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An overview of Poe's career as a critic, poet, and writer of fiction, taken from a school textbook of 1900.
Poe claims our attention as a critic, a poet, and a story-writer. His critical work, while sometimes acute and discriminating, especially when he deals with the technicalities of composition, is, on the whole, of passing rather than of lasting importance, and adds but little to his permanent reputation. He had not, as Lowell had, the breadth of view and the solid basis of scholarship which are such important elements in any enduring work of criticism. Lacking these great essentials, Poe was not free from a taint of petty jealousy, and at times he suffered his personal likes or dislikes to influence his critical judgments. A conspicuous example of this is found in his series of papers on The Literati of New York. On the other hand, he did good service, as in his recognition of the genius of Hawthorne, and if his work in this direction is not of the highest quality, he must be recognized as among the influential critics of his time.
Poe's critical writings have already fallen into a comparatively subordinate place, and it is on his work as poet and romance-writer that our estimate of his genius must really rest. Judged by this, the best that he has given us, we cannot but acknowledge his very positive limitations. He is neither profound nor varied; he is powerless to uplift, to inspire, or to console. His fame rests, not on his ability to do many things, but on his power to do a few things almost incomparably well. The reasons for his success within certain positive limits are singularly definite and comprehensible, and we can enumerate the magic gifts which the fairy godmother of genius bestowed on him in his cradle.
He was endowed with that power of close analysis, of logical and consecutive thought, which we associate with a mathematical and keenly intellectual mind. While this is by no means his greatest gift, it shows itself unmistakably in one side of his life and work. It is seen in his power of deciphering cryptograms, and in the cleverness with which, as in The Gold Bug, he involves his readers in a tangle in order to delight them with his skill in unravelling it. The clearness of his reasoning powers is shown in his detective story, The Mystery of Marie Roget. He was able to foretell correctly the plot of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge after reading the first few chapters, and nearly half a century ago he could predict the present era of tall buildings in New York city. The same hard intellectual temper is shown in his interest in science, of which he made use in fiction somewhat as Jules Verne did in later years.
Poe was further endowed with great narrative power of a certain kind. He could tell a story rapidly and vividly, filling it with a marvellous reality and thrilling interest. One of the best examples of this side of Poe's genius is the minute and horrible story of adventure, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In such stories Poe is the follower of that great master of realistic story-telling, Daniel Defoe. But while possessing this kind of narrative power in a high degree, Poe used it sparingly, for in many of his best stories his primary object is not the unfolding of a plot, but the revelation of a mood of the production of a single effect. This ability to combine the incidents and accessories of a story so that they all work together to deepen a single impression upon the reader's mind and imagination was one of the greatest with which Poe was endowed. From this aspect the nature of his art may well be styled "pictorial," for in many of his best studies, both in poetry and in prose, he resembles a painter who subordinates everything to the production of one harmonious color tone.
With Poe, this tone or total effect is gradually produced by the introduction of a number of minute and highly suggestive descriptive details, each touch, directed to the same end, intensifying the effect of what has gone before, until the whole work is filled with the spirit or atmosphere which takes hold of us with an extraordinary and ever-increasing power. The Fall of the House of Usher is a good instance of Poe's success in this particular method of composition. The mood of passive grief which the story embodies is associated with and interpreted by melancholy images of neglect, decay, and death. Our appreciation of the mental condition of the unhappy master of the House is intensified by the sombre and mournful background to the story, ineffaceably imprinted on our imagination,--a doomed house, crumbling into ruin, with its vacant, staring windows; the whole structure an image of desolation set in the midst of a deserted and indescribably dreary landscape. The spectral trees about it, with their stark, white branches, the gray sedge, the black tarn,--all these insensibly combine to create that unity of effect which makes a landscape of Poe's as individual, after its own fashion, as a picture of Corot's. And as the command of neutral tints is shown in the subdued tone of this picture, so the command of color-effects is conspicuous in The Masque of the Red Death. There, each room in the prince's suite is ablaze with a color of its own; blue or purple, green or orange, white or blood-red, the light streams through the stained glass of the Gothic windows. This same pictorial quality reappears in certain of Poe's poems. We recognize it in Ulalume, with its autumnal fall of decay and death, "with its dank tarn of Auber," its mists, and its withered leaves; we recognize it in The City in the Sea, that disordered vision of a citadel of Death, whose "Babylon-like walls" are lit by no rays from heaven, but by a strange light from the "lurid sea."
