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The BOOK of the POE 
 CENTENARY 
 
 A Record of the Exercises at the Uni- 
 versity of Virginia January 16-19, 
 1909, in Commemoration of the 
 One Hundredth Birthday 
 of Edgar Allan Poe 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 Charles W. Kent, Linden Kent Memorial School of 
 English Literature 
 
 AND 
 
 John S, Patton, Librarian 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 
 1909 
 

 ^^'^ 
 
 Copyright, 1909 
 
 BY THE 
 
 University of Virginia 
 
 The Michie Company, Printers 
 
 Chari,ottesvii,i,E, Va. '-~~r,,-,MpnFSS 
 
 1 Two v:;cuies Received 
 
 WAY 151909. 
 
 L copynent Entry 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Edgar Allan Poe 1 
 
 II. In the Jeeeerson Society . . 5 
 
 III. In the Chapel 11 
 
 IV. In Cabell Hall: The Ravens 15 
 V. In Madison Hall 34 
 
 VI. In Cabell Hall, Again . . 100 
 
 VII. In No. 13 West Range ... 186 
 
 VIII. In the Minds oe Men ... 191 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 'nr^HE University of Virginia has nothing 
 -^ with which to reproach herself in her 
 treatment of Edgar Allan Poe. Through ill 
 report and good he was followed with her ma- 
 ternal solicitude and misgivings, but never with 
 her reproof or wrath. In his college days she 
 may have been too lenient, but in the days of 
 his fame she is not constrained by any hobgob- 
 lin of consistency to withhold her praise. She 
 has, therefore, had peculiar pride in witnessing 
 his universal acclaim as a man of genius and as 
 a singularly forceful agency in compelling in- 
 ternational recognition of our American liter- 
 ature. Her anxiety is no longer lest he be not 
 recognized at his real worth, but lest, in the 
 ardor of revived enthusiasm, his real merit, 
 however high, be overrated and his rightful 
 place, so tardily won, jeopardized by claims too 
 sweeping and superlative. 
 
2 POE CENTENARY 
 
 The celebration of the Poe centenary at the 
 University of Virginia has served, however, as 
 a corrective: first, of the persistent misstate- 
 ments of his earlier biographers, and then of 
 the unsettled or adverse judgment of his liter- 
 ary rank. 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe entered the University on 
 the fourteenth of February, 1826, and did not 
 leave until the twentieth of December. By the 
 way, the many errors and uncertainties as to 
 Poe's stay at the University are due to a mis- 
 understanding of the period covered by the 
 session of 1826. It began on the first of 
 February and continued without break or holi- 
 day to the fifteenth of December, so that in- 
 stead of leaving during the session, as has 
 been asserted in various forms of ignorance or 
 malignity, he was in the University from two 
 weeks after the session opened until five days 
 after the session closed. Nor was he dis- 
 ciplined by suspension, expulsion, personal 
 reprimand, or in any other way during that 
 long session. He did fall once under suspicion 
 of misconduct, but in that particular case was 
 innocent. 
 
 His career was not entirely calm and placid 
 
POE CENTENARY 3 
 
 in that stormy session, but notwithstanding 
 alleged irregularities he was commended for 
 Italian translation, reported among the 
 "passed" in Latin and French, and, in addition, 
 was known to the librarian as a free reader of 
 good books, to his fellow-students as a gifted 
 author of undergraduate tales never published, 
 and probably of poems afterwards published 
 in the volume of 1827. Among those who 
 applauded his achievements, yet deplored the 
 errancies of his later life, were his brother 
 alumni; and in that small company of sincere 
 mourners who followed his storm-tossed and 
 wrecked body to its humble grave were repre- 
 sentatives of his alma mater. 
 
 When the semi-centennial of his death 
 came, the University of Virginia unveiled, with 
 services so significant as to attract the atten- 
 tion of the cultivated world, the Zolnay bust 
 of Poe, the most striking and satisfactory 
 artistic representation of the poet extant.* 
 Through this successful and significant celebra- 
 tion the University of Virginia's connection 
 
 *There were then but two monuments to Poe: 
 his tombstone in Baltimore and the Actors' Monu- 
 ment in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. 
 
4 POE CENTENARY 
 
 with Poe became so widely known that as the 
 centennial of his birth approached, it was 
 taken for granted by the foreign and domestic 
 press that the supreme appreciation of this 
 noted event would be shown at this University. 
 That these high expectations might not be 
 disappointed, the President of the University 
 of Virginia appointed a committee to provide 
 for some adequate recognition of the cente- 
 nary. The committee, consisting of Charles 
 W. Kent, James A. Harrison, and William H. 
 Faulkner, with the hearty support of the 
 Faculty, students, community, and especially 
 the President, arranged the programme set 
 forth in this volume officially sanctioned. 
 
 In this book no record can be made of the 
 brilliancy or enthusiasm of the audiences, no 
 representation of the spectacular features of 
 the entertainment, but the substantial contribu- 
 tions to Poe criticism and the distinct acknowl- 
 edgement of Poe's far-sweeping fame are here 
 presented to the public with grateful thanks to 
 all who by participation or presence did honor 
 to Poe's memory, and with a solemn sense of 
 chastened but lasting joy that our great 
 alumnus has at last come so fully to his own. 
 
II 
 
 IN THE JEFFERSON SOCIETY 
 
 ' I ^HE Jefferson Literary Society was estab- 
 -*■ lished in the early months of the session 
 of 1825, and Poe became a member in 1826. 
 The first public event of the centenary was a 
 celebration by this Society on the evening of 
 the 16th. Interest in the occasion and the spe- 
 cial programme drew many to the Jefferson 
 Hall in spite of the prevailing severe snow 
 storm. The programme, arranged by students 
 to do honor to their famous predecessor, 
 expressed well the attitude of the student body 
 to him. The committee on programme was 
 Paul Micou, chairman; L. M. Robinette, O. 
 R. Easley, G. F. Zimmer, and A. B. Hutzler. 
 Mr. Paul Micou presided and welcomed the 
 audience, promising that none of the speakers 
 would attempt elaborate criticism of the poet's 
 life and works. The place of oratorical trib- 
 utes and dramatic recital of poems would be 
 
 5 
 
6 POE CENTENARY 
 
 taken by simple descriptions of Poe's life at the 
 University, the student activities in his day and 
 the founding of the Society. 
 
 Mr. H. H. Thurlow, of New York, gave the 
 necessary setting for the programme in a short 
 sketch of the poet's life, not omitting the 
 pathetic story of his varying fortunes in the 
 several cities in which he sojourned. 
 
 The Washington Literary Society had been 
 invited to take part in the programme, and Mr. 
 DeRoy R. Fonville, of North Carolina, was 
 present as its delegate. Mr. Fonville, whose 
 theme was "The Pathos in the Lives of Our 
 Southern Poets," pictured the pitiful struggles 
 that had so large a share in the lives of Lanier, 
 Hayne and Timrod, reaching in Poe's life the 
 climax of his story. The courage and dignity 
 of these gifted men in the midst of the sore 
 perplexities of their artistic lives received 
 sympathetic treatment. 
 
 The natural pride of the Jefferson Society in 
 having had Poe as a member suggested the 
 theme for Mr. W. P. Powell, of Virginia — 
 "Poe and the Jefferson Literary Society." Mr. 
 Powell told his audience that the life of the 
 Jefferson Society has been almost co-equal with 
 
POE CENTENARY 7 
 
 that of the University, if we date the institution 
 from the beginning of its first session, and that 
 the poet was an active member, and, for at least 
 one meeting, temporary secretary. He seems 
 to have addressed the Society only once, and 
 then his theme was "Heat and Cold," Mr. 
 Powell drew some legitimate inferences as to 
 Poe's sociability from the fact of his member- 
 ship in the "Jeff." 
 
 Many interesting anecdotes and curious facts 
 about the poet's University year were told by 
 Mr. A. B. Hutzler, of Virginia. In the course 
 of his address on "Poe at the University of 
 Virginia," he pointed out that despite the law- 
 lessness of that session Edgar Poe appeared 
 on the minute-book of the faculty but once, and 
 that in that case it was merely to give testi- 
 mony in an affair about which he proved to 
 be ignorant. His evident literary and artistic 
 gifts were shown even then by his story-telling 
 to friends gathered at the fireside in No. 13, 
 and the decoration of his dormitory with 
 crayon copies of scenes that had caught his 
 fancy. In a few words he rehearsed the facts 
 which have convinced investigators that No. 
 13 West Range is the room that Poe occupied 
 
8 POE CENTENARY 
 
 after leaving West Lawn, where he was first 
 domiciled as a student. 
 
 Mr. J. Y. McDonald, of West Virginia, fol- 
 lowed with an address full of humorous stories 
 of "Student Life at the University in 1826," 
 the year of Poe's residence. He kept his au- 
 dience amused with story after story taken 
 from faculty minute-books of the almost 
 daily trials for violating the strict rules 
 prescribing apparel, food, amusements, and 
 conduct of the students. It was hard for the 
 students in his audience to realize, as ever 
 existing at the University, such conditions as 
 those record-books and the statutes of the 
 time record with grave formality. One fact 
 of interest pointed out by Mr. McDonald was 
 the close personal touch that Mr. Jefferson 
 maintained with the students of his 'Uni- 
 versity. The disorders of 1826, due to 
 boyish revolt against the prevailing conditions, 
 were graphically described. 
 
 Not less entertaining or full of quaint details 
 was the address of Mr. A. G. Gilmer, of 
 Virginia, on "How the Faculty Fared in 
 1826." That their lines had not fallen to them 
 in places entirely pleasant was very evident, for 
 
POE CENTENARY 9 
 
 something like twenty-five expulsions from a 
 student body of five times that number pointed 
 to a great deal of disorder and probably to 
 much that was radically wrong with the system 
 under which student self-government was first 
 attempted, Mr. Jefferson planned a student 
 tribunal to try all cases of misconduct, but no 
 student would serve on that court and the 
 faculty was forced to another method. Im- 
 mediate success was not achieved, but ulti- 
 mately there came about a mutual respect and 
 forbearance, which solved the hard problem 
 of discipline for all time. The attempt to 
 procure the entire faculty (with a single ex- 
 ception) from abroad was discussed at some 
 length, and the characteristics of the importa- 
 tions were well described. 
 
 Mr. S. M. Cleveland, of Virginia, closed the 
 exercises by an interesting analysis of the 
 poems which he believed Poe had written while 
 at the University. These were "Tamerlane," 
 "Dreams," "Visit of the Dead," "Evening 
 Star," "Imitation," "In Youth I Have Known 
 One," "A Wandering Being from My Birth," 
 "The Happiest Day," and "The Lake." The 
 discussion as to whether these poems were 
 
10 POE CENTENARY 
 
 written at the University was ingenious and 
 interesting, if not convincing. Their general 
 atmosphere and message were discussed with 
 rare insight and critical interpretation. Mr. 
 Cleveland drew a comparison between "Tam- 
 erlane" as first published and the polished 
 poem that appeared later in Poe's life, and 
 showed that, though greatly improved in form, 
 the underlying spirit was the same. 
 
Ill 
 
 IN THE CHAPEL 
 
 OUNDAY evening Dr. William A. Barr, 
 *^ of St. Paul's Church, Lynchburg, Va., 
 preached in the University Chapel on the text 
 "Whosoever would become great among you 
 shall be your servant," his thesis being that a 
 man is great in proportion to his loyalty to his 
 highest visions. He made the following 
 reference to Poe : 
 
 I believe that the true Poe was an example 
 of the very kind of greatness I have described. 
 The possession of genius alone does not make 
 men great. It is the character back of genius. 
 And Poe was consecrated through all his life 
 to his vision of beauty and truth. He held to 
 it with a tenacity that would not be daunted 
 and much of the apparent vagabondage may be 
 of the kind that Christ enjoined upon his first 
 disciples when he told them that if one city 
 11 
 
12 POE CENTENARY 
 
 would not receive them, to shake its dust from 
 their feet and go to another. But after all, 
 wherein consists Poe's great moral delin- 
 quency? From all that is known of his life 
 and work he was pure as the snow, and may 
 well stand as a rebuke to the modern literary 
 horde who appear to suppose that to be inter- 
 esting they must be salacious. Then as to his 
 relations in life, whether as ward, as husband, 
 or as son to the mother of his beautiful 
 Annabel Lee, he appears to have fulfilled these 
 relations with tenderness, fidelity and love. If 
 it be true that he had an infirmity of temper, 
 it is also true that some of the most illustrious 
 saints in history have spent their lives in a 
 struggle with the same infirmity. And so at 
 last his moral delinquency seems to be reduced 
 to a single failing and this but on occasions 
 when he indulged too freely in the cup. 
 According, however, to his own explanation, 
 this was the result of a nervous condition into 
 which his constitution at times fell. It is fair 
 to accept his explanation in the light of the 
 modern view that this failing is at times the 
 result of disease and for this to give him our 
 compassion. 
 
POE CENTENARY 13 
 
 We have a pen picture of Poe by N. P. 
 Willis, in whose employ he spent a number of 
 months. It concludes with these words : 
 "Through all this considerable period we had 
 seen but one presentment of the man : a quiet, 
 patient, industrious and most gentlemanly per- 
 son, commanding the utmost respect and good 
 feeling by his unvarying deportment and 
 ability." 
 
 I submit that a man who could have appeared 
 to Mr. Willis day after day and month after 
 month in this light could not have been so 
 bad. And yet we are obliged to admit an 
 unspeakable pathos in his short and checkered 
 life and above all in its end. Whether, as has 
 been maintained, he was drugged, or whether 
 found in a helpless condition through his own 
 failing, it is unspeakably sad that this fine 
 genius should have been used by a set of 
 political thugs and left to die like a dog. 
 
 In looking back upon Poe's career, I recall 
 the words of Carlyle, written with reference to 
 the poet Burns : 
 
 "Alas, his sun shone as through a tropical 
 tornado ; and the pale shadow of Death eclipsed 
 it at noon! Shrouded in such baleful vapors, 
 
14 POE CENTENARY 
 
 the genius of Burns was never seen in clear 
 azure splendor, enlightening the world. But 
 some beams from it did, by fits, pierce through ; 
 and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and 
 orient colours into a glory and stern grandeur, 
 which men silently gazed on with wonder and 
 tears." 
 
IV 
 
 IN CABELL HALL— THE RAVENS 
 
 'HPHE Raven Society, in its celebration of 
 -*- the Poe centenary, endeavored to empha- 
 size primarily Poe's life and influence from 
 the viewpoint of the poet's alma mater. 
 
 The speaker of the evening was an alumnus 
 of the University, the poems were by alumni, 
 and the evening was closed by a sketch of 
 Poe's connection with the University of Vir- 
 ginia, illustrated by a set of stereopticon views. 
 
 Mr. H. H. Freeman, organist and choir- 
 master of St. John's Church, Washington, 
 D. C, was in charge of the music programme. 
 A very fitting beginning was his rendition of 
 Chopin's "Marche Funebre" as a memorial to 
 the great poet. 
 
 Mrs. Charles Hancock sang Oliver King's 
 arrangement of *'Israfel." 
 
 Professor Willoughby Reade, of the Depart- 
 ment of English and Elocution in the Episcopal 
 
 15 
 
16 POE CENTENARY 
 
 High School, near Alexandria, Virginia, re- 
 cited "The Raven" and "The Bells." 
 
 In interpretation of Poe's purpose in writing 
 "The Raven," Mr. Reade said : 
 
 It was with great pleasure, ladies and gentle- 
 men, that I accepted the invitation of the 
 Raven Society to take part in its exercises 
 to-night. To others, however, I shall leave it 
 to pronounce encomiums on the genius of the 
 man whose centennial we are here met to com- 
 memorate, and shall pass at once to the reading 
 of his greatest poem. 
 
 I hold it to be a hopeless task to give an 
 acceptable reading of a piece of literature 
 which one does not understand, or in which 
 one sees no more than lies on the printed page. 
 And so I offer you, before I read the poem, my 
 interpretation of "The Raven." It may not be 
 the correct one — I do not claim that — but it 
 is the poem as I see and feel it. 
 
 Many theories have been advanced in at- 
 tempts to prove why Poe wrote "The Raven." 
 Most of us are familiar with the explanation 
 which the author himself gives of its origin. 
 He says that he sat down and composed it 
 deliberately — as he might have played a game 
 
POE CENTENARY 17 
 
 of chess — that it was a poem of the mind rather 
 than of the heart; a statement which even his 
 most ardent admirers can hardly credit, know- 
 ing, as they do, his disHke for poetry made by 
 rule. Indeed, it has been stated that he after- 
 ward said that this explanation was but a hoax ! 
 To say that it is a mere jingle of rhymes is 
 folly: no man ever wrote such a poem as this 
 without meaning something. Published two 
 years before the death of his wife, it could 
 not, as some who are not careful as to dates 
 have said, have been inspired by her loss. 
 
 I believe that he wrote the poem because he 
 could not help writing it; and, that we might 
 not read his heart's dearest secrets, he hides 
 this cry of his soul in the wonderful diction, 
 the haunting rhyme and rhythm, and the vague 
 mystery of this remarkable composition. At 
 the time it was written, Poe had travelled far 
 on the downward road. The spirit of hope- 
 lessness had taken up its abode in his heart. 
 All his nobler feelings, however, were not 
 dead, and although he seemed to realize that 
 this life held but little of good for him, there 
 was still, deep in his heart, a hope of some- 
 thing better in the hereafter. 
 
18 POE CENTENARY 
 
 What is this "ancient, grim, and ghastly 
 raven" but the spirit of evil which has entered 
 the soul of this unhappy man — the spirit of 
 Remorse, of Despair? It is never to leave 
 him again — the bird itself tells him that this 
 is the case in reply to his statement, "On the 
 morrow he will leave me." Near the close of 
 the poem he tries to drive it away, but the 
 effort is a useless one, the last line tells us that. 
 
 And what is this "lost Lenore" but his own 
 lost life? Never again on earth will he find 
 it young and pure as once it was, but what of 
 the hereafter — ay, the hereafter ? Summoning 
 all his courage, he asks of this evil spirit the 
 great question which every human being asks 
 at some time in his life, "Is there, is there balm 
 in Gilead?" Is there any hope in the here- 
 after ? Driven almost to madness by the bitter 
 negation, he asks a second question: 
 
 "Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the 
 distant Aidenn, 
 It shall clasp a sainted maiden — " 
 
 and when the same mocking "Nevermore" 
 falls upon his ear, see how all his nobler 
 feelings assert themselves, how strong his 
 
POE CENTENARY 19 
 
 belief in God, in something better beyond this 
 hfe, as he exclaims : 
 
 "Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy 
 soul hath spoken." 
 
 O mighty genius ! O blasted life ! O weary 
 heart in darkness struggling! God show thee 
 mercy in the day of thy judgment, and for 
 thy faith grant thee "surcease of sorrow" in 
 "that distant Aidenn" where, clasping again 
 thy pure young life, thou shalt know the heal- 
 ing of that balm of Gilead, and where thy soul 
 shall be forever lifted from the shadow of that 
 "Nevermore." 
 
 Dr. James Southall Wilson (M. A., 1905), 
 professor of History in William and Mary, 
 read his poem 
 
 "Whose Heart-Strings Are a Lute" 
 
 [January 19, 1809— October 7, 1849.] 
 
 The angel Israfel 
 Sang no more in Heaven'. 
 
 Silent he lay in Hell 
 'Neath the flash of the forked levin: 
 
20 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Mute were the strings of his lyre 
 By one great discord shattered; 
 
 Seared by the heat of the fire, 
 And the tones of their melody scattered. 
 
 Where the fallen angels dwell, 
 Burnt by the forked red levin. 
 
 The angel Israfel 
 Sang no more of Heaven. 
 
 When the last mad swirl of the wild red flame 
 
 Died from the darkening sky, 
 And Hell burnt scarlet with Heaven's shame 
 
 Purged from the realms on high ; 
 In Heaven, mute was the sweetest lute ; 
 
 Silent the holy choir; 
 The lyre, the viol, or the lute 
 
 Would never a note suspire: 
 For deep in Hell was Israfel, 
 
 And voiceless was his lyre. 
 
 The rivers of God, flowing silently on, 
 
 Never a melody sang; 
 And the breezes of Heaven that brought in 
 the dawn 
 
 Ghostlike in dumbness upsprang. 
 A sadness fell on the seraphim there, 
 
POE CENTENARY 21 
 
 Watching the great white throne, 
 And they longed for the passion of praise and 
 prayer 
 Israfel's lyre had known ; 
 But they offered a prayer to the God of the 
 Air, 
 Bowed to the great white throne. 
 
 "Oh grant us in pity, great Father of Love, 
 
 Israfel pardoned of wrong, 
 Whose lyre caught the breezes of Heaven, and 
 w^ove 
 Marvelous mazes of song; 
 Till one little rift in his lute crept in. 
 
 Marring his musical wire : 
 Shall the whole heart be shattered for one 
 lone sin? 
 Grant us again his lyre!" 
 And the Lord God heard and gave them his 
 
 word, 
 "Purged he shall be with fire." 
 
 And into the frame of a man there came 
 
 (This was the purging of fire) 
 The soul of Israfel out of the flame, 
 
 Israfel, lord of the lyre; 
 
22 POE CENTENARY 
 
 To fight the battle of evil and good, 
 
 Bound in the body of man; 
 For the Lord who had suffered and died on 
 the rood 
 
 Knew what suffering can. 
 So out of Hell came Israfel, 
 
 Angel and devil and man. 
 
 Then the soul of the music within him awoke ; 
 
 Longings moved in his breast; 
 And the chains that had bound him in Hell he 
 broke, 
 
 Strong with his soul's unrest ; 
 And his man's hand smote from his angel 
 lute 
 
 All the anguish of Hell: 
 Till the hosts of Heaven and earth grew mute 
 
 Hearing Israfel. 
 But the demon within still urged him to sin 
 
 After the manner of Hell. 
 
 And some men saw the demon, and cried, 
 
 "Cast this devil hence!" 
 And some men, seeing his angel side. 
 
 Pleaded his innocence; 
 But the good Lord, hearing the song divine, 
 
POE CENTENARY 23 
 
 Spake unto his choir, 
 "The soul of Israfel is mine; 
 
 IvOve hath tuned his lyre." 
 And the chilly breath of God's messenger, 
 Death, 
 
 Stilled the strings of the lyre. 
 
 For the angel and devil had fought a fight 
 
 Close in the breast of man, 
 And the angel had won by his music's might 
 
 (This was the good Lord's plan) ; 
 And the soul of him passed like a holy strain 
 
 Tunefully up on high, 
 But the human heart of him woke again 
 
 Marvelous melody; 
 Ay, the soul of him passed like a living blast 
 
 Musically up to the sky. 
 
 The angel Israfel 
 Sings evermore in Heaven, 
 
 Pleading for them in Hell 
 Burned by the forked levin; 
 
 Pleading for them below, 
 Sinful souls and straying, 
 
 Till all the Heaven shall know 
 The passion of his playing. 
 
24 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Where the sinless angels dwell 
 Around the great zvhite throne, 
 
 The angel Israfel 
 Sings evermore in Heaven. 
 
 Dr. Edward Reinhold Rogers, headmaster 
 of The Jefferson School for Boys, Charlottes- 
 ville, read his tribute 
 
 To Edgar Ai^lan PoE 
 
 The orchestra of Life once played 
 
 Soul music of a mortal man. 
 Whose joys and tears, whose hopes and fears 
 The sounding strings intoned and made 
 
 Their strange symphonic plan. 
 
 Wild music rose to greet the ears 
 
 Of those who listening passed along, 
 For moans of pain in sad refrain 
 
 Were mingled with the voice of tears 
 In melancholy song: 
 
 The bitter cry of hope in vain, 
 Discordant jars of wasted youth, 
 The deep despair of baffled prayer, 
 Ambition's agony of pain. 
 Portrayed in sounding truth. 
 
POE CENTENARY 25 
 
 So harsh the discord in the air, 
 
 To some who stood too near; 
 
 But lost and drowned in grosser sound 
 
 A voice was singing, pure and rare, 
 
 In flute-Hke beauty clear. 
 
 Its song was genius glory-crowned. 
 The song of Beauty, radiant, fine. 
 The golden heart, the perfect art. 
 Of him whose spirit truly found 
 The path to things divine. 
 
 Life's orchestra plays o'er the part; 
 
 And we who hear the score today 
 By God's own will may listen still 
 As discords die by His own art, 
 
 And Beauty holds full sway. 
 
 Bnvoi 
 
 Thy years of grief and bitterness are past, 
 No longer toll the bells in sorrow's strain; 
 But merrily and cheerily 
 In glad refrain 
 The silver bells ring worldwide praise at last. 
 
26 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Dr. Herbert M. Nash (M. D., 1852), of 
 Norfolk, Va., was the speaker of the evening. 
 Dr. Nash's remarks were of pecuHar interest 
 since he was the only speaker during the Cen- 
 tenary who had known Poe personally. Poe, 
 not long before his death, was visiting a family 
 in Norfolk, at whose home Dr. Nash was a 
 frequent visitor. 
 
 Dr. Nash said : 
 
 Little did I think that the visits I was pay- 
 ing to a beautiful, rosy cheeked, and golden 
 haired girl of sixteen, who lived in my neigh- 
 borhood some fifty years ago, vx)uld eventuate 
 in my appearance here this evening, on the eve 
 of the centenary of Edgar Allan Poe. 
 
 Professor Kent, who seems to absorb and 
 appropriate information of all sorts, and to 
 make use of it to suit himself, seems to have 
 learned in some way, I know not how, that 
 I had been personally acquainted with the poet. 
 He probably communicated this information to 
 the president of the Raven Society, and a few 
 days ago, I received an invitation from that 
 gentleman, backed by a very persuasive note 
 from Dr. Kent himself, to be present on this 
 
POE CENTENARY 27 
 
 occasion and to address you upon my reminis- 
 cence of Poe. 
 
 Now I had determined before the receipt of 
 the invitation to be here if possible, not to take 
 an active part in the celebration of his cen- 
 tenary, but only as a looker on, and to enjoy 
 what should be said by those more competent 
 than myself to do honor to the memory of that 
 wonderful man. 
 
 Had the subject to be discussed been a 
 medical one, I could not have excused myself 
 for not complying with a request for an ad- 
 dress; but to enter at so late a day upon a 
 field so entirely new to myself required my 
 sense of duty to my alma mater to be pricked 
 to the very quick, that I might even attempt 
 to say a few words here to-night as to the 
 impressions made upon my youthful nature 
 by the impressive countenance, the dignified 
 yet cordial manner, the cadence of the voice, 
 and the pressure of the hand of Edgar Allan 
 Poe. 
 
 It was in September, 1849, that fortune 
 threw me into his presence. The poet visited 
 Norfolk, then a comparatively small city, to 
 deliver his celebrated lecture on "The Poetic 
 
28 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Principle;" and while there was the guest of 
 Mrs. Susan Maxwell, whose daughter Helen, 
 was the attractive nymph before referred to, 
 whom I often found it convenient to visit 
 and to engage with in the then popular game 
 of checkers. 
 
 So here I met and was introduced to the 
 distinguished visitor and had the privilege of 
 listening to his interesting conversation and 
 of hearing him recite some of his favorite 
 poems, among them "The Raven," "The Bells," 
 and "Annabel Lee." 
 
 I was also present upon the occasion of Poe's 
 lecture delivered at the Norfolk Academy, to 
 a very fair and delighted audience, and was 
 much impressed by the artistic rendering of 
 his selections. 
 
 There was nothing that I observed in the 
 poet's appearance that indicated excessive 
 gloominess or sadness. There was an air of 
 dignified repose, which lightened, when speak- 
 ing to one, into a pleasing smile. But the 
 expression changed quickly and varied with 
 the theme that engaged him. I did not notice 
 the least awkwardness in his demeanor. 
 
 I trust I have not thus far described an 
 
POE CENTENARY 29 
 
 imaginary Poe, and that my recollection of 
 him on that occasion is essentially correct. 
 
 I have since then met with but one person 
 who reminded me, in person, manner and 
 bearing, of Poe, and that was the late Dr. 
 Marion Sims, whose face was somewhat 
 broader, but who was as inventive in another 
 field, and as distinguished in his chosen pro- 
 fession, as was Poe in the domain of literature. 
 
