Edgar Poe and His Critics — Sarah Helen Whitman, 1860

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007.with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/edgarpoehiscritiOOwhituoft Edgar Poe and his Critics. Edgar Poe AND HIS CRITICS BY SARAH HELEN WHITMAN. ^. (\ < a \ wur New York: RuDD & Carleton, 130 Grand Street, (brooks building, cor. of BROADWAY.) M DCCC LX. SEEN BY PRESERVATION SERVICES DATE L'f. I9IM~ PS We Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by EUDD & CARLETON, In the Clerk's Office of tlie District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. B. OBAIGHEAD, Printer. Siereolyper, and JilectrotypoTi * Caxton SuiltJtng, 81 , S3, and 85 Centre Street. "Wild words wander here and there; God's great gift of speech abused Makes thy memory confused." " We cannot see thy features right ; They mix with hollow masks of night." Tennyson. ** With these keys we may partially unlock the mys- tery."— -Poe's Marginalia. Preface. Dr. Griswold's Memoir of Edgar Poe has been exten- sively read and circulated; its perverted facts and baseless assumptions have been adopted into every subsequent memoir and notice of the poet, and have been translated into many languages. For ten years this great wrong to the dead has passed unchallenged and unrebuked. It has been assumed by a recent English critic, that ''Edgar Poe had no friends." As an index to a more equitable ^nd intelligible theory of the idiosyncrasies of his life, and as an earnest protest against the spirit of Dr. Griswold's unjust memoir, these pages are submitted to his more candid readers and critics by One of his Friends. Edgar Poe and his Critics. The author of tlie " Original Memoir " prefixed to the volume of Poe's Illustrated Poems, recently published hj Kedfield, says, " Of all the poets, whose lives have been a puzzle and a mystery to the world, there is not one more difficult to be understood than Edgar Allan Poe." The Rev. George Gilfillan, in his very imaginative por- traiture of the poet, admits that the moral anatomists who have met and wondered over his life, have given up all attempts at dissection and diagnosis, turning away with the solemnly whispered warning to the world, and especially to its more brilliant and gifted intellects, " Beware ! " 14 Edgar Poe and his Critics. He confesses that a history so strange as, that, of Edgar Poe should prompt us to new and more search- ing methods of critical as well as moral analysis. But before such analysis can be instituted we must have fuller, more dispassionate, and more authentic records of the phenomena to be analysed. The well written, but very brief memoir prefixed to the Illustrated Poems, and the various sketches that have, from time to time, appeared in the French and English periodicals, are all based on the narrative of Dr. Griswold, a narrative notoriously deficient in the great essentials of candor and authenticity. " It is a rare accomplishment," says one of our most original writers, " to hear a story as it is told ; still rarer to remember it as heard, and rarest of all to tell it as it is remembered" If Dr. Griswold's Memoir of Edgar Poe betrays the ■want of any, or all, of these accomplishments — if its remorseless violations of the trust confided to him are such as to make the unhallowed act of Trelawncy towards the enshrouded form of the dea