Page 36 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor

"There comes Poe,... three fifths of him genius, and two fifths sheer fudge."

But now, fifty years after his death, we see how great a man Poe was. Poe
invented the modern art of short story writing. His tales were translated into

French by a famous writer named Charles Baudelaire. Other French writers
saw how fine they were and modeled their work upon them. They learned
the art of short story writing from Poe. Then these French stories were

translated into English, and English and American writers have imitated
them and adopted similar methods of writing.

Conan Doyle’s detective stories would probably never have been written
had not Poe first composed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; and the

stories of horror and fear so common to-day are possible because Poe wrote
"William Wilson," "The Black Cat," and other stories of the same kind.

Have you ever learned to scan poetry? If you have, you know that the rules
which tell you that a foot is composed of one long syllable and one short

one, two short syllables and one long one, or whatever else it may be, are
frequently disregarded. You know, too, that some lines are cut off short at

the end, and others are made a little too long. Why is this permitted? In his
"Rationale of Verse," Poe explained all these things, and showed how the
learned of past ages had made mistakes. In a subsequent chapter we shall

see just what the relation between music and poetry is, and what Poe taught
about the art of making poetry.

For years people thought that Poe’s "The Philosophy of Composition," in
which he tells in what a cold-blooded way he wrote "The Raven," was a

joke; but in later times we have learned to understand what he meant and to
know that he was very sensible in his methods of working.

When Poe was young he was not a very remarkable poet; but, as years went
on and he learned more and more the art of writing, he rewrote and rewrote

his verses until at last in conscious art he was almost, if not quite, the
master poet of America.