Recently discovered my notecards to this I read in the Firestone Library, Princeton, 1978. Baudelaire admires Poe as an outsider in America, at odds with practicality and money-making: "As for having pity on a poet whose isolation and grief render him crazy, "il n'est a pas le temps," the American has no time for it. Baudelaire compares Poe and Balzac, also recently dead: France has lost her greatest genius, and America a fabler, critic and philosopher who was hardly made for her." May I agree, Poe the poe-ettte was not made for me: his verses are puerile, Dum da dum da, trochaic octameter--he'd have done better in tetrameter, which in fact it is, here and there because of medial caesuras like the first line: "ONCE uPON a MIDnight DREAry/ AS i PONderedWEAK and WEAry" But I always add, Poet invented a literary genre that even Dickens tried to imitate, fairly successfully, one time. The horror short.
During my postdoc year at Brown, I visited the stone Atheneum halfway down College Hill,
where Poe joined with his fiancée (proposed the cemetery up the street) Sarah Whitman--who remained a poet, reader and contributor to the Atheneum for thirty more years.
Poe's early life included several years of British grammar school in Stoke Newington, north of London, and even, Baudelaire thinks, a trip to Russia with his adoptive father (who knew Poe and Whistler shared childhood in Russia?). But I have not found corroboration of Poe in Russia.
Born in Boston (a plaque near the Commons, the boadring house where born), the child of two actor parents, his mother British (Hopkins) and the daughter of actor parents. Of her 300 roles, she played Ophelia in Hamlet opposite a famous lead, about the time Edgar was born. Her poet son lived all over, and attended U of Virginia, West Point, and other colleges. He was thrown out of Viriginia for gambling, and perhaps pranks. Later as an editor in NY (where he first published the Raven, which made him famous, the "nevermore" drawn perhaps from Dickens) he accused Longfellow of plagiarism, though the great Bostonian never responded. He also lived in a cottage in the Bronx.
Baudelaire's essay quotes from Southern Literary Messenger, 1850, one John Daniel, "Even to the end of his life, Poe had excellent handwriting"(13) Baudelaire finds this SUCH an American remark! What a fine conclusion the great French poet draws:
"A friend tells me all 'illuminés' ("mystics," "enlightened") have hidden vices, drunkenness, gluttony, ribaldry, cruelty, avarice, etc. But Mon Dieu! I say, what is the law that enchains and dominates us, which punishes its violaters by degradation and weakening of our moral being? The
illuminés have been our greatest men. Why should we chastise their grandeur? Leur ambition n'était-elle pas la plus noble?"(p.38)
Finally the great French poet compares Poe to Christ, as the catechism says, "He has suffered much for us." He decides to write on his tomb, "All who would know the truth, pray to him, and he will intercede for those who would see and know."(39) ( )