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Show H ' A MEMORIAL TO POE H 5j " By Theodore Bonnet. t NEW set of the works of Edgar Allan Poe H was brought out In London ndt long ago. And H now com.es i the news that the people of Rich- H inond, Va., have started a movement to preserve H from destruction a building wherein Foe pub- H lished his magazine. That magazine was among 1 the failures that embittered Foe's life. The Rich- H mond movement reminds us that somewhere in H the New Testament is a verse that might be H Appropriately quoted by way of comment. It is H a verse in which the children of men are re- H buked for paying tribute to a dead prophet neg- H lected by their fathers, and told that they them- H pelves were indifferent to the living. Through M the ages this is the sin of the Philistine. In H Richmond today aro the sons of the Philistines B by whom Poe was neglected. These sons aro to H honor Poe's memory by preserving a ramshackle H building; incidentally they would enrich them- H selves, for the building is to be a show place that H will attract visitors to the town. There may be another Poe starving in Richmond, but the sons H of men do not know nor do they care. In all 1 probability if Edgar Allan Poe returned today to H realize his great dream, a magazine of his own H in which he might cultivate a love of literature, H it would fail before the' second issue. For after H all it is easier to admire a show place than to H cultivate a feeling for literature. And it would H be more profitable to preserve Foe's office than H to support his magazine. Verily as a people we H are far from realizing the dream of the great H apostle of democracy, Thomas Jefferson of the H day when like a new Greece we shall be attract- H ing to our enlightened bosom great artists and scholars and aspiring students from all ends of the earth. True, our great country abounds in H universities and Carnegie libraries, and we are B building art palaces and paying high for the best B music, but what are we doing in literature? Now B literature, is the first of the arts, the one from H which wo learn all about the others, but we have H no school where literature flourishes, no academy H to prescribe a standard. M Speaking about Poe, we are reminded that H not long ago the college professors of New Eng- M land denied him a place in our hall of fame. H The fact is that even now Poe is almost unknown H to his countrymen. Yet he needs no memorial. M His shirne in the Republic of Letters will suf- m flee. There is none more conspicuous, none to M which critics of the first rank have more zealous- M ly paid the tribute of devotion. Foe is the most M famous of all our literary men. Nowhere but in m this country has Fame neglected him. "Why? We M believe the answer has been supplied by a writer H in the London Saturday Review. "The academ- H ician," says he, "is naturally afraid of the vaga- M bond; the professor is afraid of originality even m when it is more than half a century old." Show- M ing even a keener insight, this British critic goes H on to say quoting Poe himself in reference to a M brother poet "he had the misfortune to be born m too far South;" and then this Englishman hits fl the nail squarely on the head thus: "The New B England versemakers did not like intrusions into m the snug, smug, little republic of letters where m each was assiduous to keep the other warm." M Further: M "America, unhappily, established a literary H tradition before she possessed a literature. The M channels were dug, but when a mighty tattoo M ' was struck upon the rock a very poor stream m of water flowed. Poe was torrential. There B was no keeping him in bounds. Only half B American by blood, his mind was universal. B If he belonged to any country it was to the m heaven of the Koran where Israfel sings "so INI wildly well," and if anywhere he was stranger Bp it was in the well kept groves of Boston and K ML-' Philadelphia. All this did not suit the North American reviewers. One could not laiid him on the same page with Sprague, Willis, Chan-nmg, Chan-nmg, Bancroft, Frescott, and Jenkins, and so he had to be slighted when he was not damned. If the country had no literatuie yet, it was going to have one, and it was not going to be anytning like the beautiful, awful and altogether amazing thing that was being done by the young man who could not even make a great business of his own life. All the Pilgrim Fathers would rise up in judgment against this very prodigal prod-igal son who could never be got to repent publicly pub-licly on paper of his debauches and whose celebrity celeb-rity might give the New World a bad name. All of which is so strikingly, true that one immediately concludes that the writer is no stranger to the United States. It is clear that he well knows the Puritan tradition that the "Kulchaw" of Boston, which is quite as provincial and potent as the "Kultur" of Berlin, and which persists today in imprisoning not only literature but all the arts. The Pilgrim Fathers! What a tremendous influence they have had on this country! coun-try! Indeed they are still wielding it, and it was , they that barred Poe from the Hall of Fame. But little does it mutter. His genius lives and it animates the literature of other lands. The symbolists sym-bolists of France and England are the disciples of Poe. "Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge," said Lowell, thinking thus to dispose dis-pose of Poe's claims to immortality. Somewhat different was the tribute of a greater than Lowell. Lo-well. "Some men," says Baudelaire, "have genius gen-ius written upon their forehead, and Edgar Poe was of their number." Swinburne gratefully acknowledged ac-knowledged his debt to the greatest of American literary men. Gautier lauded his genius, and according ac-cording to Charles Whibley, the London critic, "Not only was he a sombre light to the decadence; deca-dence; not only was he a guiding flame in the pathway of the mystics; he also revived the novel of adventure and lost treasure, he was an example of M. Huysmans who emulated his erudition eru-dition and to Gaboriau who cheapened his mystery." mys-tery." Whibley declares that Poe has penetrated every country in Europe, and that he is as familiar famil-iar in Spain as in Scandinavia, yet today in Boston Bos-ton Poe is known principally as the author of a poem called "The Raven," which, by the way, enabled M. Stephane Mallarme to prove his sympathy sym-pathy with the author in a set of what have been pronounced "matchless translations" in rhythmical rhyth-mical prose "so close to the original that he echoes not only the phrase but the cadence of the verse." While Poe is still neglected in his own country critics abroad are disputing as to what really was his best work. This in itself is a tribute to his genius, showing as it does the diveisity of his appeal to critical minds. According Ac-cording to a London Times critic, who has given a whole page to a discussion of the poet's genius, gen-ius, "The Raven" is not a good poem at all, and Poe's best is "The Sleeper," which is comparatively compara-tively unknown. Some critics extol him chiefly for his stories of the supernatural on account of their weird effects; others think his genius is best evidenced by the stories of mystery that Conan Doyle has tried to imitate, stories by which Poe proved that the complex is seldom profound pro-found and also demonstrated his own mastery of analysis. The fact is he touched no kind of story without making it a type for all time. Nor is Poe admired only for his fiction and his verse. His greatest achievement in the opinion of some folk was a piece of prose, "the most wonderful wonder-ful piece in the English language" it has been pronounced, pro-nounced, wonderful both for matter and manner. "The Power of Words" it is called. Yet Poe wrote some feeble English In his time, for he was writing for a living, writing under pressure when he needed the money. Now isn't it an unpleasant un-pleasant commentary on this country that a man 1 like Poe should be well nigh forgotten without teven having been discovered. 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