Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/17



Poe has suffered a strange fate. Nobody ever doubted his genius, but his genius has clouded and rendered spectral and remote his personality. He is popularly regarded as a manufacturer of cold creeps and a maker of shivers, a wizened, self-centered exotic, un-American and semi-insane, who, between sprees or in them, wrote his autobiography in The Raven and a few haunting detective stories. This book is an attempt to substitute for the travesty the real Poe, to suggest at least the diversity of his interests, his future-mindedness, his sanity, and his humanity. Old-world voices are requisitioned to speak for him, and he in turn through the wide gamut of his work is permitted to speak for himself.

C. A. S.

United States Naval Academy,
 * Annapolis, Maryland