. I feel so desolate, so wretched, friendless, and alone…. I have a beautiful letter from General Morris; he did, indeed, love him. He has many friends, but of what little consequence to him now. I have to go out home—to his home to-day, to arrange his papers. Oh, what will I not suffer.

  Residing as he did in the country, we never met Mr. Poe in hours of leisure; but he frequently called on us afterwards at our place of business, and we met him often in the street—invariably the same sad-mannered, winning and refined gentleman, such as we had always known him. It was by rumor only, up to the day of his death, that we knew of any other development of manner or character. We heard, from one who knew him well (what should be stated in all mention of his lamentable irregularities) that, with a single glass of wine, his whole nature was reversed, the demon became uppermost, and, though none of the usual signs of intoxication were visible, his will was palpably insane. Possessing his reasoning faculties in excited activity, at such times, and seeking his acquaintances with his wonted look and memory, he easily seemed personating only another phase of his natural character, and was accused, accordingly, of insulting arrogance and bad-heartedness. In this reversed character, we repeat, it was never our chance to see him. We know it from hearsay, and we mention it in connection with this sad infirmity of physical constitution; which puts it upon very nearly the ground of a temporary and almost irresponsible insanity.

  I can sincerely say, that although I have frequently heard of aberrations on his part from the “straight and narrow path,” I have never seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well-bred, and fastidiously refined. To a sensitive and delicately-nurtured woman, there was a peculiar and irresistible charm in the chivalric, graceful, and almost tender reverence with which he invariably approached all women who won his respect. It was this which first commanded and always retained my regard for him…. It was in his own simple yet poetical home, that to me the character of Edgar Poe appeared in its most beautiful light. Playful, affectionate, witty, alternately docile and wayward as a petted child—for his young, gentle, and idolized wife, and for all who came, he had, even in the midst of his most harassing literary duties, a kind word, a pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous attention. At his desk, beneath the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore, he would sit, hour after hour, patient, assiduous, and uncomplaining, tracing, in an exquisitely clear chirography, and with almost superhuman swiftness, the lightning thoughts—the “rare and radiant” fancies as they flashed through his wonderful and ever-wakeful brain.

  Literature with him was religion; and he, its high-priest, with a whip of scorpions scourged the money-changers from the temple. In all else he had the docility and kind-heartedness of a child. No man was more quickly touched by a kindness—none more prompt to atone for an injury. For three or four years I knew him intimately, and for eighteen months saw him almost daily; much of the time writing or conversing at the same desk; knowing all his hopes, his fears and little annoyances of life, as well as his high-hearted struggle with adverse fate—yet he was always the same polished gentleman—the quiet, unobtrusive, thoughtful scholar—the devoted husband—frugal in his personal expenses—punctual and unwearied in his industry—and the soul of honor in all his transactions.

	When first I looked into thy glorious eyes,
	And saw, with their unearthly beauty pained,
	Heaven deepening within heaven, like the skies
	Of autumn nights without a shadow stained,
	I stood as one whom some strange dream enthralls;
	For, far away, in some lost life divine,
	Some land which every glorious dream recalls,
	A spirit looked on me with eyes like thine.
	E’en now, though death has veiled their starry light,
	And closed their lids in his relentless night—
	As some strange dream, remembered in a dream,
	Again I see, in sleep, their tender beam;
	Unfading hopes their cloudless azure fill,
	Heaven deepening within heaven, serene and still.

  We cannot dismiss this subject without paying our earnest tribute to the womanhood of the poet’s chief friend, his wife’s mother. To Mrs. Clemm will be awarded in the history of genius the rarest of all crowns, the wreath placed by God’s hands—through his noblest creatures—on woman’s beautiful and matron brow. Even in her lifetime she will receive the world’s acknowledgment of her nobility of soul; and the tongues whom envy or shame froze in the life of her gifted but unhappy son-in-law, will thaw, and like the fable of old utter praises to the perished one, condemning their own wretched selves.

  A fine, thoughtful face, with lineaments of delicacy, such as belong only to genius or high blood,—the forehead grand and pale; the eye dark, and gleaming with sensibility and soul; a face to inspire men with interest and curiosity.

  In character he was certainly one of the strangest anomalies in the history of mankind…. He was no more a gentleman than he was a saint. His heart was as rotten as his conduct was infamous. He knew not what the terms honor and honorable meant. He had absolutely no virtue or good quality, unless you call remorse a virtue, and despair a grace. Some have called him mad; but we confess we see no evidence of this in his history. He showed himself, in many instances, a cool, calculating, deliberate blackguard. His intellect was of the clearest, sharpest, and most decisive kind. A large heart has often beat in the bosom of a debauchee; but Poe had not one spark of genuine tenderness, unless it were for his wife, whose heart, nevertheless, and constitution, he broke—hurrying her to a premature grave, that he might write “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven!”… He died, as he had lived, a raving, cursing, self-condemned, conscious cross between the fiend and the genius, believing nothing, hoping nothing, loving nothing, fearing nothing—himself his own god and his own devil—a solitary wretch, who had cut off every bridge that connected him with the earth around and the heavens above. This, however, let us say in his favor—he has died “alone in his iniquity;” he has never, save by his example (so far as we know his work), sought to shake faith or sap morality. His writings may be morbid, but they are pure…. He has gone far away from the misty mid-region of Weir; his dreams of cosmogonies have been tested by the searching light of eternity’s truth; his errors have received the reward that was meet; and we cannot but say, ere we close, peace even to the well-nigh putrid dust of Edgar A. Poe.

  A being full of misery, but all beaten out upon his own anvil; a man gifted as few are, but without faith or devotion, and without any earnest purpose in life…. What a torn record of a life it is! more sorrowful by far than that of our own Otway or Chatterton. Alternately a seraph and a brute,—an inspired poet and a grovelling sensualist,—a prophet and a drunkard,—his biography unfolds a tale of mingled admiration and horror, such as has been told of very few literary men.

  A gushing youth once wrote me to this effect:—“Dear Sir: Among your literary treasures, you have doubtless preserved several autographs of our country’s late lamented poet, Edgar A. Poe. If so, and you can spare one, please enclose it to me, and receive the thanks of yours truly.” I promptly responded, as follows:—“Dear Sir: Among my literary treasures, there happens to be exactly one autograph of our country’s late lamented poet, Edgar A. Poe. It is his note of hand for fifty dollars, with my indorsement across the back. It cost me exactly $50.75 (including protest), and you may have it for half that amount. Yours, respectfully.” That autograph, I regret to say, remains on my hands, and is still for sale at first cost, despite the lapse of time, and the depreciation of our currency.

  One of the younger poets who received substantial assistance from Mr. Halleck was Edgar A. Poe, to whom he loaned, in answer to an appeal, one hundred dollars, a sum which the gifted but unfortunate young singer, like many others of the rhyming fraternity, who received aid from the generous Halleck, was never able to repay.

  Poe I have known for a whole month closeted in his house, all the time hard at work with his pen, poorly paid, and hard driven to keep the wolf from his slightly-fastened door; intruded on only by a few select friends, who always found him, what they knew him to be, a generous host, an affectionate son-in-law and husband,—in short, a respectable gentleman…. In the list of literary men there has been no such spiteful biographer as Rufus Griswold, and never such a victim of posthumous spite as poor Edgar Allan Poe…. A lady angelically beautiful in person, and not less beautiful in spirit. No one who remembers that dark-eyed, dark-haired daughter of Virginia,—her own name—her grace, her facial beauty, her demeanour, so modest as to be remarkable; no one who has ever spent an hour in her company, but will endorse what I have said. I remember how we, the friends of the poet, used to talk of her high qualities, and when we talked of her beauty, I well knew that the rose-tint upon her cheek was too bright, too pure to be of earth. It was consumption’s colour, that sadly beautiful light that beckons to an early tomb.

  Edgar A. Poe I remember seeing on a single occasion. He announced a lecture to be delivered at the Society Library building on Broadway, under the title of the “Universe.” It was a stormy night, and there were not more than sixty persons present in the lecture-room. I have seen no portrait of Poe that does justice to his pale, delicate, intellectual face and magnificent eyes. His lecture was a rhapsody of the most intense brilliancy. He appeared inspired, and his inspiration affected the scant audience almost painfully. He wore his coat tightly buttoned across his slender chest; his eyes seemed to glow like those of his own raven, and he kept us entranced for two hours and a half. The late Mr. Putnam, the publisher, told me that the next day the wayward, luckless poet presented himself to him with the manuscript of the “Universe.” He told Putnam that in it he solved the whole problem of life; that it would immortalize its publisher as well as its author; and, what was of less consequence, that it would bring to him the fortune which he had so long and so vainly been seeking. Mr. Putnam, while an admirer of genius, was also a cool, calculating man of business. As such, he could not see the matter in exactly the same light as the poet did, and the only result of the interview was that he lent Poe a shilling to take him home to Fordham, where he then resided.

  Though Edgar Poe is one of the greatest masters of the gruesome who ever lived, there seems to be no reason in that at all for making any kind of assumption as to his character.

	To
	EDGAR ALLAN POE
	Author of the Raven
	and other Poems,
	and of various works of Fiction,
	Distinguished alike
	for originality in the conception,
	skill in word-painting,
	and power over the mind of the reader,
	THE PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS
	of
	Baltimore,
	admirers of his genius,
	have erected this monument.

  Edgar Poe might have been, at this time, fifteen or sixteen—he being one of the oldest boys in the school, and I one of the youngest. His power and accomplishments captivated me, and something in me or in him made him take a fancy to me. In the simple school athletics of those days, where a gymnasium had not been heard of, he was facile princeps. He was a swift runner, a wonderful leaper, and what was more rare, a boxer, with some slight training…. For swimming he was noted, being in many of his athletic proclivities surprisingly like Byron in his youth. There was no one among the schoolboys who would so dare in the midst of the rapids of the James River…. In our Latin exercises in school, Poe was among the first—not first without dispute…. I remember that Poe was also a very fine French scholar. Yet with all his superiorities, he was not the master-spirit, nor even the favorite of the school…. Poe, as I recall my impressions now, was self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious, and though of generous impulses, not steadily kind or even amiable; and so what he would exact was refused to him…. Of Edgar Poe it was known that his parents were players, and that he was dependent upon the bounty that is bestowed upon an adopted son. All this had the effect of making the boys decline his leadership; and on looking back on it since, I fancy it gave him a fierceness he would otherwise not have had…. Not a little of Poe’s time, in school and out of it, was occupied with writing verses.

