Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/24

4 in 1909. That year marked his centennial, as it marked the centennial of Lincoln, Holmes, Darwin, Gladstone, Tennyson, Chopin, and Gogol. It was then that historians looked back over the century and attempted a fresh appraisal of the men who had now rounded out their first hundred years. If the name of Poe did not lead all the rest, it was surpassed by none in the interest awakened, in the international acclaim rendered, and in a certain recognized indebtedness for thought and vision and craftsmanship. At the University of Virginia, in Baltimore, in New York, in London, in Paris, in Madrid, and in Berlin, Poe's birthyear was celebrated by memorial meetings and centennial articles as the birthyear of no other American poet or prose-writer had ever been celebrated before.

"It is surely a somewhat striking fact," said The Edinburgh Review, for January, 1910, "that, of authors born in America, Poe is the only one to whom the term 'world-author' can with any propriety be applied." No, there are others. Franklin, Cooper, Emerson, Longfellow, and Mark Twain are world-authors; and Walt Whitman, Joel Chandler Harris, William James in a narrower sense, and O. Henry are fast becoming world-authors. But it is none the less true that the title belongs preeminently to Poe. His appeal as poet and story-teller, the universality of his themes, the purity of his style, his studied avoidance of slang and localism, his wealth of sheer intellect and his equal dowry of constructive imagination, together with his almost uncanny feeling for form and color, for the fitting melody and the enhancing background, these put him in a class alone, and these have