Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “Conflicting Aims: Journalist or Critic?,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 118-134 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 118:]

V  •  Conflicting Aims: Journalist or Critic?

 

POE had disposed of Mrs. Sigourney by an aesthetic principle, but his review of The Partisan,(1) by William Gilmore Simms, was not only a reversion to his satirical method but also a violation of the Messenger policy to encourage Southern authors. To White it must have seemed that his young editor was deliberately kicking the Southern muse in the teeth, not to mention alienating a contributor (Simms did send some poems to the Messenger which were published later in the year). To cause difficulty with Mrs. Sigourney, already a contributor, was bad enough, but to endanger support from the leading author of the South(2) was sheer perversity.

Poe's review was perverse. He spent two columns making fun of Simms's four-line dedication of the novel to a friend, a dedication which certainly seems harmless enough, even modest:

Poe, with mordant humor, created a verbal picture of the supposed presentation of this dedication to Yeadon, ridiculing Simms's close punctuation in the process. He concluded with this sentence: “Mr. Y. feels it his duty to kick the author of ‘The Yemassee’ down stairs.” Then, to contrive a point for such apparent malice, he wrote: “Now, in this, all the actual burlesque consists in merely substituting things for words. There are many of our readers who will recognize in this imaginary interview between Mr. Yeadon and Mr. Simms, at least a family likeness to the written Dedication of the latter. This Dedication is, nevertheless, quite as good as one half the antique and lackadaisical courtesies with which we daily see the initial leaves of our best publications disfigured.”

Poe used Simms's brief inscription to attack the florid dedications sometimes found in books of the time. These he construed as hypocrisy designed to curry favor. Simms's dedication was obviously not of this type, however, and Poe was out of order.

Nor did Poe stop with the dedication. In the remainder of his review he rebuked Simms for a faulty plot, for vulgarity of language, for bad taste in characterization, and for “shockingly bad English,” concluding that the Charlestonian had the eye of a painter and should sketch landscapes instead of writing novels. Simms's reaction, which appeared in a letter to Evert Duyckinck some years later, is quite understandable:

This review furnishes evidence that Poe's war against the New York literati was not his only reason for writing satirical critiques. Among his less worthy motivations must have been the desire to attract attention. It would be difficult to explain his ridicule of Simms's dedication to Yeadon on any other ground. Yet there is still the possibility that he thought The Partisan an inferior work, and, as he had written to Tucker in December, to have treated an inferior work seriously “would have defeated the ends of the critic, in weakening his own authority by making himself ridiculous.”(4) Poe was a young unknown, trying to gain authority in a hurry, and the kind of authority he had in mind was that of Jeffrey, Christopher North, William Gifford, and J. G. Lockhart, not that of the typical journalistic critic in America. In later reviews Poe was to make amends to Simms, and he and the Charleston novelist became quite friendly some ten years later.(5)

Other reviews in the January number are no more significant as literary criticism than Poe's review of Simms, but in them is evidence that Poe was trying to develop a psychological approach, a direction that would be almost inevitable in the light of the background already discussed, British aesthetics from Kames to Coleridge. In a notice of a new edition of Robinson Crusoe he called attention to the “potent magic of verisimilitude” achieved by Defoe, but he went a step farther than the ordinary journalistic critic (Defoe's “verisimilitude” was a critical commonplace) in [page 121:] attempting to account for it: “Indeed the author of Crusoe must have possessed, above all faculties, what has been termed the faculty of identification — that dominion exercised by volition over imagination which enables the mind to lose its own, in a fictitious individuality.”(6)

What Poe called the “faculty of identification” was the sympathetic imagination that some British critics had considered necessary for literary genius. Coleridge had described how Shakespeare “darts himself forth, and passes into all forms of human character and passion.”(7) Hazlitt, also in reference to Shakespeare, had written, “The poet may be said, for the time, to identify himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies.”(8) More than Coleridge and far more than Hazlitt, however, Poe emphasized the dominion of the will over the activity of the imagination. To Coleridge the imagination was a power that could be guided by the artistic will but was not dominated by it. To Hazlitt it was strongly emotionalized perception, an awareness of the object so intense that consciousness of the perceiving self was eliminated. Identification with the object was possible only in a state of strong feeling, and feeling could not be turned on or off by the dominion of the will. Hazlitt found little value in technical skill unless it was preceded by this heightened awareness. Poe, on the other hand, was already beginning to emphasize technique, for neither insight nor feeling had value unless they could be transmitted to others.

