“A lie,” says an American proverb, “will run from Maine to Mexico while Truth is putting on its boots,” and the memories of few celebrated men have been more freely aspersed or more tardily vindicated than has that of Edgar Allan Poe. No sooner was the breath out of his body than his enemies addressed themselves to the congenial task of bespattering his reputation, and continued to do so, unchecked and almost unchallenged, for many years. Amongst other charges so contemptible as to be unworthy of a moment’s consideration, he was held up to public execration as a confirmed inebriate and denounced as a shameless plagiarist. At this distance of time it is hardly necessary to remark that the former charge was a particularly cruel perversion of the truth, while the latter was entirely without foundation. But it is a well-known axiom that, if only a sufficiency of mud is thrown, some of it is sure to stick; and in consequence Poe was for a long time denied that place on the roll of fame to which his remarkable talents, both as a poet and a romancer, fairly entitled him. The present generation, however, has witnessed a signal reaction in his favour. Thanks to the untiring efforts of several prominent men of letters both in his own country and in England, the darker shadows which rested upon his name have been effectually dispersed; the world has gradually come to take a more just view both of his character and his genius; and in this, the closing year of the nineteenth century, we find Poe’s reputation more firmly established than at any time since his untimely death in 1849.
To a right understanding of the works of any author some knowledge of his life is essential, for a man’s writings are always to a greater or less extent the reflection of his character and his surroundings. Of course there are exceptions to this as to other rules. There are authors whose forte lies in describing the passions and the impossibility of controlling them, and who in private life are confirmed misogynists; while there are others, whose most entertaining books have been dictated upon a bed of suffering from which there was little chance of their ever rising again. But Poe was not one of these exceptions: in his writings—and more especially in his poetry—his character is mirrored for all men to behold it.
Naturally of a morbid temperament, Poe’s innate propensity to look upon the dark side of things was strengthened by the circumstances in which he was placed. His life was one of continuous disappointment. He laboured incessantly, and hardly earned enough to keep body and soul together; he was, perhaps, the most original genius of his time, and was accused of pilfering from the work of vastly inferior minds; he was intensely ambitious, and remained a literary hack to the end of his days; he was of a most affectionate disposition, and was compelled to witness the one whom he loved best upon earth in the grip of a cruel and lingering disease, without possessing the means of procuring her the comforts which might have alleviated her sufferings. Knowing all this, can we wonder at the tone of settled melancholy which pervades his poetry—the regret for what might have been, the yearning for what can never be? Here and there, it is true, he strikes a different note, as in “Eulalie” and the charming little lyric “To Helen,” which latter poem, however, was written when he was still a boy; but these variations, like glimpses of blue sky on a dark and lowering horizon, only serve to intensify the general gloom. And yet, in spite of their sadness, there is a pathetic sweetness in his verses, which appeals irresistibly to the heart, and makes the reader fain to admit that in his particular strain Poe is indeed a master.
Born at Boston on January 19th, 1809—the son of one David Poe, a man of good family, who had married an actress and subsequently adopted his wife’s profession—Edgar Allan Poe had the misfortune to lose both his parents in infancy, after which he was adopted by his godfather, Mr. John Allan, a wealthy and childless Richmond merchant, with the intention, it is thought, of making him his heir. The boy was handsome, witty, and precocious, and was petted and indulged by his adopted father to his heart’s content; indeed, it is to the injudicious treatment which he then received that Poe himself ascribes many of the difficulties which beset his path in after life.
When eight years old he was brought to England and placed at a school at Stoke Newington kept by a Dr. Bransby, who is amusingly depicted in “William Wilson,” one of Poe’s finest stories. Here he remained five years, when he returned to America, and after studying until he was seventeen at a Richmond academy, matriculated at the University of Virginia, at Charlottesville. At the University he seems to have acquired some reputation as a scholar; but at the end of his first session a difference of opinion with his godfather in respect of some gambling debts, which the old gentlemen very properly refused to pay, led to an open quarrel, and Poe, instead of returning to Charlottesville, set out for Europe, with the intention of assisting the Greeks, then struggling to free themselves from the intolerable yoke of Turkey. It does not appear, however, that he took any part in the war, nor even beheld, except in his mind’s eye, the remains of “the glory that was Greece.” After wandering about the Continent for a couple of years he returned home, became reconciled to Mr. Allan, and, having expressed a wish to enter the army, was accordingly nominated to a cadetship at West Point. But, alas, the “Imp of the Perverse” was ever at his heels, and in less than twelve months he was cashiered “for various neglects of duty and disobedience of orders.”