 In enumerating the studies of Poe, while a 
 student in this University, stress has been laid 
 upon his extraordinary proficiency in the lan- 
 guages; but I have suspected, from the readi- 
 ness he evinced in the solution of the enigmas 
 and curious problems submitted to him, that 
 either he must have been almost as familiar 
 with the calculus of probabilities as the great 
 La Place himself, or that he was the most 
 ingenious guesser the world has ever seen. 
 
 I shall not attempt to dwell upon the poet's 
 genius, which has been analyzed and so justly 
 praised here by Mr. Mabie on a former happy 
 occasion, and which has been written of every- 
 where that his matchless creations have been 
 read and felt; nor of his contemporaries of 
 the nineteenth century, which were legion, in 
 
30 POE CENTENARY 
 
 every branch of human thought, and of every 
 degree of fame in science, in speculative 
 thought, in art and hterature. 
 
 Now, what must have been the energetic 
 interaction of the cells of his amazing brain 
 when engaged in the invention of his marvel- 
 ous tales and his unique verses? Like a vol- 
 cano in action, throwing out fire and smoke, 
 light and darkness, the weird phenomenon at- 
 tended by the very quaking of the earth 
 around; so that great brain, and body little 
 more than frail, so buffeted by the rude fortune 
 that seemed almost inseparable from his per- 
 sonality, his alter ego, must have quailed at 
 times under the stress of his efforts. 
 
 It is confidently asserted that Poe never 
 wrote a line while under the influence of alco- 
 holic stimulants; on the contrary, when so 
 influenced, he was sick almost unto death ! No 
 impurity stains his record. 
 
 Byron has written, 
 
 "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 
 'Tis woman's whole existence." 
 
 But Poe's love was distinctly feminine in 
 
POE CENTENARY 31 
 
 nature, not to be thrown off as an outer gar- 
 ment. It was true. 
 
 I may be pardoned in taking a physician's 
 view of his not infrequent mental states. In 
 my humble opinion, Poe at such times was the 
 victim of an abnormal psychology. There are 
 conditions known as the psycho-neuroses of 
 exhaustion, during which there is a more or 
 less complete paralysis of the will. 
 
 Attacks may ensue similar to, but not iden- 
 tical with, epileptic mania. We know that even 
 hysteria is sometimes characterized by a dis- 
 sociation of consciousness. 
 
 Prof. Janet has defined dipsomania as "in 
 reality a crisis of depression in which the sub- 
 ject feels the need of being excited by means 
 of a poison, the effect of which he knows only 
 too well; by alcohol." 
 
 But Poe was certainly no dipsomaniac. As 
 a medical man, I have seen cases analogous 
 to his, though none possessing even an ap- 
 proach to his scintillating intellect. 
 
 They were not drunkards, in the usual ac- 
 ceptance of the term. They, also, were the 
 victims of psycho-neuroses, morbid, irresistible 
 impulsions. 
 
32 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Mr. Neff then introduced Dr. Charles W. 
 Kent, who, in calhng attention to the interest 
 attaching to Poe's connection with the Uni- 
 versity of Virginia, stated that, while it was 
 true that Poe had not made any direct refer- 
 ences to his alma mater, it was also true that 
 a number of his earlier poems were in 
 all probability either prepared or revised at 
 the University of Virginia and that he cer- 
 tainly cultivated during his session here the 
 art of short-story writing. Perhaps, too, he 
 was influenced by the surroundings, as well 
 he might have been by the new and strange 
 life of the young institution. Such thoughts 
 as these made pictorial representations of 
 the time in which Poe lived at the University 
 of especial interest. Following these general 
 introductory remarks, ten or a dozen views 
 of the early University and the men con- 
 nected with its history were thrown on the 
 screen and explained one by one. Among 
 them were pictures of Dr. Dunglison, who 
 was chairman of the faculty during Poe's ses- 
 sion; Madison, Monroe and General Cocke, 
 members of the Board of Visitors, before 
 whom the young poet must have stood his 
 
POE CENTENARY 33 
 
 final oral examinations ; the Rotunda and Lawn 
 in the early days; the exterior and interior of 
 No. 13 West Range, where Poe roomed the 
 greater part of the session he spent at the 
 University, and the Colonnade clubhouse, 
 which was in those days the Library; Wil- 
 liam Wertenbaker, the librarian appointed by 
 Mr. Jefferson, and a scene from the Ragged 
 Mountains. 
 
 Mr. H. H. Freeman, organist and choir- 
 master of St. John's Church, Washington, 
 D. C, played during the evening Chopin's 
 Funeral March from the G minor Sonata, ar- 
 ranged for the organ* by Sir John Stainer; 
 Bohm's Staccato in D flat, arranged for the 
 organ by Mr. Freeman; Lemare's Andantino 
 in D flat, and Schubert's Military March in D 
 major, arranged for the organ by W. T. Best. 
 
 *The organ in Cabell Hall, the gift of Mr. Andrew 
 Carnegie, was built by Skin* ar. It is of the electro- 
 pneumatic action type, and is played from a console 
 of four keyboards. 
 
V 
 
 IN MADISON HALL 
 
 AT 11 o'clock Tuesday morning, the one 
 -^^^ hundredth anniversary of Poe's birth, 
 Dr. Charles W. Kent presided at commem- 
 orative exercises held in Madison Hall, whose 
 special purpose was to offer an opportunity 
 for a study of Poe's influence beyond the 
 limits of his own country. Dr. Kent ad- 
 dressed the assemblage: 
 
 We have assembled this morning for the 
 purpose of doing further honor to the memory 
 of Edgar Allan Poe. On Saturday evening 
 the Jefferson Literary Society of which he was 
 a member recalled his close connection with 
 the student life of the University of Virginia 
 by reviving the story of Poe's University resi- 
 dence and his connection with our literary ac- 
 tivities ; on Sunday evening some of us had the 
 privilege of hearing from the distinguished 
 clergyman who occupied our Chapel pulpit his 
 
 34 
 
POE CENTENARY 35 
 
 gracious and grateful tribute to Edgar Allan 
 Poe and his plea for a right judgment of his 
 failures and foibles. 
 
 On last evening the Raven Society enter- 
 tained us thoroughly by a unique celebration 
 of Poe's interest as a man and gifts as an 
 artist. 
 
 While the University of Virginia lays claim 
 to her distinguished son to whom, at all times, 
 through good report and ill, she has been loyal 
 and kindly, she recognizes that he cannot be 
 confined within the narrow compass of her 
 encircling care. When he passed from these 
 walls into the outer world he committed him- 
 self to the judgment, too often tardy and 
 grudging, of his American countrymen. His 
 recognition, however, has now past far beyond 
 the limits of his University, his Southland, and 
 even his entire country and his fame has ex- 
 tended throughout all of the nations of Western 
 Europe and even to the more remote lands of 
 the Orient. In recognition of the universality 
 of his fame and the cosmopolitanism of his 
 literary genius we have chosen at this morning 
 meeting to remind ourselves and you of his 
 appreciation abroad. That this may be rightly 
 set before you, we liave invited distinguished 
 
36 POE CENTENARY 
 
 speakers representing other languages and 
 other civiHzations and have great satisfaction 
 in beheving that their testimony will convince 
 even the most sceptical among you of the true 
 worth and increasing fame of the University's 
 most distinguished son. 
 
 Dr. William Harrison Faulkner read letters 
 from distinguished men in England, France 
 and Germany. A letter from Richard Dehmel 
 of Hamburg, a German poet of distinction, 
 contained this tribute : — 
 
 Von Entdeckungen und Abenteuern 
 War des Herz Amerikas geschwellt. 
 Da entlad es sich mit wilden Feuern, 
 Und ein Dichter ward zum ungeheuern 
 Krater einer innern neuen Welt — 
 
 which Dr. James Taft Hatfield of North- 
 western University instantly rendered into 
 Enghsh and read, as follows: 
 
 From its endless quest and eager faring 
 Burned the new world's heart, too strained 
 and tense: 
 Forth it flamed, all older barriers tearing, 
 And a poet came to be the daring 
 
 Crater of his land's new wakened sense. 
 
POE CENTENARY 37 
 
 Other poems contributed for the occasion were : 
 
 Arthur Christopher Benson, Tremans, 
 Horsted Keynes, Sussex: 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe) 
 
 Singer, whose song was as the ray- 
 That doth the rifted cloudland part. 
 
 Too rarely heard, the magic lay 
 
 That flowed from thy o'er-brimming heart ! 
 
 And if thy fantasy beguiled 
 
 With darkest fears man's darker fate. 
 
 Not as a laughter-loving child 
 Thou didst thy soul interrogate. 
 
 What stain of strife, what dust of fight 
 Unequal, soiled that radiant brow? 
 
 Made one with life, and truth, and light. 
 Thou hast thy joyful answer now! 
 
38 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Mr. John Boyd, Montreal, Canada: 
 
 Wild child of genius with his witching lyre, 
 
 Dreamer of dreams of rarest fantasy, 
 Upon the earth he flashed with meteor fire, 
 
 And in his wake rolled waves of melody. 
 Seraphic songs as if from Heaven's choir. 
 
 With elfin music, weird and mystical, 
 Bewitching notes that golden thoughts inspire, 
 
 Angelic strains, divinely musical. 
 All praise be his on this his natal day, 
 
 May all his faults and frailties be forgot. 
 Lay laurels on his tomb and honors pay. 
 
 Think only of the glory that he wrought. 
 Hail, sister nation, for thy great son's sake, 
 
 A kindred soul to Keats, and Burns, 
 and Blake. 
 
POE CENTENARY 39 
 
 Dr. Edward Dowden, Trinity College, 
 Dublin: 
 
 Seeker for Eldorado, magic land 
 
 Whose gold is beauty, fine spun, amber 
 
 clear, 
 Over what moon-mountain, down what val- 
 ley of fear. 
 By what lone waters fringed with pallid sand 
 Did thy foot falter? Say, what airs have 
 fann'd 
 Thy fevered brow, blown from no terrene 
 
 sphere, 
 What rustling wings, what echoes thrilled 
 thine ear 
 From mighty tombs whose brazen ports ex- 
 pand? 
 
 Seeker, who never quite attained, yet caught, 
 Moulded and fashioned, as by strictest law, 
 The rainbow's moon-mist and the flying 
 
 gleam 
 To mortal loveliness, for pity or for awe 
 To us what carven dreams thy hand has 
 brought. 
 Dreams with the serried logic of a dream! 
 
40 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Dr. Casar Flaischlen, Berlin: 
 
 Lied des Lebens 
 
 Friih am Morgen 
 
 Sturm und Wolken, 
 
 Sonne dann und blauer Himmel 
 
 Mittag prachtig Hoh und Hag. 
 
 Schmetterlinge, 
 Bliihende Rosen 
 Schwalbenlieder 
 Finkenschlag 
 
 Still nun wird es rings und stiller. 
 Miide fallt am Mast die Fahne, 
 Licht und Lust ist 
 Am Erblassen. 
 
 Schmetterling — und Lied — verlassen 
 
 Liegen einsam 
 
 Hoh und Hag. 
 
 Und in Abend — 
 
 Lautlos leiser 
 
 Dammerung zerrinnt der Tag. 
 
POE CENTENARY 41 
 
 The Chairman, Dr. Kent: 
 
 In no country has Poe been so appreciated 
 and so distinctly flattered by sincere imitation 
 as in France. The development of the short- 
 story, which has reached such a marked degree 
 of excellence both in France and America, has 
 its common starting point in Edgar Allan Poe. 
 This influence was transmitted to France 
 through the translations of Baudelaire, and 
 from this day to ours the influence of Poe, 
 both in poetry and prose, has been consciously 
 felt by the artists of our sister republic. Un- 
 able because of distance to summon to our aid 
 a speaker from fair France, we have been 
 singularly fortunate in procuring as her rep- 
 resentative on this occasion Dr. Alcee Fortier 
 of Tulane University, designated by one of 
 his colleagues as our "Prince of Creoles." I 
 have the honor to introduce Dr. Fortier who 
 will speak to you in the language counted by 
 him and his compatriots as la plus belle langiie 
 du monde. 
 
 Dr. Fortier : 
 
 Je suis heureux de me trouver parmi vous 
 aujourd'hui pour prendre part a la celebration 
 
42 POE CENTENARY 
 
 du centenaire de la naissance d'Edgar Allan 
 Poe. C'est ici meme que Ton doit celebrer cet 
 evenement avec le plus d'eclat, a cette grande 
 Universite de la Virginie, ou le celebre ecrivain 
 commenga sa carriere litteraire. Ici vecut Poe, 
 ici il fut etudiant, ici il fut inspire par I'atmos- 
 phere vivifiante de la magnifique institution 
 fondee par Jefferson, Le nom de I'auteur du 
 "Corbeau," de "la Chute "de la Maison d'Usher" 
 et autres histoires admirables, est indissoluble- 
 ment lie a celui de I'Universite de la Virginie, 
 et le nom de I'Universite a celui de Poe. 
 
 L'etudiant doit une grande reconnaissance 
 au college qui lui a donne la vie intellectuelle, 
 mais le college, a son tour, ne doit pas oublier 
 I'ancien eleve qui, par son genie, a contribue 
 a illustrer son alma mater. Je sais bien que 
 cette Universite serait arrivee a la celebrite 
 sans I'aide d'Edgar Poe, mais celui-ci a grande- 
 ment ajoute a la gloire de I'institution, et il est 
 eminemment juste qu'elle se souvienne du poete 
 et qu'elle I'honore. En agissant ainsi I'Uni- 
 versite represente aussi le grand etat de la 
 Virginie qu' aimait tant Poe, et dont I'ad- 
 mirable civilisation exerga sur lui une si grande 
 influence que, malgre ses egarements, il lui 
 
POE CENTENARY 43 
 
 resta toujours dans I'ame I'amour du beau et 
 du vrai. 
 
 Nous ne pouvons admettre qu'un homme 
 soit jamais vraiment grand, s'il lui manque la 
 grandeur morale, et une institution d'enseigne- 
 ment superieur ne donnera pas cet homme en 
 exemple, quelque vaste que soit son genie. 
 Edgar Poe fut plus malheureux que coupa- 
 ble, et nous qui admirons ses belles qualites 
 mentales, lui pardonnons ses fautes, parce 
 qu'il aima I'art, parce qu'il ne ternit jamais un 
 nom de femme dans ses vers ni dans sa prose, 
 et parce qu'il etudia I'ame humaine et tacha 
 d'en comprendre les mysteres. Telle est I'opin- 
 ion qu'ont de lui les professeurs de I'Univer- 
 site de la Virginie, qui ont fait une etude ap- 
 profondie de ses oeuvres litteraires et de sa 
 vie malheureuse. Telle est I'opinion de M. 
 le Docteur James A. Harrison, qui a ecrit la 
 biographie la plus complete et la plus sym- 
 pathique du poete; telle est I'opinion de M. 
 le Docteur Charles W. Kent, qui a si bien com- 
 pris le genie de Poe; telle est I'opinion enfin 
 de I'eminent President de cette Universite, dont 
 le gout litteraire est si fin et si parfait. C'est 
 . parce que ces messieurs savent qu'Edgar Poe 
 
44 POE CENTENARY 
 
 ne fut pas le miserable, que nous presente une 
 deplorable legende, qu'ils honorent au- 
 jourd'hui sa memoire et nous ont invites a 
 I'honorer avec eux. 
 
 L'Universite de la Virginie est fiere du plus 
 illustre homme de lettres parmi ses anciens 
 eleves, elle lui sait gre de la gloire qu'il a don- 
 nee a elle, a I'etat de la Virginie, et aux Etats- 
 Unis. Pendant de longues annees, apres que 
 notre pays eut acquis son independance, il 
 n'etait connu en Europe que par ses institu- 
 tions politiques, et par son merveilleux devel- 
 oppement industriel et commercial. A peine 
 quelques noms d'ecrivains avaient traverse 
 rOcean et etaient mentionnes de temps en 
 temps, mais lorsque le Corbeau de Poe eut 
 croasse son immortelle complainte, que le 
 Scarabee d'Or eut scintille dans la nuit, et qu' 
 eurent paru les formes etherees de Morella et 
 de Ligeia, on sut dans la vieille Europe que 
 la jeune republique occidentale avait donne 
 naissance a un vrai poete, a un prosateur ex- 
 quis. De tons les ecrivains americains Edgar 
 Poe est le plus connu en Europe. II est le 
 seul qui fasse, pour ainsi dire, partie de la lit- 
 terature frangaise, qui soit reellement fran- 
 
POE CENTENARY 45 
 
 cise, comme I'a si bien dit Emile Hennequin. 
 Voyons done quelle est la genese de cette ex- 
 traordinaire popularite. 
 
 Des 1841, peu apres la publication du 
 "Double Assassinat dans la Rue Morgue," 
 M. le Docteur James A. Harrison nous dit que 
 trois journaux de Paris s'approprierent et se 
 disputerent ce conte etrange de ratiocination. 
 Ce qui commenga, cependant, la reputation de 
 Poe en France fut un article de E. D. Forgues, 
 publie dans "la Revue des Deux Mondes" du 
 15 octobre, 1846, "les Contes d'Edgar A. 
 Poe." M. Forgues commence son article par 
 une comparaison entre "I'Essai Philosophique 
 sur les Probabilites" de Laplace et le systeme 
 de Poe. II dit que les contes de I'auteur amer- 
 icain ont une parente evidente avec la philoso- 
 phic de Laplace, quoiqu' ils ne conduisent pas 
 a un aussi noble but et n'emanent pas d'une 
 pensee aussi vigoureuse. La faculte inspira- 
 trice de Poe, c'est le raisonnement ; sa muse, 
 c'est la logique, son moyen d agir sur les lect- 
 eurs, c'est le doute. "L'auteur met aux prises 
 Oedipe et le sphinx, le heros et un logogriphe." 
 Le mystere parait impenetrable, I'intelligence 
 s'irrite contre le voile etendu devant elle, mais 
 
46 POE CENTENARY 
 
 sort victorieuse de la lutte apres des travaux 
 extraordinaires. 
 
 "Monos et Una," d'apres M. Forgues, est 
 une monographie patiente, methodique, sci- 
 entifique, sur la fraternite du sommeil et de 
 la mort. La logique de Poe ne devie que rare- 
 ment les principes une fois poses; elle est 
 claire et intelligible, et s'empare du lecteur 
 malgre lui. C'est sans nul doute, a mon avis, 
 cette logique impeccable, cette clarte, malgre 
 I'obscurite apparente, que Ton trouve dans les 
 contes de Poe, qui le rendirent si populaire 
 en France, car ce sont les traits caracteristiques 
 de I'esprit frangais. Les grands ecrivains de 
 la France reconnurent en Poe une affinite lit- 
 teraire et lui donnerent droit de cite parmi eux. 
 
 M. Forgues ne se contente pas, cependant, 
 de presenter le logicien a ses compatriotes ; il 
 veut aussi leur faire voir le poete, I'inventeur 
 de fantaisies sans but, et il fait I'analyse du 
 "Chat Noir" et de "rHomme des Foules." II 
 prefere les quelques pages de certains contes 
 de Poe a de longs volumes, et comprend le 
 merite du conte, ce genre ou Ton "condense," 
 dit-il, "en peu de mots sous forme de recit, 
 toute une theorie abstraite, tous les elements 
 
POE CENTENARY 47 
 
 d'une composition originale." M. Forgues ne 
 veut pas etablir un parallele en regie entre 
 I'auteur americain et les feuilletonistes mod- 
 ernes, mais, dit-il, "il sera opportun et utile 
 de les comparer quand le temps aura conso- 
 lide la reputation naissante du conteur etran- 
 ger, et — qui sait? — ebranle quelque peu celle 
 de nos romanciers feconds." Le critique fran- 
 gais de 1846 etait prophete: les nombreux 
 volumes d'Alexandre Dumas, quoiqu'ils in- 
 teressent encore les jeunes gens de vingt ans, 
 ne font presque plus partie de la litterature, 
 tandis que les contes de Poe sont des joyaux 
 litteraires, dont I'eclat augmente ; a mesure que 
 s'ecoulent les annees. 
 
 L'article de M. Forgues attira I'attention de 
 Mme. Gabrielle Meunier, qui traduisit quel- 
 ques-uns des contes de Poe. Ce grand 
 ecrivain, neanmoins, serait reste presque in- 
 connu en France, s'il n'avait trouve en Charles 
 Baudelaire une affinite litteraire extraordinaire 
 et un traducteur merveilleux. On n'avait rien 
 vu de pareil en France aux contes de Poe, 
 malgre la concision et la clarte caracteris- 
 tiques du style frangais, si ce n'etait "la Venus 
 d'lUe" de Merimee, publiee en 1837. Aussi la 
 
48 POE CENTENARY 
 
 traduction de Baudelaire en 1848, et ensuite en 
 1856, des "Histoires Extraordinaires" eut-elle 
 un immense succes. Le traducteur consacra 
 a I'auteur americain une notice sympathique et 
 eclairee, et quoiqu'il n'eut pas les documents 
 qui exonerent le poete des calomnies de Gris- 
 wold il le defend contre son biographe 
 malveillant. II dit qu'Edgar Poe et sa patrie 
 n'etaient pas de niveau, et il ajoute que Poe 
 avait "une delicatesse exquise de sens qu'une 
 note fausse torturait, une finesse de goiit que 
 tout excepte I'exacte proportion, revoltait, un 
 amour insatiable du Beau, qui avait pris la 
 puissance d'une passion morbide." II etait 
 certainement impossible que Poe piit etre bien 
 compris par ses compatriotes de la premiere 
 moitie du XIX^ siecle. 
 
 Baudelaire raconte la vie de Poe, nous 
 presente son portrait physique et moral et fait 
 de lui un magnifique eloge que nous citons tout 
 (Cntier. "Ce n'est pas par ses miracles 
 materiels, qui pourtant ont fait sa renommee 
 qu'il lui sera donne de conquerir I'admiration 
 des gens qui pensent, c'est par son amour du 
 Beau, par sa connaissance des conditions har- 
 moniques de la beaute, par sa poesie profonde 
 
POE CENTENARY 49 
 
 et plaintive, ouvragee neanmoins, transparente 
 et correcte comme im bijou de cristal — par son 
 admirable style, pur et bizarre, — serre comme 
 les mailles d'une Armure, — complaisant et 
 minutieux, — et dont la plus legere intention 
 sert a pousser doucement le lecteur vers un but 
 voulu, — et enfin surtout par ce genie tout 
 special, par ce temperament unique qui lui a 
 permis de peindre et d'expliquer, d'une 
 maniere impeccable, saisissante, I'exception 
 dans I'ordre moral. — Diderot, pour prendre un 
 exemple entre cent, est un auteur sanguin ; Poe 
 est I'ecrivain des nerfs, et meme de quelque 
 chose de plus, — et le meilleur que je con- 
 naisse." "Quelquefois, des echappees mag- 
 nifiques, gorgees de lumieres et de couleur, 
 s'ouvrent soudainement dans ses paysages, et 
 Ton voit apparaitre au fond de leurs horizons 
 des villes orientales et des architectures, 
 vaporisees par la distance, ou le soleil jette des 
 pluies d'or." 
 
 Dans cette appreciation de son auteur favori 
 Baudelaire s'eleve a la hauteur de son modele 
 comme prosateur, et nous verrons bientot 
 qu'il I'egale presque comme poete. Je ne sais 
 reellement si I'Edgar Poe frangais n'est pas 
 
50 POE CENTENARY 
 
 superieur au Poe de langne anglaise. Ecoutez 
 I'admirable traduction de Baudelaire : 
 
 "Les annees, les annees peuvent passer mais 
 le souvenir de cet instant — jamais ! Ah ! les 
 fleurs et la vigne n'etaient pas choses incon- 
 nues pour moi — mais I'aconit et le cypres 
 m'ombragerent nuit et jour. Et je perdis tout 
 sentiment du temps et des lieux, et les etoiles 
 de ma destinee disparurent du ciel, et des lors 
 la terre devint tenebreuse, et toutes les figures 
 terrestres passerent pres de moi comme des 
 ombres voltigeantes, et parmi elles je n'en 
 voyais qu'une — Morella! Les vents du firma- 
 ments ne soupiraient qu'un son a mes oreilles, 
 et le clapotement de la mer murmurait in- 
 cessamment ; 'Morella !' Mais elle mourut, et de 
 mes propres mains je la portai a sa tombe, et 
 je ris d'un amer et long rire, quand, dans le 
 caveau ou je deposai la seconde, je ne 
 decouvris aucune trace de la premiere — 
 Morella." 
 
 En 1857 Baudelaire publia "les Nouvelles 
 Histoires Extraordinaires ;" en 1858, "les 
 Aventures d' Arthur Gordon Pym;" en 1864, 
 "Eureka," et en 1865, "les Histoires 
 Grotesques et Serieuses." Ces traductions 
 
POE CENTENARY 51 
 
 sont dignes des premieres et naturaliserent en 
 France les contes et les nouvelles de Poe. 
 "Les Petits Poemes en Prose" de Baudelaire 
 furent, sans nul doute, comme beaucoup de 
 ses vers, inspires par Poe. On y voit des 
 etudes etranges et I'amour de I'art, mais on 
 voit souvent aussi dans la prose et dans les vers 
 de Baudelaire, des grossieretes de langage et 
 des impuretes de pensee qu'on ne trouve jamais 
 dans Poe. On ne pent, cependant, qu' admirer 
 "I'Etranger," a la premiere page des "Petits 
 Poemes en Prose." On y trouve le sentiment 
 poetique de Poe: 
 
 "Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme enigma- 
 tique, dis? ton pere, ta mere, ta soeur ou ton 
 frere?" 
 
 "Je n'ai ni pere, ni mere, ni soeur, ni frere." 
 
 "Les amis?" 
 
 "Vous vous servez la d'une parole dont le 
 sens m'est reste jusqu'a ce jour inconnu." 
 
 "Ta patrie?" 
 
 "J 'ignore sous quelle latitude elle est 
 situee." 
 
 "La beaute?" 
 
 "Je I'aimerais volontiers, deesse et im- 
 mortelle." 
 
52 POE CENTENARY 
 
 "Vor?" 
 
 "Je le hais comme vous haissez Dieu." 
 
 "Eh! qu'aimes-tu done, extraordinaire 
 etranger ?" 
 
 "J'aime les nuages — les nuages qui passent 
 ....la bas....les merveilleux nuages!" 
 
 "Le Vieux Saltimbanque" est un portrait 
 tel qu'aurait pu le dessiner Poe, un portrait 
 implacable de verite, ou cependant la sympathie 
 pour les vaincus de la vie se mele au senti- 
 ment d'horreur que fait eprouver la vue 
 d'un vieil homme voute, caduc, decrepit. 
 Nous reviendrons a I'influence de Poe sur 
 Baudelaire poete. Poe le prosateur attira 
 I'attention de Barbey d'Aurevilly, et cet 
 etrange ecrivain consacra a I'auteur americain 
 plusieurs articles, entre 1853 et 1883. II ne 
 lui est pas aussi sympathique que Baudelaire, 
 mais il reconnait sa volonte extraordinaire, 
 et I'appelle "le plus energique des artistes 
 volontaires." II dit que Poe "se sert d'une 
 analyse inouie et qu'il pousse a la fatigue 
 supreme, a I'aide d'on ne sait quel prodigieux 
 miscroscope sur la pulpe meme du cerveau." 
 .... "Positivement le lecteur assiste a 
 I'operation du chirurgien; positivement, il 
 
POE CENTENARY 53 
 
 entend crier I'acier de rinstrument et sent 
 les douleurs." 
 
 Barbey d'Aurevilly lie connut d'abord 
 Poe que par sa biographie par Baudelaire. 
 II le jugea moins severement, lorsqu'il eut 
 lu la vie que joignit Emile Hennequin a sa 
 traduction des "Contes Grotesques." II lui 
 donna alors "la Royaute des hommes de 
 genie malheureux." 
 