We must interpret Poe's emphasis upon conscious art in relation to his journalistic polemics. There were apologists enough for “natural” genius among the romantic critics, but there were few for technical skill. Poe would correct the situation by providing the necessary purgative for bad art. Accordingly, in the February Messenger he announced his intention and administered his purge in a review of another subliterary novel: [page 122:]

We can see from this that Poe did not dispose of all books he considered worthless with a perfunctory notice. Here he condemned on principle, at least part of the time, and made quotations from the book itself to bear out his charge of folly and bombast. Morris Mattson's Paul Ulric was an amateurish imitation of the novels of D’Israeli, and Poe was ruthless in pointing it out, along with detailing the absurdities of plot and style.

Though Poe often condemned where the cliquists might praise, this was not the only way he moved against the tide of American journalistic criticism. He was also capable of commending authors (usually foreign) whom American critics were likely to condemn. The novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton had given many reviewers opportunities for dissertations on immorality in fiction.(10) Poe, on the other hand, reviewing Rienzi,(11) praised Bulwer for some of the very qualities other critics had found objectionable:

There are two points in this statement worth consideration. First, Poe praised the intellectual power of Bulwer and delighted in what other critics deprecated, Bulwer's portrayal of the “wildest passions of our nature.” Poe was not concerned with the social effect of such stimulation, it appears, and was capable of assuming that wisdom was its own reward. Second, he stated flatly that novels do not afford the best opportunity for the contemplation of Bulwer's genius. By genius, Poe could only mean artistic genius, and, as has been previously pointed out, he did not consider novels to be works of art. That Bulwer was capable of artistry, he hastened to affirm: “In a vivid wit — in profundity and a Gothic massiveness of thought — in style — in a calm certainty and definitiveness of purpose — in industry — and above all in the power of controlling and regulating by volition his illimitable faculties of mind, he is unequalled — he is unapproached.” Poe never wasted his superlatives. He was attributing to Bulwer the qualities that were completely lacking in Morris Mattson — thought, clearly defined purpose, industry, and “above all” the artistic will. We need only to compare Poe's excessive praise of Bulwer with the concluding paragraph of his review of Paul Ulric to detect his strategy. Mattson's book was “despicable in every respect.” And, Poe continued, “Such are the works which bring daily discredit upon our national literature. We have no right to complain of being laughed at abroad when so villainous a compound, as the thing we now hold in our hand, of incongruous folly, [page 124:] plagiarism, immorality, inanity, and bombast, can command at any moment both a puff and a publisher.” Since both of these reviews appeared in the same issue of the Messenger, Poe was administering his corrective by example and by comparison. He was rebuking uncritical literary nationalism, informing the public that it had been misled about Bulwer, and administering a purgative for bad American writing; but he was also emphasizing certain requirements for an artist: a definite purpose, together with the industry and the will to carry it out. Sensibility was not enough, he was to affirm a number of times in later reviews.

As far as the art of the novel was concerned, however, Poe was somewhat at a loss. A genre critic, he had difficulty fitting Rienzi into the conventional categories. It was a historical novel, but it stayed too close to the facts for Poe to regard it as a romance.(12) It could have been a history instead of a novel, and as such it was “essentially Epic rather than Dramatic.” This classification enabled Poe to make an Aristotelian pronouncement that Rienzi, as epic, was “History in its truest — in its only true, proper, and philosophical garb.” In addition, he wrote, it had the “delineations of passion and character” proper to the romance and gave a “profound and lucid exposition” of the philosophy of government!

No significance can be attached to Poe's evaluation of Rienzi; the real interest of the review lies in his challenge to contemporary attitudes. He could not have lauded Bulwer in such terms without full knowledge that he was going against the current of American criticism. He would have known, too, that he would be annoying [page 125:] White and perhaps even Beverley Tucker. In the January, 1837, issue of the Messenger, after Poe had left the magazine, Tucker reviewed Bulwer's play The Duchess de la Valliere. This review was as severe as any of Poe's, but White was delighted. He wrote Tucker: “For myself, individually, I am in rapture with the drubbing you have given Mr. B. — The only fault I find with it, that you have handled him half so severely as he merited.(13)

