then, after a year, with a prospect of more lucrative employment, he removed to Philadelphia, and for four years was the mainstay of Graham's Magazine. His literary work was poorly paid for, though some of his most powerful tales—Hans Pfaaf, Arthur Gordon Pym, Ligeia, The House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Marie Roget, The Descent into the Maelström—were among Poe's contributions to these periodicals. Not unnaturally he conceived the idea of starting a magazine of his own as the most hopeful way of living by his work, but he had no capital, and was obliged to abandon the project, and return to New York and miscellaneous journalism. To add to his troubles his wife, a cousin of his own, whom he had married in 1836, and to whom he was passionately attached, was in very delicate health, and during a lingering illness of eight years gave him constant anxiety. We have only to look at the character of Poe's work, and the condition of such literature commercially, to see why it was that the most popular writer of his generation in America had to struggle so hard for a bare subsistence. His short stories were an easy prey for the newspaper pirate, and when thousands were reading them the author received nothing but the few dollars paid him by the publication in which they first appeared. The Raven was published first in 1845, and in a few months was being read and recited and parodied wherever the English language was spoken; but the half-starved poet, who had to live by his genius, received only two pounds for the production. And, fertile and active as his imagination was, these short works of his, which served for the passing sensation of the newspaper reader, were far from being extempore effusions. His Philosophy of Composition is sometimes, indeed generally, regarded as half-serious half a jest in the author's peculiar way of mystification. But to any one who examines Poe's work closely by the light of this essay it is obvious that the disclosure of his method is only too seriously true. It would have been well for his own powers of endurance if he had composed on a less exacting and exhausting system. The most fantastic of Poe's creations are not the product of the imagination abandoned to the impulses of a dominant mood; the effects are deliberately calculated, as he says they were, step by step and point by point to a prearranged culmination. A man writing on such a system, with the wolf at the door and affections daily on the rack, could hardly have endured the strain if he had had a constitution of iron. It was no wonder that Poe's health became distempered, or that, during the last years of his wife's illness and the two remaining years through which he survived her, he had recourse to the dangerous help of stimulants. Not only did he subject his imagination to exhausting conditions, but he wasted his force in doing with superfluous thoroughness what a ready journalist would have dismissed with a few easy sentences of commonplace. When we read his criticisms, which are full of insight and suggestion, we see that in reviewing a book or a poem he was never satisfied till he had thought out what could be done with the subject. His famous feat in anticipating the plot of Barnaby Rudge from the opening chapters was only a sample of the thoroughness with which he threw himself into whatever he undertook. Poe failed to make a living by literature, not because he was an irregular profligate in the vulgar sense, but because he did ten times as much work as he was paid to do—a species of profligacy, perhaps, but not quite the same in kind as that with which he was charged by his malignant biographer.
The current story about his breaking off his engagement with Mrs Whitman by presenting himself at her house in a state of violent drunkenness has been proved to be a fabrication, and many other stories about him have been exploded by Mr Ingram. His wife died in 1847, and he followed her in 1849, dying under painful circumstances at Baltimore. For a critical estimate of Poe's writings the reader may be referred to Professor Nichol's American Literature. There are few English writers of this century whose fame is likely to be more enduring. The feelings to which he appeals are simple but universal, and he appeals to them with a force that has never been surpassed. (w. m.)
POERIO, Carlo (1803-1867), Italian statesman, born in 1803, was descended from an old Calabrian family and was the son of Giuseppe Poerio, a distinguished lawyer of Naples. In 1815 he accompanied his father into political exile, but, a pardon having been obtained in 1818, he returned to Naples where he afterwards adopted the profession of advocate. From 1837 to 1848 he was frequently arrested and imprisoned, but, when Ferdinand, moved by the demonstration of 27th January of the latter year, promulgated a constitution, he was at once raised to honour, being made prefect of police and shortly afterwards minister of public instruction. Discovering, however, that the king was only temporizing, he resigned office in April of the same year and was returned for Naples to parliament, where he led the constitutional opposition. On 19th July 1849 he was arrested, and after trial on the charge of belonging to the sect denominated the "Italian Unity," was condemned to irons. Chained in pairs, he and other fifteen political prisoners were confined in one small room in the bagno of Nisida near the lazaretto. The eloquent exposure of the horrors of the Neapolitan dungeons by Mr Gladstone in 1851, who emphasized especially the case of Poerio, awakened the universal indignation of Europe, but he did not obtain his liberty till 1858. He and other exiles were then placed on board a ship bound for the United States, but they compelled the crew to land them at Cork, whence Poerio made his way to London. In the following year he returned to Italy, and in 1860 he was elected deputy to the parliament of Turin, of which he was chosen vice-president in 1861. He died at Florence, 28th April 1867.
See Baldachinni, Della Vita e de' Tempi di Carlo Poerio, 1867; W. E. Gladstone, Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen, 1851; Carlo Poerio and the Neapolitan Police, London, 1858; Colletta, History of Naples.
POETRY
Poetry as an energy and as an art.IN modern criticism the word poetry is used sometimes to denote any expression (artistic or other) of imaginative feeling, sometimes to designate one of the fine arts.
As an expression of imaginative feeling, as the movement of an energy, as one of those great primal human forces which go to the development of the race, poetry in the wide sense has played as important a part as science. In some literatures (such as that of England) poetic energy and in others (such as that of Rome) poetic art is the dominant quality. It is the same with individual writers. In classical literature Pindar may perhaps be taken as a type of the poets of energy; Virgil of the poets of art. With all his wealth of poetic art Pindar's mastery over symmetrical methods never taught him to "sow with the hand," as Corinna declared, while his poetic energy always impelled him to "sow with the whole sack." In English poetical literature Elizabeth Barrett Browning typifies, perhaps, the poets of energy; while Keats (not-
