EDGAR ALLEN POE
271
the first half of the: nineteenth century is assuredly singular, and
if
as critic he performed the same services
in
opposing dull-witted
authority in the United States that 'Lewis Carroll' voiced through
Alice's lips during her adventures through wonderland and the
looking-glass in Victorian England, his situation as a poet was
no less critical, and in the worldly gaze of rival critics no less
untenable. Poe, like the then unknown Thomas Lovell Beddoes
and not unlike the youthful Longfellow and Tennyson, was a
belated arrival on the Romantic scene. In America, Longfellow's
relationship to his European contemporaries seemed more tangible,
and even more "official" than any claim that Poe might have had
to offer: while Longfellow travelled through Germany, Italy and
Spain in search of a soul that came to rest at Harvard and received
the Smith Professorship in comparative literatures, Poe's contact
with the Europe of that day was limited to the reading of British
periodicals that drifted through John Allan's commercial import–
ing house in Richmond. As Longfellow's travels increased his
reputation as an
interpret~r
of modem Europe to Harvard under–
graduates, Poe's reading in European letters-however intensive
they were or seemed
tq
be-were broadened only by his duties in
editorial offices or by the writing of book reviews. Probably the
fact that the latter half of his education was conducted in public
tended to diminish what little respect he might have earned among
the leaders of Boston's intellectual elite; certainly his disastrous
experiences at the University of Virginia and at West Point were
not of a nature to excite sympathy or understanding in the benign
circle of gifted men who had confessed their allegiance to New
England soil and were never weary of acknowledging the debt
of their educational heritage to Harvard. Viewed from their
perspective, the singularity of Poe's poetry was heightened by its
infrequency of classical image and reference; and today as then
his glory that was Greece and grandeur that was Rome must be
perceived through colors that are stained by the green tides of
the city in the sea or the Gothic fire of the Palace Metzengerstein.
Hat extremely infrequent intervals his classical images seem to
shed or to reflect a purer light, it is of Psyche who is out of favor
with her lover, or of the sexless, sky-wandering Aphrodite. We
may, I think, allow a moment of speculation to enter here, and
admit that a probable origin of Poe's angels and feminine deities
