Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/55

 I am ranging myself with the partisans of Poe? If it does, I am quite content to take an humble place in their ranks. I doubt, however, whether it really is a partisan statement. One marked characteristic of democratic culture is its readiness to give heed to what has been done and thought in other countries and to adopt and assimilate whatever seems beneficial. Poe, on the whole, appears to have counted for the world outside America more than any other American author. This fact is likely in time to produce more and more impression upon the minds of Poe's countrymen. It is furthermore a pretty plain lesson of literary history that the writer who makes the double appeal of verse and prose, especially when much of his prose is imaginative, has more chances with posterity—more chance of being really read—than writers who make the single appeal of verse alone, or prose alone. And besides the appeal made by his verse and his prose—Poe, we must never forget, wrote the Raven, which perhaps disputes with Gray's Elegy the honor or as some disdainful, hypercritical persons would hold, the dishonor of being the most popular poem in the language—besides this appeal, Poe makes the appeal that is always made by the mysterious, ill-starred genius. Now this matter of the appeal or the appeals made by a writer is even more important than we are apt to think it at first blush. The reader and the student are already bewildered and oppressed by the number of really great and good books and writers that demand to be read. As the competition grows keener, the selective process will surely grow more drastic, and just as surely the authors of double and triple appeal are going to have a greater