EDGAR ALLEN POE
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much to claim, I think, that his critical journalism created a
precedent for H.
L.
Mencken's
Prejudices
which for a brief time
in
the present century stirred the surfaces of literary criticism in
the United States. Perhaps it is of minor interest to observe that
both entered literary activity in New York after an earlier career
in
Baltimore, but it is true that both represented an energetic as–
pect of southern literary journalism in a strictly urban and (for
Poe at least) alien environment. Both writers were tonic 'to the
foreign scene: where Poe was ingenious and inclined to be over–
sharp and shrewish, Mr. Mencken was bass-toned and brisk, dis–
playing his wares with the arts of a side-show barker. Mr.
Mencken's advantages over his antagonists were those of quickness
in
repartee and the genial gift of a sense of humour; Poe's ad–
vantages were perhaps less readily conveyed to the eye and ear,
but they included the restless, penetrating love of learning that
is so often exhibited by the self-educated man. Both men chose
as targets for their satire the dull-witted members of the academic
profession; and in Poe's burlesque of the wretched charlatan,
The Business Man, one finds the prototype of Mr. Mencken's
"booboisie."
As one descends through all the phases of Poe's writing that
is less than his best, and these include the complimentary pieces
of verse which were written to ladies whose attention he wanted to
gain in the latter years of his life, his valentine, his
An Enigma,
his second poem addressed
To Helen
who this time was the fash–
ionable poetess, Mrs. Whitman, it should be said plainly that Poe
was more frequently the master of artifice than of art. His con–
scious skills are all too self-evident as though they were making a
desperate reach toward a world of daylight and of sanity. There
were moments when he could and did write badly, but in these in–
stances it is as difficult to charge Poe with mediocrity as it is to
defend his exhibitions of childishly defective morality and taste.
At
the very heart of his clefects, the preternaturally clear view of
childhood fears remains one proof of the "genius" he undoubtedly
possessed.
But before we find true glimpses of that genius which Poe
claimed as his own, some attention should be given to the histrionic
ability
with which he presented his more felicitous ventures into
literary criticism. There is an air of neatness, of shabby gentility,