  The next number of the Saturday Visitor [1833] contained the “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and announced the author. My office, in those days, was in the building still occupied by the Mechanics’ Bank, and I was seated at my desk on the Monday following the publication of the tale, when a gentleman entered and introduced himself as the writer, saying that he came to thank me, as one of the committee, for the award in his favor. Of this interview, the only one I ever had with Mr. Poe, my recollection is very distinct indeed, and it requires but a small effort of imagination to place him before me now, as plainly almost as I see any one of my audience. He was, if anything, below the middle size, and yet could not be described as a small man. His figure was remarkably good, and he carried himself erect and well, as one who had been trained to it. He was dressed in black, and his frock-coat was buttoned to the throat, where it met the black stock, then almost universally worn. Not a particle of white was visible. Coat, hat, boots and gloves had very evidently seen their best days, but so far as mending and brushing go, everything had been done, apparently, to make them presentable. On most men his clothes would have looked shabby and seedy, but there was something about this man that prevented one from criticising his garments, and the details I have mentioned were only recalled afterwards. The impression made, however, was that the award in Mr. Poe’s favor was not inopportune. Gentleman was written all over him. His manner was easy and quiet, and although he came to return thanks for what he regarded as deserving them, there was nothing obsequious in what he said or did. His features I am unable to describe in detail. His forehead was high and remarkable for the great development at the temple. This was the characteristic of his head, which you noticed at once, and which I have never forgotten. The expression of his face was grave, almost sad, except when he was engaged in conversation, when it became animated and changeable. His voice, I remember, was very pleasing in its tone and well modulated, almost rhythmical, and his words were well chosen and unhesitating.

  I have resided and practised my profession of the law in Brooklyn for about thirty years. Shortly after I moved here, in 1845, Mr. Poe and I became personal friends. His last residence, and where I visited him oftenest, was in a beautifully secluded cottage at Fordham, fourteen miles above New York. It was there that I often saw his dear wife during her last illness, and attended her funeral. It was from there that he and his “dear Muddie” (Mrs. Clemm) often visited me at my house, frequently, and at my urgent solicitation, remaining many days. When he finally departed on his last trip south, the kissing and handshaking were at my front-door. He was hopeful; we were sad: and tears gushed in torrents as he kissed his “dear Muddie” and my wife, “good-bye.” Alas, it proved, as Mrs. Clemm feared, a final adieu…. He was one of the most affectionate, kind-hearted men I ever knew. I never witnessed so much tender affection and devoted love as existed in that family of three persons. His dear Virginia, after her death, was his “lost Lenore.” I have spent weeks in the closest intimacy with Mr. Poe, and I never saw him drink a drop of liquor, wine or beer, in my life; and never saw him under the slightest influence of any stimulants whatever. He was, in truth, a most abstemious and exemplary man. But I learned from Mrs. Clemm that if, on the importunity of a convivial friend, he took a single glass, even of wine, it suddenly flashed through his nervous system and excitable brain; and that he was no longer himself or responsible for his acts.

  Edgar A. Poe was a wonderful man, and he has never had justice done him. Most happy should I be, if in my power, to witness the ceremony of the inauguration of his monument; for after all the abominable calumnies that have been circulated against him, both abroad and at home, he stands higher to-day in the estimation of kindred poets than he ever did while on earth.

  I knocked at the street-door, and was presently shown up to Poe’s rooms, on the second or third floor. He received me very kindly. I told my errand, and he promised that my Ode should be printed next week. I was struck with his poetic manner, and the elegance of his appearance. He was slight and pale, I saw, with large luminous eyes, and was dressed in black. When I quitted the room, I could not but see his wife, who was lying on a bed, apparently asleep. She, too, was dressed in black, and was pale and wasted. “Poor lady,” I thought, “she is dying of consumption.” I was sad on her account, but glad on my own: for had I not seen a real live author, the great Edgar Allan Poe, and was not my Ode to be published at once in his paper?

  Judging from these phenomena, as exhibited in his life and works, he habitually lived in a state bordering upon somnambulism—a disorder that cerebral epilepsy closely resembles. He was a denizen of two worlds and the remark of Dr. Maudsley, that the hereditary madman often gives the idea of a double being, rational and underanged when his consciousness is appealed to, and mastered by his unconscious life when left to his own devices, might have been written after a study of him. He lived and died a riddle to his friends. Those who had never seen him in a paroxysm (among them Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood) could not believe that he was the perverse and vicious person painted in the circulated tales of his erratic doings. To those who had, he was two men—the one an abnormally wicked and profane reprobate, the other a quiet and dignified gentleman. The special, moral, and mental condition incident to cerebral epilepsy explains these apparent contradictions as felicitously as it elucidates the intellectual and psychical traits of his literature. Its mental phenomena supervene after a stage of incubation more or less prolonged, and the fit generally lasts two or three days. Its supervention is evinced by extreme susceptibility and impulsiveness. Tendency to repeat the same phrase over and over witnesses to the perversion of the will. Distressing delusions and hallucinations prompt to eccentric and impulsive acts. The face is livid, and the eyes have the expression of drunkenness. Monomania may supervene, or dipsomania, or erotomania—as when Poe was expelled from the house of Mr. Allan, his friend and benefactor. Finally, the sufferer falls into a prolonged sleep, easily mistaken for that of drunkenness, and wakes up with re-established sanity.

  There is no necessity for us to touch heavily upon this terrible trait in the character of Edgar Poe—this sad, sickening infirmity of his “lonesome latter years:” his error, if such it may be styled—the impulse which blindly impelled him to his destruction—injured no one but himself; but certainly no one before or since has suffered so severely in character as a consequence of such a fault. Other children of genius have erred far worse than Poe ever did, inasmuch as their derelictions have injured others; but with them the world has dealt leniently, accepting their genius as a compensation. But for poor Edgar Poe, who wronged no one but himself, the world, misled greatly, it is true, as to his real character, has hitherto had no mercy. The true story of his life has now been told; henceforth let him be judged justly; henceforth let his errors be forgotten, and to his name be assigned that place which is due to it in the glory-roll of fame.

  The Richard Savage of American literature.

  Why, I, the most innocent of divinity students at the time (1847), while walking with Poe, and feeling thirsty, pressed him to take a glass of wine with me. He declined, but finally compromised by taking a glass of ale with me. Almost instantly a great change came over him. Previously engaged in an indescribably eloquent conversation, he became as if paralyzed, and with compressed lips and fixed, glaring eyes, returned, without uttering a word, to the house which we were visiting. For hours, the strange spell hung over him. He seemed a changed being, as if stricken by some peculiar phase of insanity.

  Poe’s eyes, indeed, were his most striking feature, and it was to these that his face owed its peculiar attraction. I have never seen other eyes at all resembling them. They were large, with long, jet-black lashes,—the iris dark steel-gray, possessing a crystalline clearness and transparency, through which the jet-black pupil was seen to expand and contract with every shade of thought and emotion, I observed that the lids never contracted, as is so usual in most persons, especially when talking; but his gaze was ever full, open, and unshrinking. His usual expression was dreamy and sad. He had a way of sometimes turning a slightly askance look upon some person who was not observing him, and, with a quiet, steady gaze, appear to be mentally taking the caliber of the unsuspecting subject.

	Oh, if his hunted spirit, held at bay
	This side of death, has covert found at last,
	How restful must the change be, and how sweet!
	And if he heeds our censure or our praise,
	As once, how glad he must be now to know—
	If know he does—that in some generous hearts
	The balances are just that measure him,
	And that some lips are pitiful and kind,
	Saying, “He might have been, and but for this,
	And this,—dead weights that circumstance
	Threw in the scale—he would have been, a man,
	A hero, worthy of his poet-soul!”

  Even as we drive out of mind the popular conceptions of his nature, and look only at the portraits of him in the flesh, we needs must pause and contemplate, thoughtfully and with renewed feeling, one of the marked ideal faces that seem—like those of Byron, De Musset, Heine—to fulfill all the traditions of genius, of picturesqueness, of literary and romantic effect.

  All that makes Poe’s career least defensible—his vices, quarrels, desperate straits, attempted suicides, ardent and sometimes simultaneous love-affairs—all these afford great resources for the biographer, who has reason to be grateful for a subject who did not dwell in decencies for ever. It is almost amusing to see how each new memoir of Poe professes to be the first to tell the real story of his life; and how each, while denouncing the obvious malice of Griswold, ends by re-establishing almost all the damaging facts which Griswold left only half-proved. If Poe fared ill at the hands of his enemy, he has fared worse, on the whole, at those of his friends.

  In a dream I once had, I saw a vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm. It was no great full-rigged ship, nor majestic steamer, steering firmly through the gale, but seemed one of those superb little schooner yachts I had often seen lying anchored, rocking so jauntily, in the waters around New York, or up Long Island Sound; now flying uncontrolled with torn sails and broken spars through the wild sleet and winds and waves of the night. On deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems—themselves all lurid dreams.

