Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/34

14 not excluding Longfellow and Whitman. A huge silence enveloped the name of Edgar Poe in the United States...... But the glory of the final rehabilitation of the poet was reserved for a European, for Baudelaire, his spiritual brother. Edgar Poe's native land is America; his spiritual birth must be sought in Germany; his elevation to immortality, with justice rendered to his supreme merits, is the gift of generous France."

Whether Poe's popularity in Latin-American countries is a derivative of his popularity in Spain or harks back for its original impulse to Baudelaire's work, it would be hazardous to say. Certain it is, however, that no other American author has so fertilized the intellect and imagination of Central and South America as has Poe. This was the prompt testimony of Rubén Darío, Nicaragua's greatest poet, if not the greatest poet of Latin America, during his visit to the United States in the spring of 1915. Darío, by the way, prefixed a promising though fragmentary study to the volume of Poe's poems published in Madrid in 1909, the best translation in the volume being that of The Raven by the Venezuelan poet, Pérez Bonalde. "Poe is very well known in our Latin-American countries," writes from Buenos Aires the distinguished South American scholar, A. Abeledo, "The Raven and The Bells having passed into our school textbooks."

But, as Guerra has said, Poe's elevation to immortality is in a way "the gift of generous France," and it was the gift of France chiefly through Baudelaire and Mallarmé. "It would be too much to say," writes Henri Potez, "that Edgar Poe begat Baudelaire and