The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1568]
An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them as 'Hawthorne and delirium tremens.' I am not aware that extreme orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of delirium. If they be, then there is a deal of truth in the criticism, and a good deal of delirium tremens in your style. But your ingenuity, your completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at his command. He was a great writer—the greatest writer in prose fiction whom America has produced. But you and he have not much in common, except a certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the workings of conscience.
I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about brevity and the steady working to one single effect. Probably you would not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe, now your countrymen's favourite novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he is eminently uninspired. In the works of one who is, what you were called yourself, a Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute observation, the subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute of humour as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear, the charm of 'Daisy Miller.' You would admit the unity of effect secured in 'Washington Square,' though that effect is as remote as possible from the terror of 'The House of Usher' or the vindictive triumph of 'The Cask of Amontillado.'
Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered to the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among canaille, a poet among poetasters, dowered with a scholar's taste without a scholar's training, embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his consolations.
THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE by Edmund Goose
In the announcements of the approaching celebration of the centenary of Poe in this country, the fact of his having been a poet was concealed. Perhaps his admirers hoped that it might be overlooked, as without importance, or condoned as the result of bad habits. At all events, the statement that the revels on that occasion would be conducted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was quite enough to prove that it was the prose writer of "The Black Cat" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and not the verso writer of "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee" who would be the centre of attention. On that side of Poe's genius, therefore, although it is illustrated by such masterpieces of sullen beauty as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and such triumphs of fantastic ingenuity as "The Gold Bug," I feel it needless to dwell here, the more as I think the importance of these tales very slight by the side of that of the best poems. Edgar Poe was, in my opinion, one of the most significant poetic artists of a century rich in poetic artists, and I hold it to be for this reason, and not because he wrote thrilling "detective" stories, that he deserves persistent commemoration.
The dominance of Poe as an important poetic factor of the nineteenth century has not been easily or universally admitted, and it is only natural to examine both the phenomena and the causes of the objections so persistently brought against it. In the first instance, if the fame of Browning and Tennyson advanced slowly, it advanced firmly, and it was encouraged from the beginning by the experts, by the cultivated minority. Poe, on the other hand, was challenged, and his credentials were grudgingly inspected, by those who represented the finest culture of his own country, and the carpings of New England criticism are not