Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “The Zoilus of the Messenger,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 94-118 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 94:]

IV  •  The Zoilus of the Messenger

 

THE December, 1835, number of the Messenger was the first issue under Poe's editorial guidance. On page one appeared the publisher's announcement that the “intellectual department of the paper is now under the conduct of the proprietor, assisted by a gentleman of distinguished literary talents.”

This gentleman, of course, was Edgar Poe, and though he did not have the title of editor he was, for all practical purposes, the primary resource of the “intellectual department.” The announcement also lauded Poe as a writer: “Every side has rung with praises of his uniquely original vein of imagination, and of humorous, delicate satire.”

Poe's editorial influence upon the magazine, if he had any at this point, is not immediately apparent. The articles and poems of this first number of Volume II are very much like those of Volume I. Since the last two numbers of Volume I had not gone to press, the December issue would have been made up of contributions received earlier and accepted by Sparhawk or White. There is a striking difference, however, in the size of the book review section. Book reviews occupy twenty-eight pages of this issue, whereas there had been only five pages in July, two in August, and three in September. If the book review section had not continued to be large while Poe was overseeing it, it would be logical to conclude that the expansion of the “intellectual department” was caused by the backlog of books that had accumulated during October and November. But throughout Poe's tenure in 1836, the space devoted to criticism averaged fifteen pages. Only in the November, 1836, issue, the last one under Poe's supervision, did the number of pages drop to the previous average. Furthermore, after Poe left the Messenger in January of 1837, the “intellectual department” almost disappeared for a time. White's friends simply could not supply the criticism that Poe had furnished largely by himself. It was as a literary critic [page 95:] that Poe made his weight felt on the Southern Literary Messenger.

Most of the reviews in the December number were undistinguished, and not all of them were written by Poe; but in one review he seized the opportunity he had probably been waiting for and catapulted the Messenger and himself into notoriety. This was a review of Norman Leslie, a novel by Theodore Sedgwick Fay, associate editor of a well-known journal, the New York Mirror.

During his years in Baltimore on the fringes of the journalistic set, Poe must have learned about the literary cliques and cabals which controlled magazine publication and, to a certain extent, journalistic reputations in America.(1) We can also assume that, with his reading of British magazines, Poe had gathered some idea of the nature of magazine publishing in England. No doubt he was aware that the earlier periodicals in England were sometimes thought of as “booksellers’ organs” which merely praised those books the booksellers wanted to push. Also lie must have known — it was common knowledge — that the great quarterlies of England represented political parties and that literary opinion was often controlled by political attitudes.(2) His own favorite, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, had been founded as a Tory journal in opposition to the Whig Edinburgh Review. In America periodicals were scarcely more independent in their opinions. Thus there was a need, sometimes described by editors in the tone of voices crying in the wilderness, for unbiased criticism, which Edgar Poe somewhat quixotically undertook to supply.

The initiation of a campaign for independent criticism is very much to Poe's credit, as Sidney Moss has amply demonstrated; and one would be inclined to award Poe appropriate laurels were there not evidence of other and less worthy motivations. The British reviewers were notorious for their harsh condemnation of works they did not like for either political or literary reasons. Although Jeffrey, [page 96:] the great Cham of the Edinburgh Review, was probably sincere enough in his attack upon the Lake School, the reviewers of Blackwood's might sometimes be accused of pure journalism or pure deviltry (or both) in their ridicule of the “Cockneys.”(3)

As an example of the Blackwood's type of review that Poe had read, we may take one from the March, 1823, number. This particular review is worth quoting because the tone of jocular contempt is similar to that which Poe employed:

Apparently this kind of reviewing appealed to Poe. He had begun his career as a writer of prose by burlesquing current modes of popular fiction, and throughout his life he displayed a liking for the kind of hoaxes, satires, and conundrums which attracted public attention. This aspect of Poe's character has been obscured beneath his romantic agony, but it is indisputably there. Of course it is possible that Poe challenged the author of Norman Leslie and his supporting clique in the name of high literary principles and was subsequently bruised in spirit by the retaliation of a gross, brutal world; but it is equally possible that, in the manner of the Blackwood's critic, he was looking for a dunce to gibbet, anticipating the probable literary war with confidence that as a journalistic critic he would thrive on the attention it would attract. People read Lockhart, Gifford, and Wilson, even when they professed to despise their methods.

