Poe--Eliot--Keats

My wife has maintained for years that Poe is second-rate, that he has a dead ear—little there but sing-song. My view of the matter is quite different, but she always insisted this is because I read—or rather heard—Poe as a child and have maintained a childish predilection for him.

Now, our daughter has the unfortunate habit of occasionally pulling a book from the shelf and flinging it across the room. This morning she did so with a book of Eliot’s criticism which happened to have landed open to the passage below, which my wife claims never to have read (altogether a co-incidence as remarkable as Augustine’s conversion):

I believe the view of Poe taken by the ordinary cultivated English or American reader is something like this: Poe is the author of a few, a very few short poems which enchanted him for a time when he was a boy, and which somehow stick in the memory. I do not think he re-reads the poems, unless he turns to them in the pages of an anthology; his enjoyment of them is rather the memory of an enjoyment which he may for a moment recapture. They seem to him to belong to a particular period when his interest in poetry had just awakened. Certain images, and still more certain rhythms, abide with him.

Though we did not read so far this morning, I see Eliot goes on to say:

Poe had, to an exceptional degree, the feeling for the incantatory element in poetry, of that which may, in the most nearly literal sense, me called ‘the magic of verse’.

This reading has more, I think to recommend it myself, than it will to her when she reads it tomorrow.

Naturally, she prefers Keats in all the very categories in which Poe seems to excel. It would be hard to argue with her.





( exampla here )