position resided in the fact that he was not admitted into so much as
the forecourt of the particular mansion inhabited by Bryant and Lowell.
There is a phrase in one of his own rather vague and "valueless" essays
(for Poe was a poor critic) which, as it were accidentally, describes
his ideal in poetry, although it is not his own verse of which he is
speaking. He described--in 1845, when his ripe genius had just brought
forth "The Raven"--the poetic faculty as producing "a sense of dreamy,
wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight." This
shadowy but absorbing and mastering pleasure impregnated his own best
writings to such a degree that it gives us the measure of his unlikeness
to his contemporaries, and states the claim of his individuality.
Without precisely knowing it or perceiving his revolution, in an age of
intelligent, tame, lucid and cautiously-defined poetry, Edgar Poe
expressed the emotions which surged within him in numbers that were,
even to excess, "dreamy, wild, indefinite and indefinable."

His early verses are remarkably exempt from the influences which we
might expect to find impressed on them. He imitated, as every man of
genuine originality imitates while he learns his trade, but his models
were not, as might have been anticipated, Coleridge and Shelley; they
were Byron and Scott. In the poetry of Byron and Scott, Poe found
nothing to transfer to his own nature, and the early imitations,
therefore, left no trace on him. Brief as is the volume of his poems,
half of it might be discarded without much regret. Scattered among his
Byron and Scott imitations, however, we find a few pieces which reveal
to us that, while he was still almost a child, the true direction of his
genius was occasionally revealed to him. The lyric "To Helen," which is
said to have been composed in his fourteenth year, is steeped in the
peculiar purity, richness and vagueness which were to characterise his
mature poems:--