Introduction (2)

    Regret is often expressed that—with the single exception of “Al Aaraaf,” which, however, was written when his intellect was still in its adolescent stage, and has done comparatively little to enhance his reputation—Poe, almost alone among the great poets of the nineteenth century, should never have given us a poem of any considerable length. But as a journalistic hack, forced to write by the column for his daily bread, Poe had but scant leisure for the composition of a “Childe Harold,” an “Endymion,” or a “Hiawatha,” and, moreover, it is extremely doubtful whether, even if the range of his possibilities had not been limited by his poverty, he would have done so, as he seems to have had a most profound contempt for prolixity in poetry. In his essay, “The Poetic Principle,” he maintains that “the phrase ‘a long poem’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms,”—that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites by elevating the soul; and that, as all such emotions are, by a psychical necessity, transient, it is obviously impossible for the necessary degree of excitement to be maintained throughout a composition of any great length. “After the lapse of half an hour at the very utmost,” he says, “it flags—fails—a revulsion ensues—and then the poem is, in effect and in fact, no longer such.” This theory of Poe’s gave rise to much hostile criticism, and justly so; still, it cannot be doubted that the time-honoured notion that no poem can be termed great that is not a long one, and no poet worthy of the name who has not written a long poem, has deprived the world of much fine lyric poetry by compelling able men to expend their time and energy in the production of bulky epics, for which in many cases their genius was but ill-adapted, instead of confining themselves to the lighter forms of verse. While thus condemning prolixity, however, Poe does not deny that a poem may be “improperly brief,” and thus “degenerate into mere epigrammatism”; and that “a very short poem,” however great its intrinsic merits may be, can never hope to produce a profound or a lasting effect. He mentions Shelley’s exquisite “Lines to an Indian Air,” and his own friend Willis’s pathetic ballad, “Unseen Spirits,” as instances of poems which had failed to receive adequate recognition by reason of undue brevity.
    The secret of Poe’s hostility to the long poem is probably to be found in the fact that he had the strongest possible aversion to the introduction of metaphysics into poetry, which he regarded as the “child of Taste,” whose sole function ought to be “the rhythmical creation of Beauty”; and the long poem had to a very large extent become identified with the Didactic school of poets, of which Wordsworth was the principal exponent.
    Poe was not the first to raise a protest against what he termed “the heresy of the Didactic.” Years before, Keats had declared that “people hated poetry that had a palpable design upon them,” and that “poetry should be great and unobtrusive.” Poe, however, went very much farther than the author of “Endymion” would have been likely to accompany him, for he maintains that “poetry has only collateral relations with the intellect and the conscience, and, unless incidentally, no concern whatever with either duty or truth.” To anyone who has even a superficial acquaintance with the great masters of verse the fallacy of such a proposition is obvious. Without the conception of duty and of truth, from which spring noble passions and great deeds—religious enthusiasm, love of humanity, love of liberty, self-sacrifice, loyalty, and patriotism—we should have had no Æschylus, no Sophocles, no Euripides, no Homer, no Shakespeare, no Milton, and no Tennyson—which reflection may enable us to bear with comparative equanimity the platitudes of the latter-day poet.
    What Poe might have done or have left undone, had not “unmerciful Disaster” dogged his footsteps, and carried him off, as it had carried off Burns, and Keats, and Shelley, and Byron, and many another child of genius, before he had reached the meridian of his days, it were idle to speculate; but this much is certain—that, when the works of far greater poets have fallen into neglect, Poe will still be read and still appreciated, for, in the domain which he made so peculiarly his own, it is hardly possible to imagine that he will ever have to encounter anything approaching serious rivalry, while the feelings which he appeals to are universal.
    Noel Williams.