EDGAR ALLAN POE

By James Russell Lowell

The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no

centre, or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes.

It is divided into many systems, each revolving round its several

suns, and often presenting to the rest only the faint glimmer of

a milk-and-water way. Our capital city, unlike London or Paris,

is not a great central heart from which life and vigor radiate to

the extremities, but resembles more an isolated umbilicus stuck

down as near as may be to the centre of the land, and seeming

rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to serve any

present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its

literature almost more distinct than those of the different

dialects of Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one

of her own, of which some articulate rumor barely has reached us

dwellers by the Atlantic.

Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism

of contemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give

praise where it is needed than where it is deserved, and

friendship so often seduces the iron stylus of justice into a

vague flourish, that she writes what seems rather like an epitaph

than a criticism. Yet if praise be given as an alms, we could not

drop so poisonous a one into any man’s hat. The critic’s ink may

suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls or of

sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we

might readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding

place of truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we

usually find mixed with it.

Remarkable experiences are usually confined to the inner life of

imaginative men, but Mr. Poe’s biography displays a vicissitude

and peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The

offspring of a romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early

age, he was adopted by Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose

barren marriage-bed seemed the warranty of a large estate to the

young poet.

Having received a classical education in England, he returned

home and entered the University of Virginia, where, after an

extravagant course, followed by reformation at the last

extremity, he was graduated with the highest honors of his class.

Then came a boyish attempt to join the fortunes of the insurgent

Greeks, which ended at St. Petersburg, where he got into

difficulties through want of a passport, from which he was

rescued by the American consul and sent home. He now entered the

military academy at West Point, from which he obtained a

dismissal on hearing of the birth of a son to his adopted father,

by a second marriage, an event which cut off his expectations as

an heir. The death of Mr. Allan, in whose will his name was not

mentioned, soon after relieved him of all doubt in this regard,

and he committed himself at once to authorship for a support.

Previously to this, however, he had published (in 1827) a small

volume of poems, which soon ran through three editions, and

excited high expectations of its author’s future distinction in

the minds of many competent judges.

That no certain augury can be drawn from a poet’s earliest

lispings there are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare’s first

poems, though brimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness,

give but a very faint promise of the directness, condensation and

overflowing moral of his maturer works. Perhaps, however,

Shakespeare is hardly a case in point, his “Venus and Adonis”

having been published, we believe, in his twenty-sixth year.

Milton’s Latin verses show tenderness, a fine eye for nature, and

a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint of

the author of a new style in poetry. Pope’s youthful pieces have

all the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity

and eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins’ callow

namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original

genius which he afterward displayed. We have never thought that

the world lost more in the “marvellous boy,” Chatterton, than a

very ingenious imitator of obscure and antiquated dulness. Where

he becomes original (as it is called), the interest of ingenuity

ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke White’s promises were

indorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey, but surely with

no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a traditional

piety, which to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less

objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober

raiment of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the

drowning pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of

his occasional simple, lucky beauty. Burns having fortunately

been rescued by his humble station from the contaminating society

of the “Best models,” wrote well and naturally from the first.

Had he been unfortunate enough to have had an educated taste, we

should have had a series of poems from which, as from his

letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from the mass of

chaff. Coleridge’s youthful efforts give no promise whatever of

that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest,

tenderest, most original and most purely imaginative poems of

modern times. Byron’s “Hours of Idleness” would never find a

reader except from an intrepid and indefatigable curiosity. In

Wordsworth’s first preludings there is but a dim foreboding of

the creator of an era. From Southey’s early poems, a safer augury

might have been drawn. They show the patient investigator, the

close student of history, and the unwearied explorer of the

beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man

who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer

and more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The

earliest specimens of Shelley’s poetic mind already, also, give

tokens of that ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to

soar above the regions of words, but leaves its body, the verse,

to be entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them.

Cowley is generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his

early insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for the

metrical arrangement of certain conventional combinations of

words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate physical

organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only

remarkable when it displays an effort of _reason,_ and the rudest

verses in which we can trace some conception of the ends of

poetry, are worth all the miracles of smooth juvenile

versification. A school-boy, one would say, might acquire the

regular see-saw of Pope merely by an association with the motion

of the play-ground tilt.

Mr. Poe’s early productions show that he could see through the

verse to the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling

that all the life and grace of the one must depend on and be

modulated by the will of the other. We call them the most

remarkable boyish poems that we have ever read. We know of none

that can compare with them for maturity of purpose, and a nice

understanding of the effects of language and metre. Such pieces

are only valuable when they display what we can only express by

the contradictory phrase of _innate experience._ We copy one of

the shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen.

There is a little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and

symmetry of the outline are such as few poets ever attain. There

is a smack of ambrosia about it.