An American Original

...Yet it was the purely mental, almost mathematical precision of composition which so impressed Paul Valery, Remy de Gourmont and—to digress into another art—Maurice Ravel...

...or Eliot's condemnation of Poe's not knowing the dictionary definition of "immemorial...

...Poe" The death of Edgar Allan Poe in 1849 set off an avalanche of biographical writing...

...In the end we must agree with Davidson that "the question of Poe will never be settled...

...Davidson's book is an excellent beginning and should be read with respect...

...There is considerable evidence to cast doubt on the greatness of the love Poe found in his first marriage...

...It will no longer do to quote Emerson's contemptuous "that jingle-man...

...What is relevant is that Poe in time developed a masterly technique for telling tales of horror, as shown by "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Masque of the Red Death...

...Lastly, the academicians and the historical novelists—Woodberry, Quinn, Allen, Anya Seton—undertook to sift the objective facts of Poe's life from the myths and to recapture his real image...

...In the years that followed, a swarm of literary ladies took up the burden of vindicating an unhappy, romantic genius, a motherless boy who had faced the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and had succumbed to weaknesses against which a mother or an understanding sweetheart could have shielded him...

...He was answered by other editors who had known Poe — especially Nathaniel Parker Willis and George R. Graham —who sought to defend the memory of a contributor who had labored for them loyally and brilliantly...

...In his own interpretive term* "f the poem as an interior psychic debate in the mind of a young man, there could be no more to say after the young man's realization that despair, the raven, over his lost Lenore has come to stay with him forever and that his momentary hope that he might see her again, perhaps in another world, was only the delusion of an anguished mind...

...Rufus W. Gris-wold, a petty litterateur, anthologist and editor, who had long nursed many grudges against a more talented rival, rushed forth with a memoir in which Poe was characterized as a drunkard, rake and liar...

...For him the poem is "a set of stages in the process of self-knowledge or the power of human consciousness to be aware not only of its being but even of its non-being...

...His explorations of Poe's inquiries into "the rationale of the single self," "the mystery of identity" and "the emergence and growth of the knowing and thinking self" are interesting, but they overlook the basic strengths and weaknesses which Poe's mere dexterity—and his glorying in it, which often led him to prideful exhibitionism—imparted to his work...

...An excellent section is that dealing with the short stories...

...but whatever it is, it deserves reading as the supreme attempt of a haunted mind and an intense sensibility to understand the riddle of the universe...

...The American artist in whom Dostoyevsky found psychological insight and Baudelaire inspiration needs to be "placed" in our literary tradition...

...And I say "a certain amount" because Davidson seems to have a pronounced bias in favor of philosophical and metaphysical meanings and tends to overlook the purely literary values which Poe's craftsmanship created...

...Poe once made the statement that in his early years he had written some satirical sketches and stories, some of them ridiculing the kind of Gothic stuff Blackwood's was printing...

...He is, of course, right in saying that the more Poe theorized about poetry, the less he was able to write it, and his explanation that "the greater the exercise of critical intelligence, the less poetry there would be" applies not only to Poe but to many poets of our own day whose creative powers have been drained off by their concentration on literary exegesis...

...The climactic stanza deals with death, and Poe's obsession with the subject sprang, indeed, as he once said, from the soul...

...author, "The Histrionic Mr...

...And sin is irrelevant: It is an intrusion in a study of Poe, Davidson having seemingly carried it over from his study of Hawthorne, on whom he has written an excellent book...

...Edward Davidson's book is the first recent attempt to study Poe's writings with a certain amount of detachment and fairness...

...Davidson is happier in following the action of the poem step hv step, but even here his statement that Poe ended the poem where lie did because his symbolic imagination could not find anything more to say is dubious...

...The English—George Moore, Edward Shanks—found Poe's poems "pure" and, consequently, needing little or no explication...

...Nor is "The Bells" merely a set of variations on the ages of man...

...T. S. Eliot and Allen Tate have swallowed Sidney Lanier's jibe that Poe "did not know enough" and Henry James's supercilious remark that a liking for Poe indicates juvenility of mind...

...The Americans have tended to see-saw between whole-hearted condemnation and half-hearted acceptance...

...What can be settled is that he was an artist who merits the serious attention Davidson has paid him...

...Pym, however, is also a capital story: a tale of adventure on the level of pure narrative, an intellectual and emotional voyage on the level of symbolism...

...Davidson's neglect of "For Annie" deprives him of a significant poem which lends support to his theory of the large increment of autobiography in Poe's poems...

...One of the weaknesses of Poe's best stories —even "Usher," "Ligeia" and "The Cask of Amontillado"—is that the workmanship shows...

...Davidson renders us all a great service in devoting much space to The Narrative of A. Gordon Pyrn and Eureka, two works which have been largely neglected by Poe scholars and critics and which are almost unknown to the general reading public...

...The French symbolists found in Poe's works inspiration and direction...

...It is possible, however, that he takes Poe's statement too seriously, for Poe's interest in disease and death was very active from the beginning of his career...

...This matter of technique deserves much more attention, especially in the case of so conscious a craftsman as Poe, than Davidson is willing to give it...

...in the words of others, a metaphysical treatise...

...having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out," proceeds to invent such incidents or combinations of incidents "as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect" is not far from the truth...

...It is, in Poe's words, a poem...

...He was proud of his facility with rhymes, assonance, onomatopoeia, tone-color, plotting and decor, with word and color and sound combinations...

...I say "recent" because both Killis Campbell and Floyd Stovall—both excellent academicians —have subjected Poe's works to close analysis in the past, and Thomas 0. Mabbott—some of whose notes f have been privileged to see—is contributing much critical comment in his forthcoming variorum edition of the poems...

...Ulalume" undoubtedly has much concealed autobiography, but the subject cannot be pinned down definitely to "the longing of a weary widower for a second wife after the loss of his first, yet all the while fearful that he might not find a great love in the second marriage...

...His statement in his famous review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales that "a skilful literary artist...

...Poe did not lie, either to himself or the world, when he wrote in "The Philosophy of Composition" that he wanted to write a poem which would produce a certain effect and proceeded to select such words, rhymes, repetends, sounds (since, as Davidson rightly notes, poetry was for Poe a form of music) as would serve his intention...

...A good example is his discussion of "The Raven...

...The German neo-Romantics—like Hanns Heinz Ewers —discovered in them confirmation of their theories...

...It may be both of these, but it is also—and most importantly—a poem...

...For Davidson, Pyrn contains "the most complete statement Poe ever made of his artistic practice" and Eureka carries "the statement that art is man's one instrument for making some order out of this infinitude of empirical formlessness...

...This morbid fear makes "The Conqueror Worm" more understandable and makes the "tolling, tolling, tolling" of the bells a sound which "affrights" the imagination...

...Poe has fared better at the hands of the professional writers: poets, critics, biographers...

...it is also "a symbolic destruction of the mind by the impact of reality upon it...

...Eureka cannot be quite so simply characterized...

...Similarly, Davidson's analyses of the other poems are both too profound and too simple...

...In this connection it is important, however, to remember that Poe was a critic of courage and competence and his essays, book reviews and dramatic notices ought not to be ignored, as Davidson does...

...Davidson, examining both the early and later stories, draws the valid conclusion that "what Poe began by burlesquing and ridiculing he afterward discovered could be made a masterly inquiry into the diseased and sin-ridden soul of man...