Poems and tales

Contents

PAGE

Introduction v

POEMS

Introduction

Life of Poe

The year 1809 marked the birth of many children destined to become famous, including in England Gladstone, Darwin, and Tennyson, and in America, Lincoln, Holmes, and Poe. The briefest and saddest among the lives of these children of genius was that of Edgar Allan Poe, which began in Boston on January igth. His father was the son of a Revolutionary patriot. General David Poe, whom Lafayette honored by kissing the turf on his grave and saying, "Here rests a noble heart." This stern old aristocrat of Baltimore disowned his son, who not only left his law books for the stage, but also married a little English actress, Elizabeth Arnold. Edgar was the second of the three children born to this couple as their small troupe made its way from town to town along the Atlantic coast. Soon the father disappeared from the stage, and the brave little mother, stricken with consumption, fought hard to gain bread for her young family. Finally, late in November, 181 1, the following card appeared in a Richmond newspaper:

"On this night Mrs. Poe, lingering on a bed of disease and surrounded by her children, asks your assistance, and asks it, perhaps, for the last time. The generosity of a Richmond audience can need no other appeal."

A week later the mother died, and the three children were thrown upon the charity of relatives and friends. Mrs. John Allan, the wife of a Richmond tobacco merchant, was attracted by the darkeyed, curly-haired Edgar and took the little waif into her home. When the lad was six, the Allans went to England on a business venture and placed him in a school at Stoke-Newington, a London suburb. Years later, in his tale of William Wilson, Poe pictured this old, irregular building, with its thick walls, its low ceihngs, and winding passages. Here he passed five years, conjugating Latin verbs, learning French, and spending more pocket-money than he should. In 1820 he returned to Richmond with the Allans, and soon was one of the leaders in his school, equally ready to declaim,

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take part in a play, run a race, or put on the boxing-gloves. Once he swam six miles against a strong current in the James River. But this proud, moody boy Uved largely in his land of dreams and made but few friends. Among these few, however, was the mother of one of his schoolmates, Mrs. Jane Standard, who so won his heart that after her death he is said to have haunted her grave at night for months. Early in 1826 Poe entered the University of Virginia, recently founded by Thomas Jefferson, where he frequented the library, the card-table and punch-bowl, and the lonely mountain paths. At the close of the year he returned to Richmond with honors in Latin and French and with some large gambling debts which his foster-father refused to pay. Set at work in Mr. Allan's office, the youth of eighteen soon rebelled and ran away to Boston, where he published in 1827 a thin book of forty pages entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems, By a Bostonian. To-day this small sheaf of verse sells for many times its weight in gold.

No one has yet been able to trace Poe in all his wanderings during these years. We are sure, however, that he enlisted as a private under the name of Edgar A. Perry, thus, like Coleridge in a similar case, retaining his own initials. He served so faithfully at Fort Moultrie, near Charleston, and later at Fortress Monroe, that he was made a sergeant-major. By the fatal illness of Mrs. Allan, Poe was partly reconciled to his foster-father, who secured his release from the army and helped gain him a cadetship at West Point. Before entering the Academy the young soldier published an enlarged edition of his verse, Al Aaraf, Tamerlane and Other Poems, 1829. The melody of these strange poems puzzled the few critics who noticed them. At West Point, Poe found the strict disciphne so little to his liking that, after six months, he deliberately provoked his own expulsion. Soon after leaving, he dedicated to the cadets his third volume, Poems, 183 1, containing To Helen, Israfel, and Lenore, which show that at twenty-two he had found himself as a poet.

We catch our next glimpse of Poe in Baltimore, half-starved at the hard task of earning his bread by his pen. his first bit of fortune coming as a hundred dollar prize which he won from the Baltimore Visiter with his story, A MS. Found in a Bottle. One of the judges of the contest, John P. Kennedy, also helped him to secure a place

INTRODUCTION VU

as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger at Richmond. Here, for the next year and a half, Poe did four men's work as editor, proof reader, story writer, and critic; the subscription list lengthened from seven hundred to five thousand names; and the nation turned to hsten to this clever young critic. At this time he married his pretty child-cousin, Virginia Clem, and brought her and her mother to hve in Richmond.

