Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “Letter to Mr. —— ——,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 35-60 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 35:]

II  •  “Letter to Mr. —— ——”

 

BEFORE 1831, when Edgar Poe published his third book of verse, he had wanted only to be a poet; but his first two publications, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) and Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829), had met the usual fate of a poet's first efforts. It was necessary for him to attract the attention of an indifferent public, so, as Wordsworth had done before him, he composed a preface designed to explain his own concept of poetry and to discredit theories that supported a different kind of verse. The preface, which he called “Letter to Mr. —— ——,”(1) appeared in his Poems, Second Edition (1831).

This “letter” appears to be a spontaneous protest against the dullness and pedantry of the Lake School of poets. It was the duty of a poet to protest, Poe announced, not to engage with metaphysical subtleties in the manner of a philosopher. He was a young man of feeling like the late John Keats, and he wanted the world to know it. Yet Poe was being somewhat less than candid. A close examination of the “letter” will show not only that he had a well-defined concept of the purpose of poetry but also that he had read enough criticism to support it. His supporting argument is largely covert, however, for it was necessary for him to preserve the stance of a young man of sensibility proclaiming his affection for the muse.

A question occasionally debated is whether or not Poe matured as a critic. Some have held that his aesthetic ideas never developed beyond this earliest expression, and one reliable authority has argued convincingly that Poe's critical theory is implicit in his early verse.(2) This position is defensible if we say “some aspects of his [page 36:] theory,” for the “letter” expresses several convictions about the nature and purpose of poetry that Poe never abandoned. Poe arrived at his idea of the priority of aesthetic value very early in his career, but his development of an argument to support aesthetic value required frequent reassessment of his proofs. Poe's general attitude was common among romantic poets, but as he began to justify it his difference from most of his contemporaries emerged; for his polemical strategies resulted in an emphasis on expressive form that was relatively uncommon in America, though it was familiar enough in Europe.(3)

One subject which has attracted the attention of scholars for many years has been the nature and extent of Poe's borrowings from other critics. Coleridge has been considered a major influence, and rightly so.(4) Yet even in the “Letter to Mr. —— ——,” where Poe appropriated almost exactly Coleridge's distinction between poetry and science, he claimed to dispute the authority of both Wordsworth and Coleridge, while at the same time professing his admiration for Coleridge's “towering intellect” and “gigantic [page 37:] power.” The grounds of his disagreement with Wordsworth were made very clear, but the only charge he brought against Coleridge was that the critic “goes wrong by reason of his very profundity ...” Ordinarily we would need to explore no further. Romantic anti-intellectualism has been discussed too many times to require additional exegesis. Poe's statements in the “letter” remind us of Rousseau's indictment of reason: “C’est que quand l’homme commence á raisonner, it cesse sentir.” At about the same age at which Poe wrote his “letter,” Keats had written letters to Richard Woodhouse condemning Wordsworth and Coleridge for philosophizing instead of being content with feeling. It is from the fragmentary remarks in these letters, as explained by subsequent scholarship, that we know Keats's literary theory. A similar procedure may be employed with Poe in an attempt to reconstruct from his “Letter to Mr. —— ——” not only what he thought about poetry at the time but also the various assumptions, psychological and aesthetic, that would have supported him in his argument. By this means Poe's dispute with Coleridge and Wordsworth, if it is reflective of anything more than a young man's protest against his elders, can be understood and placed in historical perspective.

The concluding paragraph of Poe's “letter” begins with a close paraphrase of a statement in Chapter XIV of the Biographia Literaria: “A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth ....” Then Poe omits the second half of Coleridge's sentence, which distinguishes the poem from other pleasure-giving literary forms (the novel and the romance), and substitutes a distinction of his own. The difference is crucial to our understanding of Poe.

In the omitted passage Coleridge stated that a poem could be distinguished from other pleasurable genres “by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” The only reason that Poe would have left Coleridge at this point would have been that he thought Coleridge's distinction inadequate. Poe's substitution must be quoted in full because his terminology provides clues to his assumptions about the way the mind works in perceiving [page 38:] beauty; and these assumptions, in turn, provide grounds for his opposition to Coleridge and, in a different sense, to Wordsworth.

Poe's proposition in this passage is simple enough. He thought that poetry, being in metrical form, should not attempt to express clear and definite ideas but should be limited in its aim to some sort of vague pleasure. Still, any proposition, however naïve, has something back of it. We can better understand Poe's unsupported assertion if we examine the aesthetic theories which at twenty-two, in his time and place, he would have been most likely to encounter — and we should remember that he had spent much of the time between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two in the army and at West Point, situations hardly conducive to literary study.

Poe used the term “sensation” in reference to what is felt from the “perceptible images” of both the romance and the poem.(5) If he was using the term in its strict significance and not loosely as a synonym for feeling or emotion, there can be only one assumption about the aesthetic response that justifies the usage. This assumption, which has been described briefly in Chapter I, was that an internal sense was responsible for aesthetic feeling, and that it was analogous in a certain way to the external senses. According to Gordon McKenzie, the notion of an internal sense of taste was [page 39:] archaic by the end of the eighteenth century.(6) Sir Francis Jeffrey, the famed critic of the Edinburgh Review, dismissed it somewhat contemptuously in 1811.(7) Yet archaic opinions have a habit of lingering with all the semblance of authority in popular textbooks, and we have to look no further for such authority than the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres of Dr. Hugh Blair, the first Regius Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Blair was and would continue to be considered authoritative in America, possibly because he was conservative and offered no challenging or disturbing theories.(8)

Blair presented all of the old definitions. There was an internal sense for the perception of beauty and it was called the taste. It was common to all mankind and it enabled “the philosopher and the peasant; the boy and the man” to receive “pleasure from the beauties of nature and of art.” Since it was “founded on a certain natural and instinctive sensibility to beauty,” the taste was autonomous in its activity and had nothing to do with the “operation of Reason,” although reason could be brought in a posteriori to explain why certain objects pleased and others did not. It was recognized that some had finer taste than others, partly because of innate differences in sensitivity, but more significantly because of differences in cultivation. Any sense, internal or external, was improved by exercise, so it was safe to conclude that experience of the beautiful would lead to a finer or more delicate taste, which, when corrected by the reason, would provide the standard for aesthetic discrimination.(9)

