riosity about moral ideas is so complete that
evil moves him no more than good. There have been writers of eccentric
or perverse morality who have been so much irritated by the preaching of
virtue that they have lent their genius to the recommendation of vice.
This inversion of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that is
vaguely called "immoral" in imaginative literature. But Edgar Poe is as
innocent of immorality as he is of morality. No more innocuous flowers
than his are grown through the length and breadth of Parnassus. There is
hardly a phrase in his collected writings which has a bearing upon any
ethical question, and those who look for what Wordsworth called "chains
of valuable thoughts" must go elsewhere.

In 1840 they might, in New England, go to Bryant, to Emerson, to
Hawthorne; and it is more than excusable that those who were
endeavouring to refine the very crude community in the midst of which
they were anxiously holding up the agate lamp of Psyche, should see
nothing to applaud in the vague and shadowy rhapsodies then being issued
by a dissipated hack in Philadelphia. What the New England critics
wanted, patriotically as well as personally, was as little like
"Ulalume" as can possibly be conceived. They defined what poetry should
be--there was about that time a mania for defining poetry--and what
their definition was may be seen no less plainly in the American _Fable
for Critics_ than in the preface to the English _Philip van Artevelde_.
It was to be picturesque, intellectual, pleasing; it was to deal, above
all, with moral "truths"; it was to avoid vagueness and to give no
uncertain sound; it was to regard "passion" with alarm, as the siren
which was bound sooner or later to fling a bard upon the rocks. It is
not necessary to treat this conception of poetry with scorn, nor to
reject principles of precise thought and clear, sober language, which
had been illustrated by Wordsworth in the present and by Gray in the
past. The ardent young critics of our own age, having thrown off all
respect for the traditions of literature, speak and write as if to them,
and them alone, had been divinely revealed the secrets of taste. They do
not give themselves time to realise that in Apollo's house there are
many mansions.

It is sufficient for us to note here that the discomfort of Poe's
position resided in the fact that he was not admitted into so much as
the forecourt of the particular mansion inhabited by Brya