Write Up of Brasilian Novelist Moacry Sciliar by William Grimes

Moacyr Scliar, one of Brazil’s most celebrated novelists and short-story writers, whose existential allegories explored the complexities of Jewish identity in the Diaspora, died on Feb. 27, 2011 in Porto Alegre. He was 73.

The Brazilian Academy of Letters stated on its Web site (academia.org.br), that the cause was complications of a stroke.

Moacyr Scliar (pronounced Mwa-SEAR SKLEER) lived all his life in the city of Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, to which many Eastern Europeans, like his parents, immigrated in the early 20th century.

The city and its Jewish quarter, Bom Fim, provided him with inexhaustible source material, as did his own preoccupation with the predicament of Jews in Brazil. The protagonist of his best-known novel, “The Centaur in the Garden” (1980), is a Jewish centaur born to Russian immigrant parents.

At home, you speak Yiddish, eat gefilte fish and celebrate Shabbat,” he told the Yiddish Book Center in 2003. “But in the streets, you have soccer, samba and Portuguese. After a while you feel like a centaur.”

“Max and the Cats,” about a Jewish youth who flees Nazi Germany on a ship carrying wild animals to a Brazilian zoo and, after a shipwreck, ends up sharing a lifeboat with a jaguar, achieved fame twice over. Critically praised on its publication in 1981, it touched off a literary storm in 2002 when the Canadian writer Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize for “Life of Pi,” about an Indian youth trapped on a boat with a tiger.

Mr. Martel’s admission that he borrowed the idea led to an impassioned debate among writers and critics on the nature of literary invention and the ownership of words and images.

“In a certain way I feel flattered that another writer considered my idea to be so good, but on the other hand, he used that idea without consulting me or even informing me,” Mr. Scliar told The New York Times. “An idea is intellectual property.”

Moacyr Jaime Scliar was born in March 23, 1937, in Porto Alegre. His parents, who emigrated from Bessarabia in 1919, gave him a Brazilian Indian name in a nod to their new cultural surroundings. After attending both Yiddish and Roman Catholic schools, he obtained a medical degree in 1962 and practiced in the public health service until retiring in 1987.

He is survived by his wife, Judith, and a son, Roberto.

He came to public attention with his second collection of short stories, “The Carnival of the Animals,” whose intertwining of allegory, fable, fantasy and folklore and Borges-like excursions into metafiction, marked him as a distinctive new fictional voice.

“The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar,” rendered into English by his longtime translator Eloah F. Giacomelli, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1999.

In many of his novels, Mr. Scliar places a Jewish Brazilian protagonist in a dangerous, bewildering world whose external complexities reverberate in the hero’s interior journey of self-discovery. “The War in Bom Fim” (1972), for example, describes the coming of age of a young Jew in Porto Alegre during World War II and the pull of Zionism.

The central character of “The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes” (1983) discovers that he is Jewish after finding his late father’s mysterious notebooks, which trace the family’s history back to Jonah.

“I owe to my Jewish origins the permanent feeling of wonderment that is inherent to the immigrant and the cruel, bitter and sad humor that through the centuries has served to protect Jews against despair,” Mr. Scliar told the reference work World Authors in 1991. “It is at the level of language, however, that these impulses are able to produce their effects. It is in language that I have faith, as a vehicle for aesthetic expression and also — and above all else — as an instrument for changing the world in which we live.”

Credits:  This article first appeared in 2011 in The New York Times.  It has been edited slightly for clarity.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

Marisa Merz

Until you perceive the extreme loneliness of flannel,

And rub your hands on the paint smacked brick walls,

Until you ponder the sad, square eyes of motels,
And the vinegar streaked sunsets,

When you are at the mercy of soups and kitchens,
And see yourself in the rucksack grandmothers,

When you consider under a microscope the ubiquity of cash registers,
But fail to monitor how one hand washes the other,

And you keep company with the marooned apartment cats,
And share the Purina One and the litter box,

When you understand you will perform a miracle every day,
When you finally get the artistry of lighting a match in strong winds,

When you live the purgatory of a five-story walkup,
When you suffer the pensive handshake of a stuck doorknob,

And survive years and years of emotional defenestration,
And never lose faith in the shamanistic properties of library cards,

And your body treats you like an unwanted tenant,
And you do the best that you can,

Until the stars come home,
Until God knows when.

