4- THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



solitary temper; that he never struck root in any soil and that 

 coming upon his work without the marks of authorship it 

 might be difficult to determine its locality; that there was a 

 tmich of unreality in that work and that it often lacks the deep 

 sincerity of the art that is bone of a man's bone and flesh of 

 Ins flesh ; that his talent was not nourished and warmed by a 

 large, rich humanity; that he worked habitually in phantasy, 

 so to speak, and that his men and women are phantoms and 

 the world they live in spectral; that the field of his observa- 

 tion and interest was narrow; that his prose and verse lack 

 mass, reality, passion, spirituality. 



Accept the confusion id' his life and the limitations of his 

 art: what remains?': "the singular ami exquisite genius of 

 Poe," to quote Mr. Swinburne; a reputation and influence in 

 Europe unique in its quality in the experience of American 

 poets; the record of a service to American literature in 

 criticism of high importance; a group of prose tales which 

 in originality of invention, skill in construction and perfection 

 of form place their author with the masters of the short 

 storv, and a few poems touched with the magic which wears 

 beauty like a flower that has never known tool or toil. He 

 stands beside Emerson and Hawthorne in the forefront of 

 our literature by virtue of this individual genius, this dis- 

 tinction of craftsmanship, this grace of manner. 



Do you question his right to this companionship because 

 his claim rests on songs so few and of a quality so elusive? 

 When was poetry measured by magnitude and valued by 

 weight? Does not its imponderability, its aerial grace, carry 

 it to a height to which no ardor of toil or straining of the 

 muscles can rise?' flow little there is of Keats and how 

 securely Ins kinship with the greater English poets rests on 

 that group of odes and sonnets? How often Emerson came 

 with serene and smiling face to the temple; how rarely he 

 brought the gods the gifts of immortal poetry? 



We rarely think of Poe as a critic but his work in this 

 field filled a large place in the minds of his contemporaries and 



