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More than one of Poe's friends said that the combination of Harry Franco and the poet must assuredly bring forth great literary results and financial success. But the partnership did not work at all well. In a very short time Poe bought out his partner's interest through an arrangement with Horace Greeley and moved the office of the paper into Clinton Hall.
I wondered what could be the relations between these two, the frankly voluptuous woman and the calculating full-blooded man. Whitney, for his part, seemed almost fascinated by her gaze. He rose as she bowed, and, for a moment, I thought that he was going over to speak to her, as if drawn by that intangible attraction which Poe has so cleverly expressed in his "Imp of the Perverse."
If idealistic philosophy, as Arthur Symons asserts, is the root of which poetry is the flower, then the artificial and exotic poetry of the fin de siècle school bears close resemblance to cut flowers, already drooping. It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets, Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these men.
Sometimes, too, by listening long at the key-hole, you could hear a faint sound, like a human groan; but it was probably merely the sigh of the draught through the aperture. This story so horrified me and froze my young blood that the fancies of Mrs. Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe seemed like frivolous chatter beside it.
He wrote a chapter upon Hawthorne, and spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and his estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he should express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in his tales in defence of which, he says, "however, or for whatever object employed, there is scarcely one respectable word to be said.... The deepest emotion," he goes on, "aroused within us by the happiest allegory as allegory, is a very, very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome.... One thing is clear, that if allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of overturning a fiction;" and Poe has furthermore the courage to remark that the Pilgrim's Progress is a "ludicrously overrated book."
If Poe met some of the tests of practical life inadequately, it must be remembered that his health failed at twenty-five, that he was pitiably poor, and that the slightest indulgence in drink set his overwrought nerves jangling. Ferguson, the former office-boy of the "Literary Messenger," judged this man of letters with an office-boy's firm and experienced eye: "Mr.
However, we had to be content with it and make the best of it; for, all we could do we could not coax our landscape down out of the clouds. Formerly, when I had read an article in which Poe treated of this singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye by isolated great altitudes, I had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own fancy.
Following the cook's instructions, I had gone into Wolf Larsen's state-room to put it to rights and make the bed. Against the wall, near the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with books. I glanced over them, noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De Quincey. There were scientific works, too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall, Proctor, and Darwin.
Poe came to Lowell to live awhile, but it was after I had gone away. Our national poetry was at this time just beginning to be well known and appreciated. Bryant had published two volumes, and every school child was familiar with his "Death of the Flowers" and "God's First Temples." Some one lent me the "Voices of the Night," the only collection of Longfellow's verse then issued, I think.
This is the limitation by form; the limitation by subject is quite as annoying. American writers from Poe down have been fertile in plots. Especially since O. Henry took the place of Kipling as a literary master, ingenuity, inventiveness, cleverness in its American sense, have been squandered upon the short story. But plots do not make variety. Themes make variety.
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