Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/54

 reasonable play of individual taste and judgment, it will be a bad thing for us as a people. I am optimistic enough, however, to believe that our democratic culture will improve our national taste and judgment and still leave free play for individual preferences, and I count upon this culture finally to give Poe a very high, if not the highest, place among our ante-bellum writers. I do not think that the common sense which will always characterize democratic culture—it does not hurt any kind of culture by the way—will tolerate the notion some acute critics have tried to spread that Poe's poems and tales are not real literature after all. Such a notion means nothing unless you can define real literature. If someone were to contend, for example, that no real literature had been produced since the Iliad and the Odyssey, it might be possible to comprehend him and even to sympathize with him. If someone else were to contend that any writing or writings that continued after the lapse of a generation to attract the attention of publishers, readers, and critics was real literature because it displayed vitality, it might be possible to comprehend and even to sympathize with him. But when gentlemen calmly draw their own lines between these two extremes and say that this or that book or writer is on the no-literature side of their privately drawn line, I am tempted to enquire with what instruments and by whose authority they perform their feats of critico-engineering. While waiting for their explanations, I will venture to draw my own line and to make the not very startling assertion that Poe's work does not lie on the wrong side of it.

Does this statement mean that at the close of this paper