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Edgar Allan Poe
By Willa Cather
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My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting its roses,
Its old agitations
Of myrtles and roses.
For now, while so quietly
Lying, it fancies
A holier odor
About it, of pansies
A rosemary odor
Commingled with pansies.
With rue and the beautiful
Puritan pansies.
Edgar Allan Poe.
The Shakespeare society of New York, which is really
about the only useful literary organization in this country,
is making vigorous efforts to redress an old wrong and
atone for a long neglect. Sunday, Sept. 22, it held a meeting at
the Poe cottage on Kingsbridge road near Fordham, for the
purpose of starting an organized movement to buy back the
cottage, restore it to its original condition and preserve it as a
memorial of Poe. So it has come at last. After helping build
monuments to Shelley, Keats and Carlyle we have at last remembered
this man, the greatest of our poets and the most
unhappy. I am glad that this movement is in the hands of
American actors, for it was among them that Poe found his
best friends and warmest admirers. Some way he always
seemed to belong to the strolling Thespians who were his
mothers people.
Among all the thousands of lifes little ironies that make
history so diverting, there is none more paradoxical than that
Edgar Poe should have been an American. Look at his face.
Had we ever another like it? He must have been a strange
figure in his youth, among those genial, courtly Virginians,
this handsome, pale fellow, violent in his enthusiasm, ardent
in his worship, but spiritually cold in his affections. Now
playing heavily for the mere excitement of play, now worshipping
at the shrine of a woman old enough to be his mother,
merely because her voice was beautiful; now swimming six
miles up the James river against a heavy current in the glaring
sun of a June midday. He must have seemed to them an unreal
figure, a sort of stage man who was wandering about the
streets with his mask and buskins on, a theatrical figure who
had escaped by some strange mischance into the prosaic daylight.
His speech and actions were unconsciously and sincerely
dramatic, always as though done for effect. He had that
nervous, egotistic, self-centered nature common to stage children
who seem to have been dazzled by the footlights and
maddened by the applause before they are born. It was in his
blood. With the exception of two women who loved him,
lived for him, died for him, he went through life friendless,
misunderstood, with that dense, complete, hopeless misunderstanding
which, as Amiel said, is the secret of that sad
smile upon the lips of the great. Men tried to befriend him,
but in some way or other he hurt and disappointed them. He
tried to mingle and share with other men, but he was always
shut from them by that shadow, light as gossamer but unyielding
as adamant, by which, from the beginning of the
world, art has shielded and guarded and protected her own,
that God-concealing mist in which the heroes of old were
hidden, immersed in that gloom and solitude which, if we
could but know it here, is but the shadow of Gods hand as it
falls upon his elect.
We lament our dearth of great prose. With the exception of
Henry James and Hawthorne, Poe is our only master of pure
prose. We lament our dearth of poets. With the exception of
Lowell, Poe is our only great poet. Poe found short story
writing a bungling makeshift. He left it a perfect art. He
wrote the first perfect short stories in the English language.
He first gave the short story purpose, method, and artistic
form. In a careless reading one can not realize the wonderful
literary art, the cunning devices, the masterly effects that
those entrancing tales conceal. They are simple and direct
enough to delight us when we are children, subtle and artistic
enough to be our marvel when we are old. To this day they
are the wonder and admiration of the French, who are
the acknowledged masters of craft and form. How in his wandering,
laborious life, bound to the hack work of the press
and crushed by an ever-growing burden of want and debt,
did he ever come upon all this deep and mystical lore, this
knowledge of all history, of all languages, of all art, this penetration
into the hidden things of the East? As Steadman says,
The self training of genius is always a marvel. The past is
spread before us all and most of us spend our lives in learning
those things which we do not need to know, but genius
reaches out instinctively and takes only the vital detail, by
some sort of spiritual gravitation goes directly to the right
thing.
