264
PARTISAN REVIEW
healthy," or "fanciful." Once the spell of Poe's charm is broken,
the more attentive and sophisticated reader offers similar objec–
tions, and phrases like those of "Romantic Decadence" and "a
will toward death" are spoken and repeated.
If
we ignore the
centrifugal powers of Poe's attraction, surely enough
The Fall
of the House of Usher
can be made to fit neatly within the bounds
of a decidedly unhealthy set of terms-and here even the word,
"morbid" would seem to understate the emotions roused by the
presence of the lady Madeline of Usher entering the room with
blood upon her shroud.
As we reread Poe at his second and third best-and here I
am thinking of his vastly overrated poems,
The Raven
and
The
Bells,
as well as such pieces in prose as
The Balloon Hoax,
his
critical essay,
The Rationale of Verse
and his burlesque,
The
Business Man
aru1
His Diddling Considered as One of the Exact
Sciences,
criticism of his taste becomes progressively more serious.
We should confess that Poe dissipated the atmosphere of what
he conceived to be his major poem by an attempt at a grim joke,
a very parody of the emotion that shocked his readers into atten·
tion of all he had to say:
Then this ebony bird beguiling my
sod
fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance
it
wore.
'Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, 'art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim
and
ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore–
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'
This was the Poe of whom Emerson remarked was "the
jingle man," the same Poe who defended his skills and paraded
his learning in
The Rationale of Verse.
In his essay (and not
unlike our contemporary, Mr. Ezra Pound) he attempted to disarm
his enemies, the schoolmasters, by a superior show of pedantry–
and this effort as we know too well, was unsuccessful. On this
level he contrived
The Bells
and the sensational report, brilliantly
written for The New York Sun, of a balloon that had crossed the
Atlantic westward in three days and landed on the shores of
Charleston, South Carolina. This was by no means a disgraceful
second best, the prose was lively and sharp, intelligent and clear.
In viewing Poe's not unremarkable second-best, it is not too
