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By Root 17006 0

the literary progeny of Baudelaire was numerous and important, and there are other lines of descent from him. But I think we can trace the develop­ment and descent of one particular theory of the nature of poetry through these three poets and it is a theory' which takes its origin in the theory, still more than in the practice, of Edgar Poe. And the impression we get of the influence of Poe is the more impres­sive, because of the fact that Mallarme, and Valéry in turn, did not merely derive from Poe through Baudelaire: each of them subjected himself to that influence directly, and has left convinc­ing evidence of the value which he attached to the theory and practice of Poe himself. Now, we all of us like to believe that we understand our own poets better than any foreigner can do; but I think we should be prepared to entertain the possibility that these Frenchmen have seen something in Poe that English-speak­ing readers have missed.

My subject, then, is not simply Poe but Poe's effect upon three French poets, representing three successive generations; and my purpose is also to approach an understanding of a peculiar atti­tude towards poetry, by the poets themselves, which is perhaps the most interesting, possibly the most characteristic, and certainly the most original development of the aesthetic of verse made in that period as a whole. It is all the more worthy of examination if, as I incline to believe, this attitude towards poetry represents a phase which has come to an end with the death of Valéry. For our study of it should help towards the understanding of whatever it may be that our generation and the next will find to take its place.

Before concerning myself with Poe as he appeared in the eyes of these French poets, I think it as well to present my own impres­sion of his status among American and English readers and critics; for, if I am wrong, you may have to criticize what I say of his influence in France with my errors in mind. It docs not seem to me unfair to say that Poe has been regarded as a minor, or sec­ondary, follower of the Romantic Movement: a successor to the so-called 'Gothic' novelists in his fiction, and a follower of Byron and Shelley in his verse. This however is to place him in the Eng­lish tradition; and there certainly he docs not belong. English readers sometimes account for that in Poe which is outside of any English tradition, by saying that it is American; but this docs not seem to me wholly true either, especially when we con­sider the other American writers of his own and an earlier genera­tion. There is a certain flavour of provinciality about his work, in a sense in which Whitman is not in the least provincial: it is the provinciality of the person who is not at home where he be­longs, but cannot get to anywhere else. Poe is a kind of displaced European; he is attracted to Paris, to Italy and to Spain, to places which he could endow with romantic gloom and grandeur. Al­though his ambit of movement hardly extended beyond the limits of Richmond and Boston longitudinally, and neither cast nor west of these centres, he seems a wanderer with no fixed abode. There can be few authors of such eminence who have drawn so little from their own roots, who have been so isolated from any surroundings.

I believe the view of Poe taken by the ordinary cultivated English or American reader is something like this: Poe is the au­thor of a few, a very few short poems which enchanted him for a time when he was a boy, and which do somehow stick in the memory. I do not think that he re-reads these poems, unless he

turns to them in the pages of an anthology; his enjoyment of them is rather the memory of an enjoyment which he may for a moment recapture. They seem to him to belong to a particular period when his interest in poetry had just awakened. Certain images, and still more certain rhythms, abide with him. This reader also remembers certain of the tales—not very many—and holds the opinion that The Gold Bug was quite good for its times, but that detective fiction has made great strides since then. And