Poe the Poet; H. W. Mabie, Poe's Place in American Literature (Vol. II, Virginia Edition of the Works); Brander Matthews, Introduction to the Study of American Literature, Chap. XII; P. E. More, Shelburne Essays, First Series; M. J. Moses, Literature of the South; H. T. Peck, Studies in Several Literatures; C. F. Richardson, American Literature, Vol. III, Chap. IV; E. C. Stedman, Poets of America, and Introduction in Vol. X of the Stedman-Woodberry Edition, and the Introduction to Poe in Southern Writers; Barrett Wendell, Stelligeri and Other Essays; G. E. Woodberry, America in Literature, Chap. IV. Bibliographies are appended to the principle editions; see, especially, Vol. X of the Stedman-Woodberry edition. For one whose lasting work is so slight in quantity, Poe labored in an astonishing number of fields. He is the first short-story writer of genius, the first American critic, and the first native poet to propound a unique and influential theory of verse. In the field of short-story writing, though he borrowed from E. T. A. Hoffman 1 and DeQuincey, and though Voltaire wrote detective stories before him, Poe's work is unique and creative. In the detective story, all workers owe something to Poe, so that he is the captain of a motley band containing Wilkie Collins, Emile Gaboriau, Victorien Sardou, "Sherlock Holmes," "Lupin," R. L. Stevenson, the "Father Brown" of G. K. Chesterton, and the "thrillers" of Anna Katherine Green. As the founder of the scientific hoax, and the scientific short-story, Poe inevitably suggests Jules Verne and the earlier romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. In another department-that of the fantastic and horrible it is sometimes said that Poe has no followers; but one has only to recall the mystery stories of Fitz James O'Brien, and the masterpieces of horror by Ambrose Bierce in America; the "Suicide Club" and the "Thrawn Janet" of Stevenson; Kipling's "The Return of Imray" or "The Man Who Would Be King," A. T. Quiller-Couch, and Hardy (notably "The Withered Arm") in England; Baudelaire, Daudet, and Zola in France, and the belated German school, to see how widespread Poe's influence has been. The present writer cannot but help thinking, too, that Jack London, Conrad, and Kipling (notably in "A Matter of Fact") owe something of the power of their sea-scrapes to Poe's marine_studies in "A Manuscript Found in a Bottle" and "Arthur Gordon Pym." Finally, Poe enunciated, in the "Philosophy of Composition," the technique adopted by such masters as Maupassant and Kipling—indeed, by everyone who succeeds with the short-story at all. To his own time, Poe was best known as the ruthless critic whose orbit no one could predict. Though many of his stories and poems were widely read, the conditions of periodical literature were such as to bring little lasting fame to writers; material was passed from magazine to magazine much after the fashion of the newspaper "filler" to-day, and, in the passage, much of it became perforce anonymous and evanescent. Poe's criticism, however, was too smashing to be clipped by the average magazine editors, and the proprietor of a journal to which Poe became temporarily attached, therefore, counted on a sure increase in his own circulation as 1 See Gustav Gruener's article in "Publications of the Mod. Lang. Assoc.," xix, p. 1, ff. soon as Poe's articles appeared. He was relentless and peculiar, he backed every damaging accusation by careful citation from his victim, and if he praised, he praised according to a definite theory which might be wrong but which could not be misunderstood. It is doubted that the general public gained much from his articles; they were craftsman's arguments addressed, not to the man who read, but to the man who wrote, and when the writer went down to a deserved oblivion, he dragged his critic with him. Yet it cannot be wrong, even from a priori reasoning, to suppose that fifteen years of such criticism had its effect in raising the standards of authorship and art. Poe is a deathless refutation of the statement that a poet cannot theorize on verse and still write poetry. He worked out his own idea of the purposes of poetry, and he consistently wrote his poems according to his own theories. Despite the easy jibe that "The Raven" could not possibly be produced by the mechanics of the "Philosophy of Composition," the fact remains that all of his poems are built on one principle, and that Poe probably knew what he was talking about. He was sometimes dishonest in matters of fact, but he was usually honest in matters of art. A poem may have, in Poe's opinion, no other purpose than to give pleasure; its object is not truth, but "the rhythmical creation of beauty." Didactic poetry has no place in Poe's theory: Longfellow, he said, was all wrong in his idea of the ends of art. Furthermore, the pleasure aroused by a poem should be emotional and indefinite, the "value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement," but, as "all excitements are, through a psychal [sic] necessity, transient," the "degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length." "Paradise Lost" is, then, merely a succession of short poems connected by platitudes.1 This excitement is "of the soul, quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the heart, or of that truth which is the satisfaction of the reason." Beauty is the sole end of art. But "beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears." Hence, the best "tone" for a poem is sadness, to be produced, in method, by a refrain, since a refrain in lyric verse "depends for its impression upon the force of monotone both in sound and thought," and in theme, by "the most melancholy of topics most poetical," the death of a beautiful woman. Moreover, "the lips best suited for such [a] topic are those of a bereaved lover." 2 Thus clearly and concisely is the matter put. It has been carelessly assumed that Poe would reduce the world's poetry to that part of it which deals with the death of beautiful women, but this is surely running an argument into the ground. Poe states merely that that poem which will soonest arouse the elevating excitement of soul which is the end of poetry, will deal with this theme; he does not deny the possibility of beauty to a hundred other themes-indeed, he specifically praises poems as diverse as Shelley's "Serenade," Willis's "The Shadows Lay Along Broadway," Pinkney's "Health," and the "Fair Ines" of Hood. 1 On the other hand, says Poe, "it is clear that a poem may be improperly brief," since a very short poem "never produces a profound or enduring effect.” He cites the songs of Beranger as an instance. See "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle" in the "Works." Nor does he deny the possibility of an ethical intent in poetry; his own poems are themselves allegorical (Poe was no Parnassian), and those who call him unmoral, in the sense that Lamb spoke of the Restoration dramatists as unmoral, have read him carelessly. What Poe denies is the possibility that a bare and naked didacticism or metaphysical reasoning in verse can be poetry.` Poe's theory is plausible, direct, and logical. Like the doctrines of Calvin, once the first step is admitted, everything must follow as a matter of course. It provides respectable shelter for the many who are bored by epics or by "Prometheus Unbound," and "The Ring and the Book." It expresses, furthermore, a repugnance which every cultivated reader feels to verse that is obviously didactic; one remembers "The Psalm of Life," and "Conductor Bradley," Kirke White, and the Cary sisters. But if Poe's theory has a certain plausibility when confronted by the "Columbiad" and most of Whittier to keep in the American field-when called upon to account for poems as diverse as "Snowbound" or "Ichabod," it falls clattering to the ground. "Snowbound"-since it is obviously logical to measure the worth of other poems by Poe's own compositions-has_no strangeness in beauty, it is not melancholy, it is much longer than "The Raven," and it does not produce that excitement of the soul that comes from reading "Ulalume." As for that flawless piece, "Ichabod," it derives its whole force from a fierce moral energy-from truth and passion, and not from beauty (to keep Poe's distinction), and the emotions in which it traffics are not melancholy, but pity and indignation. Poe's basic error lies in his identification of means and effect; in his confusion of the effect of the contemplation of beauty with the actual substance of things beautiful, and the identity of poetry with a mood. Beauty may or may not be subjective, wholly or in part; but the high excitement which Poe speaks of may spring from a dozen sources other than a poem, or even a piece of literature. Moreover-and this concerns long poems-Poe makes no allowance for the effect of structure-for the pleasure that lies in architectonics, in the symmetry, for instance, of the "Eneid." Finally, his distribution of beauty to the soul, passion to the heart, and truth to the reason—especially in view of Poe's use of "beauty"-will not stand examination. Critics of Poe will not admit what he admitted of himself, that his was a supremely logical mind, and choose rather to regard the ratiocinative stories as a puzzling anomaly against the grotesques and arabesques of his tales, and the phantasmagoria of his poetry. Rather, the paradox follows almost of necessity from the facts. The analytic mind does not reason or construct in the large sense in which we speak of Aristotle or Bacon as thinkers; it finds its occupation in the process, the chain, the machinery of thought. Preeminently, it is analytic, and deductive; it proceeds by the method of trial and error; it proceeds, in other words, by a destructive method. In its moments of play it finds pleasure in the fantastic, the grotesque, and the bizarre. Thus, among mathematicians, we find the author of "Alice