The loss of his profession—no great matter in itself, for anyone less fitted for the strict discipline of a military life it would be difficult to imagine—was followed by another and far more serious quarrel with his adopted father, with the result that the young man found himself thrown upon his own resources. He had already published a small volume of poems—those comprised in his last collection as “Poems written in Youth”—which included the delightful stanzas beginning “Helen, thy beauty is to me,” and he now determined to turn to literature for a livelihood. Nothing is known of his career for the next two years; but in 1833 with a tale, “A MS. found in a Bottle,” and a poem, “The Coliseum,” he carried off two prizes offered for competition by a Baltimore newspaper, and having attracted the notice of one of the judges—Mr. John Kennedy, a well-known literary man—he obtained through his influence employment on “The Southern Literary Messenger,” at Richmond.
Henceforth, until his death, Poe was intimately connected with American journalism, and more than one moribund periodical was indebted to his eloquent pen for a fresh lease of life. He was an indefatigable worker, pouring forth poems, essays, stories, and reviews with feverish energy; and, at the same time, so fastidious that he never permitted a manuscript to leave his hands until he was satisfied that he had given the public of his very best. Unfortunately in America in those days literary work was very inadequately remunerated, while copyright was a mere farce; so that even for his finest poems and his most powerful tales Poe never received more than fifty or sixty dollars, and generally very much less, and was in consequence seldom free from pecuniary embarrassment. “The Raven,” which appeared in 1845 in Cotton’s “American Review,” brought him immediate fame, and—ten dollars; and while his poem was being read, and recited, and parodied all over the English-speaking world, the author was actually in want of the common necessaries of life. To add to his troubles, his wife, Virginia Clemm, a beautiful and charming girl whom he had married in 1836, and to whom he was most devotedly attached, had soon after their marriage contracted a fatal malady, and was slowly fading away before his eyes; and his anxiety on her behalf thoroughly unnerved him and weakened his power of self-restraint, never at any time very great. It was this, combined with ill-health and the strain of overwork, which drove him to the use of the stimulants which ultimately proved his ruin; but the statement that he habitually drank to excess was a malicious fabrication. The fact was that poor Poe, in common with many other people of a nervous, highly-strung temperament, was, as one of his most intimate friends assures us, unable to take “even a single glass of wine” with impunity.
Mrs. Poe died in 1847, and in the autumn of the following year Poe became engaged to a widow, named Mrs. Whitman, a lady of considerable literary attainments. This engagement, from which his friends hoped much, was unfortunately soon broken off, for reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained, and on October 7th, 1849, the poet died under painful circumstances at Baltimore.
It is frequently asserted that Poe is a single-poem poet—that he is indebted for the niche he now occupies in the Temple of Song mainly to his wonderful poem “The Raven”; and that if “The Raven” had never been written, Poe would now be remembered merely as a skilful weaver of sensational romances, who wrote passable, if somewhat fantastic, verses in his leisure moments. But those who hold this opinion not only do Poe a grave injustice, but admit themselves incapable of appreciating some of the very finest lyrics in the English language. “The Raven,” it is true, is the poem whose artificial qualities appeal most strongly to the fancy of the general reader, and for this reason, if for no other, is entitled to all due respect from the critic; but remarkable as it undoubtedly is, it is open to question whether, considered purely as a poem, it is quite on the same plane with that masterpiece of imagination “The City in the Sea,” the mystical town where “Death has reared himself a throne,” or with that exquisite lyric “The Sleeper,” in which Poe’s inimitable power as a word-painter rises to such a height that we almost seem to see the beautiful dead woman lying pale and still in her “length of tress” waiting to exchange her death-chamber
Again, if neither “The Raven” nor either of the two poems we have just mentioned had been given to the world, such productions as “The Haunted Palace,” “Annabel Lee,” and “To Helen,” to say nothing of “Israfel,” “Ulalume,” and “The Bells,” containing as they do passages of the rarest charm, would surely have sufficed to keep their author’s memory green for all time. What can one possibly desire finer of their kind than those lines from that splendid piece of verbal music, “The Haunted Palace,” which no lover of Poe can resist quoting?—
However, although, as we have said, “The Raven” is, in its poetical constituents, probably inferior to some of Poe’s other poems, yet it is in the mind of the average reader so inseparably connected with its author’s claim to rank among
that it may not be out of place to say something about the way in which it came to be written. And first let us remark that the impression that still very generally prevails that “The Raven” was inspired by the death of the poet’s wife—that she is the “Lost Lenore” of the poem—is altogether erroneous, inasmuch as Virginia Poe’s death did not take place until January, 1847, while “The Raven” was first published in February, 1845—nearly two years earlier.