In perfection, taste would exhibit both delicacy and correctness, which could be defined as the ability of the judgment to reject [page 40:] “spurious beauties.” Unfortunately, however, these capacities did not exist in equal measure. A naturally “strong sensibility” might be impressed by “coarse” beauty, if not refined by constant experience of the beautiful. A strong judgment, which is employed in the detection of faults, might be overbearing in its disapprobation unless softened by the “power of Delicacy.” Of a person of good taste it could be said that “Delicacy and Correctness, mutually imply each other,” and if there were “any one person who possessed in full perfection all the powers of human nature, whose internal senses were in every instance exquisite and just, and whose reason was unerring and sure, the determinations of such a person ... would be ... a perfect standard for the Taste ....” However, there is no such person, Blair concluded wistfully, and the best we can do in arriving at a standard is to consult the feelings of all mankind — by which he meant, along with Lord Kames and most of the other theorists on taste, the feelings of cultivated gentlemen. Blair emphasized sensation, for reason, in his opinion, must ultimately refer to “sense and perception” as the basis for all speculation on beauty.(10)

This summary of Blair's remarks on taste explains the assumptions that lay behind Poe's attack on Wordsworth in the “letter.” His attempt to refute Coleridge is covert, however, and may be more easily understood if we examine the supposed characteristics of the aesthetic response as sensation.

When Shaftesbury and Hutcheson posited the “sixth sense” of taste, they knew that the response to beauty was as immediate as an organic sensation of pleasure or pain, but that it could be traced to no simple cause. Locke had argued that all ideas in the mind could be ascribed to sensation or reflection, but he had said little about the aesthetic response. To correct this deficiency the proponents of internal senses made room for intuitive perception of the beautiful (and of the good, of course), but they did not progress so far from Locke that they could account for these intuitions without assigning the responsibility to special sense organs. Still, the post-Lockean theorists of taste found it difficult to define [page 41:] the sensations of the beautiful. Some, such as Edmund Burke, who denied the existence of an inner sense, attributed the pleasures of taste to qualities in objects. Beautiful objects were small, smooth, gently curved, delicate or fragile, and colored in pastel. The sublime, a source of more significant pleasure, was characterized by greatness, roughness, power, and somber colors. Burke, however, was too simplistic; he failed to make enough allowance for previous experience — the influence of prior associations — in accounting for aesthetic responses.(11)

In 1749, eight years before Burke published his Enquiry, David Hartley had brought out a psychophysiological examination of perception and response that eventually discredited Burke's objectivism. Although Hartley, as a physician, was chiefly concerned with the way impulses moved from the sense organs to the brain, he attributed most of the pleasures of taste to the association of ideas. Not so extremist as his follower, Archibald Alison, Hartley did admit that simple musical sounds afforded an organic pleasure to the ear and even went so far as to speculate that discords, originally unpleasant sounds, could be pleasing to those sophisticates who were bored with the “sweetness of Concords.” He made only a minimal effort to trace the effect of association on the pleasure of music, but he did acknowledge that certain kinds of music were associated with “affections and passions” and could be said to express them.(12) Hartley, like his followers in the association theory, did not propose an inner sense of taste.

The next “psychologist” who was strongly influential on aesthetic theory was Lord Kames, whose Elements of Criticism (1762) was second only to Blair's Lectures as an authoritative reference. Kames mediated between the objectivist and subjectivist [page 42:] positions by assuming that many emotions resemble their causes, but that the process of association is also operative.(13) The quality of an object or of an event produces a correspondent feeling in the mind, but after this “primary” emotion is excited, a “secondary” emotion may be aroused by association. Kames's concept of the taste was equally mediatory. He did not describe it as an internal sense specifically, but he claimed that everyone was born with a taste for natural beauty. A taste for artificial beauty (works of art) was acquired. Those objects that have intrinsic beauty appeal only to the senses, but in works of art the beauty is relative, and the response to complex art is difficult to define.(14) Nor did Kames really attempt to define it. He could be quite specific about the pleasures derived from sights and sounds, but the best he could do when speculating upon beauty itself was to analyze it into its constituent parts, such as color, shape, size, and motion.(15) Kames still demanded the neoclassic aesthetic properties of “regularity, uniformity, proportion, order, and simplicity,” and he was quite suspicious of the “complex forms and profuse ornaments” of the most recent art. As for the psychological origin of aesthetic feeling, Karnes could do no more than say that it “depends on the percipient as much as on the object perceived” and that it “cannot be an inherent property in either.”(16)

Kames concerned himself very little with music, which was troublesome to British aestheticians of his period because it did not create images in the mind that could be examined for their emotion-producing qualities. However, he anticipated Alison by claiming that music produced a feeling that was neither an emotion nor a passion.(17) It was not an emotion, because it was productive of desire, but it was not a passion, because the desire had no object. Here Kames provided a psychological basis for the romantic attachment to music, but he showed little affection for lyric poetry because he did not think it appropriate for serious subjects.(18) Like [page 43:] most of the British theorists of his century and afterward, Karnes preferred vocal music, for music that accompanied words was very effective in enhancing such general emotions as love or pity.(19)

As deficient as he was in pure aesthetics, Kames could still be very emphatic in describing the moral effect of sight and sound, for he thought that these impressions were almost exclusively mental and that they detached us from the sensual delights of the “inferior” senses. The fine arts depended exclusively upon sight and sound and thus contributed nothing to sensual gratification. The pleasures of the taste, then, were ethereal pleasures of the mind. Music was especially productive of pleasure, for no disagreeable combination of sounds could be legitimately termed music.(20)

