Merry Poemas!

I have a fondness for "Raven" parodies--19th century writers found them irresistible--and this one is particularly suited for the holiday season. I first found this ode to the more sinister side to Christmas puddings in the humor publication "Tit-Bits" on December 23, 1882, but it continued to be republished in newspapers and magazines at least until early the next century.

The happiest of holidays to you all!

Listen, all ! I tell what happened on the night of Christmas Day,
After I'd been eating pudding in a very reckless way.
Just as Christmas Day was dying, as I on my bed was lying,
When to slumber I was trying, when I'd just begun to snore,
I became aware of something rolling on my chamber floor—
Of a most mysterious rumbling, rolling on my chamber floor.
Only this and nothing more!

Partly waking, partly sleeping, all my flesh with horror creeping,
I could hear it tumbling, leaping, rolling on my chamber floor;
Underneath the bedclothes sinking, I betook myself to thinking
If it might not be a kitten that had entered at the door;
"Yes," said I, "it is a kitten, entered at the open door.
This it is and nothing more."

Presently my heart grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Cat," said I, "or kitten, kindly stop that rolling on the floor."
But it was most irritating, for the sound was unabating.
On my nerves for ever grating was the rolling on the floor;
Till at last I cried in anguish, "Stop that rolling I implore;"
And a voice said, "Nevermore."

This convinced me of my error, up I rose in greatest terror,
Certain that 'twas not a kitten that had spoken just before;
Then into the darkness peering, shivering, wondering, doubting, fearing,
I could dimly see a pudding rolling on my chamber floor;
I could see a big plum pudding rolling on my chamber floor;
May I see it nevermore!

From its mouth a vapour steaming, while its fiery eyes were gleaming,
Gleaming fiercely bright, and seeming fixedly to scan me o'er;
Soon it rolled and rumbled nearer, and its aim becoming clearer,
I could see that it intended jumping higher than the floor;
Yes, it jumped upon my chest, and when in pain I gave a roar,
All it said was, "Nevermore."

Though my back was nearly broken, this reply so strangely spoken.
Seemed to me to be a token that it wished for something more;
So my thoughts in words expressing, I began my sins confessing,
Saying I had eaten pudding many a time in days of yore,
But although I'd eaten pudding many a time in days of yore,
I would eat it nevermore.

Still in spite of my confessing, that plum pudding kept on pressing,
Pressing with its weight tremendous ever on my bosom's core.
Till I cried, "O, monster mighty, in my work I'm often flighty.
But, if you will now forgive me, I'll work hard at classic lore!"
At the end of this vacation I'll work hard at classic lore,
Quoth the pudding "Nevermore."

" Be that word our sign of parting, pudding!" then I shrieked, upstarting,
" Get thee back — get off my stomach, roll again upon the floor!"
Thus I struggled, loudly screaming, till I found I had been dreaming.
Dreaming like a famous poet once had dreamt in days of yore;
But although 'twas like the poet's dream he dreamt in days of yore.
May I dream it nevermore!

[Note: Many thanks to Chris Woodyard for bringing this poem to my attention.]

Poe and Ludwig II

A lesser-known bit of Poeana is that that most romantic and perplexing of "mad kings," Ludwig II, was a passionate admirer of Poe. More than that, Ludwig deeply identified with Poe, seeing the poet as a kindred spirit. His perceived parallels with Poe fascinated the troubled monarch. (Rather eerily, Ludwig was not to know that, like his idol, he too would suffer a mysterious and hotly-debated death--and when one remembers that Rufus Griswold used the pen-name "Ludwig" for his infamous obituary of Poe, it is hard not to feel a bit creeped out.)

One of our main sources--in English, at any rate--for Ludwig's sense of kinship with Poe comes from an interview he gave to the American journalist Lew Vanderpoole. Vanderpoole's account of this meeting, "Ludwig of Bavaria: a Personal Reminiscence" appeared in Lippincott's Magazine for November 1886.

The adjustment of the estates of three of my French ancestors, who died in Rouen about eight years ago, necessitated my going to Bavaria. As the three deaths, being almost simultaneous, resulted in unprecedented complications, it was manifest, from the very first, that audience must be had with the Bavarian king. So, in leaving France, I bore with me, to Ludwig, a letter of introduction from M. Gambetta, which fully explained my mission and requested the king to facilitate my endeavors as far as possible. Arriving in Munich, I sent my letter to his royal highness, expecting, of course, to be turned over to the tender mercies of some deputy, after his usual custom. To my surprise, Gambetta's letter resulted in my being requested to wait upon the king at the royal palace the next morning at ten o'clock. Punctual to the second, I was shown into a beautifully-decorated sitting- room, where the monarch joined me after a brief delay.

To others he may have always been brusque, morose, and taciturn, but no one could have been more affable and gracious than he was that morning. He examined my papers with the most courteous interest, and weighed the whole matter with as much thoughtful consideration as if it had been something of vital concern to him. Waiving several Bavarian customs, for my convenience, and setting me straight in every possible direction, he was about ending the interview, when he suddenly caught sight of something which prolonged my audience with him for two of the most delightful hours which were ever owed to royal clemency. Leaving France, as I did, a day earlier than I had intended, in my haste I accidentally packed with my legal documents the proof-sheets of a paper which I had been writing for Figaro on Edgar Allan Poe. The proofs were left unnoticed with the other papers until the whole package was opened and spread out on the king's table. Until then his manner had been quiet and gentle, almost to effeminacy; but the moment he saw Poe's name be became all eagerness and animation. His magnificent eyes lit up, his lips quivered, his cheeks glowed, and his whole face was beaming and radiant.

"Is it a personal account of him?" he asked. "Did you know Poe? Of course you did not, though: you are too young. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am. Just for a moment I thought I was in the presence of someone who had actually known that most wonderful of all writers, and who could, accordingly, tell me something definite and authentic about his inner life. To me he was the greatest man ever born, -greatest in every particular. But, like many rare gems, he was fated to have his brilliancy tarnished and marred by constant clashings and chafings against common stone. How he must have suffered under the coarse, mean indignities which the world heaped on him ! And what harsh, heartless things were said of him when death had dulled the sharpness of his trenchant pen ! You will better understand my enthusiasm when I tell you that I would sacrifice my right to my royal crown to have him on earth for a single hour, if in that hour he would unbosom to me those rare and exquisite thoughts and feelings which so manifestly were the major part of his life."

His voice softened into a low monotone-almost a wail-as he approached the end of his sentence, and his head kept settling forward until his chin rested upon his breast. He kept this attitude, in dead silence, for several minutes, his face wearing an expression of the most intense sorrow. Suddenly arousing himself, he glanced at me in startled surprise, as if he had for the moment forgotten my presence. Then his eyes beamed pleasantly, and he laughed-clear, merry, ringing laugh-at being caught in a day-dream.

"Will you be good enough to let me read, what you have written?" he asked. "I see that it is in French, the only language I know except my own." 

I handed him the proofs, and watched him as be read them. As the paper was chatty and gossipy, rather than critical, he seemed to enjoy it. 

"I see by this that you, also, are fond of Poe," he said, handing the proofs back to me; "and so I will tell you of a little fancy which I have cherished ever since I first began reading the works of your great fellow-American. At first, because of my respect for his genius and greatness, the lightest thought of what I am going to tell you would make my cheeks bum with shame at my presumption. After a time, I would occasionally write out my fancy, only to burn it, always, as soon as finished. Eventually I confided it to two trusted and valued friends; and now, in some unaccountably strange way, moved, perhaps, by the sympathy born of our common interest in Poe, I am going to take you into my confidence in this particular, stranger though you are. What I have to say is this : I believe, for reasons which I will give you, that there is a distinct parallel between Poe's nature and mine. Do not be misled by assuming that I mean more than I have said. I but compared our natures: beyond that the parallel does not hold. Poe had both genius and greatness. I have neither. He had, also, force and strength, so much of both that he could defy the world, sensitive and shrinking as be was. That I never can do. Not that I am a coward, as the word is generally understood, because pain and death can neither shake nor terrify me. Yet any contact with the world hurts me. The same as Poe's, my nature is abnormally sensitive. Injuries wound me so deeply that I cannot resent them : they crush me, and I have no doubt that in time they will destroy me. Even the laceration my heart received from indignities which I suffered as a child are still uneffaceable. A sharp or prying glance from the eyes of a stranger, even though he be only same coarse peasant, will annoy me for hours; and a newspaper criticism occasions me endless torture and misery. The impressionable part of me seems to be as sensitive as a photographer's plate : everything with which I come in contact stamps me indelibly with its proportions. My impulses, it can be no egotism to say, are generous and kindly; yet I never, in my whole life, have done an act of charity that the recipient did not in some way make me regret it. People disappoint me; life disappoints me. I meet some man with a fine face and fine manner, and believe in the sincerity of his smile. Just as I begin to feel certain of his lasting love and fidelity, I detect him in some act of treachery, or overhear him calling me a fool, or worse."