White could be happy about a severe review by Tucker because it was based upon the sacrosanct principle of morality. The play, Tucker claimed, could have “taken its turn upon the stage, with the obscene comedies of Congreve and Farquhar.” He did not profess to know how the larger cities of Europe or America would react to such “exhibitions of splendid villainy and alluring sensuality,” but he was “absolutely sure, that, in our unrefined, unenlightened, unpretending, uncanting community of white and black, no such dramas as this of Mr. Bulwer's would draw together audiences as would pay the candle-snuffer. We have,” he continued, “and again we say thank God! — We have no titled libertines, no demi-reps of quality, no flaunting divorcees — none either rich, or great, or noble, who seek their wives from the stage or the stews.”(14) Furthermore, Tucker was sure that Bulwer's drama simply would not be tolerated among the ladies of Virginia!

Tucker's review was Standard American and, more important to White, Standard Virginian, with its patent distrust of the morals of great cities and its provincial smugness about the ladies of Virginia. The easy morality of European society had been the object of American abuse for nearly half a century, and villains in the sentimental novel and on the stage were often British officers. English travelers since the War of 1812 had aroused American resentment by their remarks about Yankee crudeness, vulgarity, and ignorance, and the American journals had retaliated in kind. Sensitive to such charges, Americans took pride in the sturdy honesty and moral elevation of their nativist heroes, whose mere presence on the stage was a rebuke to the licentious follies of Chesterfieldian fops. [page 126:] Tucker's tirade was typically provincial, and it was precisely this provincialism that Poe challenged in the name of universal standards. He had been a good student, and the authorities of the past had declared that the ultimate test of a work of art was universality.(15)

This is not to say, however, that Poe was about to become an objective critic — to evaluate by invariable principles was an ambition he cherished but never achieved. He could extol his friends and berate his enemies just as the cliquists of New York did. In the February number there was a review of a novel by Lambert A. Wilmer, The Confessions of Emilia Harrington.(16) Wilmer had been friendly to Poe during his difficult period of near starvation in Baltimore, and Poe had conceived with him the plan of publishing a monthly magazine. Wilmer had even written a poetic drama, Merlin, based upon Poe's youthful love for Sarah Elmira Royster.(17) Poe would have had to be either a disloyal friend or the most dispassionate [page 127:] of judges had he given the book the criticism it deserved. Being neither, he resorted to a method which violated his code as a critic — discussing a number of things other than the book itself, chiefly the power of verisimilitude in Robinson Crusoe, which he had treated in an earlier review. He credited Wilmer with the same power, which by the standards of the time was no small praise. More unusual for Poe, he went on to claim that Emilia Harrington would “render essential services to virtue in the unveiling of the deformities of vice.” This, he wrote, “is a deed of no questionable utility.” Ordinarily Poe wasted little space on the moral utility of a novel — he left that to his journalistic confreres — but, since Wilmer's book catered to the public appetite for sensation, this was about the most tactful commendation Poe could give. Quickly getting off the subject, Poe praised Wilmer's poem, “To Mira,” which had appeared in the December issue of the Messenger, as showing “exquisite tenderness of sentiment, ... deep and unaffected melancholy ... and high polish of versification.” Finally, he had some kind words for Wilmer's Merlin and for his editorial writings in the Saturday Evening Post. All this without any actual criticism indicates that Poe was for a moment doffing his mantle as the “Zoilus” of the Messenger in order to do a favor for a friend.

Yet if Poe could praise the inferior work of a friend, we must not conclude that he was always being kind when he became excited about a book that has since been forgotten. He was evidently sincere in his admiration for Henry F. Chorley's Conti the Discarded (a collection of tales),(18) though Chorley is remembered today, if at all, only by the specialist in nineteenth-century English literature. “Conti the Discarded” was a tale on a subject that titillated the romantic mind — the misunderstood genius. The place of art and artistic genius in society was Chorley's special concern throughout his literary career,(19) and the subject was of unusual interest to Poe, who already had, and was to continue to have, his own difficulties with the public. Chorley's tales, Poe wrote, “have a noble, [page 128:] and to us, a most thrillingly interesting purpose.” He continued in an adulatory vein: “In saying that our whole heart is with the author — that the deepest, and we trust, the purest emotions are enkindled within us by his chivalric and magnanimous design — we present but a feeble picture of our individual feelings as influenced by the perusal of Conti.” Then Poe paraphrased from Chorley's preface a passage concerning the way the world degrades the work of the artist into “a mere plaything” and the way the artist, perhaps in consequence, brings “his own calling into contempt by coarsely regarding it as a mere engine of money getting.” Poe continued to paraphrase Chorley freely, changing the English writer's words to make them more emphatic. Chorley wrote: “That genius is not to be bound by vulgar rules, is a maxim which, however true, has been too often repeated; and there have appeared on earth enough spirits of the loftiest and most brilliant order who have worthily taken their part in life as useful citizens, affectionate husbands, faithful friends, to deprive of their excuse all such as hold that to despise and alienate the world is the inevitable and painfully glorious destiny of the highly gifted!”(20) The first clause of this passage Poe changed to, “That genius should not and indeed cannot be bound down to the vulgar common-places of existence is a maxim ... ,” and then went on to repeat Chorley verbatim to the end of the passage.

Although we may not approve of Poe's practice of changing quotations to suit his own purpose, we can at least try to understand his motives. Poe admired Chorley because the English writer was trying to create a more generous public attitude toward the creative artist by refuting the popular notion that the artistic genius was inevitably alienated from the world by his egotistic insistence upon unconventional behavior. Poe had a personal stake in the matter. His early poetry had revealed a posture of alienation and somewhat morbid pride. His behavior — his youthful drinking and gambling — had been censured in the middle-class business milieu of John [page 129:] Allan; and he was currently having difficulties with the equally conventional Thomas Willis White.

Too, the notion that the artistic genius was unbalanced because some of his faculties were exaggerated at the expense of others was widely current in Poe's day, and more than once Poe felt called upon to defend genius by maintaining that the highest genius exhibited a complete development of all the faculties. A sympathetic treatment of genius would thus command Poe's immediate interest. Although Chorley argued that a genius did not necessarily despise the conventions of the world, he gave in Conti a sympathetic account of behavior that would be outrageous in American eyes.

In Conti Madame Zerlini, an Italian prima donna, falls in love with Colonel Hardwycke, an Englishman, and becomes his mistress for twelve years, bearing him a son. When Colonel Hardwycke decides to marry someone else, Madame Zerlini promptly expires, dying for love in proper romantic fashion. The “vulgar rules” which Chorley referred to in his preface apparently had less to do with art than with moral conventions. Poe's audience was used to the notion that genius could snatch a grace beyond the reach of art — could masterfully violate the rules of composition. Chorley could have been interpreted along these lines, but Poe wanted his readers to receive the intended meaning, so he substituted “vulgar commonplaces of existence,” which could not so easily be misunderstood. He did not want the “noble purpose” of understanding the behavior of genius to be frustrated by an ambiguous phrase in Chorley's preface. Madame Zerlini, of course, receives her comeuppance; she is properly punished for her transgressions. The significant thing is that she was treated sympathetically.

Poe's admiration of Chorley, however, was not based solely on the fact that he and the English author were interested in the same subject. In Chorley's description of the demise of Madame Zerlini, sex and death are deliciously mingled in a way which Poe must have found attractive. He quoted the appropriate passage:

It is possible that this passage, which describes the embrace of death almost as if it were a sexual struggle, prefigures Poe's own description of the fierce effort of Ligeia to preserve her life by an effort of the will; but in Poe's tale there are no exquisitely rounded shoulders for the delectation of the reader. Sex is almost completely sublimated in Poe, unless it appears in the form of necrophilia. On the other hand, as his admiration for Bulwer and Chorley indicates, he was not nearly so prudish about such matters as Heath and Tucker. His taste for the sex-death motif has occasioned a number of psychopathological studies, such as that of Madame Bonaparte, which attempt to examine Poe's neurosis through his writings. Yet if we extend the evidence to include the writing he liked, we would see that at least one aspect of his neurosis could be linked to a period taste. Readers in the 1830's relished morbidity; and it was in the Gothic tradition for sex to be smuggled in with the terror.(21)

2

The February issue of the Messenger contained thirty-one pages of criticism, the greatest number during Poe's editorship, but in [page 131:] March only nine pages of critical notices appeared. Whether anything had happened beyond the normal variation of books received, it is difficult to say. White had written to Lucian Minor on December 25, 1835, that Poe still “kept from the bottle,” but whether that happy state of affairs continued throughout January and February of 1836 we do not know. Since Poe was writing nearly all of the critical notices, any fluctuation in his state of health, emotional or otherwise, would have been directly reflected in the amount of criticism published. Mrs. Clemm and Virginia had joined him in Richmond in October of 1835, but as he did not marry Virginia until May 16 of the following year, the obligations of being a family man should not have interfered with his work. Furthermore, his letters during January and February of 1836 were cheerful and businesslike. He wrote to Kennedy on January 22, “My health is better than for years past, my mind is fully occupied, my pecuniary difficulties have vanished, I have a fair prospect of future success — in a word all is right.”(22) On the face of it, then, the relatively small number of notices for the March issue was not caused by Poe's personal situation. Probably fewer books were received, or space was limited.

