Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Association

“ He paid a great price for his poems,—precious may the world esteem them. And yet, if as he believed and so often contended, sorrow and beauty were the poet's truest themes, and love and death the great sanctifiers and transfigurers, and if, as he so often said, the poetic feeling was the greatest of earthly pleasures,—then even in his awful pain and agony, in his tragedies and sorrows, was not the great artist made, the great poet born,—were there not constant compensations and was not his heritage of woe, after all, his most precious possession? ”

“ Great as this has been, it has not robbed the world of the legacy he bequeathed to literature, nor has it stilled the voices that, as one, acclaim his many fine qualities; lauding his devotion to his nearest ties and to his friends, his undaunted efforts to maintain his wife and mother when ill in body and enduring the most wearing of all pain—hope deferred, his honest and proper pride, disdaining to reproach when reproach was justifiable, his well-nigh superhuman industry and patience, his courage that refrained from lamentation and, through all and over all, the purity of his life. ”

“ But, granted that on the side of moral conduct Poe's life is sadly lacking in inspiration, are we such children that we cannot face the unpleasant, the uncanny side of life? Can we afford to confine our sympathies to orthodox and exemplary subjects and occasions? Have we so little motive power in ourselves that we must ever be seeking inspiration from without—especially inspiration of the smug, successful, well-to-do variety? Let us have the exemplary and the inspiring by all means, but let us remember that man does not live by approbation and aspiration alone. ”

“ In my judgment, the most interesting, the most pathetic, and in some ways the most instructive of all American biographies. What we Americans seem always to demand of a biography is that it should be exemplary and inspiring. This the biography of Poe certainly is not, except in so far as there is true inspiration to be gained from the contemplation of a life so steadily devoted, amid drawbacks and vicissitudes, to the unflinching pursuit of clearly recognized artistic ideals. ”

“ He is the nightingale of our Southern poets—singing at night, singing on nocturnal themes, but with all the passionate tenderness and infinite pathos of his own angel Israfel "whose heart-strings are a lute."
We do not forget tonight the genius of Poe in the inimitable prose-tales. Such masterly productions as "The Gold Bug," "The Manuscript Found in a Bottle," and the spiritual allegory in "William Wilson," have scarcely been excelled in literature. ”

“ In this view we need not wonder at the instinctive longing of the human heart for a close and sympathetic intimacy with the supremely gifted amongst the children of men, whose transcendent masterpieces left behind them as enduring manifestations of their genius, are a never-failing source of strength and consolation, reminding us of humbler clay that the blessed Evangely of surpassing harmony and beauty which they ceaselessly proclaim may sooner or later reach even to the least of us and lift us up at last to our kinship with the sky. ”

“ The mystery surrounding Poe's last days is long in finding solution. With his faults acknowledged by his friends, the extenuating conditions of his physical organization, heredity and disease reluctantly admitted by his enemies, prejudice sprung from malice and wilful turning from truth must disappear. All who possess the divine element of pity will unite in feeling that his sufferings were his expiation, an expiation not only in life but after death in the untruthful representations of his life and character. ”

“ It recognizes the supremacy of his surpassing genius, but disdains to disparage or tarnish it by gloating over the frailties of temperament, steadily fought against, seldom victorious, conquering only in hours of extreme anguish and sorrow and always lamented with an intensity of grief known only to the exquisitely sensitive souls of those who, like him, feel the stain of such weakness more keenly than a wound. ”

“ There will come a day, I believe, when a new and beautiful charity, in form like an angel, shall yet come to another grave that lies alongside of the old General's in that same cemetery, and kneeling down in immemorial atonement for the harshness of past judgments, shall print a kiss of loving pity on the sod above the grave of genius, and shall say, "God bless him, and forgive him. ”

“ The fact that Poe, despite many limitations and drawbacks, among which we must count the comparatively brief span of his creative activity—he was writing not much more than twenty years—should have gained a position among American authors which in the eyes of most Europeans and of many of his own countrymen is, to say the least, second to none, is probably the most important fact that can be emphasized upon this centennial occasion. It is a cause for congratulation in more senses than one. The triumph of genius over untoward conditions always makes a profound appeal to generous natures. ”

“ By the immeasurable superiority of their commanding influence over that of any merely physical achievements they justify the admiration and homage they inspire, and create an irresistible desire to transmit their name and fame to future generations by visible memorials in their honor, speaking perpetually to the eye of their glory and renown.
By so much as dominion over the mind and souls of men surpasses all other dominion, by so much does the power of the supremely endowed author exceed in permanent ascendancy that of all other earthly power. ”

“ But I am nearing the end of my allotted time and all I have done is to assert that, on the whole, we have accomplished a good deal for Poe's fame in the past sixty years and that there is still much to do before we shall have the right to feel that we understand thoroughly the man and his life. To most people, however, it is the man's works that count, some holding that they represent the high-water-mark of American literary achievement, others maintaining that they are possessed of but slight intellectual and moral value and of only a very limited aesthetic value. ”