Arising, he began to walk slowly up and down the room.

"Apparently," he continued, after a brief silence, "there is no place in the economy of life except for one kind of man. If one would be respected, he must be coarse, harsh, and phlegmatic. Let him be anything else, and friends and foes alike unite in declaring him eccentric. Much as I despise the gross, sensual creatures who wear the form and receive the appellation of man, I sometimes regret that I am not more like them, and, so, more at ease. They plunge into excesses with no more concern than a duck feels in plunging into a lake. With me the thought, or rather the dread, that I may some day so far forget myself as to debase and degrade myself, according to the common custom of man, is in itself sufficient cause for the most excruciating torture. When I look upon men as they average and see the perfect nonchalance with which they commit this, that, or the other abuse from which I would recoil with utter repugnance, I wonder if, after all, they are not really to be envied. My condition is as much of a puzzle to me as it possibly can be to you. Logically, there is no reason for it. My father and mother were neither abnormally sensitive nor excessively moral. So far as I am able to ascertain, they regarded things in life very much as every one else does. It was the same, I believe, with the parents of Poe. Things he has written prove to me that he felt the same disgust for whatever demoralizes that I have always felt, only he saw how the world would behave towards him if he did not seem in sanction and approve of its rottenness. I do not blame him. His way was wisest. Deceit is best in such a case, if it can only be assumed. With his sensitiveness were associated force and defiance,-two traits which I seriously lack. Perhaps, though, he could endure the world more easily than I can, because his childhood was less dreadful than mine. All through my infancy things were done which stung and wounded me. Not that I was treated more harshly than children commonly are, but because my nature was so unlike that of children in general that the things which never disturbed them were offensive to me. I soon learned that companionship meant pain, and that I could never know or feel anything like content unless I held myself aloof from every one. This, for a man, is hard enough to do; for a child it is next to impossible. I was forced to subject myself to the will of harsh, unfeeling teachers, and to the society of those who, scarcely more than animals themselves, accredited me with no instincts finer than their own. Most of the studies thrust upon me seemed dull, stupid, and worthless : because they so jarred upon me that my understanding faculties were dulled and blunted with pain, I was declared half-witted. For hours I would sit and dream beautiful day-dreams; and that won for me similar epithets. It is a misfortune to be organized as I am; yet I am what I am because a stronger will and power than mine made me so. In that lie my so]e solace and comfort for having lived at all. If my reading and observation have not been in the wrong direction, much of the phenomenon which is called insanity is really over-sensitiveness. It is often hinted, and sometimes openly declared, that I am a madman. Perhaps I am; but I doubt it. Insanity may be self-hiding. An insane man may be the only person on earth who is not aware of his insanity. Of course I, for such reasons, may not be able to comprehend my own mental condition, except in an exaggerated and unnatural way. But I believe myself a rational being. That, though, may be proof of my insanity. Yet I doubt if any insane person could study and analyze himself as I have done and still do. I am simply out of tune with the majority of my race. I do not enter into man's common pleasures, because they disgust me and would destroy me. Society hurts me, and I keep out of it. Women court me, and for my safety I avoid them. Were I a poet, I should be praised for saying these things in verse; but the gift of utterance is not mine, and so I am sneered at; scorned, and called a madman. Will God, when he summons me, adjudge me the same?" 

With tearful eyes, he pressed my hand, smiled, and left the room. The learned doctors have already declared Ludwig of Bavaria insane, and kindlier judgment from those who loved him would very likely be counted wasted sympathy by the world.

[Note: As a postscript, here is an intriguing blog post theorizing that the "Poe Toaster" had a connection to King Ludwig.]

The Poisoning of Edgar and Virginia Poe

Rene Van Slooten, one of the more original and insightful Poe scholars out there, has an interesting article about how analysis of Edgar and Virginia's hair shows that the couple (particularly Virginia) had been poisoned with various toxic substances (largely from illuminating gas) during the years they lived in New York City.

Van Slooten goes on to suggest that this environmental poisoning was responsible for at least some of Poe's health problems and notoriously erratic behavior during this period.  Although Van Slooten does not mention this, I found myself wondering if this poisoning contributed to Virginia's early death.

As that popular blogging saying goes, read the whole thing.

If the Truth Be Told, Most Books About Poe Give Me a Similar Urge

Logansport Tribune, January 9, 1911

Today's PSA For the Historically Illiterate

To All You Nincompoops Who Have Been Posting This on Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr as a Genuine Photo of Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln:

This photo is a fake.  F.A.K.E.  It was never even intended to be seen as legitimate.  It originates from the book "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," which, (though a chilling number of people seem unaware of this,) was meant to be satire.  Poe and Lincoln never even met.  Please stop making fools of yourselves and stripping me of whatever minuscule shred of hope for the human race I have left.  After all, I can only drink so much therapeutic gin.

That is all.

Yet Another Reason Why the Internet is a Poe Blogger's Hell

The above photo is one I have been seeing all over the internet lately, particularly on Twitter. It is always described, without reservations, as a daguerreotype showing Poe at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, circa 1842. (He is supposedly the seated fellow with the impressive set of whiskers.)

Such dogmatism ignores the fact that this attribution was made only in recent years, and has very little to back it up. The man in the photo was first identified as Poe by Benjamin J. McFarland and Thomas Peter Bennett in their article "The Image of Edgar Allan Poe: A Daguerreotype Linked to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia."  (Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Vol. 147, 1997.)

This daguerreotype was first published in 1937. We do not know for certain who took this picture, who any of the men in the image are, or even exactly when it was taken. In 1950, the magazine "Frontiers" published the photo, suggesting that Poe might be the standing man in the top hat. (The only evidence proposed for this theory was the fact that Poe "was in Philadelphia in the period," and "he wrote a small book on shells." They gave the date of the photo--again, on no evidence--as 1838.)

McFarland and Bennett, through a detailed analysis of the daguerreotype, presented a well-reasoned case that the image was taken at the Academy by Paul Beck Goddard, "an early Philadelphia experimental daguerreotypist" sometime after the summer of 1842, most likely during the winter of 1842-43.

It is in the identification of the seated man as Poe--which, after all, is the only reason the daguerreotype is of general interest today--that their arguments begin to falter. Their theory that this is Poe rests on these statements:

*Poe knew a number of men who were part of Philadelphia's scientific society, such as Academy member Dr. John K. Mitchell, conchologist Isaac Lea, who was one of Poe's publishers, and poet Henry Hirst, who mounted specimens for the Peale Museum.

*Poe's name appeared on the byline of the scientific work "The Conchologist's First Book." (Although McFarland and Bennett admitted that this book was essentially written by others.)

*Poe had "a populist scientific bent," who may have been "America's first enduring science journalist."

Surely, the authors argue, these "associations and Poe's own measure of fame" "opened the Academy's doors for Poe; his interest in science and new technology provided a motive for him to be involved with the process [of daguerreotyping.]" In short, Poe "could have been in Goddard's photo."

McFarland and Bennett then went on to a forensic analysis of the daguerreotype. To make a long story (or journal article) short, they did a side-by-side visual comparison of the "McKee" daguerreotype of Poe from ca. 1843 with the Academy daguerreotype (direct superimposition of the two images could not be done,) and decided, by golly, the two looked alike.

Enlargement of the Academy daguerreotype,
showing the Man Who Would Be Poe. 

The "McKee" daguerreotype of Poe.

That's all this comes down to: Two people looking at an old daguerreotype and saying "Gosh, that might be Edgar Allan Poe!" Were they right? Who knows? Unfortunately, the Academy daguerreotype is too indistinct to make any sort of solid identification possible. I personally do not see much of a resemblance between Poe and the "Academician," but others may disagree. My point is, McFarland and Bennett's theory that this is a long-lost photograph of Edgar Allan Poe is just that--a theory, and in all honesty should always be presented as such. I can't prove that it's not Poe, but they certainly can't prove it is. The daguerreotype is merely one of many "Poe" photos or paintings that are either questionable or downright bogus. (See Michael Deas' "The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe" for an entertaining rundown on all the many fake Poe images that have appeared over the years.)

I realize that this is a minor matter compared to the numerous blood-curdling frauds and libels that are continually perpetrated against Poe (hi, Lynn Cullen!) but it still annoys me.

Poe Libel of the Day

Behold, as the city of Boston presents the Rufus Griswold Biography of memorial statues.

After all these years, the Frogpondians have finally gotten their revenge on him.

Happy Birthday, Edgar!

For this year's Poe Birthday Tribute, I am reprinting two articles published around the time of the Poe Centenary.  The first is "The Fame of Poe" by John Macy, which appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly" for December 1908.  The second is "Poe and the Hall of Fame" by James Routh.  It was published in the "Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia" for January 1911.  I do not agree with everything said in these essays--far from it--but they do make some valid points, and generally stand as a good overview of how Poe was regarded a century after his birth.  As I have mentioned before, I like to think of this blog as a place where old Poe articles go to die, so since they do not seem to have ever been reprinted anywhere, I'm giving them a new home.