 Revenons maintenant a Baudelaire et a 
 Poe, et voyons ce que Theophile Gautier a 
 dit d'eux. Nous ne doutons aucunement 
 que Poe n'ait eu une certaine influence sur 
 Gautier, le poete de "I'art pour I'art," et sur 
 son ecole. II est probable que les contes de 
 Poe ont inspire "la Morte Amoureuse," 
 "le Roman de la Momie," et "Spirite." 
 Baudelaire avait dedie ses extraordinaires 
 "Fleurs du Mai" a Gautier, et celui-ci ecrivit 
 une notice sur I'auteur du livre dans laquelle 
 il fit une fine analyse du genie de Baudelaire 
 et de celui de Poe. II dit qu'au-dessus de 
 rimmonde fourmillement de misere, delai- 
 deur et de perversite que presentent souvent 
 "les Fleurs du Mai," "loin, bien loin dans I'in- 
 alterable azur, flotte Tadmirable fantome de 
 
54 POE CENTENARY 
 
 la Beatrix, I'ideal toujours desire, jamais 
 atteint, la beaute superieure et divine incarnee 
 sous line forme de femme etheree, spiritualisee, 
 faite de lumiere, de flamme et de parfum, une 
 vapeur, un reve, un reflet du monde aromal 
 et seraphique comme les Ligeia, les Morella, 
 les Una, les Eleonore d'Edgar Poe et la Sera- 
 phita-Seraphitus de Balzac, cette etonnante 
 creation." 
 
 Gautier appelle Poe "un singulier genie 
 d'une individualite si rare, si tranchee, si ex- 
 ceptionnelle." II dit qu'en France le nom de 
 Baudelaire est inseparable de celui de Poe, et 
 que le souvenir de I'un eveille immediatement 
 la pensee de I'autre. "II semble meme par- 
 fois," ajoute-t-il, "que les idees de I'Ameri- 
 cain appartiennent en propre au Frangais." 
 Une des histoires les plus fortes de Poe est 
 "le Chat Noir," qui nous terrific, lorsqu'il ap- 
 parait "avec sa gueule rouge et son oeil unique 
 flamboyant." Baudelaire ecrivit trois poemes 
 sur les chats et dit d'eux: 
 
 lis prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes 
 Des grands sphinx allonges au fond des soli- 
 tudes, 
 Qui semblent s'endormir dans un reve sans fin ; 
 
POE CENTENARY 55 
 
 Ijeurs reins feconds sont pleins d'etincelles 
 
 magiques, 
 Et des parcelles d'or ainsi qu'un sable fin, 
 Etoilent vaguement leurs prunelles mystiques. 
 
 On voit Edgar Poe dans les plus beaux 
 poemes de Baudelaire, dans "Don Juan aux 
 Enfers," dans "les Petites Vieilles," dans "le 
 Soleil," et surtout dans, "le Mort Joyeux," 
 qui n'est qu'une autre forme du "Ver Con- 
 querant," de Poe, et que nous citerons en 
 entier, malgre I'horreur du sujet, pour faire 
 voir I'affinite litteraire et mentale vraiment 
 extraordinaire des deux poetes. 
 
 Dans une terre grasse et pleine d'escargots 
 Je veux creuser moi-meme une fosse pro- 
 fonde, 
 Oti je puisse a loisir etaler mer vieux os 
 Et dormir dans I'oubli comme un requin 
 dans I'onde. 
 
 Je hais les testaments et je hais les tombeaux; 
 
 Plutot que d'implorer une larme du monde, 
 Vivant, j'aimerais mieux inviter les corbeaux 
 
 A saigner tons les bouts de ma carcasse 
 immonde. 
 
56 POE CENTENARY 
 
 O vers! noirs compagnons sans oreille et sans 
 
 yeux, 
 Voyez venir a vous nn mort libre et joyeux! 
 Philosophes viveurs, fils de la pourriture. 
 
 A travers ma mine allez done sans remords, 
 Et dites-moi s'il est encore qiielqiie torture 
 Pour ce yieux corps sans ame et mort parmi 
 les morts! 
 
 "William Wilson," ou Edgar Poe se de- 
 double d'une maniere si etonnante, a dii plaire 
 infiniment a Baudelaire, ainsi que I'admirable 
 "Chute de la Maison d'Usher," oil le senti- 
 ment de la terreur est si intense. Baudelaire 
 a du rever bien souvent a Eleonora, qu'il eut 
 voulu suivre dans la vallee du Gazon Diapre, 
 ou "les fleurs etoilees s'etaient abimees dans 
 le tronc des arbres; ou avaient deperi les 
 asphodeles d'un rouge de rubis," qu'avaient 
 remplacees "les sombres violettes, semblables a 
 des yeux qui se convulsaient peniblement et 
 regorgeaient toujours de larmes de rosee;" d'ou 
 "le volumineux nuage retombe dans les regions 
 d' Hesperus avait emporte le spectacle infini 
 de sa pourpre et de sa magnificence." Ces 
 
POE CENTENARY 57 
 
 admirables phrases de Poe sont rendues en 
 franqais par son traducteur avec une exacti- 
 tude saisissante, un sens poetique extraordi- 
 naire. 
 
 L'influence de Poe le conteur se fait voir 
 dans Villiers de I'lsle Adam, Paul Hervieu, 
 Henri de Regnier; dans Guy de Maupassant, 
 qui I'egale dans "le Horla" et autres oeuvres 
 d'un realisme intense; dans Jules Verne, qui 
 imite ses romans scientifiques, comme "Hans 
 Pfaal," ou ses aventures de voyage, comme 
 "Gordon Pym," dans Gaboriau, dont le M. 
 Lecoq est frere de Legrand et de Dupin; dans 
 Jean Richepin, dont "les Morts Bizarres," 
 sont imitees directement des contes de Poe, 
 ou celui-ci fait une etude si extraordinaire et 
 si poignante de la mort. "Le Disseque" de 
 Richepin nous rapelle "le Cas de M. Wald- 
 emar," et Feru, I'etudiant en medecine, nous 
 interesse presque autant que les personnages 
 les plus sombres de Poe. II veut prendre la 
 matiere en flagrant debt de pensee. "II suffi- 
 rait d'arriver a ceci," dit Feru, "analyser, dis- 
 sequer, tenir sous ses doigts un cerveau pen- 
 sant. Evidemment on saisirait la pensee, 
 on la sentirait, on la toucherait, comme on 
 
58 POE CENTENARY 
 
 saisit, comme on sent, comme on touche un 
 phenomene electrique, par exemple." Pour 
 esperer une telle possibilite, Feru veut dis- 
 sequer des hommes vivants. II tuerait des 
 hommes pour le bien des hommes. A la fin 
 de la Commune, dans la cuisine de la cremerie 
 borgne, '*le Rendez-vous des Affames," un 
 corps tombe a travers une marquise en verre. 
 C'est Feru, I'etudiant en medecine. On se 
 baisse pour le relever, mais on est saisi par 
 une epouvantable horreur, "le malheureux 
 avait la poitrine depouillee, les chairs a vif, et 
 cela non pas par I'effet du verre, mais par 
 suite d'une operation. II etait disseque." II 
 s'etait disseque, veut dire I'auteur. 
 
 Le ler mai 1886 "la Revue des Deux Mon- 
 des" publia un article tres interessant sur "les 
 Poetes Americains," par Th. Bentzon (Mme. 
 Blanc), qui visita les Etats-Unis il y a quel- 
 ques annees, et fit un sympathique portrait de 
 la femme americaine. Mme. Blanc dit que 
 Poe "restera inimitable, quelque effort que 
 fassent pour approcher de lui les exploiteurs 
 du macabre grotesque ou larmoyant," Elle 
 dit que le poete americain adorait le beau 
 comme Heine et "qu'il voyait sa supreme ex- 
 
POE CENTENARY 59 
 
 pression dans la tristesse que nous cause le mal 
 de la vie et notre incapacite a saisir I'inconnu." 
 
 Mentionnons encore d'autres articles pub- 
 lies dans "la Revue des Deux Mondes :" Un 
 par T. de Wyzewa, le 15 octobre 1894, et deux 
 en 1897 par Arvede Barine (Mme. Georges 
 Vincens). M. de Wyzewa dit des vers de 
 Poe : "lis sont les plus magnifiques, a mon 
 gre, de tous ceux qui existent dans la langue 
 anglaise. Ce sont des chefs-d'oeuvre d'emo- 
 tion et de musique : a eux seuls, ils suffiraient 
 pour la gloire d'un ecrivain." M. de Wyzewa 
 ajoute qu'il "a inaugure en outre une dizaine 
 au moins de genres litteraires tout autres, dont 
 chacun a ete ensuite largement exploite." 
 
 Les articles d' Arvede Barine ont pour titre, 
 "Essais de Litterature Pathologique." Ils ne 
 nous plaisent pas autant que le livre de M. 
 Emile Lauvriere, public en 1904, "Edgar Poe, 
 sa vie et son Oeuvre, Etude de Psychologic 
 Pathologique." Voila I'ouvrage le plus com- 
 plet sur Poe qui ait paru en France. L'auteur 
 consacre 730 pages a son sujet et le traite 
 a fond. II donne la vie du grand poete 
 americain, reconnait ses fautes, les excuse, 
 jusqu'a un certain point, et le plaint. II 
 
60 POE CENTENARY 
 
 etudie de la maniere la plus detaillee les oeuvres 
 du poete et du prosateur, et nous pouvons dire 
 que son analyse du "Corbeau" est la plus 
 penetrante que nous ayons lue : le Corbeau, 
 c'est Poe lui-meme; Lenore, c'est encore lui. 
 "II y a done," dit le critique frangais, "dans 
 le puissant symbolisme de ce petit drame 
 pathetique, toute I'ame du poete: c'est son 
 etre conscient aux prises avec son ideal ex- 
 tatique et avec sa melancolie desesperee. Le 
 volume de 1845, adjoute M. Lauvriere, con- 
 tient assez de chefs-d'oeuvre pour immotaliser 
 un nom. "II n'a pas seulement 'le Corbeau' 
 qui, malgre des raffinements d'art qui touchent 
 a I'artifice, restera par la solidite de son fond 
 comme pour la vigueur de ses effets, par la 
 prestigieuse magie de sa musique comme par 
 le poignant pathetique de son desespoir, la 
 plus puissante et, partant, la plus populaire des 
 oeuvres de Poe, un vrai chef-d'oeuvre de 
 poesie fantastique, sans egal en beaucoup de 
 langues et avec lequel ne pent rivaliser dans la 
 poesi anglaise c|ue le charme moins con- 
 querant, mais plus insinuant du "Vieux Marin" 
 de Coleridge. 
 
 M. Lauvriere etudie en Poe conteur, le fan- 
 
POE CENTENARY 61 
 
 tastique, la peur, I'impulsion, la curiosite 
 r imagination, la logique et le style, et fait un 
 travail vraiment magistral. Poe critique, Poe 
 cosmogoniste, nous interessent moins que Poe 
 poete et Poe conteur, mais je le repete, le livre 
 de M. Lauvriere est remarquable. II est ecrit 
 avec une clarte bien frangaise, avec une exac- 
 titude toute scientifique, et d'un style, parfois 
 simple, parfois fort, et parfois poetique comme 
 les vers memes de I'auteur du "Corbeau." 
 
 De nombreux volumes ont ete publics en 
 France sur Edgar Poe, et ses oeuvres ont ete 
 traduites maintes fois en frangais. Parmi ces 
 traductions, outre celles de Baudelaire, nous 
 pouvons mentionner les poemes traduits par 
 Stephane Mallarme, et "le Scarabee d'Or," par 
 J. H. Rosny. C'est, neanmoins, Baudelaire, 
 comme nous I'avons dit, qui naturalisa Poe en 
 France. Son admiration fut telle qu'il fut 
 possede de son auteur favori, et Asselineau, 
 cite par M. Lauvriere, nous dit "qu' a tout 
 venant, ou qu'il se trouvat, dans la rue, au 
 cafe, dans une imprimerie, le matin, le soir, il 
 allait demandant : 'Connaissez-vous Edgar 
 Poe,' et selon la reponse, il epanchait son 
 enthousiasme ou pressait de questions son 
 
62 POE CENTENARY 
 
 auditeur. Jules Lemaitre, lui-meme, le 
 celebre ecrivain, dans un "Dialogue des 
 Morts," a place Poe en compagnie de Shake- 
 speare et de Platon, quoiqu'il disc qu'ils pre- 
 sentent trois exemplaires de I'espece humaine 
 aussi dissemblables que possible. 
 
 Nous avons donne I'opinion des critiques 
 frangais sur Edgar Poe; nous allons main- 
 tenant etudier brievement quelle fut son in- 
 fluence sur la poesie frangaise. Nous nous 
 servirons pour ce petit travail de I'excellente 
 "Anthologie des Poetes Frangais Contempo- 
 rains," de M. G. Walch, publiee en 1906. 
 Nous avons deja compare Poe poete a Baude- 
 laire poete, et nous avons vu V influence de 
 I'Americain sur le Frangais. Quant aux autres 
 poetes inspires par Poe, ils le furent, en gen- 
 eral, indirectement et principalement par I'en- 
 tremise de Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, 
 peut-etre, le seul excepte. Baudelaire repeta le 
 precepte de Poe que la poesie n'a d'autre objet 
 qu'elle-meme. C'est la doctrine de "I'art pour 
 I'art" de Theophile Gautier, et nous la voyons 
 portee a un haut point de perfection par The- 
 odore de Banville, qui avait, disait-on, "pour 
 ame la poesie meme." 
 
POE CENTENARY 63 
 
 Barbey d'Aurevilly est de I'ecole de Poe, 
 ainsi que Villiers de I'lsle Adam et Verlaine, 
 cet etonnant boheme, que M. Anatole France 
 compare a Villon, le grand poete du XV® 
 siecle. Verlaine a meme un poeme intitule 
 "Nevermore" que nous citons ici comme un 
 souvenir interessant du "Corbeau :" 
 
 Ne^vErmore ! 
 
 Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu? L'au- 
 
 tomne 
 Faisait voler la grive a travers I'air atone 
 Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotone 
 Sur le bois jaunissant ou la bise detone. 
 
 Nous etions seul a seule et marchions en re- 
 
 vant, 
 Elle et moi, les cheveux et la pensee au vent, 
 Soudain, tournant vers moi son regard emou- 
 
 vant: 
 "Quel fut ton plus beau jour?" fit sa voix 
 
 d'or vivant, 
 
 Sa voix douce et sonore, au frais timbre ange- 
 
 lique. 
 Un sourire discret lui donna la replique, 
 Et je baisai sa main blanche, devotement. 
 
64 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Ah ! les premieres fleiirs, qu'elles sont par- 
 
 f umees ! 
 Et qu'il bruit avec un murmure charmant 
 Le premier "oui" qui sort de levres bien- 
 
 aimees ! 
 
 Chez plusieurs des Parnassiens de la pre- 
 miere heure, tels que Xavier de Ricard, Leon 
 Dierx, Catulle Mendes, ainsi que chez plusieurs 
 ecrivains des deux autres Parnasses, on voit 
 I'influence de Poe. Le Parnasse fut une reac- 
 tion contre le romantisme, et fut suivi par le 
 symbolisme, qu'on a parfois appele "le deca- 
 dent." Arthur Rimbaud, I'auteur du curieux 
 "Sonnet des Voyelles," fut un des precurseurs 
 du symbolisme. Henri de Regnier en fut le 
 chef inconteste, et subit, sans aucun doute, 1' 
 influence de notre poete americain. Lisons 
 surtout I'admirable sonnet, "la Terre Doul- 
 oureuse a bu le Sang des Reves :" 
 
 La terre douloureuse a bu le sang des Reves, 
 Le vol evanoui des ailes a passe, 
 Et le flux de la Mer a, ce soir, efface 
 
 Le mystere des pas sur le sable des greves. 
 
POE CENTENARY 65 
 
 Au delta clebordant son onde de massacre 
 Pierre a pierre ont croule le temple et la cite, 
 Et sous le flot rayonne un eclair irrite 
 
 D'or barbare frisant an front d'un simulacre. 
 
 Vers la foret nefaste vibre un cri de mort; 
 Dans I'ombre ou son passage a hurle gronde 
 encor 
 La disparition d'une horde farouche; 
 
 Et le masque muet du Sphinx ou nul n'ex- 
 
 plique 
 L'enigme qui crispait la ligne de sa bouche, 
 Rit dans la pourpre en sang de ce coucher 
 
 tragique. 
 
 Stephane Mallarme, acclame le Maitre par 
 beaucoup de jeunes poetes, fut selon I'expres- 
 sion d'un critique, "impregne" d'Edgar Poe. 
 Jean Richepin poete nous rappelle I'auteur du 
 "Corbeau," ainsi que Rene Ghil, Edmond Har- 
 aucourt, Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, 
 Gregoire Le Roy, Adolphe Rette, Maurice 
 Rollinat, I'auteur des "Nevroses," parmi beau- 
 coup d'autres poetes contemporains. Men- 
 tionnons, cependant, d'une maniere toute spe- 
 ciale, deux grands ecrivains beiges, Maurice 
 
66 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Maeterlinck, dont on a dit: 'Toe, le Poe de 
 la 'Maison Usher,' est a coup sur, son maitre 
 familier;" et Emile Verhaeren. Appelons 
 encore I'attention sur deux celebres poetes 
 frangais, nes aux Etats-Unis : Stuart Merrill, 
 a Long Island, et Francis Viele-Griffin, ne 
 a Norfolk, en Virginie. Le petit poeme de 
 celui-ci, "Fleurs du Chemin," est charmant et 
 est un exemple de la "volonte" de Poe : 
 
 Crois, Vie ou Mort, que t'importe, 
 
 En I'eblouissement d'amour? 
 Prie en ton ame forte: 
 
 Que t'importe nuit ou jour? 
 Car tu sauras des reves vastes 
 
 Si tu sais I'unique loi : 
 // n'est pas de niiit sous les astres 
 
 Bt toute I'ombre est en toi. 
 
 Aime, Honte ou Gloire, qu'importe, 
 
 A toi, dont voici le tour? 
 Chante de ta voix qui porte 
 
 Le message de tout amour? 
 Car tu diras le chant des fastes 
 
 Si tu dis ton intime emoi : 
 // n'est pas de fatals desastres, 
 
 Toute la defaite est en toi. 
 
POE CENTENARY 67 
 
 Quant a Stuart Merrill ses "Poings a la 
 Porte" nous interessent presque autant que 
 "le Corbeau." Le refrain: "Entends-tu tous 
 ces poings qui frappent a la porte?" nous im- 
 pressionne tout autant que le "nevermore" de 
 Poe : Ce sont peut-etre des amis qui frappent, 
 mais le poete n'ouvre pas a la joie futile, lui 
 qui veille seul parmi les esclaves du sommeil; 
 ce sont peut-etre des vagabonds, rodant de 
 male sorte, pieds nus dans leurs sabots, cou- 
 teau clair au poing. 
 
 lis viennent quemander, quand le soleil est loin. 
 La miche de pain rassis et le pichet de vin sur 
 A la femme furtive et au vieillard lourd 
 Qui ecoutent, sans oser crier au secours, 
 Leur haleine qui souffle au trou de la serrure. 
 Si ce sont eux je rallumerai la lampe du foyer 
 Pour que s'y chauffent les pauvres que per- 
 sonne n'a choyes. 
 
 C'est peut-etre Celui qui vient vetu de blanc, 
 et quit fait dans la nuit le geste immense du 
 pardon. Le poete alors prendra le baton de 
 voyage et suivra le Redempteur vers des 
 
68 POE CENTENARY 
 
 destinees meilleures. "Entends-tu tous ces 
 poings qui frappent a la porte?" 
 
 Je ne sais si Ton ne pourrait dire qu'Edmond 
 Rostand lui-meme n'a pas pense parfois a Poe, 
 lorsqu'il ecrivait son fier "Cyrano," ou Ton 
 voit un tel culte pour I'ideal, pour la beaute 
 artistique, malgre le physique grotesque du 
 heros. Xavier Privas, Albert Samain, Carnille 
 Mauclair, Charles Morice, Leo Larquier, 
 doivent beaucoup a Baudelaire et a Mallarme 
 et, par consequent, a Poe. Paul Fort a cer- 
 tainement imite notre poete dans sa ballade, 
 "Cette Fille, elle est morte," ou nous voyons 
 le repetend si cher a Poe, la repetition et le 
 parallelisme si bien decrits par M. le Dr. C. 
 Alphonso Smith: 
 
 Cette fille, elle est morte, est morte dans ses 
 amours, 
 lis I'ont portee en terre, en terre au point du 
 jour, 
 lis I'ont couchee toute seule, toute seule en ses 
 atours. 
 lis sont rev' nus gaiment; gaiment avec le 
 
 jour 
 lis ont chante gaiment, gaiment: Chacun 
 son tour. 
 
POE CENTENARY 69 
 
 Cette fille, elle est morte, est morte dans ses 
 
 amours. 
 lis sont alles aux champs, aux champs comme 
 
 tous les jours. 
 
 Georges Marlow, Beige comme Maeterlinck 
 et Verhaeren, a donne de la poesie une defini- 
 tion que n'eiit pas desavouee Poe: "La 
 poesie? Un peu de fumee c[ui s'eleve de I'ame 
 embrasee et qui parfois, entremelee de rayons 
 d'etoile, se concrete en aureole autour de I'ame 
 qui s'eteint." 
 
 Terminons nos citations des poetes frangais 
 par le sonnet de Mallarme : 
 
 Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe 
 Tel qu'en Lui-meme enfin I'eternite le change, 
 Le Poete suscite avec un glaive nu 
 Son siecle epouvante de n'avoir pas connu 
 Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix 
 etrange ! 
 
 Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis 
 I'ange 
 Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la 
 tribu, 
 
70 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Proclamerent tres haut du sortilege bu 
 Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir 
 melange. 
 
 Du sol et de la nue hostiles, 6 grief! 
 
 Si notre idee avec ne sculpte un bas-relief 
 Dont la tombe de Poe eblouissante s'orne, 
 
 Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un desastre obscur, 
 Que ce granit du moins montre a jamais sa 
 
 borne 
 Aux noirs vols du Blaspheme epars dans le 
 
 futur. 
 
 Les vers frangais, inspires par notre grand 
 poete, sont generalement fort beaux, mais je 
 doute qu'ils egalent le merveilleux "Corbeau," 
 meme traduit en prose, tel que nous le lisons 
 dans le livre de M. Lauvriere. ' Quelle fin ad- 
 mirable du poeme, que les lignes suivantes; 
 
 Prophete! dis-je, etre de malheur! oiseau 
 ou demon, tou jours prophete. 
 Par le ciel qui se deploie au-dessus de nos 
 tetes, par ce Dieu que tous deux nous 
 adorons, 
 
POE CENTENARY 71 
 
 Dis a cette ame de chagrin chargee si dans 
 
 I'Eden lointain, 
 Elle doit etreindre une vierge sainte que les 
 
 anges nomment Lenore, 
 Etreindre une rare et radieuse vierge que les 
 
 anges nomment Lenore. 
 
 Le Corbeau dit: "J^^iais plus." 
 
 Que cette parole soit le signal de notre sep- 
 aration, oiseau ou demon! hurlai-je en 
 me dressant, 
 
 Rentre dans la tempete, retourne au rivage 
 plutonien de la nuit; 
 
 Ne laisse pas de plume noire en gage du men- 
 songe qu'a profere ton ame; 
 
 Laisse inviolee ma solitude! quitte ce buste 
 au-dessus de ma porte! 
 Le Corbeau dit : "J^^^^is plus !" 
 
 Mais le Corbeau, sans broncher, siege encore, 
 
 siege toujours, 
 Sur le pale buste de Pallas juste au-dessus de 
 
 la porte de ma chambre, 
 Et ses yeux ont toute la semblance de ceux 
 
 d'un demon qui reve, 
 
72 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Et la lueur de la lampe misselant sur lui, 
 projette son ombre sur le plancher, 
 
 Et mon ame, hors de cette ombre qui git, 
 flottante, sur le plancher, 
 Ne s'elevera plus ! 
 
 Je remercie les membres du Comite du Cen- 
 tenaire qui m'ont fait I'honneur de m'inviter 
 a parler ici en frangais. Je vous remercie, 
 mesdames et messieurs, de votre bienveillante 
 attention. Cela me fait le plus grand plaisir 
 de me retrouver ici, a cette Universite, ou, 
 comme Poe, j'ai ete moi-meme etudiant. Mon 
 sejour ici a ete bien court, mais il a laisse sur 
 mon esprit et sur mon ame des traces ineffaga- 
 bles. Je puis dire de mes annees de jeunesse: 
 "Jamais plus," mais le souvenir c|ue j'ai con- 
 serve de rUniversite de la Virginie est aussi 
 immuable que le "Corbeau qui, sans broncher, 
 siege encore, siege tou jours sur le pale buste 
 de Pallas." 
 
POE CENTENARY 73 
 
 The Chairman, Dr. Kent: 
 
 Within recent years much attention has been 
 given to the influence of Hoffman on Edgar 
 Allan Poe, and the reciprocal influence of Poe 
 on the German writers of imaginative prose 
 and more especially upon the modern school 
 of German poets. We were very fortunate 
 in finding in our own country a talented young 
 German fresh from the companionship ot 
 these modern poets and thoroughly in touch 
 with the present literary movement of the 
 Fatherland. It will be his province to tell you 
 how far this influence of Poe has extended and 
 to bring to you the greetings of the German 
 nation on this the centennial anniversary of 
 the birth of our great alumnus. I have the 
 privilege, ladies and gentlemen, of presenting 
 Dr. Georg Edward, recently of Germany, at 
 present a member of the faculty of Northwest- 
 ern University. 
 
 Doctor Edward, speaking of Poe in Ger- 
 many, said : 
 
 The purpose of my brief address is to re- 
 call to memory the tribute which German lit- 
 erature, and, accordingly, the German people 
 
74 POE CENTENARY 
 
 as a whole, has rendered and is still rendering 
 to the genius whose hundredth birthday we 
 are celebrating at this time. It will be neces- 
 sary, in the very first place, to glance back at 
 the way in which Poe gradually became well- 
 known in Germany, then to attempt to answer 
 the question why at the present time, sixty 
 years after the poet's death, the temperament 
 of precisely this American author is felt to be 
 specifically modern by a European nation; 
 why it is that we behold in him a man of let- 
 ters who was far in advance of his own times, 
 and who, accordingly, must be said to belong 
 to no earlier age than our own. 
 
 Poe's relations to German literature, and 
 the relations of German literature to Poe, are 
 both varied and manifold. The influence of 
 Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann upon the 
 author of the "Tales of the Grotesque and 
 Arabesque" has been but recently investigated 
 in detail by Professors Gruener and Cobb. It 
 is my purpose merely to show how highly 
 prized Poe is in Germany, and why he is re- 
 garded there as the typical and characteristic 
 American author. That the Germans have 
 occupied themselves with him continuously 
 
POE CENTENARY 75 
 
 and minutely is, perhaps, not an occasion for 
 especial comment. Germany is the very home 
 of what Goethe called "Cosmopolitan litera- 
 ture" (Weltliteratur). There exists in Ger- 
 many an almost marvelous familiarity with 
 the literature of other nationalities, and it is 
 not at all an exaggeration to maintain that 
 there is scarcely any important poet or writer 
 in the whole world, who has not been treated 
 "historisch-kritisch" by some German scholar. 
 Furthermore, there has been an endless num- 
 ber of translations of foreign works, and even 
 poets and authors of very moderate ability 
 have often enjoyed a renascence in the German 
 tongue. This broadly-flowing stream of trans- 
 lations, which the peculiar elasticity and 
 adaptability of the German language have 
 made so possible, has brought it to pass that 
 the German nation, not merely in professional 
 literary circles, but in the general group of 
 cultured people, is so largely acquainted with 
 the literature of other lands. It is on account 
 of this fact that the Germans have also ac- 
 quired the ability to recognize what is specific- 
 ally and characteristically national in the liter- 
 ature of other peoples; in other words, the 
 
76 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Germans have developed a very discriminat- 
 ing sense of what is specifically English in 
 an English writer, Russian in a Russian, 
 French in a Frenchman, or American in an 
 American. That which Goethe once affirmed 
 concerning French poetry and French litera- 
 ture, namely, that it could not possibly be de- 
 tached for one moment from the life and the 
 emotion of the whole nation, is none the less 
 true of every nation's poetry and literature. 
 And so it comes to pass that the intimate ac- 
 quaintance with various foreign literatures 
 which the German people possesses, leads to 
 a feeling for the national individuality of an 
 author, and the more highly this quality is 
 exhibited by a writer, the more is he valued 
 in Germany, if only, at the same time, his art 
 gives evidence of a certain international spirit. 
 In the light of these assertions, the fact that 
 the Germans regard Poe as a most prominent 
 American writer, nay, in general, as the great- 
 est of American authors, assumes an unusual 
 significance. 
 
