The Arkansaw traveler., 1886-03-27
Poe on Tennyson.
Tobias Hetchie, in New York Graphie.l

lTobias Hetchie, in New York Graphicl
 The Cas,tal O5server, few days since spoke of Lord Tennyson admiration for Edgar A. Poe. Perhaps it would be in teresting to have Edgar A. Poe's opin- ion of Tennyson. l take the following extract from a criticism of Our Anne teur Poets No. three William Ellery Charming, by Edgar Allan Poe. Gro- ham'S IHGgo-tte August, lS43: Philadel- phia
 To be serious then-as we always wish to be, if possible-Mr Charming (whom we suppose to be very young man, since we are precluded from sup posing him very old one) appears to have been inoculated at the same mo- ment with virus from Tennvson and from Carlyle, and here we do not wish to be misunderstood For Tennvson. as for man imbucd with the richest and rarest impulses We have an admiration "a reverence unbounded His Morte D Arthur, his Locksley Hall, his Sleeping Beauty his Lady of Shalott, his Lotus Eaters his Bone and many other poems, are not surpassed in all that gives to poetry its distinctive value by the compositions of any one, living or dead And his leading crror-that error which renders him unpopular-a point to be sure of no particular import ance-that very error we say is founded in truth-in keen perception of the elements of beauty We allude to his quaintncss-to what the world chooses to term his aifectation. No true poet no critic whose appreciation is worth even copy of the volume We now hold in our hand-will deny that he feels i'm pressed. sometimes even to tears, by many of those very affectatons which he iS impelled, by prejudice of his educa- tion or by the cant of his reason, to con demn. In fact, the profound intuition of Lord Bacon has supplied in one of his immortal apothegmS, the whole ph;- losophy of the point of issue. There is no exquisite beauty, he truly says. without some strangeness in it's propor- tions. We maintain, then, that Tenny- son crrs, not in his occasional quaint ness, but in its continual and obtrusive excess. And in accusing MT Charming of having been inoculated with virus from Tcnnyson, we merely mean to say that he has adopted and exaggerated that noble poets characteristic defect, having mistaken it for his principal
 
 merit
 Mir Tennyson is quaint only; he is never, as some have supposed him, oh scure except indeed to the uneducated, whom he does not address. Mir. Carlyle, on the other hand, is obscure only; he is seldom, as some have imagined him, quaint. So far he is right; for although quaintness, employed by man of judg mont unH hn m a Ia aII lopN to poem, whose true thesis is beauty and beauty alone, it is grossly and even ridiculously out of place in work of prose But in his obscurity it is scarcely necessary to say that he is wrong. Either a man intends to be understood or he does not. If he write book which he intends not to be understood we shall be very happy indeed not to understand it; but if he write book which he means to be understood, and in this book be at all possible pains to prevent us from understanding it we can only say that he is an ass, and this, to be brief is our private opinion of MT. Car lyle which we now take the liberty of making public" ... Another thing, perhaps not generally known, occurs in Poes contributions to Grahm-viz n complete history of his poem, The Raven" how he came to write it. the peculiar versification, etc, in short, all about it. l do not send this for publication-have written it hurriedly-but thought, perhaps, you might not have met with it in your reading, being so far back as lS43
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