Of course, to celebrate the anniversary of Poe's birth, the most appropriate thing to do is to read his works, rather than merely reading about them.  That is the only way we can ever hope to understand the real man.

No man more truly than Poe illustrates our conception of a poet as one who treads the cluttered ways of circumstance with his head in the clouds. Many another impoverished dreamer has dwelt in his thoughts, apart from the world's events. And of nearly all artists it is true that their lives are written in their works, and that the rest of the story concerns another almost negligible personality. In the case of Poe the separation between spiritual affairs and temporal is unusually wide. His fragile verse is pitched above any landscape of fact; his tales contain only misty reflections of common experience; and the legendary personage which he has become is a creature inspired in other imaginations by his books, and not a faithful portrait of the human being who lived in America between 1809 and 1849. The contrast between his aspirations and his earthly conditions, between the figure of romance he would fain have been and the man in authentic records stripped of myth and controversy, is pitiful, almost violent.

This poet with a taste for palaces and Edens lived in sprawling cities that had not yet attempted magnificence. This bookish man, whom one images poring over quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, owned no wonderful library, not even such a "working" collection as a literary man is supposed to require, but feasted on the miscellaneous riches that fell now and then upon the arid desk of the hack reviewer. This inventor of grotesque plots had no extraordinary adventures, none certainly that make thrilling anecdote. Capable of Chesterfieldian grace of style, and adept in the old-fashioned southern flourish of manner, he left few "polite" letters, and those few are undistinguished. To follow Poe's course by the guide of literary landmarks is to undertake a desolate journey.

As his artistic self is apart from things, so it is apart from men. In his criticisms, it is true, he is found in open and somewhat controversial relations with the writers of his time and vicinity. As editor, he had dealings with the world of authors and journalists. But his acquaintance among the "Literati" includes no man of letters who is now well remembered, and implies no possibility of flashing exchange between his imagination and another as brilliant. He never met his intellectual equal in the flesh) except Lowell, whom he saw only once. Irving in Sunnyside was not nearer than Irving in Spain. Not a friend was qualified to counsel or encourage Poe in his work; not a neighbor in art was competent to inspire him. He was the flower of no group of writers, but stands alone, original, aloof, all but exotic.

The isolation of Poe from the best minds of his day is not well understood by those who have not a correct geographical conception of America in 1840. One of the most authoritative English reviews expressed surprise that a recent book on Boston omitted from the chapter devoted to litterateurs the name of Poe, who was born in Boston and was the finest of American poets. The intellectual life of the only Greater Boston that has produced literature was as remote from Poe as was Victorian London, and he was the only important critic in America who understood the relative magnitudes of those two centres of light. His caustic opinions about the Bostonians, which seem more discerning to us than they did to our New England fathers, are witness to his detachment from the only considerable movement in American literature of those dim provincial times.

Whatever influence contemporaneous thought exerted on Poe came from books and not from men, not from experience with the world. Though a few reflections of his contacts with life, such as the English school in "William Wilson," are to be made out in his stories, and though in some of his essays a momentary admiration or hostility of a personal nature slipped a magnifying lens beneath his critical eye, yet the finger of circumstance is seldom on his pages, the echoes of human encounter are not heard in his art.

The nature of Poe's disseverance from life is one of the strangest in the annals of unworldly men of books. He was not among those who, like Lamb, transfigure petty and dull experience, or those who combat suffering with blithe philosophies like Stevenson; he was not a willful hermit; nor was he among those invalids who, in constrained seclusion, have leisure for artistry and contemplation. He was a practical editor in busy offices. He no doubt thought of himself, Mr. Poe, as urbane and cosmopolitan. He had knocked about the world a little. For a while he was in the army. He was effective and at ease upon the lecture platform. He meditated rash adventures in foreign lands until he apparently came to believe that he had really met with them. At his best, he was reserved and well bred, aware of his intellectual superiority. Sometimes, perhaps when he was most cast down and hard driven, he met the world with a jaunty man-of-the-world swagger. After he left the Allans, he was on the outskirts of social groups, high or low. His love for elegant society unfitted him for vagabondage. His lack of worldly success, if no other limitation, forbade his entering for more than a visit the circles of comfort and good breeding. But no matter what his mood or what his circumstance, it did not affect the quality of his work or the nature of his subjects. When he wrote he dropped the rest of himself.

And, with respect to him, artistic biography may well follow his example, and documentary biography may confess its futility. No biographer thus far has succeeded in making very interesting the narrative portions of Poe's career. It is a bare chronicle of neutral circumstance, from which rises, the more wonderful, an achievement of highly-colored romance, poetry of perfect, unaccountable originality, and criticism the most penetrating that any American writer has attained.

Perhaps it is his criticism, an air of maturity and well-pondered knowledge of all the literatures of the Orient and the Occident, which makes it seem the more singular that he owed nothing to universities and scholarly circles. The Allans took him to England when he was six years old and put him in a school where he learned, it is fair to suppose, the rudiments of the classics and French. He went one term to the University of Virginia, and a few months to West Point. Though one institution was founded by Jefferson and the other by the United States government, it is no very cynical irreverence to withhold from them gratitude on Poe's behalf. The most significant record of his life at "the University " is that which shows him browsing idly in the library. His most profitable occupation at West Point was writing lampoons of the instructors and preparing the volume of verses for which he collected subscriptions from his fellow cadets. He was not at either institution long enough to receive whatever of culture and instruction it had to offer. He was self-taught. He read poetry when he was young, and began to write it. As a military cadet he had precocious and arrogant critical opinions. At twenty-four he appears with a neat manuscript roll of short stories under his arm, which cause the judges of a humdrum magazine contest to start awake.

From this time to the end he was a hard-working journalist and professional story-teller. He pursued his work through carking, persistent poverty, amid the distractions of inner restlessness and outward maladjustments. His poverty was not merited punishment for indolence or extravagance. He was industrious, entitled to better wage than he received. He was not an obscure genius, waiting for posterity to discover him, but was popular in his own day. His books, however, had no great sale, for his pieces appeared in the magazines, some of them more than once, and the demand for his work was thus satisfied with more profit to the magazine publishers than to the author.

He lived laborious days and he lived in frugal style. He spent no money on himself, but handed his earnings to his mother-in-law. Whatever else was sinful in the sprees which have been over-elaborated in the chronicles, their initial cost was not great. When he went into debt, the lust he hoped to gratify with the money was the insane desire to found a good magazine. His appetites were mainly intellectual. His wildest dissipation was the performance of mental acrobatics for the applause that he craved.

He spent weeks making good his challenge to the world to send him a cryptogram that he could not decipher. When he reviewed a book, he examined it to the last rhetorical minutia. Griswold's opinion, that "he was more remarkable as a dissector of sentences than as a commenter upon ideas," is a mean way of saying that he was given to patient scrutiny. Mrs. Browning put it more generously when she said that Poe had so evidently "read" her poems as to be a wonder among critics. Poe had a mania for curious, unusual information. His knowledge was so disparate and inaccurate that several critics in sixty years have discovered, with the aid of specialists* that he lacked the thoroughness which is now habitual with all who undertake to write books. But Poe's knowledge, such as it was, implies much reading. And much reading and much writing are impossible to an idle, dissipated man.

This clear-headed, fine-handed artist is present and accounted for at the author's desk. His hours off duly, abundantly and confusedly recorded, do not furnish essential matter for large books. If one enters without forewarning any life of Poe, one feels that a mystery is about to open. There seem to be clues to suppressed matters, suspicious lacunas. The lives are written, like some novels, with hintful rows of stars. A shadowy path promises to lead to a misty midregion of Weir. But Weir proves to be a place that Poe invented. He himself was the first foolish biographer of Poe. The real Poe (to take an invidious adjective from the titles of a modern kind of biography) is a simple, intelligible, and if one may dare to say it, a rather insignificant man. To make a hero or a villain of him is to write fiction.

The craving for story has been at work demanding and producing such fiction. The raw materials were made in America and shipped to France for psychological manufacture. The resulting figure is an irresponsible genius scribbling immortality under vinous inspiration, or turning neuropsychopathic rhymes. Before paranoia was discovered as a source of genius, wine received all the credit. But Poe could not write a line except when his head was clear and he was at the antipodes of hilarity. The warmth of Bohemia, boulevard mirth, however stimulating to the other mad bards of New York and Philadelphia, never fetched a song from him. He was a solemn, unconvivial, humorless man, who took no joy in his cups. If on occasion he found companions in riot, they were not cafe poets. Once, when the bottle was passing, and there were other poets present, he so far forgot himself as to say that he had written one poem that would live ("The Raven"), but this expression of pride does not seem unduly bacchanalian. One could wish that the delights of stein-on-the-table friendship had been his. He needed friends and the happier sort of relaxation. But what record is there of the New York wits and journalists visiting Fordham of an evening to indulge in book-talk and amicable liquor? The chaste dinners of the Saturday Club in Boston were ruddy festivals of mutual admiration beside anything that Poe knew.