Kames's theories at the moment seem to have little relevance to Poe's “letter,” but Kames's psychology was used by Blair with results that are more obvious. Blair made the customary statement that music enhances feeling, but he went one step farther by asserting that under the influence of strong feeling “objects do not appear ... as they really are, but such as passion makes us see them.”(21) With Blair's enormous influence, generations of students would assume that when words were joined with music, verbal images would not resemble the objects of reference but would appear only as highly stimulated feeling dictated. Blair, something of a chronological primitivist, admired the bards of old who sang to the harp; and he expressed some regret that music should have been separated from poetry. It is not surprising, then, that he showed an affection for the lyric which was not too common [page 44:] among British critics of his generation — he was matched only by Thomas Gray, who can scarcely be considered a critic. In fact, he drew close to Poe when he wrote, “There is no agreeable sensation we receive, either from Beauty or Sublimity, but what is capable of being heightened by the power of musical sound.”(22)

Blair, a rhetorician rather than a philosopher or a psychologist, was not much concerned with the question of whether beauty was a quality of the object or something that happened in the mind, but his assumption of an internal organ of taste indicates that he was even more conservative than Karnes. He frequently referred to “agreeable sensations” in the old-fashioned way, and he dismissed beauty that expressed “qualities of mind,” particularly in regard to the human face, as a subject too difficult to explore.(23) Certainly one would never expect, if he read Blair's Lectures when they appeared in 1783, that within seven years a work would be published which would make Blair seem as antique as Quintilian (incidentally, one of Blair's favorite authorities). Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) completed the shift to subjectivism initiated by Hartley. That Blair's work continued in use for more than half a century simply illustrates the truism already mentioned — archaic ideas stay with us long after the premises upon which they are based have been discredited.

For Alison the response to beauty was a “peculiar emotion” that developed by an associative process from “simple emotions,” such as joy, grief, or sympathy. The origin and nature of this peculiar emotion were hard to describe: “It is often ... difficult to say what is the quality of the object which produces the emotion of beauty, and it is sometimes difficult, in the case of complex objects, when different qualities unite in the production of emotion, to define the exact nature of the emotion we feel ....”(24) In fact, Alison continued, analytical criticism, by attempting to define the beauties of a composition, usually succeeded in “destroying the [page 45:] sensibility of taste.”(25) At last we appear to have arrived at the idea that lies behind Poe's assertion in the “letter to Mr. —— ——” that exercise of the judgment impairs the sensitivity to beauty. If his argument had been governed strictly by Blair's premise of an inner sense of taste, Poe would have had to invoke judgment — an analytical activity — to separate genuine from spurious beauties and thereby correct the vagaries of instinctive appreciation. Yet, as we shall see, Poe employed an Alisonian argument against Wordsworth, even though his terminology was Blair's. Poe's eclecticism was uncritical; he appropriated the ideas that he needed either without knowing or without caring that they were based on conflicting accounts of mental activity.

Poe had stated that music — metrical form(26) — was essential to the pleasurable effect that was the object of a poem. As we have seen, theorists from Shaftesbury to Alison had acknowledged that the response to a work of art was different from the simple pleasures of the senses. The earlier psychologists, through Kames, had been inclined to attribute this pleasure to representation in an artificial medium of the sights and sounds that were naturally pleasing, but they had made the qualification that there was an additional pleasure in the recognition of design or purposefulness in an art form. Those who were closer to Locke tended to think that the more vivid the representation, the greater the resultant pleasure; and hence there was an eighteenth-century development of what has been called the rhetoric of sensation. Kames was especially emphatic in describing the effect of vivid description, claiming that “a lively and accurate description of an important event, raises in me ideas no less distinct than if I had been originally an [page 46:] eye-witness.”(27) However, emotions are not felt until the “ideal” spectator is thrown into a kind of “waking dream” or “reverie” by “lively and distinct images” and imagines himself actually present at the event. Obviously what Kames wanted in a poem was just exactly the opposite of what Poe wanted, yet there are critical commonplaces in Karnes that would eventually be used in Poe's arguments, by implication in the “Letter to Mr. —— ——” and directly in some of his reviews.

Kames had noted perfunctorily that a “more perfect melody of articulate sounds is what distinguishes poetry from prose” and had gone on to affirm that the chief end of prose was instruction.(28) Both Coleridge and Poe had distinguished poetry from science on grounds of purpose, but only Poe had retained the Kamesian distinction between poetry and prose in general. Elsewhere Kames, who disliked rhyme and pronounced rhythmical effects, had commented disparagingly that the melody of verse “so powerfully enchants the mind, as to draw a veil over very gross faults and imperfections.”(29) By this he did not mean stylistic defects, but failures in logic and probability. In other words, poetry by its very quality of delight is an inefficient means of conveying truth, however effective it is in making us feel. Blair followed Kames by asserting that music raises feeling to such an intense level that feeling actually modifies perception. It remained for Alison to add the last word, starting with the effect of instrumental music and then describing the effect of music joined with words, as in song.

Music, said Alison, is a succession of sounds which resemble spoken words in that, like tones of voice, these sounds are general signs of feeling which do not express “any particular passion.” He supported his point by quoting James Beattie's striking description of music as an “unknown tongue” which “conveys no determinate feeling.” Beattie and Alison agreed that words were necessary to [page 47:] make music express either ideas or emotions; and Alison, like Blair before him, thought that the union of music and words represented the “most expressive species of composition,” the only kind which affected the “minds of uninstructed men.”(30)

The rationale of Poe's assertion that music is essential to the pleasurable effect of poetry is now complete. An objection could be made that Blair and Alison were describing folk ballads which were actually sung, whereas Poe was referring in his “letter” to poetry in general. To Poe's mind, however, this would be a needlessly artificial distinction, for eventually he was to state what now he was only implying, that the ballad was the most effective kind of poetry and that something had been lost when words were separated from musical accompaniment.(31) The pleasurable effect could be retained, but only in part, by metrical form.

