the reader whose ear has long been accustomed to the haunting melodies of the original. But that Mallarmé's translations are read and enjoyed in France is in itself a testimony to the innate beauty, the residual charm, of Poe's poetic structures, when bereft of those formal elements in which their beauty and charm have hitherto been thought so largely to consist. It is hard to think of The Raven or of Ulalume without those interreticulations of sound and form, those reciprocities of repetition and parallelism, which in Poe's hands fused them into artistic unity; but in Mallarmé's versions, however exquisite the prose, it is prose still. That Poe has stood the test is a noteworthy tribute to the intrinsic worth and fundamental texture of his poetic material. One unexpected result of Mallarmé's work has been to put Poe, in the eyes of Frenchmen at least, side by side with Whitman in the ranks of the vers librists. Strange bedfellows, these! "Yet it is true," says Caroline Ticknor,[1] "that Mallarmé's translations of Poe set the pace for the new school from which the exponents of vers libre assuredly derive their inspiration."
Of the many French biographies of Poe the most elaborate is that by Lauvrière.[2] But it is a study in pathology. Scholarly, painstaking, accurate, and even sympathetic in its statement of facts, its inferences do not carry conviction. Morbidité, aliénisme, dégénérescence, décadence—these do not belong to Poe. They can be read into his life and genius only by a studied selection of incidents and an equally studied
