[Wilson attempts to rescue Poe's reputation as a literary critic by focusing on the latter's development of general critical principles that explain his specific criticisms of contemporary writers.]

Poe at the time of his death in 1849, had had the intention of publishing a book on "The Authors of America in Prose and Verse." He had already worked over to a considerable extent the material of his articles and reviews; and the collection of critical writing printed by Griswold after his death is something between a journalistic chronicle like Bernard Shaw's dramatic notices and a selected and concentrated volume like Eliot's "The Sacred Grove."

Poe as a critic has points of resemblance both with Eliot and with Shaw. He deals vigorously and boldly with books as they come into his hands day by day, as Shaw did with the plays of the season, and manages to be brilliant and arresting even about works of no interest; he constantly insists, as Eliot does, on attempting, in the practice of this journalism, to formulate general principles. His literary articles and lectures, in fact, surely constitute the most remarkable body of criticism ever produced in the United States.

Henry James called it "probably the most complete and exquisite specimen of provincialism ever prepared for the edification of men." But though Poe had his share of provincialism, as all American writers did in that period, the thing that most strikes us today is his success in holding himself above it. Intellectually he stands on higher ground than any other American writer of his time. He is trying to curb the tendency of the Americans to overrate or overpraise their own books, and at the same time he is fighting a rearguard action against the over-inflation of British reputations and the British injustice to American writers; and he has also a third battle: to break down the monopolistic instincts of the New Englanders, who tended to act as a clique and to keep out New Yorkers and Southerners. On one plane Poe grapples realistically with the practical problems of writers in the United States of that time—the copyright situation and the growth of the American magazines, with their influence on literary technique; and on another plane he is able to take in the large developments of Western literature.

With his general interest in method, he has definite ideas about the procedures in a variety of departments of literature—fiction, poetry, satire, travel, criticism. And he can be elevated, ironic, analytical, as the subject in hand requires. His prose is as taut as in his stories, but it has cast off the imagery of his fiction to become simply sharp and precise—our only first-rate classical prose of this period. His mind is a livid but incandescent shaft that is leveled at the successive objects in the American literary landscape like the searchlight on the Albany night boat that picks out the houses along the Hudson; and as there we are induced to stare at even undistinguished places which have been plucked out of the darkness into a spectral intensity of relief, so here we must read even the essays on insignificant figures whose dead features the critic makes radiant even while he is speeding them to oblivion. When we have put the whole picture together, we see it as clearly—to change the figure—as the geography of a landscape on the moon under an unattainably powerful telescope. There is no other such picture in our literature.

But Poe had tweaked the beard of Longfellow and had made people laugh at a Channing, and the lurking rancor of New England seems to have worked against the acceptance of his criticism. There is an anecdote in W. D. Howells's book, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, which shows both the attitude of New England and the influence of this attitude on others. Howells had visited Boston for the first time when he was twenty-three, and he had gone to see Emerson in Concord. Poe had been dead ten years.

After dinner [says Howells] we walked about in [Emerson's] "pleached garden" a little, and then we came again into his library, where I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away. He questioned me about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had met, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of Mr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe's criticisms: cruel and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did. "Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson. "Poe's," I said again. "Oh," he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far search for my meaning, "you mean the jingle-man." I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At any rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the Atlantic Monthly.

That Emerson's opinion of Channing was not so very different from Poe's is shown by an entry in his journal for 1855:

Ellery Channing's poetry has the merit of being genuine, and not the metrical commonplaces of the magazines, but it is painfully incomplete. He has not kept faith with the reader; 'tis shamefully insolent and slovenly. He should have lain awake all night to find the true rhyme for a verse, and he has availed himself of the first one that came; so that it is all a babyish incompleteness.

The prejudice of New England against Poe was supported by the bad reputation that had been given him by Griswold's mendacious memoir. It was not so long ago that it was possible for President Hadley of Yale to explain the refusal of the Hall of Fame to admit Poe among its immortals on the ground that he "wrote like a drunkard and a man who is not accustomed to pay his debts"; and it was only last year that Professor A. H. Quinn showed the lengths to which Griswold had gone by producing the originals of Poe's letters and printing them side by side with Griswold's falsifications.

