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Updated: June 9, 2025
One day he copied "Ulalume" upon a long, narrow slip of paper and rolled it into one of the tight little rolls that all the editors knew and Mother Clemm made a pilgrimage to the city especially on account of it. First she tried it at The Union Magazine, which promptly rejected it. It was too "queer" the editor said.
What is the beauty of the "Ulalume," or "Kubla Khan," or "Ueber allen Gipfeln"? It is the way in which the form in its exquisite fitness to our senses, and the emotion belonging to that particular form as organic reverberation therefrom, in its exquisite fitness to thought, create in us a delight quite unaccounted for by the ideas which they express.
"Do you think the knowledge that he had written a few bits of incomparable verse helped Poe to live? If he had invented a pill or a headache powder, he would have slept on down and have dined from gold dishes." "I'd rather write 'Ulalume' than dine from gold dishes." "You think that now. But in twenty years you will sigh for a feather bed " "You don't believe that."
But what a master he is what a master! In the suggestiveness of names to mention only one thing can anyone touch him? That word "Porphyrogene" the name of the Ruler of, God knows what, Kingdom of the Dead does it not linger about one and follow one like the smell of incense? But the poem of all poems in which the very genius Edgar Allen is embodied is, of course, "Ulalume."
This charge will inevitably be made from time to time, and not merely by the persons who naturally tend to stress the content-value of poetry as compared with its form-value. And it must be admitted that the "libretto" of "Ulalume," for instance, is nearly or quite meaningless to many lovers of poetry who value the "score" very highly.
The 'Odyssey' is not really inferior to 'Ulalume, as it ought to be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor 'Le Festin de Pierre to 'Undine. Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your poetic practice, to your poetic principles principles commonly deserted by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their aesthetic system. Your pieces are few; and Dr.
Poe's "Ulalume" is a masterly display of tone-color technique, but exactly what it means, or whether it means anything at all, is a matter upon which critics have never been able to agree. It is certain, however, that a poet's words possess a kind of physical suggestiveness, more or less closely related to their mental significance.
Ulalume, for example, held by some to be a mere experiment on the jingling capacity of words and the taste of readers for grappling with insoluble puzzles, is pronounced by one familiar with his most intimate feelings at the time of its composition a sublimated but distinct reflex of them and of the circumstances which gave them color.
Strangely in forlorn silence passes before us, as we close his pages, that procession of "dead, cold Maids." Ligeia follows Ulalume; and Lenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and the moaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning of eternity.
This color effect of Poe's poetry I have felt very slightly, if at all, immediately on a first reading, as I feel the music of his verse a rereading, or the lapse of time, being required for its full development. I have not read a line of Poe in the last two or three years, and at the present moment I feel Ulalume as I would some weird scene or picture viewed long ago."
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