Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/44

24

This survey of Poe as an international influence is not meant to anticipate your own opinion or to coerce your own judgment, but to free it. It is meant to furnish perspective and background for the study of a writer who in American criticism has been traditionally represented not as a world-author but as narrow and even sectional in his appeal. It is an attempt to let 1849 hear the voices of 1909.

It was an evil day for American literary criticism, for what we call Americanism in the larger sense, when the great Emerson curtly dismissed Poe as "the jingle man." He was biting on granite, as was Poe when he dubbed Emerson a "mystic for mysticism's sake." Both would have retracted gladly could they have re-weighed their verdicts in the scales of the impartial years. Jingles can not be translated into potent and radiating inspirations in other tongues; and the mystic for mysticism's sake can not enrich the ethical standards of a reading world.

When we hear that Henry James pronounced Poe's poems "very valueless verse," it is surely worth while to know that the world at large does not think so; when John Burroughs calls Poe's verse "empty of thought," it is worth asking if the defect may not lie in the critic rather than in the poet; when Brownell asserts that Poe's writings, whether prose or verse, "lack the elements not only of great but of real literature," when he pleads that Poe should be denied a place in the American Hall of Fame, it is well to hear the multitudinous laughter of a world that has already enthroned him in its own more exclusive Hall of Fame.