 Poe's naturalization has taken place more 
 slowly in Germany than in France. He has, 
 to be sure, never enlisted the services of any 
 
POE CENTENARY 77 
 
 German Baudelaire or Mallarme as inter- 
 preter, but, on the other hand, very important 
 authors and historians of hterature have been 
 his advocates, and his "Raven," at least, has 
 found a number of first-rate translators. In 
 the period from 1855 to the present day, there 
 have appeared three English editions of his 
 works in Leipsic, as well as a large number 
 of editions of various "Tales" for the use of 
 schools. The first translation of his short 
 stories appeared in two volumes in Leipsic 
 from 1855 to 1858, and to these have been 
 added thirteen further translations by most 
 varied authors, under the imprint of all sorts 
 of publishers. A selected translation of his 
 "Poetical Works" has appeared but once, 
 namely, that of Hedwig Lachmann, published 
 in 1891, but we encounter separate transla- 
 tions of separate poems scattered through the 
 pages of many journals, and "The Raven" 
 has been adapted to the mother-tongue of the 
 Germans — with greater or less felicity — some 
 dozen times. It is worthy of especial remark 
 that the best translation, that by Eduard 
 Mauthner, appeared (along with Coppee's 
 "The Smiths' Strike") in the so-called "New 
 Theatrical Library of Vienna," and has gone 
 
78 POE CENTENARY 
 
 through three editions, the last in 1894; in 
 this transmigration "The Raven" has for a 
 long time belonged to the repertoire of the 
 "show pieces" of elocutionists, and of those 
 actors who occasionally make a public appear- 
 ance as reciters. Naturally enough, the 
 "Tales" have appeared in many editions, and 
 I think it is not without significance that they 
 have been taken up by all the "Popular Libra- 
 ries," such as those of Reclam, Hendel, Cotta, 
 Spemann, and Meyer. It is only within the 
 last seven years that a complete German edi- 
 tion of Poe's Tales and Poems has appeared, 
 with an excellent introduction by the editor : 
 the ten volumes constituting "Poe's Werke," 
 by Hedda and Arthur Moeller-Bruck, which, 
 taken as a unit, must be counted as the most 
 important contribution which has been made 
 to Poe's memory in Germany up to the 
 present time. The only features of this 
 edition which we should characterize as in- 
 adequate (and in fact far inferior to other 
 similar attempts) are the selected poems 
 in the translation by Hedwig Lachmann, al- 
 ready mentioned, and the now-superseded, 
 though meritorious, "Memoir" of Ingram, 
 which precedes the first volume. 
 
POE CENTENARY 79 
 
 The translations and discussions of Poe, 
 which have appeared in Germany, cannot 
 compare, either in their extent or in their 
 influence, with similar contributions which 
 have been made in France. For thirteen 
 German translations of Poe's Tales in Ger- 
 many, we have no less than nineteen in 
 France; for one collection of selected poems 
 in Germany, four complete translations in 
 France; for one complete edition of the 
 works in Germany, two such in France. 
 But in spite of the fact that French literature 
 occupied itself with Poe at an earlier date 
 than did the Germans, it need not be as- 
 sumed that Poe found an entrance into Ger- 
 many by way of France. It is only in the 
 most recent years that German interest in 
 Baudelaire has breathed new life into the 
 interest for Poe; only at the present day has 
 Poe come to be recognized as a thoroughly 
 modern author. Germany made the ac- 
 quaintance of Poe quite as early as did 
 France, but there has never been found any 
 person among us who made the American 
 poet such an object of religious adoration as 
 did Baudelaire (the German character is 
 
80 POE CENTENARY 
 
 very chary about going to quite such lengths 
 as this!) or who, Hke Theophile Gautier, 
 discovered in him something the hke of 
 which the world had never before beheld, an 
 intellectual beverage which reminds him of 
 "those strange American drinks, compounded 
 of fizzing, prickling soda-water, and ice, and 
 every . conceivable sort of exotic alcoholic 
 ingredient." 
 
 The estimation of Poe in Germany came 
 to pass unostentatiously, but has held its 
 own consistently. The first thorough dis- 
 cussion of the poet I find in Herrig's 
 "Hand-Book of North American National 
 Literature for the year 1854," a work of very 
 little authority on its own account, which 
 nevertheless, in spite of mistaken opinions 
 and defective information (it speaks of 
 "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee," for instance, 
 as "writings"), speaks out clearly and con- 
 cisely the certain conviction : "Poe left 
 behind him a name which is bound to live in 
 the annals of American literature." Poe's 
 actual introduction to Germany was due to 
 that eminent novelist and author, who has in 
 other respects largely contributed to our 
 
POE CENTENARY 81 
 
 knowledge of America by the democratic 
 spirit of his writings — I mean Friedrich 
 Spielhagen. It was in 1860 that Spielhagen 
 pubHshed in the journal "Europa" a 
 thorough-going study of our poet, whom he 
 calls the greatest lyric singer that America 
 has produced; furthermore, he occupied him- 
 self in 1883 with an essay of considerable 
 length treating somewhat exhaustively the 
 contest between Poe and Longfellow on the 
 matter of plagiarism, and, in addition, he 
 had already published a translation of a 
 number of Poe's poems in the year 1858. 
 Two years before that time Adolf Strodtmann 
 had published similar translations in his 
 "Song- and Ballad-Book of American and 
 English Poets," to which he added in 
 1870 his widely-circulated "American An- 
 thology," a work which besides "The Masque 
 of the Red Death" contained "The Raven," 
 "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells" in very 
 good translations, and in this manner made 
 these poems at once famous throughout 
 all Germany. Of no less importance is 
 the attitude assumed toward Poe by the his- 
 torians of literature: Adolf Stern in his 
 
82 POE CENTENARY 
 
 "History of Recent Literature," Eduard 
 Engel in his "History of North American 
 Literature," and Carl Bleibtreu in his 
 "History of EngHsh Literature" have been 
 especially influential in preparing the way 
 for an appreciation of Poe in Germany. 
 The most important undertaking, one more- 
 over that is fully modern in all its tendency, 
 is the • already-mentioned translation of Poe's 
 works in ten volumes edited by Arthur 
 Moeller-Bruck, and which has been com- 
 pleted within the past year. With the ex- 
 ception of two tales, which could not be 
 translated, it contains all the stories of this 
 class, and, in addition (for the first time 
 in Germany), "Eureka." Moeller-Bruck has 
 contributed on his own account a valuable 
 essay on "Poe's Creative Activities," which, 
 in general, does full justice to Poe's tem- 
 perament; in a few places only (he appears 
 to be entirely unacquainted with the latest 
 literature of the subject, and more par- 
 ticularly with Professor Harrison's edition) 
 are his results unsatisfactory. The basis of 
 his work still continues to be the "Memoir" 
 of Ingram, the Edinburg edition of which 
 is the foundation of the German work. 
 
POE CENTENARY 83 
 
 It would carry us too far if I were to 
 discuss the numberless essays on Poe which 
 have appeared in the leading German 
 periodicals. At best I could only give a 
 barren resume of their contents, and there- 
 with I should surely overstep the bounds of 
 time which have been set for my address. 
 From the tenor of these articles, however, it 
 is easy to discover how we have gradually 
 come to the conclusion in Germany that Poe 
 is to be regarded as a thoroughly modern 
 author, and as the most characteristic 
 American poet. In order to understand 
 this one must call to mind the evolution 
 which German literature has gone through 
 in the last twenty years. Apart from those 
 circles which are required ex officio to 
 concern themselves with German literature, 
 we find among English-speaking people a 
 very incomplete, not to say a comical con- 
 ception of what the Germans have ac- 
 complished in this field. German character 
 is assuredly not over-easy to understand, 
 while its literature, which is the expression 
 of this character, is still more complicated 
 in its nature. Here in America, where people 
 
84 POE CENTENARY 
 
 are decidely prone to generalizations, German 
 literature is described either as heavy, brood- 
 ing, and tasteless, or it is given (by a very 
 short process) the general label of "decadent," 
 One of these estimates is precisely as 
 fatuous as the other. At present we have 
 to concern ourselves only with the second, 
 however: the expression "decadent" belongs 
 to the repertory of those who have to char- 
 acterize the "modern." German literature 
 has undergone great transformations in the 
 last thirty years, just as German philosophy, 
 German music, and German art have done. 
 After having disposed of "consistent nat- 
 uralism," or perhaps as a reaction against 
 it, there has appeared an unmistakable new 
 era of German psychological development: 
 after sensitiveness, romance, the "second 
 generation," realism, and naturalism, comes 
 a new species of impressionism, Nervosity. 
 Almost simultaneously it has influenced the 
 entire art, literature, and music of the 
 western European continent. It cannot be 
 denied that there is a certain element of 
 morbidity in all this, but severe psychological 
 struggles (and those struggles did precede 
 
POE CENTENARY 85 
 
 the recent art-movement) never manifest 
 themselves without some pathological symp- 
 toms. Underneath the hard pressure of the 
 Art of the Actual there has been a quest for 
 new methods of expression for the infinitely 
 subtle variations of feeling which come surg- 
 ing in upon the modern individual, and there 
 has been a discovery of new sensations, which 
 are rooted in the nervous system. I need 
 only to call to mind the music of Liszt and 
 Wagner, who have attempted to give ex- 
 pression to everything inexpressible that 
 lies concealed in the innermost depths of 
 our souls, or the painting of Bocklin and 
 Klinger, who have conducted us into a new 
 world of tones and color-impressions — who 
 have rendered the finest shadings of emotion 
 in a way which could not have been expressed 
 at an earlier time. And it is toward this 
 goal that the modern literature of western 
 Europe is also striving: the new times have 
 brought new shades of emotion, and the 
 new shades of emotion have demanded new 
 methods of expression, and new sensations. 
 It is altogether indifferent whether we call 
 modern literature symbolistic, impressionistic, 
 
86- POE CENTENARY 
 
 mystical, or flatly "decadent" : the one thing 
 which underlies all these tendencies is the 
 striving after something new, something 
 remote and strange. But in all this 
 "decadent" literature we have not to deal 
 with nervous prostration, or nervous irrita- 
 tion, or even with the moral corruption of 
 modern city-life, but a revolt of the indi- 
 vidual against the mediocrity, the dead-level 
 of Philistinism, — a battle with materialism, 
 with the age of machinery, the prosy morality 
 of mere utilitarianism and the struggle for 
 existence. 
 
 And how is it in regard to the "Pilgrim 
 of Sorrow," as Professor Harrison has 
 named him, him whose memory we recall 
 today with veneration and love, with a feeling 
 of tender regret? Perhaps in his case there 
 was not so clear a feeling as with the poets 
 of today that he was groping after new sen- 
 sations, in order to give expression to the 
 emotions which dominated his psychical ex- 
 istence. But, consciously or unconsciously, 
 certain it is that he stands at the gateway of 
 the New Art, tlie art of modern humanity, 
 as it comes to meet us at the close of the 
 
POE CENTENARY 87 
 
 last century. Poe was seeking for the new 
 world of actualities, — the very fact that in a 
 portion of his works he recoils so sensitively 
 from the surrounding unsympathetic world 
 of actuality is proof enough of this. He 
 made a quest for a means of expression for 
 that which moved his inner soul, and the 
 forms of expression which sufficed for his 
 contemporaries were no longer adequate for 
 him. In his significant introduction to Poe's 
 poems. Professor Kent has indicated how 
 rarely the poet was able to fully express 
 what hovered before the eyes of his imagina- 
 tion, how "his conceptions were at times far 
 beyond his own powers of expression," as 
 "much that was written is not understood, 
 since with ears we do not hear, and with 
 eyes we do not see, for both music and 
 vision are for those of poetic temperament and 
 artistic gift." How far was Poe, in this 
 respect, in advance of his age! Since the 
 time when he wrote his melodious lines, our 
 feeling for the musical values of language 
 has become more and more developed and 
 refined, more and more has lyric poetry 
 come nearer to the domain of music. The 
 
88 POE CENTENARY 
 
 very thing which our American poet, so 
 sensitive for the tonal effects of his verses, 
 strove for, many years ago (as is proven by 
 the frequent variants in the different texts 
 of his poems), the modern verse-technic is 
 striving today to attain, more earnestly than 
 ever before. As early as 1900 the Austrian 
 writer Rudolf Kassner pointed out, in his 
 book "Mysticism, Artists, and Life," Poe's 
 high endowment for music. He calls him a 
 psychologist of the most painful nicety of 
 apprehension, a mystagogue full of intoxi- 
 cating rhythm, self-indulgent and yielding, 
 a reveler and an adorer of angels, sarcastic 
 and moody, a comedian and a fatalist. 
 Dante and Poe — one is startled at seeing 
 these two names side by side — had one thing 
 in common (according to our writer) : the 
 necessity of having faith, — Dante because of 
 the wealth, and Poe because of the poverty 
 of his endowment of conscience. Dante 
 believed in Heaven and Hell, Poe in the con- 
 tinuation of life in the grave, and his 
 theology was mesmerism compounded with 
 cryptography. He, too, had his Beatrice, 
 whom he celebrated in song quite as subtly as 
 
POE CENTENARY 89 
 
 did the immortal Florentine. But one thing 
 he possessed, of which Dante had no sus- 
 picion: — music. It was his divinity, even 
 when he was least conscious of it. "And 
 what did Virginia Clemm mean for the art 
 of Poe? Perhaps at the very moment in 
 his life when he was most faithful to her, 
 he was rapt away by his divinity. Music." 
 That is the music which every modern poet 
 and artist carries about in his soul, those are 
 the "words ineffable" which in vain strive to 
 make their way out into the light of day, and 
 which in the end cause the heart to consume 
 away upon itself. "Who are these Helens, 
 Lenores, Ulalumes," asks Kassner once 
 again, "these ghostly beings with violet 
 eyes and tremulous lids? His art is not able 
 to tell us that. These maidens appear at the 
 beginning and end of his dreams, — so much 
 art is able to tell. They conduct him into 
 enchanted gardens, where enamored roses 
 languish in the moonlight; they row him 
 in swart craft to the enchanted islands, and 
 the waves die away upon the shore like 
 yearning after enjoyment; they lead him to 
 the castles of death, which, wind-forsaken 
 
90 POE CENTENARY 
 
 and immersed in eternal night, loom from 
 the livid waters of a languid sea ; they speak 
 out of graves and point up to the stars. 
 Though they appear at the beginning and at 
 the end, as the first and last star of the night 
 of dreams, nevertheless the dream has 
 whelmed them up. This is the art of Edgar 
 Allan Poe!" 
 
 That which gives so strong a sense of 
 modernity in Poe is not the fact that he led 
 the life of a dreamer, that he himself had 
 the consciousness of being "no book whose 
 meaning has been completely fathomed," to 
 speak with Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, but 
 "a man with his own contradiction." He 
 himself gives expression to this conviction 
 when he defends himself (in the preface to 
 his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque") 
 against the charge of "Germanism," and 
 cries out: "Let us admit, for the moment, 
 that the 'phantasy-pieces' now given are 
 Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism 
 is 'the vein' for the time being. Tomorrow 
 I may be anything but German, as yesterday 
 I was everything else." And that he was, 
 most assuredly: subjected to the never-ending 
 
POE CENTENARY 91 
 
 changes of the moods of his spirit. And in 
 the tales and writings which he has left 
 behind him this multifariousness of his 
 artistic and literary temperament comes to 
 clearest expression. He who wrote most 
 melodious stanzas, and who had the utmost 
 horror of crass actuality, he it was who 
 possessed the knowledge or the presentiment 
 of our modern actuality: one has merely to 
 recall his criminal stories, or his modern 
 types which remind us of similar creations 
 in the writings of Dostojewski, or the 
 delineation of milieus, as in "The Man of 
 the Crowd" which recall impressions in the 
 novels of Zola. And alongside of these 
 stand those tales, the fancies of his dreams, 
 with which he transfigured and beautified 
 life, those creations which sprang from his 
 vague visions, in which he seems to us a 
 visionary or an idealist, — as in his Eureka- 
 song. Ethical principles, which he should 
 be bound to champion, concerned him not — 
 he has no questions to put about the goals 
 of humanity, nothing about its future — but 
 he possesses that idealism which has fullest 
 faith in the greatness, the purity, and the 
 
92 POE CENTENARY 
 
 depth of human feeHngs, and which has 
 called into being creations which alone 
 represent these feelings : — William Wilson 
 and Roderick Usher and Eleanora, Ligeia, 
 Berenice and Morella. And then his fond- 
 ness for the horrible, the malicious. One 
 has instinctively the feeling that Poe's soul- 
 life must have been that of the criminal, as 
 though it gave him unspeakable pleasure 
 to penetrate into the very depths of crimi- 
 nality, to experience its very sensations and 
 to follow out the whole course of its origin. 
 Such a state of mind is one which is only 
 too frequently encountered in daily life, but 
 the exceptional thing about Poe is precisely 
 this, that he, as poet, is obsessed by this mania, 
 and holds fast to it in his writings. Poe is 
 the first of that long list of modern authors — 
 Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, Dostojewski, Niet- 
 zsche and Bourget — who trace back the evil 
 element in man, and consequently his crimi- 
 nality and wickedness, to an abnormal mental 
 condition. 
 
 And so Poe appears in the category of those 
 poets and authors to whom German literary 
 research has given the attribute "modern." 
 
POE CENTENARY 93 
 
 One further reason why Germany gives him 
 so high a place is, perhaps, that we stand 
 there in a neutral attitude toward the uninvit- 
 ing side of his character, his unsparing 
 sarcasm, the provocative element in his nature 
 which made enemies out of his friends. In 
 the older world, where we can look back upon 
 generations of artists, authors, and musicians, 
 one is only too well aware of the fact that 
 those persons who have been humanity's 
 richest spiritual benefactors were often, in 
 actual life, anything but model citizens and 
 blameless toilers. One recognizes, for more 
 reasons than need to be specified, that people 
 cannot be estimated by set rules, and that 
 literature, as well, must reflect both the good 
 and the bad, for life is made up of both, and 
 both keep the world moving. We are only 
 too well aware in Germany how prone Ameri- 
 cans are to lay down inflexible rules to which 
 even the poet must bend himself. As early 
 as in Eduard Engel's "History of North 
 American Literature," in which Poe is called 
 "an exceptional phenomenon for both British 
 and American authorship," we encounter the 
 undisguised satire: "The life of all the other 
 
94 POE CENTENARY 
 
 important American authors passes by 
 smoothly; they grow old in honor and abun- 
 dance, they play the part of literary patriarchs 
 with dignity, and show that authorship in 
 America is as brilliant and lucrative a career 
 as boring for petroleum or building railroads." 
 Is it hard to understand why Poe, finely-or- 
 ganized and aristocratic, who did not possess 
 the force of character to protect his sensibili- 
 ties against the commonalties of daily life, 
 became ever more and more embittered ? Why 
 he paid back the humiliations which he had 
 to endure anew every day of his life, with 
 that sarcasm, that unsparing onslaught on the 
 mediocrity which shut him in from every side? 
 Was he not, in fact, a dreamer out of ancient, 
 half-romantic Europe, who was altogether out 
 of place in the brutally realistic milieu of the 
 new world? Call to mind his sensitive tem- 
 perament, his refined conception of poetic art 
 and literature, and realize that he was fated 
 to do his singing to an age in which the first 
 railroads cut their way across the country, in 
 which the telegraph made the conquest of the 
 world, and steamships and factories darkened 
 the sunlight! Poe's fierce irritability towards 
 
POE CENTENARY 95 
 
 the life which surrounded him, and to which 
 he felt himself superior, gave itself breathing- 
 space in those criticisms which made the whole 
 world his enemy, and plunged him into that 
 deep, incurable melancholy which makes the 
 theme of his "Raven" and of all his poems : 
 the plaint of a heart which is dragged down 
 from the highest heights of enthusiasm for 
 the true and the beautiful into the mire of 
 sordid vulgarity. 
 
 And if the Germans, who cultivate cosmo- 
 politan literature, are prone to seek for the 
 national trait in every author, they have also 
 found this in Poe. The very earliest critics 
 called him "the most original spirit in Ameri- 
 can literature ;" a nature "in which the leaning 
 toward the freakish, melancholy, mysterious 
 and awesome coincides with the sense of 
 verity, the realistic acumen of the Yankee." 
 But it is only the most recent criticism which 
 finds in Poe the characteristic American poet, 
 the greatest American poet; one of the argu- 
 ments in favor of this view is not precisely 
 flattering, but the proof is mathematical in 
 its logicalness : every poet, who truly bore 
 the arms of his calling, has come into conflict 
 
96 POE CENTENARY 
 
 with actuality, but few have been victorious 
 in this struggle, and none has ever emerged 
 from it without sore wounds. Is it not there- 
 fore logically inevitable that any true poet 
 who should come into contact with the 
 American life which encounters him in the 
 larger northern cities with a materialism 
 bordering upon brutality, must go to destruc- 
 tion under these influences? An American 
 poet was in the nature of things an impossi- 
 bility: he could never survive. But there 
 haz^e been attempts to treat the matter less 
 superficially. In the contemporaries of Poe^ — 
 such as Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson and 
 Whittier — one has recognized, not American 
 poets, but merely those who have continued 
 English literature upon American soil. 
 
 In Poe, on the other hand, one recognizes 
 an artist who understood American life as 
 none other had done, who recognized its crim- 
 inal tendencies long before they had reached 
 their climax, and who comprehended, decades 
 in advance, what an evolution the American 
 spirit was destined to undergo in the field of 
 inventions and discoveries. To be sure, Poe 
 was interested merely in the physiological, or 
 rather the pathological side of the American 
 
POE CENTENARY 97 
 
 temperament, but the one-sidedness of his en- 
 tire being is itself a part of the American 
 nature. He is thoroughly American, even 
 when, compelled to write tales merely in order 
 to secure the barest necessities of life, he is 
 bound to continually invent what is new, and 
 in being able to show interest and curiosity 
 where his heart was not directly engaged. 
 Curiosity is certainly a most prominent trait 
 in American life, or interest, if the other term 
 seem offensive. Poe's interest was directed 
 toward the most strange and odd mysteries, 
 and yet he refused to concern himself with 
 things which were ready and finished. All 
 that was incomplete, unsolved, unexplained, 
 challenged him to pursuit; he was bound to 
 complete it with his imagination; and so he 
 has told of mysterious secret documents, of 
 inexplicable crimes and discoveries, so he has 
 tracked out the possibilities of mesmerism, the 
 prospects of aerial navigation — such themes as 
 these appealed to his interest. But when such 
 things became realized, they became totally 
 indifferent to him : he had to discover new 
 possibilities which should excite his curiosity. 
 And yet, even to the last, he never parted 
 company with his own self — he remained the 
 
98 POE CENTENARY 
 
 artist that he was in the beginning, the pilgrim, 
 who with bleeding heart is still searching for 
 the land of undiscovered beauty. So Spiel- 
 hagen greets him and pays him homage: 
 "Unfortunate, fortunate man! for, confess it, 
 thou hast beheld her, the fairest, the loftiest, 
 in those rare, unspeakable moments : and she 
 has kissed thee, but in passing, as she kisses 
 mortals; but thy soul was filled with the echo 
 of those kisses ; and this rapture thou, starving 
 one, wouldst not have bartered for all the 
 gold of Ormuzd; thou, the greedy for fame, 
 wouldst not have sold it for all the glory and 
 renown and honor of those who, in thine eyes, 
 were no priests at all, who counted themselves 
 as priests only because the world counted them 
 such!" 
 
 And in this hour, in which we pay our 
 homage to the poet, the artist, the author, I, 
 too, would bring to him at least one tribute 
 from across the sea — a tribute which sprang 
 from genuine enthusiasm, and which, how- 
 ever insignificant it may appear, gives its testi- 
 mony as to how widespread is the knowledge 
 of Poe in Germany, how deep the respect. I 
 myself belonged, at a very youthful age, to 
 a literary group which included Poe among 
 
POE CENTENARY 99 
 
 its objects of study, out of pure love for the 
 theme : we were then scarcely fifteen-year-old 
 schoolboys, but we had the genuine reverence 
 for the great and the beautiful which had not 
 yet been weakened or overcast by any of the 
 bitter experiences of life. We also tried our 
 hand at translating Poe's poems into our 
 mother-tongue, and out of these efforts one 
 translation emerged which for its simple, 
 melodious beauty surpasses anything which I 
 have encountered in these last days while 
 busied in preparation for this Commemora- 
 tion. It is the touching poem "To My 
 Mother," and the translator, of whom I have 
 lost all traces for many years, was called 
 Friedrich Kraft: — 
 
 Weil ich empfinde, dass der Engel Heer, 
 
 Das fliisternd sich begriisst im Himmelreiche, 
 
 Kein Wortlein findet, sucht es noch so sehr, 
 
 Das dem erhabnen einen "Mutter" gleiche, 
 
 Drum muss ich dir den teuren Namen geben, 
 
 Die du mir mehr als eine Mutter hist — 
 
 In dir allein noch find' ich Kraft zum Leben, 
 
 Jetzt da Virginia mir entrissen ist. 
 
 Die Mutter — meine Mutter, die gestorben — 
 
 War nur die Mutter meiner selbst, doch du 
 
 Gebarst mir die, die ich zum Weib, erworben, 
 
 Und die ich Hebe sonder Rast und Ruh, 
 
 So viel mal sie mir teurer als mein Ich, 
 
 So viel mal mehr verehr' und lieb' ich dich ! 
 
VI 
 
 IN CABELL HALL, AGAIN 
 
 np^HE final exercises of the Commemoration 
 -^ took place in Cabell Hall Tuesday even- 
 ing, January 19. President Alderman wel- 
 comed the audience: 
 
 We are met again on this evening of the 
 Centenary of his birth to honor the memory 
 and to study the life and work of Edgar Allan 
 Poe, a man of genius, who, for a brief period, 
 studied within the halls of this University. 
 The task of appraising the value to the world 
 of Poe, the poet and the man of letters, has 
 been assigned by our committee to the two 
 scholars who have already discharged their 
 duties so ably and thoughtfully this morning, 
 and to two other scholars whom I shall shortly 
 have the honor to introduce to you. Professor 
 Barrett Wendell, of Harvard University, who 
 will speak to you upon "The Nationalism of 
 
 100 
 
POE CENTENARY 101 
 
 Poe," and Professor Alphonso Smith, of North 
 Carolina, who will speak upon the "Ameri- 
 canism of Poe." All Americans look up to 
 Harvard University with reverence and re- 
 spect, especially at this moment when the most 
 venerable of our institutions is passing into 
 a new epoch of its vigorous life, and I shall 
 be pardoned, I am sure, for a feeling for the 
 University of North Carolina as close and 
 warm as a son may bear. 
 
 It is in no sense my task to discuss in a 
 critical way Edgar Allan Poe. I may, how- 
 ever, with propriety utter a simple, intimate 
 word, expressing for him the tenderness and 
 affection which this University has always 
 borne for him, as well in the days of his way- 
 wardness and eclipse, as in this time, when 
 the star of his fame has climbed to the zenith 
 and is shining there with intense and settled 
 glory. There is nothing finer in the world 
 than the love that men bear for institutions, 
 unless it be the solemn pride which institutions 
 display in men who have partaken of their 
 benefits. Celebrations similar to this have been 
 held to-day in London and in five American 
 
102 POE CENTENARY 
 
 cities — New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, 
 Richmond and Boston. 
 
 "Seven cities claimed the birth of Homer dead 
 Through which the living Homer begged his 
 bread." 
 
