In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe resembled Coleridge, who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism.  Poe’s verse often reminds one of Christabel and the Ancient Mariner, still oftener of Kubla Khan.  Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in the opium habit.  But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing else.  He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse.  It is curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of poetry.  At first these are metrical experiments and vague images, original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from nonsense.  Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance, without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real world of the senses.  It was a part of Poe’s literary creed—­formed upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a great display of a priori reasoning in his essay on the Poetic Principle and elsewhere—­that pleasure and not instruction or moral exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it gave should be indefinite.  About his own poetry there was always this indefiniteness.  His imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream—­a “ghoul-haunted region of Weir,” “out of space, out of time”—­filled with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes.  And yet there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery.  The reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of language, and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul.  Sometimes there is an obvious allegory, as in the Haunted Palace, which is the parable of a ruined mind, or in the Raven, the most popular of all Poe’s poems, originally published in the American Whig Review for February, 1845.  Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as in Ulalume, which, to most people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic feeling is among the most characteristic, and, therefore, the most fascinating, of its author’s creations.

Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad Annabel Lee, and To One in Paradise, the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and speaks a more intelligible language.  But in general his poetry is not the poetry of the heart, and its passion is not the passion of flesh and blood.  In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of the shadowy borderland between death and life.

  “The play is the tragedy ‘Man,’
    And its hero the Conqueror Worm.”

The prose tale, Ligeia, in which these verses are inserted, is one of the most powerful of all Poe’s writings, and its theme is the power of the will to overcome death.  In that singularly impressive poem, The Sleeper, the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the same source, the materiality of Poe’s imagination, which refuses to let the soul go free from the body.