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By Root 16494 0

drawing over a subject veil after veil of suggestion. His native temperament aided him in his research after the symbol. He was naturally a cultivator of terror, one who loved to people the world with strange and indefinable powers. His dreams were innocent and agitating, occupied with supernatural terrors, weighed upon by the imminence of shadowy presentments. He trembled at he knew not what; in this he was related to the earliest poets of the world, and in his perpetual recurrence to symbol he recalls the action of their alarms.

The cardinal importance, then, of Poe as a poet is that he restored to poetry a primitive faculty of which civilisation seemed successfully to have deprived her. He rejected the doctrinal expression of positive things, and he insisted upon mystery and symbol. He endeavoured to clothe unfathomable thoughts and shadowy images in melody that was like the wind wandering over the strings of an æolian harp. In other words, he was the pioneer of a school which has spread its influence to the confines of the civilised world, and is now revolutionising literature. He was the discoverer and the founder of Symbolism.

FROM POE TO VALÉRY by T.S. Eliot

This famous lecture delivered at the Library of Congress, Washington, on Friday November 19th, 1948.

What I attempt here is not a judicial estimate of Edgar Allan Poe; I am not trying to decide his rank as a poet or to isolate his essential originality. Poe is indeed a stumbling block for the judicial critic. If we examine his work in detail, we seem to find in it nothing but slipshod writing, puerile thinking unsupported by wide reading or profound scholarship, haphazard experiments in various types of writing, chiefly under pressure of financial need, without perfection in any detail. This would not be just. But if, instead of regarding his work analytically, we take a distant view of it as a whole, we see a mass of unique shape and impressive size to which the eye constantly returns. Poe's influ­ence is equally puzzling. In France the influence of his poetry and of his poetic theories has been immense. In England and America it seems almost negligible. Can we point to any poet whose style appears to have been formed by a study of Poe? The only one whose name immediately suggests itself is-Edward Lear. And yet one cannot be sure that one's own writing has not been influenced by Poe. I can name positively certain poets whose work has influenced mc, I can name others whose work, I am sure, has not; there may be still others of whose influence I am unaware, but whose influence I might be brought to acknowledge; but about Poe I shall never be sure. He wrote very few poems, and of those few only half a dozen have had a great success: but those few are as well known to as large a number of people, are as well remembered by everybody, as any poems ever written. And some of his tales have had an important influence upon authors, and in types of writing where such influence would hardly be expected.

I shall here make no attempt to explain the enigma. At most, this is a contribution to the study of his influence; and an elucida­tion, partial as it may be, of one cause of Poe's importance in the light of that influence. I am trying to look at him, for a moment, as nearly as I can, through the eyes of three French poets, Baude­laire, Mallarme and especially Paul Valéry. The sequence is itself important. These three French poets represent the beginning, the middle and the end of a particular tradition in poetry. Mallarme£ once told a friend of mine that he came to Paris because he wanted to know Baudelaire; that he had once seen him at a book­stall on a quai, but had not had the courage to accost him. As for Valéry, we know from the first letter to Mallarme, written when he was hardly more than a boy, of his discipleship of the elder poet; and we know of his devotion to Mailarmd until Mallarme’s death. Here are three literary generations, representing almost exactly a century of French poetry. Of course, these are poets very different from each other; of course,