point of view, must be regarded not only as the most interesting, which
he wrote, but as those which have had the most permanent effect upon
subsequent literature, not in England merely, but in France. These are
"Ulalume," "Annabel Lee," "For Annie." One of Poe's greatest inventions
was the liquidation of stanzaic form, by which he was able to mould it
to the movements of emotion without losing its essential structure. Many
poets had done this with the line; it was left for Poe to do it with the
stanza. In the three latest lyrics this stanzaic legerdemain is
practised with an enchanting lightness, an ecstasy of sinuous and
elastic grace. Perhaps, had it been subjected to the poet's latest
revision, "For Annie" would have been the most wonderful of all in the
sensitive response of its metre to the delicate fluctuations of
sentiment.

We may, then, briefly summarise that Poe's first claim to commemoration
is that he was the pioneer in restoring to the art of poetry a faculty
which it had almost lost in its attempt to compete with science and
philosophy. It had become the aim of the poets to state facts; it was
given to Poe to perceive that no less splendid a future lay before those
who only hinted feelings. He was the earliest modern poet who
substituted the symbol for the exact description of an object or an
event. That "expression directe," about which the French have been
debating for the last quarter of a century, and over which M. Adolphe
Retté and M. Albert Mockel periodically dispute like Fathers of the
Church, was perceived and was deliberately repudiated by Poe eighty
years ago. He was deeply impregnated with the sense that the harmony of
imagination is not destroyed, but developed, by drawing over a subject
veil after veil of suggestion. His native temperament aided him in his
research after the symbol. He was naturally a cultivator of terror, one
who loved to people the world with strange and indefinable powers. His