The unromantic fact is that alcohol made Poe sick and he got no consolation from it. But before this fact was widely understood, long before there was talk of neuropsychology and hydrocephalus, when even starvation was not clearly reckoned with, it was known in America that Poe drank. This fact became involved with a tradition which has descended in direct line from Elizabethan puritanism to nineteenth-century America. According to this tradition, poets who do nothing but write poetry are frivolous persons inclined to frequent taverns. The New England poets, to be sure, were not revelers, but they were moral teachers as well as poets. The American, knowing them, saw Poe in contrast, as the Englishwoman in the theatre contrasted the ruin of Cleopatra with "the 'ome life of our own dear Queen." And Poe, always unfortunate, offers a confirmatory half-fact by beginning to die in a gutter in Baltimore — a fact about which Holmes, the physician, can make a not unkindly joke. Besides, what can be expected of a poet who is said- to have influenced French poets? We know what the French poets are, because they also wrote novels — or somebody with about the same name wrote them. Alas for Poe that, in addition to his other offences against respectability, he should have got a French reputation and become, not only a son of Marlowe, but a son of Villon and brother of Verlaine.**

And Poe, meanwhile, with these brilliant but somewhat defamatory reputations, lived, worked, and died in such intellectual solitude that Griswold could write immediately after his death that he left few friends. It is the unhappy truth. Those who promptly denied it, Graham and Willis, showed commendable good nature, but were both incapable of being Poe's friends in any warm sense. Whether they were at fault or Poe, the fact is that Poe distrusted one and was contemptuous of the other.

What writer besides Poe, whose life is copiously recorded and who lived to have his work known in three nations, has left no chronicles of notable friendships ? Think how the writers of England and France, with some exceptional outcasts, lived in circles of mutual admiration! Think how in America the New Englanders clustered together, how even the shy and reserved Hawthorne was rescued from a solitude that might have been morbid for the man and damaging to his work, by the consciousness that in Cambridge and Concord, in the rear of Fields's shop, were cultivated men who delighted to talk to him about his work, whose loyalty was gently critical and cherishing. Lafcadio Hearn — who has been compared to Poe —had friends whom he could not alienate by any freak of temper. And those friends encouraged him to self-expression in private letter and work of art.

Some such encouragement Poe received from J. P. Kennedy, a generous friend of young genius, and from the journalist, F. W. Thomas, whose admiration for Poe was affectionate and abiding. But among his intimates were few large natures, few sound judgments, to keep him up to his best. Long after his death, Poe was honored in Virginia as a local hero. The perfervid biography of him by Professor Harrison, of the University of Virginia, contrives to include all the great names and beautiful associations of the Old Dominion. But during his life Poe was not a favorite of the best families of Richmond. As well think of Burns as the child of cultivated Edinburgh, or of Whitman as the darling of Fifth Avenue. At the height of his career in New York, between the appearance of "The Raven" and the time when poverty and illness claimed him irrecoverably, Poe appears as a lion in gatherings of the literati. But, among them, his only affectionate friends were two or three women.

To the intellectual man who has no stalwart friends, who consumes his strength in a daily struggle against poverty and burns out his heart in vain pride, there remains another refuge, a home warmed with family loyalty, full of happy incentive to labor, able perhaps to cooperate with the genius of the household. Such refuge was not given to Poe. No man ever had a more cheerless place in which to set up his work-table. His wife was a child when he married her, and was still young when she died of lingering consumption. His aunt and mother-in-law, who no doubt did her best with the few dollars which "Eddie" put into her hands, was an ignorant woman and probably had no idea what the careful rolls of manuscript were about, beyond the fact that they sometimes fetched a bit of money. Poe would have been excusable if he had sought and found outside his home some womanly consolation of a finer intellectual quality than his wife and aunt were able to afford. His writings are graced with poetic feminine spirits that suggest vaguely the kind of soul with which he would have liked to commune. But he never found such a soul. He made several hysterical quests after swans, but they turned out geese, if not to him, certainly to the modern eye that chances to fall on their own memorials of the pursuit. None was of distinguished mind, and all were either innocent or prudent. If Poe, with his Gascon eloquence and compelling eye, rushed the fortress of propriety, nothing serious came of the adventure and nothing serious remains, — only trivial gossip, silly correspondence, and quite gratuitous defences. It is a Barmecide feast for hungry scandal.

What has just been written may seem a negative and deprecating comment on Poe's story. But it gives truly, I believe, the drab setting in which his work gleams. And by depressing the high false lights that have been hung about his head, we make more salient the virtue that was properly his, the proud independence of mind, the fixity of artistic purpose, the will which governed his imagination and kept it steadily at work in a poor chamber of life, creating beautiful things. However much or little we admire Poe's work, we must understand as a fact in biography that, from the first tales with which he emerged from obscurity to the half philosophical piece with which, the year before his death, he sought to capture the universe and astound its inhabitants, his writings are the product of an excellent brain actuated by the will to create. He was a finical craftsman, patient in revision. He did not sweep upward to the heights of eloquence with blind, undirected power. He calculated effects. His delicate instrument did not operate itself while the engineer was absent or asleep. Deliberate, mathematical, alert, he marshaled his talents; and when he failed, failed for lack of judgment, not for want of industry.

To labor for an artistic result with cool precision while hunger and disease are in the workshop; to revise, always with new excellence, an old poem which is to be republished for the third or fourth time in a cheap journal; to make a manuscript scrupulously perfect to please one's self, — for there is to be no extra loaf of bread as reward, the market is indifferent to the finer excellences, — this is the accomplishment of a man with ideals and the will to realize them. Let the most vigorous of us write in a cold garret and decide whether, on moral grounds, our persistent driving of our faculties entitles us to praise. Let us be so hungry that we can write home with enthusiasm about the good breakfast in a bad New York boarding-house; and after it is all over, let us imagine ourselves listening earthward from whatever limbo the moralists admit us to, and hearing a critic say that we have been untrue, not only to ourselves, but to our art. For so Dr. Goldwin Smith's ethical theory of art disposes of Poe, Poe who was never untrue to his art in his slenderest story, or lazy-minded in his least important criticism.

This confident man, who will measure the stars with equal assurance by the visions of poetry and the mathematics of astronomy, and set forth the whole truth of the universe in even, compact sentences such as no man can make by accident, lacks bedclothes to cover a dying wife — except the army overcoat which he had got at West Point sixteen years before. Says Trollope, the most self-possessed day-laborer in literature, "The doctor's vials and the ink-bottle held equal places in my mother's rooms. I have written many novels under many circumstances; but I doubt very much whether I could write one when my whole heart was by the bedside of a dying son. Her power of dividing herself into two parts, and keeping her intellect by itself, clear from the troubles of the world and fit for the duty it had to do, I never saw equalled. I do not think that the writing of a novel is the most difficult task which a man may be called upon to do; but it is a task that may be supposed to demand a spirit fairly at ease. The work of doing it with a troubled spirit killed Sir Walter Scott."

If Poe's work consisted of brilliant fragments, disconnected spurts of genius, the relation between his labors and his life as it is usually conceived would be easy to trace. His biography furnishes every reason why his work should be ill thought and confused; it does not sufficiently credit him with sturdy devotion to his task. That must be his merit as a man, and the ten volumes establish it. His tales may be "morbid," and his verses "very valueless." They required, to produce them, the sanest intelligence continuously applied.  On Poe's uneventful and meagre life there has been built up an apocryphal character, the centre of controversies kept awhirl by as strange a combination of prejudices and non-literary interests as ever vexed an author's reputation. Some of the controversies he made himself and bequeathed to posterity, for he was a child of Hagar.***

But the rest have been imposed on him by a world that loves art for talk's sake. Since he was a Virginian by adoption and in feeling, he has been tossed about in a belated sectionalism. Southerners have scented a conspiracy in New England to deprive him of his dues, even to keep him out of the Hall of Fame because he was not a northerner. Englishmen and Frenchmen, far from the documents, have redeemed his reputation from the neglect and miscomprehension of the savage nation where he had the misfortune to be born. Only last year Mrs. Weiss's "Home Life of Poe" threatened to become an international issue. It was to certain British admirers of Poe the banal and slanderous voice of America against the greatest of American writers. As has been said, the very newest fashion in biography, the pathological, makes Poe a star case and further confuses the facts. Echoes of neuropathological criticism find their way to American Sunday papers which serve Poe up as a neurotic, with melancholy portraits and ravens spreading tenebrous wings above the columns of type.

If Poe's spirit has not forgotten that in its earthly progress it perpetrated hoaxes, courted Byronic fame, advertised itself as an infant prodigy, made up adventures in Greece and France which its earthly tenement did not experience, took sardonic delight in mystifying the public, it must see a kind of grim justice in the game the world is playing with its reputation. Nevertheless, it is unfitting that a man who did little worth remembering but write books, who lived in bleak alleys and dull places, should be haled up and down the main streets of gossip; that a poet who was, as one of his critics says, all head like a cherub, should have volumes written about his physical habits.

