University of Virginia Library

VI

IN CABELL HALL, AGAIN

THE final exercises of the Commemoration
took place in Cabell Hall Tuesday evening,
January 19. President Alderman welcomed
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

Poe," and Professor Alphonso Smith, of North
Carolina, who will speak upon the "Americanism
of Poe." All Americans look up to
Harvard University with reverence and respect,
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, however,
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 waywardness
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

cities—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Richmond and Boston.

That experience of the elder world is repeated
to-day save that the number of cities
is five instead of seven through which the living
Poe suffered and struggled. It is the same
old story, too, of outward defeat and apparent
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

receive; and Poe did not fit into this conception.
I have come, however, to see the limitations
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 suffered,
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 conquerors
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
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 University
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
founded here on the western borders of the
young republic 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
to think sometimes that when our poet wrote
those stateliest lines of his—

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 endowment
are the technical phrases of college administration
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

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 understanding,
a feeling for the gold and not the
dross in life, a genius for reverence, an instinct
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?

Poems contributed for the occasion were
read. The following, by Robert Burns Wilson,
entitled "Genius," was "inscribed with
great admiration and esteem to Dr. Charles
W. Kent:"

Mr. Ben C. Moomaw, of Virginia:

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 newspapers
congratulated her on her happy recovery
from her confinement. This is apparently
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 discovered
that David Poe was taxed that year
as resident in a house owned by one Henry
Haviland, who had bought the property, a few

years before, from a Mr. Haskins, a kinsman,
I believe, of the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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 restless;
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 beginning
to end his earthly life seems; to him,
this world could not often have smiled contagiously
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

youth. There was little 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 extending

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 admiration
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 accident.
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 unchallenged
in proof that our country has
enriched the literature of the world. Even
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, like 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 centuries
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

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, yielding
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, spiritually
at one in loyalty to what they believe the
changeless ideals of truth and of righteousness,
are torn asunder by outbreaks of such
tremendous historic forces as make the mechanical
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 subside
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, immortally
brethren. So, by and by, we come
wondrously to perceive that we may honour
our own heroes most worthily,—most in the
spirit which they truly embodied, most, I believe,
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 withstand
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 unshaken.
Among those careers almost all—
North and South, East and West—won, in
their own time, distinguished public recognition.
What I have in mind we may best realize,
perhaps, if for a moment we imagine ourselves
in some nineteenth century congregation

of our countrymen, similar to this where we
are gathered together. Fancy, for example,
the companies assembled to welcome Lafayette,
far and wide, during his last visit to our
nation, which he had helped call into 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 distinguished
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 our
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 assemblage
sixty-five years ago. Glancing
about, you might very likely have observed
a slight, alert man, with rather lank, dark hair,

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 engagingly
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 distinguished
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
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 collected
works. Almost certainly he would
hardly have impressed you as a familiarly
memorable personage. His rather inconspicuous
solitude would not have seemed noteworthy.
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 company,
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

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 beside,
but the whole civilized world would instantly
and eagerly recognize the certainty of
his eminence. What he was, while still enmeshed
in the perplexity of earthly circumstance,
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 national
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

trouble ourselves to dispute. It is enough for
us, during this little while when we are together,
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 ourselves
in conjectures concerning his positive
magnitude, or his ultimate significance, when
you measure his utterances with what we conceive
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, forgotten
ever since the years when it was written.
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

principle, superficially grave, certainly ingenious,
perhaps earnest, perhaps impishly fantastic.
All of these, and more too, would inevitably
force themselves on our consideration
if we were attempting to revive the Poe who
was. At this moment, however, we may neglect
them as serenely as we may neglect scrutiny
of outward and visible signs—such questions
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 because
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 throughout
the range of literature. From sheer reaction,
I sometimes think, we are apt nowadays,
when concerned with letters, to pass our
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 concerning
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 salutary
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 scholarship
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
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 poems
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 superficially,
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 always,
surely, recurrently feel. The most remarkable
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 either
to appeal to you or to repel you. In one
mood you may think it inspired; in another,

you may find it little better than prankishly
artificial. You may praise it until dissent gape
breathless at your superlatives; or you may relentlessly
point out what you are pleased to
believe its limitations, its artificialities, its patent
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 incontestably,
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

which our language hardly affords a name
more exact than the name poetic. The accident
that we are generally accustomed to confuse
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:—

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 illustrative
of these lines,—I had almost said more
definative,—than you shall find in the tales and

the poems of Poe at their surviving best. Momentarily
illusive though his concrete touches
may sometimes make his tales,—and he possessed,
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 always
be reduced to the forms of things unknown,
bodied forth by sheer power of imagination.
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 always
prove at last, phantasmally and hauntingly
immaterial. They are like figured tapestries
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 craftsmanship,
itself almost a miracle, they must
have hovered inexorable beyond the range of
all other consciousness than his who dreamed
them. Dreamer and craftsman alike, and supreme,
it is he, and none but he, who can make
us feel, in certain most memorable phases, the
fascinating, fantastic, elusive, incessant mystery
of that which must forever environ human
consciousness, unseen, unknown, impalpable,
implacable, undeniable.