Letter to Denise

by

Hayden Carruth

Wharton Escherik

Remember when you put on that wig

From the grab bag and then looked at yourself

In the mirror and laughed, and we laughed together?

It was a transformation, glamorous flowing tresses.

Who knows if you might not have liked to wear

That wig permanently, but of course you

Wouldn't. Remember when you told me how

You meditated, looking at a stone until

You knew the soul of the stone? Inwardly I

Scoffed, being the backwoods pragmatic Yankee

That I was, yet I knew what you meant. I

Called it love. No magic was needed. And we

Loved each other too, not in the way of

Romance but in the way of two poets loving

A stone, and the world that the stone signified.

Remember when we had that argument over

Pee and piss in your poem about the bear?

"Bears don't pee, they piss," I said. But you were

Adamant. "My bears pee." And that was that.

Then you moved away, across the continent,

And sometimes for a year I didn't see you.

We phoned and wrote, we kept in touch. And then

You moved again, much farther away, I don't

Know where. No word from you now at all. But

I am faithful, my dear Denise. And I still

Love the stone, and, yes, I know its soul.

Figurative North Topeka

by Eric McHenry

for Ben Lerner

Derivative graffiti crawls
up the overpass like ivy—
abstract names on concrete stanchions.
To the south, symbolic walls:
NO OUTLET signs along the levee,
idle river, idle tracks,
bypass, bluffside and the backs
of Potwin’s late Victorian mansions,
flush like book spines on a shelf.
Drunk on your late-Victorian porch
you promised me that if elected
you’d have the river redirected
down Fourth Street, to make Potwin search
North Topeka for itself.

I told you to retire Ad Astra
Per Aspera and put For God’s
Sake Take Cover on the state
seal and flag—the license plate
at least, since we collect disaster
and loss like they were classic rods:
’51 Flood; ‘66 Tornado.
Even the foot-lit Statehouse mural
has a sword-bearing Coronado,
a Beecher’s Bible-bearing Brown
and a tornado bearing down
on its defenseless mock-pastoral,
The Past. The present was still wet
when the embarrassed legislature
resolved that it would never let
John Steuart Curry paint the future.
He never did, although Topekans
would learn to let bygones be icons.

On Thursday, July 12, the rain
relented and the water rose,
darkened and stank more. The stain
is just shy of the second story
in what used to be Fernstrom Shoes.
That entire inventory
spent five nights underwater, gaping
like mussels on the riverbed.
Fernstrom spent the summer scraping
gobs of septic-smelling mud
out of eleven thousand toes.

On Friday the 13th, the Kaw
crested at thirty-seven feet.
They thought it might have cut a new
channel down Kansas Avenue.
One Capital reporter saw
a kid reach up from his canoe
and slap the stoplight at Gordon Street.

Porubsky’s never did reclaim
its lunchtime customers; the torrents
sent the Sardou Bridge to Lawrence
and there was no more Oakland traffic.
Business hasn’t been the same
for fifty years now. Fifty-two.
Ad astra per aspera: through
the general to the specific.
You do what you want to do
but I’m not using North Topeka
in conversation anymore,
because there is no north to speak of;
there’s only mud and metaphor.

Credits:  "Figurative North Topeka" was originally published in 2004 in Slate.  

McHenry is the author of Potscrubber Lullabies, Mommy, Daddy, Evan Sage, Odd Evening.  He was poet laureate of Kansas from 2015-2017.  He has won several distinguished awards. 

The Short, Sad Story of Stanwix Melville by Christopher Benfey

“Melville’s second son, Stanwix, was born a few weeks after the publication of Moby-Dick. He is a puzzle…”
—Elizabeth Hardwick, Herman Melville

Martin Bloch

“I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of the man.”

—Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener"

I was teaching “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to a dozen undergraduates on a cold November morning, all of us a little haggard after an unexpected Halloween snowstorm. Distractedly, I glanced across the page to the editor’s headnote, and settled on these words: “Their second son, Stanwix… was found dead in a San Francisco hotel in 1886.” I found myself thinking what a strange name Stanwix was, more like a commercial brand than a given name. Stanwix: When Kleenex Isn’t Enough. And what, I wondered, was Stanwix found dead of? Did he blow his brains out, or was that another of Melville’s star-crossed sons? During the days that followed, I began to assemble a few stray notes on Stanwix. I was following a thread, as I imagined it. And yet, the thread didn’t seem to lead out of a maze, like Ariadne’s, but farther into it.

I assumed that Stanwix—one of those “lesser lives” that, as Diane Johnson has pointed out, don’t feel any less to those living them—had been accorded a very small place in Herman Melville’s biography, which turned out to be true. But I wanted to stave off this kind of limitation in my own thinking. For this reason, the book I most consulted, or rather wandered around inside, was Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log (1951). During the 1930s, Leyda had traveled to Moscow to work with the great filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. On his return, he wrote the standard history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Leyda tried to get a foothold in film production, but he was blacklisted in Hollywood. Unemployed, he took up a project initially conceived as a birthday gift for Eisenstein, a Melville enthusiast: a collage, or montage, of the known documents of Melville’s life. Leyda wanted to give each reader the chance “to be his own biographer of Herman Melville.” Later, Leyda did something similar in The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960).

It was during the centenary of Dickinson’s death, in 1986, that I first came to know Leyda, a shy and formal man, when he was an emeritus professor of film at NYU. The floor of his apartment was covered at the time with documents, assembled for an expanded version of The Melville Log, undertaken with the Melville scholar Hershel Parker. I told Leyda how much I admired an article that he had published, in 1953, about one of the Irish servants in the Dickinson household, Margaret Maher.

It occurs to me now that my pursuit of Stanwix, another obscure life lived on the margins of fame, resembles Leyda’s work on “Miss Emily’s Maggie.” I imagine myself crawling around on Leyda’s apartment floor, searching among the piles of documents for stray mentions of Stanwix.

“Small and thin,” Stanwix Melville was born on October 22, 1851, between the British publication of Melville’s sixth novel, under the title The Whale, on October 18, and its American publication, about three weeks later, as Moby-Dick. The novel itself is notably careful about naming: Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck. Call me Stanwix.

Stanwix was burdened with a name linked to an illustrious ancestor. In 1777, at a pivotal moment in the American Revolution, forces under the command of Peter Gansevoort held off a siege by British troops at Fort Stanwix, a star-shaped fort built around 1758, in upstate New York, under the direction of the British General John Stanwix. Gansevoort was Herman Melville’s grandfather. And yet, at the time that Gansevoort defended it, Fort Stanwix had already been renamed Fort Schuyler, for an American general. Melville’s choice for his son’s name seems perversely self-defeating. Why wasn’t Stanwix named Schuyler, a good Dutch name like Gansevoort, for the victors?

A hundred years later, Herman Melville stopped by the luxurious Gansevoort House in Greenwich Village, and casually asked about the origins of the name. “A wealthy landholder in the area,” came the response. The hero of Fort Stanwix, forgotten! “The dense ignorance,” Herman fulminated in a letter to his mother, “of this solemn gentleman,—his knowing nothing of the hero of Fort Stanwix, aroused such an indignation in my breast, that, disdaining to enlighten his benighted soul, I left the place without further colloquy.”

On Stanwix’s birth certificate, in the spaces reserved for the newborn child’s parents, Herman Melville signed his name, as required, and then, unaccountably, the name of his own mother. While Stanwix was nursing, his mother, Elizabeth Shaw Melville, developed a painful inflammation in her breast. Hershel Parker speculates that sexual deprivation likely ensued for Herman Melville. The more obvious deprivation was Stanwix’s, whose early weaning entailed both a loss of intimacy with his mother and, presumably, a diminished resistance to disease later in life.