The theoretical commonplaces of the past half-century do not fully account for Poe's insistence that poetry aims at indefinite pleasure. To equate Alison's “complex pleasure of taste” with Poe's “indefinite pleasure” would be to violate Alison and perhaps to misread Poe. However, no one would be likely to deny the young poet the ability to arrive at his own conclusions and to use what he knew of critical theory to support them. Then, too, he was engaging with a problem that had not been particularly important to the critics of the eighteenth century. Prior critics had not needed to defend metrical form; they had taken it for granted. When Kames distinguished poetry from prose on the ground that it exhibited a “more perfect melody” and that its chief end was to please, he was simply expressing what everyone knew. Coleridge had introduced a challenging and disturbing discrimination when he had separated poetry not only from science but also from the novel and the romance. [page 48:] The analysts of taste were not concerned with prose fiction because it was not an art form. The fine arts to Kames and Blair and Alison were poetry, drama, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, and landscape gardening. Therefore, when they discussed the pleasure derived from a poem as aesthetic pleasure, they did not have to distinguish it from the pleasure gained from a novel. For all practical purposes the problem did not exist. It did exist for Wordsworth, who had to explain why he wrote in verse instead of prose;(32) it existed for Coleridge, and perhaps, as a consequence, for Edgar Poe. In Poe's naïve aesthetics, however, the distinction was as simple and obvious as it had been for Kames. Poetry was different from prose fiction because it was fine art. Metrical form, like music, created indefinite feelings which modified the ideas derived from a perception of real objects or of a representation of real objects. Prose fiction, on the other hand, being less “artificial,” presented “perceptible images” that aroused definite sensations. That's all there was to it. Poe never forgot the Kamesian dictum that emotions resembled their causes, and given this premise his logic is impeccable. Poetry as a fine art raised the peculiar feeling of taste, which previous authority had established as different from [page 49:] ordinary sensation.(33) Feelings are like their causes; therefore the indefinite pleasure of taste must arise from indefinite sensations caused by metrical form. Nothing of the kind could be said of the romance or the novel, so the young Poe thought he had caught Coleridge in an obvious error. Poetry was different from prose because it was directed exclusively at the taste.

As has been already mentioned, Coleridge in Chapter XIV of the Biographia Literaria had distinguished the pleasure of a poem from that of prose fiction not in kind but in degree. The poem, being an organized whole, demanded close attention to its parts not merely as isolated elements but in their relatedness to each other in a total construct. If we assume that Poe read more than one chapter, he would have found Coleridge arguing in Chapter XVIII that metrical form was not essential to the pleasurable effect of poetry but was only a conditional pleasure dependent upon thought and expression. Coleridge agreed with the traditional commonplace that meter stimulated feeling, but he was not prepared to admit that this intensified feeling necessarily blurred our perceptions. Instead, he wrote, “it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention.” In itself metrical form is useless; it is valuable only as a stimulant. Meter is the proper form of a poem, Coleridge conceded, not because metrical form is essentially poetic (Poe's position), but because poetry implies “an excited state of the feelings and faculties” and meter helps provide this excitement. Coleridge always urged, and Poe denied, that though the immediate object of a [page 50:] poem is pleasure, its ultimate object ought to be truth, “either moral or intellectual.” Even in compositions designed to give pleasure, Coleridge affirmed, the “mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme,” would not entitle prose compositions “to the name of poems.”

It is obvious that Coleridge attributed value to poetry not because it was a fine art and aroused the peculiar pleasure of taste, but because, in the words of Walter Jackson Bate, “beauty is a way of approaching the true and the good; it is a way of rendering truth realizable to the total mind ....”(34) The difference between Poe and Coleridge is fundamental, not simply a superficial qualification made by a young man trying to attract attention to himself by quarreling with an authority. Edgar Poe, in the “Letter to Mr. —— ——” and in all of his subsequent criticism, argued that poetry as a fine art appealed only to the sense of beauty, that metrical form was essential to this appeal, and that (perhaps remembering Kames) it had nothing to do with sensual gratification or “passion” directed toward an object. Poe was to develop various strategies of proof in later years, but eventually he returned to the premises of the analysts of taste — that there was a separate faculty for the recognition of beauty, and that the operation of the reason in its pre-Kantian definition as the power of analysis was alien to and even destructive of aesthetic feeling. Poetry, Poe was to say eleven years later, “is the handmaiden but of Taste,” a statement which admits no ambiguity but which can be understood as Poe meant it only if we have recourse to the psychological premises upon which the statement rests.

2

Perhaps my excursion into an aspect of literary history that has been more thoroughly investigated by others is permissible if it helps illuminate Poe's critical practice as well as some of the obscurer references of his theory. If my reconstruction of the premises that underlie his concluding argument in the “letter” is accurate, [page 51:] then Poe's reproof of Coleridge for profundity and his high contempt for Wordsworth are not quite so irresponsible as they may seem. Most of his essay is polemical, but he would have felt reasonably safe in assaulting a poet whose subjects and diction had outraged conservative critics and a “philosopher” whose opinions were as yet understood by only a few in America. As we have seen, Poe had behind him the covert authority of the theorists best known to his potential audience. His strategy was not without guile, for he indirectly validated his own kind of poetry by discrediting theories that would implicitly or explicitly oppose it, a procedure which indicates that Poe knew very well what he was about. An examination of this strategy will be helpful, for it prefigures a method that he was to employ with increasing skill in his book reviews.

