Very few men can. Given Poe's
temperament, and the problem is insoluble. He wrote to Lowell in
1844: "I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and
evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to
anything--to be consistent in anything. My life has been
WHIM--impulse--passion--a longing for solitude--a scorn of all
things present in an earnest desire for the future." It is the
pathetic confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was also a
keen analyzer, a tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he
sought and found a refuge from actuality. The marvel of his
career is, as I have said elsewhere, that this solitary,
embittered craftsman, out of such hopeless material as negations
and abstractions, shadows and superstitions, out of disordered
fancies and dreams of physical horror and strange crime, should
have wrought structures of imperishable beauty.
Let us notice the critical instinct which he brought to the task
of creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to
account for all of the facts.
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