  I now felt it necessary that I should determine the nature of his disease and make out a correct diagnosis, so as to treat him properly. I did not then know but he might have been drinking, and so to determine the matter, I said, “Mr. Poe, you are extremely weak, pulse very low; I will give you a glass of toddy.” He opened wide his eyes, and fixed them so steadily upon me, and with such anguish in them that I had to look from him to the wall beyond the bed. He then said, “Sir, if I thought its potency would transport me to the Elysian bowers of the undiscovered spirit world, I would not take it.” “I will then administer an opiate, to give you sleep and rest,” I said. Then he rejoined, “Twin sister, spectre to the doomed and crazed mortals of earth and perdition.” I was entirely shorn of my strength. Here was a patient supposed to have been drunk, very drunk, and yet refuses to take liquor. The ordinary response is, “Yes, Doctor, give me a little to strengthen my nerves.” I found there was no tremor of his person, no unsteadiness of his nerves, no fidgeting with his hands, and not the slightest odor of liquor upon his breath or person. I saw that my first impression had been a mistaken one. He was in a sinking condition, yet perfectly conscious. I had his body sponged with warm water, to which spirits were added, sinapisms applied to his stomach and feet, cold applications to his head, and then administered a stimulating cordial…. The appearance of the dead poet had not materially changed; his face was calm and placid; a smile seemed to play around his mouth, and all who gazed upon him remarked how natural he looked; so much so, indeed, that it seemed as though he only slept.

  The most fantastic of Poe’s creations are not the product of the imagination abandoned to the impulses of a dominant mood; the effects are deliberately calculated, as he says they were, step by step and point by point to a prearranged culmination. A man writing on such a system, with the wolf at the door and affections daily on the rack, could hardly have endured the strain if he had had a constitution of iron. It was no wonder that Poe’s health became distempered, or that during the last years of his wife’s illness and the two remaining years through which he survived her, he had recourse to the dangerous help of stimulants. Not only did he subject his imagination to exhausting conditions, but he wasted his force in doing with superfluous thoroughness what a ready journalist would have dismissed with a few easy sentences of commonplace…. Poe failed to make a living by literature, not because he was an irregular profligate in the vulgar sense, but because he did ten times as much work as he was paid to do—a species of profligacy, perhaps, but not quite the same in kind as that with which he was charged by his malignant biographer.

  No doubt many discreditable things were said of him which were not true; but they were growths from the seed which he himself had planted…. At the time of Poe’s death, and for some years afterward, while his moral lapses were fresh in the minds of numberless contemporaries, few who took public notice of him were so rash as to assert his innocence; and in subsequent years memoirs of him were written, that were satisfactory in every particular, by those who either knew him well or had received their impressions from his associates, and who weighed his character with judicial impartiality. These memoirs are dispassionate and charitable, but they tell the truth…. The three headlights to which I have pointed attention—a neglected, dying wife; a seduction deliberately attempted; and a second seduction, with its attendant ruin, as deliberately accomplished—show clearly enough the trend of his character and the range of some of his pursuits. The picture is sufficiently complete. Let the truth prevail. As a writer, Poe’s name stands among the very highest on the glory-roll of American authorship. I heartily agree with Prof. Minto that “there is no English author of the present century whose fame is likely to be more enduring.” But as a man, he has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. And let his failure to display the triumphs of a pure and noble manhood be set forth in fitting terms side by side with the chronicle of his mental greatness. Let it be presented in sharp contrast with the attractive personal record of his exalted cotemporaries—a Longfellow, a Holmes, a Whittier, and a Bryant,—enforcing the cardinal truth on the minds and hearts of ambitious youth, that one of the most sparkling gems in the coronal of a great author’s greatness is the immaculate purity of his daily life.

  Beautiful, gifted, and sensitive, proud, ambitious, and daring, endowed with a subtle charm of manner as well as of person, amiable and generous in his home life, loyal and devoted to his family, a very pleasing picture is presented of the man if we look but on this side. Could he have overcome the fatal fascination of drink, we might never have seen the reverse side of all this. As it is, let us cover his follies with our mantle of charity and dwell only upon his genius and his virtues.

  “My intimacy with Mr. Poe isolated me a good deal. In fact my girl friends were many of them afraid of him, and forsook me on that account. I knew none of his male friends. He despised ignorant people, and didn’t like trifling and small-talk. He didn’t like dark-skinned people. When he loved, he loved desperately. Though tender and very affectionate, he had a quick, passionate temper, and was very jealous. His feelings were intense, and he had but little control of them. He was not well balanced: he had too much brain. He scoffed at everything sacred, and never went to church. If he had had religion to guide him, he would have been a better man. He said often that there was a mystery hanging over him he never could fathom. He believed he was born to suffer, and this embittered his whole life. Mrs. Clemm also spoke vaguely of some family mystery, of some disgrace…. The only thing I had against him,” she continued, “was that he held his head so high. He was proud, and looked down on my uncle, whose business did not suit him. He always liked my father, and talked with him a good deal.”

  It was a positive privilege to hear Poe talk. I have known times when at a dinner party, warmed with wine, and in a genial, glowing mood, he would pour out torrents of learning, and say hundreds of Rochefoucauld-like things apropos of literature and art, which, had they found their way into print, would have delighted cultivated society. It is a pity there was not in his audience a Boswell to take them down. Some of his utterances reminded one of the worldly wise sayings of Tacitus and Seneca…. In personal appearance Poe was a slight, small boned, delicate looking man, with a well developed head, which, at a glance, seemed out of proportion to his slender body. His features were regular, his complexion pale; his nose was Grecian and well molded, his eyes large and luminous, and when excited, peculiarly vivid and penetrating. He dressed with neatness, and there was a suggestion of hauteur in his manner towards strangers. He was impatient of restraint or contradiction, and when his Southern blood was up, as the saying goes, he could be cuttingly rude and bitterly sarcastic.

  Edgar Poe’s life was not all dark and desolate. It was his singular good fortune, from his birth to his death, to win and hold the love and friendship of many sweet and sympathetic women. Carlyle says the “story of genius has its bright side as well as its dark.” The bright side of Poe’s life was, as Washington Irving expresses it, when it “was gladdened by blessed womankind.” The poet possessed many of those personal qualities and intellectual gifts which interest and fascinate the gentle sex: he was handsome, polished, richly imaginative, and a perfect master of all the graceful refinements of language. Perhaps there never lived a poet so truly appreciative of the loveliness of woman as Edgar Poe. He was a worshipper of beauty, believing, with a recent poet, that of all beauty a beautiful woman is the supremest. His was the delicate, ethereal, poetical sentiment of the Greek worship of an ideal beauty, so exquisitely personified by Nausicaa in the Odyssey. Poe’s female friends, with one or two exceptions, were women who were able to sympathize with his lofty intellectual ambition, able to “point to higher worlds,” although, perhaps, not capable of “leading the way” for him to follow. Proud, solitary, and ambitious he found a never-failing congeniality and sympathy in the society of bright and lovely women, some of whom almost realized the creations of his wonderful imagination: Ligeia, Morella, Lenore.

  Poe, to be sure, is fantastic and meretricious throughout. In his work as in his life he was haunted by the vices and the falsity of the stage that bred him; but he was really haunted. As one knows him better, one does not love him more. In another way, though, one grows to care for him, or at least to pity him. For with all his falsity, with all his impudence and sham, the man is a man by himself. There is something freakish, not quite earthly, wholly his own in the fancies and the cadences that grow wild amid his work. If it be something to have added a new note to literature, then we Americans must respect the memory of Poe.

  He spent much of his time with Mrs. Shelton, and finally asked her to marry him, and was, it must be believed from the correspondence, accepted. She was older than he, a plain woman, and wealthy. Poe got the wedding ring, and after his death she wore mourning for him. At the last moment, he still wavered when he thought of “Annie,” who was evidently the nearest to him of all, except Mrs. Clemm,—but that was impossible. He was in doubt whether to have Mrs. Clemm come on to Richmond, or to go himself and bring her. He decided on the latter course, and on Sunday, as is conjectured, September 30, or else on the following day, he left his friends in Richmond, and went on the boat sober and cheerful. After reaching Baltimore, it is said that he took the train to Philadelphia, but was brought back, being in the wrong car, from Havre de Grace in a state of stupor. It is also said that he dined with some old military friends, became intoxicated, and was captured by politicians, who kept him stupefied, and made him vote at several booths on Wednesday, election day. All that is known is that, being then partially intoxicated, he called upon his friend. Dr. Brooks, on an afternoon, and, not finding him, went away; and that on Wednesday, October 3, about noon, he was recognised at a rum shop used as a voting-place,—Ryan’s Fourth Ward Polls,—and on his saying that he was acquainted with Dr. Snodgrass, word was sent to that gentleman, who had him taken to the Washington Hospital. He was admitted at five o’clock, and word was sent to his relatives, who attended to his needs. He remained, except for a brief interval, in delirium; and on Sunday, Oct. 7, 1849, at about five o’clock in the morning, he died. The funeral was taken charge of by his relatives, and took place the next day. Five persons, including the officiating minister, followed his body to the grave.

  In the place of moral feeling he had the artistic conscience.

  Sir:—As you are aware, The New York Shakespeare Society lately secured the passage of an act of the Legislature of the State of New York (now cited as Chapter 537 of the Laws of 1896) appropriating $10,000 to preserve the Edgar Allan Poe cottage, at Fordham, Borough of the Bronx, New York City, by laying out a parcel of land directly opposite the present cite of the cottage, to be called Poe Park: and to remove the cottage thereto, a removal rendered necessary by the widening of the Kingsbridge Road, which takes the original site of the Cottage. It is now proposed to place within Poe Park, and facing the historic Cottage on its new site, a bronze statue of Edgar Allan Poe; and to aid in that design, you are invited to send us your contribution to the expense of such statue, to such extent as the sentiment of the project may appeal to you.