The reason for Poe's posthumous misfortune it is worth while to examine, for an understanding of it is necessary as an introduction to any of the lives of Poe, and it lies at the very heart of the institution of biography. We have seen that Poe was a friendless man. Griswold so affirmed just after Poe had left, amid shadowy circumstances, a life that was none too bright to the eye of the moralist nor clear to the eye of the world. And Griswold proved his assertion, for he was by his own declaration not Poe's friend, and yet he was the appointed biographer and editor of the collected works. There is no other relation so strange, so unfortunate, in literary history as this

Griswold was an editor and anthologist of no mean ability. Upon one of his collections of poetry — now an interesting museum of antiquity where archaeologists may study the literature of ancient America — Poe made acerbating, and no doubt discriminating, comments in a lecture. The report of the lecture angered Griswold. Poe's printed commentary is favorable, and we do not know just what he said in the lecture. He apologized to Griswold, for he was alert to the advantage of his own appearance in later clusters of literary lights which Griswold might assemble. Once, after an absence from his office in Graham's Magazine, he returned to find Griswold at his desk. He resigned immediately, so the story goes, in one of his costly outbursts of pride. Yet he thought Griswold was his friend. He borrowed money from him, and when, the year before his death, he left New York for Richmond he wrote to Griswold appointing him literary executor. Griswold's letter in which he accepted the office must have been friendly, for there is something like unwitting testimony on this point. When Poe read the letter in Richmond, a young girl, Susan Archer Weiss, was with him and noted that he was pleased.

After Poe's death Griswold published a severe but not untrue article in the Tribune, the famous article signed " Ludwig." Willis and Graham came to Poe's defense in good spirit. Griswold, rather piqued than chastened, prefixed to the third volume of Poe's work his memoir, since unnecessarily suppressed. And long afterward appeared his letter to Mrs. Whitman, written just after the Tribune article. In that letter he says, " I was not his friend, nor was he mine." Therein lies Griswold's perfidy, and not in the memoir itself. For when, coming from one of the later lives of Poe, one turns in a heat of indignation to Griswold, one finds nothing very bad and little that is untrue. Griswold merely emphasized the wrong things, and in so doing he became a monster among biographers. Through him, the Muse of Biography violated one of the important laws of her dominion. This law prescribes that the best of a man's life shall be told fully, and told first.

When a man dies, his letters and papers are put into the hands of one who loves and admires him, or who at least has no reluctance to celebrate him. The work of the first biographer is thrown to the world, where it undergoes scrutiny and correction. The mark of commentators in time turns it gray, but the original ground is white. The thousands of human stories together make a vast whiteness. In the midst of this background a black official portrait, even though the blackness be lines of fact, becomes a libel. The Devil's Advocate occupies the place where God's Advocate is expected to speak. If the champion tells a dark tale, people think the truth must be darker still, for does not the champion put the best possible face on his hero? Proper tone is impossible to restore. Injustice is done irrevocably. What the friend admits the world doubly affirms.

The life-story that grows brighter with time is very rare. Joan of Arc is metamorphosed from a witch to a saint. Machiavelli is proved after centuries to have been not very "machiavellian." Bacon, another upholder of legal autocracy, is seen at last to have been a just and generous man, and not the figure which rising Puritanism made of him at the moment of his death and its triumph. But these are restorations of characters that flourished before the age when official biographies are looked for within a year or two of a man's death. Of the recently dead we are not yet scientific enough to tell the whole truth. The rights of friendship are recognized, and its duties taken for granted. If its support is withdrawn the structure is awry. One has only to remember Henley's protest against Balfour's Stevenson, Purcell's life of Cardinal Manning, and Froude's Carlyle, to be reminded how strong is the obligation upon the friend, or the one holding the friend's office, not to emphasize the hero's blemishes.

Yet Henley said nothing against Stevenson except that Balfour's portrait was too sugary to be a true image of a man. Purcell only showed that Manning played politics, disliked Newman, and was anxious about what posterity should think of him. Froude, so far as we can discover, now that we no longer make Carlyle an object of that kind of hero worship which he thought was good for us, said nothing damaging at all. He only protested too much in his prefaces that he was doing the right thing to draw Carlyle as he was. Yet, as late as 1900, I heard an editor of Carlyle say that Froude had blackened the Master.

Such men as Carlyle and Stevenson and Manning settle back amid any biographic disturbance. They knock malicious or incompetent biographers off their feet, and burst the covers of little books. It is the poor fellow with an unheroic soul that the biographer can confine and distort. It is the man of a middling compound of virtue and sin who can be sent down for a half century of misrepresentation by the hand of a treacherous friend. Biography, especially when it deals with the artist who has no part in the quarrels of creeds and politics, is wont to bear its hero along "with his few faults shut up like dead flowerets." Griswold startles the peaceful traffic by turning and running against the current of convention.

Later biographers have not served Poe by falling foul of Griswold. For he had the facts and is an able prosecuting attorney. And much harm has been done, too, by emotional souls who, as Mark Twain says of Dowden's Shelley, " hang a fact in the sky and squirt rainbows at it." The error of Griswold, and of Poe's defenders, is an error of spirit, the delusion that Griswold's "charges" are momentous. After Griswold the story of Poe becomes a weaving and tangling of very small threads of fact. Every succeeding biographer has to take his cue from a powerful man who cannot be disregarded; and each biographer, in order as a faithful chronicler to do his part to straighten the story out, must put rubbish in his book. Even Mr. Woodberry, whose Life is incomparably the best, shows the constraint imposed on him by wearisome problems, and loses his accustomed vitality and his essential literary enthusiasm.****

It is too much to hope that the nebular Poe will be dispelled and the Poe of controversy be laid. Perhaps one should not hope for this, because it may be that, even as the Shakespeare myth is a necessary concomitant of the poet's greatness, the mythic Poe is a measure of his fame, and to attempt to destroy it may have the undesirable effect of seeming to belittle Poe. Nevertheless Poe's centennial year, falling in an age of grown-up judgments, affords a good occasion for the world to cease confounding his magnificent fame with petty inquisitions and rhetorical defenses. If sudden cessation is impossible, we can at least hope that more and more the trivialities of his life may recede, and the supreme triumph of his art stand forth unvexed and serene.

[Following are the footnotes to Macy's article.]

* A special student of one abstruse subject assures me that, in that subject, Poe is the only modern writer of general culture who knows what he is talking about. As this specialist has not yet published his researches, I will not say what the subject is.

** The biographer's province ma; extend far enough into literary criticism to note a curious confusion of literary judgments with biographic. Colonel Higginson, in bis Life of Longfellow, says that" Poe took captive the cultivated bat morbid taste of the French public." The words " but morbid " are not only a singular indictment of France, but a more singular indictment of America, for Foe took captive the American reading public before France heard of him. Let us deliver Poe's work, if we cannot deliver his life, from provincial controversy. But even his work, accepted, individual, indisputable, is troubled by another biographic question — his debt to one Chivers. Chivers could not write poetry. Poe could. The debt is evident.

*** As late as 1895. fifty years after the event, Thomas Dunn English, writing from the uncontroversial atmosphere of the House of Representatives to Griswold's son, shoved that he still regarded as alive a quarrel almost as comic as Whistler's quarrel with Ruskin, though far less witty.

****I am sorry that I cannot see the revised edition of Mr. Woodberry's Life of Poe before sending this paper to press. No one who has not labored through the Poe bibliography can appreciate how fine and sound is Mr. Woodberry's work of twenty-five years ago. No doubt the revision has resulted in an ultimately satisfactory life of Poe.

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Poe has at last been enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Like Chinese tea that has been boxed and marked according to quality as "First chop," "Second chop" and so on, Poe has been inspected and labeled, and may now be supposed to pass current as strictly "First chop." That this consummation has been so long delayed may be accounted one of the strangest phenomena of literary history. The explanation is still far from being wholly clear. It may be worth while, therefore, before turning away from so important an event, to look once more at the facts of Poe's posthumous fame, a fame that has encountered such perverse, and to the minds of his fellow alumni of Virginia, as it appears, such inexplicable hindrances. 

