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Edgar Allan Poe
Lines after Elizabeth Barrett
Fragment
In his Broadway Journal review of Elizabeth Barrett’s “Drama of Exile” (January 1845), Poe praised her work extravagantly while identifying one passage he thought metrically defective. He then rewrote it, producing these five lines as a corrective demonstration of what the passage could become — an unusual act of critical generosity that also displayed his own craft.
Hear the far generations — how they crash,
From crag to crag, down the precipitous Time,
In multitudinous thunders that upstartle,
Aghast, the echoes from their cavernous lairs
In the visionary hills!
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