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“A Dream within a Dream”: T. S. Eliot on Edgar Allan Poe
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Although the writings of Edgar Allan Poe are not very extensive, his work is more difficult to sum up in a quarter of an hour than that of some men who wrote a great deal more. He did not live to be old: his life covers the first half of the nineteenth century; his life was very irregular and mostly spent in poverty; and as a literary journalist he wrote a good deal of ephemeral stuff. Even of his small output of verse, about a dozen poems are what support his reputation. Then there are his tales, as he called them, “of the grotesque and arabesque”; a few essays on the art of poetry; and a considerable amount of literary criticism, mostly of American authors of his day who are no longer read. Yet each of his kinds of writing could make the subject of an hour’s talk. His stories alone could provide several hours’ subject-matter. [They were often hurriedly written, or written under the most unfavourable conditions: some of them are very poor stuff. Yet they not only have, all of them, a characteristic stamp which no other author could have given them, but they are of varied types.] It is enough to say that in one group of these tales he anticipated some of the aims and methods of modern “detective fiction”; in others he foreshadows the modern “scientific romance” such as we find in the early work of Mr. H. G. Wells; in others he provides a link between the tales of supernatural horror of a previous generation and those of more recent times.
There is another aspect of Poe’s work which ought to be considered at length, and that is his historical importance. He carries on the romantic tradition, of Byron and Shelley, after it was fading out in England, and transforms some of its elements, and by so doing provides an influence upon the romantic movement of another generation. He spent the whole of his life in America, engaged fitfully in hack-writing for various provincial periodicals; he was in bitter opposition to most of the literary men and movements in his country; he was unpopular and underrated; his life was eccentric, his habits unsocial; he was generally disapproved of. Yet his work was quickly accepted and admired in France and various European countries; his tales were translated into French by the greatest French poet of his
Now influence is not the same thing as greatness. [A man may have an importance for his own age for reasons which are particular to that age; and the mere fact that he has influenced great writers does not in itself make him great. And when that influence is upon men writing in a different language, we may suspect that they may have seen in his work more than was actually there. And] But in the case of Poe it is particularly difficult to estimate his degree of permanent greatness apart from his great influence. To us, a hundred years after his time, a great deal in his writing seems old-fashioned to the point of absurdity; when we are grown up, his horrors no longer terrify and his wonders no longer thrill; and some of his poems seem hardly better than nonsense jingles. Yet there remains something unique, which is the contribution of Poe, which makes the world different from what it would be if we had never read him. [And what makes it more baffling is that we are aware of the presence of something unique, not...
