This sort of personality we see more or less in Burns,
Byron, Schiller, and George Sand. But we do not see it in Edgar Poe.
(All this is the result of reading at intervals the last three days a
new volume of his poems--I took it on my rambles down by the pond, and
by degrees read it all through there.) While to the character first
outlined the service Poe renders is certainly that entire contrast and
contradiction which is next best to fully exemplifying it.
Almost without the first sign of moral principle, or of the concrete
or its heroisms, or the simpler affections of the heart, Poe's verses
illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with
the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal
themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page--and, by final
judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative
literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat. There is an
indescribable magnetism about the poet's life and reminiscences, as
well as the poems. To one who could work out their subtle retracing
and retrospect, the latter would make a close tally no doubt between
the author's birth and antecedents, his childhood and youth, his
physique, his so-call'd education, his studies and associates, the
literary and social Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia and New York, of
those times--not only the places and circumstances in themselves, but
often, very often, in a strange spurning of, and reaction from them
all.
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