The usual explanation of the antipathy that many undoubtedly feel towards Poe is that it is due to a series of actions executed by New England critics, actions which the milder defenders of Poe call prejudice, the more radical, conspiracy. As this theory has been repeatedly advanced, and is in many quarters implicitly accepted, it may be well to observe at the outset that it rests on foundations that are flimsy, if not wholly imaginary. Emerson called Poe "that jingle man." Are we to suppose that he was maliciously attacking Poe? The idea is exquisitely absurd. Nor was it likely that Emerson was merely repeating the ideas of others; his original independence of thought was not less vigorous than his honesty. Henry James referred to Poe's "very valueless verses." His phrase may have been tempted into extremes by the lure of alliteration: but Mr. James is not given to partisanship. Baudelaire, the French disciple of Poe, whose moral character was to Poe's as black is to light grey, inspired no prejudice in New England. Why should partisan prejudice be supposed to operate against the master when it does not attack the disciple? Most conclusive of all, though, is the fact that the same ballot that first excluded Poe from the Hall of Fame also excluded the New York novelist Cooper and the New England-New York poet Bryant, and included Lee! There was plainly no sectional prejudice at work. No, some other motive than sectional prejudice must be sought in explaining the opinions of the sturdy fellow countrymen of Longfellow, of Whittier, and of Hawthorne. 

Let us then look for a moment at the facts. Upon inspecting the literature about Poe written since his death, two facts become at once plain: first, that, except in the writing of a small minority of New England critics, Poe's literature has always been accepted as of the highest rank; second, that his personal character was, about the time of his death, generally assigned to the lowest rank, and that the public at large, unsatisfied with the verdict, have been discussing the matter with increasing interest ever since. These facts can be well illustrated by figures. The number of editions of a writer's work or of a part of his work is a fair index to popularity. By way of adopting a standard by which to measure popularity, we may take Longfellow, the most popular American poet, and compare the frequency of Longfellow editions with the frequency of Poe editions. The result is given in a table: 

1902-1905 inclusive.... Poe: 45 Longfellow: 68
1906-1909 inclusive...Poe: 39 Longfellow: 75 

The greatest number of Longfellow editions for any year of the second period (25) appeared in 1906, in anticipation of the Longfellow centenary in 1907. The Poe centenary in 1909 seems to have had no influence upon the number of editions.  Poe then in 1902 was almost as popular an author as Longfellow. Since then the editions of his works have decreased in number while the editions of Longfellow have increased. The decrease may perhaps be explained as due to other causes than a decreasing vogue; for one thing, Poe's works do not lend themselves to exploitation in picture books, as do Longfellow's. But it is plainly wrong to suppose that the recognition of Poe's work is just coming into its own. 

The other fact, that the personal interest in Poe as a man is increasing, may be similarly illustrated. Here again we may take Longfellow for comparison. The following table gives the articles that have been printed in popular magazines about the two authors. 

Before 1882... Poe: 25 Longfellow: 104
1882-1886 inclusive ...Poe: 21 Longfellow: 73
1887-1891 inclusive...Poe: 9 Longfellow: 10
1892-1896 inclusive...Poe: 18 Longfellow: 17
1897-1901 inclusive...Poe: 26 Longfellow: 12
1902-1906 inclusive...Poe: 25 Longfellow: 13
1907-Dec. 1, 1910...Poe: 60 Longfellow: 27 

During the last of these periods, that from 1907 to the present, both the Poe and the Longfellow centenary celebrations occurred. Both show an increase in public interest for this period, but the increase is much greater in the case of Poe. The Longfellow centenary brought out twelve articles, the Poe thirty-six. These figures bear out the contention that Poe's writing is not more recognized to-day than heretofore, but that Poe the man is being more and more discussed, and that such discussion was increasing before the Hall of Fame controversy, beginning in 1900, stirred the whole matter up afresh. 

The explanation of this phenomenon is not difficult, though in many details the matter is obscure. There has been, from the time when Poe sprang into fame to the present moment, a continuous and unrelenting discrimination made between the man and his work. The work has, with the exceptions mentioned, always been praised, the man violently attacked and as violently defended. During Poe's lifetime, he was highly praised. Tennyson called him the most original American genius, Victor Hugo the "'Prince of American literature." Lowell said that he might be "the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works" in America, if he did not sometimes mistake his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand. Even Griswold the notorious, repeating after Poe's death one of his short sketches of that author printed in the "Poets and Poetry of America." speaks of his "brilliant articles," says "His poems are constructed with wonderful ingenuity, and finished with consummate art," finds him one of the few magazine writers "who have any real skill in literary art." and quotes Willis concerning "The Raven:" "It is the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country, and is unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent sustaining of imaginative life." Can this be the Griswold we are taught to picture with horns and tail, the arch-fiend of the anti-Poe cult? 

There have, it is true, been dissenters besides Emerson and James, who have esteemed Poe's writing but little. An anonymous reviewer of the Stedman and Woodberry edition, writing in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1896, naively concludes that "Poe was far from being the literary mountebank he is generally pictured." John Macy, writing for the same magazine, December, 1908, attacks the French idea, presumably that of Barine and Lauvriere, that Poe was an "irresponsible genius scribbling immortality under vinous inspiration, or turning neuropsychopathic rhymes." Even Mr. Woodberry, the admirably impartial and sympathetic biographer of Poe, is doubtful about the moral effect of his writings. Baudelaire called Poe the martyr of a raw democracy; to which Mr. Woodberry replies [Atlantic Monthly, Dec, 1884] that a cult that flowered into the Fleurs du Mai must have had a foul root, and that he prefers raw democracy, even though the root in question be Poe. This illogical doctrine is repeated by Professor Barrett Wendell. Side by side, though, with Professor Wendell's treatment of Poe should be set his own remark, in finishing the "Book" in which he has discussed, among other writers, Irving, Cooper and Poe: "By the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, the literary impulse of the Middle States [Irving, Cooper and Poe, understand] had proved abortive. For the serious literature of America we must revert to New England."(!) More significant is a recent opinion expressed in the Edinburgh Review [Jan., 1910]. In the palace of imaginative literature is one haunted room. Some shun it, others are attracted. But it has a spell for all. It is the antechamber to the unknown. And above the door is the name of Poe. "His works will not always be approved, but we believe that they will always be read." 

These slightly or more markedly negative criticisms of Poe's writing are, however, exceptional. Moreover they are explainable. There is in Poe's work an alloy of melodrama, that pet vice of most great writers. This the average reader sees and readily understands, precisely as he understands the humor of George Ade's fables, or the morality of the "Psalm of Life," or the carefully emphasized sensations of the Sunday press. The finer qualities of Poe, the delicate satire, the heart-wringing pathos half hidden from a world he contemptuously despised, the exquisite workmanship, like that of a fine worker in mosaic, these and many other virtues are caviar to the general reader. And even by the reader of naturally good taste Poe is often misinterpreted and so made repulsive. Notice, for example, the illustrations by Mr. Frederick Coburn, contemplate the loathsome cadaver in a state of semi-putrefaction with the skin sunken and the black cat crouched upon its head: there you see the objection that many intelligent persons raise toPoe. That the "Black Cat" was a profound study of a mental state escapes such persons just as the fact fails to appear in the grossly carnal conception of Mr. Coburn. As has been observed, however, these objections are rare. For the most part Poe, as a writer, has been frankly admired. 

As a man he has been regarded with different sentiments. Perhaps Poe was himself in some measure responsible for this. Drunkenness even Puritan New England might have forgiven; New England, at precisely this time, was raving over the philosophy of the opium fiend Coleridge. But most of the persons whom Poe attacked could not forgive being called charlatan. And that was what Poe called them. "As a literary people," he wrote, "we are one vast perambulating humbug." Again, "Chicanery is, with us, a far surer road than talent to distinction in letters." He then refers to bribery and blackmail between critics and publishers to puff literary reputations, indulges in a few such phrases as "unadulterated quackery," "blustering arrogance," "bare-faced plagiarism," and ends with a few direct allusions: "Mr. Bryant is not all a fool. Mr. Willis is not quite an ass. Mr. Longfellow will steal [plagiarize], but, perhaps, he cannot help it (for we have heard of such things) and then it must not be denied that nil tetigitquod non ornavit." Amusing? Of course, it is amusing; and doubtless in good part true. That is precisely what they could not forgive. That it was in part true is evidenced by Lowell's strictures upon the grossly inflated reputations of most writers of the day. The real trouble probably lay in the fact that Poe never met but one man who was intellectually his equal; that was Lowell, and he only saw Lowell once. Most of the others he despised and ridiculed, and they naturally hated him in return with deadly enmity. And many of them were in places of power or influence. That Poe went too far with his irresponsible satire in other ways cannot be denied. For example, on one occasion he promised to read a poem in Boston, failed to write it in time, palmed off on the audience "Al Araaf" written many years before, and then under the influence of the champagne supper that followed, confessed the whole thing. The audience was polite, but disgusted. 