A childhood photograph from around 1860 shows a pale, thin, unsmiling boy, with an oversized, almost clownish, bowtie. “Papa took me to the cattle show grounds to see the soldiers drill,” Stanwix wrote his aunt on June 20, 1861, “but we did not see them, because one of the factories was on fire, it was too bad. But papa took me [on] a ride all through the Cemetary.” Soon, the whole country was taking a ride through the cemetery.

In 1863, the Melville family left its “square, old-fashioned” (Stanwix’s adjectives) home in Pittsfield, Western Massachusetts, and moved to New York City, where Herman took a modest position in the Custom House. His novels, especially Moby-Dick, had been ridiculed by reviewers and ignored by readers. Henceforth, he would be a poet, as he embarked on his long, gloomy epic poem, Clarel.

In 1867, with the Civil War a recent memory, Stanwix’s older brother, Malcolm, joined a volunteer regiment. He was so smitten with his pistol that, according to a newspaper report (citing Stanwix), he slept with it under his pillow. Malcolm returned from a party at three o’clock one morning. He slept late. Let him sleep, said his father, and be punished at work for his tardiness. In the evening, when Herman came home, they broke down the bedroom door. The boy was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head. “Mackie never gave me a disrespectful word in his life,” his father declared, “nor in any way ever failed in filialness.”

In 1869, Stanwix announced that—like his father before him—he wanted “to go to sea, & see something of the great world.” Augusta Melville, Herman’s sister, added: “Herman & Lizzie have given their consent, thinking that one voyage to China will cure him of the fancy.” (One voyage did not cure Herman Melville of his fancy.) On April 4, the Yokohama, with seventeen-year-old Stanwix aboard, sailed for Canton. He wrote from Shanghai a few months later. Life at sea agreed with him, he said. A few weeks later, news reached his family that he had jumped ship in England. “What have you heard of Stanwix Melville [and] from what point did he run away?” asked one of Herman’s cousins. Suddenly, unannounced, Stanwix showed up in Boston, “much taller & stouter.”

In 1871, Stanwix was off again, to a small town in Kansas. Searching for work, he drifted down through Indian lands, followed the Arkansas River to the Mississippi, and arrived in New Orleans. “I found that a lively city, but no work,” Stanwix wrote, “so I thought I should like a trip to Central America, I went on a steamer to Havana, Cuba & from there to half a dozen or more ports on the Central America coast till I came to Limon Bay in Costa Rica.” Buoyed by rumors that a canal was soon to be cut through Nicaragua, he set out on foot from Limon Bay, “I walked from there on the beach with two other young fellows to Greytown in Nicaragua, one of the boys died on the beach, & we dug a grave in the sand by the sea, & buried him, & travelled on again, each of us not knowing who would have to bury the other before we got there, as we were both sick with the fever & ague.”

Having avoided a grave by the sea, Stanwix almost found a grave in the sea. He joined a surveying expedition on a schooner charting potential sites for the canal. “I got wrecked there in that heavy gale of wind,” he wrote. “and I lost all my clothes, & every thing I had, & was taken sick again with the fever, I went into the hospital there, & then came home on the Steamer Henry Chauncey, where I find the cold weather agrees with me much better, than the fun of the tropics.” Stanwix concluded: “Now I say New York forever.” But he discovered, like Bartleby, that failing eyesight was a “serious obsticle” to office work. And besides, he wrote, “I don’t like to be a clerk in an office.” (Bartleby: “No, I would not like a clerkship; but I am not particular.”) He sailed for California.

“He seems to be possessed with a demon of restlessness,” Stanwix’s mother remarked. But his real demon was motionlessness. After eighteen months in California, Stanwix reports: “I am still stationary.” After Bartleby’s employer suggests that he might consider “going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation,” Bartleby replies, “I like to be stationary.” To which his exasperated employer responds: “Stationary you shall be then.” Published two years after Stanwix’s birth, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” could not be based on Stanwix. But could Stanwix be based on Bartleby? Could Herman Melville, the distant, depressed father, have helped create the conditions for a Bartleby?

