“My first object (as usual) was originality,” said Poe, in discussing the versification of “The Raven.” It is a remarkable fact that the two great poets of America--Poe and Whitman--were two of the most deliberately original poets of the nineteenth century--in English at least. They were both conscious frontiersmen of poetry, drawn to unmapped territories, settlers on virgin soil. This may help to explain some of their imperfections. Each of them gives us the impression of a genius rich but imperfectly cultivated. Different though they were from each other, they resembled each other in a certain lack of the talent of order, of taste, of “finish.” They were both capable of lapses from genius into incompetence, from beauty into provincialism, to an unusual degree. A contemporary critic said of Poe that he had not talent equal to his genius. Neither had Whitman. In the greatest poets, genius and talent go hand in hand. Poe seldom wrote a poem in which his mood seems to have attained its perfect expression. His poetry does not get near perfection even in the sense in which Coleridge’s fragments do. It seems, as a rule, like a first sketch for greater things. His _Complete Poems_, indeed, is one of the most wonderful sketch-books of a man of genius in literature. Poe himself attributed the defects of his work to lack of leisure rather than to lack of talent. “Events not to be controlled,” he said in the preface to the 1845 edition of his poems, “have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose but a passion, and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not--they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the petty compensations, or the more petty commendations, of mankind.” Other poets, however, who have lived in as bitter circumstances as Poe, have written an incomparably greater body of good poetry. There was in him some flaw that kept him, as a rule, from being more than a great beginner. It may have been partly due to theatrical qualities that he inherited from his actress mother. Again and again he mingles the landscape of dreamland with the tawdry grandeur of the stage. He takes a footlights view of romance when, having begun “Lenore” with the lines---- Ah, broken is the golden bowl!--the spirit flown for ever!-- Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river he continues: And, Guy de Vere, hast _thou_ no tear?--weep now, or never more. This, no doubt, was in tune with the fashionable romance of the day, but Poe’s romantic conceptions at times were those of one who was especially entranced by stage trappings. He made his heroines rich and highborn as well as beautiful. In “Lenore” he cries: Wretches, ye loved her for her wealth, and hated her for her pride! In “The Sleeper” he speaks of: The crested palls Of her grand family funerals.