as foolishness.

CHAPTER VIII. POE AND WHITMAN

Enter now two egotists, who have little in common save their egotism,
two outsiders who upset most of the conventional American rules for
winning the literary race, two men of genius, in short, about whom we
are still quarreling, and whose distinctive quality is more accurately
perceived in Europe than it has ever been in the United States.

Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both shared in
the tradition and influence of European Romanticism. But they were also
late comers, and they were caught in the more morbid and extravagant
phases of the great European movement while its current was beginning
to ebb. Their acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand
and through the medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was
older than Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824.
He was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was
colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models
were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge
than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without
the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the
same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same
reputation as a deadbeat.

A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he
hated "Frog-Pondium"--his favorite name for the city of his nativity--as
much as Whistler hated his native town of Lowell. His father died early
of tuberculosis, and his mother, after a pitiful struggle with disease
and poverty, soon followed her husband to the grave. The boy, by
physical inheritance a neurasthenic, though with marked bodily activity
in youth, was adopted by the Allans, a kindly family in Richmond,
Virginia. Poe liked to think of himself as a Southerner. He was sent to
school in England, and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly
a year the newly founded University of Virginia. He was a dark, short,
bow-legged boy, with the face of his own Roderick Usher. He made a good
record in French and Latin, read, wrote and recited poetry, tramped
on the Ragged Mountains, and did not notably exceed his companions in
drinking and gambling. But his Scotch foster-father disapproved of his
conduct and withdrew him from the University. A period of wandering
followed. He enlisted in the army and was stationed in Boston i