In 1876, Stanwix begged his half-uncle Lem for money. “There is a party of five or six of us that are going to start for the Black Hills country about the middle or last of January two of them who were there before & were doing well until driven away by the Indians, & I am going with them if I can get this money.” Then he added, presumably afraid of his father’s reaction, “Do not let anyone know of my intentions to go to the Black Hills.”

In the San Francisco directory, for April 1879, there is a listing for “Melville Stanislaus, canvasser.” Stanwix-Stanislaus was rounding up votes, for pay. Bartleby is evicted from his law-office lodgings on Election Day, and is consigned, fatally, to the Tombs.

Stanwix Melville died on February 22, 1886, age thirty-four, presumably of tuberculosis. So much was taken away during his short life: his mother, his namesake, his brother, his eyesight, his employment (many times), his health, his life. On March 16, his aunt Helen Griggs wrote to her cousin Catherine Lansing:


It is sad indeed to have had Stannie die away from home. But it seems he had a friend, who did all he could to make him comfortable, and there was money enough to procure all that was necessary for his comfort. It is sad enough; but it might have been worse, since there is so much consolation for his poor mother.

Ah me. The sorrows that lie round our paths as we grow older!

Ah Stanwix. Ah humanity.

Credits:  This article was originally published in 2010 in The New York Review of Books.  

As if haunted by a raging dark angel

by

Herbert Leibowitz

Theodore Roethke had a singular, almost fanatical fidelity to poetry. Like Dylan Thomas, he “drank his own blood, ate of his own marrow to get at some of the material of his poems.” The unfolding of his lyric genius was slow, harried, stumbling, but irreversible. In the greenhouse of childhood memories — a jungle and a paradise he called it — he discovered his lifelong subject matter: the mysterious shooting out of green life from the rich and rank fetor of dying.

From “The Lost Son” to “The Far Field” he wrote poems of an imperious and unnerving need, as though haunted by some raging “dark angel” in his mind and pulled by Invisible undertows to the edge of nonbeing. He was uncannily alive to, and attracted by, a dark kingdom of slugs, molds, worms and stones where the will was nearly extinguished. Yet he was as attentive as Thoreau at Walden Pond to the swelling bud. He would slide downward to “primeval sources” in order to leap upward into the “realm of pure song” where in mystical jubilation “all finite things reveal infinitude.” His spirit waited for the premonitory tremors that announced a resumption of motion, a waking to light and force.

Marguerite Blasingame

At his death in 1963 Roethke left 277 notebooks in which he had jotted down, for 20 years, fragments of verse, aphorisms, elliptical injunctions to himself, remarks about teaching poetry, reveries and random observations (surprisingly few and mild) about other poets. The notebooks evidently served Roethke as a verbal compost heap. He would on occasion raid it for lines and images and graft them onto his current work.

David Wagoner, the poet who selected and grouped the extracts that compose “Straw for the Fire,” suggests that Roethke didn't use the material because “he was sometimes dealing with material too painful to complete” and “he loved incompleteness, perhaps because it represented a promise that he would never exhaust himself.” In some of the passages of verse, there is a sense of the cadences and urgent themes, “the steady storm of correspondences,” that held him to the end of his career:

All things rolling away from me,

All shapes, all stones,

My face falling from itself,

Sunken like cratered snow,

My voice, lost, a lark

Grating like a jay.

As for you assassin of air,

Noise in the topmost tree,

Articulated despair,

The inhuman ecstasy:

My lament to the last; unloved...

More likely, though, the material did not meet Roethke's high artistic standards. For the melancholy fact is that there is very little here that is not more eloquently said in the “Collected Poems” and in “On the Poet and His Craft.” Wagoner imposes order on Roethke's anarchic entries, but the effect, even to an admirer of the poems, is exasperatingly tedious. Roethke's sense of humor, theatricality and burly charm vanish for long stretches.


