Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/95

 To compare Poe as a critic with Coleridge or Matthew Arnold or Sainte-Beuve or Taine or Lowell is to compare him with men who wore, it is true, the same livery, but who served under other banners. His criticism was different from theirs because his purpose was different. When I read them, I feel more than I feel in Poe the impact of philosophical suggestions, of wide historical relationships, of literature interpreted as life, and life seen anew through literature. Whether you call their method judicial in the Aristotelian sense, or purely impressionistic, or learnedly historical, the man whose work they are criticizing seems in certain vital ways to live again. I seem to know him as a man and as a thinker, but not as a craftsman. How he succeeded in bodying forth his conceptions, how the man became for the time being the literary artist, how he made an ally of that tested body of truth known as technique, how he differs from me who now think as he thought but am as powerless as before to write as he wrote,—this remains in its original obscurity. But it is this niche in criticism that Poe has come nearer filling than any one else. It is this quality in his critical work that makes him a living force wherever men are "stung by the splendor of a sudden thought" but impotent to impart it. It is this radiation from his criticisms that makes them permanently serviceable not merely to the creative artist in letters but to all those who wish to write or to speak more convergently and thus more effectively.

II

The following extracts are chosen to exemplify the more important aspects of Poe's criticism but