But disaster dogged his steps. In January, 1836, he lost his position with the Messenger, and after trying jn vain to establish himself in New York, he moved to Philadelphia, then, the magazine center of the nation. The following six years, 1838-1844, found Poe at his best as a critic and a short-story writer. During this period appeared his fine criticism of Hawthorne and Tennyson and such masterpieces of the short story as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Purloined Letter, and his best-known story. The Gold-Bug, which won another hundred dollar prize. As editor of The Gentleman's Magazine and afterward of Graham's he did splendid service. For the latter he gained a name of perhaps the leading literary journal of the nation and increased the circulation from five thousand to thirty-five thousand. His ability to decipher secret messages, or cryptograms, aroused a wide interest; and his prediction of the plot of Barnaby Rudge, after the first chapters had appeared, caused Dickens to ask if he was the devil.

Poe's industry and energy, his originality and versatility, made him one of the best editors of the day. Unfortunately, however, he was a child of impulse, always yielding to the "Imp of the Perverse" which stood at his elbow and tumbled down what he had built with such skill and care. He was tactless and touchy, impatient of restraint, dissatisfied with the present, and ever seeking some land of heart's desire. Furthermore, he fought a losing fight with drink and drugs. A single glass of liquor would work like poison in his veins and set his brain on fire. He paid dearly for these weaknesses and indulgence, not only in the loss of good positions but also in health and strength.

In 1844 Poe made a fresh start in New York, where at first he found a small market and poor pay for his wares. When he was too ill to leave the house, his tall, gaunt mother-in-law, one of nature's

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noblewomen, went uncomplainingly from publisher to publisher, trying to sell some story for which many present-day magazines would gladly give more than Poe sometimes received for whole years of toil. Editors valued his work more highly after the publication of The Raven in 1845 ^^^ won him a wide name and fame as a poet; and in that same year appeared a volume of his Tales and another of his verse. But he never gained any very steady or profitable position; he never escaped the pinch of poverty; and when finally he secured control of the Broadway Journal, and thus realized his dream of a magazine of his own, he lacked the capital to tide it over the first few months.

In 1846 the Uttle family moved out to a cottage among the cherry trees in Fordham, a village now swept away by the tide of the city, in the vain hope that a purer air might benefit the young wife, Virginia. For years she had lived near the brink of death; and as the dreaded consumption tightened its final grip upon her, Poe knew the fullest measure of bitterness and despair. Here is a picture of the bed of suffering left us by one who went to her aid:

"There was no clothing on the bed, which was only straw, but the snowwhite counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on a straw bed, wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet. "

After her death in 1847, Poe battled with a long, hard fever which left him shattered both in body and in spirit. Over the remainder of his ill-starred life we need not hnger. Haggard and careworn, he produced little abiding work except such short poems as Ulalume, Annabel Lee, and The Bells. He tried in vain to estabhsh a magazine of his own; he lectured and read his verse in public. His nature seemed to demand the sympathy and encouragement of women; and some of those whose friendship and love he sought were, after his death, his strongest champions. In 1849 he visited Richmond and left for the North carrying the receipts from a lecture before an audience of generous friends. No one knows exactly what happened to him at Baltimore, where he was found dazed, and possibly drugged; but it is generally believed that at the election there

INTRODUCTION IX

he had been carried from booth to booth and used as a repeater. He died at the Washington Hospital, in Baltimore, October 7, 1849.

"There is one spot in America," said Tennyson, "which I should like to visit, viz., the long-neglected spot in Baltimore where the greatest American genius li^s buried. In my opinion he is the literary glory of America."

Poe was scarcely in his grave when a bitter debate arose concerning his life and writings, the echoes from which may still at times be heard. To-day, however, certain phases of his character seem fairly clear. First, he was a dreamer of dreams whose imagination worked freely in a charnel land of tombs, far from the happy haunts of men. "To dream," he wrote, "has been the business of my life." Again, he was blessed, or cursed, with a morbidly acute nervous system, as responsive to ev^ery impression as is a delicate thermometer to the slightest change in temperature. i\ll his senses were keenly alive. "I have often thought," he once said, "that I could hear the sound of the darkness as it stole over the horizon." But Poe was more than a dreamer and a visionary, for he was gifted with one of the keenest minds America has ever known. He was quick to analyze these moods and subject them so thoroughly to his intellect that his passion seemed less of the heart than of the head. His range of intellectual interests was remarkably wide: mathematics, astronomy, and architecture; landscape gardening and furniture; physical and mental science; theories of literary style and prosody; curious reading and secret writing — such are the many subjects that filled his busy brain. He was possessed of an abnormal curiosity that throve upon the extravagant, the unreal, the mysterious, and the puzzling. His mind loved to dwell in the regions of the unknown if not the unknowable. In a word, Poe was not a learned man, a scholar, but a pioneer on the frontiers of knowledge, who sent his thoughts out along the boundaries that divide life and death as freely as he sent them to the borderland where verse passes into music.

