And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has
seen that man before, in "The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows." All of
them would find in him something to praise, a great deal to
marvel at, and perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive,
shabby, lonely Poe--what would he think of them? He might not
care much for the other guests, but I think he would say to
himself with a thrill of pride: "I belong at this table." And he
does.
Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the "good gray
poet," offers a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was
nothing distinctively American about Poe except his ingenuity; he
had no interest in American history or in American ideas; he was
a timeless, placeless embodiment of technical artistry. But
Whitman had a passion for his native soil; he was hypnotized by
the word America; he spent much of his mature life in brooding
over the question, "What, after all, is an American, and what
should an American poet be in our age of science and democracy?"
It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of the average citizen
of "these states.
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