Text: Edward Everett Hale, Jr., “Edgar Allen [[Allan]] Poe,” The Reader, vol. V, no. 4, March 1905, pp. 487-490

[page 487:]

“Et tout le reste est littérature.” Such is the closing utterance of the “Art Poétique” of Paul Verlaine. I think perhaps Poe would have agreed to it, if not to a good deal that preceded. But it is the hardest lesson to learn, to leave the “‘literary” part on one side and get the real thing.

There is much literature about Poe — fact, gossip, problem, criticism, opinion. Was he really dissipated? What are the rights between him and Griswold? Did he get ideas from Tieck? Could he read German? Did he have a hundredth part of the omniscience which he exhibited? Did he borrow of Chivers, or Chivers from him? Is he, or Hawthorne, the great master of the short story? Did he really write “The Raven,” as he said he did? Did he write it at Fordham or somewhere else in New York City? Who was the person who suggested “Annabel Lee”? What are all the variations in all the texts? Is he right in his idea that a poem must be short? And so on: each question might be swelled to a dozen and the labor of a lifetime's leisure provided?

But the thing to do with Poe is to put [column 2:] these things aside and to aim to get his very best and greatest things, at first, and to make them entirely one's own. This is the thing to do with any poet, but the temptation to do something else is not always so great as with Poe. His life is full of “questions” that have but slight connection with his work, and his work is full of interesting things that have but slight connection with his best.

Poe's best was his poetry. He wrote some keen and suggestive criticism, and also he wrote many remarkable stories. He might have a place in the literature of the world by virtue of the first, and would certainly by virtue of the second. But he himself felt that his poetry was the real thing, and people nowadays agree with him.

One would not neglect those wonderful tales; indeed no one is likely to do so. Poe wrote many: some were trivial things, — satires, burlesques, hoaxes, descriptions, sketches. But some were powerful stimulants either to intellectual curiosity or to the sensitive emotion. The brain and the heart, — Poe was great in both. “The Murders in the [page 488:] Rue Morgue” gives us the surprises of clever analysis and argument. “The Fall of the House of Usher” arouses and excites that part of us that feels in mystery, even in awe or terror, a release from a conventional humdrum. “The Gold Bug” gives us both. What the mind could grasp, that Poe loved to hold and comprehend and explain. What was beyond the reaches of the mind he loved to apprehend in silence and to suggest by romantic figure and circumstance. So he wrote detective stories, real and imaginative, and those tales of mysterious existence and communication of which science can give no account, like “Ligeia,” “The Assignation,” “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Further he went and aroused feelings of terror and awe, from no feeling of tragedy but simply from a pleasure in those things, like “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Black Cat.” And he wrote also tales of mere adventure, sometimes of a scientific form, like “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” sometimes with a mysterious turn, like “The MS. Found in a Bottle.” He was, in fact, a master of the short story: knew it in others, as Hawthorne, and could make it himself. No one is likely to forget that about Poe, or to need any introduction to it.

Still he was greatest as a poet. The essential Poe is in his poetry, rather than in his troubled life; or in his criticism, or even in his tales; nor is it in all his poems, for though he wrote only half a hundred, yet even of this small number hardly a half are worth still reprinting, and of these few but half a dozen give us the poet at his best. If, however, one can know these few fully, appropriate them, make them absolutely one's own, one has a poetic possession of great purity.

Poe's poetic ideal was beauty. “In the widest and noblest sense, he was a poet. He comprehended, moreover, the true character, the august aims, the supreme majesty and dignity of the poetic sentiment. The proper gratification of the sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of Beauty.” Poe wrote this, although it was not of himself, but of the fantastic Ellison in “The Landscape Garden.” What were the novel forms of beauty that Poe created?

He was a lyric poet: the thing he had to [column 2:] express was his own mood, thought, or feeling. Sometimes he tried to express something else — as in “Tamerlane,” ‘’Politian,” “Al Aaraaf” — but he was never quite successful unless some mood possessed him.

He had two ways of expressing his mood. The first, in which he was least successful, was the simplest; it consisted in telling as directly as was consistent with poetic form and manner how he felt and what he thought. As he said himself, “in the mad pride of intellectuality” he “maintained the power of words — denied that ever a thought arose within the human brain beyond the utterance of the human tongue.” And in the poem from which that statement is taken (“To —— ”) he says that he has feelings (“unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thoughts’) which he can not utter. It was true: many of the poems addressed to women quite fail to give us the thing he wished to express. He had tried the method in his earlier lyrics (“Poems of Youth”), now mostly unread. It was in another wise that he succeeded. He succeeded only when he could express his feeling in some striking form. That seems on the face of it a more poetical way of writing: poetry is not science, and does not often deal in clear-cut intellectualities.

Among Poe's earlier poems is one that he never surpassed. “To Helen” is said by tradition to have been written at the age of fourteen, but it is hard to imagine how a boy of that age could ever have had the experience indicated — it seems to me necessitated — by the poem. Read it and you will have an exquisite expression of the saving delight and power of classic art. It is romantic in form, but its romance may be the romance of classicism, the romantic charm of the colored statue, of the painted Parthenon, of the singers of the Cloud-choruses in particolored robes. How could a boy of fourteen have known the contrast between classic beauty and romantic wonder? It may be that he had merely been reading Keats; but the explanation is a historical matter and not a matter of poetry, and therefore unimportant for the moment. The thing of importance is that the beautiful figure may express for us the delightful and consoling spell of beauty after the extravagances and errors of various sensations. [page 489:]

Very early did Poe strive for that beauty which, as he later said, excites by elevating the soul to a vision of what it could not otherwise gain.