Poe belonged to the modern French school of decorative
and discriminating prose before it ever existed in France. He
rivalled Gautier, Flaubert and de Maupassant before they
were born. He clothed his tales in a barbaric splendor and
persuasive unreality never before heard of in English. No such
profusion of color, oriental splendor of detail, grotesque combinations
and mystical effects had ever before been wrought
into language. There are tales as grotesque, as monstrous, unearthly
as the stone griffens and gargoyles that are cut up
among the unvisited niches and towers of Notre Dame, stories
as poetic and delicately beautiful as the golden lace work
chased upon an Etruscan ring. He fitted his words together as
the Byzantine jewelers fitted priceless stones. He found the
inner harmony and kinship of words. Where lived another
man who could blend the beautiful and the horrible, the gorgeous
and the grotesque in such intricate and inexplicable
fashion? Who could delight you with his noun and disgust
you with his verb, thrill you with his adjective and chill you
with his adverb, make you run the whole gamut of human
emotions in a single sentence? Sitting in that miserable cottage
at Fordham he wrote of the splendor of dream palaces
beyond the dreams of art. He hung those grimy walls with
dream tapestries, paved those narrow halls with black marble
and polished onyx, and into those low-roofed chambers he
brought all the treasured imagery of fancy, from the huge
carvings of untutored Egypt to mingled and conflicting
perfumes, reeking up from strange convolute censers, together
with multitudinous, flaring and flickering tongues of
purple and violet fire. Hungry and ragged he wrote of Epicurean
feasts and luxury that would have beggared the
purpled pomp of pagan Rome and put Nero and his Golden
House to shame.
And this mighty master of the organ of language, who
knew its every stop and pipe, who could awaken at will the
thin silver tones of its slenderest reeds or the solemn cadence
of its deepest thunder, who could make it sing like a flute or
roar like a cataract, he was born into a country without a
literature. He was of that ornate school which usually comes
last in a national literature, and he came first. American taste
had been vitiated by men like Griswold and N. P. Willis until
it was at the lowest possible ebb. Willis was considered a
genius, that is the worst that could possibly be said. In the
North a new race of great philosophers was growing up, but
Poe had neither their friendship nor encouragement. He went
indeed, sometimes, to the chilly salon of Margaret Fuller, but
he was always a discord there. He was a mere artist and he
had no business with philosophy, he had no theories as to the
higher life and the true happiness. He had only his unshapen
dreams that battled with him in dark places, the unborn
that struggled in his brain for birth. What time has an
artist to learn the multiplication table or to talk philosophy?
He was not afraid of them. He laughed at Willis, and flung
Longfellows lie in his teeth, the lie the rest of the world was
twenty years in finding. He scorned the obtrusive learning of
the transcendentalists and he disliked their hard talkative
women. He left them and went back to his dream women, his
Berenice, his Ligeia, his Marchesa Aphrodite, pale and cold as
the mist maidens of the North, sad as the Norns who weep
for human woe.
The tragedy of Poes life was not alcohol, but hunger. He
died when he was forty, when his work was just beginning.
Thackeray had not touched his great novels at forty, George
Eliot was almost unknown at that age. Hugo, Goethe, Hawthorne,
Lowell and Dumas all did their great work after they
were forty years old. Poe never did his great work. He could
not endure the hunger. This year the Drexel Institute has put
over sixty thousand dollars into a new edition of Poes poems
and stories. He himself never got six thousand for them altogether.
If one of the great and learned institutions of the land
had invested one tenth of that amount in the living author
forty years ago we should have had from him such works as
would have made the name of this nation great. But he sold
The Masque of the Red Death for a few dollars, and now
the Drexel Institute pays a publisher thousands to publish it
beautifully. It is enough to make Satan laugh until his ribs
ache, and all the little devils laugh and heap on fresh coals. I
dont wonder they hate humanity. Its so dense, so hopelessly
stupid.
Only a few weeks before Poes death he said he had never
had time or opportunity to make a serious effort. All his tales
were merely experiments, thrown off when his days work as
a journalist was over, when he should have been asleep. All
those voyages into the mystical unknown, into the gleaming,
impalpable kingdom of pure romance from which he brought
back such splendid trophies, were but experiments. He was
only getting his tools into shape getting ready for his great
effort, the effort that never came.
Bread seems a little thing to stand in the way of genius,
but it can. The simple sordid facts were these, that in the
bitterest storms of winter Poe seldom wrote by a fire, that
after he was twenty-five years old he never knew what it was
to have enough to eat without dreading tomorrows hunger.
Chatterton had only himself to sacrifice, but Poe saw the
woman he loved die of want before his very eyes, die smiling
and begging him not to give up his work. They saw the
depths together in those long winter nights when she lay in
that cold room, wrapped in Poes only coat, he, with one
hand holding hers, and with the other dashing off some of
the most perfect masterpieces of English prose. And when he
would wince and turn white at her coughing, she would
always whisper: Work on, my poet, and when you have
finished read it to me. I am happy when I listen. O, the
devotion of women and the madness of art! They are the two
most awesome things on earth, and surely this man knew
both to the full.
