Page 35 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor
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beautiful spot overlooking the Hudson river and Sleepy Hollow.
NOTE.--The thanks of the publishers are due to G. P. Putnam’s Sons for
kind permission to use extracts from the Works of Washington Irving.
THE STORY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE
[Illustration: EDGAR ALLAN POE.]
EDGAR ALLAN POE
CHAPTER I
THE ARTIST IN WORDS
Who has not felt the weird fascination of Poe’s strangely beautiful poem
"The Raven"? Perhaps on some stormy evening you have read it until the
"silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" has "thrilled you,
filled you, with fantastic terrors never felt before." That poem is the almost
perfect mirror of the life of the man who wrote it--the most brilliant poetic
genius in the whole range of American literature, the most unfortunate and
unhappy.
Poe had a singular fate. When Longfellow and Bryant and Lowell and
Holmes were winning their way to fame quietly and steadily, Poe was
writing wonderful poems and wonderful stories, and more than that, he was
inventing new principles and new artistic methods, on which other great
writers in time to come should build their finest work; yet he barely
escaped starvation, and the critics made it appear that, compared with such
men as Longfellow and Bryant, he was more notorious than really great.
Lowell in his "Fable for Critics" said:
