Lapses like that destroy like lightning flashes the mysterious atmosphere he has been at pains to create. They are the penalty he had to pay for being a citizen in a youthful democracy. Americans are never safe from the pitfalls of a language that is older than their nation.
His isolation.
In the America of that time, Poe was like the little boy in the grocer's shop, who, while the shopmen are busy with paper and string, dreams of green meadows and scribbles verses on the sugar bags. Even in Europe he would have been one of those men 'who live on islands in the sea of souls.' There are some like Scott and Gautier who are always called by their Christian names, and can talk unreservedly with a thousand. There are others more aloof in mind of whom it is difficult even to think with familiarity. It seems fitting enough to hear of Scott as Walter or Wattie, and of Gautier as Théo, even in old age; but who would have dared to call that man Tommy who heard in tavern song some echo of the music of the spheres? There are men who cannot be habitually good companions, and, when the talk is at its loudest, turn from the crowd, pull aside the curtain, and look up to see the pale moon far above the housetops. Such a man was Poe. He would have been lonely even in the city of Europe where he could perhaps have found three men of his own aloofness from the inessential, his own hatred of the commonplace, his own intense belief in individualism. He was extraordinarily lonely in America. His love of beauty, his elevation of his work above its results in gold, were next to incomprehensible by that people in that chaotic state of their development. Energetic and wholly practical, fiercely busied with material advancement, they could not understand his passionate, impractical, intellectual existence. His biographer, a literary man, remembered not that he was a great artist, but that he died through drink, not that he had made beautiful things but that he had gained little money by doing so. In the Poe who 'reeled across Broadway on the day of the publication of The Raven,' in the Poe who died in an hospital, they forgot the reality, and, in their hurry, found it easy to make a melodrama out of a gentle and inoffensive life. Their traditional idea of Poe allows his extravagances to represent him. It is as if we were to describe some hills by saying there was a lightning flash between the peaks. I prefer to think of the little cottage at Fordham, where he lived with his wife and her mother, and their pets, parrots and bobolinks, a peaceful, small citadel held by those three friends against the world. Throughout Poe's harassed existence this note of gentleness and quiet is always sounding somewhere below the discords of penury and suffering.
His work.
The result of his isolation, his poverty, his sensibility, and his intellectual energy was a great deal of work of no value whatever, some melancholy and beautiful verse, critical articles of a kind then new in America, a philosophical poem, some tales of the same flavour as the most delightful of Euclid's propositions, and some other stories that can only be fully enjoyed by those who come to them with the reverence and careful taste it is proper to bring to a glass of priceless wine. It is by them chiefly that he will be remembered. They are a delicacy, not a staple of food. They are not stories from which we can learn life; but they are the key to strange knowledge of ourselves. They leave us richer, not in facts but in emotions. We find our way with their help into novel corners of sensation. They are like rare coloured goblets or fantastic metal-work, and we find, often with surprise, that we have waited for them. That is their vindication, that the test between the valueless and the invaluable of the fantastic. There are tales of twisted extravagance that stir us with no more emotion than is given by an accidental or capricious decoration never felt or formed in the depths of a man. But these stories, like those patterns, however grotesque, that have once meant the world to a mind sensible to beauty, have a more than momentary import. Like old melody, like elaborate and beautiful dancing, like artificial light, like the sight of poison or any other concentrated power, they are among the significant experiences that are open to humanity.