The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1031]
If Outis will now take a seat upon one of the horns of his dilemma, I will proceed to the third variation of the charges insinuated through the medium of the "snarling critic," in the passage heretofore quoted.
The first point to be attended to is the "ten to one that I never saw it before." Ten to one that I never did — but Outis might have remembered that twenty to one I should like to see it. In accusing either Mr. Aldrich or Mr. Hood, I printed their poems together and in full. But an anonymous gentleman rebuts my accusation by telling me that there is a certain similarity between a poem of my own and an anonymous poem which he has before him, and which he would like to transcribe if it were not too long. He contents himself, therefore, with giving me, from this too long poem, three stanzas which are shown, by a series of intervening asterisks, to have been culled, to suit his own purposes, from different portions of the poem, but which (again to suit his own purposes) he places before the public in consecutive connexion! The least that can be said of the whole statement is that it is deliciously frank — but, upon the whole, the poem will look quite as well before me, as before Outis, whose time is too much occupied to transcribe it. I, on the other hand, am entirely at leisure, and will transcribe and print the whole of it with the greatest pleasure in the world — provided always that it is not too long to refer to — too long to have its whereabouts pointed out — as I half suspect, from Outis's silence on the subject, that it is One thing I will take it upon myself to say, in the spirit of prophecy: — whether the poem in question is or is not in existence (and we have only Nobody's word that it is,) the passages as quoted, are not in existence, except as quoted by Outis, who, in some particulars, I maintain, has falsified the text, for the purpose of forcing a similarity, as in the case of the verses of Coleridge. All this I assert in the spirit of prophecy, while we await the forthcoming of the poem. In the meantime, we will estimate the "identities" with reference to the "Raven" as collated with the passages culled by Outis — granting him everything he is weak enough to imagine I am in duty bound to grant — admitting that the poem as a whole exists — that the words and lines are ingenuously written — that the stanzas have the connexion and sequence he gives them — and that although he has been already found guilty of chicanery in one instance, he is at least entirely innocent in this.
He has established, he says, fifteen identities, "and that, too, without a word of rhythm, metre, or stanza, which should never form a part of such comparison" — by which, of course, we are to understand that with the rhythm, metre, and stanza (omitted only because they should never form a part of such comparison) he would have succeeded in establishing eighteen. Now I insist that rhythm, metre, and stanza, should form and must form a part of the comparison, and I will presently demonstrate what I say. I also insist, therefore, since he could find me guilty if he would upon these points, that guilty he must and shall find me upon the spot. He then, distinctly, has established eighteen identities — and I proceed to examine them one by one.
"First," he says "in each case the poet is a broker-hearted lover." Not so: — my poet has no indication of a broken heart. On the contrary he lines triumphantly in the expectation of meeting his Lenore in Aidenn, and is so indignant with the raven for maintaining that the meeting will never take place, as to call him a liar, and order him out of the house. Not only is my lover not a broken-hearted one — but I have been at some pains