Poe himself, in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he treats us to a very elaborate analysis of the methods employed in writing this poem, while ridiculing the suggestion that it was the offspring of any sudden impulse—of “any species of fine frenzy” under the influence of which poets are popularly believed to compose their masterpieces—does not admit that he is indebted for either the rhythm or the idea of “The Raven” to any extraneous sources. Several of his critics, however, regard this essay as not the least imaginative of his writings, and even hint that it is nothing more or less than an ingenious attempt to throw dust in the eyes of a too inquisitive public. One of the ablest and most discriminating of Poe’s critics, Mr. Stedman, in the admirable essay which is prefaced to Gustave Doré’s illustrations of this poem, while not going so far as this, is of the opinion that the rhythm of “The Raven” was suggested by Mrs. Browning’s (then Elizabeth Barrett) charming poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” in proof of which he points out a very remarkable similarity between certain verses in the two poems. Thus in Mrs. Browning’s poem we have:
While in “The Raven” we find:
The fact that it was very largely due to the influence of Poe that Mrs. Browning’s works received such a favourable reception in America (she was a frequent contributor to “Graham’s Magazine” while it was edited by him); that he always professed the most intense admiration both for her genius and her lyrical methods; and that he subsequently dedicated to her, as “the noblest of her sex,” “The Raven and Other Poems,” would certainly seem to lend colour to this suggestion. Mr. Stedman, it may be added, does not insinuate that there is anything in this similarity which can possibly be construed into an act of plagiarism on the part of the American writer; indeed, the whole motive of the two poems—the one a love-story pure and simple with an ideal ending; the other a weird, fantastic creation, breathing an atmosphere of doubt and despair, of desires unfulfilled and hope abandoned—is altogether different.
Another theory, propounded by Mr. Ingram, who has, perhaps, done more than anyone to vindicate the memory of Poe from the calumnies of his soi-disant biographer, Griswold, is that the inspiration of “The Raven” is to be found in a poem called “Isidore,” which was contributed by Albert Pike, the Arkansas poet, to “The New Mirror,” at a time when Poe was writing for the same journal. In this poem a bird “whose song enhances depression”—a mocking-bird to wit—also figures, while the refrain is not unlike that of “The Raven.” However, even if we are prepared to admit that “The Raven” is not so entirely the fruit of its author’s imagination as was at first supposed, this fact does not sensibly detract from the merits of a work which must always retain its place amongst the masterpieces of English verse.
Poe then, as we have endeavoured to show, is very far from being a single-poem poet; but, on the other hand, he is undoubtedly the poet of a single mood—a mood which by no stretch of the imagination can be called a pleasing one in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but withal so striking and so original as to command—nay, even to compel—the reader’s attention. Poe does not sing of “emerald fields” and “ambient streams,” like Wordsworth; of wide, rolling prairies and dense forests of murmuring pines, like Longfellow; of “stainless knights” and “lily maids,” like Tennyson; nor of love both within and without the limits of the conscience, like Byron. No, his theme is a widely different one from all these. As with his prose romances so with his poetry. Just as in his romances he concerns himself in the main with subjects which most writers of fiction leave severely alone—with death in strange and awful forms; with the horrors of insanity and remorse; with men who under mesmeric influences continue to speak long after the King of Terrors has laid his icy finger upon them; with others who are prematurely buried, and who explore the secrets of the charnel-house—in a word, with what his friend honest John Kennedy called “the terrific”: so in his poetry his song is of phantom cities sinking into fathomless seas; of demon shapes flitting through enchanted palaces; of ghoul-haunted tarns; of “sheeted memories of the past”; of loved ones who have been taken from us, and of the utter hopelessness of reunion with them in “the distant Aidenn.” Sadness, as we have said elsewhere, is the dominant note of all his poetry; but sadness, as he himself tells us in his “Philosophy of Composition,” was his conception of the highest tone of Beauty, and therefore the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. Thus we understand why it is that the death of a beautiful woman—the saddest of all losses—forms the burden of so many of his finest lyrics. How different is all this from Shelley, who defines poetry as what redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man, and is the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds; and yet Poe in his earlier efforts, such as “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf,” was obviously the disciple of Shelley!
As we read these wonderful poems we are alternately repelled and attracted; still, strive as we may, we cannot escape the spell of those weird, mystic measures. When once we begin a poem, whether it be “The Raven,” “The City in the Sea,” or even “The Conqueror Worm,” we are compelled, in spite of ourselves, to read on to the end; and when the end is reached, it is not seldom with a sigh of regret that we close the book.