The mood we are thus attempting to define
is bafflingly elusive; it has no precise substance,
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, evocable
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 assertion,
or to stray in fancy through conclusion
after conclusion towards which it may have
seemed to lead us, we should remain or wander

mischievously far from the truth. That
Poe's imagination was solitary, like so much
of the circumstances of his life, 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 habitations
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 anachronistic.
Even the visual image of his restless
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
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 temperamental
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 æsthetic temper of his time, all

over the European and American world.
We use it concerning all manner of emotion
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 encyclopædias,
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

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 romanticism
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 romanticism
lies in passionate assertion of
literary or artistic individuality. Wherefore,
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

for a little while on this whole romantic
generation. Before long, we may contentfully
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 tradition
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
æsthetic emotion. Already we may well
feel insecure. We are straying, beyond dispute,
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
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 mediæval. 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 mediæval period,
we may soon agree, the intellect of Europe
was authoritatively forbidden to exert itself

beyond narrowly fixed and rigid limits.
European emotion, meanwhile, was permitted
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 declaration
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, controlled,
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 independence.
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
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 mediæval
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 circumstances
as from their instant, obvious remoteness
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
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 mediæval guise.

Throughout Europe such semblance could
always be guided, controlled, and regulated
by the pervasive presence everywhere of
relics, material or traditional, of the mediæval
times thus at length welcomed back to the
light. So far as the full romantic literature
of Europe deals with mediæval matters,
accordingly, or so far as intentionally or
instinctively it reverts to mediæval 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 nineteenth
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 accepted
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 semblance
of reality they had no mediæval relics

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 magnitude
of our national task, to explain our
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

to the light in this country. The first example
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 triumphantly,
asserts his nationality. No other
romanticism of the nineteenth century was
ever so serenely free from limitation of material
condition and tradition; none, therefore,
was so indisputably what the native romanticism
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 limitations.
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

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 expression.
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 demonstrate
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
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—
æsthetically solitary. You might fancy yourself
for the while fantastically disembodied—
a waking wanderer in some region of unalloyed
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 imprisonment
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 attention,—the
most ardent of his admirers can
hardly maintain his work to be dominant or
commanding. Except for the pleasure it gives

you, it leaves you little moved; it does not
meddle with your philosophy, or modify your
rules of conduct. Its power lies altogether
in the strange excellence of its peculiar beauty.
And even though the most ethical poet of
his contemporary New England has immortally
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 weakness,
or of fragility is no such solitude as
this; weak and fragile solitude vanishes with
its earthly self, leaving no void behind. Solitude
which endures as Poe's is enduring

proves itself by the very tenacity of its endurance
to be the solitude of unflagging and independent
strength. Such strength as this is
sure token of poetic greatness. We may grow
more confident than ever. We may unhesitatingly
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 animates
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 essential
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

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 century—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 Virginia,

when a little while ago I named the
six chief literary worthies of nineteenth century
New England. They were contemporaries
of Poe. They were honest men and
faithful poets. They never hesitated to utter,
with all their hearts, what they devotedly believed
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 utterances
heroically true to the idealism ancestrally
and peculiarly our own. Yet it would
be mischievous folly to pretend that such utterances,
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 themselves
without utterance after utterance fatally
sure to provoke passionate response, or passionate
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 anecdotic.
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 Blacksmith."
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

or national, but local. What is thus true of
New England is generally true, I believe, of
literary expression throughout America. Turn,
if you will, to the two memorable writers of
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 surface
of decadent Puritanism; and neither understood
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 positive
merit, whatever the sturdy honesty of
most American expression in the nineteenth
century, it lacked conciliatory breadth of feeling.
Its intensity of localism marks it, whatever
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;

and no work could have been much less inspired
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 England
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 appeal.
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 unearthly
fantasy. Such lack of sympathy, however,
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 individual
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 believe,
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 certainly of finding
no line, no word, no quiver of thought or of
feeling which should arouse or revive the consciousness
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 temperamental
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 reunion,
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

song, which possessed him, when he wrote the
words—

And yet is it too much to fancy that to-day
we can hear that bolder note swelling 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 harmony.

Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, of the University
of North Carolina, spoke on "The Americanism
of Poe:"

The continental tributes to Poe which were
read this morning recalled an incident in
which the name of the founder of this University
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 companionship
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 revolutionizing
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

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 evidence
that the significance of genius is not exhausted
by the written tributes of great
scholars and critics, however numerous or
laudatory these may be. There is an everwidening
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 farflung
battle-lines intersected on this campus,
forever remind us that this University is dedicated
not to the mere routine of recitation
rooms and laboratories but to the emancipation
of those mighty constructive forces that
touch the spirits of men to finer aspirations
and mould their aspirations to finer issues.

