An Epistle to Poe |
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Dear Edgar Allen:
Truly, sir, your mortal remains have been in the ground for a very long time. What is it? One-hundred-fifty years and some odd? A long time, Edgar. Long indeed. That being so, in writing this letter, I must address whatever aspects of you may have survived the grave – impervious, eternal, immortal elements of mind, soul, essence – however we care to name them. In doing so, I shall continue use of the name by which you were known while still wearing flesh. The question occurs: do spirits change their names in after-life? We cannot know. Hoping this will not cause offence, I will continue to call you Poe. Some of course do not believe in spirit-life. For my part, I concede that it is possible, even if unlikely. In your case, such an existence is perhaps more likely than not. There is evidence enough to say, your ghost is lively. I mean partly that during this century and a half of your physical absence, you have had many generations of readers, a host of imitators, critics, biographers near innumerable. Easy to surmise that your surviving essence might wish to hover near the scene of action to observe your long, long literary life after a shortened mortal span. Forgive these digressions. I will state my intentions and get on with my business here. I wish, in this letter, to offer comment on a score of poems from the hundred or so we have of your composition. I choose these twenty because they have seemed to me unlike the remainder. They rise above the common earth like luscious perfumes or like pungent odours. Drenched in the sensual, they are at the same time emblematic of intensely spiritual states of being. Like vague and beautiful archangels, like embodiments of hell, they inhabit regions impenetrable by others lacking your vision, your gifts. Until the French symbolists, until Stephen Crane, there were no writings on this earth even vaguely like these twenty of your best. You were, I believe the first ‘modern’ poet; certainly the first ‘original’ American writer of poems.
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