Poets of the South | Page 9

but his great fault was his neglect of and apparent contempt for
military duties. His wayward and capricious temper made him at times
utterly oblivious or indifferent to the ordinary routine of roll call, drills,
and guard duties. These habits subjected him often to arrest and
punishment, and effectually prevented his learning or discharging the

duties of a soldier." The final result may be easily anticipated: at the
end of six months, he was summoned before a court-martial, tried, and
expelled.
Before leaving West Point, Poe arranged for the publication of a
volume of poetry, which appeared in New York in 1831. This volume,
to which the students of the academy subscribed liberally in advance, is
noteworthy in several particulars. In a prefatory letter Poe lays down
the poetic principle to which he endeavored to conform his productions.
It throws much light on his poetry by exhibiting the ideal at which he
aimed. "A poem, in my opinion," he says, "is opposed to a work of
science by having for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; to
romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite
pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance
presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with in definite
sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension
of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when
combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is
simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very
definiteness." Music embodied in a golden mist of thought and
sentiment-- this is Poe's poetic ideal.
As illustrative of his musical rhythm, the following lines from _Al
Aaraaf_ may be given:--
"Ligeia! Ligeia!
My beautiful one!
Whose harshest idea
Will to
melody run,
O! is it thy will
On the breezes to toss?
Or,
capriciously still,
Like the lone Albatross,
Incumbent on night
(As
she on the air)
To keep watch with delight
On the harmony there?"
Or take the last stanza of Israfel:--
"If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He
might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note
than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky."
The two principal poems in the volume under consideration--_Al

Aaraaf_ and Tamerlane--are obvious imitations of Moore and Byron.
The beginning of Al Aaraaf, for example, might easily be mistaken for
an extract from Lalla Rookh, so similar are the rhythm and rhyme:--
"O! nothing earthly save the ray
(Thrown back from flowers) of
Beauty's eye,
As in those gardens where the day
Springs from the
gems of Circassy--
O! nothing earthly save the thrill
Of melody in
woodland rill--
Or (music of the passion-hearted)
Joy's voice so
peacefully departed
That, like the murmur in the shell,
Its echo
dwelleth and will dwell--
Oh, nothing of the dross of ours--
Yet all
the beauty--all the flowers
That list our Love, and deck our bowers--

Adorn yon world afar, afar--
The wandering star."
After his expulsion from West Point, Poe appears to have gone to
Richmond; but the long-suffering of Mr. Allan, who had married again
after the death of his first wife, was at length exhausted. He refused to
extend any further recognition to one whom he had too much reason to
regard as unappreciative and undeserving. Accordingly Poe was thrown
upon his own resources for a livelihood. He settled in Baltimore, where
he had a few acquaintances and friends, and entered upon that literary
career which is without parallel in American literature for its
achievements, its vicissitudes, and its sorrows. With no qualification
for the struggle of life other than intellectual brilliancy, he bitterly
atoned, through disappointment and suffering, for his defects of temper,
lack of judgment, and habits of intemperance.
In 1833 the Baltimore Saturday Visitor offered a prize of one hundred
dollars for the best prose story. This prize Poe won by his tale, A Ms.
Found in a Bottle. This success may be regarded as the first step in his
literary career. The ability displayed in this fantastic tale brought him to
the notice of John P. Kennedy, Esq., who at once befriended him in his
distress, and aided him in his literary projects. He gave Poe, whom he
found in extreme poverty, free access to his home and, to use his own
words, "brought him up from the very verge of despair."
After a year or more of hack work in Baltimore, Poe, through the
influence of his kindly patron, obtained employment on the _Southern

Literary Messenger_, and removed to Richmond in 1835. Here he made
a brilliant start; life seemed to open before him full of promise. In a
short time he was promoted to the editorship of the Messenger, and by
his tales, poems, and especially his reviews, he made that periodical
very popular. In a twelve-month he increased its subscription list from
seven hundred to nearly five thousand, and made the