Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/34

Continent—where to us effete Easterners there seems to be no dearth of the materials for thrilling adventure—on the unwholesome effects upon youthful minds of the excitement created by the perusal of Poe's stories. And—that I may balance a southern experience with these from the North and West—I have had a colleague, a Southerner of great culture and scholarship, whose name would be familiar to many of you, tell me that he had been obliged to decline an invitation to write an essay on Poe because, being a Southerner, he did not wish to undertake the invidious task of showing how badly the author of The Fall of the House of Usher usually wrote. And, coming back to the North, only the other day a colleague said to me, with a slight note of glee in his voice, "I've just read Blank's article on Poe in manuscript, it will appear in the — number of ———. I tell you, he just rips Poe up the back." I got my colleague to admit, before we parted, that, when writers of Poe's calibre and standing are ripped up the back by modern critics, two features of the phenomenon may be predicated as fairly constant. One is that the rip nearly always follows the line of a previous rip; the other is that, as a rule, the victim's admirers are unconscious of the fact that any ripping has taken place. I submit, in the light of my reading and my personal experiences that we do not need ballots for The Critic, or the Hall of Fame to convince us that, even in this centennial year, Poe's admirers in America have still something of a task before them if they wish, as they must wish, to make his fame in his native land at all commensurate with his achievements, as these are viewed by the world at large.