POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 47 



limited kind; with emotions, passions, and tendencies which 

 are exceptional and abnormal; with landscapes and localities 

 which are essentially phantasmal and unreal, nol in the sense 

 of being purely imaginary, but of lying outside the range of 

 imagination creating along lines of normal activity. 



In the short story as in the short poem Poe was an artist 

 of consummate skill who enriched our literature with a little 

 group of masterpieces as distinctive and original as any tales 

 of their kind that have appeared; after the novels of Cooper 

 and the charming' essays of Irving these stories were next in 

 point of time to secure readers abroad. They made a deep 

 impression on some of the younger writers in France and 

 German}-; they were admirably translated; they gave fresh 

 impulse and direction to the art of short story writing, and 

 were the forerunnners of a brood of stories of terror, of 

 baffling invention, of intricate and subtle analysis. 



But it is by his poetry that Poe must ultimately stand or 

 fall; for in his poetry his genius and its limitations are most 

 clearly revealed. Although not in any sense a deep and 

 consistent thinker, Poe made his art a matter of constant 

 meditation, and. with the aid of Coleridge, evolved a theory 

 both of verse and of short-story writing which throw's clear 

 light on his aims and methods. The Rationale of Verse and 

 The Poetic Principle are lucid and definite in the statement 

 of that theory. Truth, he held, appealed and gave expression 

 to the intellect, passion stirred the heart, but beauty was the 

 natural speech of the soul ; beauty was. therefore, the expres- 

 sion of the deepest part of man's nature, the immortal part; 

 its presence liberated the noblest forces in him, excited the 

 highest emotions and supplied the deepest satisfactions. Un- 

 der the pressure of the need of his own soul and the recogni- 

 tion of the beautiful in the world about him man is impelled 

 to create, under the forms of art. a beauty of his own in 

 which the real and the imaginary are harmoniously blended. 

 From this creative activity truth and passion are not to be 

 excluded; but they are to be kept in strict subordination to 



