It is understood that Edgar Allen Poe is still unforgiven in New England. "Those singularly valueless verses of Poe," was the now celebrated _dictum_ of a Boston prophet. It is true that, if "that most beguiling of all little divinities, Miss Walters of the _Transcript_," is to be implicitly believed, Edgar Poe was very rude and naughty at the Boston Lyceum in the spring of 1845. But surely bygones should be bygones, and Massachusetts might now pardon the _Al Aaraaf_ incident. It is not difficult to understand that there were many sides on which Poe was likely to be long distasteful to Boston, Cambridge, and Concord. The intellectual weight of the man, though unduly minimised in New England, was inconsiderable by the side of that of Emerson. But in poetry, as one has to be always insisting, the battle is not to the strong; and apart from all faults, weaknesses, and shortcomings of Poe, we feel more and more clearly, or we ought to feel, the perennial charm of his verses. The posy of his still fresh and fragrant poems is larger than that of any other deceased American writer, although Emerson may have one or two single blossoms to show which are more brilliant than any of his. If the range of the Baltimore poet had been wider, if Poe had not harped so persistently on his one theme of remorseful passion for the irrecoverable dead, if he had employed his extraordinary, his unparalleled gifts of melodious invention, with equal skill, in illustrating a variety of human themes, he must have been with the greatest poets. For in Poe, in pieces like _The Haunted Palace_, _The Conqueror Worm_, _The City in the Sea_, and _For Annie_, we find two qualities which are as rare as they are invaluable, a new and haunting music, which constrains the hearer to follow and imitate, and a command of evolution in lyrical work so absolute that the poet is able to do what hardly any other lyrist has dared to attempt, namely, as in _To One in Paradise_, to take a normal stanzaic form, and play with it as a great pianist plays with an air. So far as the first of these attributes is concerned, Poe has proved himself to be the Piper of Hamelin to all later English poets. From Tennyson to Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse-music does not show traces of Poe's influence. To impress the stamp of one's personality on a succeeding generation of artists, to be an almost (although not wholly) flawless technical artist one's self, to charm within a narrow circle to a degree that shows no sign, after forty years, of lessening, is this to prove a claim to rank with the Great Poets? No, perhaps not quite; but at all events it is surely to have deserved great honour from the country of one's birthright. _1889._ WHAT IS A GREAT POET? What is a Great Poet?