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PARTISAN REVIEW
ened ego from pride of seeming singular and distinct to pride of
being among the fallen and outcast angels. This salvation from
the fate of the too·beautiful Narcissus is not merely the mutation
of a sensibility in Romantic literature, but it exists and endures
within all poetry that expresses the fulness and release of youthful
emotion; it is the obverse side of the same coin which presents
its self.identity to God or to Nature or to an amorphous vision of
mankind or to a concept, as Shelley saw it, of Platonic love.
Surely the circumstances of Poe's life nourished and enlarged
the internal conviction that he occupied a unique position in the
world; and one need go no further than Mr. Allen's able biography
to see how profoundly they shaped Poe's sensibilities in his early
life. One might almost say that his marriage to Virginia Clemm,
including his adoption of Virginia's mother, as his own, was a
decision which carried childhood with him into middle-age, and
indeed, within two years of his own death. In reading Poe, the
childhood visit to England with its sight of Gothic towers and its
glimpse of the sea's terrors during the long Atlantic voyage should
not be ignored; here one restores fragments of memory which seem
to float irresistably to the surfaces of his shorter poems. One sees
them in his "ultimate dim Thule," his "bottomless vales and bound–
less floods," his "Time-eaten towers that tremble not," his " o'er
the Past (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering," and brilliantly, his
"one bright island smile."
If
these memories were brought to
consciousness through his readings in the poetry of his day, or
reinspired through his experiments in taking drugs, their actual
sources and their "sepulchre by the sea" are definitely circum·
scribed by the first fourteen years of his life.
No poet (and indeed Wordsworth's recollections of childhood
seem positively remote compared to these) has expressed the
scenes of terror within childhood's fears with more enduring
vividness than Poe; Rainer Maria Rilke's
Kindheit
with its
"kleine
bleiche Gesicht, das sinkind aus dem Teiche schien"
has, I admit,
far more delicacy of perception into the same complex of youthful
desires and an adult sense of loss, but Poe holds his own by
associating a lack of security which is so often felt and realised
by the sensitive and unhappy child with the conviction of being
prematurely doomed, of being predestined for madness or for Hell.
In this sense, Poe's position in American literature during