Poe confined himself almost entirely to simple ballad forms—which is the case even in poems like “Ulalume” and “The Bells,” where the measures certainly seem at first sight to be somewhat intricate—and relied for his effect upon the melody. With him everything was subordinate to sound. Here and there, as in “Ulalume,” it must be admitted that, in striving to please the ear, he approaches perilously near the point where “sense swoons into nonsense”; but, on the whole, as a melodist he achieved wonders, and no poet has used the refrain and the repetend in quite the same way or so effectively. What, for instance, in “The Bells” could possibly be more telling than the constant repetition of the word which gives its name to the poem? The repetend, his free use of which did so much for the success of “The Raven,” he employed even more lavishly in some of his later poems, such as “Lenore,” “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume,” and “For Annie,” and with the happiest results. Thus:
And again:
In the management of his metres, too, Poe stands almost without a rival. Unlike the majority of poets, who, in determining the length of a poem, are guided by the sense rather than by the sound, he regarded the melody as of equal if not of primary importance, and one famous critic has declared that “it would be impossible to omit a line or stanza without injuring the metrical as well as the intelligible effect.”
Regret is often expressed that—with the single exception of “Al Aaraaf,” which, however, was written when his intellect was still in its adolescent stage, and has done comparatively little to enhance his reputation—Poe, almost alone among the great poets of the nineteenth century, should never have given us a poem of any considerable length. But as a journalistic hack, forced to write by the column for his daily bread, Poe had but scant leisure for the composition of a “Childe Harold,” an “Endymion,” or a “Hiawatha,” and, moreover, it is extremely doubtful whether, even if the range of his possibilities had not been limited by his poverty, he would have done so, as he seems to have had a most profound contempt for prolixity in poetry. In his essay, “The Poetic Principle,” he maintains that “the phrase ‘a long poem’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms,”—that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites by elevating the soul; and that, as all such emotions are, by a psychical necessity, transient, it is obviously impossible for the necessary degree of excitement to be maintained throughout a composition of any great length. “After the lapse of half an hour at the very utmost,” he says, “it flags—fails—a revulsion ensues—and then the poem is, in effect and in fact, no longer such.” This theory of Poe’s gave rise to much hostile criticism, and justly so; still, it cannot be doubted that the time-honoured notion that no poem can be termed great that is not a long one, and no poet worthy of the name who has not written a long poem, has deprived the world of much fine lyric poetry by compelling able men to expend their time and energy in the production of bulky epics, for which in many cases their genius was but ill-adapted, instead of confining themselves to the lighter forms of verse. While thus condemning prolixity, however, Poe does not deny that a poem may be “improperly brief,” and thus “degenerate into mere epigrammatism”; and that “a very short poem,” however great its intrinsic merits may be, can never hope to produce a profound or a lasting effect. He mentions Shelley’s exquisite “Lines to an Indian Air,” and his own friend Willis’s pathetic ballad, “Unseen Spirits,” as instances of poems which had failed to receive adequate recognition by reason of undue brevity.
The secret of Poe’s hostility to the long poem is probably to be found in the fact that he had the strongest possible aversion to the introduction of metaphysics into poetry, which he regarded as the “child of Taste,” whose sole function ought to be “the rhythmical creation of Beauty”; and the long poem had to a very large extent become identified with the Didactic school of poets, of which Wordsworth was the principal exponent.
Poe was not the first to raise a protest against what he termed “the heresy of the Didactic.” Years before, Keats had declared that “people hated poetry that had a palpable design upon them,” and that “poetry should be great and unobtrusive.” Poe, however, went very much farther than the author of “Endymion” would have been likely to accompany him, for he maintains that “poetry has only collateral relations with the intellect and the conscience, and, unless incidentally, no concern whatever with either duty or truth.” To anyone who has even a superficial acquaintance with the great masters of verse the fallacy of such a proposition is obvious. Without the conception of duty and of truth, from which spring noble passions and great deeds—religious enthusiasm, love of humanity, love of liberty, self-sacrifice, loyalty, and patriotism—we should have had no Æschylus, no Sophocles, no Euripides, no Homer, no Shakespeare, no Milton, and no Tennyson—which reflection may enable us to bear with comparative equanimity the platitudes of the latter-day poet.
What Poe might have done or have left undone, had not “unmerciful Disaster” dogged his footsteps, and carried him off, as it had carried off Burns, and Keats, and Shelley, and Byron, and many another child of genius, before he had reached the meridian of his days, it were idle to speculate; but this much is certain—that, when the works of far greater poets have fallen into neglect, Poe will still be read and still appreciated, for, in the domain which he made so peculiarly his own, it is hardly possible to imagine that he will ever have to encounter anything approaching serious rivalry, while the feelings which he appeals to are universal.
Noel Williams.