Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/102

82 ago, in one of the Gazettes of the State, and that they were favorably received. "For the last six months," says the author, "I have been importuned by persons from all quarters of the State to give them to the public in the present form." This speaks well for the Georgian taste. But that the publication will succeed, in the bookselling sense of the word, is problematical. Thanks to the long-indulged literary supineness of the South, her presses are not as apt in putting forth a saleable book as her sons are in concocting a wise one.

[The Culprit Fay and Other Poems, by Joseph Rodman Drake, reviewed in The Southern Literary Messenger, April, 1836. The suggestive distinction here made is not that of Coleridge between fancy and imagination. See page 110. Note that Poe's constructive sense leads him to rewrite a passage from The Culprit Fay, a striking illustration of the propinquity of theory and practice, of thought and expression, in his own art.]

It is only lately that we have read the "Culprit Fay." This is a poem of six hundred and forty irregular lines, generally iambic, and divided into thirty-six stanzas, of unequal length. The scene of the narrative, as we ascertain from the single line,

is principally in the vicinity of West Point on the Hudson.........

It is more than probable that from ten readers of the "Culprit Fay," nine would immediately pronounce