bt Poe was ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was
caged in by his ignorance, Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised
themselves against his prison.

Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards of
workmanship and his critical precepts have been of great service to his
careless countrymen. He turned out between four and five short stories
a year, was poorly paid for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling
them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting them for the better. His
best poems were likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire
for artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of
men in France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and they
brought back the glory and the cash.

I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman,
seated at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of
themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray
would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him.
George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him
with those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But
Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe
before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he
has seen that man before, in "The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows." All of
them would find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel
at, and perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely
Poe--what would he think of them? He might not care much for the other
guests, but I think he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: "I
belong at this table." And he does.

Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the "good gray poet,"
offers a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was nothing
distinctively American about Poe except his ingenuity; he had no
interest in American history or in American ideas; he was a timeless,
placeless embodiment of technical artistry. But Whitman had a passion
for his native soil; he was hypnotized by the word America; he spent
much of his mature life in brooding over the question, "What, after
all, is an American, and what should an American poet be in our age of
science and democracy?" It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of
the average citizen of "these states." His personality is unique. In
many respects he still baffles our curiosity. He repels many of h