Poe's first review of this type, his annihilation of Confessions of a Poet, had been premature. His position with the Messenger had not been secure enough for protracted warfare, but, perhaps fortunately for Poe, the only reaction to the review had been a mild rebuke by the Richmond Compiler. In attacking the editor of the New York Mirror, however, Poe encountered organized opposition. The novel had been receiving advance publicity (“puffs”) in the Mirror for months, and excerpts from it had been printed, Poe felt, ad nauseam. Poe had found a proper adversary, and he must have thought his new position was firm enough to withstand a counterattack. The first lines of his review were an open challenge: “Well! — here we have it! This is the book — the book par excellence — the book bepuffed, beplastered, and be-Mirrored: the book ‘attributed to’ Mr. Blank, and ‘said to be from the pen’ of Mr. Asterisk: the book which has been ‘about to appear’ — ‘in press’ — ‘in progress’ — ‘in preparation’ — and ‘forthcoming’: the book ‘graphic’ in anticipation — ‘talented’ a priori — and God knows what in prospectu. For the sake of everything puff, puffing, and puffable, let us take a peep at its contents!”(5)

Not one word of qualification mitigates Poe's scorn. He ridiculed the plot, asserted that the characters had “no character,” and [page 98:] claimed that the style was “unworthy of a schoolboy.” Further, to make it perfectly clear that he was inviting retaliation, he exposed Theodore Fay as the author (the novel bore the customary anonymity), and emphasized his position as the editor of the New York Mirror, the journal responsible for most of the advance publicity. All in all, said Poe, Norman Leslie was “the most inestimable piece of balderdash with which the common sense of the good people of America was ever so openly or villainously insulted.”

This review established Poe's reputation as a literary polemicist — many in his own time used a less neutral term. An account of his journalistic conflicts has been given in scrupulous detail by Sidney P. Moss and need not be repeated here, but the effect of Poe's method upon his employer White has been either neglected or glossed over by Poe's biographers. The evidence is not extensive, but it is sufficient. White, previously disturbed by Poe's satirical reviews, became quite alarmed. The possibility of a lawsuit must have crossed his mind, for he wrote to his adviser, Lucian Minor: “You are altogether right about the Leslie critique. — Poe has evidently shown himself no lawyer, whatever else he may be. The Editor of the Metropolitan has fallen into the same error. — Well that blunder cannot be repaired. — It will pass undetected, I hope.”(6)

But White's hope was not fulfilled. The New York clique retaliated first covertly and then directly, not only through the Mirror but also through the New York Commercial Advertiser and the Philadelphia Gazette of Willis Gaylord Clark. The affair eventually created lifelong enemies for Poe, among them Lewis Gaylord Clark, brother of Willis;(7) but there was one immediate salutary effect — White's magazine became a phenomenon. Attention had been attracted to an obscure Southern publication, and attention in the journalistic world meant subscriptions.

Still, White was worried. His advisers took exception to Poe's satirical method. His previous editor, Heath, had been contemptuous [page 99:] of harsh criticism, which he assumed was mean-spirited. A few Southern newspapers published adverse editorial comments. Had White been a professional journalist, he might have been delighted at the publicity the Messenger was to receive during the next few months; but the amateur spirit ruled in the South, and White was concerned with his public image. The publisher had at least one consolation, however. On December 25 he confided to Minor that Poe, “I rejoice to tell you, still keeps from the bottle.”(8)

With the amount of work Poe was doing, he must have been keeping from the bottle. In addition to his numerous reviews he was preparing the “Autography” series for the Messenger. Pretending to be one Joseph Miller,(9) Poe wrote to as many of the famous or near-famous men of the day as he could and then professed to analyze their personalities from their autographs, which were duplicated in the Messenger. The hoax was a clever piece of journalism that immediately became a hit, but Poe's analyses sometimes contained a sting, and White was wary.

In comparison with the review of Norman Leslie, Poe's other critiques in the December issue are tame, but three should be mentioned. He examined The Hawks of Hawk Hollow, the third of Robert Montgomery Bird's novels to be reviewed in the Messenger.(10) In the two earlier critiques, already discussed, measured approval of the novelist's works had been expressed, but in this review, which is more secure in the Poe canon, Bird was accused of imitating Scott and of producing an inferior imitation at that. Poe found no fault with the style of the novel but objected to the character development. The hero, Hyland, was inconsistently portrayed, and “although to be inconsistent with one's self, is not always to be false to Nature,” Bird allowed his hero to change character completely. This criticism was conventional. To Poe and [page 100:] his contemporaries, “following Nature” did not necessarily mean the reproduction of empirically verifiable traits. Conformity to social type was preferable, a literary propriety observed quite successfully by Cooper but less faithfully by Simms and Bird.

Poe was not prepared, in this review or in later ones, to make any significant contribution to the theory of the novel. To him it was not a true art form and could not be properly examined as an artistic structure, for, as Poe said of the epic or long narrative poem, a composition that could not be immediately apprehended as a total design did not stimulate aesthetic pleasure, however much it might please on other grounds. However, when he came to review the short tale, Poe invoked what he considered to be an indispensable aesthetic principle. In his analysis of Tales of the Peerage and the Peasantry, allegedly “edited” by Lady Dacre, he made a statement which anticipated his mature theory of the short tale. After accusing Lady Dacre of an “unpardonable piece of affectation” in pretending to edit the tales she had actually written (Poe disliked the anonymity practiced by most authors of the day), he praised her artistry in achieving “unity of effect”: “An every day writer would have ended a story of continued sorrow and suffering, with a bright gleam of unalloyed happiness, and sunshine — thus destroying, at a single blow, that indispensable unity which has been rightly called the unity of effect, and throwing down, as it were, in a paragraph what, perhaps, an entire volume has been laboring to establish.”(11)

