[Footnote 1: The following notice of Mr. Poe's life and works was
written at his own request, and accompanied a portrait of him published
in _Graham's Magazine_ for February, 1845. It is here [in R.W.
Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)] given with a few alterations
and omissions.]
The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no centre, or,
if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is divided into
many systems, each revolving round its several sun, and often presenting
to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way. Our capital
city, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart, from which
life and vigor radiate to the extremities, but resembles more an
isolated umbilicus, stuck down as near as may be to the centre of the
land, and seeming rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to
serve any present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its
literature almost more distinct than those of the different dialects of
Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one of her own, of
which some articulate rumor barely has reached us dwellers by the
Atlantic.
Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism of
contemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give praise where
it is needed than where it is deserved, and friendship so often seduces
the iron stylus of justice into a vague flourish, that she writes what
seems rather like an epitaph than a criticism. Yet if praise be given as
an alms, we could not drop so poisonous a one into any man's hat. The
critic's ink may suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls
or of sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we
might readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding-place
of truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we usually find
mixed with it.
Remarkable experiences are usually confined to the inner life of
imaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude and
peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of a
romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted by
Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed seemed the
warranty of a large estate to the young poet. Having received a
classical education in England, he returned home and entered the
University of Virginia, where, after an extravagant course, followed by
reformation at the last extremity, he was graduated with the highest
honors of his class. Then came a boyish attempt to join the fortunes of
the insurgent Greeks, which ended at St. Petersburg, where he got into
difficulties through want of a passport, from which he was rescued by
the American consul, and sent home.[1] He now entered the military
academy at West Point from which he obtained a dismissal on hearing of
the birth of a son to his adopted father, by a second marriage, an event
which cut off his expectations as an heir. The death of Mr. Allan, in
whose will his name was not mentioned, soon after relieved him of all
doubt in this regard, and he committed himself at once to authorship for
a support. Previously to this, however, he had published (in 1827) a
small volume of poems, which soon ran through three editions, and
excited high expectations of its author's future distinction in the
minds of many competent judges.
[Footnote 1: There is little evidence for this story, which some
biographers have dismissed as a myth created by Poe himself. See
Woodberry's _Poe_, v. i, p. 337.]
That no certain augury can be drawn from a poet's earliest lispings
there are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare's first poems, though
brimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness, give but a very faint
promise of the directness, condensation, and overflowing moral of his
maturer works. Perhaps, however, Shakespeare is hardly a case in point,
his "Venus and Adonis" having been published, we believe, in his
twenty-sixth year. Milton's Latin verses show tenderness, a fine eye for
nature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint
of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all
the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and
eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow
namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius
which he afterwards displayed. We have never thought that the world lost
more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator
of obscure and antiquated dulness. Where he becomes original (as it is
called) the interest of ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke
White's promises were endorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey
but surely with no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a
traditional piety, which, to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less
objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment
of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowning
pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasional
simple, lucky beauty. Burns, having fortunately been rescued by his
humble station from the contaminating society of the "best models" wrote
well and naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough to
have had an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems from
which, as from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from
the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whatever
of that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest,
most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's
"Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an intrepid
and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is
but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early
poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient
investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer
of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer and
more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest
specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that
ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions
of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope
of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a
wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for
rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional
combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate
physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only
remarkable when it displays an effort of _reason_, and the rudest verses
in which we can trace some conception of the ends of poetry, are worth
all the miracles of smooth juvenile versification. A schoolboy, one
would say, might acquire the regular see-saw of Pope merely by an
association with the motion of the play-ground tilt.
Mr. Poe's early productions show that he could see through the verse to
the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling that all the life
and grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will of the
other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have ever
read. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity of
purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre.
Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only express
by the contradictory phrase of _innate experience_. We copy one of the
shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is a
little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and symmetry of the
outline are such as few poets ever attain. There is a smack of ambrosia
about it.