We have often been told of Poe's criticism that it is spiteful, that it is pretentious, that it is vitiated by Poe's acceptance of the sentimental bad taste of his time. In regard to the first two of these charges it must be admitted that these essays give us unpleasant moments; they do have their queer knots and wrinkles; they are neurotic as all Poe's work is neurotic; and the distortions do here sometimes throw us off as they do not do in the stories, because it is here a question of judgment, whereas in his fiction the distortion itself is the subject of the story. It is true, as Joseph Wood Krutch has said, that there is constantly felt in Poe's criticism the same element of obsessive cruelty that inspires his tales of horror. Yet in his criticism Poe does try to hold this in check—with an occasional effect of inconsistency, in judgment as well as in tone, as when he will begin by telling us that certain passages in some book he is reviewing are among the best things of their kind to be found in contemporary writing, and then go on to pick the poet to pieces slowly, coldly, and at a length of many pages. It is also true that Poe pretends sometimes, or at least sometimes lets us infer, that he has read things he has not read. The psychology of the pretender is always a factor to be reckoned with in Poe.

The child of a fascinating actress who had died when he was two years old, he had been adopted by a Scotch merchant in Richmond, brought up as a Southern gentleman, and then cast off with no job and no money at the end of his first year of college, during which his adoptive father had failed to pay even his necessary expenses, so that he could associate, as he said, "with no students except those who were in a similar situation with myself." Poe had always been in the false situation of not being Allan's son and of knowing that in the society he was bred to his parents had been déclassés; and now he was suddenly deprived of his role of a well-heeled young Southern gentleman with prospects of inheriting a fortune, and found himself a poor man with no backing who had to survive in the American Grub Street. He had the confidence of faith in superior abilities, and the reports of his work at his English school and at the University of Virginia show that he excelled as a student. But his studies had been aborted at the same time as his social career, and a shade of the uncertainty of the "gentleman" was communicated also to the "scholar." Perhaps, also, though Poe's mind was a first-rate one, there was in him a dash of the actor who delights in elaborating a part.

Out of this consciousness of being a pretender, at any rate, with its infliction of a habitual secretiveness, came certainly Poe's love of cryptograms, his interest in inventing and solving crimes, and his indulgence in concocting and exposing hoaxes. If Poe sometimes plays unavowed tricks by cheating the reader a little about what he has written or read, the imposture is still almost as gratuitous, as innocent, and as unimportant as Stendhal's disguises and aliases and his weakness for taking ladies from the provinces through Paris and misinforming them about the public monuments. And with this we must also write off Poe's rather annoying mania of accusing his contemporaries of plagiarism—a harsh name he is in the habit of brandishing to indicate borrowings and echoes of a kind which, whether more or less abject, is usually perfectly harmless. Poe himself was certainly guilty—in his imitation of chivers, for example—of borrowings equally harmless. But these, too, touched off the pretender.

As for the charge of Poe's acquiescence in the mawkish bad taste of his period, it is deserved to only a slight degree. He more often ran counter to this taste, as when he came down on Fitz-Greene Halleck; and, for the rest, his excessive enthusiasm for poets like Mrs. Osgood is attributable to the same sort of causes as, say, the praises of Bernard Shaw for the plays of Henry Arthur Jones: the writer who is potentially a master sees in the inferior writer a reflection of the kind of thing that he wants to do himself, but the possibilities of which will hardly be plain to anyone else till the master himself has made them actual.

We must recognize these warpings of Poe's line; but we must not allow them as serious impugnments of the validity of his critical work. His reading was wide and great, and his culture was derived from a plane of the world of thought and art which had hardly been visited by Longfellow with his patient persistent transposition of the poetry of many lands and ages into terms of his own insipidity or by Lowell with his awful cosy titles for his collections of literary essays: My Study Windows and Among My Books. The truth is that literary America has always resented in Poe the very superiority which made him so quickly an international figure.

He may have been a difficult person, though certain people seem to have got on very well with him; but it seems hard to explain the virulence with which Griswold pursued him after his death and the general hostility toward him which has haunted us ever since, except on the ground that he puts us out by making so much of our culture seem second-rate. In our childhood we read "The Gold Bug" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and everybody knows "Annabel Lee" and "Ulalume" and "The Bells" and "The Raven"; but Poe is not, as he is with the French and as he ought to be with us, a vital part of our intellectual equipment. It is rare that an American writer points out, as Waldo Frank once did, that Poe belongs not with the clever contrivers of fiction like O. Henry and S. S. Van Dine but, in terms of his constricted personality, with the great inquiring and versatile minds like Goethe. So that it is still worth while to insist on his value.

In the darkness of his solitary confinement Poe is still a prince.