[Illustration]
“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
“For one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy.”
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?—
“Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow,
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago,)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A wingèd odour went away.”
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
“The bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time,”
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:
“With a murmurous stir uncertain in the air the purple curtain
Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows.”
While in “The Raven” we find:
“And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.”
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:
“An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young—
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.”
And again:
“It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”
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.