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EDGAR ALLAN POE.
Scribner's contains a centenary article on Edgar Allan Poe (born January 19th, 1809) by Professor W. C. Brownell. The writer protests against American over-praise of Poe, saying it is particularly irrational. “The cult of Poe is not in the interests of literature, since as literature his writings are essentially valueless.” Yet the writer admits that Poe is “the only Ishmael of American literature,” and there is no more effective way of realising the distinction of his genius than by imagining this literature without him”: —
Poe's antagonism instinctively inclined him to art. He is in fact the solitary artist of our elder literature. This is his distinction and will remain such. Hawthorne is in a degree a rival, but in form rather than in fond, as his addiction to allegory attests, and in any case his puritan pre-occupation with the moral forces invalidates his purely æsthetic appeal. Poe's art was unalloyed.
Then surely he should have been judged as an artist unalloyed, and not on all sorts of grounds other than artistic. He was supremely interested in; “technic,” says this critic; his was the temperament which delights in terminology, labels, definitions, catalogues, and so forth — “the passion for order run to seed,” is the way Professor Brownell puts it: —
As a technician his most noteworthy success is the completeness of his effect. He understood to perfection the value of tone in a composition, and tone is an element that is almost invaluable. In this respect he has no American and few foreign rivals.
In other words, Poe was a literary artist, and America does not yet much appreciate literary artists. At least, to judge from this paper, one would a think she did.
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Notes:
Although the article is unsigned, it is assigned to Ingram by J. C. Miller, Building Poe Biography, 1977, p. 260.
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[S:0 - RRUK, 1909] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Edgar Allan Poe (J. H. Ingram, 1909)