re for the future." It is the pathetic
confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was also a keen analyzer,
a tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he sought and found
a refuge from actuality. The marvel of his career is, as I have said
elsewhere, that this solitary, embittered craftsman, out of such
hopeless material as negations and abstractions, shadows and
superstitions, out of disordered fancies and dreams of physical horror
and strange crime, should have wrought structures of imperishable
beauty.

Let us notice the critical instinct which he brought to the task of
creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account
for all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth
but pleasure--the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be
brief, indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain
quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst
for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true
type of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more
readily to auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's
chosen audience. For them he executes, like Paganini, marvels upon his
single string. He has easily recognizable devices: the dominant note,
the refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the phrase which echoes,
with some variation, a phrase or line already used. In such poems as "To
Helen," "Israfel," "The Haunted Palace," "Annabel Lee," the theme, the
tone, the melody all weave their magic spell; it is like listening to a
lute-player in a dream.

That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In "The Bells"
and "The Raven" we detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though
such juggling as only a master-musician can perform. In "Ulalume" and
other showpieces the wires get crossed and the charm snaps, scattering
tinsel fragments of nonsense verse. Such are the dangers of the
technical temperament unenriched by wide and deep contact with human
feeling.

Poe's theory of the art of the short story is now familiar enough.
The power of a tale, he thought, turned chiefly if not solely upon its
unity, its harmony of effect. This is illustrated in all of his finest
stories. In "The Fall of the House of Usher" the theme is Fear; the
opening sentence strikes the key and the closing sentence contains the
climax. In the whole composition every sentence is modulated to the one
end in view