The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1688]
About the time of his beginning his duties at Graham's he must needs have had a visit from some fairy godmother, the touch of whose enchanted wand left him with a new gift. This was a wonderfully developed power of analysis which he found pleasure in exercising in every possible way. To quote his own words, "As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as bring his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play."
He tried the newly discovered talent upon everything. In his papers on "Autography" he practised it in the reading of character from hand-writing, and in his deciphering of secret writing he carried it so far and awakened the interest and curiosity of the public to such extent that it bade fair to be the ruin of him; for it seemed his correspondents would have him drop literature and devote himself and the columns of Graham's Magazine for the rest of his life, to the solving of these puzzles. Finally, having proved that it was impossible for any of them to compose a cypher he could not read in less time than its author had spent in inventing it, he took advantage of his only safeguard, and positively declined to have anything more to do with them.
But he found a much more interesting way of exercising his power of analysis. In the April number of Graham's he tried it upon a story—"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"—which set all the world buzzing, and drew the interested attention of France upon him. In the next number, while the "Murders" were still the talk of the hour, he made an excursion into the world of pseudo-science the result of which was his thrilling "Descent into the Maelstrom;" but later in the same month he returned to his experiments in analysis—publishing in The Saturday Evening Post an advance review of Charles Dickens' story "Barnaby Rudge," which was just beginning to come out in serial form. In the review he predicted, correctly, the whole development and conclusion of the story. It brought him a letter from Dickens, expressing astonishment, owning that the plot was correct, and enquiring if Edgar Poe had "dealings with the devil."
Soon followed the "Colloquy of Monos and Una," in which in the exquisite prose poetry of which The Dreamer was a consummate master, his imagination sought to pierce the veil between this world and the next—to lay bare the secrets of the soul's passage into the "Valley of the Shadow."
Whatever else Edgar Poe wrote, he continued to pour out through the editorial columns of Graham's Magazine a steady stream of criticism of current books. While entertaining or amusing the public as far as power to do so in him lay, he did not for a moment permit anything to come between him and the duties of his post as Defender of Purity of Style in American Letters. He was unsparing in the use of his pruning hook upon the work of his contemporaries and the height of art to which by his fearless, candid and, at times, cruel criticism, he sought to bring others, he exacted of himself. In spite of the amount of work he produced, each sentence that dropped from his pen in this time of his maturity—his ripeness—was the perfection of clear and polished English.
But the evidences of this conscientiousness in his own work did not make the little authors one whit less sore under his lash. Privately they writhed and they squirmed—publicly they denounced. All save one—an ex-preacher, Dr. Rufus Griswold—himself a critic of ability, who would like to have been, like The Dreamer, a poet as well as a critic.
When Edgar Poe praised the prose writings of Dr. Griswold, but said he was "no poet," Dr. Griswold like the other little authors writhed and squirmed secretly—very secretly—but openly he smiled and in smooth, easy words professed friendship for Mr. Poe—and bided his time.
As for Poe himself, he had by close and devoted study of the rules which govern poetic and prose composition—rules which he evolved for himself