 That experience of the elder world is re- 
 peated to-day save that the number of cities 
 is five instead of seven through which the liv- 
 ing Poe suffered and struggled. It is the same 
 old story, too, of outward defeat and ap- 
 parent oblivion, and yet of inward victory 
 and a sure grasping of enduring fame, I 
 may be frank and say that there was a 
 time when Poe did not greatly appeal to 
 me. I felt the sheer, clear beauty of his 
 song, indeed, as one might feel the beauty 
 of the lark's song, but his detachment from 
 the world of men, where my interests most 
 centered, left me unresponsive and simply 
 curious. The great name of poet had held 
 place in my thinking as signifying a 
 prophet, or as a maker of divine music for 
 men to march by towards serener heights. 
 My notion of the poet came down to me out of 
 the Hebraic training that all of our consciences 
 
POE CENTENARY 103 
 
 receive; and Poe did not fit into this concep- 
 tion. I have come, however, to see the limita- 
 tions of that view, and to behold something 
 very admirable and strange and wonderful in 
 this proud, gifted man, who loved beauty and 
 mystery, who had such genius for feeling the 
 pain of life and the wonder of it, who grasped 
 so vainly at its peace and calm, and who suf- 
 fered, one feels, a thousand deaths under its 
 disciplines and conventions. To me the glory 
 of Poe as a man is that, though whipped and 
 scourged by human frailties, he was able to 
 keep his heart and vision unstained and to 
 hold true to the finest thing in him, so that 
 out of this fidelity to his very best there issued 
 immortal work. World poets like world con- 
 querors are very rare. Not many universities 
 have had the fortune to shelter a world poet, 
 and to offer him any nourishment. Christ 
 College, at Cambridge, has warmed itself at 
 the fire of Milton's genius for three hundred 
 years. In our own young land, with its short 
 intellectual annals, Williams College sheltered 
 Bryant for a while; and Virginia, Poe; and 
 Harvard, Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes; 
 Bowdoin, Longfellow; and Oglethorpe, a little 
 
104 . POE CENTENARY 
 
 college in Georgia, that other child of genius 
 and misfortune, Sidney Lanier. We might 
 say, therefore, that only four out of the four 
 hundred American colleges have sheltered 
 great poets, and perhaps only two, poets of 
 world-wide fame, and perhaps only one, a 
 world artist. Not such a poet as Sophocles or 
 Virgil or Dante or Shakespeare have we 
 nourished here, to be sure, but a world poet 
 in a legitimate and classic sense. In many of 
 these colleges minor poets have appeared, who 
 have sung truly and clearly, like our own 
 Thompson, and Lucas, and Page, and Lindsay 
 Gordon and Armistead Gordon. So long is 
 the list of the great singers who knew no 
 college training, and so short the list of those 
 who did, that we may well cherish here our 
 high privileges in the fame of Poe. I have 
 often wondered just what the University of 
 Virginia did for Poe in that short year of his 
 life here. He makes no mention of the Uni- 
 versity in his writings, but that is like him 
 and his detachment from time and place. He 
 saw the University when it was young. He 
 must have heard much talk about him of the 
 dreams and hopes for the new institution 
 
POE CENTENARY 105 
 
 founded here on the western borders of the 
 young repubHc by the statesman whose renown 
 then filled the world. The great philosopher 
 of democracy and the great classic artist must 
 have often passed each other on the Lawn 
 and doubtless often held speech with each 
 other, little dreaming that each would share 
 with the other the widest fame to be accorded 
 to the thousands who would hereafter throng 
 these halls. It is probably true that "Annabel 
 Lee" and the "Ode to Helen" would have sung 
 themselves out of Poe's heart and throat if he 
 had never seen the University of Virginia; 
 but surely there was genuine inspiration in 
 the place in that time of its dim beginnings. 
 There were noble books here, few in number 
 and great in quality, Coleridge, Byron, 
 Shelley, Keats, and the great Greeks were all 
 here; sincere scholars from the old world and 
 the new had set up their homes here. Here 
 were unbeaten youths with young hearts and 
 passions; here hopes gleamed and ambitions 
 burned. And then, as now, beauty dwelt upon 
 the venerable hills encircling the horizon, and 
 the University itself lay new and chaste in its 
 simple lines upon the young Lawn. I venture 
 
106 POE CENTENARY 
 
 to think sometimes that when our poet wrote 
 those statehest lines of his — 
 
 To the glory that was Greece, 
 And the grandeur that was Rome — • 
 
 perhaps there flashed into his mind's eye the 
 vision of the Rotunda upon some such night 
 as this, with its soaring columns whitened by 
 the starlight and vying with the beauty and 
 witchery of the white winter about it. 
 
 It is perhaps easier to answer the question, 
 What has Poe done for the University? We 
 hear much of endowments in connection with 
 universities. The words donor and endow- 
 ment are the technical phrases of college ad- 
 ministration baffling and alluring the builders 
 of universities. Poe has endowed his alma 
 mater with immortal distinction, and left it a 
 legacy which will increase with the years. 
 This legacy is not endowment of money, for 
 there was no scrip left in his poor purse, but 
 simply the endowment of a few songs and a 
 fund of unconquerable idealism. I am not of 
 those who believe that Poe has been to our 
 young men a kind of star that has lighted 
 them to their destruction, as some good 
 
POE CENTENARY 107 
 
 Presbyterians believe Burns to have been to 
 the youth of Scotland. The vast tragedy of 
 his life, its essential purity, its hard work, the 
 unspeakable pity of it, have kept his name a 
 name of dignity and the suggestions of his 
 career to modern youth are suggestions of 
 beauty and of labor. Let us concede that he 
 was no exemplar or pattern of correct living 
 to whom we can point our youth, but the fact 
 that there is a little room on West Range in 
 which dwelt a world poet who never wrote 
 an unclean word, and who sought after beauty 
 in form as passionately as a coarse man might 
 seek after gain, has contributed an irreducible 
 total of good to the spirit which men breathe 
 here, as well as a wide fame to his alma mater 
 that will outlive all ill-fortune, change, or 
 disaster. May I call this spiritual residuum 
 a clear tradition of beauty and poetic under- 
 standing, a feeling for the gold and not the 
 dross in life, a genius for reverence, an in- 
 stinct for honor, and an eye to see, burning 
 brightly, the great realities that are wont to 
 pale and disappear before the light of common 
 day? 
 
108 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Poems contributed for the occasion were 
 read. The following, by Robert Burns Wil- 
 son, entitled "Genius," was "inscribed with 
 great admiration and esteem to Dr. Charles 
 W. Kent:" 
 
 Not in the courts of kings alone 
 
 Are found life's princes of the blood: 
 They rise and reign where field and flood 
 
 Know not the temple nor the throne. 
 
 From some unnoted, silent dawn 
 
 Their souls receive the golden dower; 
 And conscious of their spirit's power 
 
 They put the crimson mantle on. 
 
 Across the desert of their days 
 
 They look with fixed imperious eyes 
 And on some sky, beyond the skies, 
 
 They bend the soul's untiring gaze. 
 
 In that far, undistracted bourne. 
 
 They build the kingdom of the mind : 
 And there — unvexed by Fate's ill wind, — 
 
 They rule unmoved — in might unshorn. 
 
POE CENTENARY 109 
 
 The sculptured glory of that dream 
 
 Through all the echoing courts they know : 
 The domes — the palaces of snow — 
 
 The bastioned walls that glow and gleam. 
 
 The clouded-mighty arches ring 
 With music and the mingling call 
 Of trumpets and, above them all, 
 
 The cry — The King! — It is the King!! 
 
 Far-faded from their fancy's ken 
 The fashion of the world's regard; 
 Alike to them the wounding shard. 
 
 The censure and the praise of men. 
 
 The small mind's hate — the world's disdain. 
 The fool's forlorn felicity : — 
 The masked and mocking mimicry — 
 
 All menace, their set minds make vain. 
 
 Yet from a race which cannot fail, 
 The torch, instinctively, they bear; 
 Their destined course they keep — they dare 
 
 Some new and untried sea to sail. 
 
110 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Creative, undisturbed, they see 
 The super-truth in Beauty's mold; 
 In form — the soul, in clay — the gold, 
 
 Not man's day, but eternity. 
 
 Across the desert of their days 
 The never-ceasing voices call; 
 They do not fear nor faint nor fall 
 
 Nor change their soul's untiring gaze. 
 
 Not in the courts of kings alone 
 
 Are found life's princes of the blood : 
 They rise and reign where field and flood, 
 
 Know not the temple nor the throne. 
 
POE CENTENARY 111 
 
 Mr. Ben C. Moomaw, of Virginia: 
 Edgar Ali^an Poe 
 
 I 
 
 Lo! ever among the bards was he the 
 
 wondrous Israfel, 
 For never to the listening world sang they so 
 
 wildly well; 
 Nor ever in all the earth arose, from lips that 
 
 mortal be, 
 A burst of song so marvelous, a holier 
 
 melody ! 
 The soul that soaring sought the sky across 
 
 the starlit way 
 Was not a soul of the sordid earth, whatever 
 
 the world may say, — 
 Was not a sodden soul of the clod, whatever 
 
 the clods may say. 
 
 II 
 
 Vain is the orient vision for eyes that can- 
 not see, 
 
 And silent are the morning stars to ears that 
 heavy be. 
 
 And sweet the song of minstrel to none in all 
 this earth 
 
 Whoso the godlike song shall hold a thing of 
 little worth; 
 
112 POE CENTENARY 
 
 And silent so for weary years the poet's lyre 
 
 has been, 
 And mute the singing lips to-day amid the 
 
 haunts of men 
 Hushed by the clamor of the earth, by the 
 
 clamor of noisy men. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Wide are the reaches of the sea, and far the 
 
 flight of time, 
 And many mysteries there be in every earthly 
 
 clime. 
 But not the sea, nor time, nor space, nor 
 
 mysteries of men. 
 Nor soaring height nor darkling depth escape 
 
 the searching ken 
 Of him whose song unearthly, like the splendor 
 
 of the sun. 
 The aureate glory kindleth that makes the 
 
 nations one; — 
 For the joy of love and the sorrow of life, 
 
 maketh the whole world one. 
 
 IV 
 
 For yet his vibrant song was like the sobbing 
 
 of the sea, — 
 The Sea! — the awful glory and the rhythm 
 
 of the sea, 
 
POE CENTENARY 113 
 
 Akin in stately measure, to the whirling of 
 
 the spheres; 
 The noble measured marching of innumerable 
 
 years 
 Adown the magic corridors, where mighty 
 
 anthems roll. 
 In the mystic gloom and glory of the elemental 
 
 soul, — 
 The tragic world, and infinite, that centers in 
 
 the soul. 
 
 V 
 
 Alike the choral grandeur in the temple of the 
 
 night,— 
 The thunder of the tempest in the waning ot 
 
 the light; 
 The mournful sighing of the wind amid the 
 
 wintry wood; 
 The splendid diapason of the universal 
 
 flood; 
 The threnody of sorrow in the soul that never 
 
 dies, — 
 Thus sang the bard whose lyre rang the 
 
 anthems of the skies, 
 And showered on a listening world the starry 
 
 melodies. 
 
114 POE CENTENARY 
 
 VI 
 
 Afar the centuries may wing their never rest- 
 ing flight, 
 Empires arise, and vanish then in an eternal 
 
 night. 
 While be the annals of the race to joy or 
 
 sorrow given, 
 While yet we borrow love of life, or hope ot 
 
 bounteous heaven. 
 So shall his fame enduring be, a coronal 
 
 sublime ; 
 A burst of cosmic light upon the skies of every 
 
 clime ; 
 A path of dazzling splendor to the far oft 
 
 bounds of time. 
 
 VII 
 
 Oh ye who zealous are to blame the weakness 
 of the man, 
 
 Who virtuous, blaze to all the world your un- 
 relenting ban. 
 
 Aye, doubtless are ye without guilt to hurl the 
 sinless stone. 
 
 And crush a quivering heart. But stay, it is 
 not nobly done, 
 
 For if there be — or much there be — that we 
 have not forgiven, 
 
POE CENTENARY 115 
 
 Remember that the sternest tongue is shamed 
 
 by silent heaven, — 
 That e'en a thousand tireless tongues are 
 
 hushed by piteous heaven. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Though Truth is Argus-eyed and stern, pity- 
 ing Love is blind. 
 
 And twain they are in all the world save in 
 the noblest mind. 
 
 But wed they are where angels fare, and lo! 
 the heavenly song 
 
 The breathless skies acclaim to-night, the sing- 
 ing stars prolong; — 
 
 The choral stars, — and lo! a star lost to its 
 native light 
 
 Has lifted songs of beauty amid the Stygian 
 night,— 
 
 Has lifted marvelous melodies out of the 
 gloomy night. 
 
 IX 
 
 Thus e'er it was and e'er shall be while earthly 
 
 cycles roll. 
 The sweetest music of the world swells from 
 
 the saddest soul; 
 
116 POE CENTENARY 
 
 But since the guard at Eden's gate who held 
 
 the ghttering sword 
 Hath sheathed its flaming terrors in the pity 
 
 of the Lord, 
 The luminous soul hath borne afar its golden 
 
 argosies 
 From the moorings of its sorrow to the beauty 
 
 of the skies, — • 
 From earthly ports in shadow to the splendor 
 
 of the skies. 
 
 X 
 
 Aye, thus it is that of the bards the wondrous 
 
 Israfel 
 Is he, for never a mortal bard has sung so 
 
 wildly well; 
 Nor ever in all the earth arose from lips that 
 
 mortal be, 
 A burst of song so marvelous, so pure a 
 
 melody. 
 The soaring soul that sought the sky across 
 
 the starlit way 
 Was not a soul of the sordid earth, whatever 
 
 the world may say, — 
 Was not a sodden soul of the clod, whatever 
 
 the clods may say. 
 
POE CENTENARY 117 
 
 Dr. Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, speaking 
 on "The Nationalism of Poe," said: 
 
 One hundred years ago to-day, Edgar Allan 
 Poe was born in Boston. The vital records 
 of that period are scanty and defective. It is 
 only within the past two weeks that my friend, 
 Mr. Walter Watkins, has collected, from the 
 newspapers of 1808 and 1809, notices of all 
 the plays in which the parents of Poe appeared 
 during that season. From them it is clear 
 that Mrs. Poe withdrew from the stage about 
 Christmas time, 1808, and returned only on 
 February 9th, 1809, when one of the news- 
 papers congratulated her on her happy re- 
 covery from her confinement. This is appar- 
 ently the most nearly contemporary record of 
 Poe's birth. The researches of Mr. Watkins 
 did not end here. It had been supposed that 
 all record of Poe's birthplace was lost; and 
 indeed it is improbable that he himself ever 
 knew just where it was. By examining the 
 tax lists for 1808 and 1809, Mr. Watkins dis- 
 covered that David Poe was taxed that year 
 as resident in a house owned by one Henr}' 
 Haviland, who had bought the property, a few 
 
118 POE CENTENARY 
 
 years before, from a Mr. Haskins, a kinsman, 
 I believe, of the mother of Ralph Waldo Emer- 
 son, The house was pulled down some fifty 
 years ago; but Mr. Watkins has ascertained 
 from the records that it was situated at what 
 is now No. 62 Carver Street. In 1809, this 
 was a respectable, though not a fashionable, 
 part of the city. There Poe was born. 
 
 The circumstances of Poe's career were rest- 
 less; on the whole, they were solitary. 
 Throughout his forty years of mortal sunlight 
 and shadow, he was never quite in accord 
 with his surroundings. He was never tried 
 by either of the tests for which ambition 
 chiefly longs — the gravely happy test of wide 
 responsibility, or the stimulatingly happy test 
 of dominant success. Troublous from begin- 
 ning to end his earthly life seems; to him, 
 this world could not often have smiled con- 
 tagiously sympathetic. So much is clear; and 
 yet a little more is clear as well. When he 
 sought sympathy, or found semblance of it, 
 and thus for a little while could feel trouble 
 assuaged, he could find it most nearly among 
 those generous phases of Southern spirit 
 which surrounded the happier years of his 
 
POE CENTENARY 119 
 
 youth. There was Httle trace of it, for him, 
 in the still half-Puritan atmosphere of that 
 New England where he chanced, a stranger, 
 to see the light. 
 
 So it was with deep and reverent sense of 
 your Southern generosity that I received your 
 grave and friendly summons to join with you 
 here and now. Here, in this sanctuary of 
 Virginia tradition, you have not scrupled to 
 call me from the heart of New England, to 
 pay tribute not only for myself, and for 
 my own people, but tribute in the name of 
 us all, to the memory of Poe. If one could 
 only feel sure of performing such a task 
 worthily, no task, of duty or of privilege, 
 could be more solemnly happy. For none 
 could more wonderfully imply how Virginians 
 and the people of New England, — each still 
 themselves, — have so outlived their long 
 spiritual misunderstandings of one another 
 that with all our hearts we can gladly join 
 together, as fellow countrymen, in celebrating 
 the memory of one recognized everywhere as 
 the fellow-countryman of us all. 
 
 For everywhere is no hyperbolic word to 
 describe the extent of Poe's constantly extend- 
 
120 POE CENTENARY 
 
 ing fame, sixty years after they laid him in 
 his grave. His name is not only eminent in 
 the literary history of Virginia, or of New- 
 York, or of America; it has proved itself 
 among the very few of those native to America 
 which have commanded and have justified ad- 
 miration throughout the civilized world. Even 
 this does not tell the whole story. So far as 
 we can now discern, he has securely risen 
 above the mists of time and the fogs of ac- 
 cident. His work may appeal to you or leave 
 you deaf; you may adulate it or scrutinize it, 
 as you will; you may dispute as long and as 
 fruitlessly as you please concerning its positive 
 significance or the magnitude of its greatness. 
 The one thing which you cannot do — the thing 
 for which the moment is forever past — is to 
 neglect it. Forever past, as well, all loyal 
 Americans must gladly find the moment, — if 
 indeed there ever was a moment, — when any 
 of us could even for an instant regret it. There 
 is no longer room for any manner of question 
 that the work of Poe is among the still few 
 claims which America can as yet urge un- 
 challenged in proof that our country has 
 enriched the literature of the world. Even 
 
POE CENTENARY 121 
 
 with no other reason than this, loyal Americans 
 must already unite in cherishing his memory. 
 
 So true, so obvious, this must seem to-day 
 that we are prone, in accepting it, to forget 
 the marvel of it, as we forget the marvels of 
 Nature, — of sunrise, of sleep, of birth, of 
 memory itself. The marvel of it, in truth, is 
 none the less reverend because, Hke these, we 
 need never find it miraculous. Happily for us 
 all, — happily for all the world, — Poe is not 
 an isolated, sporadic phenomenon in our 
 national history. He was an American of the 
 nineteenth century. If we ponder never so 
 little on those commonplace words, we shall 
 find them charged with stirring truth. To 
 summarize the life of any nation, there is no 
 better way than to turn to the successive cen- 
 turies of its history, and to ask yourself, with 
 no delay of slow or painful study, what names 
 and what memories, unborn at the beginning 
 of these epochs, were in enduring existence 
 when they ended. When we thus consider our 
 United States of America, the spiritual 
 splendor of the nineteenth century glows 
 amazing. 
 
 That nineteenth century, as we all gravely 
 
122 POE CENTENARY 
 
 know, was by no means a period of national 
 concord. Rather, far and wide, it was a period 
 when the old order was fatally passing, yield- 
 ing place to new. Thus inevitably, throughout 
 our country, it was a period of honest and 
 noble passion running to the inspiring height 
 of spiritual tragedy. For no tragedy can be 
 more superbly inspiring than that of epochs 
 when earnestly devoted human beings, spiritu- 
 ally at one in loyalty to what they believe the 
 changeless ideals of truth and of righteous- 
 ness, are torn asunder by outbreaks of such 
 tremendous historic forces as make the me- 
 chanical forces of Nature seem only thin 
 parables, imaging the vaster forces still which 
 we vainly fancy to be immaterial. It is not 
 until epochs like this begin to fade and sub- 
 side into the irrevocable certainty of the past 
 that we can begin to perceive the essential 
 unity of their grandeur. Nothing less than 
 such supreme ordeal of conflict can finally 
 prove the quality and the measure of heroes; 
 and in the stress and strain, no human vision 
 can truly discern them all; but once proved 
 deathless, the heroes stand side by side, im- 
 mortally brethren. So, by and by, we come 
 
POE CENTENARY 123 
 
 wondrously to perceive that we may honour 
 our own heroes most worthily, — most in the 
 spirit which they truly embodied, most, I be- 
 lieve, as they themselves would finally bid us, 
 if our ears could still catch the accents of their 
 voices, — when we honour with them their 
 brethren who, in the passing years of passion, 
 seemed for a while their foes. 
 
 When we of America thus contemplate the 
 nineteenth century, we cannot fail to rejoice 
 in the memories it has left us. They are so 
 many, so full of inspiration, so various in all 
 but the steadfastness with which they with- 
 stand the deadening test of the years, that it 
 would be distracting, and even invidious, to 
 call the roll of our heroes at a moment like 
 this. What more truly and deeply concerns 
 us is an evident historical fact, generally true 
 of all the human careers on which our heroic 
 memories of the nineteenth century rest un- 
 shaken. Among those careers almost all — 
 North and South, East and West — won, in 
 their own time, distinguished public recogni- 
 tion. What I have in mind we may best real- 
 ize, perhaps, if for a moment we imagine our- 
 selves in some nineteenth century congregation 
 
124 POE CENTENARY 
 
 of our countrymen, similar to this where we 
 are gathered together. Fancy, for example, 
 the companies assembled to welcome Lafay- 
 ette, far and wide, during his last visit to our 
 nation, which he had helped call mto being. 
 Among the American worthies then in their 
 maturity, and still remembered by others than 
 their own descendants, almost every one would 
 already have been well and widely known. A 
 local stranger in any such assemblage, to 
 whom his host should point out the more dis- 
 tinguished personages then present, would 
 generally have found their names not only 
 memorable but distinguished, just as we should 
 find them still. And what would thus have 
 been the case in 1824 would have stayed so, 
 five and twenty years later. The heroes of oui 
 olden time were mostly gladdened by the 
 consciousness of recognized and acknowledged 
 eminence. 
 
 Now, in contrast with them, let us try to 
 imagine a figure which might perhaps have 
 attracted the eye in some such American as- 
 semblage sixty-five years ago. Glancing 
 about, you might very likely have observed 
 a slight, alert man, with rather lank, dark hair, 
 
POE CENTENARY 125 
 
 and deep, restless eyes. His aspect might 
 hauntingly have attracted you, and set you to 
 wondering whether he was young or old. On 
 the whole you might probably have felt that 
 he looked distrustful, defiant if not almost 
 repellant, certainly not ingratiating, or en- 
 gagingly sympathetic. Yet there would have 
 hovered about him an impalpable atmosphere 
 of fascination, which would have attracted 
 your gaze back to him again and again; and 
 each new scrutiny would have increased your 
 impression that here was some one solitary, 
 apart, not to be confused with the rest. He 
 would hardly have been among the more dis- 
 tinguished personages, on the platform or at 
 the high table. You might well have wondered 
 whether anybody could tell you his name. 
 And if, in answer to a question, your neighbor 
 had believed that this was Edgar Allan Poe, 
 you might very probably have found the name 
 by no means familiar. You would perhaps 
 have had a general impression that he had 
 written for a good many magazines, and the 
 like, — that he had produced stories, and 
 verses, and criticism, but the chances are that 
 you would not clearly have distinguished him 
 
126 POE CENTENARY 
 
 unless as one of that affluent company of 
 literati who illustrated the '40's, and who are 
 remembered now only because their names 
 occur in essays preserved among Poe's col- 
 lected Avorks. Almost certainly he would 
 hardly have impressed you as a familiarly 
 memorable personage. His rather inconspicu- 
 ous solitude would not have seemed note- 
 worthy. Very likely, if you were a stranger 
 thereabouts, you would have paid little more 
 attention to his presence, but would rather have 
 proceeded to inquire who else, of more solid 
 quality, was then and there worth looking at. 
 All this might well have happened little 
 more than sixty years ago; and though to 
 some of us sixty years may still seem to 
 stretch long, they are far from transcending 
 the period of human memory. It would be 
 by no means remarkable if in this very com- 
 pany, here present, there were some who can 
 remember the year 1845, or the election of 
 President Taylor. Beyond question, every 
 one of us has known, with something like 
 contemporary intimacy, friends and relatives, 
 only a little older than ourselves in seeming, 
 to whom those years remained as vivid as you 
 
POE CENTENARY 127 
 
 shall find the administration of President 
 Roosevelt. That olden time, in fact, when 
 amid such congregations as this, anywhere 
 throughout America, the presence of Poe 
 would hardly have been remarked, has not 
 quite faded from living recollection. And yet, 
 at this moment, there is no need to explain 
 anywhere why we are come together here, 
 from far and wide, to honor his memory. 
 Not only all of us here assembled, not only 
 all Virginia, and all New York, and all New 
 England, and all our American countrymen be- 
 side, but the whole civilized world would in- 
 stantly and eagerly recognize the certainty of 
 his eminence. What he was, while still en- 
 meshed in the perplexity of earthly circum- 
 stance, is already become a matter of little else 
 than idle curiosity. What he is admits of no 
 dispute. So long as the name of America shall 
 endure, the name of Poe will persist, in serene 
 certainty, among those of our approved na- 
 tional worthies. 
 
 In all our history, I believe, there is no more 
 salient contrast than this between the man in 
 life and his immortal spirit. Just how or 
 when the change came to be we need not 
 
128 POE CENTENARY 
 
 trouble ourselves to dispute. It is enough for 
 us, during this little while when we are to- 
 gether, that we let our thoughts dwell not on 
 the Poe who was but on the Poe who is. And 
 even then we shall do best not to lose our- 
 selves in conjectures concerning his positive 
 magnitude, or his ultimate significance, when 
 you measure his utterances with what we con- 
 ceive to be absolute truth, or the scheme of the 
 eternities. We should be content if we can 
 begin to assure ourselves of what he is, and 
 of why. 
 
 The Poe whom we are met to celebrate is 
 not the man, but his work. Furthermore, it 
 is by no means all the work collected in those 
 volumes where studious people can now trace, 
 with what edification may ensue, the history, 
 the progress, the ebb and the flow, of his 
 copious literary production. His extensive 
 criticism need not detain or distract us; it is 
 mostly concerned with ephemeral matters, for- 
 gotten ever since the years when it was writ- 
 ten. His philosophical excursions, fantastic 
 or pregnant as the case may finally prove to 
 be, we need hardly notice. The same is true 
 concerning his copious exposition of literary 
 
POE CENTENARY 129 
 
 principle, superficially grave, certainly ingen- 
 ious, perhaps earnest, perhaps impishly fantas- 
 tic. All of these, and more too, would inevi- 
 tably force themselves on our consideration 
 if we were attempting to revive the Poe who 
 was. At this moment, however, we may neg- 
 lect them as serenely as we may neglect scru- 
 tiny of outward and visible signs — such ques- 
 tions as those of where he lived and when and 
 for how long, of what he did in his private 
 life, of whom he made love to and what he 
 ate for dinner, of who cut his waistcoats, and 
 of how — if at all — he paid for them. The 
 very suggestion of such details may well and 
 truly seem beneath the dignity of this moment. 
 They are forced into conscious recognition 
 not by any tinge of inherent value, but be- 
 cause of the innocently intrusive pedantry 
 now seemingly inseparable from the ideal of 
 scholarship. We have passed, for the while, 
 beyond the tyranny of that scholarly mood 
 which used to exhaust its energy in analysis 
 of every word and syllable and letter through- 
 out the range of literature. From sheer re- 
 action, I sometimes think, we are apt nowa- 
 days, when concerned with letters, to pass our 
 
130 POE CENTENARY 
 
 time, even less fruitfully than if we were still 
 grammarians, in researches little removed 
 from the impertinence of gossip. And gossip 
 concerning memorable men and women is 
 only a shade less futile than gossip concern- 
 ing the ephemeral beings who flit across our 
 daily vision. So far as it can keep us awake 
 from superstitious acceptance of superhuman 
 myth, it may perhaps have its own little salu- 
 tary function. If it distract us from such 
 moods of deeper sympathy as start the vagrant 
 fancies of myth-makers, it does mischief as 
 misleading as any ever wrought by formal 
 pedantry, and without the lingering grace of 
 traditional dignity. Your truly sound schol- 
 arship is concerned rather with such questions 
 as we are properly concerned with here and 
 now. Its highest hope, in literary matters, is 
 to assert and to maintain persistent facts in 
 their enduring values. In the case of Poe, for 
 example, its chief questions are first of what 
 from among his copious and varied work has 
 incontestably survived the conditions of his 
 human environment, and secondly of why this 
 survival has occurred. What contribution did 
 Poe make to lasting literature? Does this 
 
POE CENTENARY 131 
 
 justly belong to the literature of the world, 
 as well as to that of America? In brief, why- 
 is he so memorable as we all acknowledge by 
 our presence here today? 
 