Poe's victims, though, had their revenge; they gratified to the full that lowest of human motives, the desire to "get even." Not only were all his foibles paraded forth and his virtues studiously ignored but the deliberately coined falsehoods set afloat have floated ever since, so that the mariner upon literary seas still encounters from time to time that strange and sinister flotsam and jetsam of scandal. And not only did Poe's enemies repeat these things, they taught their successors who never knew Poe to repeat them. The more Puritanic swallowed such statements with gusto, because they fell in with their predilections. For example, a writer in the Nation for March 25, 1875, writes, apparently in good faith: "He quarreled with every one who had a less indiscriminate admiration of him than Mr. Ingram has; was adopted by a wealthy man, whose money he wasted at wine and cards, and whose affections he alienated by all sorts of misconduct, and who finally forbade him his house. He attacked every literary man of eminence greater than his own with virulent and senseless abuse [this ineffable old donkey saw none of the wit or satire], and, though poor, had that sublime contempt for earning money which Mr. Ingram would call philosophic, perhaps, but which common-sense people in America call shiftlessness." There is the crux of the matter. He was shiftless; he was not a common-sense person. In addition to this defect there was a "Satanic" streak in Poe. While his Puritan contemporary Bryant was following Wordsworth, Poe was learning how to write by reading the "Satanic" Byron and Shelley. On the whole there was in him, his critics thought, something sinister. They also suspected him of being a hypocrite, and, like the virtuous people that Mark Twain mentions, gravely concluded that he was all the greater hypocrite for concealing the fact that he was one. 

This view of Poe was easily carried abroad, and the Edinburgh Review, in April, 1858, expressed the conviction that he was "one of the most worthless persons of whom we have any record in the world of letters." He was, according to this writer, idle, improvident, drunken, dissipated, treacherous, and ungrateful; he, in fact, combined "all the floating vices which genius had hitherto shown itself capable of grasping." Again, "The lowest abyss of moral imbecility and disrepute was never attained until he came." But why quote more of such stuff. Suffice it to say that these views had little effect upon Europe, and that the British instinct for fair play was proof against such perversions. In France, it is true, as late as 1897, was heard an echo of this, in an article by Arvede Barine, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1897. Poe, he says, when publicly denounced for drunkenness, "lied with the maladroitness of the criminal who loses his head when he finds himself discovered." Frenchmen, however, know Poe's own writings as few know them; and both the man and his work are certain of honest criticism at their hands.
This, in general outline, is the history of Poe's posthumous career. With the death of the last of his personal enemies, the personal abuse has ceased; and the false traditions to which it gave rise are rapidly disappearing before the rising light of truth. Among the symptoms of this we have the recent acceptance of the poet by the Hall of Fame. 

There is one other curious tradition of Poe which, though not directly connected with this subject, should perhaps not be passed over. In the article by Mr. Barine just mentioned, the vagueness of some of Poe's poetry is explained as due to alcoholism of the neuropsychopathic type. This view is repeated without dissent by M. Lauvriere in his book, "Edgar Poe." The vagueness is a feature of style learned from Shelley, whose usage Poe elsewhere follows. Moreover it was a conscious and intentional thing, as the poet explained in one of his letters. When he saw fit to be precise in his writing he surpassed in scientific accuracy of detail almost any writer of our language. Poe had enough of bona fide failings to answer for; but neuropsychopathic degeneration in his writing was not one of them. If this alcoholism was a pathological thing, it never, so far as can be determined, gave rise to any literary symptom. 

At the present time Poe's fame seems secure. Though not evidenced by a great profusion of popular editions, the permanent respect he commands is evidenced by the continual reappearance of his work in standard forms, in large library editions, at least three of which have recently appeared in this country, in collections of standard literature designed for the class room, in the appearance of editions of a part or the whole of his works, copiously in England, Germany, and France, and less copiously in Sweden, in the Czechish country, in Italy, Denmark, Greece, South America, and Australia. In five representative collections of world literature in English, German, and Italian, Poe is the only author who appears in all five.
Abroad, curiously enough, they frequently do not regard Poe as exactly American. Mr. Esme Stuart, writing in the English review, Nineteenth Century for July, 1893, finds him half English. In France they had adopted his tales at least three years before his death, and even at that early date were quarreling in the law courts over the right to publish them. Baudelaire a year or two later discovered in Poe the embodiment of his own literary ideas, and thereafter devoted much of his life to translating his works. Even the sections of America, now that prejudice against the man has disappeared, are contending for his glory. Boston claims his birth-place, Baltimore his paternal family, Virginia the credit for such early training as he did not acquire in England; while New York, as his home at the height of his fame, confidently regards him as a New Yorker. Truly Poe is, to-day, all things to all men, despite the fact that during most of his life he was homeless and often friendless. 

The other persons who were elected to the Hall of Fame at the last election were Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Fenimore Cooper, Phillips Brooks, William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, Andrew Jackson, John Lothrop Motley, Roger Williams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frances E. Willard. Among the electors with whom the choice rests are, as alumni of the University of Virginia will recall with interest, two Virginians, Edwin A. Alderman, President of the University, and Richard Heath Dabney, historian and Dean of the Graduate School of the University.

Halloween With Edgar

What is Halloween without Edgar Allan Poe?  What is Edgar Allan Poe without absurd, insulting apocryphal stories about his drinking habits?

This little anecdote made the rounds of the newspapers during October of 1893. Consider the combined Halloween/booze elements as something of a Poe Apotheosis.

An Early Poe Memorial Poem

The following poem appeared in the "New York Tribune" a few weeks after that paper published Rufus W. Griswold's infamous obituary of Poe. These lines are clearly a direct rebuttal to Griswold's libelous eulogy.

While these anonymous verses may not be great poetry, they do stand as a heartfelt tribute to the deep effect that Poe's work had on many of his contemporaries--even ones who, like this unknown poet, probably never laid eyes on the man. On this, the anniversary of Poe's death, it's good to remember that despite the popular current-day legend, there were many people in his time who loved Poe and mourned his passing. There have always been those of us who "feel in Poe we had a friend."

It is not true, "the Poet had no friends."
There's not a hamlet nor a way-side cot
Throughout the land, where misery has dwelt,
But furnished him a friend--warm, heart-felt friend.
'Tis true they did not swell the air with praise
And loud-toned, fulsome acclamation,
(Like purse-made friends, who never tell the heart
Their friendship,) for his soul seemed theirs--
His lips and pen their speaking oracles--
His harp, their tale of wrong and suffering.
There's not a spirit crushed by time and grief,
And silent in its heart-wrecked misery,
(A looker-on, midst homage ill-deserved,)
But feels in Poe he had a friend, and Poe
A friend in him.

There is a class of men who feel some wrong
In every freak of circumstance and chance--
But these were not his friends. His were the souls
Who, through the live-long day and darkling night,
Conjure no wrong--but writhe with it, and pride,
Till, broken-down in spirit, Death relieves.
It may have been that on thy youthful brow,
Shaded by curls and love, and in the eye
Nature had written Genius--Child of Song!
If this--and dark obscurity were his,
We have a key to wrongs most exquisite;
And in the wreck of hopes, when cheeks have paled
And curls lie matted o'er the sunken eye,
No wonder we should see Poe's world-sick friend
Striving in silence to let the soul go free.
It may have been that chilling poverty
Had stepped between his heart and her he loved,
Changing his crimson hopes to dark despair,
Freezing the morning of his look and life--
If so--I pledge you he became Poe's friend
For lending him his Annabel, and song.
Ah! many a friend, around the grave of Poe,
Will help to plant the willow o'er his head,
Shading his harp and him, low sleeping there;
And with a lynx-eyed jealousy, will watch
And shield from weaker pens his memory.
His was a heart too big for mortal frame;
And in that soul that, rearing up dark things
For men to stare at, turned his gaze to Heaven,
When o'er the quiet Earth deep twilight hang,
Shading the face of nature (that the light
Her sleep might not disturb,) we see a star
That rises in the firmament of thought
So far above its fellows, that we start
To know it had a habitation here,
And fear 'tis sacrilege in hearts like ours
To feel we are Poe's Friends!
-Chicago, Oct. 1849

Poe and Charles Dickens

Poe and Dickens were two very different writers. They spent their lives in separate countries, only met on two brief occasions, and their known correspondence is scanty and impersonal. However, their careers still intersected in various significant ways--which seems only fitting for two of the most renowned writers of the 19th century.

Poe’s interest in Dickens’ work began very early. In his first published mention of the English author, a review of “Watkins Tottle and Other Sketches” in the June 1836 issue of the “Southern Literary Messenger,” he referred to Dickens’ stories as “old and highly esteemed acquaintances.” He went on to describe the author as a “far more pungent, more witty, and better disciplined writer of sly sketches, than nine-tenths of the Magazine writers of Great Britain.”

In the November “Messenger” Poe said “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” (which had just appeared in a pirated American edition) “fully sustained” his earlier glowing opinion of Dickens. “The author possesses nearly every desirable quality in a writer of fiction, and has withal a thousand negative virtues…we can only express our opinion that his general powers as a prose writer are equaled by few.”

Poe gave a brief review of “Nicholas Nickleby” in the December 1839 “Burton’s Magazine.” He called it perhaps Dickens’ best work to date, declaring boldly, “Charles Dickens is no ordinary man, and his writings must unquestionably live.”

