No More Learning

Once, when Baudelaire heard that an American man of letters(? ) was in
Paris, he secured an introduction and called on him. Eagerly inquiring
after Poe, he learned that he was not considered a genteel person in
America, Baudelaire withdrew, muttering maledictions. Enthusiastic poet!
Charming literary person! Yet the American, whoever he was, represented
public opinion at the time. To-day criticisms of Poe are vitiated by the
desire to make him an angel. It is to be doubted whether without his
barren environment and hard fortunes we should have had Poe at all. He
had to dig down deep into the pit of his personality to reach the
central core of his music. But every ardent young soul entering
"literature" begins by a vindication of Poe's character. Poe was a man,
and he is now a classic. He was a half-charlatan as was Baudelaire. In
both the sublime and the sickly were never far asunder. The pair loved
to mystify, to play pranks on their contemporaries. Both were implacable
pessimists.
Both were educated in affluence, and both had to face
unprepared the hardships of life. The hastiest comparison of their
poetic work will show that their only common ideal was the worship of an
exotic beauty. Their artistic methods of expression were totally
dissimilar. Baudelaire, like Poe, had a harp-like temperament which
vibrated in the presence of strange subjects. Above all, he was obsessed
by sex. Women, as angel of destruction, is the keynote of his poems. Poe
was almost sexless. His aerial creatures never footed the dusty highways
of the world. His lovely lines, "Helen, thy beauty is to me," could
never have been written by Baudelaire; while Poe would never have
pardoned the "fulgurant" grandeur, the Beethoven-like harmonies, the
Dantesque horrors of that "deep wide music of lost souls" in "Femmes
Damnees":

"Descendes, descendes, lamentable victimes. "

Or this, which might serve as a text for one of John Martin's vast
sinister mezzotints:

J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un theatre banal
Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore,
Une fee allumer dans un ciel infernal
Une miraculeuse aurore;

J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un theatre banal
Un etre, qui n'etait que lumiere, or et gaze,
Terrasser renorme Satan;
Mais mon coeur que jamais ne visite l'extase,
Est un theatre ou l'on attend
Toujours, toujours en vain l'Etre aux ailes de gaze.

George Saintsbury thus sums up the differences between Poe and
Baudelaire: "Both authors--Poe and De Quincey--fell short of Baudelaire
himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have a
superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperameut and affection
for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror. " Poe is without
passion, except a passion for the macabre; what Huysmans calls "The
October of the sensations"; whereas, there is a gulf of despair and
terror and humanity in Baudelaire, which shakes your nerves, yet
stimulates the imagination. However, profounder as a poet, he was no
match for Poe in what might be termed intellectual prestidigitation. The
mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious detective tales, tales
extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights into the cosmic blue, the
Poe the prophet and mystic--in these the American was more versatile
than his French translator. That Baudelaire said, "Evil be thou my
good," is doubtless true. He proved all things and found them vanity.