Miss Lowell said that “Endymion suddenly finding his empty uplifted arms clasped about a naked waist is a beautiful flight of imagination astringently absorbingly expressed.” Her John Keats is astringently absorbing, but its expressions are sometimes corrosive.
We may not know all Poe’s virtues and infirmities; time may be dealing too harshly or too leniently with him; it is possible that short-story writers do not acknowledge their indebtedness to him, and that students of style do not study him sufficiently; and it may be that some do not admit that he is one of a very small group constituting the world’s great writers. But none of these injustices of mind or heart will be remedied by Mr. Sherwin Cody’s book. The author may possess qualifications for writing a life of Poe, but his book does not testify them. The art of narrative has eluded him; style, which must give flavour and substance to all biography, seems to be beyond his reach, and he has no critical judgment in the use of the vast material that Professor Harrison and many other students of Poe have collected. The only qualification he would seem to have is “a confessed sympathy with Poe’s difficult personal character.” Even though this sympathy embraced Poe’s impersonal character, it would not suffice him as biographer.
It would be easy to characterize Mr. Cody’s book, but I shall refrain and call attention only to his intemperance of statement and his disregard of the rules governing grammatical construction. “Poe stood absolutely alone among American writers.” “It is probable that Poe has been the most venomously hated man of letters in the whole range of history. W. C. Brownell in his cold, impersonal way discusses Poe with a hatred as intense as Griswold’s.”
“Poe died of nervous breakdown rather than of the effects of over-indulgence in intoxicants.”
“Poe wrote but few poems the next fifteen years, but every one is a masterpiece.” There are scores of statements of similar texture, but none of them is true.
As an example of Mr. Cody’s lack of critical judgment and understanding, the following is offered: “The writer has in mind two young friends who, in recent times, struggling to attain literary recognition as Poe did, though with far less accomplishment than his, sank under the mental strain and died, one of paresis, one of apoplexy, and a careful study of literary history would reveal scores of such.” Paresis has one cause, and only one; apoplexy in early life has two, and one of them is the same spirochete that causes paresis.
There is a finality about the author’s statements that is at first irritating, then depressing. “No very excitable person, such as Poe was, could possibly give us calm and placid judgment that would harmonise with the crude impressions of common men and women.” Anatole France was a very excitable person, and he gave very calm and placid judgments, and it is up to “common women” to say whether such judgments harmonise with their “crude impressions” or not. Not all of Mr. Cody’s book is irritating. Some of it is amusing. Commenting on some of Poe’s well known lies (his personal mendacity he calls it) he says, “Possibly he regarded this romancing about himself as harmless in itself and of some value as advertising, but the thoughtful critic can not refrain from severely blaming him.” Here speaks the author of Business Correspondence and Advertisement Writing for Business Men and the critic who is not only thoughtful but moral!
The publishers say that Mr. Cody received a letter from Bliss Perry which contains the sentence, “You have done a real service to literature.” It is more difficult to believe, even, than many of the statements of his book.
Doctor Robertson says his study of Poe “contains something new which attempts to harmonise and to present in new aspects old and well established facts, and which further makes plain the neurosis from which he suffered.” The facts about Poe were stated temperately and judiciously forty years ago by a man whose labours have ornamented American letters, and few facts have been added since the time George E. Woodberry wrote: