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PARTISAN REVIEW
floated in his imagination against the painted and domed ceiling
of a church which he visited in early childhood in Richmond,
safely escorted by his foster-parents. But for us, it is perhaps
more important to realise that his imagination had created its
world at an immeasurable distance from the Colonial classicism
of Jefferson and of New England. In this particular Poe's rela–
tionship to an American culture will always seem extraordinary;
for in general, our literary and historical imagination looks back–
ward through the neo-classic eighteenth century to an Athens that
never existed on our soil, and when it attempts to gaze into the
future, it dimly discerns with growing optimism, the seemingly
endless cycles of rebirth. In this climate, or atmosphere, or what–
ever name we wish to call it, the phenomenon of Edgar Poe is all
too likely to appear as an anomaly-and so it does until we re–
member that its emotional associations are of the secret
place~
of the heart and that they touch the springs of human failure.
In this latter view, Poe's lonely figure stands at a not too distant
call from the Herman Melville who wrote
Pierre
and the unread
Poems,
and in our day, it is not impossibly remote from the
E. A. Robinson who conceived the spiritual isolation of
The
Man
Who Died Twice.
And perhaps-although it is still too soon to
say that a similar critical uneasiness will result-we may yet
discover that the exile of Poe in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New
York was a shadowy premonition of Ezra Pound's exile in Italy.
In America no poet so widely read as Poe has left behind
him so small a number of poems on which to rest the usual vicissi–
tudes of fame. By a generous count and including the fragmentary
Politian,
the youthful and experimental
Al Aaraaf
and
Tamerlane,
the number rises to a scant half hundred. Mter his second and
third best poems have been dismissed the number that remain
is
incredibly small, but among these few Poe's imagination illumi·
nates a world that has enduring relationship to the myths and
Popular Stories of MM. Grimm (which, by the way, had been
translated into English with revalatory notes and commentaries
in 1823 and in 1826). In
The Sleeper,
and in
Romance
and
in
Lenore,
it is as though Poe had
r~.;ached
the same depths of delight
and of terror that are perceived where the sun and moon and the
night wind speak their warnings, where Rose-Bud sleeps her many
years (is it sleep or death?) within an enchanted forest. In Poe's
