where dwelt the Yonghi Bonghi Bo.
The celebrated "Raven," probably by far his most popular poem, winged his way to Poe's study from the cliffs which frown on the dim lake of Auber. His fancy for ever dwells "out of space, out of time," where it has learned that mysterious music of his which can be parodied, but cannot be recaptured. He has heard the harping of Israfel, and follows it in "a mortal melody".
Thus, in "The Haunted Palace,"
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow,.
(This—all this—was in the olden
Times long ago.)
And every gentle air that dallied
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid
A winged odour went away.
Poe's versification was self-taught, and his verse, so small in volume and so original, was precisely adapted to the dreams of which his poetry is made. He wrote "There is no such thing as a long poem," meaning that no long poem can be uniformly exquisite. Yet he never attained to what is most entirely exquisite, apart from actuality, and dreamlike, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". As has been said of Gerard de Nerval, "his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this earth, and far from human shores, his fancy haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars "; night is light to him, and daytime is darkness. Like Gerard's, his overword is
Où sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau!
Elles sont plus heureuses
Dans un séjour plus beau.
Perhaps because he is so non-American, so decidedly a citizen of no city, Poe has been more admired on the Continent, and translated into more languages than any poet of America. His works were admirably rendered into French by Charles Baudelaire, himself an adorer of
The love whom I shall never meet,
The land where I shall never be.
Poe died in 1849; legends of his life are many and negligible. He is a poet who has not much honour in his own country, or who, at least, has more honour in countries not his own. To call him a great poet is impossible, but he is a haunting poet. His prose stories were dismissed as "Hawthorne and delirium tremens" by a great English critic, but really his horrors are carefully designed and elaborated works, polished ad unguem; rather cold than frenzied,—witness "The Cask of Amontillado".
Critics, and many readers, have a passion for "classing" poets, as if they were in an examination. We cannot call Poe great, for poetry deals with life, with action, with passion, with duty, and with the whole of the great spectacle of Nature. To the Muse of Poe these things are indifferent; but to the singing of the dreams with which he dwells he brings such originality of tone and touch as is rare indeed in the poetry of any people. As a critic, too, he is a pioneer of the school of l'art pour l'art, of art for art's sake—a school distinctly decadent, and therefore in modern Europe he, rather than Aristotle, is hailed as a prince of critics.