rhythms of our songs, in rhymes final and initial, in the beautiful gestures of the young girl who thinks of him."
"Poe is regarded in Germany," says Doctor Georg Edward,[1] himself a distinguished German poet and critic, "as the typical and characteristic American author." If the German attitude has been less devotional than that of France or Russia it has at least been more dissertational, the number of special studies that appeared in 1909 far surpassing those that appeared in any other country. Five years after Poe's death a leading German review declared that his name "was bound to live in the annals of American literature." Since then Poe's stories have been translated into all the German popular collections of world literature—Reclam, Hendel, Cotta, Spemann, Meyer, and others; and his poems have had an almost equal vogue. It was in 1860 that Friedrich Spielhagen, the German Balmont as Balmont was the Russian Baudelaire and Baudelaire the French Ingram, published in Europa a notable study of Poe whom he called "the greatest lyric singer that America has produced." There has been no diminution of German interest in Poe since 1860, and the German contention that Poe is representatively American rather than distinctively un-American seems to me one of the most valid contributions to Poe criticism yet made.
But German criticism errs, I think, in its insistence on the supposed debt that Poe owed to German literature and especially to Hoffmann. No indebtedness
- ↑ See The Book of the Poe Centenary, University of Virginia, 1909, p. 74.