  Near the Boulevard, upon the site of the house No. 206 Eighty-fourth Street and the lot adjoining on the east, stood until a few years ago a large old-fashioned frame dwelling in which Poe wrote that chapter of accumulated horrors, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,”—one of the best examples of fiction which has the semblance of literal fact. Here, too, according to metropolitan belief, he composed the deathless poem which gave him his highest renown. It is noteworthy that while several localities are now claiming the honor of having been Poe’s home when he wrote “The Raven,” Dr. Woods is producing specious reasons for his belief that Poe did not write it at all. The house stood high upon the rocks in the midst of a pleasing rural landscape, and was occupied by the parents of Commissioner Brennan, with whom the poet and his family boarded: his room was a large square apartment on the second floor, whose front windows looked across the lordly Hudson to the heights of the Palisades, and here his desk was so placed that his eyes rested upon that inspiring view whenever he lifted them from his page. This chamber was thereafter called the “Raven room,” and the belief of the Brennans and their neighbors that the great poem was here composed is alleged to have been founded upon the statements of Poe and Mrs. Clemm.

  The winds were bleak on Fordham heights in that winter of 1846–47; visitors speak of that wasting girl-wife wrapped (for warmth) in her husband’s cloak, with a “tortoise-shell cat gathered to her bosom” and the mother “chafing the cold feet.” Again and again she touches the gates of death, and rallies; even so, Leigeia in that horrific story of the weird lady, with the “black abounding tresses,” cheats her lover with ever new, and ever broken promise of life! I don’t think the child-wife lamented the approach of death (January, 1847); nor did the mother; but to the “ghoul-haunted” poet, who had lived in regions peopled by shadows, this vanishing of the best he had known of self-sacrificing love, was desolating. He was never the same again. We have hardly a right to regard what he did after this—whether in way of writing, of love-making, or of business projects—as the work of a wholly responsible creature. It were better perhaps if the story of it all had never been told.

  He had unquestionably an abnormal sensitiveness to drink—a single glass of the mildest liquor would affect him to the point of stupefaction; but he was in no sense an habitual drinker or a dissolute man, as he has been painted by his detractors for fully half a century—since his untimely death at the hands of the political “repeaters” of Baltimore. Alas, poor Poe! Was not your punishment in life, your poverty, your anguish of privation, a sufficiently terrible expiation for your occasional lapses of will, that your memory should be held up to the execration of posterity by those unfit to loose the lachets of your shoes? To-day we honor Willis, who in life fraternized with Poe as a companion and a gentleman, worthy of the friendship of the ideal Chevalier Bayard of his time. We concede the laurel of genius to the lamented Poe, but we stab him in the back while proffering it, and prelude the study of his matchless genius with materialistic and abhorrent pictures of his personal character.

  I personally think that Poe was an unfortunate, more sinned against than sinning, who bore his misfortune with resignation, lacking the strength to “fight it out.” On the other hand, I think he had more the nature of an artist than of a profound thinker; consequently, he probably was careless in many ways, which his enemies made capital of against him. Be that as it may, it seems to me that the mission in transmitting the image of Poe to posterity, is not to emphasize his shortcomings, if he had any, but his great qualities of a genius. However, I think I ought to preserve a certain sadness in his expression which depicts his unfortunate life. This, in a general way, is my idea of Poe, and I should be under great obligations if you would kindly let me know to what extent my views coincide with your wishes.

	His faults were such
	As thousands live and die with, unobserved,
	But, being his faults, because of his mind’s light,
	They loomed like towers upon a sunset hill.
	Broken upon the wheel of his misfortunes,
	Toiling, alone, where life’s dark pathway leads
	Close by the steep and treacherous brink of hell,
	Haunted by specters, vexed by easeless griefs,
	His soul went down to death, in loneliness,
	A death too pitiful for aught save silence,
	Too mournful in its wretchedness for tears.
	But not with death he dwells. Above his dust
	Time’s slow impartial hand has made for him
	A shaft, memorial, builded of the stones
	Which Hate and Envy cast upon his grave.
	He dwells not with the shadows.

Poetry

  His poems are constructed with wonderful ingenuity, and finished with consummate art. They display a somber and weird imagination, and a taste almost faultless in the apprehension of that sort of beauty which was most agreeable to his temper. But they evince little genuine feeling, and less of that spontaneous ecstasy which gives its freedom, smoothness and naturalness to immortal verse…. He was not remarkably original in invention. Indeed some of his plagiarisms are scarcely paralleled for their audacity in all literary history.

  So many faculties were brought into play in the expression of Poe’s poetical compositions, that readers in whom the critical intellect prevails over the imaginative, often acknowledge the refined art, the tact, the subtlety, the faultless method, while the potent magnetism of his genius utterly escapes them. There are persons whom nature has made non-conductors to this sort of electricity…. It is not to be questioned that Poe was a consummate master of language; that he had sounded all the secrets of rhythm; that he understood and availed himself of all its resources,—the balance and poise of syllables, the alternations of emphasis and cadence, of vowel-sounds and consonants, and all the metrical sweetness of “phrase and metaphrase.” Yet this consummate art was in him united with a rare simplicity. He was the most genuine of enthusiasts, as we think we shall presently show. His genius would follow no leadings but those of his own imperial intellect. With all his vast mental resources, he could never write an occasional poem, or adapt himself to the taste of a popular audience. His graver narratives and fantasies are often related with an earnest simplicity, solemnity, and apparent fidelity, attributable not so much to a deliberate artistic purpose, as to that power of vivid and intense conception that made his dreams realities, and his life a dream.

  Once as yet, and once only, has there sounded out of it all [America] one pure note of original song—worth singing, and echoed from the singing of no other man; a note of song neither wide nor deep, but utterly true, rich, clear, and native to the singer; the short exquisite music, subtle and simple and sombre and sweet, of Edgar Poe. All the rest that is not of mockingbirds is of corncrakes, varied but at best for an instant by some scant-winded twitter of linnet or of wren.

  Of Edgar Poe’s poems,—except “The Raven,” which will always owe a certain popularity to the skill with which rhyme and metre reflect the dreary hopelessness and shudderiness, if I may coin a word, of the mood depicted—it is impossible to speak very highly. His imagination was not high enough for the sphere of poetry, and when he entered it he grew mystical and not a little bombastic.

  Very different from the poems of Shelley and Keats, and yet burning with the same poetic ardor, and inspired with an imaginative genius scarcely, if at all, inferior, are the poetical productions of our American Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe.

  Imagination working on intellectual materials was the one quality which lifted Poe. Experience, a richly-stored memory, a balanced judgment of life, feeling, except in one direction, human sympathy—these play but a very small part in his work. His imagination was powerful for situation and coloring, and the ear had the keenest possible sense of music. But in his attempt to make situations clear and coloring vivid and music pleasing, he everywhere overreaches himself. The strain for musical words made him forget that in verse “more is meant than meets the ear.” His repetitions, though often exquisitely timed, create at last a sense of mechanism, and, to the ear only ordinarily nice, suggest the workshop. Again, his straining after lurid accessories, at first indicating a morbid condition, ends with betraying a jaded sensibility. Still, with his deep-lying faults, half-a-dozen poems of Poe’s earlier life—and the whole life was a short one—stand out so far above the verse of most of his contemporaries, that we do not hesitate to place him among the most striking of American geniuses—a genius narrow, and, as Mr. Stoddard shows, only meagerly productive, but intense, piercing, original—mad.

  He affects different natures differently, and, unlike many poets, he affects all who are capable of being touched by poetry. To the multitude who enjoy the cheerful optimism of Longfellow and poets of his class, he is gloomy and hateful; to those who are predisposed to melancholy, he is the melodious laureate of dead hopes; to those with whom poetry is an art, and not a feeling, he is at once attractive and repulsive; a gifted creature with a morbid personality, clinging to the weakness which is its wretchedness, and the madness which is its death.

  “Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,” so you wrote; “the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive), is precisely what we should aim at in poetry.” You aimed at that mark, and struck it again and again, notably in “Helen, thy beauty is to me,” in “The Haunted Palace,” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “The City in the Sea.” But by some Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world, the poet of one poem—“The Raven:” a piece in which the music is highly artificial, and the “exaltation” (what there is of it) by no means particularly “vague.”

  It is not difficult to understand that there were many sides on which Poe was likely to be long distasteful to Boston, Cambridge, and Concord. The intellectual weight of the man, though unduly minimised in New England, was inconsiderable by the side of that of Emerson. But in poetry, as one has to be always insisting, the battle is not to the strong; and apart from all faults, weaknesses, and shortcomings of Poe, we feel more and more clearly, or we ought to feel, the perennial charm of his verses. The posy of his still fresh and fragrant poems is larger than that of any other deceased American writer, although Emerson may have one or two single blossoms to show which are more brilliant than any of his. If the range of the Baltimore poet had been wider, if Poe had not harped so persistently on his one theme of remorseful passion for the irrecoverable dead, if he had employed his extraordinary, his unparalleled gifts of melodious invention, with equal skill, in illustrating a variety of human themes, he must have been with the greatest poets…. From Tennyson to Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse-music does not show traces of Poe’s influence. To impress the stamp of one’s personality on a succeeding generation of artists, to be an almost (although not wholly) flawless technical artist one’s self, to charm within a narrow circle to a degree that shows no sign, after forty years, of lessening, is this to prove a claim to rank with the Great Poets? No, perhaps not quite; but at all events it is surely to have deserved great honour from the country of one’s birthright.

	No singer of old story
	Luting accustomed lays,
	No harper for new glory,
	No mendicant for praise,
	He struck high chords and splendid,
	Wherein were fiercely blended
	Tones that unfinished ended
	With his unfinished days.

  Poe’s keen sensitiveness to criticism either of himself or of his writings is a noteworthy trait. The melody of his best poems is haunting, but tended ever to degenerate into mere mechanical jingle. His tone is spirituous, never spiritual. Alone among our poets, Poe links us to European literature by his musical despair—so similar to that of Leopardi, Pushkin, Heine, Lenau, Petöfi, and De Musset (all descendants of Byron).

