Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/36

 even just to pour forth the vials of our wrath. It was also Poe's fate to have that period of detraction which usually follows a writer's death coincide with a period of civil discord and confusion in which literature was bound to suffer and did suffer greatly. After the war was over, the work of material and political reconstruction took its natural precedence. It may therefore be said without exaggeration that thoroughly normal conditions for the spread of a writer's fame have existed in this country only for a space of about thirty years. During these years our sense of nationality has been immensely developed, and we have consequently taken a greater interest and pride in our literature. Poe, with other writers of the past, has naturally profited from these propitious conditions, but here again fate has been somewhat untoward to him. His early biographers and critics tended to become either extravagantly eulogistic or unduly captious, and the weight of authority lay, for some years, with the unduly captious. For obvious reasons, American literature was synonymous to a majority of readers with New England literature, and it would have been little short of a miracle if the admirers and exponents of the latter literature had greatly relished or indeed thoroughly understood the works of a man who had not himself too well comprehended the merits of the literature they loved and represented. Poe's fame, therefore, became too much of a sectional or a partisanly individual matter and too little of a national matter, when all the while, thanks in part to his lack of local, that is of untranslatable flavor, in part to the extraordinarily sympathetic comprehension of Baudelaire, in part to