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from The Living Age, July 20, 1867. Part of a larger article on the contemporary poets of America, this excerpt gives one impression of the power of Poe's poetry.
When we compare an author like Whittier with Edgar Allan Poe, the relative estimate we form of their works must depend on our view of the province of poetry. If its aim be to astonish or to fascinate, Poe takes a high rank among poets; according to Wordsworth's view of poetry, he has hardly a place among them at all. He teaches us nothing, and, living in one world, writes in another. All we know of the personality of the authors we have been reviewing adds to the charm of their works. Regarding Poe's career, it is enough to say that polite literature has no terms to describe it. He was both mad and bad, and ostentatious in his madness and his badness. The vain and captious jealousy of his criticisms, and his habitual meanness, are, if possible, more repulsive than his other vices, with which literary critics are less concerned. But there are some who maintain that he is the greatest of American poets. This is an exaggeration of his powers only surpassed by his own exaggeration of them. It is true, however, that, by pure intensity of delirium, he now and then takes aflight beyond that of any other Western poet. His ‘Politian' is perhaps the stupidest fragment of a play that has ever been written; but, in his lyrics, the fervour of his sympathy for himself makes artistic recompense for his want of sympathy for others. The passion of ‘Annabel Lee' is at a white heat, and is pervaded by a pathos as deep as ‘the sounding sea.' The classic finish of the best of his verses that have any meaning is unsurpassed, and his exquisitely musical cadences give an irresistible charm even to those which are most nonsensical. ‘The Raven' is, at the worst, a marvellous piece of mechanism, and the same delicacy of touch is everywhere visible in the rushing lines of ‘Annie,' ‘Eulalie,' ‘Ulalume,' ‘Leonore,' and ‘The City by the Sea.' An appreciative though over-indulgent biographer has directed attention to the precocity of Poe's genius; more remarkable is the purity of his poems. By the side of his life they are like nuns in the convent of a disorderly city; but they are at the same disadvantage: their isolation gives them an air of unreality. The ‘banners, yellow, glorious, golden' of his fancy, ‘float and flow' on the roof of an imaginary palace. As a romancer Poe inhabits the morbidly analytic world of Balzac; as a poet he is not human, much less American, and has no proper place in our review.