Two years later, Poe reviewed “Master Humphrey’s Clock” and “The Old Curiosity Shop” for the May 1841 issue of “Graham’s Magazine.” As befitted his increased maturity as a critic, Poe’s analysis was more detailed and judgmental than his earlier reviews. When taking note of the somewhat muddled aspects of the works, he went so far as to suggest that “…the rumors in respect to the sanity of Mr. Dickens, which were so prevalent during the publication of the first numbers of the work, had some slight, some very slight foundation of truth.” He suspected that some of the narratives “were probably sent to press to supply a demand for copy,” and asserted that “Mr. Dickens did not precisely know his own plans when he penned the five or six first chapters of the ‘Clock.’”

When focusing on “The Old Curiosity Shop,” Poe wrote a lengthy paragraph itemizing its various shortcomings, including the complaint that Dickens endowed his characters “with a warmth of feeling so very rare in reality. Above all, we acknowledge the death of Nelly is excessively painful; that it leaves a most distressing oppression of spirit upon the reader, and should, therefore, have been avoided.”

It’s very interesting indeed to observe a tender-hearted Poe chastising Dickens for his grimness.

Although Poe found many minor details to criticize, he saw much to praise in the work’s overall conception. He wrote, “The plot is the best which could have been constructed for the main object of the narrative.” The depiction of love between grandfather and grandchild was “indeed most beautiful. It is simple and severely grand. The more fully we survey it, the more thoroughly are we convinced of the lofty character of that genius which gave it birth.”

He went on to extol the “imagination” and “originality,” displayed in “The Old Curiosity Shop.” “[Imagination] is the one charm all potent, which alone would suffice to compensate for a world of more error than Mr.Dickens ever committed.”

In the May 1 issue of the “Saturday Evening Post,” Poe examined the first few installments of “Barnaby Rudge,” which was then being published as a serial. His predictions for how the story would play out were not terribly accurate. (He would later blame this on Dickens’ shortcomings as a novelist: “We did not rightly prophesy,” he later wrote in his most delightfully Poeish manner, “yet, at least, our prophecy should have been right.”)

The February 1842 “Graham’s” contained Poe’s long, highly detailed, and not altogether flattering analysis of the now-completed “Rudge.” Obviously realizing his criticisms might be unpopular, he defended himself in advance with the ingenious assertion that fault-finding was the highest form of flattery:

“Those who know us will not, from what is here premised, suppose it our intention, to enter into any wholesale laudation of ‘Barnaby Rudge.’ In truth, our design may appear, at a cursory glance, to be very different indeed. Boccalini, in his ‘Advertisements from Parnassus,’ tells us that a critic once presented Apollo with a severe censure upon an excellent poem. The God asked him for the beauties of the work. He replied that he only troubled himself about the errors. Apollo presented him with a sack of unwinnowed wheat, and bade him pick out all the chaff for his pains. Now we have not fully made up our minds that the God was in the right. We are not sure that the limit of critical duty is not very generally misapprehended. Excellence may be considered an axiom, or a proposition which becomes self-evident just in proportion to the clearness or precision with which it is put. If it fairly exists, in this sense, it requires no farther elucidation. It is not excellence if it need to be demonstrated as such. To point out too particularly the beauties of a work, is to admit, tacitly, that these beauties are not wholly admirable. Regarding, then, excellence as that which is capable of self-manifestation, it but remains for the critic to show when, where, and how it fails in becoming manifest; and, in this showing, it will be the fault of the book itself if what of beauty it contains be not, at least, placed in the fairest light. In a word, we may assume, notwithstanding a vast deal of pitiable cant upon this topic, that in pointing out frankly the errors of a work, we do nearly all that is critically necessary in displaying its merits. In teaching what perfection is, how, in fact, shall we more rationally proceed than in specifying what it is not?”

Although Poe had many flattering comments about the completed work, he faulted Dickens’ handling of the plot, as well as the general construction of the novel.

The names of Dickens and Poe were next linked through a minor literary guessing-game. In October 1842, "American Notes," Dickens’ account of his visit to the United States, was released. His critical, if not mocking, views of the country unsurprisingly caused American publications to return his disparagement, with interest. One of the most vigorous rebuttals to Dickens’ work was a pamphlet called “English Notes,” which was published under the pseudonym of “Quarles Quickens” two months later. For all its patriotic fervor, it was an inferior piece of work, and soon vanished nearly without a trace. It was forgotten by all except the most passionate collectors of Dickensiana until 1912, when an eccentric literary scholar named Joseph Jackson attributed the authorship of “English Notes” to Poe, largely on the basis that Poe first published “The Raven” under the name “Quarles.”

As so often happens when researchers fall in love with their own theories, Jackson was forced to essentially turn to writing fiction to support his argument. In March of 1842, Poe and Dickens met in Philadelphia, where the former secured the latter’s promise to help him secure an English publisher. Jackson took this snippet of fact to assume that, when Poe failed to hear from Dickens for some months afterwards, he became so embittered that, a la Griswold, he was inspired to take a savage literary revenge for this presumed neglect. When Poe did hear from Dickens in November, the Englishman apologized for his delay in answering and proved that he had tried—albeit unsuccessfully—to find Poe a publisher.  Unfortunately, it was too late to recall the insulting pamphlet. However, Dickens’ reference to Poe as an “unknown writer” so offended Poe personally that he used the name “Quarles” when publishing “The Raven” as a way of publicly showing Dickens what he really thought of him.

To summarize what was a long and rather tiresome debate: Jackson claimed to see in “English Notes” similarities with Poe’s known writings that eluded virtually everyone else except—as one observer suggested—book dealers and collectors hoping to increase the value of their otherwise worthless copies of “English Notes.” (One notable exception is Poe biographer Mary E. Phillips. In her 1926 “Edgar Allan Poe: The Man,” she expended many characteristically rambling and incoherent pages in arguing that Poe did indeed write “English Notes”--and several other relevant anonymous articles besides. Unfortunately, all she proved was that as a historian, she had a good deal more energy than sense.)

Although the idea that Poe was the author of “English Notes” has long been dismissed, it is true that at one point Poe fancied he had a grudge against Dickens. In January 1844 a review of Rufus Griswold’s anthology “Poets and Poetry of America” appeared in London’s “Foreign Quarterly Review.” The anonymous critic thought little of the collection as a whole, and personally offended Poe by suggesting he was a mere imitator of Tennyson. For someone with Poe’s obsession about plagiarism, this slur on his own originality was extremely irritating.

Poe believed Dickens was the author. He wrote James Russell Lowell that it was denied that Dickens wrote the review, “but, to me, the article affords so strong internal evidence of his hand that I would as soon think of doubting my existence.”

We now believe that Poe was wrong in his assertion that Dickens was responsible for the article that so outraged him (although the author was likely Dickens’ close friend John Forster.) In any case, whatever Poe may have privately thought about the Englishman, it did not affect his critical acumen. He remained as supportive of Dickens’ writings as ever.

Soon after Poe moved to New York in the spring of 1844, he sent a series of seven “letters” to the “Columbia Spy,” published under the title “Doings of Gotham." In his May 27 "letter" Poe compared Bulwer-Lytton's upcoming visit to America with Dickens' tour two years before. “The Gothamites,” he wrote sardonically, “not yet having made sufficient fools of themselves in their fete-ing and festival-ing of Dickens, are already on the qui vivi to receive Bulwer in a similar manner. If I mistake not, however, the author of ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’ will not be willing ‘to play Punch and Judy’ for the amusement of the American rabble…When I spoke of Bulwer’s probably refusing to do what Dickens made no scruples of doing, I by no means intended a disparagement of the latter. Dickens is a man of far greater genius than Bulwer.”

The most famous link between these two literary giants is suggested by Poe’s final review of “Barnaby Rudge.” He regretted that the title character’s pet raven was not used to its fullest. “Its croaking might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama. Its character might have performed, in regard to that of the idiot, much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air.”

Yes, it is generally acknowledged that Dickens’ ghastly, grim, and ancient Grip, prone to croaking “Nobody” at ominous moments, provided a germ of suggestion for Poe’s even more famous bird--one of the most felicitous examples in literature of one great artist unwittingly providing inspiration to another.
It is curious that the Poe/Dickens connection essentially ended there. Poe never reviewed Dickens’ subsequent writings again, and there is no evidence he read them. It is as if, after “The Raven,” he had no further interest in his contemporary.

On Dickens’ side, his attitude was even more unfortunately indifferent. He seemed unfamiliar with Poe’s body of work, and while his personal attitude towards Poe was far from unfriendly, he showed no interest in pursuing their brief acquaintance.

Perhaps, however, Dickens had a deeper regard for Poe than we know. It was said that during his second visit to America in 1868, he took the trouble to look up Poe’s ever-beleaguered aunt/mother-in-law Maria Clemm, and “generously entreated her acceptance of one hundred and fifty dollars with the assurance of his sympathy.”

(Image of Dickens via NYPL Digital Gallery; Barnaby Rudge and Grip by Fred Barnard c. 1870 via Wikipedia.)