Unity, of course, was one of the oldest standards of literary criticism, but in the past it had been conceived in terms of form. It was Archibald Alison who had advanced the most persuasive argument in British aesthetics for what he called the “unity of expression” or “unity of emotion.” Basing his argument upon the subjective reaction of an audience, he claimed that throughout a composition a single emotional tone should be preserved. A historian would be forced to include “trifling and uninteresting events,” but a poet, treating the same material, should exclude everything that did not contribute to the general emotion he wished to arouse in his reader.(12) [page 101:]

In the criticism of fiction Poe's contemporaries sometimes demanded a unity of action, as they did in the drama, but standards for the short tale had not been established, and Poe's statement that unity of effect was necessary represented an innovation. Obviously he meant the same kind of unity that Alison had demanded in all of the fine arts, and, had he wished to do so, he could have cited Alison, Coleridge, and Schlegel in his support.(13) This was Poe's first expression of the theory of the single effect which he was to develop more fully in later reviews.

His only other criticism in the December issue which is worthy of comment is a detailed examination of various periodicals. Before Poe became editor, the Messenger had occasionally reviewed other journals, but usually in brief paragraphs. Poe, however, devoted a paragraph to each article in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1835, and, following the current practice of reviewing reviews, called for a reform in journalistic criticism: “This article is written with great ability; but why call that a Review which is purely a dissertation on the state of the Irish Church?”(14) Then, in examining a review of Wordsworth's Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems in the Quarterly Review, he continued in the same vein of disapproval: “Here is one of those exceedingly rare cases in which a British critic confines himself strictly to his text — but this is nearly all that can be said in favor of the article. A more partial, a more indiscriminate or fulsome panegyric we never wish to see, and surely ‘Yarrow Revisited’ is worthy of a better fate.”(15) Next Poe turned his attention to the North American Review, a quarterly which he later called “that ineffable buzzard.” The issue for October, 1835, he found guilty of “puffing” American writers: “The North American, in its last number, considered Southey a fine writer, but Washington Irving a much finer, and indeed ‘the best living writer of English [page 102:] prose’: having, however, to review Mr. Channing in the present number, its opinions are conveniently modified to suit the occasion, and now the English of William E. Channing is declared coram populo to be ‘equally elegant, and a little more pure, correct, and pointed than that of Mr. Irving.’ There is surely something very absurd in all this.”(16) What Poe objected to here was both national and sectional bias in criticism. It was bad enough for the North American to exhaust superlatives upon Irving, an internationally recognized stylist, but to claim that Channing's prose was superior to that of Irving was simply uncritical admiration of a son of New England by a New England journal. Furthermore, the North American was guilty of deprecating its betters in the person of Coleridge. He challenged the magazine to prove its claim that “ ‘Coleridge shews an almost total want of precision and clearness of thought.’ “Coleridge's works are available, Poe stated, and “we greatly prefer proof to assertion.” Poe's position is obvious. He was demanding an unbiased criticism which examined the text and did not employ unsupported generalizations.

Poe used these reviews of other journals not as perfunctory notices (equivalent to cooperative advertising), but as a means to reform current reviewing methods; and, as we have seen, he did not hesitate to challenge the most powerful critical voice in America, the North American Review. He envisioned a review as a review and nothing more, thus eliminating, at least as critiques, the long, elaborate essays of the quarterlies.(17) If a review were to be genuine [page 103:] criticism, it could not be guilty of overestimating the quality of native sons, and it had to rid itself of sectional bias. Eventually Poe was to demand what he called for now only by implication: an analytical review that examined merits and defects and made judgments on the basis of principles. For several years Poe was compelled to smuggle his program for reform into his own reviews. It was not until 1841 that he found an opportunity to express it at length in an article published in Graham's Magazine.

2

The December number of the Messenger, with its large quota of criticism, attracted attention both North and South, and many journals reviewed it. It was Poe, we must assume, who collected these reviews and published some of them in a supplement to the January, 1836, issue of the Messenger. No doubt White approved, but, having little of Poe's flair for journalism, he probably did not originate the idea.

Some of Poe's biographers, following his own interpretation, have claimed that his methods of criticism gained practically universal approval, except from the New York clique incensed by his Norman Leslie review. But even if Poe's supplement contains a fair cross-section of opinion, the most we can claim is that the press approved more frequently than it disapproved.(18) Those who liked Poe's reviews commended his candor, impartiality, and independence of spirit; but other journals found fault with his severity and his tone of derision. The New York Courier and Enquirer thought that the review of Norman Leslie evinced “personal hostility” not only toward Mr. Fay, the author, but also toward “all who may be supposed to favor or admire him.” The Washington Telegraph objected to Poe's satirical method, although it found his severity justifiable. The Baltimore American censured the tone of Poe's notice of the North American Review and warned him that, though there was much matter for “cutting up,” he had better take a lesson [page 104:] from the meat carver and not smear his own fingers; “Mr. White and his editor should keep the tone and bearing of the Messenger elevated and cavalier-like.”

