were "unsurpassed by any image expressed in writing." But when Tennyson was asked in 1875 to write an epitaph of one line for Poe's monument in Westminster Churchyard, Baltimore, he said to his son: "How can so strange and so fine a genius, and so sad a life, be exprest and comprest in one line?" He wrote, however, to the committee: "I have long been acquainted with Poe's works, and am an admirer of them." But when later he came to pass a more matured judgment on Poe as poet and prose-writer, he said:[1] "I know several striking poems by American poets, but I think that Edgar Poe is (taking his poetry and prose together) the most original American genius."
Tennyson's opinion is shared by the representative English critics. "Poe is the greatest writer in prose fiction whom America has produced," wrote Andrew Lang.[2] "He has left a body of widely various criticism which, as such, will better stand critical examination today," writes J. M. Robertson,[3] "than any similar work produced in England or America in his time." And Edmund Gosse[4] in his centennial article says of Poe, the poet: "He was the pioneer of a school which has spread its influence to the confines of the civilised world, and is now revolutionising literature."
- ↑ Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Memoir by his son, vol. II, pp. 292-293 (1897). This was said in 1883.
- ↑ In his edition of The Poems of Poe (1881).
- ↑ Robertson's essay on Poe, first published in Our Corner, London, 1885, and republished in New Essays Towards a Critical Method, London and New York, 1897, seems to me on the whole the ablest brief treatment of Poe (fifty-four pages) yet published in any language. It has been reproduced in Specimens of Modern English Literary Criticism, edited by William T. Brewster, New York, 1907.
- ↑ Contemporary Review, February, 1909.