Of the criticism in the March number only two reviews have any bearing on Poe's development as a literary critic. The first was of a brief study guide to the “science” of phrenology, compiled by a Mrs. L. Miles from the works of the founders of phrenology, J. K. Spurzheim and F. J. Gall.(23) Poe, like many other Americans, was tremendously excited by the potentialities of the phrenological system. It seemed to be useful for self-analysis, mental therapy, educational theory and practice, and even literary criticism.(24) American magazines had been publicizing phrenology since 1809, and a short-lived quarterly called the Annals of Phrenology had begun publication in Boston in 1834. Spurzheim himself had visited [page 132:] America and in the course of his visit had died somewhat spectacularly in 1832. A public autopsy was held, his brain was removed and weighed, and Harvard University made a special effort to commemorate his loss.(25) An alert reader of all the journals he could get his hands on, Poe would certainly have encountered many articles on phrenology. It had been a topic of special interest in the New-England Magazine between 1833 and 1835, and Poe had tried to sell a tale to that journal in 1833.(26) It was discussed in many other magazines, including Lewis Gaylord Clark's Knickerbocker.(27) Poe's familiarity with the background of phrenology is suggested by his repeating the story of Spurzheim's gaining five hundred “converts” by lecturing with a brain in one hand and a copy of the Edinburgh Review in the other. He also mentioned the Scottish phrenologist George Combe, whose works went through many editions in the 1830's and 1840's and who was immensely popular in America.

Poe claimed that the “most salutary” use of phrenology was “self-examination and self-knowledge” and that “through the science, a perfectly accurate estimate of ... moral capabilities” might be obtained.(28) There were other uses too numerous to mention in a brief review, Poe said. Two which he did not mention, but which he was soon to put into practice, were characterization in fiction and psychological criticism.(29) [page 133:]

The only other review in the March issue which is worthy of comment is of A. B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes. In this review Poe demonstrated that he was capable of commending a type of American humor different from his own “grotesques.” He made no attempt to analyze the humor or express a theory of the comic. He simply praised the work for its quality of producing sheer enjoyment and concluded that it would make the writer's fortune if it were published in England. For if Poe, who professed himself “not of the merry mood,” enjoyed Longstreet's tales, “what would Christopher North say to them? — ah, what would Christopher North say? that is the question. Certainly not a word. But we can fancy the pursing up of his lips, and the long, loud, and jovial resonation of his wicked, uproarious ha! ha's!”(30)

Poe gave credit to Longstreet for his ability to draw character, Southern character in particular, and regarded the book as “a sure omen of better days for the literature of the South.” This was an accurate forecast, for Longstreet's book was the first in a line of publications of Southwestern humor which were to catch the public fancy for the next half-century. Of equal interest, however, is Poe's visualization of the reaction of Christopher North to Georgia Scenes. It gives us some idea of the image he had of the famous critic. Certainly to Poe, North was not, as he seemed to Beverley Tucker, the sinister figure who took sadistic pleasure in flaying poor-devil authors. Instead, Poe saw him as a jovial imp, characterized more by “wicked” good humor than by cruelty. And it is not hard to imagine that Poe, in his own satirical reviews, had attempted to project a similar image of himself but had succeeded only in evoking the charge of flippancy from American journalists who were not sympathetic toward mordant humor — particularly when it was directed at their friends.

