XIV. To Edgar Allan Poe - Page 2

defences of your
personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing, private
letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in settling above your
tomb.

For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your pen, and
that in an age when the author of 'To Helen' and' The Cask of Amontillado' was
paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When such poverty was the mate of such
pride as yours, a misery more deep than that of Burns, an agony longer than
Chatterton's, were inevitable and assured. No man was less fortunate than you
in the moment of his birth--_infelix_opportunitate_vitae_. Had you lived a
generation later, honour, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at home,
would all have been yours. Within thirty years so great a change has passed
over the profession of letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate
the rewards which would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the
contemporary of Mark Twain and of 'Called Back.' It may be that your
criticisms helped to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the
reach of quite unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a
respect for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as
'objectional' in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by
such a sentence as 'his connection with it had inured to his own benefit by
the frequent puffs of himself,' and so forth.

Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of short
tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate poems is a
waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition of poetry, 'the
rhythmic creation of the beautiful,' exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is
the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural bent, and reaction against the
example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you too intolerant of what you
call the 'didactic' element in verse. Even if morality be not seven-eighths of
our life (the exact proportion as at present estimated), there was a place
even on the Hellenic Parnassus for gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of
the case must always be the largest public.

'Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,' so you wrote;
'the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should be
indefinite and never too strongly suggestive), is precisely what we should aim
at in poetry.' You aimed at that mark, and struck it again and again, notably
in 'Helen, thy beauty is to me,' in 'The Haunted Palace,' 'The Valley of
Unrest,' and 'The City in the Sea.' But by some Nemesis which might, perhaps,
have been foreseen, you are, to the world, the poet of one poem--'The Raven:'
a piece in which the music is highly artificial, and the