PARTISAN REVIEW
not mean this-I do not mean you should consider what I now write
you a jest-oh pity me! for I feel my words are incoherent-but I will
recover myself. You will not fail to see that I am suffering under a de–
pression of spirits which will not fail to ruin me should it be long con–
tinued. Write me then, and quickly. Urge me to do what is right. Your
words will have more weight with me than the words of others-for you
were my friend when no one else was. Fail not-as you value your peace
of mind hereafter."
These two quotations are impoverished by being extracted from
the full context of the two volumes which echoes with variety the parti–
cular notes heard here. The letters taken all together offer a melange
of self-pity, vindictiveness, hypocrisy, and rat;ionalized weakness; but
they also offer a picture of deep emotional sickness, despair, and
wounded affection. Only an angel or a fool would dare to undertake a
moral judgment. But a literary critical judgment, while ultimately moral,
exists in its own right, and the letters are illuminating from this point
of view, for they confirm what one had suspected all along: that the
ratiocinative strain which is the compelling strength in Poe's best stories
and articles ("The Mystery of Marie Roget," "The Purloined Letter,"
"The Gold Bug," "Maelzel's Chess-Player," etc.) is not the pure vein
of reasoning which it seems, but is deeply and intricately imbedded in a
widely ramified attempt at self-justification.
It has occasionally been maintained that Poe was a first-rate journal–
ist. Such a view has on its side the weighty argument that Poe did make
a success of the literary magazines with which he was associated; and
Poe's frequent and obvious vulgarity finds a ready explanation in the
duties and attitudes imposed by his journalistic work. But despite the
numerous letters in the present collection seeming to validate such an
opinion, there is a quality in Poe's ingenious and over-elaborated ex–
planations to poets whom he has reviewed unfavorably or whose work
he has rejected, as well as in the web-like flatteries of his professional
overtures to other writers that, · so far from suggesting the journalist,
impresses one as an extension of that nervous sensibility whose hysterical
heightening was observed in the two quotations above. Poe's letters, then,
record both his uncontrollable emotional collapses, and the complex,
studied rationalizations by which he tried at other times to excuse and
guard against those breakdowns, and come to working terms with so–
ciety. These two sides of his correspondence are not so much related to
each other as they are different aspects of the same thjng. Reading these
letters one begins to understand how it was possible for Poe to endow
the logic with which he wrote his best stories with an intense excitement
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