 Stated thus, these questions are not very 
 hard to answer. The Poe of literature is the 
 writer of a good many tales, or short stories, 
 and of a few intensely individual, though not 
 deeply confidential, poems. Stories and po- 
 ems alike stand apart not only from all others 
 in the literature of America, but — I believe 
 we may agree — from any others anywhere. 
 Some profoundly, some rather more superfi- 
 cially, they all possess, in their due degree, an 
 impalpable quality which the most subtle of 
 us might well be at pains to define, but which 
 the most insensitive man imaginable can al- 
 ways, surely, recurrently feel. The most re- 
 markable phase of the impression they thus 
 make is probably the complete and absolute 
 certainty of its recurrence. Turn, whenever 
 you will and in whatever mood, to any of 
 Poe's work which has proved more than 
 ephemeral. Tale or poem, it may chance ei- 
 ther to appeal to you or to repel you. In one 
 mood you may think it inspired; in another. 
 
132 POE CENTENARY 
 
 you may find it little better than prankishly 
 artificial. You may praise it until dissent gape 
 breathless at your superlatives ; or you may re- 
 lentlessly point out what you are pleased to 
 believe its limitations, its artificialities, its pat- 
 ent defects. Even then, a very simple question 
 must bring you to pause. Let anybody ask 
 you what this piece of literature is like, or 
 what is like it, — let anybody ask with what 
 we should match it. Whether you love it or 
 are tempted to disdain it, you must be forced 
 to the admission that it is almost unique. 
 Whatever its ultimate significance, the better 
 work of Poe remains altogether itself, and 
 therefore altogether his. This gleams the- 
 more vividly as you come to recognize how 
 his individuality asserts itself to you, whatever 
 your own passing mood, under any imaginable 
 conditions. The utterance of Poe is as in- 
 contestably, as triumphantly, itself as is the 
 note of a song bird — as poets abroad have 
 found the music of the skylark, or of the 
 nightingale, or as our own countryfolk find 
 the call of the whip-poor-will echoing through 
 the twilight of American woods. 
 
 His individuality, the while, is of a kind for 
 
POE CENTENARY 133 
 
 which our language hardly affords a name 
 more exact than the name poetic. The acci- 
 dent that we are generally accustomed to con- 
 fuse the spirit of poetry with some common 
 features of poetic structure can mislead us 
 only for a moment. Poetry is not essentially 
 a matter of rhyme or meter, of measure and 
 quality in sound or syllable. The essence of 
 it is not material but spiritual. There are few 
 more comprehensive descriptions of it than 
 the most familiar in all English literature: — 
 
 The lunatic, the lover, and the poet 
 
 Are of imagination all compact: — 
 
 One sees more devils than vast Hell can hold, — 
 
 That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic. 
 
 Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt; 
 
 The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling. 
 
 Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to 
 
 heaven; 
 And, as imagination bodies forth 
 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
 Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
 A local habitation and a name. 
 
 In all the literature of America, and indeed 
 in all that of the English language, you will 
 be at pains to point out utterances more illus- 
 trative of these lines, — I had almost said more 
 definative, — than you shall find in the tales and 
 
134 POE CENTENARY 
 
 the poems of Poe at their surviving best. Mo- 
 mentarily illusive though his concrete touches 
 may sometimes make his tales, — and he pos- 
 sessed, to a rare degree, the power of arousing 
 "that willing suspension of disbelief for the 
 moment which constitutes poetic faith," — the 
 substance of his enduring phantasies may al- 
 ways be reduced to the forms of things un- 
 known, bodied forth by sheer power of im- 
 agination. To these airy nothings the cunning 
 of his pen, turning them to shapes, gives local 
 habitations and names so distinct and so vivid 
 that now and again you must be at pains to 
 persuade yourself that in final analysis they 
 are substantially unreal. Yet unreal they al- 
 ways prove at last, phantasmally and haunt- 
 ingly immaterial. They are like figured tap- 
 estries spun and woven, warp and woof, from 
 such stuff as dreams are made of. Only the 
 dreams are not quite our own. The dreamer 
 who has dreamed them is the poet who has 
 woven them into this fabric, making them now 
 forever ours as well as his. Without his own 
 innermost life they could never have come into 
 being at all. Without his consummate crafts- 
 manship, itself almost a miracle, they must 
 
POE CENTENARY 135 
 
 have hovered inexorable beyond the range of 
 all other consciousness than his who dreamed 
 them. Dreamer and craftsman alike, and su- 
 preme, it is he, and none but he, who can make 
 us feel, in certain most memorable phases, the 
 fascinating, fantastic, elusive, incessant mys- 
 tery of that which must forever environ hu- 
 man consciousness, unseen, unknown, impal- 
 pable, implacable, undeniable. 
 
 The mood we are thus attempting to de- 
 fine is bafflingly elusive; it has no precise sub- 
 stance, no organic or articulate form. It is 
 essentially a concept not of reason, or even of 
 pervasive human emotion, but only of poetry 
 — a subtly phantasmal state of spirit, e vocable 
 only by the poet who has been endowed with 
 power to call it from the vasty deep where, 
 except for him, it must have lurked forever. 
 If it were not unique, it could not be itself; 
 for it would not be quite his, and whatever is 
 not quite his is not his at all. So much we 
 may confidently assert. And yet if we should 
 permit ourselves either to rest with the asser- 
 tion, or to stray in fancy through conclusion 
 after conclusion towards which it may have 
 seemed to lead us, we should remain or wan- 
 
136 POE CENTENARY 
 
 der mischievously far from the truth. That 
 Poe's imagination was soHtary, Hke so much 
 of the circumstances of his hfe, we need not 
 deny or dispute. Clearly, nevertheless, he 
 lived his solitary life not in some fantastic 
 nowhere, but amid the familiarly recorded 
 realities of these United States of America, 
 during the first half of the nineteenth century. 
 It is equally clear that throughout the years 
 when his solitary poetic imagination was 
 giving to its airy nothings their local habita- 
 tions and their names, countless other 
 poetic imaginations, at home and abroad, 
 were striving to do likewise, each in its own 
 way and fashion. Solitary, apart, almost 
 defiant though the aspect of Poe may 
 have seemed, isolated though we may still 
 find the records of his life, or the creatures 
 of his imagination, he was never anach- 
 ronistic. Even the visual image of his rest- 
 less presence, which we tried to call up a 
 little while ago, will prove on scrutiny not 
 only individual, but outwardly cast in the 
 form and the habit of its own time — to 
 the very decade and year of the almanac. 
 With his dreams, and with the magic fabrics 
 
POE CENTENARY 137 
 
 into which he wrought them, the case is 
 much the same. Neither dreams nor fabrics, 
 any more than his bodily presence, could have 
 been quite themselves — and still less could 
 the dreams and the fabrics have fused 
 forever in their wondrous poetic harmonies — 
 during any other epoch than that wherein 
 Poe lived and moved and had his being. 
 
 What I mean must soon be evident if we 
 stop to seek a general name for the kind 
 of poetical mood which Poe could always 
 evoke in so specific a form and degree. 
 The word is instantly at hand, inexact and 
 canting if you will, but undeniable. It is 
 the word which his contemporaries might 
 carelessly, yet not untruly, have applied to 
 his personal appearance, alluring to the eye 
 if only for the quiet defiance of his tem- 
 peramental solitude. It is the word by which 
 we might most fitly have characterized such 
 impulsive curiosity as should have impelled 
 us, if we had seen him, to inquire who 
 this mysterious-looking stranger might be. 
 It is the word — misused, teasing, elusive — by 
 which we are still apt indefinitely to define 
 the general aesthetic temper of his time, all 
 
138 POE CENTENARY 
 
 over the European and American world. 
 We use it concerning all manner of emo- 
 tion and of conduct, and all phases of 
 literature or of the other fine arts throughout 
 their whole protean ranges of expression. 
 You will have guessed already, long before 
 I come to utter it, the word thus hovering 
 in all our minds — the word romantic. 
 
 If we should hereupon attempt formally 
 to define what this familiar word means, 
 there would be no hope left us. Turn, as 
 widely as you will, to dictionaries, to en- 
 cyclopaedias, to volumes, and to libraries 
 of volumes. Each may throw its ray of 
 light on the matter; none will completely 
 illuminate it or irradiate. You might as well 
 seek words which should comprehend, in 
 descriptive finality, the full, delicate, sensuous 
 truth of the savor of a fruit or of the scent 
 of a flower. Yet, for all this, there are 
 aspects of romanticism on which we may 
 helpfully dwell; and of these the first is an 
 acknowledged matter of history. Throughout 
 all parts of the world then dominated by 
 European tradition, the temper of the first 
 half of the nineteenth century was strongly 
 
POE CENTENARY 139 
 
 romantic. This was nowhere more evident 
 than in the spontaneous outburst of poetry 
 which, in less than twenty years, enriched 
 the roll of English poets with the names 
 of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, 
 Byron, and Scott. Now the way in which 
 this period of poetry was lately described in 
 an American announcement of teaching may 
 help us to perceive with a little more approach 
 to precision, one feature of what ro- 
 manticism everywhere means. Some worthy 
 professor, doubtless chary of indefinite terms, 
 chose to describe the romantic poets as 
 those of the period when the individual 
 spirit revived in English literature. Poetic 
 or not, this sound instructor of youth was 
 historically right. The very essence of ro- 
 manticism lies in passionate assertion of 
 literary or artistic individuality. Where- 
 fore, as we can now begin to feel sure, that 
 romantic isolation of Poe's has double 
 significance; it not only marks him, apart 
 from others, as individual, but it defines him, 
 at the same time, as an individual of his 
 own romantic period. 
 
 We shall not go astray, then, if we ponder 
 
140 POE CENTENARY 
 
 for a little while on this whole romantic 
 generation. Before long, we may content- 
 fully agree that the individualism of the 
 romantic poets resulted everywhere from 
 their passionate declaration of independence 
 from outworn poetic authority. The precise 
 form of poetic authority from which they 
 thus broke free was the pseudo-classic tra- 
 dition of the eighteenth century — in matters 
 literary a period of formal rhetorical decency, 
 and of a cool common-sense which had 
 little mercy for the vagaries of uncontrolled 
 sesthetic emotion. Already we may well 
 feel insecure. We are straying, beyond dis- 
 pute, into dangerously elusive generalization, 
 interminably debatable. Yet, if our present 
 line of thought is to lead us anywhere, we 
 must not hesitate to generalize more boldly 
 still. That same eighteenth century, from 
 which romanticism broke free, was not a 
 sporadic and intensive episode in the history 
 of European culture; it was the culmination 
 of a period at least five hundred years long. 
 This period began when the reviving critical 
 scholarship of the Renaissance brought back 
 to the dominant upper consciousness of 
 
POE CENTENARY 141 
 
 Europe vivid understanding of the facts of 
 classical antiquity; and when, so doing, it 
 began to suppress the vigorous and splendid 
 body of intervening tradition and temper 
 to which we have consequently given the 
 name of mediaeval. In matters literary, at 
 least, the spirit which began with the 
 Renaissance persisted until the Revolution 
 of the dying eighteenth century prepared the 
 way for that nineteenth century, of romantic 
 freedom, wherein Poe lived and did his 
 living work. 
 
 Already we can begin to see that there 
 was some analogy between the Middle Ages, 
 which preceded the Renaissance, and the 
 epoch of romanticism which ensued after 
 the eighteenth century. Both periods, at 
 least, were free each in its own way from 
 the intellectual control of such formal 
 classicism or pseudo-classicism as intervened. 
 A little closer scrutiny of the Middle Ages 
 may therefore help us to appreciate 
 what nineteenth-century romanticism meant. 
 Throughout that whole mediaeval period, 
 we may soon agree, the intellect of Europe 
 was authoritatively forbidden to exert itself 
 
142 POE CENTENARY 
 
 beyond narrowly fixed and rigid limits. 
 European emotion, meanwhile, was per- 
 mitted vagrant and luxuriant freedom of 
 range and of expression. It might wander 
 wherever it would. In contrast with this 
 period, we can now perceive, the Renaissance 
 may be conceived as an intellectual declara- 
 tion of independence; and through a full five 
 hundred years, the intellect of Europe was 
 increasingly free. Its very freedom made 
 it, in turn, tyrannical. At least in the matters 
 of temper and of fashion, it repressed, con- 
 trolled, or ignored the ranges of emotion 
 which had flourished during its subjection. 
 In literature its tyranny extended far and 
 wide. Though for awhile thought was 
 permitted to range more or less free, emotion 
 was at best sentimentalized. So, when the 
 centuries of tyranny were past, poetry, if 
 it were ever to regain full freedom of 
 emotional existence, to enjoy again the fine 
 frenzy of creation, needed more than inde- 
 pendence. To revive the spirit which should 
 vitally reanimate its enfranchisement it needed 
 to drink again from the fountains for which 
 it had thirsted for centuries; it must revert 
 
POE CENTENARY 143 
 
 to something like the unfettered emotional 
 freedom of the Middle Ages. To put the 
 case a little more distinctly, the romanticism 
 of the nineteenth century could be its true 
 self only when to the intellectual maturity 
 developed by five centuries of classical culture 
 it could add full and eager sympathy with 
 the emotional freedom of the Middle Ages, 
 inevitably ancestral to all modernity. So 
 it was a profoundly vital instinct which 
 directed the enthusiasm of poets to mediaeval 
 themes and traditions, even though these 
 were imperfectly understood. The inspiration 
 derived from them came not so much from 
 any detail of their actual historical circum- 
 stances as from their instant, obvious re- 
 moteness from the common-sense facts of 
 daily experience — matters judiciously to be 
 handled only by the colorless activity of 
 intellect. It was remoteness from actuality 
 which above all else made romantic your 
 romantic ruins and romantic villains, your 
 romantic heroines, your romantic passions 
 and your romantic aspirations. Yet even 
 your most romantic poet must give the airy 
 nothings of his imagination a local habitation 
 
144 POE CENTENARY 
 
 and a name. Unreal and fantastic though 
 they might be, they must possess at least some 
 semblance of reality. And this semblance, 
 whether bodily or spiritual, normally assumed 
 a mediaeval guise. 
 
 Throughout Europe such semblance could 
 always be guided, controlled, and regulated 
 by the pervasive presence everywhere of 
 relics, material or traditional, of the mediaeval 
 times thus at length welcomed back to the 
 light. So far as the full romantic literature 
 of Europe deals with mediaeval matters, 
 accordingly, or so far as intentionally or 
 instinctively it reverts to mediaeval temper, 
 it has a kind of solidity hardly to be found 
 in the poetic utterance of its contemporary 
 America. For, at the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century, America was not only 
 consciously further than Europe from all 
 the common roots of our ancestral humanity; 
 it possessed hardly a line of what is now ac- 
 cepted as our national literature. As patriots 
 and as men of their time, the poets of America 
 were called on to add their part to romantic 
 expression. To give their expression sem- 
 blance of reality they had no mediaeval relics 
 
POE CENTENARY 145 
 
 to guide them, nor enduring local traditions, 
 thick and strong about them. They were 
 compelled to rely on sheer force of creative 
 imagination. Pretentious as that phrase may 
 sound, it is animated by a spirit of humility. 
 Its purpose is in no wise to claim superiority 
 for the romantic literary achievement of our 
 country. It is rather, by stating the magni- 
 tude of our national task, to explain ouf 
 comparative lack of robust solidity, and to 
 indicate why the peculiar note of our country 
 must inevitably have been a note of singular, 
 though not necessarily of powerful, creative 
 purity. 
 
 Now just such creative purity is evidently 
 characteristic of Poe. It may sometimes 
 have seemed that among our eminent men 
 of letters he is the least obviously American. 
 A little while ago, indeed, when I again 
 turned through all the pages of his collected 
 works, I was freshly surprised to find 
 how little explicit trace they bore of the 
 precise environment where they were written. 
 Throughout all their length, it seemed, there 
 was not a single complete page on which a 
 stranger might rest proof that it had come 
 
146 POE CENTENARY 
 
 to the light in this country. The first ex- 
 ample which occurs to me — it happens to be 
 also the most generally familiar — will show 
 what I have in mind : the mysterious chamber 
 where the Raven forces uncanny entrance is 
 not American. The image of it originated, 
 I believe, in a room still pointed out. Yet, 
 so far as the atmosphere of it is concerned, 
 that room might have been anywhere; or 
 rather, as it lives far and wide, it is surely 
 nowhere. Yet, all the while, it has strange 
 semblance of reality. What is true here proves 
 true throughout. The Paris of Poe's detective 
 stories is no real Paris ; the House of Usher 
 never stood, or fell, on any earthly continent; 
 Poe's maelstrom whirls as fantastic as the 
 balloon or the moon of Hans Pfaal. One 
 might go on unceasingly, recalling at random 
 impression after impression, vivid as the most 
 vivid of dreams, and always as impalpable. 
 There is nowhere else romantic fantasy so 
 securely remote from all constraining taint of 
 literal reality; there is none anywhere more 
 unconditioned in its creative freedom. And 
 thus, paradoxical though the thought may at 
 first seem, Poe tacitly, but clearly and tri- 
 
POE CENTENARY 147 
 
 umphantly, asserts his nationality. No other 
 romanticism of the nineteenth century was 
 ever so serenely free from limitation of ma- 
 terial condition and tradition; none, therefore, 
 was so indisputably what the native roman- 
 ticism of America must inevitably have been. 
 Call his work significant, if you like, or call 
 it unmeaning; decide that it is true or false, 
 as you will, in ethical or artistic purpose. 
 Nothing can alter its wondrous independence 
 of all but deliberately accepted artistic limita- 
 tions. In this supreme artistic purity lies not 
 only the chief secret of its wide appeal, but 
 at the same time the subtle trait which marks 
 it as the product of its own time, and of its 
 own time nowhere else than here in America, 
 our common country. 
 
 American though Poe's utterance be, the 
 while, it stays elusive. When one tries to 
 group it with any other utterance of his time, 
 one feels again and afresh the impression of 
 its temperamental solitude. This solitude is 
 far from prophetic or austere; it is as remote 
 as possible from that of a voice crying in 
 the wilderness. Nor indeed was America, in 
 Poe's time, any longer a wilderness wherein 
 
148 POE CENTENARY 
 
 a poet should seem a stranger. Even though 
 when the nineteenth century began there was 
 hardly such a thing as literature in America, 
 the years of Poe's life brought us rather 
 copiousness than dearth of national expres- 
 sion. As a New Englander, for example, I 
 may perhaps be pardoned for reminding you 
 that in the year 1830 Boston could not have 
 shown you a single enduring volume to dem- 
 onstrate that it was ever to be a centre of 
 purely literary importance. Twenty years 
 later, when Poe died, the region of Boston 
 had already produced, in pure literature, the 
 fully developed characters, though not yet the 
 complete and rounded work, of Emerson, and 
 Longfellow, and Lowell, and Holmes, and 
 Whittier and Hawthorne. For the moment, 
 I call this group to mind only that we may 
 more clearly perceive the peculiar individuality 
 of Poe. In many aspects, each of the New 
 England group was individual, enough and 
 to spare; no one who ever knew them could 
 long confuse one with another. Yet individual 
 though they were, none of them ever seems 
 quite solitary or isolated. You rarely think 
 of any among them as standing apart from 
 
POE CENTENARY 149 
 
 the rest, nor yet from the historical, the social, 
 the religious or the philosophic conditions 
 which brought them all to the point of poetic 
 utterance. Now Poe was in every sense their 
 contemporary; yet the moment you gladly 
 yield yourself to the contagion of his poetic 
 sympathy, you find yourself alone with him — 
 aesthetically solitary. You might fancy your- 
 self for the while fantastically disembodied — 
 a waking wanderer in some region of un- 
 alloyed dreams. American though he be, 
 beyond peradventure, and a man of his time 
 as well, he proves beyond all other Americans 
 throughout the growingly illustrious roll of 
 our national letters, resistant to all imprison- 
 ment within any classifying formula which 
 should surely include any other than his own 
 haunting and fascinating self. 
 
 This isolation might at first seem a token 
 of weakness. For enduring as the fascination 
 of Poe must forever be, — even to those who 
 strive to resist it and give us dozens of wise 
 pages to prove him undeserving of such atten- 
 tion, — the most ardent of his admirers can 
 hardly maintain his work to be dominant or 
 commanding. Except for the pleasure it gives 
 
150 POE CENTENARY 
 
 you, it leaves you little moved; it does not 
 meddle with your philosophy, or modify your 
 rules of conduct. Its power Jies altogether 
 in the strange excellence of its peculiar beauty. 
 And even though the most ethical poet of 
 his contemporary New England has immor- 
 tally assured us that beauty is its own excuse 
 for being, we can hardly forget that Emerson's 
 aphorism sprang from contemplation of a wild 
 flower, in the exquisite perfection of ephemeral 
 fragility. A slight thing some might thus 
 come to fancy the isolated work of Poe — the 
 poet of nineteenth century America whose 
 spirit hovered most persistently remote from 
 actuality. 
 
 If such mood should threaten to possess us, 
 even for a little while, the concourse here 
 gathered together should surely set us free. 
 That spirit which hovered aloof sixty and 
 seventy years ago is hovering still. It shall 
 hover, we can now confidently assert, through 
 centuries unending. The solitude of weak- 
 ness, or of fragility is no such solitude as 
 this ; weak and fragile solitude vanishes with 
 its earthly self, leaving no void behind. Soli- 
 tude which endures as Poe's is enduring 
 
POE CENTENARY 151 
 
 proves itself by the very tenacity of its endur- 
 ance to be the soHtiide of unflagging and in- 
 dependent strength. Such strength as this is 
 sure token of poetic greatness. We may grow 
 more confident than ever. We may unhesi- 
 tatingly assert Poe not only American, but 
 great. 
 
 And now we come to one further question, 
 nearer to us, as fellow-countrymen, than those 
 on which we have touched before. It is the 
 question of just where the enduring work of 
 this great American poet should be placed in 
 the temperamental history of our country — 
 of just what phase it may be held to express 
 of the national spirit of America. 
 
 That national spirit — the spirit which ani- 
 mates and inspires the life of our native land — 
 has had a solemn and a tragic history. From 
 the very beginning of our national growth, 
 historic circumstance at once prevented any 
 spiritual centralization of our national life, 
 and encouraged in diverse regions, equally es- 
 sential to the completeness of our national 
 existence, separate spiritual centers, each true 
 to itself and for that very reason defiant of 
 others. So far as the separate phases of our 
 
152 POE CENTENARY 
 
 national spirit have ever been able to meet 
 one another open-hearted, they have marvelled 
 to know the true depth of their communion. 
 But open-hearted meeting has not always been 
 possible. And throughout the nineteenth cen^ 
 tury — the century in which Poe lived and 
 wrought — it was hardly possible at all. 
 Americans were brethren, as they were 
 brethren before, as they are brethren now, as 
 they shall stay brethren, God willing, through 
 centuries to come. For the while, however, 
 their brotherhood was sadly turbulent. They 
 believed that they spoke a common language. 
 The accents of it sounded familiar to the ears 
 of all. Yet the meanings which those accents 
 were bidden to carry seemed writhed into 
 distortion on their way to the very ears which 
 were straining to catch them. It was an 
 epoch, we must sadly grant, of a Babel of 
 the spirit. 
 
 So, throughout Poe's time, there was hardly 
 one among the many whom the time held 
 greater than he to whose voice the united 
 spirit of our country could ever unhesitatingly 
 and harmoniously respond. What I have in 
 mind may well have occurred to you, of Vir- 
 
POE CENTENARY 153 
 
 ginia, when a little while ago I named the 
 six chief literary worthies of nineteenth cen- 
 tury New England. They were contem- 
 poraries of Poe. They were honest men and 
 faithful poets. They never hesitated to utter, 
 with all their hearts, what they devotedly be- 
 lieved to be the truth. And every one of them 
 was immemorially American. Not one of 
 them cherished any ancestral tradition but was 
 native to this country, since the far-off days 
 of King Charles the First. In every one of 
 them, accordingly, any American — North or 
 South, East or West — must surely find utter- 
 ances heroically true to the idealism ances- 
 trally and peculiarly our own. Yet it would 
 be mischievous folly to pretend that such utter- 
 ances, speaking for us all, can ever tell the 
 whole story of the New England poets. They 
 were not only Americans, as we all are; they 
 were Americans of nineteenth century New 
 England. As such they could not have been 
 the honest men they were if they had failed 
 to concern themselves passionately with the 
 irrepressible disputes and conflicts of their 
 tragic times. They could not so concern them- 
 selves without utterance after utterance fatally 
 
154 POE CENTENARY 
 
 sure to provoke passionate response, or pas- 
 sionate revulsion in fellow-countrymen of 
 traditions other than their own. 
 
 Even this sad truth hardly includes the 
 limitation of their localism. Turn to their 
 quieter passages, descriptive or gently an- 
 ecdotic. Strong, simple, sincere, admirable 
 though these be, they are themselves, we must 
 freely grant, chiefly because they could have 
 been made nowhere else than just where they 
 were. In New England, for example, there 
 was never a native human being who could 
 fail to recognize in "Snow Bound" a genuine 
 utterance straight from the stout heart of his 
 own people; nor yet one, I believe, who, smile 
 though he might at his own sentimentality, 
 could resist the appeal of the "Village Black- 
 smith." But we may well doubt whether any 
 Southern reader, in those old times, could have 
 helped feeling that these verses — as surely as 
 those of Burns, let us say, or of Wordsworth 
 — came from other regions than those familiar 
 to his daily life. 
 
 The literature of New England, in brief, 
 American though we may all gladly assert it 
 in its nobler phases, is first of all not American 
 
POE CENTENARY 155 
 
 or national, but local. What is thus true ot 
 New England is generally true, I believe, of 
 literary expression throughout America. Turn, 
 if you will, to the two memorable writers ot 
 New York during the first quarter of the 
 nineteenth century — Washington Irving and 
 James Fenimore Cooper. They were good 
 men, and honest men of letters, and admirable 
 story-tellers. Neither of them, however, 
 wasted any love on his neighbors a little to 
 the eastward; both hated the unwinsome sur- 
 face of decadent Puritanism; and neither un- 
 derstood the mystic fervor of the Puritan 
 spirit. So, even to this day, a sensitive reader 
 in New England will now and again discover, 
 in Irving or in Cooper, passages or turns of 
 phrases which shall still set his blood faintly 
 tingling with resentment. Whatever the posi- 
 tive merit, whatever the sturdy honesty of 
 most American expression in the nineteenth 
 century, it lacked conciliatory breadth of feel- 
 ing. Its intensity of localism marks it, what- 
 ever the peacefulness of its outward guise, as 
 the utterance of a fatally discordant time. 
 
 Now it is from this same discordant time 
 that the works of Poe have come down to us; 
 
156 POE CENTENARY 
 
 and no work could have been much less in- 
 spired by the local traditions and temper of 
 New England. To his vagrant and solitary- 
 spirit, indeed, those traditions must have been 
 abhorrent. New England people, too, would 
 probably have liked him as little as he liked 
 them. You might well expect that even now, 
 when the younger generations of New Eng- 
 land turn to his tales or his poems, sparks of 
 resentment might begin to rekindle. In one 
 sense, perhaps, they may seem to; for Poe's 
 individuality is too intense for universal ap- 
 peal. You will find readers in New England, 
 just as you will find readers elsewhere, who 
 stay deaf to the haunting music of his verse, 
 and blind to the wreathing films of his un- 
 earthly fantasy. Such lack of sympathy, how- 
 ever, you will never find to be a matter of 
 ancestral tradition or of local prejudice or of 
 sectional limitation; it will prove wholly and 
 unconditionally to be only a matter of in- 
 dividual temperament. Among the enduring 
 writers of nineteenth century America, Poe 
 stands unique. Inevitably of his country and 
 of his time, he eludes all limitation of more 
 narrow scope or circumstance. Of all, I be- 
 
POE CENTENARY 157 
 
 lieve, he is the only one to whom, in his own 
 day, all America might confidently have 
 turned, as all America may confidently turn 
 still, and forever, with certainty of finding 
 no line, no word, no quiver of thought or of 
 feeling which should arouse or revive the con- 
 sciousness or the memory of our tragic 
 national discords, now happily for all of us 
 heroic matters of the past. The more we 
 dwell on the enduring work of this great 
 American poet, the more clearly this virtue 
 of it must shine before us all. In the temper- 
 amental history of our country, it is he, and 
 he alone, as yet, who is not local but surely 
 enduringly national in the full range of his 
 appeal. 
 