What in the poems and essays is intense and deep, if somewhat narrow — his “love for the bottoms, the fell last roots of things” — is in the “Notebooks” flat‐footed: “I must learn that we must die.” “Intuition is one of our classic and great methods of learning.” “At least I have a sense of evil: that's more than most possess.” What is the purpose of exhuming such dull sayings?

The reader who turns to the “Notebooks” for help in unriddling Roethke the man who struggled for deliverance from himself will find only a scattering of clues. He is shy and oblique in talking about his childhood or disclosing his inner concerns. Nor do we learn how Roethke's poems grew out of such unpromising mulch, how such damp straw could ignite any fire. Perhaps it did. But to read these ramblings is to examine a torn papyrus and guess at its meanings. We need a study of Roethke's drafts and revisions that will trace and explain the leaps and advances of his imagination.

There is an intricate simplicity and directness to Roethke's finest lyrics and sequences—“I would with the fish, the blackening salmon, and the mad lemmings,” “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,” (“Elegy for Jane”) In one entry in the “Notebooks” he declares “I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.” This is the truth he lived for. Poetry, his chaste goddess, could temporarily quell the insecurities of self, the fears and suffering, the anguished separateness and longing for oneness. 

Credits:  This article was originally published in 1972 in The New York Times; it has been edited slightly for clarity.

A Talking Bird is a Most Natural Thing

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (April 1896)

It is nearly fifty years since the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and his writings are now for the first time gathered together with an attempt at accuracy and completeness. The alleged reason for this indifference to the claims of a writer who has received almost universal recognition is that the literary executors of Dr. Rufus B. Griswold, Poe's first editor, held until recently the copyright to his works. But in reading the various memoirs of which, at one time or another, Poe has been the subject, it appears that other causes have been at work. One and all, even the most flattering estimates of Poe's genius, are pervaded by a curious antipathy to him as a man, and this prejudice, no doubt, has been largely responsible for the absence of any serious demand on the part of the public for a fair representation of the author in his works. A part of the disfavor with which Poe is regarded is due to Dr. Griswold's biography; for of all men Poe had best reason to pray that he might be delivered from the hands of his friends. But still more is chargeable to the extraordinary confusion of the man with his work--of the ethical with the purely literary aspect--which is so characteristic of literary judgments in this country.

This puritanical tang is to be detected even in a study so conscientious as the Memoir by Professor Woodberry, which occupies the opening pages of the first volume of the new edition. However, unlike his predecessor, Professor Woodberry has not allowed his lack of sympathy with his subject to interfere with the precision of his editing. Every care has been given to the preparation of the text and the notes. Whenever obtainable, the exact date of publication of the various papers has been ascertained, as well as other facts of interest regarding them, although no new light is thrown upon the source of Poe's inspiration.

Benjamin Lacombre

Besides the Memoir by Professor Woodberry, the Tales, Criticisms, and Poems are severally preceded by a critical introduction by Mr. E.C. Stedman. These essays are distinguished by a very just appreciation of the merits and demerits of Poe as a writer. In effect, Mr. Stedman pronounces him a critic of exceptional ability, and agrees with the opinion of Mr. James Russell Lowell that Poe's more dispassionate judgments have all been justified by time. As a story-writer, Mr. Stedman considers that Poe's achievement fell short of his possibilities; he lacked the faculty of observation of real life, a defect for which his unique imaginative power in part compensated, but which will prevent his being classed among the greatest writers of fiction of his century. These qualities, however, appear in their proper aspect when he is regarded as a poet; they then fall into their right relation to his work, and are seen to have made him what he was, a master in his chosen field.

The imaginative illustrations have scarcely the quality of Poe's own creative genius, but the edition is well supplied with portraits of Poe, his wife, and his mother, as well as interesting views of places with which Poe's name is associated.

