“I recall those old Maryland and Virginia homesteads, dark and dusty, falling to decay; a few sticks of furniture, moth-eaten hangings, and silent, pale, in-door men and women--the former drinking, the latter taking drugs and patent medicines. I remember also the well-to-do families in the towns, the wild young cursing blades, and the old topers with trembling hands. I remember the uncle who shot off his head in the park, and that other uncle, with a distinguished naval record, who lived into old age without ever being sober. I remember my own father, and my childhood and youth of struggle to save him. All these men were kind and gentle, idealistic, charming in manners--” “I, too, had an uncle,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the tenderest heart you ever knew. He drank because he could not stand the life he saw about him, the unsolvable race problem, the mass of ignorance and brutality. I would get his bottle away from him and hide it, and then in his torment he would go so far as a ‘damn’; but I never saw him so drunk that he failed to apologize for such a word.” We must take Poe as one of the pitiful victims of these customs; we must understand that his virtues were his own, while his vices were fed to him in a “sugar-tit.” Of all American poets up to this time his was the greatest genius; his was the true fire, the energy, the vision--and for the most part it was wasted and lost. It was wasted, not merely because he got drunk, because he was always on the verge of starvation, because he was chained to slavery, and had to write pot-boilers under the orders of men with routine or mercenary minds; it was wasted also because he was a victim of perverse theories about art and life. He began, as a child, with imitations of Byron, and then came under the spell of Coleridge’s disorderly genius. We might take a great part of Poe’s work, just as we took “Kubla Khan,” and show how his talent goes into the portrayal of every imaginable kind of ruin, terror and despair. We cannot say to what extent Poe’s art theories were the product of his vices, and to what extent the vices were the product of the theories. After he left West Point, and was starving in Baltimore, he met his cousin, a frail, sensitive child, as poor as himself. He married her when she was less than fourteen years old; he adored her, but their life was a long crucifixion, because of her failing health. Several times she broke a blood vessel, and in the end she faded away from tuberculosis. The shadow of that tragedy hung over Poe’s whole mature life, and you will note that his loveliest poetry deals with beautiful women who are dying or dead.