This last must have annoyed White considerably. A Virginian having to take a lesson in journalistic deportment from a Baltimore paper! White wanted his magazine to do honor to his native state. A journalistic war, however profitable it was commercially, would scarcely fit the image he wished to project.

Sectional feeling, which was already running high in the thirties, may have been responsible for some of the Southern satisfaction with Poe's method, but even in Virginia not all of the papers were so eager to take the starch out of the Yankees that they joined Poe's cause. The Norfolk Beacon felt that in general the critical notices were “in bad taste, particularly the reviews of the North American and the British Reviews,” but the editor went on to admit that the good outweighed the bad. The Lynchburg Virginian was more severe; several of the notices, the Lynchburg editor maintained, were “too dogmatical and flippant.” Such reviews as that of Norman Leslie would be read, he continued, because people “will always be attracted in crowds to behold an infliction of the Russian knout or to see a fellow creature flayed alive.” Though Mr. Fay undoubtedly deserved a “blistering” for publishing such a book as Norman Leslie, he did not deserve a flaying. The implication of the Lynchburg editor was that Poe was making a deliberate bid for notoriety.

Though White must have been disturbed by the mixed reaction to Poe's reviewing tactics, at least he did not force the young editor to hold back — not yet. The January, 1836, number of the Messenger contained sixteen pages of criticism, a considerable drop from the twenty-eight of the previous number, but still more than the Messenger had ever had before Poe became editor.

The lead review in the issue was of the poetry of a triumvirate which Beverley Tucker, in a letter to White, called “a leash of ladies” — Mrs. Lydia Huntley Sigourney, a valued contributor to the Messenger, Miss H. F. Gould, and Mrs. E. F. Ellet.(19) Only [page 105:] the critique of Mrs. Sigourney merits comment. Poe, usually the perfect Virginian in his tenderness toward females, was in something of a dilemma. Ordinarily he employed different standards in reviewing the works of women, but he must have felt that honesty required him to suggest that Mrs. Sigourney's reputation was not justified by her poems. Quite tactfully, if we remember how Poe's gorge rose every time he contemplated, perhaps enviously, an undeserved reputation, he described how mediocre writers managed to achieve recognition by the careful manipulation of publicity, “or by appealing continually with little things, to the ear of that great, overgrown gander, the critical and bibliographical rabble.” Then, perhaps feeling that he was going too far in implicating Mrs. Sigourney, he inserted a qualification: “But it must not be thought that we wish to include Mrs. Sigourney in the number. By no means. She has trod, however, upon the confines of their circle. She does not owe her reputation to the chicanery we mention, but it cannot be denied that it has been thereby greatly assisted.”

Next Poe brought up what for him was a frequent charge — imitation:

Poe, now rarely content to make a general charge without supplying the evidence, catalogued the particulars in which Mrs. Sigourney imitated Mrs. Hemans — in subject matter, in the elements of her versification, in “peculiar terms of her phraseology” (such as in overuse of yea! and alas!), and in “an invincible inclination to apostrophize every object, in both moral and physical existence,” and to prefix to nearly every poem mottoes and quotations “of which the verses ensuing are, in most instances, merely a paraphrase.” [page 106:] Such mannerisms in Mrs. Hemans herself were “gross and inartistic,” but as imitated mannerisms they were absolutely inadmissible.

Poe's criticism is sound. Imitation of an author's stylistic eccentricities suits only parody or burlesque, but Mrs. Sigourney was in dead earnest. Still, the justice of Poe's charges counted for little when they were levied against the divine Lydia, who, like Mrs. Hemans, could do no wrong.(20) The retaliation was immediate. Mrs. Sigourney's friends rose indignantly to her defense, and the lady herself announced sorrowfully that she could no longer contribute to the Messenger. White, alarmed, had Poe write a letter of apology, which turned out to be not particularly apologetic. Instead, Poe defended his review:

The concluding sentences which Poe hoped would mitigate his criticism state that when Mrs. Sigourney throws “aside the petty shackles which have hitherto enchained her, she will assume, at once, that highest station among the poets of our land which her noble talents so well qualify her for attaining.”

Poe's apology was not enough, for the poet's literary honesty had been impugned. Maintaining the air of modesty and piety which constituted her public image, Mrs. Sigourney answered Poe at length. She had a deep consciousness of her own imperfections and [page 107:] knew that “the courtesy of the publick” had exceeded her deserts. Aware of this, she should not be oversensitive about a review, but —

If Mrs. Sigourney was telling the truth, she had the better of the argument, and Poe, who thought of himself as an impartial critic, was diminished to a mean-spirited hack who assailed an author's character instead of concentrating, as Mrs. Sigourney demanded, on “faults in style, spirit, and construction.” There were grounds for Mrs. Sigourney's indignation. Sincerity was part of the romantic credo. An imitative poet, since he was not expressing himself, was culpable from both a literary and a moral perspective, the first because an imitation is rarely as good as an original, and the second because, as Poe pointed out, the imitative author improved his [page 108:] status by trading on another's ability and reputation. Knowing these implications, Mrs. Sigourney was right in feeling that her integrity had been impeached.

