Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/47

Rh moments and moods into fixed crystallizations of habit or impulse. Gestures are regarded as attitudes, and a single incident is made the scales in which an entire life is weighed. Let us take Poe's great phrase, "totality of effect," and look at his life as a whole.

So far from being unrelated to the problems and interests of his time, Poe seems to me the one man in American literature from whose writings a history of the essential thought-currents of the time could be garnered. But by his writings I do not mean primarily his poems or his stories; in these he deliberately turned away from the things of every-day life or so subtly transfused them as to make the distillation not easily identifiable as concrete incident or personal experience. I mean, above all, the criticisms that he passed on the men and women and things and themes that made up the life round about him. In the only complete edition of his works, the Virginia Edition, containing seventeen volumes, only one volume contains Poe's poetry, five volumes his stories, while nine volumes contain his criticisms, his essays, his miscellanies, his marginalia, and his letters. In these nine volumes lie scattered the elements which combined will summon back to us Poe, the man, as he can not be recalled from the volumes that reveal him as the self-conscious and creative artist.

All the information that we have about Poe goes to show that he observed closely and accurately. Mere dreamers do not. If he saw through a telescope it was