"1 There is essential agreement, too, as to Poe's excellence as artist, though it is conceded by all that he sometimes failed to conceal his art effectively. Professor Woodberry, for instance, speaks of the "exquisite construction" shown in his poems, but notes, with reference particularly to the later poems, that "if any one presses the charge of artifice home, it must be allowed just." Stedman praises without stint the craftsmanship displayed in some of the poems of Poe's middle period, but admits that "we . . . are halted often throughout his later lyrics by the persistence of their metrical devices." 2 Collins declares " an artist more consummate never existed," but observes in the same connection that in certain of his poems "he reveled in the display of mere mechanical craftsmanship.' "3 Griswold admits that Poe's verses "are constructed with wonderful ingenuity, and finished with consummate art," but complains, with characteristic severity, that there was in the construction of them "an absence of all impulse," an "absolute control of calculation and mechanism." ↑ Mr. Brownell pronounces Poe "the solitary artist of our elder literature," but adds that at times he shows himself to be the artist rather than the poet and the technician rather than the artist." 5 Mr. Lewis E. Gates, after setting forth a fantastic "inventory of Poe's workshop," remarks: "Masterly as is Poe's use of this poetical outfit, subtle as are his cadences and his sequences of tone-color, it is only rarely that he makes us forget the cleverness of his manipulation and wins us into accepting his moods and imagery with that unconscious and almost hypnotic subjection to his will which the true poet secures from his readers." 6 Mr. Robertson, in the midst of his praise of Poe, admits that both Lenore and The Raven, as well as The Bells, "have a certain 1 Life of Poe, II, pp. 75, 170. 2 Poe's Works, ed. Stedman and Woodberry, X, p. xxiv. "Memoir," p. xlviii. 5 American Prose Masters, pp. 208, 217. 6 Studies and Appreciations, p. 110. ९९ 1 smell of the lamp, an air of compilation, a suspicion of the inorganic." And Mr. Stebbing, after dwelling on the artistic excellence of most of the poems, remarks, apropos of the suggestion of artifice in The Raven: "With himself confirming the suspicion, it becomes at least practicable to persuade ourselves that we smell the sawdust and oil of the workshop." 2 It is plain, too, that the volume of Poe's verse is small, and that the body of his verse of superior worth and significance is extremely small, amounting in all to scarcely more than a dozen poems and to not above fifteen hundred lines. It is equally plain that his range, whether of literary form or of subject-matter, is narrow, being confined, on the one hand, to the lyric, and, on the other, so far as his better poems are concerned, to a scant half dozen subjects. It is obvious, too, that most of his earlier poems and several of the later ones are either fragmentary or uneven, or both. And it is manifest that there is nothing of humor in Poe's verses. On these three or four points there is pretty general agreement. But for the rest there is, again, the widest conflict of opinion. According to some of the critics, the poems of Poe are wanting both in substance and in depth. His verses are "empty of thought," says Mr. John Burroughs. Mr. Brownell urges a similar objection.* And Henry James, in a revised edition of his essay on Baudelaire, in which he had originally spoken of Poe's verses as "valueless," substitutes for this phrase the almost equally astonishing epithet superficial." But there have always been those who have stood ready to defend Poe on this count. Professor W. B. Cairns holds that "it is not true . . . that thought is absent " from Poe's verses, but that each of the poems, with the exception of The Bells, "has a definite and sufficient content." 6 Mr. Charles Leonard Moore 1 New Essays, p. 77. 2 Chaucer to Tennyson, II, p. 205. 8 The Dial, October 16, 1893. 4 American Prose Masters, p. 231. 5 French Poets and Novelists (London, 1893), p. 60. 6 History of American Literature, p. 422. declares that it is Poe's "superior weight of meaning which... enables him to overrun the boundaries of his own country and speech." And Mr. Robertson, in commenting on Mr. James's charge of superficiality, exclaims: "When was verse so aspersed before? 2 By some of the critics, again, it has been objected that the matter of Poe's verse is too far removed from the things of ordinary life, that the poet dwelt too much in an ideal world; and by still others that his poems are without moral significance. "Poe wanted as a man," says Andrew Lang, what his poetry ९९ ९९ also lacks; he wanted humanity.' "Life as we know it he scarcely touches at all," says Newcomer. Duyckinck, a friend of Poe at one time, declared: He lived entirely apart from the solidities and realities of life was an abstraction; thought, wrote, and dealt solely in abstractions." 