“ And so, too, on the other hand, if it be indeed true that the life of this man of transcendent powers was disfigured by deplorable lapses from the path of honor and virtue, which justice requires us to censure and condemn, may we not in our own hours of weakness and failure—of pitiable yieldings to temptation—of gloom and despondency be stimulated to renewed and continuous struggle out of darkness into light by the knowledge that he, even in the immensity of his vastly superior gifts, was unable to stand where we fell? ”

“ I know of no more foolish conduct a critic can be guilty of than to endeavor to demonstrate that a man who has produced and continues to produce fairly striking emotional and intellecual effects is little more than a charlatan. It is at least obvious that such critics are not charlatans, for they belong to the class of dupes—they are duped by their own overacuteness. And let us remember also that it is unsafe to pay much attention to analytical critics who would have us believe that the effects produced by a famous book or writer can be reproduced if one will only follow a formula. ”

“ Yes—a great deal has been accomplished in sixty years. It has been made practically certain that Poe's fame is permanent and large and luminous as a star, even if the star still shines out upon us from behind light clouds. ”

“ I merely wish once more to ask the question whether we really know the essential facts of Poe's life and comprehend the evolution of his character as well as we think we do, and to urge upon all in possession of documents or family traditions likely in any way to aid us to put their information at the disposal of students. It is not fair to pass moral judgments upon the mature man about whose frailties so much is known, until we are better acquainted with the voluntary and involuntary elements that made up the formative period of his life. ”

“ Such a notion means nothing unless you can define real literature. If someone were to contend, for example, that no real literature had been produced since the Iliad and the Odyssey, it might be possible to comprehend him and even to sympathize with him. If someone else were to contend that any writing or writings that continued after the lapse of a generation to attract the attention of publishers, readers, and critics was real literature because it displayed vitality, it might be possible to comprehend and even to sympathize with him. ”

“ Alas! it soon became evident that Virginia was dying. With the passing summer dire want hemmed in the young wife, the uncomplaining striving mother, and the hard working, frantic husband, who for many weeks was too ill to write or even to leave the house. [11] Hope had almost turned away her face, yet love survived as witnessed by the tender letter from Poe to Virginia when he was unexpectedly detained in New York. ”

“ I am optimistic enough, however, to believe that our democratic culture will improve our national taste and judgment and still leave free play for individual preferences, and I count upon this culture finally to give Poe a very high, if not the highest, place among our ante-bellum writers. I do not think that the common sense which will always characterize democratic culture—it does not hurt any kind of culture by the way—will tolerate the notion some acute critics have tried to spread that Poe's poems and tales are not real literature after all. ”

“ It is a work of genius, absolutely unforgetable by the world. It stands secure in its magic spell among the most remarkable poems of the ages. It has gone into many languages and become a part of the priceless heritage for all time. ”

“ Indeed the proof of his habitual reverence for woman than which no more conclusive evidence of the nobility of manhood can be found, comes as the fitting climax of his lofty conception of the true poetic principle, which he delineates with such amazing beauty and power and whose mastery over him he so proudly avows. ”

“ We may say, if we choose, that many Englishmen and Americans have judged Byron and Poe by Puritanical standards, or we may say that a sound instinct of moral self-preservation has led the British and the American public to withhold its allegiance, in whole or in part, from men and writers whose examples and whose works scarcely seemed to make for individual or collective righteousness and happiness. ”

“ Byron and Poe have been and are constantly judged by moral standards, and they have suffered in consequence both as men and as writers. But they have been judged at the same time by literary standards, and here the parallel seems to break down. Criticism adverse to Byron tends to center in the charge that he had too little art; criticism adverse to Poe tends to center in the charge that he had too much art. The one poet is pronounced to be over-copious, coarse, and slipshod ”

“ Poe, on the whole, appears to have counted for the world outside America more than any other American author. This fact is likely in time to produce more and more impression upon the minds of Poe's countrymen. It is furthermore a pretty plain lesson of literary history that the writer who makes the double appeal of verse and prose, especially when much of his prose is imaginative, has more chances with posterity—more chance of being really read—than writers who make the single appeal of verse alone, or prose alone. ”

“ It is also said that in his stories Poe displays invention rather than imagination, but I am inclined to believe that in literature as in life, like calls to like and that it is Poe's imagination that holds our imaginations spellbound. In the construction of his stories and occasionally in his verbal style he yields to no writer of his class—in other words, he takes high rank as a conscious artist. His appeal is limited by the fact that the substance of his fiction lies apart, not precisely from life but from ordinary human experience ”

“ His only religion and his only sacrifice on earth were his unceasing fidelity to love and beauty, and his unconquerable longings for the unattainable. His mystical cadences seem to bring us into the very shadow of the supernatural. They are an enchanted treasure, more precious than silver or gold. ”

“ Not only have the editions, the monographs, the essays multiplied greatly, but what is more important, Poe in the last twenty years, through small volumes of selections and through various sorts of anthologies, has made his way into the schools. We poor teachers of English are constantly belabored for the supposititious inefficiency of our methods of instruction; but I am vastly mistaken if, thanks partly to us, there is not a much larger amount of intelligent reading done in this country today by a proportionately larger number of people than was the case twenty years ago. ”