 As I thus grow to reverence in him a 
 wondrous harbinger of American spiritual re- 
 union, I find hovering in my fancy some lines 
 of his which, once heard, can never be quite 
 forgotten. To him, I believe, they must have 
 seemed only a thing of beauty. He would 
 have been impatient of the suggestion that 
 any one should ever read into them the prose 
 of deeper significance. It was song, and only 
 
158 POE CENTENARY 
 
 song, which possessed him, when he wrote the 
 words — ■ 
 
 If I could dwell 
 Where Israfel 
 
 Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
 He might not sing so wildly well 
 
 A mortal melody, 
 While a bolder note than this might swell 
 
 From my lyre within the sky. 
 
 And yet is it too much to fancy that to-day 
 we can hear that bolder note swelHng about 
 us as we meet in communion? None could 
 be purer, none more sweet. And none could 
 more serenely help to resolve the discords 
 of his fellow-countrymen into enduring har- 
 mony. 
 
POE CENTENARY 159 
 
 Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, of the University 
 of North Carohna, spoke on "The Ameri- 
 canism of Poe:" 
 
 The continental tributes to Poe which were 
 read this morning recalled an incident in 
 which the name of the founder of this Uni- 
 versity and the name of its most illustrious 
 son were suggestively linked together. In 
 the Latin Quarter of Paris it was my fortune 
 to be thrown for some time into intimate com- 
 panionship with a young Roumanian named 
 Toma Draga. He had come fresh from 
 Roumania to the University of Paris and was 
 all aflame with stimulant plans and ideals for 
 the growth of liberty and literature in his 
 native land. His trunk was half filled with 
 Roumanian ballads which he had collected 
 and in part rewritten and which he wished to 
 have published in Paris as his contribution to 
 the new movement which was already revolu- 
 tionizing the politics and the native literature 
 of his historic little motherland. He knew not 
 a word of English but his knowledge of 
 French gave him a sort of eclectic familiarity 
 with world literature in general. Shakespeare 
 
160 POE CENTENARY 
 
 he knew well, but the two names that were 
 most often on his lips were the names of 
 Thomas Jefferson and Edgar Allan Poe. 
 Time and again he quoted in his impassioned 
 way the Declaration of Independence and the 
 poems of Poe with an enthusiasm and sense 
 of personal indebtedness that will remain to 
 me as an abiding inspiration. 
 
 Let the name of Toma Draga stand as evi- 
 dence that the significance of genius is not ex- 
 hausted by the written tributes of great 
 scholars and critics, however numerous or 
 laudatory these may be. There is an ever- 
 widening circle of aspiring spirits who do not 
 put into studied phrase the formal measure 
 of their indebtedness but whose hands have 
 received the unflickering torch and whose 
 hearts know from whence it came. And let 
 the names of Jefferson and Poe, whose far- 
 flung battle-lines intersected on this campus, 
 forever remind us that this University is dedi- 
 cated not to the mere routine of recitation 
 rooms and laboratories but to the emancipa- 
 tion of those mighty constructive forces that 
 touch the spirits of men to finer aspirations 
 and mould their aspirations to finer issues. 
 
POE CENTENARY 161 
 
 In an address delivered at the exercises at- 
 tending the unveiling of the Zolnay bust of 
 Poe, Mr. Hamilton W, Mabie declared that 
 Poe alone, among men of his eminence, could 
 not have been foreseen. "It is," said he, "the 
 first and perhaps the most obvious distinction 
 of Edgar Allan Poe that his creative work 
 baffles all attempts to relate it historically to 
 antecedent condition; that it detached itself 
 almost completely from the time and place 
 in which it made its appearance, and sprang 
 suddenly and mysteriously from a soil which 
 had never borne its like before." That Mr. 
 Mabie has here expressed the current concep- 
 tion of Poe and his work will be conceded by 
 every one who is at all in touch with the vast 
 body of Poe literature that has grown up since 
 the poet's death. He is regarded as the great 
 declasse of American literature, a solitary 
 figure, denationalized and almost dehuman- 
 ized, not only unindebted to his Southern en- 
 vironment but unrelated to the larger Ameri- 
 can background, — in a word, a man without a 
 country. 
 
 My own feeling about Poe has always been 
 different, and the recent edition of the poet's 
 
162 POE CENTENARY 
 
 works by Professor James A. Harrison, re- 
 producing almost four volumes of Poe's 
 literary criticism hitherto inaccessible, has con- 
 firmed a mere impression into a settled con- 
 viction. The criticism of the future will not 
 impeach the primacy of Poe's genius but will 
 dwell less upon detachment from surround- 
 ings and more upon the practical and repre- 
 sentative quality of his work. 
 
 The relatedness of a writer to his environ- 
 ment and to his nationality does not consist 
 primarily in his fidelity to local landscape or 
 in the accuracy with which he portrays rep- 
 resentative characters. Byron and Browning 
 are essentially representative of their time and 
 as truly English as Wordsworth, though the 
 note of locality in the narrower sense is negli- 
 gible in the works of both. They stood, how- 
 ever, for distinctive tendencies of their time. 
 They interpreted these tendencies in essen- 
 tially English terms and thus both receptively 
 and actively proclaimed their nationality. If 
 we judge Poe by the purely physical standards 
 of locale, he belongs nowhere. His native 
 land lies east of the sun and west of the moon. 
 His nationality will be found as indeterminate 
 
POE CENTENARY 163 
 
 as that of a fish, and his impress of locality no 
 more evident than that of a bird. No land- 
 scape that he ever sketched could be identified 
 and no character that he ever portrayed had 
 real human blood in his veins. The repre- 
 sentative quality in Poe's work is to be sought 
 neither in his note of locality, nor in the 
 topics which he preferred to treat, nor in his 
 encompassing atmosphere of terror, despair, 
 and decay. But the man could not have so 
 profoundly influenced the literary craftsman- 
 ship of his own period and of succeeding 
 periods if he had not in a way summarized 
 the tendencies of his age and organized them 
 into finer literary form. 
 
 If one lobe of Poe's brain was pure ideality, 
 haunted by specters, the other was pure intel- 
 lect, responsive to the literary demands of his 
 day and adequate to their fulfillment. It was 
 this lobe of his brain that made him not the 
 broadest thinker but the greatest constructive 
 force in American literature. He thought in 
 terms of structure, for his genius was essen- 
 tially structural. In the technique of effective 
 expression he sought for ultimate principles 
 with a patience and persistence worthy of 
 
164 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Washington; he brought to his poems and 
 short stories an economy of words and a hus- 
 bandry of details that- suggest the thriftiness 
 of Frankhn ; and he both reahzed and suppHed 
 the structural needs of his day with a native 
 insight and inventiveness that proclaim him of 
 the line of Edison. 
 
 The central question with Poe was not 
 "How may I write a beautiful poem or tell 
 an interesting story?" but "How may I pro- 
 duce the maximum of effect with the minimum 
 of means?" This practical, scientific strain in 
 his work becomes more and more dominating 
 during all of his short working period. His 
 poems, his stories, and his criticisms cannot 
 be thoroughly understood without constant 
 reference to this criterion of craftsmanship. 
 It became the foundation stone on which he 
 built his own work and the touchstone by 
 which he tested the work of others. It was 
 the first time in our history that a mind so 
 keenly analytic had busied itself with the 
 problems of literary technique. And yet Poe 
 was doing for our literature only what others 
 around him were doing or attempting to do 
 in the domain of political and industrial 
 
POE CENTENARY 165 
 
 efficiency. The time was ripe, and the note 
 that he struck was both national and inter- 
 national. 
 
 Professor Miinsterberg/ of Harvard, thus 
 characterizes the intellectual qualities of the 
 typical American : "The intellectual make-up 
 of the American is especially adapted to 
 scientific achievements. This temperament, 
 owing to the historical development of the 
 nation, has so far addressed itself to political, 
 industrial, and judicial problems, but a return 
 to theoretical science has set in; and there, 
 most of all, the happy combination of inven- 
 tiveness, enthusiasm, and persistence in pur- 
 suit of a goal, of intellectual freedom and of 
 idealistic instinct for self-perfection will yield, 
 perhaps soon, remarkable triumphs." He 
 might have added that these qualities may be 
 subsumed under the general term of construct- 
 iveness and that more than a half century 
 ago they found an exemplar in Edgar Allan 
 Poe. 
 
 It is a noteworthy fact, and one not suffi- 
 ciently emphasized, that Poe's unique influ- 
 ence at home and abroad has been a structural 
 
 1. In "The Americans," p. 428. 
 
166 POE CENTENARY 
 
 influence rather than a thought influence. He 
 has not suggested new themes to Hterary 
 artists, nor can his work be called a criticism 
 of life; but he has taught prose writers new 
 methods of effectiveness in building their plots, 
 in handling their backgrounds, in developing 
 their situations, and in harmonizing their de- 
 tails to a preordained end. He has taught 
 poets how to modulate their cadences to the 
 most delicately calculated effects, how to re- 
 enforce the central mood of their poems by 
 repetition and parallelism of phrase, how to 
 shift their tone-color, how to utilize sound- 
 symbolism, how to evoke strange memories 
 by the mere succession of vowels, so that the 
 simplest stanza may be steeped in a music as 
 compelling as an incantation and as cunningly 
 adapted to the end in view. The word that 
 most fitly characterizes Poe's constructive art 
 is the word convergence. There are no parallel 
 lines in his best work. With the opening 
 sentence the lines begin to converge toward 
 the predetermined effect. This is Poe's great- 
 est contribution to the craftsmanship of his 
 art. 
 
 Among foreign dramatists and prose writers 
 
POE CENTENARY 167 
 
 whose structural debt to Poe is confessed or 
 unquestioned may be mentioned Victorien 
 Sardou, Theophile Gautier, Guy de Maupas- 
 sant, Edmond About, Jules Verne, Emile 
 Gaboriau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard 
 Kipling, Hall Caine, and Conan Doyle. In 
 English poetry the debt is still greater. "Poe 
 has proved himself," says the English poet- 
 critic Gosse, "to be the Piper of Hamelin to 
 all later English poets. From Tennyson to 
 Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse 
 music does not show traces of Poe's influence." 
 A German critic,^ after a masterly review of 
 Poe's work, declares that he has put upon 
 English poetry the stamp of classicism, that he 
 has infused into it Greek spirit and Greek 
 taste, that he has constructed artistic metrical 
 forms of which the English language had not 
 hitherto been deemed capable. 
 
 But the greatest tribute to Poe's constructive 
 genius is that both by theory and practice he 
 is the acknowledged founder of the American 
 short story as a distinct literary type. Pro- 
 
 2. Edmund Giindel in "Edgar Allan Poe: ein 
 Beitrag zur Kenntnis und Wiirdigung des Dichters," 
 Freiberg, 1895, page 28. 
 
168 ' POE CENTENARY 
 
 fessor Brander Matthews^ goes further and 
 asserts that "Poe first laid down the principles 
 which governed his own construction and 
 which have been quoted very often, because 
 they have been accepted by the masters of the 
 short story in every modern language." It 
 seems more probable, however, that France 
 and America hit upon the new form inde- 
 pendently,'* and that the honor of influencing 
 the later short stories of England, Germany, 
 Russia, and Scandinavia belongs as much to 
 French writers as to Poe. 
 
 The growth of Poe's constructive sense 
 makes a study of rare interest. He had been 
 editor of the Southern Literary Messenger 
 
 3. See "The Short-Story: Specimens Ilkistrating 
 Its Development," 1907, page 25. 
 
 4. "'La Morte Amoureuse' [by Gautier], though 
 it has not Poe's mechanism of compression, is other- 
 wise so startHngly like Poe that one turns involun- 
 tarily to the dates. 'L,a Morte Amoureuse' appeared 
 in 1836; 'Berenice,' in 1835. The Southern Literary 
 Messenger could not have reached the boulevards 
 in a year. Indeed, the debt of either country to the 
 other can hardly be proved. Remarkable as is the 
 coincident appearance in Paris and in Richmond of 
 a new literary form, it remains a coincidence." — In- 
 troduction to Professor Charles Sears Baldwin's 
 "American Short Stories" (in the Wampum Li- 
 brary), 1904, page 33. 
 
POE CENTENARY 169 
 
 only two months when in comparing the 
 poems of Mrs. Sigourney and Mrs. Hemans 
 he used a phrase in which lie may be said to 
 have first found himself structurally. This 
 phrase embodied potentially his distinctive 
 contribution to the literary technique of his 
 day. "In pieces of less extent," he writes,^ 
 "like the poems of Mrs. Sigourney, the 
 pleasure is unique, in the proper acceptation 
 of that term — the understanding is employed, 
 without difficulty, in the contemplation of 
 the picture as a zvhole — and thus its effect 
 will depend, in a very great degree, upon the 
 perfection of its finish, upon the nice adap- 
 tation of its constituent parts, and especially 
 upon what is rightly termed by Schlegel the 
 unity or totality of interest." Further on in 
 the same paragraph he substitutes "totality 
 of effect." 
 
 Six years later^ he published his now 
 famous criticism of Hawthorne's "Twice- 
 Told Tales," a criticism that contains, in 
 one oft-quoted paragraph, the constitution 
 of the modern short story as distinct from 
 
 5. Southern Literary Messenger, January, 1836. 
 
 6. In Graham's Magazine, May, 1842. 
 
170 POE CENTENARY 
 
 the story that is merely short. After calling 
 attention to the "immense force derivable 
 from totality," he continues: "A skillful 
 literary artist has constructed a tale. If 
 wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to 
 accommodate his incidents; but having con- 
 ceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique 
 or single effect to be wrought out, he then 
 invents such incidents, — he then combines 
 such events as may best aid him in estabhshing 
 this preconceived effect. If his very initial 
 sentence tend not to the outbringing of this 
 effect, then he has failed in his first step. In 
 the whole composition there should be no 
 word written, of which the tendency, direct 
 or indirect, is not to the one preestablished 
 design. And by such means, with such care 
 and skill, a picture is at length painted which 
 leaves in the mind of him who contemplates 
 it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest 
 satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been 
 presented unblemished, because undisturbed; 
 and this is an end unattainable by the novel." 
 In 1846 he publishes his "Philosophy of 
 Composition"'^ in which he analyzes the 
 
 7. In the April number of Graham's Magazine. 
 
POE CENTENARY 171 
 
 structure of "The Raven" and declares that 
 he confined the poem to about one hundred 
 Hnes so as to secure "the vastly important 
 artistic element, totality or unity of effect." 
 In 1847, in a review of Hawthorne's "Mosses 
 from an Old Manse," he republishes^ with 
 hardly the change of a word the portions 
 of his former review emphasizing the im- 
 portance of "totality of effect." The year 
 after his death his popular lecture on "The 
 Poetic Principle" is published,^ in which 
 he contends that even "The Iliad" and 
 "Paradise Lost" have had their day because 
 their length deprives them of "totality of 
 effect." 
 
 This phrase, then, viewed in its later 
 development, is not only the most significant 
 phrase that Poe ever used but the one that 
 most adequately illustrates his attitude as 
 critic, poet, and story writer. It will be 
 remembered that when he first used the 
 phrase he attributed it to William Schlegel. 
 The phrase is not found in Schlegel, nor any 
 
 8. In the November number of Godey's Lady's 
 Book. 
 
 9. In Sartain's Union Magazine, October, 1850. 
 
172 POE CENTENARY 
 
 phrase analogous to it, Schlegel's "Lec- 
 tures on Dramatic Art and Literature" had 
 been translated into English, and in Poe's 
 other citations from this great work he 
 quotes accurately. But in this case he was 
 either depending upon a faulty memory or, 
 as is more probable, he was invoking the 
 prestige of the great German to give 
 currency and authority to a phrase which 
 he himself coined and which, more than any 
 other phrase that he ever used, expressed 
 his profoundest conviction about the archi- 
 tecture of literature. The origin of the 
 phrase -is to be sought not in borrowing but 
 rather in the nature of Poe's genius and 
 in the formlessness of the contemporary 
 literature upon which as critic he was called 
 to pass judgment. Had Poe lived long 
 enough to read Herbert Spencer's "Philoso- 
 phy of Style," in which economy of the 
 reader's energies is made the sum total of 
 literary craftsmanship, he would doubtless 
 have promptly charged the Englishman with 
 plagiarism, though he would have been the 
 first to show the absurdity of Spencer's con- 
 tention that the difference between poetry 
 
POE CENTENARY 173 
 
 and prose is a difference only in the degree 
 of economy of style. 
 
 Schlegel, it may be added, could not have 
 exerted a lasting influence upon Poe. The 
 two men had little in common. Schlegel's 
 method was not so much analytic as historical 
 and comparative. His vast learning gave 
 him control of an almost illimitable field of 
 dramatic criticism while Poe's limitations 
 made his method essentially individual and 
 intensive. The man to whom Poe owed most 
 was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The influence 
 of Coleridge grew upon Poe steadily. Both 
 represented a curious blend of the dreamer 
 and the logician. Both generalized with 
 rapidity and brilliancy. Both were masters 
 of the singing qualities of poetry, and both 
 were persistent investigators of the principles 
 of meter and structure. Though Coleridge 
 says nothing about "totality of effect"^*' 
 
 10. The nearest approach is in chapter XIV of the 
 "Biographia Literaria:" "A poem is that species of 
 composition, which is opposed to works of science, 
 by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not 
 truth; and from all other species (having this object 
 in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing 
 to itself such delight from the whole, as is compati- 
 ble with a distinct gratification from each component 
 part." 
 
174 POE CENTENARY 
 
 and would not have sanctioned Poe's appli- 
 cation of the phrase, it is undoubtedly true 
 that Poe found in Coleridge his most 
 fecundating literary influence. 
 
 In his admiration for Coleridge and in 
 his antipathy to Carlyle, Poe was thoroughly 
 representative of the South of his day. The 
 great Scotchman's work was just beginning 
 and Coleridge's career had just closed 
 when Poe began to be known. Carlyle and 
 Coleridge were both spokesmen of the great 
 transcendental movement which originated 
 in Germany and which found a hospitable 
 welcome in New England. But transcen- 
 dentalism in New England meant a fresh 
 scrutiny of all existing institutions, social, 
 political, and religious. It was identified 
 with Unitarianism, Fourierism, the renuncia- 
 tion of dogma and authority, and the increas- 
 ing agitation of abolition. "Communities 
 were established," says Lowell, "where every- 
 thing was to be common but common sense." 
 The South had already begun to be on the 
 defensive and now looked askance at the 
 whole movement. Coleridge, however, like 
 Burke and Wordsworth, had outgrown his 
 
POE CENTENARY 175 
 
 radicalism and come back into the settled 
 ways of institutional peace and orderliness. 
 His writings, especially his "Biographia 
 Literaria," his "Statesman's Manual," and 
 his "Lay Sermon," were welcomed in the 
 South not only because of their charm of 
 style but because they mingled profound 
 philosophy with matured conservatism. No 
 one can read the lives of the Southern leaders 
 of ante-bellum days without being struck 
 by the immense influence of Coleridge and 
 the tardy recognition of Carlyle's message. 
 When Emerson, therefore, in 1836, has 
 "Sartor Resartus" republished in Boston, 
 and Poe at the same time urges in the 
 Southern Literary Messenger the republica- 
 tion of the "Biographia Literaria," both are 
 equally representative of their sections. 
 
 But Poe as the disciple of Coleridge rather 
 than of Carlyle is not the less American 
 because representatively Southern. The in- 
 tellectual activity of the South from 1830 
 to 1850 has been on the whole underrated 
 because that activity was not expended upon 
 the problems which wrought so fruitfully 
 upon the more responsive spirits of New 
 
176 POE CENTENARY 
 
 England, among whom flowered at last the 
 ablest group of writers that this country- 
 has known. The South cared nothing for 
 novel views of inspiration, for radical reforms 
 in church, in state, or in society. Proudly 
 conscious of her militant and constructive 
 role in laying the foundations of the new 
 republic, the South after 1830 was devoting 
 her energies to interpreting and conserving 
 what the fathers had sanctioned. This work, 
 however, if not so splendidly creative as 
 that of earlier times, was none the less 
 constructive in its way and national in its 
 purpose. Poe's formative years, therefore, 
 were spent in a society rarely trained in subtle 
 analysis, in logical acumen, and in keen 
 philosophic interpretation. 
 
 Though Poe does not belong to politics 
 or to statesmanship, there was much in com- 
 mon between his mind and that of John C. 
 Calhoun, widely separated as were their 
 characters and the arenas on which they 
 played their parts. Both were keenly alive 
 to the implications of a phrase. Both 
 reasoned with an intensity born not of im- 
 pulsiveness but of sheer delight in making 
 
POE CENTENARY 177 
 
 delicate distinctions. Both showed in their 
 choice of words an element of the pure 
 classicism that lingered longer in the South 
 than in New England or Old England; and 
 both illustrated an individual independence 
 more characteristic of the South then than 
 would be possible amid the leveling influences 
 of to-day. When Baudelaire defined genius 
 as 'i'aflirmation de I'independance indi- 
 viduelle," he might have had both Poe and 
 Calhoun in mind; but when he adds "c'est 
 le self-government applique aux oeuvres 
 d'art," only Poe could be included. Both, 
 however, were builders, the temple of the 
 one visible from all lands, that of the other 
 scarred by civil war but splendid in the very 
 cohesiveness of its structure. 
 
 I have dwelt thus at length upon the 
 constructive side of Poe's genius because it 
 is this quality that makes him most truly 
 American and that has been at the same time 
 almost ignored by foreign critics. Baudelaire, 
 in his wonderfully sympathetic appraisal 
 of Poe, considers him, however, as the 
 apostle of the exceptional and abnormal. 
 
178 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Lauvriere/^ in the most painstaking inves- 
 tigation yet bestowed upon an American 
 author, views him chiefly as a pathological 
 study. Moeller-Bruck/- the editor of the 
 latest complete edition of Poe in Germany, 
 sees in him "a dreamer from the old mother- 
 land of Europe, a Germanic dreamer." Poe 
 was a dreamer, an idealist of idealists; and 
 it is true that idealism is a trait of the 
 American character. But American idealism 
 is not of the Poe sort. American idealism 
 is essentially ethical. It concerns itself 
 primarily with conduct. Poe's Americanism 
 is to be sought not in his idealism but in the 
 sure craftsmanship, the conscious adaptation 
 of means to end, the quick realization of 
 structural possibilities, the practical handling 
 of details, which enabled him to body forth 
 his visions in enduring forms and thus to 
 found the only new type of literature that 
 America has originated. 
 
 The new century upon which Poe's name 
 now enters will witness no diminution of 
 
 11. "Edgar Poe, sa vie et son oeuvre: etude de 
 psychologie pathologique." Paris, 1904. 
 
 12. "E. A. Poe's Samtliche Werke." Minden i. W., 
 1904. 
 
POE CENTENARY 179 
 
 interest in his work. It will witness, however, 
 a changed attitude toward it. Men will ask 
 not less what he did but more how he 
 did it. This scrutiny of the principles of his 
 art will reveal the elements of the normal, 
 the concrete, and the substantial, in which 
 his work has hitherto been considered defective. 
 It will reveal also the wide service of Poe to 
 his fellow-craftsmen and the yet wider 
 service upon which he enters. To inaugurate 
 the new movement there is no better time 
 than the centennial anniversary of his birth, 
 and no better place than here where his 
 genius was nourished. 
 
180 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Dr. Kent, in naming the recipients of the 
 Poe medals, said : 
 
 Mr. President : Your committee of ar- 
 rangements has deemed it wise to have 
 prepared a significant memorial of this inter- 
 esting celebration which. is now coming to a 
 happy close. Through the kindness and 
 liberality of a young alumnus of the 
 University of Virginia, we have been able to 
 procure from Tiffany a beautiful bronze 
 medal, bearing upon the reverse the seal of the 
 University of Virginia, and on the obverse the 
 profile of Edgar Allan Poe, with the date 
 of his birth, and a reminder of this centenary. 
 We have selected as the recipients of this 
 medal those who were active in procuring 
 for the University of Virginia the Zolnay 
 bust of Poe; those who have contributed to 
 the success of this present celebration; and 
 others who by signal services in fixing or 
 furthering the fame of Poe have deserved 
 well of his alma mater. I have the honor 
 to announce to you as worthy recipients of 
 this medal the following: 
 
 The medals in commemoration of this 
 
POE CENTENARY 181 
 
 Centennial of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe 
 are bestowed : — 
 
 On The University of Virginia: 
 
 Library of the University of Virginia, 
 Colonnade Club, 
 Jefferson Society, 
 Raven Society. 
 
 On the following who contributed sig- 
 nificantly to the success of the movement to 
 commemorate the poet with a bronze bust: 
 
 Sidney Ernest Bradshaw, of Furman Uni- 
 versity, 
 
 Paul B. Barringer, president of Virginia 
 Polytechnic Institute, 
 
 William A. Clarke, Jr., of Butte, Mon- 
 tana, 
 
 James W. Hunter, of Norfolk, Va., 
 
 Hamilton W. Mabie, of New York, 
 
 Carol M. Newman, Virginia Polytechnic 
 Institute, 
 
 William M. Thornton, University of 
 Virginia, 
 
 Morris P. Tilley, of the University of 
 Michigan, 
 
 Lewis C. Williams, of Richmond, Va., 
 
 George Julian Zolnay, of St. Louis, Mo. 
 
182 POE CENTENARY 
 
 On the following who, by committee 
 service, participation in the exercises, con- 
 tribution of poems, etc., have contributed to 
 the success of this occasion : — 
 
 Edwin Anderson Alderman, of the Uni- 
 versity of Virginia, 
 W. A. Barr, of Lynchburg, 
 James C. Bardin, of the University of 
 
 Virginia, 
 Arthur Christopher Benson, Magdalene 
 
 College, Cambridge, 
 Edward Dowden, Trinity College, Dublin, 
 Philip F. du Pont, of Philadelphia, Pa., 
 Richard Dehmel, of Germany, 
 Georg Edward, of Northwestern Uni- 
 versity, 
 Alcee Fortier, of Tulane University, 
 William H. Faulkner, of the University 
 
 of Virginia, 
 James Taft Hatfield, of Northwestern 
 
 University, 
 Charles W. Hubner, of Atlanta, Georgia, 
 John Luck, of the University of Virginia, 
 Walter Malone, of Memphis, Tennessee, 
 Herbert M. Nash, of Norfolk, Va., 
 F. V. N. Painter, of Roanoke College, 
 Va., 
 
POE CENTENARY 183 
 
 Willoughby Reade, of the Episcopal 
 High School, 
 
 E. Reinhold Rogers, of Charlottesville, 
 Va., 
 
 Charles Alphonso Smith, of the Univer- 
 sity of North Carolina, 
 
 Robert Burns Wilson, of New York, 
 
 Barrett Wendell, of Boston, Mass., 
 
 Leonidas Rutledge Whipple, of the Uni- 
 versity of Virginia, 
 
 James Southall Wilson, of William and 
 Mary College. 
 
 On the following for literary services of 
 various sorts connected with fixing and 
 furthering the fame of Edgar Allan Poe : — 
 
 Palmer Cobb, of the University of North 
 
 Carolina, 
 John Phelps Fruit, of Missouri, 
 Armistead C. Gordon, of Staunton, Va., 
 James A. Harrison, of the University of 
 
 Virginia, 
 John H. Ingram, of London, England, 
 Charles W. Kent, of the University of 
 
 Virginia, 
 Emile Lauvriere, of Paris, 
 
184 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Abel Le franc, of Paris, 
 John S. Patton, of the University of Vir- 
 ginia, 
 Father John B. Tabb, of St. Charles Col- 
 lege, 
 William P. Trent, of Columbia Uni- 
 versity, 
 George E. Woodberry, of Massachusetts, 
 John W. Wayland, of the University of 
 
 Virginia, 
 Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss, of Richmond, 
 
 Va., 
 Samuel A. link, of Tennessee, 
 Henry E. Shepherd, of Baltimore, Md., 
 Robert A, Stewart, of Richmond, Va., 
 Thomas Nelson Page, of Washington, 
 
 D. C, 
 George A. Wauchope, of the University 
 of South Carolina. 
 
 For peculiar services to the University of 
 Virginia, in connection with Poe : — 
 
 Mrs. Henry R. Chace, of Providence, 
 
 R. I., 
 Miss C. F. Dailey, of Providence, R. I., 
 Miss AmeHa F. Poe, of Baltimore, Md., 
 Miss Bangs, of Washington, D. C, 
 
POE CENTENARY . 185 
 
 Miss Whiton, of Washington, D. C, 
 Miss Sara Sigourney Rice, of Baltimore, 
 Md. 
 
