The fresh honesty of this point of view was doubtless reënforced by the local gratification which Poe afforded a body of Southern readers in laying low the New York Knickerbockers and worrying the complacent New Englanders. At all events, the circulation of the Messenger rose from seven hundred to five thousand during his editorship.
After his break with the proprietor, which came suddenly and unaccountably, there was a lapse of a year and a half before he took up his duties with Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, continuing in a perfunctory way for about a year (July, 1839-June, 1840) when, with much bitter feeling, the connection was severed. In the following April Burton’s was bought out and combined with Graham’s feeble monthly, The Casket, as Graham’s Magazine, and Poe gave over his own design to found the Penn Magazine to join forces with a new employer. In the year that ensued he wrote and published several analytical tales and continued his aggressive criticism, while the magazine, under good management, ran its circulation up from eight to forty thousand. Then suddenly, in May, 1842, he was a free lance once more, facing this time two years of duress before he secured another salaried position, now with the Evening Mirror and the tactful Willis, as a “mechanical paragraphist.” The months of quiet routine with this combination daily-weekly were marked by one overshadowing event, the burst of applause with which “The Raven” was greeted. It was the literary sensation of the day, it was supplemented by the chance publication in the same month of a tale in Godey’s and a biographical sketch in Graham’s, and it was reprinted in scores of papers. Such general approval, dear to the heart of any artist, seems for the moment to have lifted Poe out of his usual saturnine mood. “I send you an early number of the B. Journal,” he wrote to his friend F. W. Thomas, “containing my ‘Raven.’ It was copied by Briggs, my associate, before I joined the paper. The ‘Raven’ has had a great ‘run’ ...—but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold Bug,’ you know. The bird has beat the bug, though, all hollow.”
The reference to his new associate records another editorial shift. Poe’s position on the Mirror had been too frankly subordinate to last long, and with the best of good feelings he changed to an associate editorship of the Broadway Journal in February, 1845. With the next October he had realized his long-cherished ambition by obtaining full control; yet before the year was out, for lack of money and of business capacity, his house of cards had fallen and the Journal was a thing of the past. One more magazine contribution of major importance remained for him. This was the publication in Godey’s, from May to October, 1846, of “The Literati,” a series of comments on thirty-eight New York authors, done in his then well-known critical manner. His story-writing was nearly over; “The Cask of Amontillado” was the only important one of the last half dozen, but of the twelve poems later than the “Raven,” four—“Ulalume,” “To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells”—are among his best known.
The personal side of Poe’s life after his last breach with Mr. Allan, in 1834, is largely clouded by poverty and bitterness and a relaxing grip on his own powers. His marriage to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, in 1836 was unqualifiedly happy only until the undermining of her health, three years later, and from then on was the cause of a shattering succession of hopes and fears ending with her death in 1847. His relations to most other men and women were complicated by his erratic, jealous, and too often abusive behavior. Only those friendships endured which were built on the magnanimous tolerance or the insuperable amiability of his friends and associates. His nature, which was self-centered and excitable to begin with, became perverted by mishaps of his own making until the characterization of his latest colleague was wholly justified. Said C. F. Briggs to James Russell Lowell:
He cannot conceive of anybody’s doing anything, except for his own personal advantage; and he says, with perfect sincerity, and entire unconsciousness of the exposition which it makes of his own mind and heart, that he looks upon all reformers as madmen; and it is for this reason that he is so great an egoist.... Therefore, he attributes all the favor which Longfellow, yourself, or anybody else receives from the world as an evidence of the ignorance of the world, and the lack of that favor in himself he attributes to the world’s malignity.
Under the accumulating distresses of his last two years the decline of will-power and self-control terminated with his tragic death in Baltimore in 1849. The gossip which pursued him all his life has continued relentlessly, even to the point of coloring the prejudices of his biographers,—commonly classified as “malignants” and “amiables,”—but only such facts and reports have been mentioned here as have some legitimate bearing on his habits of mind as an author.
Poe was first a writer of poems, then of prose tales, and then of analytical criticisms, and one may take a cue from his famous discussion of the “Raven” by considering them in reverse order. His theory of art can be derived from the seventy-odd articles on his contemporaries which he printed and reprinted, from the days of the Southern Literary Messenger to those of Godey’s, and from the summarized essays which he formulated in the three latest years. “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle” are equally well illustrated by his own poems and his comments on the poems of others. He accepts the division of the world of mind into Intellect, which concerns itself with Truth; Taste, which informs us of the Beautiful; and the Moral Sense, which is regardful of Duty. He defines poetry of words as “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.” In the moods aroused by the contemplation of beauty man’s soul is elevated most nearly to the level of God; and the privilege of Poetry—one refrains from using such a word as “function”—is to achieve an elevation of soul which springs from thought, feeling, and will, but which is above them all.
For the composition of poetry, thus limited in its province, he developed a fairly rigid formula, a Procrustes bed on which he laid out his several contemporaries. Poems, he said, should be brief; they should start with the adoption of a novel and vivid effect; they should be pitched in a tone of sadness; they should avail themselves of fitting refrains; they should be presented, in point of setting, within a circumscribed space; and always they should be scrupulously regardful of conventional poetic rhythms. These artistic canons are largely observed in his poems and severely insisted on in his criticisms. He was immensely interested in detail effects, and hardly less so in the isolated details themselves. All the fallacious and inconsistent metaphors of Drake’s “Culprit Fay,” for example, by which the reader is distracted, he assembled into a final indictment of that hasty poem; and in the works of Elizabeth Barrett, of whom he was one of the earliest champions, he discussed diction, syntax, prosody, and lines of distinguished merit in the minutest detail. Seldom in these critiques does he rise to the task of expounding principles, and more seldom still does he discuss any principles of life. Always it is the cameo, the gold filigree, the miniature on ivory under the microscope.
It is not unfair to apply his own method to him, with reference, for instance, to poetic passages he most admired, by quoting a few of his quotations. From Anna Cora Mowatt:
Thine orbs are lustrous with a light