The fine enamel of his genius is all corroded by the deadly
acid of his passions. The imperfections of his temperament have pierced
his poetry and prose, shattered their structure, and blurred their
beauty. Only four or five of his poems--"The Raven," "Ligeia," the
earlier of the two addressed "To Helen," and the sonnet to his
wife--escape being flawed by some fit of haste, some ungovernable error
of taste, some hopeless, unaccountable break in their beauty. In
criticism, Poe initiated a fearless and agile movement; he had an acute
instinct in questions of literary form, amounting to a passion, as all
his instincts and perceptions did; he had also the knack of finding
clever reasons, good or bad, for all his opinions. These things are
essential to a critic's equipment, and it was good service in Poe to
exemplify them. Yet here, too, the undermining processes of his
thoroughly unsound mind subverted the better qualities, vitiated his
judgments with incredible jealousies and conflicting impulses, and
withered the most that he wrote in this direction into something very
like rubbish. We have seen, for example, how his attempt to
dispassionately examine Hawthorne resulted. Sooner or later, too, he ran
his own pen full against his rigid criteria for others. It is suggestive
to find that the holder of such exacting doctrine about beauty, the man
also of whom pre-eminently it may be said, as Baudelaire wrote of him,
"Chance and the incomprehensible were his two great enemies," should so
completely fail to reach even the unmoral perfection which he assigned
as the highest attainable.
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