CHAPTER I


THE ARTIST IN WORDS


Who has not felt the weird fascination of Poe's strangely beautiful
poem "The Raven"? Perhaps on some stormy evening you have read it
until the "silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" has
"thrilled you, filled you, with fantastic terrors never felt before."
That poem is the almost perfect mirror of the life of the man who
wrote it--the most brilliant poetic genius in the whole range of
American literature, the most unfortunate and unhappy.

Poe had a singular fate. When Longfellow and Bryant and Lowell and
Holmes were winning their way to fame quietly and steadily, Poe was
writing wonderful poems and wonderful stories, and more than that, he
was inventing new principles and new artistic methods, on which other
great writers in time to come should build their finest work; yet he
barely escaped starvation, and the critics made it appear that,
compared with such men as Longfellow and Bryant, he was more notorious
than really great. Lowell in his "Fable for Critics" said:

"There comes Poe,... three fifths of him genius, and two fifths sheer
fudge."

But now, fifty years after his death, we see how great a man Poe was.
Poe invented the modern art of short story writing. His tales were
translated into French by a famous writer named Charles Baudelaire.