The ideal of classic beauty is not our common idea of Poe, but classic or romantic he does not seem to have appreciated at once the success of his poetic method. Perhaps he never did appreciate it; he wrote once or twice on his modes of composition but never said a word of this one. As time went on, however, he found in it the means to his greatest success. First he deserted the pure lyric and created a number of romantic figures, expressive of intense perception but without further significance. Such are half a dozen poems that appeared in the volume of 1831. Like “To Helen,” in the same volume, even if written before, they create figures, but the figures have no further significance. “Israfel” has, perhaps, a thought, but “The City in the Sea” is a pure picture. Nor could we attach further meaning, even if we would, to “The Sleeper,” or “Lenore,” or “The Valley of Unrest.” These poems may be symbolic, but no one has even conjectured what they symbolize, and it is probable that they symbolize nothing that can be otherwise expressed, — that is one of the privileges of Beauty, to express nothing but itself.

But as years went by Poe became more definite. In his tales he sometimes used a poem as an additional instrument to fill out the harmony. So in “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”; “The Conquerer [column 2:] Worm” and “The Haunted Palace” have certainly a wider significance than their subject only. So has “Dreamland.”

At first, however, he employed his means too obviously. “The Haunted Palace” is almost an allegory in its presentation of the ruin of a beautiful intellect. “The Conquerer Worm” mingles the idea and the figure under which the idea is expressed, so that one gets but a suggestion of either. “Dreamland” is detailed in its picture, but very vague in the idea that the picture is meant to convey.

A year or so afterward Poe wrote “The Raven.” When we come to it directly from these poems in which Poe has clearly some thought or idea which he presents in poetic, even symbolic form, we may be allowed to imagine that along with the absolute form of “The Raven” went vaguely conceived ideas. It is certainly full of moments which we know otherwise were, with Poe, moments of romantic intensity.

The opening of a door was to Poe a romantic moment; in the “House of Usher” the opening of a door precedes the crisis. Here it precedes nothing — but is only the more intense thereby. So “the shadow that lies floating on the floor” will remind one of the fateful shadow in “Ligeia.”* These are the intense moments of romance when the heart stops a moment and we taste an instant's immortality. They are themselves and not symbols; they have no significance. Perhaps the whole poem is like them. But then perhaps it is not, — the idea of the mind tortured by unavailing but remembered passion, seeking to lose itself in the cold ocean of thought, and being recalled to the superior power of the heart by an accident of which the grotesqueness is lost in the emotion, — this is something too like what we know of Poe to be sure that it was not in his mind when he wrote “The Raven.”

In “Ulalume,” also, Poe found a form for a mood, and that mood his most characteristic. [page 490:] In truth he had the symbol already in a more obvious form. In “Dreamland” we have Titanic woods and dismal barns haunted by ill angels and ghouls, wherein he who walks meets with memories of the past, “white-robed forms of friends long given in agony to Earth and Heaven.” “Ulalume” presents us the very same mood in the very same imagery.

True it is that the later poem has a romantic richness, wholly lacking in the other. There is the fanciful geography, Mount Yaanek, the dim barn of Auber, the realms of the boreal pole, the misty mid-region of Weir, — there is the suggestive vocabulary, the senescent night, the scoriac rivers, the nebulous lustre, the luminous eyes, the crystalline light, the legended tomb; there is the miracle of resource in rhyme, repetition, parallelism, assonance; there is the element of personality, in which, as we all have walked, the poet walks with his soul, and there is the note of bitter regret. But at bottom what does the poet say? He says that he thought that he wandered with his soul; and in his meditation he followed a melancholy train of thought that he had known before, though for the time he was not conscious of it. That in his depth of gloom he saw before him a beautiful something, that he felt sure would be an aid and a stimulus; that he followed it, against the warnings of his soul, and found himself suddenly where he had been before, at the tomb of all that was really lovely on earth, an ideal of beauty which he had with his own hands buried. That is surely meaning enough for a poem — too much, indeed, when so stated, or rather perhaps too little, for the very nature of Poe's poetry is, as he says, to convey something otherwise beyond the range of thought.

Much the same thing may we say of “Annabel Lee.” The poem presents a romantic [column 2:] tale on much the same motive as “The Raven” and “Ulalume,” save where they have loss and unending regret, flashing from despair into revolt and down to despondency, this poem has final reconciliation. It was written for one particular person, say some, or to another, as others say; it may be so, but that was merely because the prevailing mood of Poe came to a focus in some special event. Perhaps the poem is written with his dead wife in mind, yet the mood is the same as in “Ulalume,” written before she died, and in “The Raven,” written some years before. “All the rest is literature.” Poe gives us here a beautiful figure, and in contemplating beauty we feel that we have also truth and right.

“For Annie” gives us also reconciliation after the passing of passion. The subject is not unlike that of “To Helen,” though it is treated in a very different way, one being almost clear-cut, as suited its classic idea, and the other vague, indefinite, dreamlike, full of figures and repetitions. No longer the clear image of Psyche at the window, but the half-delirious trance of the sick-room, or, say some, the consciousness of the grave.

But in each we have the form of beauty which gives us a moment of pure delight. In a world of constant need and constant work to supply need, beauty comes to us with an unanticipated fullness, and gives us a satisfaction that nothing else can. Poe knew that and strove to create such beauty. Sometimes he succeeded; then he gives us in beautiful form the spirit of feelings, moods, emotions of a day, a month, a year, or perhaps a lifetime. They are surcharged with significance, and to possess ourselves of them and keep them permanently is the one thing to get from Poe, even if we miss all the information about him that might be found in a hundred tomes.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 489, column 2:]

* Let it be pardoned to academic minuteness if it be noted that the phrase “seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor” receives illumination from the “carpets of tufted gold” in “Ligeia.” Doubtless Poe wanted the t and the f, but he liked the idea too.