From Fitz-Greene Halleck: They were born of a race of funeral flowers That garlanded in long-gone hours, A Templar's knightly tomb. From Bayard Taylor: In the red desert moulders Babylon And the wild serpent's hiss Echoes in Petra's palaces of stone And waste Persepolis. From William Wallace: The very dead astir within their coffined deeps. From Estelle Anna Lewis: Ætna's lava tears-- Ruins and wrecks and nameless sepulchres. And from Bryant the concluding familiar lines of "Thanatopsis." These are the natural selections of the mind which evolved "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." His readiness to indulge in a "pleasurable melancholy" led him to delight chiefly in the mortuary beauties of his fellow-poets. At times, to be sure, he responded to the beauties of entire compositions. "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," "June," all appealed to him for the "elevation of soul" on which he laid critical stress, and so did poems hither and yon by others than Bryant. But for the most part even those productions which stirred or pleased him resulted in detailed technical comments on defects of unity or structure or style, and for the most part what he commended was not so much ideas as poetic concepts. He could lose himself in the chromatic tints from one facet of a diamond to the extent of quite forgetting the stone in its entirety. Hence it was that Poe was a poet in the limited sense of one who is highly and consciously skilled in the achievement of poetic effects, but by his own definition of poetry wholly uninspired toward the presentation of poetic truth. If the creative gift is "to see life steadily and to see it whole," Poe was as far from fulfilling the equation as mortal could be--as far, let us say, as William Blake was. This is not to say that Poe failed to appreciate or to write the kind of poetry in which he believed. It is an estimate of his own sense of values rather than for the moment of his performance. A letter to Lowell written in 1844 presents the negative background against which his theory and practice are thrown into relief.