IN 1852, having translated a selection of the tales of Poe, Charles
Baudelaire sent a copy of his work to Sainte-Beuve with the
injunction: 'Il faut, c'est-à-dire je désire, qu'Edgar Poe, qui
n'est pas grand'chose en Amérique, devienne un grand homme
pour la France'. ¹ In 1874 Mallarmé published a prose trans-
lation of The Raven, illustrated with five of Manet's drawings.
Fourteen years later he dedicated a group of translations from the
poems of Poe, including Le Corbeau, as 'un monument du goût
français au génie qui à l'égal de nos maîtres les plus vénérés,
exerça chez nous une influence'. In an essay first published in
1920, ² the claim that Poe was a'grand homme' was revived by the
most distinguished of Mallarmé's disciples, the late Paul Valéry,
who affirmed that Anglo-Saxons alone refuse to accept Poe as a
poet. And M. André Fontainas seems to have made a no less
partial, if less dignified, protest. 'Why the devil', he asked of
an American correspondent, 'won't your fellow-countrymen
admit once and for all that Edgar Poe was one of the most
wonderful, most influential and most profound poets who
ever lived?' ³

As an example of our unregenerate attitude one may cite a

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