“Shall we compare our sluggish eyes and our deafened ears to those eyes which pierce the mist, to those ears which would hear the grass growing?” Charles Baudelaire
“I admire a few lyrics of his extremely and a few pages of his prose, chiefly in his critical essays, which are sometimes profound.” W. B. Yeats
Edgar Allan Poe’s literary legacy is as extraordinary as it is extensive, but the praise Poe has been afforded is often overlooked for the small yet infamous criticism he has received. Poe inspired sentiments of both admiration and contempt in writers such as T.S. Eliot and Henry James, who were unwilling to accept the reverence of Poe by prominent writers in France. In many instances, unfavourable remarks about a particular poem or story by Poe have been misconstrued as an overall aversion to his works. As Argentine Jorge Luis Borges wrote of Poe in 1978: “Whitman was unfair to him, and so was Emerson. Even today, there are critics who underestimate him.” Borges rightly hailed Poe “a projector of multiple shadows” and as a man “without whom contemporary literature would not be what it is.” In honour of what would have been Edgar Allan Poe’s 205th birthday, we take a look at the praise Poe received from some of the world’s greatest intellects, authors and poets.
In 1839 Poe sent a copy of his doppelgänger tale “William Wilson” to an author he admired greatly: Washington Irving. Irving responded, telling Poe: “I have read your little tale of “William Wilson” with much pleasure. It is managed in a highly picturesque style, and the singular and mysterious interest is well sustained throughout.” Irving, who had also praised “The Fall of the House of Usher,” encouraged Poe to collect his short stories and publish them in a book.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to Poe in 1846, thanking him for the earnest criticism of his tales, concluding his letter with: “I confess, however, that I admire you rather as a writer of tales than as a critic upon them, I might often – and often do – dissent from your opinions in the latter capacity, but could never fail to recognize your force and originality in the former.” That year English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning commended Poe for his story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” noting “the power of the writer, and the faculty he has of making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar.” In the same letter, she wrote of Robert Browning’s admiration of “The Raven,” telling Poe: “I think you will like to be told our great poet, Mr. Browning, the author of “Paracelsus,” and the “Bells and Pomegranates,” was struck much by the rhythm of that poem.”
Following his untimely death in 1849, Poe was infamously defiled in America by literary anthologist Rufus Griswold in a fabricated memoir, but in France a different Poe was becoming known. In 1850, Charles Baudelaire began translating Poe’s tales to ensure France knew the magic and beauty of Poe. Shocked by the negative criticism surrounding Poe in America, Baudelaire portrayed him as an alienated artist unappreciated by his countrymen, writing in Notes Nouvelles Sur Edgar Poe: 1857: “Shall we compare our sluggish eyes and our deafened ears to those eyes which pierce the mist, to those ears which would hear the grass growing?”
Baudelaire’s acknowledgment of Poe’s genius saw Poe become a literary God-like figure in France, and it was in Poe’s essays “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of Composition” in which Stéphane Mallarmé found the literary ideals he wished to attain. In “Responses to Inquiries” Mallarmé described Poe’s writing as “magical architecture” and in “Portraits of the Next Century” called him “the absolute literary phenomenon.” After Baudelaire’s death, Mallarmé translated Poe’s poems into French, most famously “Le Corbeau” (“The Raven”) in 1875 with lithographs by distinguished artist Édouard Manet.
Baudelaire and Mallarmé’s French translations of Poe led to Paul Valéry becoming deeply immersed in Poe’s poetic principles and philosophical compositions by the age of 18. Valéry, one of the most influential poets and intellects in French history, admitted to learning how to write poetry from Poe and that Poe’s scientific and literary theories were the models upon which he founded his own ideologies. Valéry hailed Poe a “marvelous inventor” writing in “Situation de Baudelaire” that Poe’s work “presents on every page the act and exigency of an intelligence the like of which is not to be observed to the same degree in any other literary career.”
In his introduction to Three Tales of Edgar Allan Poe the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote that it was Poe’s vigorous imagination that distinguished him from all other writers: “Poe presents the whole fancied picture or events in all its details with such stupendous plasticity that you cannot but believe in the reality or possibility of a fact which actually never has occurred and even never could happen.” In a letter to illustrator W.T. Horton in 1899, iconic Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote of Poe: “A writer who has had so much influence on Baudelaire and Villiers de L’Isle Adam has some great merit. I admire a few lyrics of his extremely and a few pages of his prose, chiefly in his critical essays, which are sometimes profound.” In 1909 George Bernard Shaw hailed Poe as “the greatest journalistic critic of his time,” praising also his poetry and short tales: “There is really nothing to be said about it; we others simply take off our hats and let Mr. Poe go first.”
Poe began to garner critical praise in America in the 20th century, led by principle poet of the Imagist movement William Carlos Williams, who in 1925’s In The American Grain wrote that Poe was a genius of originality and that it was “to save our faces that we’ve given him a crazy reputation, a writer from whose classic accuracies we have not known how else to escape.”
In his 1927 essay “Wilke Collins and Dickens” T.S. Eliot wrote: “The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem.” Eliot also referred to Poe’s poetic principles in an essay on Dante. In Hawthorne, Henry James acknowledged Poe’s landmark review of Twice-Told Tales praising Poe as a critic, describing him as: “a man of genius, and his intelligence was frequently great.”
In 1950 distinguished American poet W.H Auden wrote that Poe’s tales were “masterpieces” and that Poe was so original in his story telling that his successors had all failed in any attempt to surpass him. In “The House of Poe” Richard Wilbur wrote Poe was a significant artist who advanced the short story to heights previously unattained in fiction, observing that Poe’s stories “remain the best things of their kind in our literature.”
H.P. Lovecraft’s homage to Poe in his essay “Supernatural Horror In Literature” leaves no doubt of the profound influence made upon him by the man he famously called his “God of fiction.” Lovecraft wrote a lengthy appraisal of Poe’s stories in his essay, claiming: “Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.” In his foreword for The Edgar Allan Poe Scrapbook Robert Bloch hailed Poe “the master of fantasy” admitting: “William Wilson undoubtedly peered over my shoulder as I wrote Psycho.”
The late Ray Bradbury never held back his reverence of Poe throughout his long and successful career. In an interview for the The Paris Review Bradbury was asked how early he began writing to which he responded: “It started with Poe. I imitated him from the time I was twelve until I was about eighteen. I fell in love with the jewelry of Poe. He’s a gem encruster, isn’t he?”
Horror icon Stephen King has frequently praised Poe’s works and acknowledged his influence in the horror and mystery genres, even admitting that the only two works of fiction that have scared him were William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies and Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In an essay entitled “The Genius of The Tell-Tale Heart” from 2009’s In the Shadow of the Master, King wrote: “what elevates this story above merely scary and into the realm of genius though, is that Poe foresaw the darkness of generations far beyond his own. Ours, for instance.”
Internationally acclaimed author Neil Gaiman says that Poe’s stories will always remain popular because they inspire the need for rereading. In “Some Strangeness in the Proportion: The Exquisite Beauties of Edgar Allan Poe,” Gaiman wrote: “Poe, for all his short life and unfulfilled potential, remains read today, his finest stories as successful, as readable, as contemporary as anyone could desire. Fashions in dead authors come and go, but Poe is, I would wager, beyond fashion.”
Happy 205th Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe!
© copyright Maria Nayef 2014
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