His Work and its Characteristics

What has just been said of Poe as a pioneer should help us in appreciating his threefold work as (i) a critic, (2) a poet, and (3) a writer of tales. To-day the emphasis has shifted; but during the

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greater part of his life he was known as an original, vigorous, and pungent critic. The sheer power of his keen mind did much to offset his lack of scholarship and the hurried pressure under which he usually wrote. He was not without his faults and weaknesses; for example, he could seldom deal severely with the writings of a woman, and how thoroughly he was possessed of a mania for discovering literary thefts may be seen in his attacks upon "Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists." Nevertheless, after every allowance has been made, Poe still deserves honor as the first important American critic. He was quick to discern genuine literary power and was among the first to welcome Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Dickens, Lowell, and Hawthorne. His longer essays, such as The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, stand as modest milestones along the path of literary theory, and have pointed the way for many writers both in America and in Europe. Furthermore, since Poe strove to practice what he preached, his criticisms are valuable in helping us understand his own prose and verse.

Poe's claitn to remembrance as a poet rests on some ten or twelve poems written either at the beginning or near the close of his literary career. During his busy middle life he produced practically no verse, for poetry was his passion, he said, "and as such to be held in reverence." His early verse, with its parade of dark-browed sorrow and a mysterious past, bears so plainly the stamp of Byron that we might well ascribe the following lines to the English bard rather than to'Poe, should we find them detached: •

"The happiest day — the happiest hour My sered and blighted heart hath known, The highest hope of pride and power, I feel hath flown."

After Poe had outgrown his Byronism, he learned from Coleridge much about the witchery of musical words. We must be careful, however, not to overestimate this influence, for Poe's verse has an elfin tone of its own and strikes a unique, distinctive note in poetry. Here, again, he was a pioneer; but "pioneer" does not suggest his nice craftsmanship, his fine command of his art. No other American poet chiseled and polished his work so carefully, or toiled with such skill and pains till the perfect poem emerged. Poe wrought his

INTRODUCTION XI

verse largely in accord with certain theories he had evolved; consequently, if we would understand his aims and methods of work, we must study these theories.

His definition of poetry as "the rhythmical creation of beauty" emphasizes his hunger and thirst for a loveliness beyond that of this earth. Poe was haunted by visions of beauty, exalting the soul and granting it glimpses of infinite beauty. To elevate the soul with these supernal visions of lovehness, he maintained, is the great purpose of poetry. Beauty appeals to the soul, just as duty appeals to the conscience, and truth to the reason. Such a conception helps us to understand why Poe's poetry is usually as free from any message or any moral purpose as it is from any impure suggestion.

But while Poe thus allowed little place for duty or truth, he ever emphasized the close relation of beauty and sorrow. " Let me remind you," he urged, "that, how or why we know not, this certain taint of sadness is inseparably connected with all the higher manifestations of beauty." These ghmpses of divine loveliness, this "light that never was on sea or land," deepened Poe's perception of man's weakness and mortality. Consequently, he scarcely ever wrote a happy poem. His verse is the home of Regret and Despair, of Melancholy and Remorse, where Beauty walks side by side with Death.

Images of melancholy beauty wedded to musical verse — such was Poe's conception of poetry; and few have ever equaled him in evoking the charm and melody lurking in words. His verse Hes on the borderland where poetry passes into music; it offers us but little truth that appeals to the intellect; but it appeals strongly to our emotion and allures us with its weird, unearthly melodies. Much in the manner of a skillful musician, Poe presents his theme, repeats it, varies it, and returns to it till he holds us in his spell. Like Coleridge's Wedding Guest, we "cannot choose but hear."

