Text: Theodore Watts, “Edgar Poe,” Athenaeum (London, UK), whole no. 2549, September 2, 1876, p. 306, col. 1

[page 306, column 1, continued:]

EDGAR POE.

I HAVE read Mr. Ingram's letter with considerable interest. Now that the subject of Edgar Poe and his works is on the tapis again, I wish that some one could say whence arose the extraordinary talk that was current in London some years ago, and which often got into print, about ‘The Raven's’ being an adaptation from the Persian! The most definite form the story took was this: Mr. Lang — Mr. “Mofussilite” Lang, according to a paragraph in Tait's Magazine — heard ‘The Raven’ for the first time repeated by a friend, and cried out, “Hallo! that's very good Persian;” and then quoted the original. The story is at least curious. But was Poe, as has been said, a Persian scholar? As to the originality of ‘The Raven,’ surely no creature but Edgar Poe could ever have conceived it, as none certainly could have executed it. Indeed, after all that has been said about his dispute with Longfellow, and his imitation of Mrs. Browning, the only piece of direct plagiarism that can, as far as I know, be brought against his poems, is in those oft-quoted lines in ‘Eulalie’: —

Striking as is the use of the adjective stagnant, as descriptive of a tide, many will be distressed to learn that it is not so original as it seems, but was suggested apparently by a still more striking use of the same adjective in the ‘Rejected Addresses’: —

But, with regard to his prose stories, each one of which has a most striking motif, it would be surprising indeed if we did not, now and then, come upon narratives which he must have used as suggestions. I hope Mr. Ingram will forgive me for saying that, with all my admiration of Poe's astonishing powers, I cannot agree with him that Mr. Mudford's story in Blackwood, called ‘The Iron Shroud,’ was not read by Poe, and turned by him into ‘The Pit and the Pendulum, with the Pcelike additional terrors of heated walls and loathsome pit.

Again, take the narrative of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym,’ and compare it with the Scottish story of ‘Allan Gordon,’ — with the “spectre bark” of Coleridge's ‘Ancient Mariner,’ — and with a very remarkable story, called ‘The Lonely Man of the Ocean,’ which appeared in the Monthly Magazine, No. LXL, four years before Poe's story came out in the Southern Literary Messenger, and you will see at once the suggestions for ‘Arthur Gordon Pym,’ and the way in which they crystallized into new forms in Poe's mind.

Yet, any one who should from this infer that Poe's genius was not one of the most original that has ever expressed itself in our literature, would be a poor psychologist indeed; and I am glad to see that he has begun to tell his stories again, like a new writer, in La République des Lettres, where ‘L’Enterrement Prématuré’ is concluded this week.

THEODORE WATTS.