Poe began the “letter” by making an indirect attempt to qualify himself as an expert in judging poetry. He asserted with seeming boldness that a good poet was necessarily a good critic, dismissing the obvious argument that a poet is likely to favor the kind of poetry that he himself writes. Poe's easy disposal of such a crucial question was not without precedent. It was assumed that a good poet would have a cultivated taste, refined, as Kames and Blair had said, by experience with works of art. After Alison had invalidated the use of the analytic reason, which Kames and Blair had both found necessary for criticism, Sir Francis Jeffrey, in a review of Scott's The Lady of the Lake, had made the same claim as Poe: that a good poet was a good judge because in addition to natural sensibility he would have a cultivated taste.(35) Such a judge would not have to think about an object of art before pronouncing it beautiful, for, as Jeffrey affirmed in a review of the 1811 edition of Alison's Essays, “the perception of beauty ... we hold to be, in most cases, quite instantaneous, and altogether as immediate as the perception of the external qualities of the object to which it is ascribed.”(36) Because of the prestige of Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review, we can be certain that this opinion was widely circulated, particularly since his review of Alison was subsequently published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1824) as the article on Beauty. [page 52:] Jeffrey had emphasized “long experience” of the beautiful, however, and such a qualification, it would appear, would virtually eliminate the youthful Poe. Alison himself would have been more to Poe's purpose, for Alison had declared that sensibility diminished with age, a premise which Poe was about to use against Wordsworth.

Almost immediately in the “letter,” by stating that a good poet would have an “intimate acquaintance with the subject,” Poe protected himself against the possible charge that he was making innate talent the only qualification for criticism. If his remark were interpreted to mean that studying the subject is all that is required, Poe would be on shaky ground indeed, for a bad poet could study as much as a good one and thus would have an equal capacity for making a just critique — a possibility which Poe categorically denied. However, cultivating the taste, in Poe's sense, did not mean immersing oneself in theoretical considerations. It meant experiencing the beautiful in nature and in art. By such experience delicacy or refinement of taste is acquired, and since by Jeffrey's time taste could be regarded as a discriminative as well as a perceptive faculty, all a critic really needed was cultivated taste. That Poe was thinking in such terms is indicated by his analogical argument: “Poetry, above all things, is a beautiful painting whose tints, to minute inspection, are confusion worse confounded, but start boldly out to the cursory glance of the connoisseur.”(37) Here we have Jeffrey's “instantaneous” recognition of the qualities of the beautiful combined with Alison's hostility toward close analysis. Cultivated taste is implied by the word “connoisseur.”

That Alisonian aesthetics were common enough in America needs no demonstration, but a pair of opposite reactions from the South are significant. George Tucker, professor of moral philosophy [page 53:] at the University of Virginia, was one of the few Americans who wrote on the subject of taste. His essays were first published in the Port Folio in 1814 and 1815, and were issued as a collection in 1822 under the title Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals and National Policy. Tucker, considering beauty a quality of the object, was so opposed to the new subjectivism that he devoted a portion of his satirical fantasy A Voyage to the Moon (1827) to an attack on Jeffrey's associationism, no doubt inspired by the article in the Britannica. It has been suggested a number of times that Tucker's work was influential on Poe. If so, the influence was minimal as far as aesthetic theory is concerned. Much more relevant to Poe's argument was a review published in 1829 in the Southern Review. The anonymous critic had obviously read Alison and Jeffrey and then had ventured to propose his own definition of taste: “Taste does not represent a single idea, nor a composition of ideas, but only an abbreviation of terms designating ideas, which occur simultaneously. It is in relation to the heart and to the senses of discipline, the eye and the ear, what judgment is in reasoning, and honour is in morals — the rapid perception of those ultimate results, which repeated development has so completely ascertained, as to render it no longer necessary to expand and exhibit their elements in detail.”(38) Here are the familiar psychological assumptions: the faculties — the taste, the reason, and the moral sense — are allowed their discrete functions; a seeming immediacy of judgment is described, for both perception and feeling have been trained by appropriate exercise; detailed analysis is unnecessary for the discriminative act of the taste. More obviously relevant to Poe's statement is the author's explanation of the way in which a poet is able to detect the qualities of a poem. There is a similarity, the author claimed, between the quick decisions of a “practiced reasoner” in regard to familiar subjects and the quick judgments of a poet on Poems. These instantaneous decisions seem marvelous to the uninitiated, yet the reasoner himself “is at no loss to trace out the ladders and the scaffolding, which enabled him, gradually, to reach [page 54:] the vantage ground of truth.” In like manner the poet's eye perceives “at a glance, a multitude of nice appliances, linked together on a chain of gossamer,” which the ordinary observer could not “detect, distinguish, or detail.”(39) So it is with Poe's connoisseur, who perceives at a “cursory glance” those details of execution that are meaningless to the “minute inspection” of the analytical judgment.

Having qualified himself as a connoisseur, a poet intimately acquainted with his subject, Poe was now in a position to prosecute his general attack on the use of reason in matters of taste and his detailed assault on Wordsworth. The generalized charges came first: “Against the subtleties which would make poetry a study — not a passion — it becomes the metaphysician to reason — but the poet to protest.” Wordsworth, Poe insinuated, had behaved like a metaphysician instead of a poet. Intellectual activity does not produce poems: “I feel, from the bottom of my heart, that learning has little to do with the imagination — intellect with the passions — or age with poetry.” Why? Because the recognition of beauty is instinctive, like that “moral mechanism by which the simplicity of a child may overbalance the wisdom of a man.” Thus far Poe was preaching the gospel of Blair, and, as Blair had to do before him, he had to rescue himself from the implications of a naïve primitivism. It is at this point, therefore, by inserting his example of the connoisseur, that he reinforced his earlier proposition that a good poet would know his subject. What we are to understand is that in terms of wisdom a poet may be like a child, but that his taste is highly developed.

