But could we have had the poems of Poe without the tragic life of Poe,—without the suffering, poverty, passionate love, awful losses, infinite tragedy and sorrow? They are the tear drops of his life, yea, the blood drops. They are the distillation of his awful agonies. He paid a great price for his poems,—precious may the world esteem them. And yet, if as he believed and so often contended, sorrow and beauty were the poet's truest themes, and love and death the great sanctifiers and transfigurers, and if, as he so often said, the poetic feeling was the greatest of earthly pleasures,—then even in his awful pain and agony, in his tragedies and sorrows, was not the great artist made, the great poet born,—were there not constant compensations and was not his heritage of woe, after all, his most precious possession?
But friends, was there not another side? Many of us of this generation love Robert Louis Stevenson. There are many points of "kinship between Poe and Stevenson. Both loved the sea and its adventures, and things romantic and occult. "The Manuscript in a Bottle " perchance suggested The Bottle Imp of Stevenson. Certainly "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is exactly in the vein of Poe. Both writers were victims of untimely disease. Poe we call the greater genius; Stevenson the greater heart. We love Stevenson for his intense humanness and his heroic spirit. Have we been blind to these things in Poe?
His poems and other writings only represent a part of the man. Even as we read his poems, I feel that we ought to revise our traditional and prejudiced view of Edgar Allan Poe. We cannot forget his faults and failings, for the world has dwelt long and too insistently upon
