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she despised and detested Buonaparte." In 1820, Wordsworth, his wife, and Dorothy visited Paris and lived on intimate terms with Annette, Caroline, and Caroline's husband. They even went to lodge in the same street. Of Caroline it was reported earlier that "she resembles her father most strikingly." For the rest, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, when writing his uncle's biography, said nothing about the matter. He cannot be accused of having hidden anything of very great significance. The truth is now out, and we know little more about Wordsworth than we knew before.

XIV

THE POETRY OF POE

"My first object (as usual) was originality," said Poe, in discussing the versification of "The Raven." It is a remarkable fact that the two great poets of America-Poe and Whitman— were two of the most deliberately original poets of the nineteenth century-in English at least. They were both conscious frontiersmen of poetry, drawn to unmapped territories, settlers on virgin soil. This may help to explain some of their imperfections. Each of them gives us the impression of a genius rich but imperfectly cultivated. Different though they were from each other, they resembled each other in a certain lack of the talent of order, of taste, of "finish." They were both capable of lapses from genius into incompetence, from beauty into provincialism, to an unusual degree. A contemporary critic said of Poe that he had not talent equal to his genius. Neither had Whitman. In the greatest poets, genius and talent go hand in hand. Poe seldom wrote a poem in which his mood seems to have

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attained its perfect expression. His poetry does not get near perfection even in the sense in which Coleridge's fragments do. It seems, as a rule, like a first sketch for greater things. His Complete Poems, indeed, is one of the most wonderful sketch-books of a man of genius in literature.

Poe himself attributed the defects of his work to lack of leisure rather than to lack of talent. "Events not to be controlled," he said in the preface to the 1845 edition of his poems, "have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose but a passion, and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not-they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the petty compensations, or the more petty commendations, of mankind." Other poets, however, who have lived in as bitter circumstances as Poe, have written an incomparably greater body of good poetry. There was in him some flaw that kept him, as a rule, from being more than a great beginner. It may have been partly due to theatrical qualities that he inherited from his actress mother. Again and again he mingles the landscape of dreamland with the tawdry grandeur of the stage. He takes

a footlights view of romance when, having begun "Lenore" with the lines

Ah, broken is the golden bowl!-the spirit flown for ever!Let the bell toll!-a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river

he continues:

And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?-weep now, or

never more.

This, no doubt, was in tune with the fashionable romance of the day, but Poe's romantic conceptions at times were those of one who was especially entranced by stage trappings. He made his heroines rich and highborn as well as beautiful. In "Lenore" he cries:

Wretches, ye loved her for her wealth, and hated her for her pride!

In "The Sleeper" he speaks of:

The crested palls

Of her grand family funerals.

In "Annabel Lee" he made the very angels heroes of the green-room:

Her highborn kinsmen came

And bore her away from me.

On the other hand, Poe's theatricalism, though it explains some of the faults of his poetry, leaves

unexplained the fact that he has cast a greater spell on succeeding poets than has even so great a theatrical genius as Byron. Poe is one of those poets who are sources of poetry. He discovered -though not without forerunners such as Coleridge a new borderland for the imagination, where death and despair had a new strangeness. He seems to have reached it, not through mere fancy, as his imitators do, but through experience. When he was a youth he worshipped Mrs. Helen Stannard, the mother of one of his friends. She went mad and died, and for some time after her death Poe used to haunt her tomb by night, and "when the autumnal rains fell and the winds wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest, and came away most regretfully." J. H. Ingram and other writers have found in these "solitary churchyard vigils" the clue to "much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet's after life." Love overshadowed by death, beauty overshadowed by death, remained the recurrent theme of his verse. It is the theme of his supreme poem, "Annabel Lee," with its haunting close:

In the sepulchre there by the sea,

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Poe was a poet for whom life was darkened by

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