Far from being a naïve protest, Poe's criticism of Wordsworth [page 55:] has the weight of familiar authority behind it. His terminology was Blair's, but the psychology he used was Blair improved by Alison and, more remotely, by Dugald Stewart. “As to Wordsworth, I have no faith in him. That he had, in youth, the feelings of a poet I believe — for there are glimpses of extreme delicacy in his writings — (and delicacy is the poet's own kingdom ...) — but they have the appearance of a better day recollected ....” “Delicacy” is the key term here, and it should be rescued from the effeminate connotations it has gathered since the eighteenth century. Several critics had associated delicacy in one way or another with the aesthetic response. Burke had used it to refer to a quality of beautiful objects and Alexander Gerard had employed it in reference to a refined sensibility, but Hugh Blair was the familiar authority who had declared that delicacy represented “the perfection of that natural sensibility on which Taste is founded.”(40)

The presumption that sensibility declined with age, though a truism scarcely worth examining, was particularly prominent in Alison, who attributed it not only to the diminishing warmth of imagination but also to the habits of reason and reflection acquired in maturity. This idea is evident in Poe's next statement: “He [Wordsworth] was to blame in wearing away his youth in contemplation with the end of poetizing in his manhood. With the increase of his judgment the light which should make it apparent has faded away. His judgment consequently is too correct.” If we read Poe's last sentence without benefit of Blair, we are annoyed by his apparent illogic. How can a judgment be correcter than correct? Blair had defined the operation of judgment in taste as having to do chiefly with the detection of faults. All Poe meant was that Wordsworth was too assiduous in finding fault and was more or less blind to beauty. Blair himself had been too conservative to disparage correctness of judgment. He went only so far as to admit that delicacy and correctness never existed in perfect balance in the taste of a single individual and that error could be expected on one side or the other. Alison had few neoclassic inhibitions and asserted flatly that habitual exercise of analytical judgment would destroy [page 56:] the sensibility. This, according to Poe, was Wordsworth's predicament. Having desiccated his sensibility by too much speculation on art in his youth, the mature Wordsworth had had to “reason us into admiration of his poetry.” This was an absurd procedure, for beauty was self-evident to the refined taste.(41) Poe, of course, was referring to Wordsworth's prefaces, and he was now ready, having accounted for the elder poet's lack of taste, to demonstrate that Wordsworth had lost the ability to write good poems and appreciate others. Wordsworth was equipped only to detect faults.

The case in point was James Macpherson's “Ossian,” which had been admired extravagantly for its sublimity by Blair and Karnes. Poe echoed their judgment by finding in the Ossianic poems “gorgeous, yet simple imagery, where all is alive and panting with immortality, than which earth has nothing more grand, nor paradise more beautiful.” Still, it should have taken more than an affection for Macpherson's poems to provoke an extended diatribe against Wordsworth in the context of Poe's preface to his own poems. Wordsworth had criticized Macpherson's images in his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” of the Poems of 1815, and it would appear that Poe, who had read all of Wordsworth's prefaces more carefully than he was admitting, had detected a threat to his own kind of poetry. The discussion hinges on the nature of poetic imagery, and we should remember that images, in the terminology of the late eighteenth century, signified not figures of speech but the pictures called up in the mind by descriptive passages. We should remember also that Poe concluded his essay with an account of what he considered to be the proper effect of images in poetry, as these images were rendered in metrical form.

In the passage to which Poe referred, Wordsworth alluded to Macpherson's “spurious imagery” and asserted that everything in “Ossian” which was not stolen was “defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened,” and that it would always be so when “words are substituted [page 57:] for things.”(42) This statement exhibits what was sometimes called Wordsworth's “peculiar theory,” which required concrete diction, or specific words instead of the normal “poetic” style. Poe was offended for two reasons, first because Wordsworth had said that Macpherson's images were defined, whereas to Poe they were grandly indefinite, and secondly because Wordsworth's requirement of specificity, of things instead of words, invalidated Poe's own “vague and indefinite” poems.

The other aspects of Poe's criticism of Wordsworth can be summarized briefly; Poe simply repeated the charges made by hostile critics for the past two decades and even aped their manner. The most notorious assault on Wordsworth's poetry was Sir Francis Jeffrey's review of The Excursion in 1814. Jeffrey, using the premise of taste, had been harsh in condemning Wordsworth's verbose didacticism, his mysticism, his low diction and subjects, and his “peculiar system,” arguing that these “blemishes” represented a combination of bad taste and “self-partiality.”(43) Poe included the whole list of faults, directly or indirectly. Jeffrey had spoken of the disproportion between Wordsworth's taste and his genius (power of execution). Poe went a step further by implying that the poet had lost both powers, and quoted, somewhat inaccurately, lines from “The Idiot Boy” and “The Pet Lamb” as self-evident proof. He also referred contemptuously to Peter Bell and made a veiled allusion to The Waggoner; these two works had provoked a flurry of hostile criticism when they were published in 1819.(44)

It is apparent that Poe's specific charges against Wordsworth were as commonplace in 1831 as were the assumptions about taste which supported them. His employment of direct ridicule is worth [page 58:] noting, however, for it anticipates one of the methods he employed in reviewing books. Poe concluded his diatribe by quoting a passage from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and interpolating parenthetical guffaws:

This was the kind of ridicule which Poe was to use in some of his early book reviews and which he defended in 1835 in a letter to Beverley Tucker. Its use here shows that he was already familiar with the tactics of British reviewers and that the distance between the romantic poet of 1831 and the “tomahawk” critic of 1835 is not so great as might be supposed.

On the larger issue of hedonic value Poe was on safer ground, at least as far as posterity is concerned, than he was in his protest against Wordsworth. The analysts of taste, however they differed among themselves as to the operation of taste, were in agreement that the faculty was concerned only with the recognition of beauty. Fine art, they all said, appealed to the taste, and only indirectly to the moral sense or the reason. This was the aesthetic to which Edgar Poe subscribed, and if its proponents enlisted hedonic value in the service of virtue, some of them still knew where art stopped and preaching began — witness Jeffrey's impeachment of Words-worth's didacticism. Throughout his career Poe asked no more than this, that taste come first, and in his most characteristic statement in “The Poetic Principle” he declared that taste served virtue by depicting its beauty, causing us to loathe the “deformity” of vice. Poe was far less of an aesthete than some critics would have us believe, but the ground of his dispute with Coleridge indicates that [page 59:] even at the age of twenty-two he was able to understand that the British critic considered insight more valuable than pleasure and estimated the worth of metrical form accordingly. Poe took his stand on the side of form, for it was form alone that separated fine art from the practical art that had truth as its object.

