Page:The Raven (1884).pdf/12

Rh famous as the room where Roget de I'Isle composed the Marseillaise (All have heard that the poem signed "Quarles" appeared in the "American Review" with a pusedo-editorial comment on its form; that Poe received ten dollars for it; that Willis, the kindest and least envious of fashionable arbiters, reprinted it with a eulogy that instantly made it the town-talk. All doubt of its authorship was dispelled when Poe recited it himself at a literary gathering, and for a time he was the most marked of American authors. The hit stimulated and encouraged him. Like another and prouder satirist, he too found "something of summer" even "in the hum of insects" Sorrowfully enough, but three years elapsed—a period of influence, pride, anguish, yet always of imaganitve or critical labor,— before the final defear, before the curtain dropped on a life that for him was in truth a tragedy. and he yeilded to "the Vounqueror Worm")

("The American Review; A Whig Journal" was a creditable magazine for the time, double-columned, printed on good paper with clear type, and illustrated by mezzotint portraits. Amid much matter below the present standard it contained some that any editor would be glad to receive. The inital volume for 1845, has articles by Horace Greely, Donald Mitchell, Walter Whitman, Marsh, Tuckerman, and Whipple. Ralph Hoyt's quaint poem "Old" appeared in this volume. And here are three lyrics by Poe: "The City in the Sea,"

"The Valley of Unrest," and The Raven. Two of these were built up.—such was his way.—from earlier studies, but the last-named came out as if freshly composed, and almost as we have it now. The statement that it was not afterward revised is erroneous. Eleven trifling changes from the magazine-text appear in The Raven and Other Poems, 1845. a book which the poet shortly felt encouraged to offer the public. These are mostly changes of punctuation, or of single words, the latter kind made to heighten the effect of alliteration. In Mr Lang's pretty edition of Poe's verse, brought out in the "Parchment Library," he has shown the instinct of a scholar, and has done wisely, in going back to the text of the volume just mentioned, as given in the London issue of 1846. The "standard" Griswold collection of the poet's works abounds with errors. There have been repeated by later editors, who also made new errors of their own. But the text of The Raven, owing to the request made to the author for manuscript copies, was still further revised by him; in fact he printed it in Richmond, just before his death, with the poetic substitution of "seraphim whose foot-falls" for "angles whose faint foot-falls" in the fourteenth stanza. Our present text, therefore whilst substantially that of 1845, is somewhat modified by the poet's later reading, and is, I think, the most correct and effective version of this single poem. The most radical change from the earliest version appeared, however, in the volume of 1845; the eleventh stanza originally having contained these lines, faulty in rhyme and otherwise a blemish on the poem:

It would be well if other and famous, poets could be as sure of making their changes always improvements. Poe constantly rehandled his scanty show of verse, and usually bettered it. The Raven was the first of the few poems which he nearly brought to completion before printing. it may be that those who care for poetry lost little by his death. Fluent in prose, he never wrote verse for the sake of making a poem. When a refrain or image haunted him,m the lyric that resulted was the inspiration, as he himself said of a passion, not of a purpose. This was at intervals so rare as almost to justify the Fairfield theory that each was the product of a nervous crsis.)

What then, gave the poet his clue to The Raven? From what misty foundation did it rise slowly to a music slowly breathed? As usual, more than one thing went to the building of so notable a poem. Considering the longer sermons often preached on brief and less suggestive texts, I hope not to be blamed for this discussion of a single lyric.—especially one for which an artist like Doré has made the subject of prodigal illustration. Until recently I had supposed that this piece, and a few which its author composed after its appearance, were exceptional in not having grown from germs in his boyish verse. But Mr Fearing Gill has shown me some unpublished stanzas by Poe, written in his eighteenth year, and entitled "The Demon of Fire." The manuscript appears to be in the poet's early handwriting, and its genuineness is vouched for by the family in whose possession it has remained for half a century. Besides the plainest germs of "The Bells" and the "Haunted Place" it contains a few lines somewhat suggestive of the opening and close of The raven. As to the rhythm of our poem, a comparison of dates indicates that this was influenced by the rhythm of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship." Poe was one of the first to honor Miss Barrett's genius; he inscribed his collected poems to her as "the noblest of her sex," and was in