Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters, and Opinions — John H. Ingram, 1880, volume II — reading text

spirit of poesy, no longer circumscribed by the arbitrary and enervating procedures of Dryden’s contemplated academy, ranged in unchecked freedom over seas and continents, arousing the buried forms of mediaeval civilisation, the lay of the minstrel, the lyric of the troubadour, the ancient glory of the Arthurian cycle. One day was as a thousand years in the growth and advancement of the human mind. Edgar was in his childhood when the Georgian era had attained the meridian of its greatness. He spent five years at school in England, from 1816 to 1821. During this interval little is known of his personal history, save what he has left us is the story of ‘William Wilson,’ in which he depicts with a power of vivid delineation, worthy of the best days of De Quincey, his impressions of the school and its surroundings. We may feel assured, however, that his mind was rapidly unfolding, and with that keen susceptibility to external impressions, characteristic of the dawning intellect of youth, acquiring a permanent colouring from the wonderful drama that was enacting around him. The term of Edgar’s school life in England was a period of intense poetical activity and creative power, heroic emprise, knightly valour, and brilliant achievement. The atmosphere was echoing with the strains of songsters, whose notes make as sweet music as when they fell for the first time upon the ears of our youthful poet and aroused him to the consciousness of poet power. Alfred Tennyson was seven years of age when Edgar arrived in England, and, during the time of Edgar’s school life at Stoke Newington, was spending his play hours with Mallory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’ upon his knees, musing upon the faded splendours of the Table Rounde, and perhaps looking with prophetic vision to the time when Lancelot, Arthur, Percival, and Galahad should regain their ancient sway, with more than their ancient renown, as the mythical heroes of the British race. Mrs. Browning and Arthur Hallam, the hero of; In Memoriam,’ were in their childhood: Byron, Scott, Shelley, and Keats were in the zenith of their fame, and the English tongue had not been illustrated by so brilliant a constellation of poets since ‘the spacious times of great Elizabeth.’ It were difficult to imagine that this constellation did not exert an inspiring, influence upon the genius and temperament of our youthful poet,, an influence which mgt have determined in some degree his fatore career. He must have listened with that exquisite sympathy, of which the poetic temperament alone in capable, to the mournful story of gents, ‘the young Lycidas’ of our poetic history. “A strange resemblance in mental constitution may be discerned between these wayward children of genius; the same deep taint of Celtic sadness, the same enthusiastic worship of supernal beauty, the same relentless struggle with the immutability of fact. The delicately wrought sensibilities of Keats, who could ‘feel the daisies growing over him,’ strikingly recalls the memory of our own poet, who imagined that he could ‘distinctly hear the darkness as it stole over the horizon.’ ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,’ was the animating principle of the genius of the one and the art of the other. In 1822 Edgar, then in his fourteenth year, returned to his native land. He attained to manhood at a time when by a revolution, familiar in the history of every literature, the supremacy was reverting from poetry to prose. “The romantic fervour, the Spenserian symphonies of ourlast great poetic era, were gradually yielding to the steady advance of philological investigation, critical dissertation, and scientific analysis. A new reflective era, more brilliant than that of Pope or Bolingbroke, was dawning The cold generalisations of reason, the relentless inductions of philosophy, chilled the glowing ardour of the preceding era. The publication of Macaulay’s Essay on Milton in 1825 marked the translation from the sway of the imaginative faculty to the present unsurpassed period in our prose literature. From this desultory outline of nearly contemporary literature, you will observe that our poet’s intellectual constitution was formed under peculiar conditions. He does not belong chronologically to the Georgian era; his position was, for the most part, one of comparative isolation, like that of Sackville, Wyatt, or Collins, in the -midst of, an unpoetic generation, uusustained by the consolations of poetic association or the tender endearments of poetic sympathy. When Poe attained to the full consciousness of his great powers, none of these quickening influences existed save as matters of history or poetic tradition. Tennyson, in England, was viewing nature in perspective, and involving his critics in webs as tangled and hopeless as that which enveloped the fatal lady of Shallot. Wordsworth had abjured the teachings of his early manhood. Shelley, Beats, and Byron were dead, Morris and Swinburne were yet unborn, and the thrones of the elder gods were principally filled by ‘the idle singers of an empty day.’ American poetry had then accomplished little that future ages will not willingly let die. “The succession of sweet songsters is never broken; the silver cord that binds in perennial union the spirit of Chaucer and the muse of Spenser is never severed, however slight and impalpable may be the filaments that bind it together. There are always some who retain the echoes of long-gone melodies, upon whom descends something of the inspiration of those grand epochs around which is concentrated so much of the glory of the English tongue. Such a position is not an anomaly in our literary history; each a relation was sustained by the chivalrous Surrey, who introduced into the discordant English of his time that peculiar form of verse which was attuned to the harmonies of Milton, and by means of which Shakspeare, after a long and painful struggle with ‘the bondage of rhyming,’ rose to the supreme height of poetic excellence. A similar relation was sustained by Sackville, the sombre splendour of whose ‘Induction’ proved him the worthy herald of Spenser’s dawning greatness, and the gentle Cowper, who marks the transition from the school. of Jonson and of Addison to the advent of the Gothic revival. Such is in some essential respects the position that Poe occupies among American poets in the order of poetic succession. Having traced somewhat in detail the conditions of the age during which our poet’s intellectual constitution was developed, we are now prepared to appreciate the distinctive characteristics of his genius as revealed in his prose, but more especially in his poetry, It is known to students of our literary history, that in all periods of our literature, from the time that our speech was reduced to comparative uniformity, by the delicate discrimination and rare philological perception of Chaucer, there have existed two recognised schools of poetry — the native or domestic, aud the classical. In some poets the classical element constitutes the animating principle, as in Milton, whose pages, sprinkled with the diamond dust of ancient lore ‘thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa,’ furnish the most impressive illustrations of its beauty and its power. A wonderful impulse was communicated to the development of literary poetry by that ‘morning star of modern song,’ the poet Keats, and since his advent our poesy has tended more and more to divest itself of domestic sympathies, and to assume an artistic or classical character. Our poetry may have lost pliancy, but it has gained in elaboration and perfection of structure. Genius and imagination are not repressed, but are regulated by the canons of art, and from their harmonious alliance arises the unsurpassed excellence of Poe’s maturer productions. In the school of classical poets, he must be ranked is that illustrious succession of bards which includes the names of Surrey, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Shelley, and Keats. Having assigned to Poe an honourable eminence in the school of literary poets, I proceed to speak of the originality, the creative power displayed in his poetry, as well as his brilliant achievements in metrical combination. Specific points of resemblance may be discovered between his poetry and that of his contemporaries and predecessors, but no general or well-defined likeness; and few poets have displayed a more surpassing measure of creative power. Some of his maturer poems are almost without precedent, in form as well as in spirit. “The legend of the Raven, related by Roger de Hoveden, and referring to the era of the Latin conquest of Constantinople, nor the legend of Herod Agrippa, cited by De Quincey in his celebrated Essay on Modern Superstition, furnish an adequate foundation for the text of Poe’s masterpiece. The raven has constituted a prominent character in English poetry for many ages. In Macbeth, in Hamlet, in Sir David Lindsay, in Tickell’s exquisite ballad of Colin and Lucy, and in Coleridge, the appearance of this ‘ominous bird of yore’ will readily suggest itself to all lovers of our dramatic and lyric poetry. But none of these can be considered as the precursor of Poe’s poem. The nearest approach to any distinctive future of the ‘Raven’ is to be found, I suspect, in the dramas of Shakspeare, those unfailing sources of intellectual nutriment. The one word, Mortimer, of Harry Percy’s starling, preents a marked phonetic resemblance to the one word Nevermore of Poe‘a raven, whose melancholy refrain seems almost the echo of the starling’s unvarying note. “No poem in our language presents a more graceful grouping of metrical appliances and devices The power of peculiar letters is evolved with a magnificent touch; the sonorous melody of the liquids is a characteristic feature, not only of the refrain, but throughout the compass of the poem, their I linked sweetness long drawn out’ falls with a mellow cadence, displaying the poet’s mastery of those mysterious harmonies which lie at the basis of human speech. The alliteration of the Norse minstrel and the Saxon bard, the continuity of the rhythms, illustrating Milton’s ideal of true musical delights in which ‘the sense is variously drawn out from one verse into another,’ the power of sustained interest and graphic delineation, are some of the features that place the ‘Raven’ foremost among the creations of poetic art in our age and in our land. “But perhaps the especial glory of the ‘Raven’ is the novelty as well as the skill of its metrical forms. In the originality of his metrical combinations, Poe has surpassed almost every poet of our era except Tennyson. The invention of new metres, or new dispositions of those in existence, is a task upon which few poets have ventured for centuries. From Surrey to Cowley was an era of transition and experiment. Under the ascendancy of the conventional school our poetry glided smoothly along in the orthodox ten-syllabled couplet, until Cowper broke through the consecrated measures of Pope and Dryden with a boldness and originality to which our literature had long been a stranger. Few poets of the Lake School ventured into the enchanted ground of metrical experiment. They were inclined rather to discard the restraints of verse, or to render it subordinate to the spontaneous expression of the thought. With the advent of the new poetic school, the increased attention to beauty of form and perfection of structure, the expanding of our metrical forms, became a question of serious import. The possible combinations of metre are infinite, I but for centuries,’ to use Poe’s own language, ‘no man had thought of doing an original thing in verse.’ The ‘Raven,’ which is a novel blending of trochaic octometres, is one of the most brilliant achievements that our era has witnessed, and marks an epoch in the history of the metric art. “In no respect is the genius of our poet more signally displayed than in his essay upon the