 As representatives of the Poe family: — 
 
 W. C. Poe, of Baltimore, Md., 
 
 Miss Anna Gertrude Poe, Relay, Md. 
 
 Mr. Freeman's programme of music for the 
 evening included Mendelssohn's Priest's 
 March from Athalia, arranged for the organ 
 by Samuel Jackson; Bach's Toccata in D 
 minor; Moszkowski's Serenata, arranged for 
 the organ by Arthur Boyse; Schubert's Mili- 
 tary March in D major (by request), ar- 
 ranged for the organ by W. T. Best. 
 
VII 
 
 NO. 13 WEST RANGE: A POE 
 MUSEUM 
 
 TOURING the Centenary Celebration the 
 -*-^ room which Poe occupied while a student 
 was used as a museum for Poeana. It was 
 opened on January 16 under the auspices of the 
 Raven Society, and visitors were admitted until 
 the 20th. A considerable collection of Poe mate- 
 rial was displayed. These memorials included 
 the bronze bust of Poe designed by Zolnay; 
 an oil painting- of the Fordham Cottage by 
 Sadakichi Hartman; an autographed letter 
 of the poet's ; the lace cap of his sister Rosalie ; 
 the entire library of Poe literature presented 
 to the University of Virginia Library by Dr. 
 James A. Harrison, editor of the Virginia 
 edition of his works; a stuffed raven pre- 
 sented by an alumnus from Montana; a num- 
 ber of framed letters and poems by distin- 
 guished literary men; engravings of Poe's 
 
 186 
 
POE CENTENARY 187 
 
 residences; and a very interesting group of 
 portraits of the author at various periods of 
 his Hfe. This material was lent by the Uni- 
 versity of Virginia, members of its faculty, 
 and friends. 
 
 This little room, 13 West Range, is the 
 only spot at the University of Virginia actu- 
 ally reminiscent of the living Edgar Allan 
 Poe. That he did pass here and there on the 
 grounds is of course true; but that he dwelt 
 and dreamed in this dormitory has been satis- 
 factorily proven. It was the home of the 
 poet. Here he studied and wrote for the bet- 
 ter part of a year; here on the bare walls he 
 sketched the charcoal studies that served as 
 decorations; here on the last night of his res- 
 idence at the University he split a rough deal 
 table to furnish fire-wood. And to this spot 
 as to a shrine came many visitors during the 
 Centenary Celebration. 
 
 The room itself is one of the row of dormi- 
 tories built under Jefferson's direction about 
 eighty-five years ago. It forms part of what 
 is called "West Range," a long line of single 
 cloistral cells, in front of which extends a 
 covered walk or arcade, formed by the over- 
 
188 POE CENTENARY 
 
 hanging roof supported by square brick col- 
 umns. It looks toward the west, giving a 
 view of the misty reaches of the Blue Ridge, 
 and nearer, toward the south, of the broken, 
 tree-clad Ragged Mountains, — the scene of the 
 poet's sohtary rambles and lone communings. 
 Over the door is a simple bronze tablet, the 
 gift of Miss Whiton and Miss Bangs of Wash- 
 ington, D. C, bearing the inscription : Do- 
 nms parva magni poetcs. 
 
 Within the single door is a severely bare 
 apartment. The room is about twelve by 
 fourteen feet in dimensions, with a compara- 
 tively low ceiling. It contains one window 
 opposite the entrance, and on the right a grate 
 fireplace with a plain wood mantel shelf. On 
 either side of the mantel are recesses a couple 
 of feet deep. What it looked like in the poet's 
 day can only be conjectured, but it was prob- 
 ably much the same as at present; indeed, 
 there is sufficient evidence to uphold the be- 
 lief that despite the hard use to which univer- 
 sity dormitories are subjected, the floor, 
 though patched, is composed in the main of 
 the very boards across which Poe's restless 
 feet paced, and that the mantel is the same 
 before which he brooded during long watches. 
 
POE CENTENARY 189 
 
 For many years the room was used as a 
 dormitory inhabited by a succession of super- 
 stitious or hero-loving students. About 1900 
 and for three years thereafter the room was 
 the office of Professor Richard H. Wilson, of 
 the Department of Romance Languages, In 
 1906 the University turned the room over to 
 the Raven Society, an honorary society com- 
 posed of the literati and scholars of the insti- 
 tution. This organization had taken the title 
 of Poe's famous poem for its name, and a 
 silhouette of that solemn bird as its insignia. 
 To do its patron honor, it desired to fit out 
 his old room. In 1907 a committee was ap- 
 pointed, but, owing to financial difficulties, 
 could accomplish nothing. The fall of 1908 
 a committee composed of L. R. Whipple, 
 chairman; R. M. Jeffress, and J. B. Holmes, 
 was selected by The Ravens from their num- 
 ber to furnish the room. 
 
 The society voted money from its own 
 treasury, and sent out an appeal to its alumni 
 members. The latter responded generously, 
 and with the funds secured from these sources, 
 the committee was able to carry out its in- 
 tention. After the consideration of several 
 
190 POE CENTENARY 
 
 plans it was decided to decorate and furnish 
 the apartment as a student's room in Poe's 
 time. The place had fallen into a state of se- 
 rious disrepair. With the assistance of the 
 University and Dr. W. A. Lambeth, the nec- 
 essary changes were made. Two unsightly 
 closets were removed, the floor was strength- 
 ened, the mantel adjusted, the walls plastered 
 and tinted, and the paint renovated. 
 
 Then with the co-operation of the Biggs 
 Antique Company of Richmond, Virginia, and 
 a firm of decorators in St. Louis, Missouri, 
 the furnishing was partly completed. The 
 furniture is all solid mahogany, of the period 
 of 1830, and most of the pieces are genuine 
 antiques. Of particular interest is a heavy set- 
 tee which at one time was in the Allan home 
 in Richmond. The table, chairs and hangings 
 conform to this style. The room has been 
 suitably marked, and partly furnished, and 
 with the contributions that will doubless come 
 with the years, will finally contain worthy 
 memorials to the poet's fame. 
 
D 
 
 VIII 
 IN THE MINDS OF MEN 
 R. Alois Brandl, University of Berlin 
 
 It is not so easy to give a true estimate of 
 Poe's mission. He was a man of the imagi- 
 nation, and he did a great deal towards rous- 
 ing the imagination of New Englanders. He 
 was a literary pioneer. It meant a great deal 
 in his day to build a poetical hunting lodge; 
 the temples of literature had to follow. I am 
 not acquainted enough with America to feel 
 the specifically American elements in him; he 
 is rather a Coleridge, separated from his Eng- 
 lish surroundings and transplanted on Massa- 
 chusetts soil; a Coleridge without a Words- 
 worth at his side, without a Napoleon to fight 
 with, but in a colonial country, vast and peace- 
 ful and still in the making. A German will 
 always feel reminded of E. T. A. Hoffman, 
 for, like him, Poe was one of the few invent- 
 ors that Teutonic literature can boast of, while 
 
 191 
 
192 POE CENTENARY 
 
 the fabulistic faculty is more frequent among 
 Romance people. Altogether it has been a 
 good idea of the University of Virginia to 
 celebrate the birthday of an author who is 
 known to the educated of all nations as one 
 of the most fascinating "makers" of America. 
 
 President Paul B. Barringer, Virginia Poly- 
 technic Institute : 
 
 I have always been an admirer of Poe, not 
 only as our greatest literary genius, but as a 
 "good, safe, household poet." Poe is one of 
 the few writers of that day and time whose 
 every line is so clean and free from taint that 
 it can be put into the hands of one's twelve- 
 year-old daughter. 
 
 If those critics who always insist on judg- 
 ing Poe's work by the side light of morality 
 would take the internal evidences of moral 
 cleanliness found in his work itself, rather 
 than the uncertain evidences of loss of stamina 
 which come to us through manifestly biased 
 tradition, their task would be simpler. When 
 a man's natural inclination towards literary 
 cleanliness is so strong that it cannot be un- 
 done by a life of misfortune, poverty, and 
 
POE CENTENARY 193 
 
 physical suffering, he should at least be given 
 credit for his better instincts. 
 
 Dr. Sidney E. Bradshaw, Furman University: 
 
 In spite of the efforts of all the critics to 
 "place" him in American literature, Edgar 
 Allan Poe continues to be read, admired, and 
 discussed for the marvelous qualities of his 
 verse and prose. There is none like him, and 
 whether we agree with one critical judgment 
 or another, his work will endure as long as 
 the English language is known and read. 
 
 Professor St. James Cummings, South Caro- 
 lina Military Academy: 
 
 I should like to see you presiding in such 
 a high ceremony of enlarging the realm of 
 Poe. And indeed, I should be greatly pleased, 
 to vitalize our relations face to face. As you 
 may easily guess, I am a devoted hanger-on of 
 Poe : and by that I mean that I am one of those 
 vvho maintain a breathless and eager attitude 
 of suspense and devotion toward the yet un- 
 revealed fulness of grace of our poet's soul. 
 I hope any day for the oracle to speak with 
 finality, and declare the true estate of him 
 
194 POE CENTENARY 
 
 whose bright spirit has been beating its way- 
 through darkness for a season. In my Hop- 
 kins days I was allowed to feel the living in- 
 fluence of Lanier, who had already left our 
 planet. Here in Charleston I have learned 
 to know the living influence of Timrod, long 
 since departed. I still look for a day — and it 
 may be to-morrow — when the Poe beyond 
 disclaimer will be disclosed alive and trium- 
 phant — an avatar for those who have the faith 
 to wait. More than any one else, Poe repre- 
 sents the South. Rich and poor, shining and 
 dim, passionate in soul yet calling for rights 
 on the dictates of cold reason, the poet, the 
 people and the province still retain a mystery 
 virginal and elusive, but are undeniably en- 
 dowed with resources, with a proper genius, 
 deep and abiding. The Poe world will some 
 time be no figure of speech, but will enjoy a 
 day and a night of its own, where the greater 
 and the lesser light may beat in splendor 
 against the darkness; and the God of har- 
 mony will call it good. Hail to the day! 
 Your centenary celebration cannot fail to 
 awaken for a finer rendition the magic music 
 beyond words that he has left in our keeping. 
 
POE CENTENARY 195 
 
 Dr. Charles W. Dabney, University of Cin- 
 cinnati : 
 
 The reference to No. 13, West Range, re- 
 minds me that, upon entering the University 
 of Virginia, I was first assigned to that room 
 and Hved in it for about a month. It was 
 a dark, dismal room with a window looking 
 out on the backyard, which was in those days 
 filled with rubbish, tin cans, etc., thrown out 
 from the kitchens of the dining hall, and I 
 was very happy to get as soon as possible a 
 better room over in one of the Dawson-Row 
 houses. The event did not fail, however, to 
 make a great impression upon me, and I re- 
 member distinctly the traditions I picked up at 
 the time. Among others, Mr. Wertenbaker 
 told me his usual story about Poe and showed 
 me the registration book where he signed his 
 name. 
 
 Mr. Hamlin Garland, Chicago: 
 
 I have been a lover of Poe's verse since my 
 earliest boyhood and have read almost every 
 book and nearly every article about him, ex- 
 cept some of the very recent ones, and his 
 wonderful power over the imaginations of 
 
196 POE CENTENARY 
 
 men is still a kind of unaccountable wizardry 
 — I mean that the quality that resides in his 
 verse and in his best prose is like the magic 
 that rises from a strain of really original mu- 
 sic. His wizardry does- not vanish with the 
 years — at least in my case. To this day, "The 
 Raven" has power to thrill me. Worn, hack- 
 neyed, if the critic pleases, there is still some- 
 thing in this poem and in "The City in the 
 Sea" and other of Poe's best verse which defies 
 the years. 
 
 Mr, Thomas Hardy, Max Gate, Dorchester, 
 England : 
 
 The University of Virginia does well to 
 commemorate the birthday of this poet. Now 
 that the lapse of time has reduced the insig- 
 nificant and petty details of his life to their 
 true proportion beside the measure of his 
 poetry, and softened the horror of the correct 
 classes at his lack of respectability, that fan- 
 tastic and romantic genius shows himself in 
 all his rarity. His qualities, which would 
 have been extraordinary anywhere, are alto- 
 gether extraordinary for the America of his 
 date. Why one who was in many ways dis- 
 
POE CENTENARY 197 
 
 advantageously circumstanced for the devel- 
 opment of the art of poetry should have been 
 the first to realize to the full the possibilities 
 of the English language in rhyme and alliter- 
 ation is not easily explicable. It is a matter 
 of curious conjecture whether his achieve- 
 ments in verse would have been the same if 
 the five years of childhood spent in England 
 had been extended to adult life. That "un- 
 merciful disaster" hindered those achieve- 
 ments from being carried further, must be an 
 endless regret to lovers of poetry. 
 
 Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Old Rectory, Broad 
 Chalke, England : 
 
 Nothing that I could say could add to Ed- 
 gar Poe's fame. So far as Europe is con- 
 cerned he is secure of his immortality. I 
 believe myself that he will live as a poet 
 rather than as a prose writer; but that he will 
 be remembered as a genius, a creature apart, 
 one of those rare beings whose power con- 
 stitutes a privilege, I have no doubt whatever, 
 I rank him, in the quality of his gift, with our 
 John Keats. 
 
198 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson, New York : 
 
 Whatever may be said of Poe — and hardly 
 any writer has been so praised and so criti- 
 cised — his service to letters has been im- 
 mense. It seems to me that the chief bases 
 of his fame are his original type of imagina- 
 tion, which awakens and challenges that fac- 
 ulty in his reader; his intense intellectuality, 
 and the opulence of his rhythmic resources. 
 If his work does not have the close touch with 
 real life which is an essential of great writ- 
 ing, he has created a realm of his own, in 
 which he detains us by a sort of mesmeric 
 power, till we find ourselves "moving about 
 in worlds not realized." If his voice has not 
 the diapason of Emerson, — if it is not the 
 vox humana of our more philanthropic day; 
 if his theory of beauty in literary composition 
 leaves out of account the beauty of conduct, 
 nevertheless, he has been for fifty years, and 
 still remains, an important and vital influence 
 in poetry, fiction and criticism. His name was 
 long ago indelibly inscribed in the world's 
 Hall of Fame. 
 
POE CENTENARY 199 
 
 Professor Thomas C. McCorvey, University 
 of Alabama: 
 
 * * * The greatest of American poets — one 
 of the greatest, in my judgment, of the Eng- 
 lish speaking race, "Time at last sets all 
 things even," and Poe's alma mater is to be 
 congratulated upon the fact that tardy justice 
 has slowly but surely determined his rightful 
 place in the world of letters as a genius of 
 the very highest order. The University of 
 Alabama has a special interest in Poe's cen- 
 tenary from the fact that one of the first pro- 
 fessors in this institution, the late Henry Tut- 
 wiler, was a fellow student of the poet at the 
 University of Virginia. While the earnest, 
 diligent student — intent upon appropriating 
 during his college course as much as possible 
 of the world's learning — had little in common 
 with the erratic child of genius, whose imag- 
 ination was even then perhaps "dreaming 
 dreams no mortal ever dared to dream be- 
 fore," still Dr. Tutwiler cherished, throughout 
 his long life, a lively recollection of the youth- 
 ful escapades of the poet while they were col- 
 lege mates at Charlottesville. 
 
200 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Dr. Edwin Mims, Trinity College, N. C. : 
 
 The University has every reason to be 
 proud of Poe's relation to it. I am sure that 
 he was more influenced by the atmosphere of 
 the University than many people have thought. 
 It is very significant that a Southern Univer- 
 sity should place such emphasis upon literary 
 work as you do in this celebration. It ought 
 to serve to call renewed attention to the im- 
 portance of high art in the lives of our people. 
 
 Dr. Frederick Dunglison Power, Garfield Me- 
 morial Church, Washington, D, C. : 
 
 I have always felt America's two greatest 
 poems were Poe's "Raven" and Bryant's 
 "Waterfowl." Starkweather's word is a good 
 one : "To use a geographical metaphor, Poe's 
 life was bounded on the north by sorrow, on 
 the east by poverty, on the south by aspiration, 
 and on the west by calumny. His genius was 
 unbounded. His soul was music, and his very 
 lifeblood was purest art." Had Poe humor 
 and human sympathy he would be our great- 
 est literary genius. 
 
POE CENTENARY 201 
 
 Professor Walter Raleigh, University of Ox- 
 ford: 
 
 I have the profoundest admiration for Poe; 
 and his influence on European literature has 
 been enormous. So I hope I may say what 
 I feel, that we are stifling ourselves with lit- 
 erary anniversaries. I begin to think that 
 English literature is dead, and to wish that 
 I was not a professor of it, when I see all 
 this monumental stone-mason work engross- 
 ing the time and attention of literary men year 
 after year. Have they nothing worth saying 
 for itself that they must search in the calen- 
 dar and speak when the clock strikes? We 
 have Johnson, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, on 
 hand in England — new season's goods for the 
 window to get the reluctant public drawn in. 
 It is all very illiterate. But if ever a cente- 
 nary was warranted, yours is, — in Virginia, 
 and to commemorate a poet who was barely 
 recognised while he lived. Pious deeds are 
 good; and I should love to see Virginia in its 
 daily life; though I prefer to honor Poe by 
 reading him. 
 
202 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Professor Franklin L. Riley, University of 
 Mississippi : 
 
 On the occasion of my visit to the Uni- 
 versity last summer I found no place on your 
 campus more interesting than room No. 13, 
 West Range. I am delighted to learn that, 
 by making this a "Poe Museum," it will be- 
 come a more attractive literary shrine. It is 
 especially gratifying to know that the great 
 University of Virginia, the alma mater of men 
 of letters as well as statesmen, will commem- 
 orate in a fitting manner the literary services 
 of perhaps the most talented, certainly one of 
 the most original, authors connected with its 
 history. 
 
 Dr. William James Rolfe, Cambridge, Mass. : 
 
 I have known and loved the poet from my 
 first acquaintance with him in my college 
 days, sixty years ago. The pocket edition 
 of his poems published by Middleton (New 
 York) in 1863, has often been a favorite 
 companion of mine in travel by sea and on 
 land; and, though I have the recent 1903 
 edition of his complete works in five volumes, 
 
POE CENTENARY 203 
 
 I still feel a particular love for that little 
 book, so frequently read and reread, and 
 associated with so many delightful memories. 
 "Annabel Lee" became fixed in my memory 
 when it was first printed in 1849, and I can 
 never forgot how its tender music and 
 sentiment first moved me. 
 
 Professor George Saintsbury, University of 
 Edinburgh : 
 
 Thirty-three years ago, when I was en- 
 deavoring to make some opening in literature, 
 I horrified and almost enraged a magazine 
 editor of great note by sending him an essay 
 tending to show that Poe, with all his faults, 
 was "of the first order of poets." I am of 
 the same opinion to-day. 
 
 Professor Erich Schmidt, University of 
 Berlin : 
 
 Von Edgar Allan Poe hab' ich schon in 
 jungen Jahren starke Eindriicke empfangen 
 und bewundere in seinen Werken die seltene 
 Vereinigung der kiihnsten Phantasie mit dem 
 scharfsten Verstand. 
 
204 POE CENTENARY 
 
 Miss Molly Elliot Seawell, Washington, D. C. : 
 
 As time passes, the conviction grows that 
 Poe had the fire divine, and the mere survival 
 of his scanty and incomplete work shows 
 it to be of the first quality. It seems a 
 sort of reparation for his melancholy and 
 unfortunate life that the world which once 
 used him very ill should now be eager to do 
 him honor. 
 
 Dr. Wilhelm Victor, University of Marburg: 
 
 1st es mir auch nicht moglich, unsere 
 Universitat an Ihrem Festtage pers6nlich 
 zu vertreten, so gereicht es mir doch zur 
 hohen Ehre, als Marburger Professor der 
 Englischen Philologie, unsere schriftlichen 
 Gliickwiinsche senden zu diirfen. Ich werde 
 des Tages in meiner Vorlesung oder in der 
 Sitzung des Englischen Seminars gebiihrend 
 gedenken und so den Marburger Studenten 
 der Englischen Philologie ins Gedachtnis 
 rufen, was die gebildete Welt dem Genius 
 des Dichters der "Tales of the Grotesque 
 and Arabesque" und des "Raven" schuldet. 
 
POE CENTENARY 205 
 
 Dr. George Armstrong Wauchope : 
 
 South Carolina, where Poe once resided 
 and the scene of "The Gold-Bug," gladly 
 joins hands with his alma mater in honoring 
 his memory. In doing so, we believe that we 
 are not only ratifying an act of public justice, 
 but honoring this University and the South, 
 which gave his radiant name to the nation. 
 
 We can never discharge the unpaid debt 
 which the whole country owes to Poe for 
 our (Esthetic declaration of independence, 
 for he was our prophet of beauty who led us 
 willy-nilly out of the wilderness of phi- 
 listinism, puritanism, and provincialism. The 
 chief causes of the failure in America to 
 recognize earlier the great worth of Poe, 
 have been, in my opinion, the challenge of 
 his strange and abnormal personality, the 
 hostility aroused by him as our first searching 
 and authoritative critic, the challenge to the 
 literary pharisees of the North of his aesthetic 
 literary creed, and closely, though perhaps 
 unconsciously, associated with the foregoing 
 causes, a certain vague though deep-seated 
 sectional prejudice. Happily such hindrances 
 
206 POE CENTENARY 
 
 to a just appreciation are but local and tem- 
 porary, and will soon, I believe, actually 
 accelerate the crowning and apotheosis of 
 Poe. Meanwhile, foreign criticism has hailed 
 him thrice-laureled victor in his chosen lists 
 — criticism, song, and story — and his fame is 
 safely enshrined in the Pantheon of Southern 
 hearts. 
 
 Professor Dr. Georg Witkowski, University 
 of Leipsic : 
 
 Der Universitat von Virginien spreche ich 
 zur Feier von Edgar Allan Poe's hundertstem 
 Geburtstag meinen Gliickwunsch aus. An 
 der Feier, die einem der Groszen im Reiche 
 eigenartiger Phantasiebegabung, einem Er- 
 schlieszer ungekannter Tiefen des Seelenlebens, 
 einem Dichter von seltenem Formtalent, 
 einem Meister unter den Erzahlem aller 
 Volker und Zeiten, einem der starksten 
 Anreger neuer Kunst gilt, nehme ich im Geiste 
 Teil, und wurde ihr gern personlich beiwoh- 
 nen, wenn es mir moglich ware. 
 
POE CENTENARY 207 
 
 Professor Richard Wiilker, University of 
 Leipsic : 
 
 Ich danke vielmals fiir diese Ehrung, und 
 ware gerne dazu erschienen, um so mehr als 
 ich Poe als Dichter ftir origineller und 
 damit bedeutender als Longfellow betrachte, 
 und damit fiir den ersten Dichter Nord- 
 Amerikas erklaren mochte. 
 
 Mr. William B. Yeats, of Ireland: 
 
 I wish very much it were possible for me 
 to join with you in doing honor to the 
 memory of one who is so certainly the 
 greatest of American poets, and always and 
 for all lands a great lyric poet. But the 
 Atlantic is very wide, and therefore I can 
 only send my thoughts and my good wishes 
 to you in Virginia. 
 
 Mr. Israel Zangwill, London : 
 
 I thank the University of Virginia for the 
 honor of its invitation, and regret that time 
 and space oppose themselves to my desires 
 to pay honor to the memory of so great a 
 creative artist as Edgar Allan Poe. In verse 
 
208 POE CENTENARY 
 
 he created new poems and new rhythms, 
 in criticism he created new methods of 
 analysis, in prose he created the romance of 
 horror, of treasure-adventure, and of criminal 
 mystery. He is one of the few masters of 
 the short story, and the true father of 
 Sherlock Holmes. While nobody has been 
 able to imitate his poetry, his prose has 
 created a school in France, in Germany, and 
 in England, to say nothing of literatures 
 less known to me. The University of Vir- 
 ginia may well celebrate the birthday of the 
 adopted Virgfinian who ranks as the most 
 original of the, authors of America. 
 
POE CENTENARY 209 
 
 Gree:tings 
 
 Dr. Charles W. Kent, chairman of the com- 
 mittee in charge of these exercises, sent greet- 
 ings to other assemblages met to honor Poe : 
 
 Mr. Albert E. Davis, the Poe Cottage at 
 Fordham : 
 
 We gather in his University room and you 
 in his ill-starred cottage to honor the genius 
 that has made each domicile a Mecca. 
 
 Dr. Ira Remsen, Johns Hopkins University: 
 
 The University of Virginia, mindful of Bal- 
 timore's guardianship of Poe's ashes and your 
 University's loyalty to the Southland's poets, 
 congratulates city and University alike on the 
 tribute they pay to his genius. 
 
 Authors' Club, London: 
 
 The University of Virginia has pride in 
 your recognition of her son. 
 
 Dr. George A. Wauchope, University of South 
 Carolina : 
 
 The University of Virginia congratulates 
 
210 POE CENTENARY 
 
 the University of South Carolina on its cele- 
 bration of the Poe Centenary. May the land 
 that created heroes never forget them! 
 
 Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia Uni- 
 versity : 
 
 Jefferson's University hails Hamilton's in 
 their common recognition of Poe's genius, 
 and yields her State's right in him to the 
 world-wide federation of letters. 
 
 Chancellor Henry M. McCracken, New York 
 University : 
 
 The University of Virginia greets New 
 York University with the hope that the Hall 
 of Fame may some day be as hospitable to 
 genius as is your University to-day. 
 
 To this the Chancellor responded: New 
 York University reciprocates the greeting of 
 the University of Virginia, and will gladly 
 fellowship with her in communicating to the 
 one hundred electors of the Hall of Fame, 
 representing all the forty-five states of our 
 Union, important facts and enduring senti- 
 ments respecting famous Americans. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Addresses: Alderman 100-107, Edward 73-99, Fortier 
 41-72, Kent 34, 41, 73, Nash 26-31, Reade 16-19, 
 Smith 159-179, Wendell 117-158. 
 
 Alderman, Edwin A., address, 100-107. 
 
 Barr, William A., reference to Poe, 11-14. 
 
 Dehmel, Richard, 36. 
 
 Edward, Georg, address, 73-99. 
 
 Fortier, Alcee, address, 41-72. 
 
 "Genius," 108. 
 
 Greetings, messages of, 209. 
 
 Jefferson Literary Society, 5; Poe in, 12. 
 
 Kent, Charles W., 32, 34, 41, 73. 
 
 "Lied des Lebens," 40. 
 
 Medals, Poe, 180; recipients, 181-185. 
 
 Music programme, 33, 185. 
 
 Nash, Herbert M., address, 20-31. 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1-4, Americanism, 159 et seq.; 
 in France, 41; in Germany, 73 et seq.; in Jefifer- 
 son Society, 5, 7-8; medals of, 180; nationalism, 
 117; poems written at the University, 9; room 
 (13 West Range), 13. 
 
 Poe museum, 186, 202. 
 
 Poems, 19-25, 37-40, 108-116. 
 
 Raven Society, 15, 35. 
 
 "Raven," Willoughby Reade's interpretation, 16-19. 
 
 Reade, Willoughby, 16-19. 
 
 Smith, C. Alphonso, address, 159-179. 
 
 Thirteen West Range, Poe's room, 13, 186-190, 195, 
 202. 
 
 "To Edgar Allan Poe," poems: Rogers, 24; Benson, 
 37; Boyd, 38; Dowden, 39; Moomaw, 111. 
 
 Tributes, 191-208. 
 
 Wendell, Barrett, address, 117-158. 
 
 "Whose Heartstrings Are a L"te," 19. 
 211 
 
15 1909 
 
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