Poe recognized clearly that such moods are transient, and that the spell is short-lived; consequently, he maintained that all true poetry must be brief, and that a long poem is a contradiction of terms. How thoroughly he carried this beHef into practice may be judged from the fact that the longest of his better poems, The Raven, scarcely exceeds one hundred lines.

Such poetry further resembles music in that it works through its power of suggestion, and of this art Poe was a master. Some-

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times he charms us with the melody of beautiful cadences, as in the following:

'Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow, (This — all this — was in the olden Time long ago.) "

Again, he condenses into a phrase all the power of appeal in some splendid, bygone age:

"The glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome."

At times this suggestive power is felt in some undercurrent of meaning, some symbolism, which adds to the melody a force and charm like that of an accompaniment in music. Such, for example, is the suggestion of the overthrow of a human mind in The Haunted Palace.

Poe's passion for the perfect union of word and image, of melody and emotion, led him to plan and poHsh his verse with loving patience. He chose his phrases with cunning; or he coined new words of beauty and suggestive power — "Weir," "Auber," "Nicean," "Ulalume." He called to his aid every poetic device of alliteration and assonance, rhyme and rhythm, refrain and repetend, and used them aptly in developing his chosen mood or tone. He fitted part to part with nicest care, worked deftly and surely toward his climax, and invariably brought his verse to a fitting close. He is our greatest craftsman in verse.

When we turn to the third class of Poe's work, his prose tales, we can trace the same skill and care that mark his verse. We can again discern that love of dreaming, curbed by the keen intellect; and once more we notice that the themes are remote from the ordinary concerns of men. But we also discover that if poetry was his passion, prose was his pot-boiler and bread-winner, — that many of his stories were written to keep the wolf from the door. Of his sixty or seventy tales less than a third hold a place among our best stories. These better tales may be divided into three fairly distinct classes: (i) Stories of Mystery and Terror, intended to thrill us, such as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Masque of the Red Death; (2) Analytical or Detective Stories, which

INTRODUCTION Xlll

interest us in the solution of a puzzle, as The Purloined Letter and The Gold-Bug; (3) Poetic Prose Tales, presenting novel combinations of beauty, as Eleonora and The Oval Portrait.

Most of these tales were constructed in keeping with his belief that every element in a story — description, plot, character portrayal, and style — should be made subordinate and subservient to the effect as a whole. Poe's own statement of his conception is as follows :

"A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design. And by such means, with such skill and care, a picture is at length painted which leaves on the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art the sense of fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed."

Poe's definition and practice of the short story mark a distinct advance in the development of that form and have given it a direction which all subsequent theorizing has followed. His influence may also be traced in the tales of Stevienson and Kipling, of Maupassant and Doyle. Here, again, he was a pioneer.

The union of Poe's theory with his practice finds good illustration in his story The Black Cat, whereby he strove deliberately to evoke a shudder of horror and determined that a murder offered the best subject for his purpose. The murder of a wife by her husband was chosen to deepen the horror; and then Poe worked from one terrible detail to another up to the last touch in depicting the murderer as telling the story on the night before his execution.

In devising his total impression Poe recognized the worth of a well-selected setting. The scenes of his detective stories gain an added semblance of truth by being laid in some such definite place as Charleston or Paris; but there is really little local color. In his tales of mystery and horror the setting occasionally becomes almost as important as the actors and the action. Here Poe chooses a setting detached from definite time and place; and though he

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may talk of castles by the Rhine, Venetian palaces, and English abbeys, we know that these are built in one country — the realm of his dreams. Poe-land is a dim, gloomy, far-oflf country, where the late autumn is the single season, where the winds moan through black groves of cypress and time-eaten towers and across open graves. Through the small, high windows of his crumbling castles struggles a dim light; it falls upon heavy black draperies, embroidered with grotesque figures, and upon fantastic gold censers which load the air with their heavy perfume. We are soon glad to escape to some fresher, purer atmosphere; but we admire the magician who has thus led our imagination captive down through the valley of the shadow of death.