5 Of his alleged lack of wholesomeness and morality, Professor Brander Matthews writes: ९९ ... 6 There is no moral purpose, either explicit or implicit, to be discovered in his poetry," and, again: "His poems lack not only moral purpose, but also spiritual meaning "; while Churton Collins declares that "of morality, or of anything pertaining to morality, he has nothing," and adds that his verses never kindled a generous emotion or a noble thought." Professor Richardson, on the other hand, protests that “it is an error to call Poe soul-less, non-ethical, pagan, a man of morbid taste, unrelated to the great problems of source, life, and destiny." And Mr. Robertson says, with reference to the complaint that Poe's poetry conveys no moral teachings or descriptions of life and scenery," that this "objection need only be conceived to be dismissed." An anonymous contributor to the British Quarterly Review, who writes with evident discrimination in most particulars, takes the extreme position that Poe's "ethical import is so unmistakably a part of his art, that . . . we must assert it is everywhere burdened by the ethos." ९९ ९९ 5 The critics have differed, too, as to the quality of Poe's imagination and as to the sincerity and spontaneity of his emotion. Professor Wendell, as already noted, pronounces poems and tales alike to be melodramatic. Walt Whitman assigns to Poe an ultimate place among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat." Griswold objected that Poe's poems" evince little genuine feeling"; and Lowell, in his famous characterization of the poet in his Fable for Critics, complained, with evident allusion to the poems,that "the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind." Stoddard asserts that there is nothing in Poe's poetry which indicates that it was written from the heart," that "there is a simulation of emotion in it, but the emotion is . . . imaginary.' imaginary." And of Ulalume, which has been laid hold of oftener than any of the rest of the poems to illustrate this alleged defect, he says: "I can perceive no trace of grief in it, no intellectual sincerity, but a diseased determination to create the strange, the remote, and the terrible, and to exhaust ingenuity in order to do so." "No healthy mind," he goes on, was ever impressed" by it." But Professor Woodberry suggests that we perhaps have in Ulalume the most spontaneous, the most unmistakably genuine utterance of Poe"; and Mr. Robertson asserts of The City in the Sea: "It cannot for a moment be ९९ 1 New Essays, p. 81. 2 July, 1875 (LXII, p. 212). 8 Stelligeri, p. 138. 8 4 Whitman's Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia, 1897), p. 157. pretended of these verses, even by the sciolists of criticism, that they lack inspiration' and spontaneity of movement." Churton Collins, after complaining of the excess of the mechanical in some of the poems, admits that "the fascination and witchery of much of Poe's poetry had its origin from mystic sources of genuine inspiration." 2 4 5 3 By others, finally, it has been held that Poe relied too much at times on musical effects in verse, that, like Lanier, he attempted in language "feats that only the gamut can make possible." This view has been put forward by Stoddard and by Professor W. C. Bronson and Mr. Robertson, among others; and Ulalume, again, in particular, has been instanced as giving exemplification of this fault. But Theodore Watts-Dunton, in his essay on " Poetry," in the Encyclopædia Britannica, singles out this very poem to illustrate the skillful and legitimate employment of musical devices for poetic ends, and has no word of dispraise for Poe in this connection.R This conflict of opinion, it may be added, is peculiar to no one period of the history of Poe criticism. During the poet's lifetime, 1 New Essays, p. 87. 2 Studies in Poetry and Criticism, p. 43. 8 Poe's Works, I, pp. ix, 149. 4 A Short History of American Literature, p. 167. 5 New Essays, p. 87. • It is interesting to observe that there has also been much difference of opinion as to the relative excellence of single poems. Popular opinion inclines to give first place to The Raven. But Poe, we can be sure, was well aware of the superior excellence, at least in the matter of poetic quality, of some of his early work. To a New England correspondent he wrote in 1848 that he considered The Sleeper "in the higher qualities" of poetry better than The Raven; and to Mrs. Richmond he declared in 1849 that he believed For Annie "much the best" of all his poems. Few students of Poe have subscribed to the popular verdict in favor of The Raven. Mallarmé preferred both Ulalume and For Annie to The Raven. Professor Page gives first place to Ulalume. Mr. Stebbing follows Poe in allotting first place to For Annie. Richardson holds that Poe never surpassed his early lyric To Helen. John Nichol and Mr. Ingram give first place to Annabel Lee. And both Stedman and Professor Woodberry declare Israfel to be the most precious of all the lyrics that Poe wrote. |