Text: Francis Gerry Fairfield, “Life and Literature of Edgar A. Poe,” The Library Table (New York, NY), vol. II, no. 2, April 1877, pp. 31-32

[page 31:]

An examination of the fluctuations of public sentiment for any given number of years — say, for half a century, by way of establishing a limit — reveals this curious physical law, to wit, — that its movements are proximately measurable wave movements, that may be imperfectly described as rhythmical impulses, but are, perhaps, more exactly in the nature of psychic pulsations. The development of Greek literature, for illustration, has something of the sensuous progress of one of Homer's hexameters, and the fluctuations of Helenic sentiment and taste, from Homer to Pindar., may be compared to a series of dactyls and spondees, with appropriate cæsuræ to mark the occasional pauses during which the Greek literary development rested preparatory to a new movement This psychic pulsation, as concerns the English-speaking races, is decidedly complex than that which is illustrated in Hellenic literature, and, therefore, more susceptible of exact mathematical analysis, being definable, perhaps, as an iambic pulsation, fixed, regular, and decisive, without a vestige of that sliding and indeterminate movement that the Italians so felicitously describe as bisdrucciole. The tendency to complexity in those psychic pulsations, of which public sentiment essentially consists, and which constitute its dynamic property, is, perhaps, more noticeable in American than in English literary taste. In curious harmony with this tendency to more complex pulsation, American poets prefer an anapest to an Iambic rhythm; the trisyllable sinuosity of the one to the disyllable simplicity of the other; and are more decidedly complex in their metrical movements than their English co-workers in the art of all arts — the art of causing beautiful imaginings to sing; of adapting to melody, not the psychic life only, for that is the function of music proper, but the imagination verbally expressed also.

In 1844, a slender gentleman of about five feet six in physical stature, and of romantic personnel, appeared in New York, then a provincial city compared with its present metropolitan position. A strange pallor; large and gloomy, but lurid and magnificent eyes, of indecisive color and of velvety lustre; a nose a trifle too long for symmetry, but splendidly cut; a mouth sweet. Sad, yet slightly cynical and sneering; a tout ensemble indicative of vanity, of gloom, of brooding and terrible solemnity, of egotism, of irascibility, of insincerity, of rhapsodizing enthusiasm — with that vestige of unveracity and deficiency in real earnestness that unregulated enthusiasm always implies! He darted across the literary firmament like a meteor, bu he did not fall. He was as startling, as unrealizable, as a sun risen at midnight, but he neither softened nor attracted. He was a human magnet, but one that generally repelled, in place of assimilating his readers to his own psychical life. He has been the subject of more biographies than any other American poet, save, perhaps, William Cullen Bryant, and yet the faces of his personal history appear to be less ascertainable, if one may judge from the many contradictory statements in [column 2:] which his biographies abound, than those of an littérateur whom this century has produced. Of the two new memoirs submitted with the new editions of his works under review, that of Mr. Eugene L. Didier, of Baltimore, may be dismissed without very particular comment; since, although it suppresses important facts, distorts other important facts, and brings in light a few gossiping anecdotes that remain to be verified, it is not written with sufficient ability to command popular attention. The prefacing letter by Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, although it contains some rather unnecessary strictures on the writer of this article, must be ranked, however, as, within the limits of a few paragraphs, a very appreciative critique on the life and literature of Edgar Allan Poe; one that shows a more penetrative insight into the nature of the man, and a profounder sympathy with his psychical attitude, than any that has recently been published — than any ever published, excepting always Baudelaire's comprehensive, sympathetic, and masterly essay. Mr. Didier's life of the poet introduces a new edition of the poems — the most sumptuously beautiful that has yet been issued for general circulation — with the addition of his lecture on the “Poetic Principle” and his clever disquisition on the “Rationale of Verse,” both of which are essential to a correct apprehension of the motive of his art. Baudelaire's elegant critique prefaces a selected edition of his poetry, essays, and tales, which includes most of his masterpieces and deserves a large circulation. R. W. Griswold's memoir, which certainly did Poe great injustice, is now out of print, although, in point of critical analysis, it outranks Mr. Didier's rhapsodizing as the calm and gray-eyed comprehensiveness of Gœthe outranks the ravings of a little-minded fanatic. In place of Griswold's memoir, Mr. J. H. Ingram's careful and pains-taking biography has been prefixed in the complete four-volume library edition of Poe's works, and Lowell's and Willis’ papers the one critical, the other a melange of personal recollections, have been retained. Mr. Ingram's life of Poe evinces abundant industry in the collection and verification of facts, but is not of any value as criticism. Dr. Johnson had one Boswell; great is the pity that Poe should have two, neither of whom is capable of comprehending (or even apprehending) his merits on the one hand, or his defects on the other. Mr. R. H. Stoddard's biographical memoranda of the eccentric poet, recently published in Harper's Magazine, although abounding in fresh materials, are not even mentioned by either of these aspiring young rhapsodists. I ought to observe, perhaps, that Mr. Ingram's paper was originally prepared as an introduction to the beautiful “Memorial Edition of Poe's Poems and Essays,” published in commemoration of the ceremonies attendant upon the recent dedication of the Poe monument in Baltimore, and representing the initial volume of the Poe revival which is now at its climax. Fame! — what is it but the shadow that a soul casts upon the wainscoating [[wainscoting]] of life — a dim, faint reverberation of the poet's self in the great collective self of humanity? Poe left such a shadow; no man, perhaps, has ever reproduced himself in the psychic lives of his fellows with more singular and sombre distinctness. From one aspect he was an incarnate sensation; from another, an evasive, incomprehensible spirituality. But, as it is true of the poet, that the intensity with which the psychic life of one soul reproduces itself in the lives of the other souls is in exact ratio to the overbearing egotism impressed upon its creations, it follows that poets are of necessity disagreeable persons as concerns their social relations. They find it difficult to retain friends, aisé to make enemies, particularly among their co-workers in literature. To Poe, in the egoistic reverie of his [column 3:] life, men were puppets — fantoccini for worms to eat finally. He saw

The worm conquered all things; beauty was created to rot. He moral transmigration — the law by which beauty is its own resurrection from the dead — was an aspect of life in which his acute but limited perception did not penetrate. And yet he had seen the magnolia blooming above desolate swamps, and the grasses greenest, the blossoms most luxuriant, upon graves. He saw his face in the water and inquired with absurd but solemn earnestness, which was the real and which the shadow. In one or two things Baudelaire and Mrs. Whitman have not fathomed the tangle of psychical activities of which he was composed. It was not wandering among the graves of an ancient burial ground in his boyhood that influenced the dark and sombre spirit of his life and literature. It was a native predisposition well expressed in his own stanza: —

a native predisposition engendered by a deep-seated and oppressive nervous unrest, on the contrary, that rendered him a wanderer among graves. The egotism that laps itself in pictures of luxurious sensation is most likely, when perverted, to gloat upon its own self-tortures. Baudelaire gives a volume of criticism in the remark that Poe is a writer of the nerves, but he fails to penetrate into the causation that rendered him such, to wit, — because in the morbid and paroxysmal sensitiveness of his nervous system his mental life was in the nature of a psychosis. That margin that in most organizations intervenes between nervous and mental action was absent in his; and thus his imaginings were distorted reflex spectra of the life that surrounded him. Let not this sentence be misapprehended. The rhythm of every true poem is representative of a nervous paroxysm, and the predisposition to certain kinds of rhythm, as Longfellow's for iambic accentuation, has as its origin, no doubt, in an ascertainable nervous bias. In many of Poe's poems analysis shows with sufficient clearness that their psychical material is prosaic. This, for example, is not psychically poetic, although it has the form of poetry: —

Nor is this, although it has an extraordinary sonorousness: —

In other words, “I took a lonely walk through an avenue of cypresses, when I was a young man, and my passions were lava like.” There is no poetic imagery here. Indeed, the poetic effect is altogether dependent on impressing the auditory nerve with a sensation of purely rhythmic luxury, and whatever response the reader's imagination gives is purely a reflex action. The “Raven,” again, traces simply the progress of a prosaic incident, and depends for its psychological significance upon the purely nervous element of sensuousness. There is no delicious impulse to sing embodied in it, there are no reverie imaginings, there is simply the dusky suggestion of something præternatural in the sable croaker that sits solemnly [page 32:] upon the bust of Pallas over the door. Gloomy, sombre, fantastic, cynical, — the poem is ludicrously — but ah, how terribly! — solemn. But it must be conceded, I think, that the shadow of a raven sitting on the bust of Pallas above the door of any apartment of the regular pattern, would not be at all likely to fall upon the floor, with the lamp in any ordinary position. Cruel and relentless destiny, terribly and menacingly præternatural as this

undoubtedly is, its ability to cast a shadow contrary to the laws of physics is very dubious. But this, perhaps, is carrying criticism too far.

There is certainly a species of imagination in this sensuous sonorousness — this vague excitation of the auditory nerve of the reader, in such a manner as to produce an impression of imagery where no such thing exists in reality; and it, with Mr. Didier, the conscientious critic cannot style Poe the greatest of American poets, he must undoubtedly be ranked as the poetry most exceptional — not, I think, as the most original nor as the most imaginative. As a curious anomaly, indeed, his tales are more imaginative than his poems, although there is the same laborious struggle to produce an effect running through both. In “Ligeia,” “Morella,” “Eleonora,” and the “Fall of the House of Usher” — wonderful creations! — the origin of this apparent effort lucidly reveals itself as the ingenious word-torturing of one who is tormented with things that elude expression — with reminiscences of the visions and imaginings that spring up in an abnormally excited brain, and are but dimly recollected in the progress of the slower and colder work of writing. His brain and hand did not work together, and hence his composition lacks spontaneity. I shall be able, I hope, to unfurl to the reader's comprehension the tortuous tangle of psychological causes that rendered this a necessary law of its literary art. The fugitive, striking, and exceptional impressions that formed the métier of his creations are exactly such as spring from exceptional states of the nervous system. To illustrate, in using ether as an anæsthetic, at a certain stage of the intoxication a certain reverie or dream will be taken up and continued, even though days may have elapsed since the last administration of the drug. To a less extent it is so with morphia. I have personally taken quinine in ten grain doses three nights in succession, and dreamed exactly the same dream under the influence of each administration of the medicine This is the cause of that singular periodicity in dreams of a certain class that has so often puzzled acute psychologists. In other words, identical states of the nervous system are accompanied by identical series of psychological phenomena[[.]] If a certain brilliant conception has eluded me to-day, I study the nervous conditions in which it originated, and by reproducing them I may find the same conception again and transfer it to paper. This is one of the simplest laws of mnemonics.

To the careful student of Poe his style carries with it the evidence of a constant effort, while composing, to recollect — to remember in detail — to recall and describe fleeting and dimly recorded mental and nervous impressions. And this is verified as to his method, to wit, — that his finder pieces were all produced either immediately before or immediately after nervous crises. An article in the Southern Literary Messenger affirms that these crises were consequent upon liberal indulgence in alcoholic stimulants. There exist, however, abundant grounds for believing that they were a natural an inevitable crisis of nervous disorder, often superinduced, perhaps, by artificial excitants, but inexorably certain in their recurrence and periodicity; — and thus he lived two distinct lives, one of trances and of morbid psychical experiences, [column 2:] and one in which he calmly and laboriously recalled and recorded on paper the transient and singular psychical impressions of the other. Let me point out the fact that the frequency with which he employs the dash in literary composition, is a very direct evidence of the effort to remember and to describe with exactness those flitting memoranda of another life which his memory — strangely retentive — jotted down during these periodical crises of an over-excited brain. Hence, as he grew older the morbidnezza of his earlier writings deepens into a weird, bizzare, and unreal coloring in his later. Beautiful as his “Annabel Lee” is, the awful and sombre contrast of the “Haunted Palace” must from this point of view be regarded as his best and most original poem. It is native — himself written out in six solemn and imperious stanzas, and has a spontaneous swing and cadence not found in “Ulalume” or the “Raven.”

In conclusion, a paragraph as to his position as a critic may be admissible. Extraordinary and phenomenal as his analytic faculties were, he was notably deficient in philosophical insight. His most unerring perception of symmetry in literary form was coupled with a decided deficiency in the region of æsthetic intuition. Nowhere, perhaps, is his lack of philosophical penetration more forcibly illustrated than in his attempt to point out the distinction between fancy and imagination. To be sure, imagination is creative; but there is an imaginative perception which forms the basis of the faculty styled artistic intelligence. It is a perception of the beautiful within the beautiful — of the life that shall be, as potential and partly realizing itself in the life that is. “Forma formans in formam formalam,” says Coleridge. This prophetic perception, as an element of poetry, did not enter into Poe's dreams. That the idea of beauty has its psychological basis in the fact that life is continually realizing itself, by a law of its own being, in progressive series of higher and more beautiful forms, is a conception that his puny egotism prevented him from grasping. He called Carlyle a fool, and R. H. Horne's “Orion” a poem of “beauties intrinsic and supreme,” italicizing the latter adjective. Not grasping the central reality of all poetry, his work has an air of artificiality and of appeal to the purely sensuous which even his phenomenal ingenuity was not able to overcome. Mark this property in one of this most beautiful stanzas: —

There is sweetness, softness, repose in this picture although as with all his quiet pictures its atmosphere is sultry, humid, misty, enervating, and he cannot forbear a dash of gorgeous splendor in the banners. But his habitual mood is a species of rhythmic galvanism that renders his critical work, although abnormally analytic, either abusive or rhapsodical.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 31, column 1:]

*Complete Works of Edgar A. Poe. With a New Memoir. By J. H. Ingram, and Notices by J. R. Lowell, N. P. Willis, and George R. Graham, and a new steel portrait (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1877.)

Life and Poems of Edgar A. Poe. With Memoir by E. L. Didier and Introductory Letter by Sarah Helen Whitman. (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1877.)

Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Selections from his poems, tales, and essays. With Biographical and Critical Essay. By Charles Baudelaire. (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1877.)

Poe's Poems. Illustrated by Porton, Hay, and Palmer. (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1877.)