Originality, that traditional sign of poetic genius, Poe made one of his own criteria. Originality not only affirmed that the poet possessed innate sensibility, a necessary requirement; it could even testify to what Keats had called the “holiness of the heart's affections,” because originality precluded the use of someone else's feelings — borrowed emotions could scarcely be holy. Poe, however, placed as much emphasis upon originality of expression as he did upon originality of sentiment or of thought. Stealing another poet's idea, a charge which he was to make against Longfellow, deserved condemnation because the consequent expression could not be sincere; but stealing a poet's manner — his stylistic signature — was equally to be condemned because the thief used a skill not his own. As for stealing mannerisms which had no virtue in the first place, this denoted not only dishonesty but a profound lack of taste.

Thus we can understand the bases of Poe's obsession with plagiarism. Unfortunately he brought his accusations against second-rate poets who were doing no more than writing about conventional subjects in the period style. Poets of this sort usually sound pretty much alike. Even Poe's own poetry, in spite of his efforts at originality, is superficially similar to that of other poets of the time, including Edward Coote Pinkney and Thomas Holley Chivers. A few years later Poe achieved some understanding of the imitativeness likely to be found in a bookish poet who wrote in the period style, but this was only after he had engaged in the unpleasant “Longfellow war” and had incensed Longfellow's friends in much the same way as he had Mrs. Sigourney's. One thing he was beginning to learn from these experiences, however, was that it was safer and indeed more virtuous for a reviewer to stick to the text than it was to indulge in either the savage or jocular attacks of the earlier British reviewers. This was already his theoretical position, but he was unable to maintain it whenever he was riding his hobbyhorse of plagiarism or finding it necessary to take vengeance on a literary enemy. [page 109:]

Pressure from White required Poe to placate Mrs. Sigourney and, if possible, induce her to continue her contributions to the Messenger. On June 4 he wrote again, expressing his fears that he had forfeited her good will and requesting her to forgive him to the extent of resuming her contributions.(23) Her answer of June 11 was quite amiable. She assured Poe that she cherished no resentment, and that if she had, his favorable review of her friend Grenville Mellen's poems would have removed it. (Fortunately she did not know that this review in the April issue was not by Poe.) Having thus delicately cleared herself of the possible imputation of unwomanly anger, Mrs. Sigourney acquiesced: “I send at your request, what I happen to have by me, — and as you will have it to be a peace offering, you can thus view it, though there is in reality, no truce to be made between us. Do not, however, assume a more lenient style with regard to me, in consequence of any little aid I may have afforded the ‘Messenger,’ since no traffick in civilities is as valuable in my opinion as sincerity.”(24) So the Sigourney affair was smoothed over, with the honors, if there were any, going to the lady. Preserving the approved moralities of the age and maintaining sweetness and light even in this private correspondence, she vindicated her character if not her poetry. Some of Poe's other victims were less high-minded.

Though Mrs. Sigourney was mollified, Thomas Willis White was still uneasy. As early as January White had begun to doubt Poe's capacity as a critic and had let him know it. Disturbed, Poe had written to Beverley Tucker for support, and Tucker responded immediately with a letter to White:

Tucker was one of White's trusted advisers, and this statement should have been reassuring enough. In January of 1836, with the Messenger's reputation booming and new subscriptions pouring in, White should have been happy with Poe, but a letter to Tucker reveals an ambiguous attitude: “My right-hand man Poe thinks it [the January number] superior [to the others] — This is natural .... I shall on some suitable occasion, tell you a great deal about my young friend and editor. — It will be for your private ear.”(26)

Unfortunately we do not know what White told Tucker in his “private ear,” but cloistered praise like cloistered virtue rarely makes a noise in the world. If White had had something good to say about Poe, why would he be secretive about it, especially since Tucker was engaged in Poe's defense? On the basis of other letters about Poe, which shall be taken up in due course, we must suspect White of some irony in his phrase, “my young friend.” Still, Poe was his right-hand man, no question about that. As a rule White deferred to Poe in decisions about contributions, as his letter to William Scott of August 25, 1836, indicates: “Courtesy to Mr. Poe, whom I employ to edit my paper, makes it a matter of etiquette with me to submit all articles intended for the Messenger to his judgment, — and I abide by his dicta. What he might decide ... it is impossible for me to say.”(27) However, in January of 1837, when Poe was on his way out, White wrote again to Scott saying that Poe had accepted his manuscript after striking out the first and the two concluding paragraphs, which White had taken upon himself to restore.(28) Unquestionably White reserved to himself the privilege of overruling Poe, but more than likely Poe put up an [page 111:] argument whenever it happened. Despite White's misgivings, however, for nearly a year Poe was to have virtual control of the “critical department,” and he made the most of his opportunities.