Taken as a statement of theory, Poe's “Letter to Mr. —— ——” is a jejune performance, disorganized and irresponsible in asserting what a mature critic would have attempted to argue in detail; but taken for what it is, a defense of poems intended to make us feel instead of think, it is well enough managed to anticipate the polemicist who in five years was to attack a New York literary clique and thereby attract nationwide attention to an obscure Southern periodical. America needed an apologist for art; moralists lurked behind every bush, particularly in New England.

Poe never developed an aesthetic system that could withstand intensive scrutiny, which is the reason why Wimsatt and Bate, among others, have dismissed him summarily.(45) He advanced no new propositions, and he chose from the old whatever he needed to establish his proofs. He did not write to the “selectest of the wise of many generations,” as Shelley would have it, but to the American mass audience. A mob, Poe once said, had to be led by its nose, and he led it by dangling carrots of familiar arguments and pseudoscientific demonstrations. He cajoled, he threatened, he lied, and sometimes he raved, but always in the service of what he considered art. Popular didactic poets, like Longfellow, became the inoffensive targets of his abuse, but poets like Keats and Shelley and the early Tennyson, whose didacticism was less overt, received a full measure of praise. Yet to Poe's mind it was Keats alone who never erred in his appeal to the sense of beauty.

Within five years Poe was to reverse his attitude toward critical analysis, for after he became a reviewer he learned through trial and error that protests were not proof and that it was more effective to blast literary sin with evangelical fervor than it was to empathize with the “spirit” of each author, an approach that was currently [page 60:] recommended. He learned to describe “blemishes” in graphic detail, occasionally ridiculing them but more often patiently analyzing them by whatever principle he was able to apply, whether it was Coleridge's definition of the imagination or a rhetorical rule for figures.

Poe reviewed fiction as well as poetry, and since the prose romance could not be examined adequately by the aesthetic of taste, he had to devise his own standards, borrowing or adapting principles formulated for other genres.(46) Such a procedure was effective in producing a rationale for the short tale, but Poe could never accommodate the novel to his conviction of what art should do — appeal to the taste. Eventually he decided that the value of a novel depended on thought, not on form, which made it a practical instead of a fine art.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 35:]

1.  I have used the 1831 version of this essay with its less familiar title because the “Letter to B—— ——,” as printed in the Southern Literary Messenger for July, 1836, omits one significant statement. The text of the 1831 version may be found in Poe's Poems, Second Edition, Facsimile Text Society (New York, 1936).

2.  Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, 2.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 36:]

3.  M. H. Abrams has described the development of the concept of the lyric as poetic norm in British criticism but has then gone on to show that the expressive theory, which exalted music as the pure expression of feeling, reached an extreme among the German Frühromantiker. See The Mirror and the Lamp (Norton Library ed.; New York, 1958), 84-94. It is possible that Poe, even at the age of twenty-two, had learned something of German aesthetics from his reading of British journals, but it is unlikely that he had more than a marginal acquaintance, if any at all, with the pertinent texts. Henry A. Pochmann has listed Poe's references to Herder, Novalis, Tieck, Hoffman, and A. W. Schlegel, but the references were all made later. See German Culture in America (Madison, Wis., 1957), 393-97, 722. Poe's interest in German literature might have been aroused by George Blaetterman, professor of modern languages at the University of Virginia and a native of Germans’, but the best evidence points toward Poe's having studied only Latin and French, and possibly Italian and Spanish. See Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), 99-101. The troublesome problem of Poe's knowledge of German language and literature has been handled by a number of competent specialists, and I will limit myself here to the background in British aesthetics that was almost certainly familiar to him.

4.  See Floyd Stovall, “Poe's Debt to Coleridge,” University of Texas Studies in English, X (1930), 70-127.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 38:]

5.  We must understand the romance as a highly imaginative prose narrative, not as a metrical romance. Sir Walter Scott had given currency to the distinction between the prose romance and the novel, and it was employed in America by Hawthorne and Simms, as well as by Poe. Coleridge referred to the romance and the novel, but Poe omitted the novel, probably because he thought that the romance differed from the poem only because it was in prose, whereas the novel was so different that it was not worth consideration. Poe's opinions of the novel and the romance will be examined in the context of his book reviews.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 39:]

6.  Critical Responsiveness: A Study of the Psychological Current in Later Eighteenth-Century Criticism (Berkeley, 1949), 30.

7.  Review of Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, in Francis Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (New York, 1869), 13-15.

8.  Jeffrey disposed of Blair summarily by classing him with “a whole herd of rhetoricians” who did not “pretend to have any new or original notions.” Ibid., 20.

9.  Blair, Lectures, I, 16-19.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 40:]

10.  Ibid., 20-31.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 41:]

11.  Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London, 1958), 64, 116-17, 124. “What Burke failed to recognize was that a complex evaluation, such as the recognition of beauty, is largely a cognitive process and cannot be successfully described as a physiological reaction to the stimulus. The association psychologists, however elementary their assumptions, were aware of the cognitive process and tried to explain it.

12.  Observations on Man, facsimile reproduction, 2 vols. in one (Gainesville, 1966), I, 425-26.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 42:]

13.  Elements of Criticism, 22-23, 28, 94-95.

14.  Ibid., 42-43, 103-108.

15.  Ibid., 102-61 passim.

16.  Ibid., 108.

17.  Ibid., 38-39.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 42, continuing to the bottom of page 43:]

18.  Ibid., 20-23. Kames was a strict moralist, music could “humanize and polish” the mind, he was obviously afraid that [page 43:] it could “promote luxury and effeminacy” because of its inherent charms. An undue emphasis upon instrumental music would result in a kind of wallowing in pure hedonic value; therefore music should be used to accompany words that expressed the ethically sanctioned feelings.