  Poe, like Swinburne, was a verbal poet merely; empty of thought, empty of sympathy, empty of love for any real thing: a graceful and nimble skater up and down over the deeps and shallows of life,—deep or shallow, it was all the same to him. Not one real thing did he make more dear to us by his matchless rhyme; not one throb of the universal heart, not one flash of the universal mind, did he seize and put in endearing form for his fellow men…. I am not complaining that Poe was not didactic: didacticism is death to poetry. I am complaining that he was not human and manly, and that he did not touch life in any helpful and liberating way. His poems do not lay hold of real things. I do not find the world a more enjoyable or beautiful place because he lived in it. I find myself turning to his poems, not for mental or spiritual food, as I do to Wordsworth or Emerson or Whitman, or for chivalrous human sentiments as in Tennyson, but to catch a glimpse of the weird, the fantastic, and, as it were, of the night-side or dream-side of things…. I would not undervalue Poe. He was a unique genius. But I would account for his failure to deeply impress his own countrymen, outside the professional literary guild. His fund of love and sympathy was small. He was not broadly related to his fellows, as were Longfellow and Whittier and Whitman. His literary equipment was remarkable; his human equipment was not remarkable: hence his failure to reach the general fame of the New England poets.

  To appreciate Poe, the imagination requires either distance of time or independence of attitude. It may, however, be observed that the interest attaching to his poetry is strictly of the personal and private kind. Yet if apart from “The Raven,” Poe was the least of the greater American poets, except as to form, in which he was careful exceedingly, who would affirm that in his originality as well as in clearness and execution he was inferior to any particular poet who wrote later?

  Along with “The Raven,” other poems by Poe—“Ulalume,” “For Annie,” “The Haunted Palace,” and many another—were a deep well of delight to Rossetti in all these years. He once wrote a parody of “Ulalume.” I do not rightly remember it, nor has it left a vestige behind.

  And yet in the eyes of foreigners he is the most gifted of all authors of America; he is the one to whom the critics of Europe would most readily accord the full title of genius. At the end of this nineteenth century Poe is the sole man of letters born in the United States whose writings are read eagerly in Great Britain and in France, in Germany, in Italy, and in Spain, where Franklin is now but a name, and where the fame of James Fenimore Cooper, once as widely spread, is now slowly fading away…. That his scheme of poetry was highly artificial, that the themes of his poems were vague and insubstantial, and that his stanzas do not stimulate thought—these things may be admitted without disadvantage. What the reader does find in Poe’s poetry is the succession of departed but imperishable beauty, and the lingering grace and fascination of haunting melancholy. His verses throb with an inexpressible magic and glow with intangible fantasy. His poems have no other purpose; they convey no moral; they echo no call to duty; they celebrate beauty only—beauty immaterial and evanescent; they are their own excuse for being.

  The charm of poetry can be created for us by but few men; but Poe in a few moments was one of those few. His poems, indeed, have been very variously judged; and their merit is of a virtuoso type which needs special defense from those who keenly feel it. Few verse-writers, we must at once admit, have been more barren than Poe of any serious “message;” more unequal to any “criticism of life;” narrower in range of thought, experience, emotion. Few verse-writers whom we can count as poets have left so little verse, and of that little so large a proportion which is indefensibly bad. On some dozen short pieces alone can Poe’s warmest admirers rest his poetic repute. And how terribly open to criticism some of even those pieces are! To analyze “Ulalume,” for instance, would be like breaking a death’s-head moth on the wheel. But nevertheless, a dozen solid British poets of the Southey type would to my mind be well bartered for those few lines of Poe’s which after the sternest sifting must needs remain.

  Poe seems to have taken the hint for his characteristic manner, or, at least, borrowed many of his best effects, from Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers, in whose “snatches of sweet unsustained song,” Poe confessed to finding “an indefinite charm of sentiment and melody.” The themes of death and despair, the sad and resonant refrains, as “nevermore,” mellifluous names suggestive of some unearthly grace, as “Israfel” and “Isadore”—this last becoming with Poe “Lenore,” subtly interwoven rhythms, sonorous rhymes that beat and beat again upon the ear, the repetitions and parallelisms born of excited feeling, are lyrical devices all to be found in Chivers before they appeared in Poe, but the hand that feebly tuned the strings yielded place to a hand that swept them with the master-touch.

  There seems to be no end of interest in Poe legends and Poeana. Poe is the one American poet—Whitman, perhaps, being a second—whose work has produced a cult; and, at the same time, exercises a fascination which is contagious and indescribable. Some might possibly call it hypnotic. He uses what Emerson calls “polarized words;” and, while they haunt the mind, and even the very soul of the reader, they virtually create an atmosphere as distinct as that—though not like that—in one of Corot’s landscapes. Poe contributed little to human thought. He had no ethical message whatever to deliver. He could not have written Wordsworth’s “Ode on the Intimations of Human Immortality”—which is as pious, though not burdensomely so, as it is poetic. What his poetry is, is not what Matthew Arnold defined poetry to be—“a criticism of life.” It is more like a series of musical diversions—fluent, sensuous, weird, sorrowful, and sepulchral, even subterranean almost in passages. But what differentiates it most specifically is, that it is sensuous. It moves no one to do anything; it, on the contrary, makes you feel something. In reading it you mourn for a vanished Aiden or a lost Lenore. It is a curious fame that rests so much upon so little—at least, upon so small a body of work. For, if you take “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells” from Poe’s poems—if you do not consider these at all—what would his poetic fame have been? Could it have been very great?

The Bells

  If I were called upon to express my opinon of Poe as a poetic artist, I should say that “The Bells” was the most perfect example of his “power of words,” if not, indeed, the most perfect example of that kind of power in all poetic literature. I should also say that “Alexander’s Feast,” which our ancestors thought so incomparable, was not to be named in the same day with it.

  The “Bells” is perhaps the rarest instance in the language of the suggestiveness of rhyme and the power of onomatopoetic words.

  Poe’s doctrine of “rhythm and rhyme” finds its amplest verification in “The Bells.” Reason and not “ecstatic intuition,” led him to conclude that English versification is exceedingly simple, that “one tenth of it, possibly, may be called ethereal; nine-tenths, however, appertain to the mathematics; and the whole is included within the limits of the commonest common-sense.” It must be believed that Poe appropriated, with the finest artistic discernment, the vitalizing power of rhythm and rime, and nowhere with more skill than in “The Bells.” It is the climax of his art on its technical side.

Ulalume

  Muffled in an unusual number of thicknesses of elaborate rigmarole in rhyme, this is the pith of a ballad, which borrows interest from its position as the last exponent of the perpetual despair that enshrouded Poe’s manhood, and the last visit of his tortured soul to the tomb of his lost beautiful, typified by the dead Ulalume. The geist of the ballad—that which transfuses it with meaning, and redeems it from the criticism so often passed upon it, that it is mere words—lies solely in the fact of its interpenetration with a kind psychological significance. Thus sang he, then died.

  All things considered, the most singular poem that he ever produced, if not, indeed, the most singular poem that anybody ever produced, in commemoration of a dead woman, which I take to have been Poe’s object, or one of his objects, when he sat down to write it. The mood of mind in which it was conceived was no doubt an imaginative one, but it was not, I think, on the hither side of the boundary between sense and madness. I can perceive no touch of grief in it, no intellectual sincerity, but a diseased determination to create the strange, the remote, and the terrible, and to exhaust ingenuity in order to do so. No healthy mind was ever impressed by “Ulalume,” and no musical sense was ever gratified with its measure, which is little beyond a jingle, and with its repetitions, which add to its length without increasing its general effect, and which show more conclusively than any thing in the language, the absurdity of the refrain when it is allowed to run riot, as it does here.

  It is so strange, so unlike anything that preceded it, so vague and yet so full of meaning, that of itself it might establish a new method. To me it seems an improvisation, such as a violinist might play upon the instrument which had become his one thing of worth after the death of a companion had left him alone with his own soul.

  The ballad of “Ulalume” was written in 1847. The poet, still distraught by the death of his idolized child-wife, shattered in health, and impoverished in fortune, was nearing the borderland of insanity. Though not yet out of his thirties, he lived among the ghosts and shadows of a wasted life, in a world peopled with the horrors of a Dantean Inferno.

	“There sighs, complaints, and ululations loud
	Resounded through the air without a star.”

It was under such circumstances that the poet composed his “Ulalume,” pronounced by a competent critic, “the extreme limit of Poe’s original genius.” The poem will not stand criticism. Many of its lines and rhymes are indefensible. Yet, in spite of its faults, it is an exquisite lyric. It comes like a wail of suffering, wrenched from a tortured, baffled soul, whose very anguish finds expression only in a melodious rhythm. The vagueness of its fantasies is forgotten in the effect of its irresistible music. In spite of the bitter arraignment by Mr. R. H. Stoddard, all classes of minds, healthy and otherwise, have been impressed by the little poem, and if, as that critic asserts, “no musical sense was ever gratified with its measure,” it is difficult to explain away its subtle charm.

The Raven

  We regard it as the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country.

  Your friend, Mr. Poe, is a speaker of strong words “in both kinds.” But I hope you will assure him from me that I am grateful for his reviews, and in no complaining humor at all. As to the “Raven” tell me what you shall say about it. There is certainly a power—but it does not appear to me the natural expression of a sane intellect in whatever mood; and I think that this should be specified in the title of the poem. There is a fantasticalness about the “sir or madam,” and things of the sort, which is ludicrous, unless there is a specified insanity to justify the straws. Probably he—the author—intended to be read in the poem, and he ought to have intended it. The rhythm acts excellently upon the imagination, and the “never more” has a solemn chime with it.

  It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem…. The reader begins now to regard the Raven as emblematical—but it is not until the very last line of the very last stanza that the intention of making him emblematical of Mournful and Neverending Remembrancers permitted distinctly to be seen.

  What a dismal, tragic, remorseful transcript it is!… Perhaps the very finest and most original single poem of its kind that America has yet produced. It indicates a most wayward and subtle genius. It takes you captive by its gloomy, weird power.

  “The Raven” is indeed the most original production of American poetry, a strange and original form of the idea that the dark side of nature enters into the existence of man.

  It would be impossible for the most fastidious workman to alter his poem with advantage.

