rs never felt before."
That poem is the almost perfect mirror of the life of the man who
wrote it--the most brilliant poetic genius in the whole range of
American literature, the most unfortunate and unhappy.

Poe had a singular fate. When Longfellow and Bryant and Lowell and
Holmes were winning their way to fame quietly and steadily, Poe was
writing wonderful poems and wonderful stories, and more than that, he
was inventing new principles and new artistic methods, on which other
great writers in time to come should build their finest work; yet he
barely escaped starvation, and the critics made it appear that,
compared with such men as Longfellow and Bryant, he was more notorious
than really great. Lowell in his "Fable for Critics" said:

"There comes Poe,... three fifths of him genius, and two fifths sheer
fudge."

But now, fifty years after his death, we see how great a man Poe was.
Poe invented the modern art of short story writing. His tales were
translated into French by a famous writer named Charles Baudelaire.
Other French writers saw how fine they were and modeled their work
upon them. They learned the art of short story writing from Poe. Then
these French stories were translated into English, and English and
American writers have imitated them and adopted similar methods of
writing.

Conan Doyle's detective stories would probably never have been written
had not Poe first composed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; and the
stories of horror and fear so common to-day are possible because Poe
wrote "William Wilson," "The Black Cat," and other stories of the same
kind.

Have you ever learned to scan poetry? If you have, you know that the
rules which tell you that a foot is composed of one long syllable and
one short one, two short syllables and one long one, or whatever else
it may be, are frequently disregarded. You know, too, that some lines
are cut off short at the end, and others are made a little too long.
Why is this permitted? In his "Rationale of Verse," Poe explained all
these things, and showed how the learned of past ages had made
mistakes. In a subsequent chapter we shall see just what the relation
between music and poetry is, and what Poe taught about the art of
making poetry.

For years people thought that Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition,"
in which he tells in what a cold-blooded way he wrote "The Raven," was
a joke; but in later times we have learned to understand what he meant
and to kno