in Wonderland," a grotesque that has all the power of a dream, containing such maddeningly singable verses as the "White Rabbit's Testimony"; and in our own day nonsense is notably purveyed by Stephen Leacock, author of a political economy and of "Behind the Beyond.' Furthermore, the analytic mind will be fascinated by the mysterious, the question that cannot be analyzed, the fact without form from which nothing can be drawn. Finally, such a mind is fascinated, as Poe was fascinated, by death. It needs scarcely to be pointed out that Poe's followers are of the analytic order-self-conscious artists, whether pessimists or decadents; that is, they have adopted programmes based on an analysis of æsthetic principles, and, like their master, they find fascination in death, and in the treatment of death and morbidity. At the basis of Poe's poems will be found the same logical impossibilities as in "Alice in Wonderland." It is impossible for a city to exist in the sea in the same way that it is impossible for an egg to move from counter to counter of the grocery in "Through the Looking-Glass," but once admitting the incredibility, certain minds take pleasure in working the thing out as completely as possible. The theatre of "The Conqueror Worm" is simply beyond comprehension; "The Raven" is, from one angle, a tissue of absurdities, and, generally speaking, the Poe landscape-"out of space, out of time"-has the same basic absurdity as nonsense verses, nightmares, or the etchings of Piranesi. What fascinates, whether in the stories of Frank R. Stockton, or in the "Haunted Palace," is the gravity with which the impossible is carried out. To this Poe owes much, but, of course, not all, of his power. As a master of verbal music, Poe is unique. He depends upon none of the obvious devices of Swinburne, nor upon the subtler ones of Rossetti; he has an eerier music all his own. In "The City in the Sea," consider such a passage as: Here the rhythm is basically iambic, but how smoothly it is changed in such a line as: On the long night-time of that town where long night-time holds up the march of the verse while indefinite hours roll leadenly on. Or in the last two quoted lines note how the ow sounds gradually slow down the metre preparatory to the adagio of gigantically! Yet, radical as such a metric change may be, the poem retains its iambic beat throughout, much as a nocturne of Chopin's keeps its rhythmic outlines beneath any irregularity in the melody. How delicately the assonance is handled in that unforgettable line: Time-eaten towers that tremble not and how unobtrusively the same letter does yeoman service in: Streams up the turrets silently! Such hidden harmonies and rich chords of language suggest only one comparison: Poe is the Chopin of poetry. Poe's images are always vague, vast, and mysterious: Hell rising from a thousand thrones, What awful thing is this, we ask ourselves, that is seated on a thousand thrones somewhere under the sea? So the "Haunted Palace" has no shape or substance, and all we know of the shadowy graves in which Poe's heroines lie buried is that at the end of an alley of Titanic cypresses there is somewhere a "legended tomb," and that another sepulchre lies "by the sounding sea." The geography of Poe has no outlines, all is conveyed in that hurrying and indistinct imagery by which Milton is differentiated from Dante in Macaulay's essay. Yet Poe is not to be explained by these devices, nor by any others. He remains what all geniuses remain-inscrutable. Out of some darkness rose cities and palaces seen of no man else; lit by impossible stars and fragrant with dead men's feet and many colored grasses; remote, horrible, and tremendous. There, girt by dreadful waters, "les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs," and there Poe heard that orchestra sighing fitfully a weird music which he wove afterwards in sadness and desolation of soul. In one brief sentence Frederick Myers characterized the genius of Swinburne as tinged by "the conviction that has stolen over many hearts, that there is a mortality of spirit, as well as flesh." So can we speak of Poe. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892) J. John Greenleaf Whittier, son of a Quaker farmer, was born in the east parish of Haverhill, Essex County, Massachusetts, 1807, the second of four children. He spent his boyhood on the farm, developing that deep affinity for rustic things which marks his verse, but, as it proved, permanently injuring his health by exposure and overexertion. His first published verse appeared in the Newburyport Free Press, June 8, 1826, and occasioned a lifelong friendship with William Lloyd Garrison. Whittier worked his way through two terms of the Haverhill Academy by making shoes; then, in 1829, he began editorial work. The crisis of his life came in 1833, when he put aside opportunities for a successful political career by writing "Justice and Expediency," an abolition pamphlet. |