19.  Ibid., 74-75. Even in song Karnes found certain disadvantages. Songs, in his opinion, could not express “important” emotions. He deprecated French and Italian opera because one's pleasure at a performance was derived more from the music than from the “sentiments,” which he defined as thoughts that are aroused by strong feeling. Music, to Kames as to Poe, was feeling without thought; it was only a stimulant without a proper cause or object. It had to be combined with an idea to produce a poem.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 43:]

20.  Ibid.

21.  Blair, Lectures, II, 315.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 44:]

22.  Ibid., I, 92.

23.  Ibid., 87.

24.  Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, ed. Abraham Mills (New York, 1844), 63. Hereinafter cited as Essays on Taste.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 45:]

25.  Ibid., 73.

26.  Poe's term was “music,” but it is obvious that he was referring to poetry instead of song. Consequently he could only mean metrical form. This usage was conventional. Kames had employed the terms “music” and “melody” in reference to versification, for it was assumed that poetry was read aloud and that the psychological effect of similar sounds, as in rhyme, ap-, proximated that of recurrent musical phrases. The effect of meter corresponded to that of musical measure.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 46:]

27.  Elements of Criticism, 52.

28.  Ibid., 291. As Gordon McKenzie has explained, Coleridge did not distinguish between poetry and prose because any such distinction would be on the basis of superficial form. The poetic experience could occur in either. See McKenzie, Organic Unity in Coleridge (Berkeley, 1939), 69.

29.  Kames, Elements of Criticism, 323.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 47:]

30.  Essays on Taste, 160-67. James Beattie, professor of moral philosophy at Marischal College, was closely associated with the Scottish common-sense school. His essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind was published in 1776 and was for some time considered authoritative. Adam Smith, better known as an economist, also had something to say on the subject. He agreed with Beattie that instrumental music conveyed no ideas or definite emotions. In fact, pure sound did not signify anything.

31.  Poe made this suggestion a number of times in his reviews, but he stated it unequivocally in “The Poetic Principle.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 48:]

32.  See the Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800). Wordsworth was very much aware of prior speculation on the effect of meter and rhyme in casting a veil of unreality over objects and events; and he knew that with his purpose of presenting, as nearly as possible, the real passions of man in a state of nature, many would wonder why he did not write in prose. Prose was considered a less artificial form of discourse, better suited for the imitation of real life — which appeared to be Wordsworth's object. Yet in spite of the charges of didacticism made by his detractors, Wordsworth professed commitment to the hedonic value commonly attributed to poetry and explained his decision to write in verse on a perfectly conventional basis. It was “the tendency of metre to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition ....” Accordingly, the pain of pathetic situations would be “overbalanced” by the pleasure derived from meter and the situation itself would seem less real. This much of Wordsworth's argument would have been acceptable to Poe, had it not been invalidated by the elder poet's insistence on distasteful subjects and low diction. Coleridge, of course, had located certain fallacies in Words-worth's argument and had exposed them in several chapters of the Biographia Literaria, which Poe had just read.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 49:]

33.  It is worth noting that Jeffrey, in his attempt to account for the peculiarity of the pleasure of taste, used the term “vague” to describe the effect of the perception of beauty. See Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 31. Aesthetic feeling was indescribable, but Alison and Jeffrey argued that it came from perception as modified by previous experience and by the activity of the imagination. Kames and Blair had placed more emphasis upon the evocative medium than upon the imaginative activity of the observer. Poe, confining himself strictly to hedonic value in the “letter,” referred only to the kind of pleasure attributable to a work of art. His use of “indefinite pleasure” as a description of the emotion of taste would be considered accurate. In later essays he sometimes used “vague” as a synonym for “indefinite.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 50:]

34.  Prefaces to Criticism (Garden City, 1959), 161.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 51:]

35.  Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 368.

36.  Ibid., 21.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 52:]

37.  Poe omitted this sentence from the version he published in the Messenger in 1836, probably because he recognized that his analogy with painting was carelessly chosen and would suggest to his readers that he retained the old neoclassic concept of poetry as an imitation of nature: ut pictura poesis. Fully committed to the romantic doctrine that poetry was like music in its expression of feeling, Poe by 1836 would admit that a short tale could be like a painting, but a poem could not.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 53:]

38.  Review of De La Motte Fouqués Kleine Romane, in Southern Review, III (1829), 32.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 54:]

39.  Ibid. It is significant that in “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe was to make a similar claim for the ability of the poet to reconstruct the rational processes of composition. He even used cognate metaphors, though his own were drawn from stagecraft instead of from building construction. Compare Poe's “wheels and pinions — the tackle for scene shifting — the step-ladders and demon traps” with the Southern Review author's “ladders and scaffolding.” Disciples of the Scottish school would not think it extraordinary for a man of cultivated taste to know what he was doing. He would have learned from experience. Only primitives were supposed to depend on blind inspiration.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 55:]

40.  Blair, Lectures, I, 23.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 56:]

41.  The inner sense of taste, according to Blair, enabled us to feel immediate pleasure in a work of art. The reason could explain why we were pleased (ibid., 22), but pleasure came first. No one could reason us into liking tasteless compositions.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 57:]

42.  “Essay Supplementary to the Preface,” The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1904), 813.

43.  Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 457-69. See also Jeffrey's review of The White Doe of Rylstone, ibid., 469-72.

44.  William S. Ward, “Wordsworth, the ‘Lake’ Poets, and Their Contemporary Magazine Critics,” Studies in Philology, XLII (1945), 94. Professor Ward's survey indicates that, except for “die-hards like Jeffrey,” Wordsworth had won acceptance among the magazine critics by 1820. Poe was clearly following the line of Jeffrey and the earlier reviewers.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 59:]

45.  Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History, 478-80; Bate, Prefaces to Criticism, 149-51.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 60:]

46.  This was a common problem for the magazine critics. Sir Archibald Alison, son of the critic referred to in these pages, dated the appearance of the new genre, the historical romance, from the publication of Scott's Waverly in 1814. For the first time a prose form had appeared that could appeal to the imagination and taste. Alison denigrated both the eighteenth-century novel and the Gothic romance, declaring that they were now (1842) almost unreadable. The historical romances, on the other hand, rivaled the epic and the drama; they were “the ballads of a civilized and enlightened age.” Essays, Political, Historical, and Miscellaneous (Edinburgh and London, 1850), III, 533.