	Then, to the poet’s brain there came
	Nought but fierce visions, breathing flame;
	Spectres of gibbering horror pale,
	All creatures of the house of bale
	His fate remorseless urged him o’er
	Oceans that stretched without a shore,
	Whose swart waves whispered “Nevermore!”…
	Henceforth, with pinions seldom furled,
	His sombre “Raven” roams the world:
	All stricken peoples pause to hear
	The echo of his burden drear;
	For ah! the deathless type is he
	Of pangs we may not shun, nor flee,—
	And grief’s stern immortality.

  The “Raven” room is little altered since the time Poe occupied it. It has a modern mantlepiece, painted black and most elaborately carved. Poe’s name may be found in fine letters cut upon one side of it. His writing-table stood by one of the front windows, and, while seated before it, he could look down upon the rolling waters of the Hudson and over at the Palisades beyond. It was a fitting dwelling for a poet, and though not far from the city’s busy hum, the atmosphere of solitude and remoteness was as actual, as if the spot had been in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. The explanations of the composition of “The Raven” given by Poe, even to his most intimate friends, were very conflicting, except that all these agree in stating that the analysis given in the “Philosophy of Composition,” was pure fiction,—one of the poet’s mischievous caprices to catch the critics, which proved successful beyond his expectation. Mrs. Weiss states that, not only Poe assured her that his published account of the alleged method of the composition of “The Raven” was not genuine, but that he also said that he had never intended it should be seriously received as such.

  His reputation rests upon three or four short poems, chiefly remarkable for their melody, and half a dozen tales, distinguished by their weirdness of colouring, their analytic power, and their subtle skill of construction. The best known of his poems is also the most elaborate—“The Raven,” and of this it may fairly be said that, in spite of its want of adequate motive, it is unique in conception as in execution, and it occupies a place of its own in our English literature.

  “The Philosophy of Composition,” his analysis of “The Raven,” is a technical dissection of its method and structure. Neither his avowal of cold-blooded artifice, nor his subsequent avowal to friends that an exposure of this artifice was only another of his intellectual hoaxes, need be wholly credited. If he had designed the complete work in advance, he scarcely would have made so harsh a prelude of rattle-pan rhymes to the delicious melody of the second stanza,—not even upon his theory of the fantastic. Of course an artist, having perfected a work, sees, like the first Artist, that it is good, and sees why it is good. A subsequent analysis, coupled with a disavowal of any sacred fire, readily enough may be made. My belief is that the first conception and rough draft of this poem came as inspiration always comes; that its author then saw how it might be perfected, giving it the final touches described in his chapter on Composition, and that the latter, therefore, is neither wholly false nor wholly true.

  In the “Evening Mirror,” January 29, 1845, “The Raven” was published, with a highly commendatory card from Willis; and a few days later “The American Whig Review” for February, from the advance sheets of which this poem had been copied, was the centre of literary interest and the prey of editorial scissors throughout the length and breadth of the country. In the magazine the author was masked under the pseudonym “Quarles,” but in this journal he had been named as E. A. Poe. The popular response was instantaneous and decisive. No great poem ever established itself so immediately, so widely, and so imperishably in men’s minds. “The Raven” became, in some sort, a national bird, and the author the most notorious American of the hour.

  Seems to go on in people’s minds with a constant crescendo of admiration from one year and generation to another.

  I remember well with what gusto and unction the poet-editor of that old Whig Review read over to me (who had been a younger college friend of his), in his ramshackle Nassau Street office, that poem of the “Raven”—before yet it had gone into type; and as he closed with oratorical effect the last refrain, declared with an emphasis that shook the whole mass of his flaxen locks—“that is amazing—amazing!” It surely proved so; and how little did that clever and ambitious editor (who died only two years later) think that one of his largest titles to remembrance would lie in his purchase and issue of that best known poem of Edgar Poe!

  My brother Dante Gabriel and myself must have been among the earliest readers of Poe’s Raven when that classical bird reached the English shore, and how many and many times did we not re-peruse it, and (more especially my brother) recite it!

Tales

  You are mistaken in supposing that you are not “favorably known to me.” On the contrary, all that I have read from your pen has inspired me with a high idea of your power; and I think you are destined to stand among the first romance-writers of the country, if such be your aim.

  In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united: a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed.

  I have always found some one remarkable thing in your stories to haunt me long after reading them. The teeth in “Berenice;” the changing eyes of Morella; that red and glaring crack in the “House of Usher;” the pores of the deck in the “MS. Found in a Bottle;” the visible drops falling into the goblet in “Ligeia,” etc., etc.,—there is always something of this sort to stick by the mind—by mine at least.

  In his “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,” evinces a genius in which a love of the marvelous and an intensity of conception are united with the wildest sympathies, as if the endowments of Mrs. Radcliffe and Coleridge were partially united in one mind.

  It is through his tales that Mr. Poe is best known, and in them is displayed the real bent of his genius. Their chief characteristic is a grim horror,—sometimes tangible, but usually shadowy and dim. He revelled in faintly sketching scenes of ghastly gloom, in imagining the most impossible plots, and in making them seem real by minute detail. His wild and weird conceptions have great power; but they affect the fears only, rarely the heart; while sometimes his morbid creations are repulsive and shocking; yet, in the path which he has chosen, he is unrivalled.

  With all the materials at hand, which thirty years of careful observation have supplied, no man living, not subject to the malady it paints, could write a “Fall of the House of Usher;” and if critics are to suppose that Poe elaborated his story without facts upon which to proceed, then they must accept the miracle that, by a simple process of analytic ratiocination, he anticipated all the discoveries and observations of the last quarter of a century. If, on the other hand, he was subject to the malady, the story explains itself and furnishes the clue to the fantastic invention incident to all his tales of monomania, through every one of which, thinly draped and enveloped in impenetrable gloom, stalks his own personality—a madman muttering to himself of his own morbid imaginings.

  Poe’s place in purely imaginative prose-writing is as unquestionable as Hawthorne’s.

  Poe’s most remarkable achievement in the region of the supernatural is “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which occupies the same gloomy eminence in prose fiction that Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” occupies in romantic poetry. It is of imagination all compact, an imagination which reveals the secrets of the heart, the dark places of the soul.

  Although it may be doubted whether the fiery and tumultuous rush of a volcano, which might be taken to typify Poe, is as powerful or impressive in the end as the calm and inevitable progression of a glacier, to which, for the purposes of this comparison only, we may liken Hawthorne, yet the weight and influence of Poe’s work are indisputable. One might hazard the assertion that in all Latin countries he is the best known of American authors. Certainly no American writer has been so widely accepted in France. Nothing better of its kind has ever been done than the “Pit and the Pendulum,” or than the “Fall of the House of Usher” (which has been compared aptly with Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” for its power of suggesting intellectual desolation). Nothing better of its kind has ever been done than the “Gold Bug,” or than the “Purloined Letter,” or than the “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The “Murders in the Rue Morgue” is indeed a story of the most marvellous skill: It was the first of its kind, and to this day it remains a model, not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable. It was the first of detective stories; and it has had thousands of imitations and no rival. The originality, the ingenuity, the verisimilitude of this tale and of its fellows are beyond all praise. Poe had a faculty which one may call imaginative ratiocination to a degree beyond all other writers of fiction.

  Closely akin to this dryness of treatment is a certain insincerity of tone or flourish of manner, that often interferes with our enjoyment of Poe. We become suddenly aware of the gleaming eye and complacent smile of the concealed manipulator in the writing-automaton. The author is too plainly lying in wait for us; or he is too ostentatiously exhibiting his cleverness and resource, his command of the tricks of the game. One of the worst things that can be said of Poe from this point of view is that he contains the promise and potency of Mr. Robert Hichens, and of other cheap English decadents. Poe himself is never quite a mere acrobat; but he suggests the possible coming of the acrobat, the clever tumbler with the ingenious grimace and the palm itching for coppers.

  The tales may be said to constitute a distinct addition to the world’s literature. From time immemorial there have been tales in prose and in verse, tales legendary, romantic, and humorous, but never any quite like Poe’s. How difficult it is to find any derivation for them may be seen from the fact that the writers most commonly mentioned as having given some direction to Poe’s genius are Defoe and Bulwer! Godwin and the German Hoffmann would be nearer the mark, yet very distant still. “Bizarre” and “terrific” are the words which Kennedy in his helplessness applied to the tales; and the words represent fairly the first impression which they will always make, for the two qualities of strangeness and power are to be found in nearly all. A few are grotesque only, but they are among the weakest and are seldom read. Perhaps we may venture to divide the important ones, according to their dominant motives, into analytical tales, allegorical or moral tales, and tales of the supernatural.

  In the “Tales of Ratiocination” Poe laid the foundation for the modern school of “detective stories.” In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” “The Gold Bug,” and “The Purloined Letter,” Poe solved mysteries by the detective’s process of analysis. As a result of his success, he received many actual cryptographs to decipher, and still further revealed his powers by publishing in Graham’s Magazine a careful solution of the intricate plot of Dickens’s “Barnaby Rudge,” when only the introductory chapters had appeared. Monsieur Dupin, who appears in several of these stories, is the original of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, while the detective stories of Anna Katherine Green and other moderns have Poe’s method without his genius…. Poe’s detective stories differ from modern imitations not in ingenuity of solution of complex plot, but in artistic selection and handling of material. “The Purloined Letter” is as far from the ordinary “detective story” as Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” from the “blood-and-thunder pirate story.”

Criticisms

  The harshness of his criticisms I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.

  Had he been really in earnest, with what a solid brilliancy his writings might have shone forth to the world. With the moral proportioned to the intellectual faculty he would have been in the first rank of critics. In that large part of the critic’s perceptions, he has been unsurpassed by any writer in America; but lacking sincerity, his forced and contradictory critical opinions are of little value as authorities, though much may be gathered from them by any one willing to study the peculiar mood in which they were written.

  As a critic, Poe spent himself upon questions of detail, and, in all cases, belittled his subject. He did not exercise the most engaging faculties of his mind. He is brilliant, caustic, stinging, personal without geniality, expressing an irritated mind. Reading his criticisms, we think his literary being might be said to resemble a bush that blossoms into a few perfect flowers, but always has its thorns in thickest profusion. Poe was what may be called a technical critic. He delighted to involve his reader in the mechanism of poetry, and convict his victim of ignorance, while he used his knowledge as a means to be exquisitely insolent. He was like an art critic stuffed with the jargon of studies, talking an unknown language; careless about the elements of the subject which, properly, are the chief and only concern of the public. That Poe was acute, that he was exact, that he was original, no one can question; but he was not stimulating, and comprehensive, and generous, like the more sympathetic critics, as, for example, Diderot or Carlyle.

  There was but little literary criticism in the United States at the time Hawthorne’s earlier works were published; but among the reviewers Edgar Poe perhaps held the scales the highest. He, at any rate, rattled them loudest, and pretended, more than any one else, to conduct the weighing-process on scientific principles. Very remarkable was this process of Edgar Poe’s, and very extraordinary were his principles; but he had the advantage of being a man of genius, and his intelligence was frequently great. His collection of critical sketches of the American writers flourishing in what M. Taine would call his milieu and moment, is very curious and interesting reading, and it has one quality which ought to keep it from ever being completely forgotten. It is probably the most complete and exquisite specimen of provincialism ever prepared for the edification of men. Poe’s judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry.

  A keen critic.

  The poor man certainly raked and scraped the field of “American literature” with sufficient assiduity. If the result was not very valuable, certainly it was not alone the critic’s mistake. What he said of his illustrious company of incipient celebrities and moribund mediocrities was sometimes bitter, unjust, limited in range, brightened or darkened by personal prejudices, and therefore almost as unread to-day as the books he described. But much in his method and achievement deserves grateful praise. Poe cleared the heated and unwholesome atmosphere which overhung our literature; he exposed many pretentious humbugs, who attitudinized as “men of letters,” or “Poetesses;” and, if we except his pseudo-critical praise of the verse of his sympathizing women-friends and his angry screams over his men-enemies the general average of his criticism was both intelligent and wholesome. He showed American authors and scribblers that there existed among them a critic who, though not without favor, could at least write without fear…. Poe seems to later critics more often right than wrong; and sometimes his analyses and prophecies were surprisingly accurate. With a mind not unjustly priding itself upon ratiocinative power, this could hardly be otherwise.

  In fact, his reputation as a critic would now suffer rather for the mercy he showed than for the vengeance he took. With what hesitancy he suggests that Mrs. Sigourney might profitably forget Mrs. Hemans; with what consideration he hints a fault in Mrs. Ellet, or just notices a blemish in Miss Gould; with what respect he treats Mellen and Gallagher! And if he asserts that Drake had an analogical rather than a creative mind, and insinuates that Halleck’s laurel was touched with an artificial green,—these were the names that a lesser man would have let pass unchallenged. The whole mass of this criticism—but a small portion of which deals with imaginative work—is particularly characterized by a minuteness of treatment which springs from a keen, artistic sensibility, and by that constant regard to the originality of the writer which is so frequently an element in the jealousy of genius. One wearies in reading it now; but one gains thereby the better impression of Poe’s patience and of the alertness and compass of his mental curiosity.

  Acute rather than comprehensive, he professed to be a critic, but, apart from the mechanism of authorship, which he called the philosophy of composition, his verdicts were of no value.

  That most exquisite critic Edgar Poe.

  I read with no less zest than his poems the bitter, and cruel, and narrow-minded criticisms which mainly filled one of the volumes. As usual, I accepted them implicitly, and it was not till long afterward that I understood how worthless they were.

  His discriminations with respect to writers of importance have for the most part been confirmed. Sometimes they were affected by gratitude, as in the cases of Kennedy and Willis, the peculiar status of the latter affording Poe a chance to express his conviction that the mere man of letters could not then hold his own in America, but needed the aid of some factitious social position. But he might as well have said this of Bulwer and Disraeli in England. He was not far out in his estimates of Cooper and Bryant; he saw that Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Lowell were to be among the foremost builders of our imaginative literature, and his rally to the defence of young Bayard Taylor was quick and fine. He ranked Lowell high among our poets, on the score of his imagination, but found his ear for rhythm imperfect. Whittier seemed to him distinctly unimaginative, and as a Southerner and artist he was opposed to the poet-reformer’s themes; but he recognized his vivida vis, his expressional fervor. Poe was among the first to do homage, in an outburst of genuine delight, to the rising genius of Tennyson.

  His criticism was almost entirely free from that narrow localism which values a writer because he belongs to a section, and not because his work belongs to literature. He brought into the field of criticism large knowledge of the best that had been done in literature, and clear perception of the principles of the art of writing. His touch on his contemporaries who won the easy successes which are always within reach in untrained communities was often caustic, as it had need to be; but the instinct which made him the enemy of inferior work gave him also the power of recognizing the work of the artist, even when it came from unknown hands. He discerned the reality of imagination in Hawthorne and Tennyson as clearly as he saw the vulgarity and crudity of much of the popular writing of his time. By critical intention, therefore, as well as by virtue of the possession of genius, which is never provincial, Poe emancipated himself, and went far to emancipate American literature, from the narrow spirit, the partial judgment, and the inferior standards of a people not yet familiar with the best that has been thought and said in the world. To the claims of local pride he opposed the sovereign claims of art; against the practice of the half-inspired and the wholly untrained he set the practice of the masters. When the intellectual history of the country is written he will appear as one of its foremost liberators.

General

  There is poetry in the man, though, now and then, seen between the great gaps of bathos…. “Politian” will make you laugh—as the “Raven” made me laugh, though with something in it which accounts for the hold it took upon such as Mr. N. P. Willis and his peers—it was sent to me from four different quarters besides the author himself, before its publication in this form, and when it had only a newspaper life. Some of the other lyrics have power of a less questionable sort. For the author, I do not know him at all—never heard from him nor wrote to him—and in my opinion, there is more faculty shown in the account of that horrible mesmeric experience (mad or not mad) than in his poems. Now do read it from the beginning to the end. That going out of the hectic, struck me very much … and the writhing away of the upper lip. Most horrible! Then I believe so much of mesmerism, as to give room for the full acting of the story on me … without absolutely giving full credence to it, understand.

	There comes Poe, with his “Raven,” like “Barnaby Rudge,”
	Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,
	Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
	In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
	Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
	But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind.

  That the author of the “Raven,” &c., was a poet no doubt can exist. Extravagant as our opinion may now appear, we venture to say that in a few years, when the memory of his failings shall have died away, he will be considered one of America’s best poets. He was the first who arrested our attention, and conveyed to our mind the fact that a man of great peculiarity was speaking. We use peculiarity out of a sort of insecurity and hesitation we do not often feel, otherwise we have a full and strong inclination to write originality. Had we been in England we should unhesitatingly have done so; but as Mr. Poe is only an American, we forbear to move a second time the indignation of the Press by claiming for a native of this great republic a common share of God’s great gift of intellect. The day will, however, come when all the objections of a foreign Press will not prevent justice being done to the native genius of the land of Washington.

  Just look at the dreadful, the unquenchable, the infernal life of Poe’s “Lyrics and Tales.” No one can read these without shuddering, without pity, and sorrow, and condemnation of the author, without a half-muttered murmur of inquiry at his Maker—“Why this awful anomaly in thy works?” And yet no one can avoid reading them, and reading them again, and hanging over their lurid and lightning-blasted pages, and thinking that this wondrous being wanted only two things to have made him the master of American minds—virtue and happiness.

  That exquisite piece of mystery and music, “The Raven;”… “Annabel Lee,”… one of the sweetest lyrics in the language. His prose tales are full of wild and absorbing interest.

  Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens. What is exquisitely fanciful and airy in the genuine artist is replaced in his rival by an attempt to overpower us by dabblings in the charnel-house and prurient appeals to our fears of the horribly revolting. After reading some of Poe’s stories one feels a kind of shock to one’s modesty. We require some kind of spiritual ablution to cleanse our minds of his disgusting images.

  Your desire to honor Poe’s genius is in the heart of every man of letters, though perhaps no American author stands so little in need of a monument to perpetuate his memory as the author of the “Raven.” His imperishable fame is in all lands.

	Through many a night of want and woe
	His frenzied spirit wandered wild—
	Till kind disaster laid him low,
	And Heaven reclaimed its wayward child.
	Through many a year his fame has grown,—
	Like midnight, vast, like starlight sweet,—
	Till now his genius fills a throne,
	And nations marvel at his feet.

  The hearts of all who reverence the inspiration of genius, who can look tenderly upon the infirmities too often attending it, who can feel for its misfortunes, will sympathize with you as you gather around the resting place of all that was mortal of Edgar Allan Poe, and raise the stone inscribed with one of the few names which will outlive the graven record meant to perpetuate its remembrance.

  The extraordinary genius of Edgar Poe is now acknowledged the world over.

  One whose original genius has done so much to adorn and distinguish American literature.

  My firm conviction that widely as the fame of Poe has already spread, and deeply as it is already rooted, in Europe, it is even now growing wider and striking deeper as time advances; the surest presage that time, the eternal enemy of small and shallow reputations, will prove in this case also the constant and trusty friend and keeper of a true poet’s full-grown fame.

  No cunning barrister preparing an important brief; no great actor studying a new part; no machinist brooding over the invention of an engine, or a change subversive of the old machinery; no analytic chemist seeking to establish the fact of a murder by the discovery and proof of blood or poison in some unexpected substance; no Dutch painter working for months on the minute finish of all sorts of details in the background as well as foreground of his picture,—ever took more pains than did Edgar Allan Poe in the production of most of his principal works. The more impossible his story, the more perseveringly, learnedly, patiently, and plausibly he labored to prove the facts as he saw them. And, unless you throw the book down, he always succeeds. If you read on steadily, you must go with him.