In an address delivered at the exercises attending
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 conception
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
déclassé of American literature, a solitary
figure, denationalized and almost dehumanized,
not only unindebted to his Southern environment
but unrelated to the larger American
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

works by Professor James A. Harrison, reproducing
almost four volumes of Poe's
literary criticism hitherto inaccessible, has confirmed
a mere impression into a settled conviction.
The criticism of the future will not
impeach the primacy of Poe's genius but will
dwell less upon detachment from surroundings
and more upon the practical and representative
quality of his work.

The relatedness of a writer to his environment
and to his nationality does not consist
primarily in his fidelity to local landscape or
in the accuracy with which he portrays representative
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 negligible
in the works of both. They stood, however,
for distinctive tendencies of their time.
They interpreted these tendencies in essentially
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

as that of a fish, and his impress of locality no
more evident than that of a bird. No landscape
that he ever sketched could be identified
and no character that he ever portrayed had
real human blood in his veins. The representative
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 craftsmanship
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 intellect,
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 essentially
structural. In the technique of effective
expression he sought for ultimate principles
with a patience and persistence worthy of

Washington; he brought to his poems and
short stories an economy of words and a husbandry
of details that suggest the thriftiness
of Franklin; and he both realized and supplied
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 produce
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

efficiency. The time was ripe, and the note
that he struck was both national and international.

Professor Münsterberg,[1] 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 inventiveness,
enthusiasm, and persistence in pursuit
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 constructiveness
and that more than a half century
ago they found an exemplar in Edgar Allan
Poe.

It is a noteworthy fact, and one not sufficiently
emphasized, that Poe's unique influence
at home and abroad has been a structural

influence rather than a thought influence. He
has not suggested new themes to literary
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 details
to a preordained end. He has taught
poets how to modulate their cadences to the
most delicately calculated effects, how to reenforce
the central mood of their poems by
repetition and parallelism of phrase, how to
shift their tone-color, how to utilize soundsymbolism,
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 greatest
contribution to the craftsmanship of his
art.

Among foreign dramatists and prose writers

whose structural debt to Poe is confessed or
unquestioned may be mentioned Victorien
Sardou, Théophile Gautier, Guy de Maupassant,
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 poetcritic
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,[2] 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. Professor

Brander Matthews[3] 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 independently,[4]
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

only two months when in comparing the
poems of Mrs. Sigourney and Mrs. Hemans
he used a phrase in which he 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,[5]
"like the poems of Mrs. Sigourney, the
pleasure in unique, in the proper acceptation
of that term—the understanding is employed,
without difficulty, in the contemplation of
the picture as a whole—and thus its effect
will depend, in a very great degree, upon the
perfection of its finish, upon the nice adaptation
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[6] he published his now
famous criticism of Hawthorne's "TwiceTold
Tales," a criticism that contains, in
one oft-quoted paragraph, the constitution
of the modern short story as distinct from

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 conceived,
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 establishing
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 preëstablished
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"[7] in which he analyzes the

structure of "The Raven" and declares that
he confined the poem to about one hundred
lines 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[8] with
hardly the change of a word the portions
of his former review emphasizing the importance
of "totality of effect." The year
after his death his popular lecture on "The
Poetic Principle" is published,[9] 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

phrase analogous to it. Schlegel's "Lectures
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 architecture
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 "Philosophy
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 contention
that the difference between poetry
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]

and would not have sanctioned Poe's application
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 transcendentalism
in New England meant a fresh
scrutiny of all existing institutions, social,
political, and religious. It was identified
with Unitarianism, Fourierism, the renunciation
of dogma and authority, and the increasing
agitation of abolition. "Communities
were established," says Lowell, "where everything
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

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 republication
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 intellectual
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

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
rôle 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 common
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 impulsiveness
but of sheer delight in making

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 "l'affirmation de l'independance individuelle,"
he might have had both Poe and
Calhoun in mind; but when he adds "c'est
le self-government appliqué aux œuvres
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.

Lauvrière,[11] in the most painstaking investigation
yet bestowed upon an American
author, views him chiefly as a pathological
study. Moeller-Bruck,[12] the editor of the
latest complete edition of Poe in Germany,
sees in him "a dreamer from the old motherland
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

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.

Dr. Kent, in naming the recipients of the
Poe medals, said:

Mr. President: Your committee of arrangements
has deemed it wise to have
prepared a significant memorial of this interesting
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

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 significantly
to the success of the movement to
commemorate the poet with a bronze bust:

On the following who, by committee
service, participation in the exercises, contribution
of poems, etc., have contributed to
the success of this occasion:—

On the following for literary services of
various sorts connected with fixing and
furthering the fame of Edgar Allan Poe:—

For peculiar services to the University of
Virginia, in connection with Poe:—

As representatives of the Poe family:—

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 Military
March in D major (by request), arranged
for the organ by W. T. Best.