It is true that his vision, whether of life or immortality, has something of the incoherence of the landscape of his “Dreamland”:
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore.
If his imagination passes “out of space, out of time,” it is on the wings of trance rather than of faith. At the same time, his dreams would not have made so strong an appeal to generations of readers if they had been mere sensational fancies, and had not seemed to wander in a wider universe than we are conscious of in our everyday life. They cannot be dismissed as the visions of a drugged man. They are the questionings of a spirit.
It may be that, like some of the decadents of Europe, Poe was preyed upon by a demon—that he was an outcast poet in whose sky was
The cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
But in the best of the decadents the soul survived; and if they have a place in literature it is because they have left a record of the travels of the prodigal soul in a far country. Poe, though not sharing their decadence, is also the poet of a far country. That loveliest of his poems (if we except “Annabel Lee”), “To Helen”—what is it but a triumphant cry of return? Unlike “The Raven,” it is a poem that never loses its beauty with repetition. “Annabel Lee” may be the fullest expression of his genius, but “To Helen” is the most exquisite. Even to write it down, hackneyed though it is, renews one’s delight:
Helen, thy beauty is to me