In his effort to secure a maximum of effect in a minimum of space Poe usually devised an opening sentence that would both set the tone of his story and attract attention like an electric bell. When he wishes to create a mood or an atmosphere, as in his tales of mystery and horror, he lingers and gradually draws us under his spell by every power of suggestion — dwelling upon some emotion, appealing to our five senses, and even intensifying the mood through the order and cadence of his words and phrases. Never for a moment does he forget the effect he would produce upon his reader. He lures us into surrendering for a time our disbelief, and then holds us in the web of his novel and daring conceptions. He realizes that we cannot long be held, so most of his stories are short; he knows that he must give these unique fancies every appearance of truth, so he uses a minute realism, which, as Lowell puts it, "does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed. "

In his analytical or detective stories, however, he pays less attention to tone or atmosphere. Here he invariably presents us with some mystery or puzzle, solves it, and then explains the steps in the solution. But whatever the kind of tale, when once he has struck off along the path of his plot to his predetermined goal, he steadily increases the tension and interest. He is a past master in using suspense and surprise; and though he sometimes lingers, tempted by some favorite theme, he usually sweeps to a rapid ending in a series of short, ringing phrases. We do not easily forget Poe's stories, largely because these vivid conclusions clinch them in our memories.

INTRODUCTION XV

This brilliant mastery in his management of plot makes more noticeable his deficiencies in character-portrayal. Such a weakness is not surprising when we recall that Poe was a soul that dwelt apart, misunderstood by his fellows, and in turn misunderstanding them. Hence his characters are all the children of his dreams, or perhaps they might better be described as Poe himself playing many parts. Almost always these tales are told in the first person; and despite their diversity, they seem the adventures of one man displaying some phase of Poe's own nature. At times, as in A MS. Found in a Bottle and in The Fall of the House of Usher, he has even endowed his heroes with his physical appearance — the dark hair, the full massive brow, and the weak chin. Frequently his hero is an ingenious man, fond of mental analysis, quick to solve a puzzle, to read secret writings, or to unravel the mystery of a crime. Again, he is a dreamer, usually a man of rank and of wealth, whom Poe knew only in the castles of his fancy. Many of his heroes are men of wonderfully acute sensibilities, haunted by impulse, plagued by fear, and dwelling in the borderland between sanity and madness. All in all they are far from a sane, healthy company; and there is scarcely one whom we should choose as a companion or friend. They are as isolated from the usual life of the world as Robinson Crusoe on his desert island; our interest in them ceases with the story, and they have no existence apart from it. His women are shadowy creatures, with melodious names, beautiful of body and often noble of mind, but touched by the finger of death. They, too, dwell far from the world of flesh and blood; they are the creations of his reveries, the daughters of his mystic dreams.

When we turn to examine Poe's style, we are impressed by the difference between the bald, meager sentences of his hurried stories and the finished work of his better tales. In the latter he fitted his phrases to gain the best emphasis and rhythm; he made cunning use of questions and exclamations; and he even employed his punctuation to give just the right color and tone to his narrative. His store of words for expressing horror, grief, and every morbid passion of the mind has seldom been equaled; and he is a master in repeating a word till it drives its way home to the nerves of the reader.

In his poetical tales we discover many of the characteristics that mark his verse — the vague symbolism, the brevity, the slow move-

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ment, repetition and repetend, musical cadence, and skillful alliteration. Here he has woven into his diction many quaint old words, many simple but suggestive monosyllables, many phrases that recall the prophets of Israel. In this domain lying between prose and poetry Poe holds by right of discovery and conquest a sure kingdom. His excellence, in both prose and verse, was widely recognized in Europe many years before it had been commonly acknowledged in America. Continental critics have long regarded him as our greatest, if not our single, literary genius. Here at home, as the prejudices against his life and work have subsided, Americans have come to regard his writings with ever-increasing admiration. Year by year his tales and poems are more widely read and more highly valued. They are standing well that supreme test of literature — the test of time; and to-day they seem safely enrolled in that small company of books which the world will "not wiUingly let die."

POEMS SONNET — TO SCIENCE

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who would not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

ROMANCE

Romance, who loves to nod and sing.

With drowsy head and folded wing.

Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake.

To me a painted paroquet Hath been — a most familiar bird — Taught me my alphabet to say — To lisp my very earliest word While in the wild wood I did lie, A child — with a most knowing eye.

Of late, eternal Condor years So shake the very Heaven on high With tumult as they thunder by, I have no time for idle cares Through gazing on the unquiet sky.

And when an hour with calmer wings Its down upon my spirit flings — That Httle time with lyre and rhyme To while away — forbidden things!

My heart would feel to be a crime Unless it trembled with the strings.

TO HELEN

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea.

The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore.