EDGAR ALLAN POE.

Enigmatic Genius.

(BY R.G.H.)

Again and again, with such poets as Blake, Coleridge, and Poe, we are made to realise that it is a mental or spiritual biography we need, not a life-story. Inner experience was more to these men than outer, and the mere facts of their lives have little value in illuminating their work although those facts are neatly all that we have to go upon. So far as Poe is concerned many scholars have collected and sifted the material for his personal history without succeeding in explaining him. In spite of two elaborate modern "lives" he remains an unearthly and mysterious being.

NEW FACTS

The latest attempt to penetrate the arcana of his mind is that of Dame Una Pope Hennessy, whose sane and scholarly work on Scott is well known. She calls her study a "critical biography " mentioning as justification for its existence the fact that to previous writers on Poe the vitally important letters now in the Valentine Museum were unknown. These letters tell us, for example, that he commenced to write short stories in his characteristic style at a very early period. Five of them were actually printed by the " Saturday Courier " of Philadelphia in 1831, when he was 22. A large part of the celebrated "Gold Bug" too, was composed while Poe was a cadet in the U S army. The same applies to many of the poems, even if they were revised or rewritten later. There is some indication that the pathetic "Annabel Lee" existed before the death of his girl wife, whom it is supposed to lament. But, then again, Poe knew she would die.

LITERARY INFLUENCES

Dame Una is particularly interested in tracing Poe's reading. " The key to his work, apart from his native aptitudes lies in the books he read. His career as a journalist, exaggerating as it did his predisposition to reflect the life around him, deflected him from his principal literary purpose, original poetry, and we may see him receiving imprint after imprint from all kinds of authors and rendering them back sometimes recognisably, sometimes unrecognisably, transformed." A comparison is elsewhere made of the similar processes in Coleridge's mind, as revealed by Professor John Livingstone Lowes, that led to "Kubla Khan ." "Poe's output as a whole produces a kaleidoscopic effect, for he never settled to any one type of work, the mischief being that he was caught up in journalism— journalism that makes a ceaseless demand for piquancy, novelty, and compactness." However that may be an early love of seventeenth century minor poets and major prose-writers left an indelible impress on his style (there are sentences of the prose that immediately recall Sir Thomas Browne).
Then he began to read voyages and accounts of scientific discoveries, all which ultimately produced the "Tales of Mystery and Imagination." The strongest influence on his early poetry was however, Byron, who yielded at length to Coleridge and other contemporaries, until his own original manner of expression was evolved. As a writer he passed through many phases, now a realist, now a romanticist, now scientific in temper again a metaphysician, he remained, nevertheless, a poet, and in spite of a miserable life, of drugs, alcohol, and nervous disease, wrote "the most intense and idiosyncratic of all his poems," namely, "Ulalume," at the very end. His movement however was definitely towards social satire of which "Mellonta Tauta," observations written from the deck of a dirigible crossing the Atlantic gives a foretaste. There he prophesies the mechanical civilisation, the mass-thought, to which we have arrived, with their inconveniences and limitations.

HIS INDIVIDUALITY

Having become the most original and powerful force in American letters, Poe began to exert—particularly on French writers such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valery—an immense influence. Both poets and prose-writers acknowledge derivation from him. He foreran symbolists and surrealists. He is the father of the detective story. Jules Verne took from him the suggestion for the scientific romance. He has even affected dramatic writing, as may be seen in the works of Maeterlinck. In America, however, the total effect of his multifarious activity was small because, as Dame Una maintains his was an alien mind a product not of American culture, but of something his countrymen could not understand. He may have been, she suggests, of Jewish origin on the mother's side.

This biography, as has perhaps been indicated, is no catchpenny semi-novel but an extraordinarily fine well-balanced, withal interesting inquiry into the state and growth of an isolated human soul. (Macmillan )

 smh 16/2/1935,