3

The squabble with Mrs. Sigourney and White's reaction have been described in detail to illustrate the difficulties encountered by an “independent” critic. But the review which occasioned the quarrel has even more significance, for in it Poe made his first considered statement of what unity in a poem meant to him. With the theories of both Schlegel and Coleridge in mind, he brought up the question of unity in reference to the epigrams which Mrs. Sigourney customarily prefixed to her poems. This topic was only an excuse, however, for Poe's principle is much broader than the particular practice he condemned by it:

This passage must be examined with some care because it expresses the concept of artistic form which Poe retained throughout his career and for which he was to advance a teleological argument.(30) He never made any essential modifications of the concept, yet in different reviews he shifted his emphasis from structural unity to the unity of emotional effect — Alison's unity of emotion — as the situation demanded. Such a shift is apparent in this passage. In reference to “poems of magnitude” Poe concentrated on hedonic value, “the sum of ... pleasure,” and typically employed his hedonistic calculus in assuming that, since the mind cannot immediately grasp the design of a long poem, the peculiar pleasure derived from an immediate recognition of purpose would be lacking. Such a proposition could be derived logically from the premises of taste advanced by Jeffrey and Alison, although neither critic went so far as to say that poems should be brief.(31) Nor did Poe at this particular time; it was in later years that he argued that poems should be brief because the intensity of the effect could not be long endured, an assumption he shared with John Stuart Mill and some others.(32) The point here is that Poe, like the Scottish aestheticians, [page 113:] sought to analyze effects and then to validate those effects teleologically, a procedure he was to employ much more extensively three months later.

In accounting for the proper effect of a short poem, Poe shifted from hedonic value to what he called “totality of effect,” making use of the term “understanding,” in either a Lockean or a Coleridgean sense,(33) to indicate that the intellectual as well as the emotional faculties must be engaged in the total apprehension which prior authority had declared characteristic of cultivated taste.(34)

By 1836 Poe had read both Coleridge and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and there are evidences of this reading in the passage under consideration. His proposition about the pleasure derived from a long poem reminds us of Coleridge's statement that in any poem the pleasure derived from the whole is that which is “compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” More pertinent to Poe's criticism of Mrs. Sigourney is Coleridge's next paragraph.

It is easy to see why this passage might have come to Poe's mind when he was confronted with Mrs. Sigourney's mottoes, which, in his interpretation, forced the reader to refer to a “separate whole” for matter that should have been integrated into the body of the poem itself. He and Coleridge were describing different phenomena, but the principle of unity of effect would apply to each. Poe invoked it to demand autonomy for the poem itself, Coleridge in the service of organic unity.

It is strange that Poe referred to Schlegel in this passage, for Coleridge's remarks are much more pertinent. Probably it was because he had just been reading Schlegel's lectures, and it may have been five years since he had consulted the Biographia Literaria. Even at that he borrowed only a phrase from Schlegel, took it out of context and applied it in a way not completely compatible with his source. The German critic was not referring to poems at all but was trying to establish a more comprehensive principle for the drama than the traditional unity of action. Even the phrase, “unity of interest,” was not Schlegel's, as Poe implied, but had been taken from a French critic: “De La Motte, a French author who wrote against the Unities in general, would substitute for Unity of action, the Unity of interest. If the term be not confined to the interest in the destinies of some single personage, but is taken to mean in general the direction which the mind takes at the sight of an event, [page 115:] this explanation, so understood, seems most satisfactory and very near the truth.”(36)

Poe's own explanation of the pleasurable effect of a short poem hinges upon two separate but related phenomena: 1) total design, as recognized by “perfection of ... finish” and “nice adaptation of ... constituent parts,” those elements of a composition which can be apprehended by the rational faculty; and 2) unity of interest, which must mean “unity of impression.” That this explanation could have been derived from Schlegel's lecture on unity is easily substantiated.

Like Coleridge, Schlegel insisted upon organic unity instead of the formal unity of the neoclassicists, which he considered lifeless. The mechanical unity of a watch, Schlegel wrote, consists in its function of measuring time, but this unity can be apprehended by the understanding. On the other hand, the organic unity of a living form consists in the idea of life, which we possess only by “inward intuition.” This vitality cannot be recognized through a mere analytical examination of parts. In a work of art, which Schlegel, like most other romantics, took to be analogous to a living thing, unity is apprehended not by the eye and ear alone, nor by the understanding alone, but by a comprehensive act of the mind which he called “intuition.” All of the parts of an art work, Schlegel maintained, are “subservient to one common aim ... to produce a joint impression on the mind.” For Schlegel as for Coleridge, one could not separate feeling from ideas, as the faculty psychologists had been prone to do, for the intuitions of the mind produce ideas: “This is all one; for the feeling, so far as it is not merely sensual and passive, is our sense, our organ for the infinite, which forms itself into ideas for us.”(37) [page 116:]

