Text: Anonymous, “[Review of Ingram's Life of Poe],” Birmingham Daily Post (Birmingham, England), whole no. 8,833, December 29, 1886, p. 7, col. 2

[page 7, column 2, continued:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE: His Life, Letters, and Opinions. By JOHN H. INGRAM. New edition. [London: W. H. Allen and Co.]

This work first appeared six years ago, and we have no indication that it has undergone any change. Poe's fate was peculiarly unfortunate. When he had fallen silent, and could repel no false accusation, mean slanderers of the dead drew a so-called portrait of him that was one big libel. Mr. Ingram did good service by prefiling to an edition of Poe's Works in 1874 a vindicatory memoir. That memoir was expanded in 1880 to the present volume. Mr. Ingram has spent years in searching and verifying information, and it would be the merest affectation for anyone who has not undertaken similar labour to pronounce as to the fidelity of the likeness he has produced, but it certainly is a human and not unbeautiful life, and credible, which is much more than could be said for the introduction of his earliest biographer. Mr. Ingram has allowed Poe to speak for himself, and those who follow the story in! these pages will find it quite possible to love as well as to admire him. At the same time1 there has been no attempt to conceal the true lineaments of the man; the weakness, the follies, the passions to which the sensitive nature of the poet — especially when it is “deguidet” in early years — is so liable. George Eliot has remarked in one of her essays — “It is apparently too often a congenial task to write severe words about the transgressions committed by men of genius, especially when the censor has the advantage of being himself a man of no- genius, so that these transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; he, forsooth, never lacerated anyone by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion; and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that lies in transcendent power.” The Griswold calumnies were probably in large part due to this absence of anything that could give a sympathy with genius.