  A literary Erinaceus…. Professing himself the special apostle of the beautiful in art, he nevertheless forces upon us continually the most loathsome hideousness and the most debasing and unbeautiful horror. This passionate, unhelmed, errant search for beauty was in fact not so much a normal and intelligent desire, as an attempt to escape from interior discord; and it was the discord which found expression, accordingly, instead of the sense of beauty,—except (as has been said) in fragments. Whatever the cause his brain had a rift of ruin in it, from the start, and though his delicate touch often stole a new grace from classic antiquity, it was the frangibility, the quick decay, the fall of all lovely and noble things, that excited and engaged him…. Always beauty and grace are with him most poetic in their overthrow, and it is the shadow of ruined grandeur that he receives, instead of the still living light so fair upon them, or the green growth clinging around them.

	He loved all shadowy spots, all seasons drear;
	All ways of darkness lured his ghastly whim;
	Strange fellowships he held with goblins grim,
	At whose demoniac eyes he felt no fear.
	On midnights through dense branches he would peer,
	To watch the pale ghoul feed, by tombstones dim;
	The appalling forms of phantoms walked with him,
	And murder breathed its red guilt in his ear!
	By desolate paths of dream, where fancy’s owl
	Sent long lugubrious hoots through sombre air,
	Amid thought’s gloomiest caves he went to prowl
	And met delirium in her awful lair,
	And mingled with cold shapes that writhe or scowl—
	Serpents of horror, black bats of despair!

  There is not an unchaste suggestion in the whole course of his writings,—a remarkable fact, in view of his acquaintances with the various schools of French literature. His works are almost too spiritual.

  One of the most morbid men of genius the modern world has seen; in the regions of the strangely terrible, remotely fantastic, and ghastly, he reigns supreme. With his lyrics we have not here to do. His best prose is no less distinctive and admirable for richness, force, clearness, and the correct choice of phrase, only definable as the literary touch. He, in this field, distances all his competitors, except Balzac, in the mental dissecting-room his only master. But, while the Frenchman deals with anomalous realities, the power of the American consists in making unrealities appear natural. Many of his works, like Hawthorne’s, are either pages torn, as it were, from the second or third volumes of a complete romance, or suggestions of what might have been developed into one. This fragmentary manner has its disadvantages; but the writer of real imagination, who confines it within limited bounds, never allows the interest of his readers to flag. Edgar Poe is consequently, save in his acrid criticisms and mistaken attempts at humour, never dull.

  I know several striking poems by American poets, but I think that Edgar Poe is (taking his poetry and prose together) the most original American genius.

	A certain tyrant, to disgrace
	The more a rebel’s resting-place,
	Compelled the people every one
	To hurl, in passing there, a stone,
	Which done, behold, the pile became
	A monument to keep the name.
	And thus it is with Edgar Poe;
	Each passing critic has his throw,
	Nor sees, defeating his intent,
	How lofty grows the monument.

  Farewell, Farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered to the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among canaille, a poet among poetasters, dowered with a scholar’s taste without a scholar’s training, embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his consolations.

  Edgar Allan Poe was fastidious—even morbidly fastidious—in his love of beautiful form; but he had no root of humanity in him, and little passion for actual external nature. He was not an interpreter. He had no mission, save to create dreams. A greater dreamer in prose than in verse, he has yet added to American literature a few poems of the most striking originality; but of deep spirituality he has none. His loftiest flights of imagination in verse, like his boldest efforts in prose fiction, rise into no more empyreal realm than the fantastic. His sense of beauty in language was usually fine. Like Gautier, he loved to work “in” onyx and enamel.

  Oblivious of what I may have said, but fully conscious of what I mean to say, Poe was a curious compound of the charlatan and the courtly gentleman; a mixture of Count Cagliostro, of Paracelsus, who was wisely named Bombastes, and of Cornelius Agrippa,—the three beings intermoulded from the dust of Apollonius of Tyana and Elymas the Sorcerer. His first master in verse was Byron, in prose Charles Brockden Brown, and later Hawthorne. Most men are egoists; he was egotistical. His early poems are exquisite, his later ones are simply melodious madness. The parent of “Annabel Lee” was Mother Goose, who in this instance did not drop a golden egg. Always a plagiarist, he was always original. Like Molière, whom he derided, he took his own wherever he found it. Without dramatic instinct, he persuaded himself (but no one else) that he was a dramatist. The proof of this assertion is his drama of “Politian,” which was never ended, and which should never have been begun.

  A meteoric genius, a wandering star, a man cursed and ruined by his own follies, and without significance as regards his times.

  Turning aside from his own special field of literature, Baudelaire talked and wrote to make the name of Edgar Poe famous; and he was successful, for, as a Frenchman has himself certified, “It was through the labour and genius of Baudelaire that Edgar Poe’s tales have become so well known in France, and are now regarded as classical models.” Further, it should be noticed that Edgar Poe is the only American writer who has become popular in that land where the literature of the nineteenth century has reached a perfection which after-ages will certainly record and admire. But we ask ourselves, Is this result due to the exquisite style Baudelaire employed in his translation? and would his magic pen have endowed any foreign author, however unworthy, with fame? Did the strange influence lie in the rich fancy of the American author or in the richer setting given to it by the Frenchman? Baudelaire must evidently have known English well; but did he, whilst reading it, simultaneously clothe the English words in his own French dress, or did English style and New World fancy win his admiration? These questions are difficult to answer. Baudelaire’s explanation does not altogether clear up the difficulty. “Believe me or not, as you like,” he says, “but I discovered in Edgar Poe’s works, poems and stories which had been lying dormant in my own brain, vague, confused, ill-assorted, whilst he had known how to combine, to transcribe, and to bring them to perfection.” Here was, according to the French poet, the secret of his success. He had discovered his affinity; he had but to collect his own floating ideas, finding no difficulty in the setting, for all was clear to him. The two authors were of one mind, and the result was this gift of classic work to France, created with alien thought.

  Hawthorne and Poe stand at the head of American literature in the line of creative ability. The chosen field of both was romance. Hawthorne, as said, had a large sense of humor, in which Poe was somewhat deficient. Hawthorne, though a recluse by nature, had finer touches of human sympathy. Poe had more of that imagination which bodies forth shapes unknown from airy nothingness and clothes them with rarest beauty. In structure of work, in painting with the rich colors of the South, Poe has never been excelled. When we would classify him, we may mention Coleridge and others as similar at a few points, but the author of “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” stands alone. His works are unique and original.

  It is the first and perhaps the most obvious distinction of Edgar Allan Poe that his creative work baffles all attempts to relate it historically to antecedent conditions; that it detached itself almost completely from the time and place in which it made its appearance, and sprang suddenly and mysteriously from a soil which had never borne its like before. There was nothing in the America of the third decade of the century which seemed to predict “The City in the Sea,” “Israfel,” and the lines, “To Helen.”… Poe stood alone among his contemporaries by reason of the fact that, while his imagination was fertilized by the movement of the time, his work was not, in theme or sympathy, representative of the forces behind it. The group of gifted men, with whom he had for most part only casual connections, reflected the age behind them or the time in which they lived; Poe shared with them the creative impulse without sharing the specific interests and devotions of the period. He was primarily and distinctively the artist of his time; the man who cared for his art, not for what he could say through it, but for what it had to say through him…. Poe alone, among men of his eminence, could not have been foreseen. This fact suggests his limitations, but it also brings into clear view the unique individuality of his genius and the originality of his work. His contemporaries are explicable; Poe is inexplicable. He remains the most sharply-defined personality in our literary history. His verse and his imaginative prose stand out in bold relief against a background which neither suggests nor interprets them. One may go further, and affirm that both his verse and his prose have a place by themselves in the literature of the world.

  Few, I fancy, will be present at that festival who can recall, as I do, the effect of the first publication of the poem which flamed like a meteor across our literary heavens and made the name of Poe immediately famous. When a boy in the backwoods of Western New York, I saw “The Raven” in one of the hundred of country papers in which it was almost simultaneously copied, and recognized at once that a new genius had arisen to divide the homage I paid to Byron, my prime favorite in those early days. Anything connected with the name of Poe interested me intensely from that time; and though I never met him, I felt a shock of personal bereavement when his tragic death occurred, in 1849. Then, it was thought by some, a meteor of a night-time had burned itself out in space. But the genius of Poe was no meteor; it was a star of peculiar brilliancy, from which the mists of doubt and misunderstanding have parted more and more, and which still shows no signs of fading, amidst the brightest luminaries of our sky.

  When a boy of seventeen, in Harvard College, I read Poe’s “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.” It was just after the publication of the book and before it had attracted general attention; but I felt it at once to be the most remarkable production of the imaginative genius of this nation, save the works of Hawthorne alone; nor have I ever varied from that opinion. Later I heard Poe read his “Ligeia,” before an audience in Boston, in a voice whose singular music I have never heard equalled. These two early impressions sustained my admiration and gratitude for Poe through all his stormy and sad career.

  A half century has passed since the death of our poet and romancer, and no man has appeared who is worthy to stand beside him in his chosen field of literature. His maligners make his sky dark, but the stars of his intellect—and they are many—shine all the brighter.

  In tales and poems alike he is most characteristic when dealing with mysteries; and though to a certain point these mysteries, often horrible, are genuinely mysterious, they reveal no trace of spiritual insight. They indicate a sense that human perception is inexorably limited, but no vital perception of the eternities which lie beyond it. Excellent in their way, one cannot but feel their way to be melodramatic. The very word, “melodramatic” recalls to us the strolling stage from which Poe almost accidentally sprung in that Boston lodging-house ninety years ago. From beginning to end his temper had the inextricable combination of meretriciousness and sincerity which makes the temperament of typical actors. Theirs is a strange trade, wherein he does best who best shams. At its noblest the stage rises into tragedy or breadthens into comedy; but in our century it has probably appealed most generally to the public when it has assumed its less poetical and more characteristic form of melodrama. Poe, at least temperamentally, seems to have been a melodramatic creature of genius.