This edition is supposed to include all of Poe's writings which are of value. The Elk is here reprinted for the first time, while The Landscape Garden and The Pinakidia, a collection of quotations which struck Poe as important or suggestive, are omitted. Whatever may be thought of the omission of the first paper, that of the second is surely an error. It is conceded that not more than a half dozen of the tales, less than that number of the critical essays, and not all of the poems are of interest to the public at large. The sole reason, therefore, for publishing a complete edition of the works of Poe, as of any other writer, must be to increase the facilities for the student of the particular period in which he lived. To exclude writings in which an author has recorded the influences, however slight, which have moulded his thought is plainly to eliminate the chief reason for the compilation of such an edition. In this case, it amounts to an assumption on the part of editors and publishers alike that the last word in regard to Poe has been said. But as yet we have had no critical history of the intellectual development in this country during the past century. There remains, therefore, for the student of Poe's life and times, a field of research practically unexplored; and as long as this is the case it is impossible to form any conclusions in regard to him which can be considered final.

For Poe was essentially the product of his time. The intellectual activity which characterized the educated class in this country before 1860 was no sporadic instance, but the logical result of influences which belong to universal history. For example, when Goethe made his discovery of the unity of structure in organic life, it gave to the philosophers a physiological argument for the suppression of tyrants, and put the whole of creation on an equal footing. The French Revolution pointed the moral most effectually, and to the dullest mind brought a host of new deductions. These deductions necessarily involved a realization of the dignity and value of the individual, whether man or beast, and presented life in an entirely new aspect.

To us Americans these ideas came filtered through the mind of Coleridge, vivified by his enthusiasm. They found a fertile soil, and resulted in a growth of new ideas so vigorous and rapid that a kind of explosion of righteousness took place, which effectually and permanently upset some ancient and picturesque notions of might and right.

The so-called Transcendentalists of New England were the most conspicuous result of this new enthusiasm for the individual. In spite of his scorn for their pretensions, Edgar Allan Poe, in his way, was as deeply affected by the enthusiasm as the most radical among them. He was not, indeed, a reformer in the ordinary sense; he remained always, so to speak, just within the outer fringe of this new humanist movement. Its effect upon him was purely psychologic and the human mind became, in his estimation, a treasure-house of undreamed-of possibilities, which was but the poet's version of the value of the individual. Yet he was no more conscious of this than he was that Goethe's researches in natural history actuated him when, in imitation of Coleridge, he humanized his redoubtable raven. His mind was like a mirror in the precision with which it reflected the prevailing tendencies of his time, and with no more intention. The effect of Coleridge's influence on Poe has never been properly estimated. Professor Woodberry, it is true, accuses him of "parroting Coleridge," while Mr. James Russell Lowell also pointed out Poe's great indebtedness to him. Both critics, however, failed to appreciate the extent of this indebtedness. Not only did Coleridge exert a general influence, which Poe shared with every other man of letters in this country, but he transmitted a special and unique influence to him alone. This had already made of Coleridge a great poet, while to it Poe owes the tardy measure of fame which has been accorded him.

One aspect of the general influence which Coleridge exerted upon Poe is curiously exemplified in his poems from the time that he began to write. Coleridge was among the first to humanize nature. It was a fashion of the day, and a part of those tendencies of thought already briefly indicated. It arose, probably, from a haziness as to the limitations of self-consciousness. But whatever its cause, the idea strongly affected the poets, and animals, birds, plants, and insects were given human attributes, or were made to symbolize all kinds of abstractions. "Christabel," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and many of the political poems, such as "The Destiny of Nations"and "The Raven," are evidence of the attraction this notion possessed for Coleridge.

It apparently suited as well Poe's mystical turn of mind. "The Raven" is, of course, the most conspicuous instance, and in the Philosophy of Composition Poe assumes that a talking bird is the most natural thing in the world. In his so-called Juvenile Poems, printed about 1831, thirteen years before "The Raven" was published, he already makes use of birds as symbols of Nemesis or Destiny, and many of the passages are nearly identical in thought with some of Coleridge's lines. That Poe was familiar with the writings of Coleridge at that time is shown by his eulogistic reference to him in the preface to this early edition of his poems. The special influence which Coleridge had upon Poe relates to the development of his own poetical genius, and, to be understood, requires a short digression from the main subject.

