Text: Joel Benton, “Poe's Opinion of The Raven,” In the Poe Circle (1899), pp. 54-60

[page 54:]

THERE seems to be no end of interest in Poe legends and Poeana. Poe is the one American poet — Whitman, perhaps, being a second — whose work has produced a cult; and, at the same time, exercises a fascination which is contagious and indescribable. Some might possibly call it hypnotic. He uses what Emerson calls “polarized words”; and, while they haunt the mind, and even the very soul of the reader, they virtually •create an atmosphere as distinct as that — though not like that — in one of Corot's landscapes.

Poe contributed little to human thought. He had no ethical message whatever to de liver. He could not have written Words worth's “Ode on the Intimations of Human Immortality” — which is as pious, though not burdensomely so, as it is poetic. What [page 55:] his poetry is, is not what Matthew Arnold defined poetry to be — “a criticism of life.” It is more like a series of musical diversions — fluent, sensuous, weird, sorrowful, and sepulchral, even subterranean almost in passages. But what differentiates it most specifically is, that it is sensuous. It moves no one to do anything; it, on the contrary, makes you feel something. In reading it you mourn for a vanished Aiden or a lost Lenore.

It is a curious fame that rests so much upon so little — at least, upon so small a body of work. For, if you take “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells” from Poe's poems — if you do not consider these at all — what would his poetic fame have been? Could it have been very great?

But with these poems he did undoubtedly put an imprint on the literature of his day and time that is matchless. Its influence is, at any rate, a more potent force in England [page 56:] and France than any other poet of our nation has yet attained to. Perhaps the weird and eerie has naturally upon the human mind a more durable and clinging hold than the things that are sober and earthly. However this may be, “The Raven “ alone, as a poem, seems to go on in people's minds with a constant crescendo of admiration from one year and generation to another.

We get a good deal from time to time about the way it was composed. Persons who knew Poe, and those who have heard orally from them what he said, have given us many edifying stories concerning Poe's life at the time this poem was written, and the circumstances under which it was composed.

There are but two American poems that I can think of whose bringing forth has been talked of anywhere near so much as this poem's birth has been, if any other than these three have been talked of in this respect at all. The two I allude to are, of [page 57:] course, Bryant's “Thanatopsis” and Longfellow's “Excelsior.”

Does anybody remember, though — but this is an “aside” — that Emerson's “Humble Bee” when it first appeared opened thus?

instead of — in the vastly improved version —

How those two new adjectives, encyclopedic almost in their bottled essence of description, and displacing “fine,” strengthened the piece! But you will find, in the very first edition of Dana's “Household Book of Poetry,” that the poem is printed in the first fashion — as it stood I suppose in “The Dial,” before it was revised for Emerson's first volume of verses.

But I must return to Poe and “The Raven.” The brief story I have to tell about [page 58:] them I got orally from an author who once had some vogue, but who is now nearly completely forgotten. His name was at one time in many of our best periodicals; and the old Democratic Review once had a considerable critique upon his poetic position and promise. He was likened by the writer of the review article to Shelley and Keats; and there were passages of his verse given which brought out, as I remember, a considerable of the suggested resemblance. Probably, though, his poem of “The Sword of Bunker Hill” — which was set to music — best typifies his prevailing poetic style, which was, in the main, noted for being eloquent and patriotic.

William Ross Wallace (for it is he to whom I refer) was not unlike Poe in both temperament and habits. He was not a little like him in physique — in brightness of the eye, and in a superb courtliness of manner. He had the same, or a similar, irresolute will; but he was a delightful companion [page 59:] to meet if you met him at the right time. He was, I believe, a Southerner by birth, as Poe was by acclimation.

Wallace told me (in the early war-time when I first met him) that he knew Poe tolerably well. They were, he said, on pleasant and familiar terms; and, it would seem (as Keats and Reynolds did), they read over to each other their not yet published poetical work. It was in obedience to this habit that Poe, on meeting Wallace one day, told him in some such words as these (I will be sponsor now only for their substance, and not for their form, or for the form of the colloquy between the known and the now-unknown poet):

“Wallace,” said Poe, “I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written.”

“Have you?” said Wallace. “That is a fine achievement.”

“Would you like to hear it?” said Poe.

“Most certainly,” said Wallace.

Thereupon Poe began to read the so to-be [page 60:] famous verses in his best way — which I believe was always an impressive and captivating way. When he had finished he turned to Wallace for his approval of them — when Wallace said :

“Poe — they are fine; uncommonly fine.”

“Fine?” said Poe, contemptuously. “Is that all you can say for this poem? I tell you it's the greatest poem that was ever written.”

And then they separated — not, however, before Wallace had tried to placate, with somewhat more pronounced praise, the pettish poet.

And to-day there are critics who say — not knowing Poe's own opinion of “The Raven “ — that it is “the greatest poem ever written.” Whether it is or not, it bids fair to be the one that will be the most and the longest talked about.