The Washington Star of November 16, 1875 reported the following remarks by Walt Whitman at the public reburial of Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore:
For a long while, and until lately, I had a distaste for Poe’s writings. I wanted, and still want for poetry, the clear sun shining, and fresh air blowing—the strength and power of health, not of delirium, even amid the stormiest passions—with always the background of the eternal moralities. Non-complying with these requirements, Poe’s genius has yet conquer’d a special recognition for itself, and I too have come to fully admit it, and appreciate it and him. Even my own objections draw me to him at last, and those very points, with his sad fate, will doubtless always make him dearer to young and fervid minds.
The quote offers a nice insight into Whitman’s own philosophy. He spoke extemporaneously, having declined to make a formal speech. In conclusion, he evoked a vision of Poe:
In a dream I once had, I saw a vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm. It was no great full-rigg’d ship, nor majestic steamer, steering firmly through the gale, but seem’d one of those superb little schooner yachts I had often seen lying anchor’d, rocking so jauntily, in the waters around New York, or up Long Island sound—now flying uncontroll’d with torn sails and broken spars through the wild sleet and winds and waves of the night. On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems—themselves lurid dreams.
Elaborating on his remarks in The Critic, Whitman wondered what to make of the “lush and the weird” influences that had “taken such extraordinary possession of Nineteenth Century verse-lovers”.
Nick Louras 