The organic concept, then, was there for Poe's use in the same lecture from which he borrowed one phrase, but his reductionism was apparent in the way he used that phrase. He did not really invoke organic unity, that “deeper, more intrinsic, and more mysterious unity” which Schlegel called for in a work of art, but used the principle of a unified effect to demolish Mrs. Sigourney's mottoes. A poem would not produce a unified effect if the reader had to go outside the poem for information to clarify its import. It would be unfair to say that Poe did not understand the organic principles of Coleridge and Schlegel, for, as was typical of his practical criticism from this time forward, he advanced the general proposition and then applied it to the case at hand. He is more to blame for fixing his attention upon a defect so trivial as Mrs. Sigourney's epigrams, but we must realize that to Poe it was not an inconsequential error. He was to continue to insist that a poem should contain within itself all that was necessary for its comprehension, a corrective so necessary that it was revived by the “new” critics of the twentieth century.

A more serious limitation was his denial of unity of effect to long poems. His declaration that the mind of the reader cannot grasp “the proportions and proper adjustment of the whole” would make sense only if he retained the notion that the “design” or formal structure of a poem is analogous to that of the visual arts, which indeed he implied by his phrase, “one comprehensive survey.” We should not be misled by Poe's usual correlation of poetry with music as a nonrepresentational art; for not only are his poems and his tales pictorial in many ways, but, as we shall see, he continued for some time to emphasize pictorial effects in his theoretical propositions. It was six years before he was to limit the length of a poem on the ground of the intensity of its effect, an entirely different psychological principle from the one he used here. No doubt he was still remembering the theories of the psychologists of taste, who had made the recognition of design one of the chief intellectual pleasures to be derived from a work of art.

In evaluating Poe as a literary critic we should keep in mind the requirements of his profession. He was forced to review an incredible [page 117:] amount of bad but popular writing, the kind that might have been condemned out of hand on the basis of taste. Yet in striving to establish a critical method based upon principles instead of taste, he often had to employ principles suitable for the evaluation of works of literature upon writings that were beneath the level of art. A literary critic would feel disposed to be satirical about a hopelessly bad book because he could not treat it seriously. As we have seen, Poe had just tried the satirical method, but the reaction was perhaps stronger than he was prepared for. Beverley Tucker had warned him a month earlier about the possible reaction: “I did not mean to deny the efficacy of a certain style of criticism in demolishing scribblers .... It may make the critic as formidable to the rabble of literary offenders as Jack Dalgliesh or Jack Portious himself, but it makes him odious too, and adds nothing to his authority in the estimation of those whose approbation for his sentence cuts off the sufferer from the poor privilege of complaining, and the poor consolation of sympathy.”(38)

Perhaps this admonition from a man he respected influenced Poe to start trying to criticize on the basis of science instead of spleen during the coming year; but, as we shall see, he did not relinquish the satirical method. Beginning with the review of Mrs. Sigourney, however (a review which won Tucker's approbation), Poe began to introduce literary theory into his reviews more and more in order to furnish a basis for his allocation of merits and defects.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 95:]

1.  For an account of journalistic cliques during this period, see Miller, The Raven and Whale, 23-35, 104-117; and Moss, Poe's Literary Battles, 3-37.

2.  Ward, “Some Aspects of the Conservative Attitude,” 386-98.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 96:]

3.  The term “The Cockney School” was contemptuously applied by John Gibson Lockhart to a number of London writers. Lockhart was a reviewer for Blackwood's who was so vitriolic that he was called “the Scorpion.” He became editor of the Quarterly Review in 1825, but derision at the expense of the “cockneys” was associated with Blackwood's. In a letter to Beverley Tucker in December, 1835 (Letters, I, 77), Poe defended his own “levity” in reviewing by alluding to a Blackwood's review of “an Epic Poem by a cockney tailor.” Tucker's reply (Works, XVII, 23) reveals his own attitude toward satirical criticism: “As to Blackwood; I admire Wilson, but he is an offence unto me by the brutal arrogance of his style of criticism. I have no doubt he demolished the poor Tailor. But ‘who breaks a butterfly upon the wheel?’ Supported by the powerful party whose organ he is, he may never feel that he injures himself by such things; but he does. His criticisms will have the less weight with the impartial.”

See John Louis Haney, Early Reviews of the English Poets (Philadelphia, 1904), xxiv-xlvi, for an account of British reviewing practices, particularly those of Blackwood's in assailing the “Cockney School.”

4.  Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, XIII (1823), 321.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 97:]

5.  Works, VIII, 51.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 98:]

6.  November 23, 1835, in Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger, 105.

7.  Moss has described this feud in detail. Poe's Literary Battles, 85-131.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 99:]

8.  In Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger, 105.

9.  Joe Miller's Jests, by John Mottley, an eighteenth-century playwright, had been first published in 1739. “Joseph Miller” had been an actor in the Drury Lane company noted for his humor. “Joe Miller” was slang for a trite jest, so it should have been easy for both Poe's victims and his audience to detect the hoax.

