Of tender, or majestic dreams.”
It must be said in justice to Poe’s memory, however, that the above idea of his being both demon and angel became prevalent through the first biography published of him, by Dr. Rufus Griswold, who no doubt sought to avenge himself on the dead poet for the severe but unanswerable criticisms which the latter had passed upon his and other contemporaneous authors’ writings. Later biographies, notably those of J. H. Ingram and Mrs. Sarah Ellen Whitman, as well as published statements from his business associates, have disproved many of Griswold’s damaging statements, and placed the private character of Poe in a far more favorable light before the world. He left off gambling in his youth, and the appetite for drink, which followed him to the close of his life, was no doubt inherited from his father who, before him, was a drunkard.
It is natural for admirers of Poe’s genius to contemplate with regret akin to sorrow those circumstances and characteristics which made him so unhappy, and yet the serious question arises, was not that character and his unhappy life necessary to the productions of his marvelous pen? Let us suppose it was, and in charity draw the mantle of forgetfulness over his misguided ways, covering the sad picture of his personal life from view, and hang in its place the matchless portrait of his splendid genius, before which, with true American pride, we may summon all the world to stand with uncovered heads.
As a writer of short stories Poe had no equal in America. He is said to have been the originator of the modern detective story. The artful ingenuity with which he works up the details of his plot, and minute attention to the smallest illustrative particular, give his tales a vivid interest from which no reader can escape. His skill in analysis is as marked as his power of word painting. The scenes of gloom and terror which he loves to depict, the forms of horror to which he gives almost actual life, render his mastery over the reader most exciting and absorbing.
As a poet Poe ranks among the most original in the world. He is pre-eminently a poet of the imagination. It is useless to seek in his verses for philosophy or preaching. He brings into his poetry all the weirdness, subtlety, artistic detail and facility in coloring which give the charm to his prose stories, and to these he adds a musical flow of language which has never been equalled. To him poetry was music, and there was no poetry that was not musical. For poetic harmony he has had no equal certainly in America, if, indeed, in the world. Admirers of his poems are almost sure to read them over and over again, each time finding new forms of beauty or charm in them, and the reader abandons himself to a current of melodious fancy that soothes and charms like distant music at night, or the rippling of a nearby, but unseen, brook. The images which he creates are vague and illusive. As one of his biographers has written, “He heard in his dreams the tinkling footfalls of angels and seraphim and subordinated everything in his verse to the delicious effect of musical sound.” As a literary critic Poe’s capacities were of the greatest. “In that large part of the critic’s perceptions,” says Duyckinck, “in knowledge of the mechanism of composition, he has been unsurpassed by any writer in America.”
Poe was also a fine reader and elocutionist. A writer who attended a lecture by him in Richmond says: “I never heard a voice so musical as his. It was full of the sweetest melody. No one who heard his recitation of the ‘Raven’ will ever forget the beauty and pathos with which this recitation was rendered. The audience was still as death, and as his weird, musical voice filled the hall its effect was simply indescribable. It seems to me that I can yet hear that long, plaintive ‘nevermore.’”
Among the labors of Poe, aside from his published volumes and contributions to miscellaneous magazines, should be mentioned his various positions from 1834 to 1848 as critic and editor on the “Literary Messenger” of Richmond, Virginia, the “Gentleman’s Magazine” of Philadelphia, “Graham’s Magazine” of Philadelphia, the “Evening Mirror” of New York, and the “Broadway Journal” of New York, which positions he successively held. The last he gave up in 1848 with the idea of starting a literary magazine of his own, but the project failed, perhaps on account of his death, which occurred the next year. His first volume of poems was published in 1829. In 1833 he won two prizes, one for prose and one for poetic composition, offered by the Baltimore “Saturday Visitor,” his “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” being awarded the prize for prose and the poem “The Coliseum” for poetry. The latter, however, he did not [♦]receive because the judges found the same author had won them both. In 1838 Harper Brothers published his ingenious fiction, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” In 1840 “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” were issued in Philadelphia. In 1844 he took up his residence at Fordham, New York, where his wife died in 1847, and where he continued to reside for the balance of his life. His famous poem the “Raven” was published in 1845, and during 1848 and 1849 he published “Eureka” and “Elalume,” the former being a prose poem. It is the crowning work of his life, to which he devoted the last and most matured energies of his wonderful intellect. To those who desire a further insight into the character of the man and his labors we would recommend the reading of J. H. Ingram’s “Memoir” and Mrs. Sarah Ellen Whitman’s “Edgar Poe and His Critics,” the latter published in 1863.
[♦] ‘recieve’ replaced with ‘receive’
