Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/71

Rh by the same adventitious assistance—that of rhythm and of rhyme. Thus the only bond between humorous verse and poetry, properly so called, is that they employ in common a certain tool."

Others point as evidence to the stories in which Poe tried to be funny and failed,—to A Tale of Jerusalem, How to Write a Blackwood Article, The Devil in the Belfry, The Man That Was Used Up, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, The Spectacles, The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq., and X-ing a Paragrab. That these are flat and irredeemable failures if weighed in the scales of laughter I for one should admit without hesitation. If laughter is heard in them or caused by them it is surely a falsetto cackle. It is not the laughter of Shakespeare or Lamb or Mark Twain or O. Henry. But these futile efforts do not prove that Poe had no sense of humor. They prove only that, if he did, he could not put it into literature. He could not fuse it with his other constructive qualities. He could not make it merchantable as a social commodity.

But he could make it felt in his criticisms of foolish books. When he was asked by Griswold to name certain selections from his writings that might be considered fairly representative, he replied that among his "funny" pieces the review of Flaccus would do as well as anything else. Flaccus was Thomas Ward, whom Griswold had praised in his Poets and Poetry of America and characterized as "a gentleman of elegant leisure." "The sum of his [Ward's] deserts," says Poe, "has been footed up by a clique who are in the habit of reckoning units as tens in all cases where champagne and 'elegant leisure' are concerned."