10.  Works, VIII, 63-73.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 100:]

11.  Ibid., 74-75.

12.  Essays on Taste, 100-103.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 101:]

13.  In Chapter XV of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge discussed the ability of the imagination to reduce “multitude into unity of effect.” Schlegel examined the dramatic unities in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature and concluded in Chapter XVII that a “deeper, more intrinsic, and more mysterious unity” than the Aristotelian unity of action was required in dramatic art.

14.  Works, VIII, 89.

15.  Southern Literary Messenger, II (1836), 62.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 102:]

16.  Southern Literary Messenger, II (1836), 64. The review Poe condemned was by A. H. Everett, a conservative critic who did not admire Coleridge.

17.  Poe's opposition to discursive essays did not go unchallenged. The Washington Telegraph defended the current practice in these terms: “We do not agree with the reviewer [Poe] in condemning every thing under the name of a ‘Review,’ to which that name, in its strictest sense, does not apply. He who under the name gives an essay on tile subject of the article professed to be reviewed, does not break faith with the public, because for more than thirty years, tile word has been understood to include such essays. Now he who gives a good essay, gives a good thing, and when he does this, ... we have no right nor mind to complain.” Quoted in Southern Literary Messenger, II (1836), 136.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 103:]

18.  The following quotations may be found in the Supplement, Southern Literary Messenger, II (1836), 133-40.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 104:]

19.  Works, VIII, 122-42.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 106:]

20.  For the astonishing popularity of Mrs. Sigourney, see E. Douglas Branch, The Sentimental Years, 1836-1860 (New York, 1934), 135-38; and Mott, A History of American Magazines, 499.

21.  April 12, 1836, in Letters, I, 89-90.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 107:]

22.  April 23, 1836, in Works, XVII, 34-35.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 109:]

23.  Poe's letter of June 4 has been lost, but it may be reconstructed in part by Mrs. Sigourney's reply on June 11.

24.  In Works, XVII, 38.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 110:]

25.  Quoted in Hull, “A Canon,” 60.

26.  White to Tucker, February 6, 1836, ibid., 52.

27.  Hull, “A Canon,” 57. Scott was probably the “Englishman from New York” who wrote an article entitled “Rights of Authors” published in the January, 1837, issue of the Messenger. He may have been William Cowper Scott, a New York journalist, but David K. Jackson has not listed William Cowper Scott as contributing anything prior to 1845.

28.  Ibid.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 112:]

29.  Works, VIII, 125-26.

30.  Poe repeated this passage with minimal revision six years later in his review of Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems.

31.  Alison discussed at length the influence of design, or the recognition of purposeful skill, in arousing the “emotion of beauty,” concluding, as was typical of the Scottish philosophers, with a proposition about the final cause of art, which was to create from the raw material of nature forms “more pure and more perfect than any that Nature herself ever presents to them,” thus imitating the creativity of God and reinforcing religious feeling. Essays, 453-54, 458. Our first impression of a beautiful scene, Alison argued, was that of design, or the effect of workmanship. Jeffrey had insisted upon the immediacy of the aesthetic response. Poe's deduction is logical. If the mind could not grasp an artistic structure without extensive study, then the aesthetic pleasure aroused by the immediate recognition of design would be lacking, although other pleasures might be experienced from separate details.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 112, running to the bottom of page 113:]

32.  Abrams has pointed out that J. G. Sulzer had anticipated Poe in an encyclopaedia of aesthetics published in 1771-74 and that John Stuart [page 113:] Mill had said the same thing in 1838. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 90, 136-37. Poe advanced the argument in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and in “The Poetic Principle” (1848).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 113:]

33.  Locke had used the term for the reasoning faculty of the mind, but Coleridge, following Kant, had classified the understanding as a lower power, directed toward the comprehension of ordinary experience, whereas the reason was an intuitive power with insight into the universal. If Poe was using Schlegel accurately, he may be interpreted as saying that the understanding is employed in apprehending the formal structure of a short poem, its adaptation of means to the end; but in this review he virtually Ignored what Schlegel considered more significant, the organic unity which was apprehended intuitively.

34.  From the time of Blair and Karnes through that of Alison and Jeffrey to the time of Coleridge and Schlegel, the complexity of the response to art was increasingly recognized. A “cultivated taste” implied appreciation of artistic skill, a capacity to interpret meaning, and the ability to express value judgments as well as a sensitivity to emotional nuance.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 114:]

35.  Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (London, 1907), II, 10-11.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 115:]

36.  A. W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, ed. A. J. W. Morrison (2nd ed.; London, 1904), 340. For a discussion of Poe's debt to Schlegel, see Albert J. Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LII (1953), 1-12. My own interpretation of Poe's use of Schlegel will appear both in my text and in explanatory notes.

37.  Schlegel, Lectures, 244.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 117:]

38.  December 5, 1835, in Works, XVII, 23.