Text: Sherwin Cody, “Poe's Contribution to American Literary History,” The Dial (Chicago, IL), vol. XXXV, September 16, 1903, pp. 161-162

[page 161, column 1, continued:]

POE'S CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY.

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If we may judge from the new editions of Poe that have recently been or are about to be put upon the market, we may reasonably conclude that Poe's day has at last arrived, or at least is within sight. Let us, therefore, once more examine his literary history and see what ideas he has really contributed to the world's stock.

To the casual reader, Poe is a sort of Mephistopheles, with human weaknesses, who created that weird poem “The Raven” and wrote the popular detective story “The Gold-Bug.” One is pure genius, unexplained and unexplainable; the other, clever but somewhat cheap legerdemain.

To the more careful and thoughtful student, Poe offers a bundle of fragments, which afford abundant evidence of genius, but are so slight and scattered, so imperfect (except in a few instances), that it is impossible to accord their author a very high place or a very lasting reputation. Not only is his work fragmentary, but it is disfigured by extravagance and folly of the more pitiable kind.

But now, more than fifty years after Poe's death and nearly a hundred after his birth, we are called upon by the Poe enthusiast to reéxamine the records, and see if we have not been misled by a series of conditions, natural but hostile to appreciation of his true worth.

None can deny that there is some truth in the statement that the Literary Powers have been hostile to Poe. Poe attacked Longfellow violently, denied Hawthorne's “originality,” finally turned against Lowell, and included all the New England writers in his sneers at “Frogpondium.” Irving and Bryant, moreover, according to Poe, were not as great as they ought to have been. Ina word, he set himself against all that we have learned to value and consider in American literature.

It was hard for any friend of Longfellow to be an enthusiastic admirer of Poe. Poe seems to force everyone to take sides, — and when sides have been taken, we have Poe on one side and [column 2:] every other literary man of eminence on the other. Professor Woodberry, whose biography of Poe has contributed more to our knowledge of the man than anything else that has been written, manifestly dislikes Poe. And what critic but has accepted with a smile Lowell's epigrammatic characterization,

All this has been like a wall of ice about any attempt to examine Poe in the only way in which any great author can be fairly examined, namely, with the enthusiasm of a lover who is likewise a thoroughly intelligent and just critic. Poe has had his devoted friends, it is true; but for the most part they have not been endowed with the highest critical ability.

But we have now a younger generation, owning no thralldom to the New England writers, and among them a number of keen critical minds. Here, then, is work for them. Let us outline, briefly, three leading points of the inquiry upon which they must enter.

1. Poe was a most accomplished literary artist. He had a skill that he had learned by patient study and practice. This is clearly shown by the improvement he made in revising his poems and tales. What a world of difference, for instance, do we find between “A Pean” of 1831 and “Lenore” of 1843, though one is but the developed form of the other! Poe never revised but to improve, and he was an habitual reviser of all his work. Have we not here, then, a conscious literary artist (whose genius none can deny), with methods we might study, with the closest attention, for the critical principles they would reveal?

Poe's literary history in this respect is interesting. He published his first volume of poems in 1827, the same year and at the same age when Tennyson published his contributions to “Poems by Two Brothers”; and his volumes of 1829 and 1831 correspond closely with Tennyson's early volumes of about the same dates. Clearly the first two volumes are altogether experimental; but in the third (1831) we find such gems as “ To Helen.” From this time on, Poe never attempted a serious poem without making a pronounced artistic success, with the single exception of the dramatic poem “ Politian,” which was a further experiment such as “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf” had been. What other great poet, after he had once learned his art, practised it so rigorously? Tennyson may be regarded as almost the only other one.

After the volume of poems of 1831, which contains proof that Poe had really mastered the poetic art, he turned his attention to short story writing. We hear nothing of him for two years. Then, in 1833, he appears as the prize winner in the “Baltimore Visiter” contest, and he has on hand at least half a dozen stories of the first order.

The French would doubtless accept Poe as the father of the art of short story writing in its modern development. In his work we find a genus quite different from the narrative tales that had prevailed until his day. He begins a story with an essay on [page 162:] some peculiarity of the human mind, and then he uses his dramatic plot to illustrate it. In his review of Hawthorne, he explains the principle analytically:

Of course Poe means “in the novel” of the great English writers, such as those of Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, each with its two or three hundred thousand words, rambling along a path the end of which not even the author himself could see.

2. A phrase in the paragraph quoted above suggests another point for our study of Poe. He speaks of “him who contemplates it with a kindred art.” If this means anything, it means that the reading public must be educated in the principles of literary art if artistic creations are to have any value.

There have been few hitherto to point out Poe's devotion to and permanent interest in the American reading public. While English and French writers have lamented bitterly that Poe was not born somewhere, anywhere, not in America, we find in Poe's own writing not one word of complaint, not one expression of a wish that he had been, or might be, anything but an American.

His magazine project, to which he devoted himself so strenuously throughout his life, — was not that much more than an ambitious desire to make money? Poe's real passion was to establish a periodical that would educate the American reading public critically to appreciate the best in literature, since he believed that only with such an educated audience could the best works of literary art be produced. No other American writer ever devoted himself so unselfishly and passionately and persistently to so noble an artistic cause. Poe justly accuses Longfellow of literary indolence in “Hyperion,” a novel totally at variance with the literary principle of unity enunciated by Poe in the paragraph previously quoted. He says:

And he ends his review sadly, — “We are indignant that he [Longfellow] too has been recreant to the good cause.” Poe was faithful unto death. [column 2:]

3. Poe was first poet, then story-writer and educator of the reading public; finally, toward the close of his life, he turned his attention toward a great scientific subject, — rather, toward the substance of all science, — a conception of the totality of the universe. Such scientific stories as “Hans Pfaal” and “The Conversation of Charmion and Eiros” are light; and while they serve their purpose, they are somewhat fanciful. In “Eureka” Poe made a profoundly serious effort, which has never been properly studied, and indeed has usually been looked on as a curiosity in the literary garret, not unlike the flying machine of Darius Green.

In studying this side of Poe's literary history, we must bear in mind, first, that Poe was not a scientist, but a literary man, and “Eureka” he specifically calls a “prose poem.” When he says it is “Truth,” he does not mean, as Professor Woodberry supposes he does, that he believes himself a great scientist and metaphysical thinker, but rather that he feels the sublimity of his subject and has studied it with the serious reverence which Truth requires. There are various kinds of truth, and the truth Poe aims at is of a literary, not a scientific, character, — that is, it is touched with imagination and sentiment. Whether Poe was successful or not in “Eureka,” he at any rate gives us an ideal of loftiness and immensity as the proper subject-matter of literature, and a hint as to how the plodding investigations of science may be utilized for the most ideal purposes.

Science has made such immense strides since Poe's day that we cannot hold him responsible for any inaccuracies or shortcomings in statements of scientific truths; but the present writer believes that the thoughtful student wili find in “ Eureka” the germs of that modern philosophy which has fully reconciled the material and the spiritual, discovering in mind, matter, God, and man, an unassailable Unity. In any case, the method of thought, the poetic conception, can never be affected by our changing knowledge, for they belong to the permanence, the immortality, of genius.

We have not yet exhausted Poe. There has been but little really sympathetic study of him as yet, and therefore no real or permanently valuable comprehension of him. Curious circumstances have retarded his vogue. Now that those circumstances have passed away, we may look forward with renewed hope of his finding his true place in our literary history.

SHERWIN CODY.