Fine as such conceptions are, they are remotely suggestive of a theatrical setting striving after scenic effects; they seem to rise from an unwholesome imagination. Shadowy, fantastic, distorted, they make us feel that (to borrow Poe's own phrase) in the spell he casts over us there is--
"Much of madness and more of sin,
And horror the soul of the plot."
Yet, within the confines of the grotesque and terrible, Poe has few superiors. He rules over this sombre, miasmic, melancholy region, full of waste places, of ruins, and of stagnant waters, haunted by broken hopes and "leaden-eyed despairs."
In addition to Poe's pictorial power and closely associated with it is his mastery of one especial mood--the mood of a passionate and hopeless grief. Much of his best prose and poetry consists of studied and highly artistic variations on a single theme--sorrow for the death of a young and beautiful woman. The Raven, Annabel Lee, Ulalume, and For Annie are familiar examples of this in his poetry; Ligeia, Berenice, and The Fall of the House of Usher in his prose. The underlying theme is variously treated: it may take form as a simple lyrical expression of grief, as in Annabel Lee, or all the wonderful resources of Poe's pictorial art may be employed to enhance it, as in The Fall of the House of Usher; but in either case we can detect the fundamental similarity.
Finally, Poe was endowed with still another gift,--a gift of musical utterance, which gives to his verse a charm and melody of its own. Shallow in its thought, narrow in its range, almost devoid of true human sympathy, Poe's poetry has made a secure place for itself largely by an undefinable fascination that he somehow found in the lingering beauty of his musical utterance. Critics have pointed out that this especial haunting quality of Poe's verse is mainly due to his use of what are technically known as the refrain and the repetend, the first a familiar poetic device, the second not wholly unknown before Poe's time. The refrain is the recurrence at stated intervals of a particular word or phrase; the repetend, as employed by Poe, is the immediate repetition of a line in a slightly modified form. Stedman, who has given much attention to the subject, thinks that Poe was aided in his characteristic employment of these two metrical effects by certain passages in Mrs. Browning and in Coleridge. At all events there is an originality as well as beauty in Poe's use of these effects, and we feel that by his use of what had been done before he virtually created a new thing. Whatever the source of his music, Poe's verse has that unmistakable note of personality which is one of the marks of a true poet. It is no small matter to have added anything to the technique of English verse, and when we reflect upon the wild power of Poe's imagination, upon his lyrical and descriptive gifts and marked individuality of tone, we must assign him, in spite of all that we miss in him, a place among our poets which is both distinctive and secure.
Our final estimate of Poe's work as a whole will depend upon our view of the true function of the artist. He believed that the artist's highest work and mission was to give pleasure; he defined poetry as "the rhythmical creation of beauty," and declared that "unless incidentally" it had "no concern whatever with duty or with truth." He put forth all the resource of his genius: his intellectual subtility, his feeling for the weird, the sublime, and the grotesque, his sense of color, his sense of sound,--he manipulated all these as a skillful craftsman for the building of works of wonder and beauty. He probably did all that it was in him to do. If we are satisfied that he was right in his aims and in his theory of art, we can ask nothing more. But if we believe that the spiritual and moral are vital elements in the greatest art, if we think that conscience and truth and duty have their place in its temple, we are forced to conclude that the limitations of Poe's own nature, the painful inadequacy of the man himself, have left ineffaceable marks upon the quality and character of his work, and prevented it from reaching an excellence to which it might otherwise have attained.
