As if great poets ever
refrained from dealing with it! The tenure of fame depends on whether
the writer has himself become infected with sickness. With Hawthorne
this is most certainly not the case, for the morbid phases which he
studied were entirely outside of himself. Poe, on the other hand,
pictured his own half-maniacal moods and diseased fancies. There is
absolutely no study of character in his stories, no dramatic
separateness of being. He looks only for fixed and inert human
quantities, with which he may juggle at will. He did not possess
insight; and the analytic quality of which he was so proud was merely a
sort of mathematical ingenuity of calculation, in which, however, he was
extraordinarily keen. As a mere potency, dissociated from qualities, Poe
must be rated almost highest among American poets, and high among
prosaists; no one else offers so much pungency, such impetuous and
frightful energy crowded into such small compartments. Yet it would be
difficult to find a poetic fury less allied to sane human life than that
which informs his tales. It is not the _representation_ of
semi-insanity that he gives: he himself is its _representative_.
Instead of commanding it, and bringing it into some sort of healthy
relation with us, he is swayed and carried away by it. His genius
flourished upon him like a destructive flame, and the ashes that it
left, are like a deadly powdered poison. Clifford Pyncheon in the "Seven
Gables" is Poe himself, deprived of the ability to act: in both are
found the same consummate fastidiousness, the same abnormal egotism.
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