Poe selected with great care the point
which he wished to emphasize. He then discarded everything which did not
serve to draw attention to that point. On his stage the colored lights may
come from many different directions, but they all focus on one object.
Hawthorne and Poe, two of the world's great short-story writers, were
remarkably unlike in their aims. Hawthorne saw everything in the light of
moral consequences. Poe cared nothing for moral issues, except in so far as
the immoral was ugly. Hawthorne appreciated beauty only as a true
revelation of the inner life. Poe loved beauty and the melody of sound for
their own attractiveness. His effects, unlike Hawthorne's, were more
physical than moral. Poe exalted the merely technical and formal side of
literary excellence more than Hawthorne.
Poe's prose style is direct, energetic, clear, and adequate to the
occasion. His mind was too analytic to overload his sentences with
ornament, and too definite to be obscure. He had the same aim in his style
as in his subject matter,--to secure an effect with the least obstruction.
[Illustration: BUST OF POE IN UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA]
His poetry is of narrower range than his prose, but his greatest poems hold
a unique position for an unusual combination of beauty, melody, and
sadness.
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