About 1773, Gottfried August Bürger, a poor student at Göttingen, wrote a ballad under the title of "Lenore." The composition of this ballad was due to Herder's famous appeal to the poets of Germany for the development of a national spirit in poetry. "Lenore"was modeled upon the ancient ballad forms as Bürger found them in the collections of Bishop Percy, Motherwell, and Ossian. From these and other relics of folk-songs, as well as from the study of Shakespeare, he evolved a theory as to the requirements of a poem which should endure,--a poem, in short, which should possess a universal, and therefore a national interest. The ballad was written in strict accord with the theory, and its success justified its author's conclusions. It was sung and recited by all classes throughout Germany, and its author, according to Madame de Staël, was more famous than Goethe. The poem was translated into nearly every language. In England it had seven different translators, among them Sir Walter Scott and Pye the poet laureate. It was set to music in many forms, and is said to have inspired The Erl King of Schubert. To the artists it was equally suggestive. Ary Scheffer and Horace Vernet both painted pictures which had for their subjects some episode in the poem, while two of the greatest illustrators of the day, Maclise and Bartolozzi, found it worthy of their best efforts.

Nor did the poets escape its influence. In England, Keats, Shelley, Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth either imitated or were inspired by it. Coleridge and Wordsworth were of all most deeply affected by its influence. From the evidence at hand it is apparent that the two poets based their famous new departure in poetry upon Bürger's poetic theory, which had been formulated in the preface to the second edition of his volume containing Lenore; also, that Coleridge's greatest poems, including "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel," were its direct result. It is this theory which is the foundation of Poe's Philosophy of Composition, and Poe was the third poet to be made famous by the careful application of it to his work. It is a striking confirmation of these facts that the productions in which Poe most faithfully conformed to the rules laid down by Burger are of all his writings those which have been considered by the critics as best worth preserving.

The famous theory whose effects have been so far-reaching is extremely simple. It is based upon a fundamental principle of aesthetics, that art, to endure, must deal with experiences common to all men. Simplicity of phrase, the narrative form, the refrain, and particularly the use of the supernatural are the ancient and essential means for the accomplishment of this end.

Bürger's poems were well known in this country before 1840, but Poe undoubtedly received his knowledge of the theory from Madame de Staël and from The Lyrical Ballads. This, it will be remembered, is the volume of poems whose publication in 1798 marked the apostasy of Wordsworth and Coleridge from the classic models. In the appendix to the second edition their reasons are set forth at length, and Bürger's ideas are referred to with enthusiasm. It is this explanation which Poe quotes in the introduction to his Juvenile Poems. The succession therefore, is uninterrupted: Bürger formulated his theory in the essay prefixed to the edition of his poems published in 1778; Coleridge and Wordsworth applied it and quoted it in The Lyrical Ballads in 1800; while Poe, in his turn quoted it, as adopted by Wordsworth and Coleridge, in the preface to the edition of his poems in 1831, and finally by its complete application made the chief success of his life.

It is clear from this that Poe was far from being the literary mountebank he is generally pictured. From his earliest youth he seems to have been actuated by a unity of purpose, an unswerving application of proven means to a desired end, which indicates in him the possession of qualities that are even Philistine, so respectable are they. As for Poe's weaknesses, some day, perhaps, they may find a critic such as François Villon found in Stevenson, and Coleridge in Walter Pater, who will judge them together with his genius as alike the expression of a nature too keenly responsive to the exigencies of life.

In the mean time, satisfactory as the new edition of Poe's works undoubtedly is to the general reader, we shall hope it may some day be supplemented by the republication of the papers now omitted, with the suggestion of new light to be thrown upon the tendencies of the period in which Poe lived.

Credits: This article first appear in The Atlantic Monthly.