I have wondered so often how he did it. How he kept his
purpose always clean and his taste always perfect. How it was
that hard labor never wearied nor jaded him, never limited
his imagination, that the jarring clamor about him never
drowned the fine harmonies of his fancy. His discrimination
remained always delicate, and from the constant strain of
toil his fancy always rose strong and unfettered. Without
encouragement or appreciation of any sort, without models
or precedents he built up that pure style of his that is without
peer in the language, that style of which every sentence
is a drawing by Vedder. Elizabeth Barrett and a few great
artists over in France knew what he was doing, they knew
that in literature he was making possible a new heaven and a
new earth. But he never knew that they knew it. He died
without the assurance that he was or ever would be understood.
And yet through all this, with the whole world of art
and letters against him, betrayed by his own people, he
managed to keep that lofty ideal of perfect work. What he
suffered never touched or marred his work, but it wrecked his
character. Poes character was made by his necessity. He was a
liar and an egotist; a man who had to beg for bread at the
hands of his publishers and critics could be nothing but a liar,
and had he not had the insane egotism and conviction of
genius, he would have broken down and written the drivelling
trash that his countrymen delighted to read. Poe lied to
his publishers sometimes, there is no doubt of that, but there
were two to whom he was never false, his wife and his muse.
He drank sometimes too, when for very ugly and relentless
reasons he could not eat. And then he forgot what he suffered.
For Bacchus is the kindest of the gods after all. When
Aphrodite has fooled us and left us and Athene has betrayed
us in battle, then poor tipsy Bacchus, who covers his head
with vine leaves where the curls are getting thin, holds out his
cup to us and says, forget. Its poor consolation, but he
means it well.
The Transcendentalists were good conversationalists, that
in fact was their principal accomplishment. They used to talk
a great deal of genius, that rare and capricious spirit that visits
earth so seldom, that is wooed by so many, and won by so
few. They had grand theories that all men should be poets,
that the visits of that rare spirit should be made as frequent
and universal as afternoon calls. O, they had plans to make a
whole generation of little geniuses. But she only laughed her
scornful laughter, that deathless lady of the immortals, up in
her echoing chambers that are floored with dawn and roofed
with the spangled stars. And she snatched from them the only
man of their nation she had ever deigned to love, whose lips
she had touched with music and whose soul with song. In his
youth she had shown him the secrets of her beauty and his
manhood had been one pursuit of her, blind to all else, like
Anchises, who on the night that he knew the love of Venus,
was struck sightless, that he might never behold the face of a
mortal woman. For Our Lady of Genius has no care for the
prayers and groans of mortals, nor for their hecatombs sweet
of savor. Many a time of old she has foiled the plans of seers
and none may entreat her or take her by force. She favors no
one nation or clime. She takes one from the millions, and
when she gives herself unto a man it is without his will or that
of his fellows, and he pays for it, dear heaven, he pays!
The sun comes forth and many reptiles spawn,
He sets and each ephemeral insect then
Is gathered unto death without a dawn,
And the immortal stars awake again.
Yes, and the immortal stars awake again. None may
thwart the unerring justice of the gods, not even the Transcendentalists.
What matter that one mans life was miserable,
that one man was broken on the wheel? His work lives and
his crown is eternal. That the work of his age was undone,
that is the pity, that the work of his youth was done, that is
the glory. The man is nothing. There are millions of men.
The work is everything. There is so little perfection. We
lament our dearth of poets when we let Poe starve. We are like
the Hebrews who stoned their prophets and then marvelled
that the voice of God was silent. We will wait a long time for
another. There are Griswold and N. P. Willis, our chosen
ones, let us turn to them. Their names are forgotten. God is
just. They are,
Gathered unto death without a dawn.
And the immortal stars awake again.
The Courier, October 12, 1895
You can afford to give a little more care and attention to
this imaginative boy of yours than to any of your other children.
His nerves are more finely strung and all his life he will
need your love more than the others. Be careful to get him
the books he likes and see that they are good ones. Get him a
volume of Poes short stories. I know many people are prejudiced
against Poe because of the story that he drank himself to
death. But that myth has been exploded long ago. Poe drank
less than even the average man of his time. No, the most
artistic of all American story tellers did not die because he
drank too much, but because he ate too little. And yet we, his
own countrymen who should be so proud of him, are not
content with having starved him and wronged him while he
lived, we must even go on slandering him after he has been
dead almost fifty years. But get his works for this imaginative
boy of yours and he will tell you how great a man the author
of The Gold Bug and The Masque of the Red Death
was. Children are impartial critics and sometimes very good
ones. They do not reason about a book, they just like it or
dislike it intensely, and after all that is the conclusion of the
whole matter. I am very sure that The Fall of the House of
Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Black Cat
will give this woolgathering lad of yours more pleasure than a
new bicycle could.
The Home Monthly, May 1897
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