Text: J. B. Wallis, “Poe, Tennyson, Wordsworth,” Academy (Covent Garden, London, UK), vol. LXIX, whole no. 1749, November 11, 1905, p. 1181, col. 2

[page 1181, column 2, continued:]

POE, TENNYSON, WORDSWORTH

To the Editor of THE ACADEMY

SIR, — “The noblest poet that ever lived,” was Poe's eulogium of Tennyson; but, as for Wordsworth, Poe had “no faith in him.” And the secret of that admiration and this aversion seems to have lain simply in Poe's closer temperamental approach to Tennyson than to Wordsworth,

Take the several attitudes of the three poets towards Death. Poe saw Death in its charnel-house aspect; Tennyson regarded it through the distorting cloud of dust aroused, as it were, in his mind by the conflict of scientific with theological ideas; while Wordsworth, the truer child of Nature, viewed it as simply and naturally as the little ones who played, happy as the sunbeams, around their baby sister's grave.

Of course, Poe was right in accounting Tennyson a great and noble poet; but he was lamentably wrong in disparaging Wordsworth. The morbid author of “The Conqueror Worm” could surely never have felt the “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” Not for him were the “round ocean and the living air.” Owl-like he loved, in fancy, to haunt old ruins in the dark, or meditate in the dimness of a sullen evening by “some sepulchre, remote, alone.” Many of his poems and most of his tales (not to impugn the intrinsic merits of either) are peculiarly gruesome and repellent. To turn from them to the “woods and hills” of Wordsworth is like going forth amid the dew and sunshine of a midsummer's morning after a night of horrid dreaming.

Let it not be for a moment supposed that I suggest a similar morbidity in Tennyson. Far from it; but the haunting tone of pessimism so often dominant in Tennyson's poems would be far more agreeable to the gloomy spirit of Poe than would be the quiet optimism of Wordsworth, whom he despised because he could not understand.

Of Tennyson, Poe said there was no poet “so little of the earth earthy”; of himself he might have said there was none so unearthly. Some readers there may be who take a fearful delight in his neurotic writings; a minority, happy only when miserable, may sympathise with the croaking cry of “Nevermore”; but there must be many who think, with the writer, that Poe is too fond, like the ghouls in his “Bells,” of “rolling on the human heart a stone” ever to secure that affection which it is a poet's highest triumph to win, Great was his genius, but very unhappy was its bent; while his attitude towards Wordsworth speaks little for either Poe's judgment or his charity.

J. B. WALLIS.

November 6.