Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

by Edmund Gosse

His early verses are remarkably exempt from the influences which we might expect to find impressed on them. He imitated, as every man of genuine originality imitates while he learns his trade, but his models were not, as might have been anticipated, Coleridge and Shelley; they were Byron and Scott. In the poetry of Byron and Scott, Poe found nothing to transfer to his own nature, and the early imitations, therefore, left no trace on him. Brief as is the volume of his poems, half of it might be discarded without much regret. Scattered among his Byron and Scott imitations, however, we find a few pieces which reveal to us that, while he was still almost a child, the true direction of his genius was occasionally revealed to him. The lyric "To Helen," which is said to have been composed in his fourteenth year, is steeped in the peculiar purity, richness and vagueness which were to characterise his mature poems:—

"On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."

This was not published, however, until the author was two-and-twenty, and it may have been touched up. Here is a fragment of a suppressed poem, "Visit of the Dead," which Poe certainly printed in his eighteenth year:—

"The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill,
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token;
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!"

This is not so perfect, but it is even more than "To Helen" symptomatic of Poe's peculiar relation to the poetic faculty as fostering a state of indefinite and indeed indefinable delight. And from these faint breathings how direct is the advance to such incomparable specimens of symbolic fancy as "The City in the Sea," "The Sleeper," and finally "Ulalume"!

The determination to celebrate, in a minor key, indefinite and melancholy symbols of fancy, is a snare than which none more dangerous can be placed in the path of a feeble foot. But Poe was not feeble, and he was protected, and permanent value was secured for his poetry, by the possession of one or two signal gifts to which attention must now be paid. He cultivated the indefinite, but, happily for us, in language so definite and pure that when he succeeds it is with a cool fulness, an absence of all fretting and hissing sound, such as can rarely be paralleled in English literature. The finest things in Milton's 1645 volume, Wordsworth at his very best, Tennyson occasionally, Collins in some of his shorter odes, have reached that perfection of syllabic sweetness, that clear sound of a wave breaking on the twilight sands, which Poe contrives to render, without an effort, again and again:—

"By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon,[6] nam'd Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule,
From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime.
Out of space, out of time."

The present moment is one in which the reaction against plastic beauty in poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appeal against it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence in the younger school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though he were preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is done purposely, and in accordance with mysterious harmonic laws entirely beyond the comprehension of ordinary ears, makes the matter worse. There is no heresiarch so dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegating life, and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges, that the twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage for cacophony. He holds something of the same place in relation to Swinburne and Poe, that Donne did to Spenser three hundred years ago. In this condition of things it may seem useless to found any claim for Poe on the ground of the exquisite mellifluousness of his versification. We may hope, however, some day to regain the use of our ears, and to discover once more that music and metre are utterly distinct arts. When that re-discovery has been made, Poe will resume his position as one of the most uniformly melodious of all those who have used the English language.

Critics who have admitted the extraordinary perfection of his prosody have occasionally objected that in the most popular examples of it, "The Raven" and "The Bells," he obtains his effect by a trick. It might be objected, with equal force, that Victor Hugo in "Les Djinns" and even Tennyson in "The Lotus Eaters" made use of "tricks." On the other hand, if the charge be deserved, it seems odd that in the course of nearly seventy years no other juggler or conjurer has contrived to repeat the wonderful experiment. In each poem there are what must be judged definite errors against taste in detail—Poe's taste was never very sure—but the skill of the long voluptuous lamentation, broken at equal intervals by the croak of the raven, and that of the verbal translation, as if into four tones or languages, of the tintinabulation of the bells, is so extraordinary, so original, and so closely in keeping with the personal genius of the writer, that it is surely affectation to deny its value.

It is not, however, in "The Bells" or in "The Raven," marvellous as are these tours de force, that we see the essential greatness of Poe revealed. The best of his poems are those in which he deals less boisterously with the sentiment of mystery. During the latest months of his unhappy life, he composed three lyrics which, from a technical point of view, must be regarded not only as the most interesting, which he wrote, but as those which have had the most permanent effect upon subsequent literature, not in England merely, but in France. These are "Ulalume," "Annabel Lee," "For Annie." One of Poe's greatest inventions was the liquidation of stanzaic form, by which he was able to mould it to the movements of emotion without losing its essential structure. Many poets had done this with the line; it was left for Poe to do it with the stanza. In the three latest lyrics this stanzaic legerdemain is practised with an enchanting lightness, an ecstasy of sinuous and elastic grace. Perhaps, had it been subjected to the poet's latest revision, "For Annie" would have been the most wonderful of all in the sensitive response of its metre to the delicate fluctuations of sentiment.