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Kansas University Weekly.
Wordsworth accomplished a revolution in subject matter. Poe has suggested a revolution of thought in these words: (Marginalia XLI) "If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words, 'My Heart Laid Bare.' But this little book must be true to its title. Now is it not very singular that, with the rabid thirst for notoriety which distinguishes so many of mankind—so many, too, who care not a fig what is thought of them after death, there should not be found one man having sufficient hardihood to write this little book? To write, I say. There are ten thousand men who, if the work were once written, would laugh at the notion of being disturbed by its publication during their life, and who could not even conceive why they should object as to its being published after their death. But to write it—there is the rub." In other words a poet could revolutionize the world of thought by expressing the wonders of his own soul.
The poem "Ulalume" is elementary feeling expressed in concrete terms. This poem is said to be the most characteristic of Poe's spirit and method. When Poe expresses his feelings he gives us the wierd, unearthly kind, but his method of portraying these feelings could have been employed by Wordsworth when singing of the sunlight on the meadows. The methods of two verses may be the same though the feeling be vastly dissimilar. Mr. Stedman says of "Ulalume" (Poets of America) "It is so strange, so unlike anything that preceded it, so vague and yet so full of meaning that of itself it might establish a new method." So far as I know, Mr. Stedman does not define this "new method." If it is true that "Ulalume" shows a new method then its beauty cannot be gauged by any of the old. Richard Henry Stoddard evidently attempts to judge the poem by the common standards. "This poem," he says "all things considered, is the most singular poem that he ever produced, if not indeed, the most singular poem that anybody ever produced, in commemoration of a dead woman, which I take to have been Poe's object or one of his objects when he sat down to write it." No doubt Ulalume was a woman. But we gather this conclusion from what we know of Poe's poetical theories and not from what is expressed in the poem, for the name is evidently coined for the occasion, and since no sex is mentioned, it might apply equally well to a man. Satisfied that this poem is about woman, Mr. Stoddard looks for "grief and intellectual sincerity" and finds none. Perhaps nobody else could. But in place of intellectual sincerity and grief for a dead woman, there may be something else that is the theme of the poem. Perhaps the theme of the poem is the poet's own feelings as affected by the death of a woman. Perhaps the poem is a work of elementary feeling and thus incomprehensible to an unimaginative intellect. This singular poem leads us into a
"Wild, wierd clime that lieth sublime.
Out of Space—out of Time."
It leads us into dreamland—into the realm of pure feeling—into a spirit world that knows neither space nor time. The poem on Dreamland where
—"the sad soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses,"
helps to explain the total lack of form and outline that predominates in "Ulalume." But it is method and not explanation that I am considering. Ulalume is like an impressionist painting—a blurred mass of color with no form whatever and yet producing a feeling in the observer that none can mistake. Where people have attempted to explain this poem on an objective basis no two explanations are alike. They agree however, on one point: that certain verses express emotions such as fear, hope or despair. It is where they offer explanations of the causes of these feelings that they disagree. And yet, I think, we can show that it was Poe's design that explanations of cause in this poem should disagree.