Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/313



one must have noticed in Poe's stories a tendency at times to become essays. Narration and exposition play hide-and-seek. O. Henry, in one of the last discussions that he had about his art, told of his perplexity in deciding whether to place his expository matter first or last in his stories. Poe has written a few masterpieces that it is customary to call "Tales" or "Essays." But while there is much narration in them, there is no plot ; and the exposition that runs through them is hardly of the essay kind. It is in fact illumination rather than exposition. Though this chapter might be called "The Prose Poet" or "The Seer" or "The Philosopher," I prefer to entitle it "The Frontiersman." Each selection represents Poe as seeking for truth along those vast borderlands of speculation in which vision and intuition tread with firmer footing than smug logic or traditional philosophy.

There is more pure beauty in these sketches than is found in the majority of the short stories but not enough to justify metrical form or stanzaic division. In length, too, these poems in prose are midway between the poem proper and the recognized short story. Whatever you call them, you can not know Poe without knowing that he was more than a literary critic, a lyric poet, and the father of the short story. He was a frontiersman who found the old boundary lines of