By the time he had written the reviews for the March number of the Messenger, Poe had developed patterns which he was to follow, more or less regularly, throughout his career, for he had learned what he had to do to survive as a journalistic critic. The competition in the magazine world was vicious. Magazines were [page 134:] started with little capital and inadequate subscription lists, and most of them expired within one to five years. The thing to do was to secure contributions from the best-known writers(31) — Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Bird, and a few others esteemed in the 1830's — but few publishers could manage more than token payments. White most certainly could not afford to pay established authors,(32) and Poe had to employ other tactics to attract attention. He had proved himself to be a tough competitor, but this does not mean that he relinquished standards. On the contrary, he thought that courageous book reviews, unqualified by fear or favor, were as necessary for the reputation of a magazine as the quality of merchandise was for a retail establishment. Whatever qualms he may have had as a “Southern” gentleman were quickly overcome by his recognition that he was in a business and that his competitors in New York were not hampered by scruples. Yet they had been the first to utter cries of outrage when Poe assaulted one of their own. This alone would not have been likely to deter him, but when White and his advisers had failed to appreciate the shrewdness of Poe's tactics, he knew that ridicule, however much it was justified in his own mind, would not gain respect for him as a critic. He had to become what was then called a “philosophical” critic and validate his claims on psychological or even metaphysical grounds, as Coleridge had before him. His first “philosophical” criticism appeared in April, 1836, in a review which most Poe scholars have taken to be the most significant of his Messenger period, his double review of The Culprit Fay, by Joseph Rodman Drake, and Alnwick Castle, by Fitz-Greene Halleck, two poets whose reputations were much higher in 1836 than they are today.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 118:]

1.  Works, VIII, 143-58.

2.  Simms had already published several books of verse and three novels, which Poe listed, along with Simms's best long poem, Atalanta (1832). The Charleston author was by far the most successful writer in the South, having earned six thousand dollars from his books in 1835. Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 582. It is quite obvious that Poe knew of Simms's reputation both North and South. He would have been equally aware that to offend Simms was potentially damaging to the Messenger, for Simms could have contributed poems, short stories, and book reviews which, except for Poe's own work, would have been superior to anything as yet published.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 119:]

3.  William Gilmore Simms to Evert A. Duyckinck, March 15, 1845, in Mary Simms Oliphant, Alfred Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves (eds.), The Letters of William Gilmore Simms (5 vols.; Columbia, S.C., 1953), II, 43. After this complaint Simms paid tribute to Poe's “remarkable power” and [page 120:] showed a certain amount of insight by suggesting that Poe said “bitter things through a wanton consciousness of power.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 120:]

4.  Letters, II, 77.

5.  This reconciliation occurred after Poe had said some good things about Simms's later books, but it came about partly because Simms joined with Duyckinck and Poe in a hot literary war against Lewis Gaylord Clark of the New York Knickerbocker, a war which, as far as Poe was concerned, had begun with his review of Norman Leslie. Sidney Moss has described this affair in detail in Poe's Literary Battles, but Perry Miller's The Raven and the Whale gives a fuller account of the various personalities involved. Simms's letters to Duyckinck during 1845 and 1846 are pungent with hostility toward Clark. See especially those dated October 19, 1845, and November 13, 1845, in Oliphant, Odell, and Eaves (eds.), The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, H, 105-108, 116-19. Sympathy and understanding are shown in his letter to Poe of July 30, 1846. Ibid., 174-77.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 121:]

6.  Works, VIII, 169-73.

7.  Biographia Literaria, II, 20.

8.  Hazlitt, “On Shakespeare and Milton,” Collected Works, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (New York and London, 1902), V, 47-48.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 122:]

9.  Works, VIII, 178-79.

10.  Charvat, American Critical Thought, 152-53. This opportunity had not been neglected by the Messenger. Bulwer's The Pilgrims of the Rhine had been damned for immorality in the third issue of the magazine. Southern Literary Messenger, I (1834-35), 54.

11.  Works, VIII, 222-29.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 124:]

12.  Poe was having difficulty accommodating his conception of the romance to the historical novel. In his review of The Partisan, he had stated that the “interweaving of fact with fiction is at all times hazardous,” for he could not conceive of a successful union of truth with fable in the novel any more than he could in poetry. A romance to him was a product of the imagination, not a manipulation of historical fact into a story. Simms, less inhibited by genetic theory than Poe, felt no such difficulty. A writer of historical romances should stick to the facts as far as possible but should not be confined by them: “He must be free to conceive and to invent — to create and to endow; — without any dread of crossing the confines of ordinary truth, and of such history as may be found in undisputed records.” Quoted in Parks, William Gilmore Simms as Literary Critic, 16.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 125:]

13.  Quoted in Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger, 111.

14.  Southern Literary Messenger, III (1837), 90.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 126:]

15.  Kames, for example, had been disturbed by the apparent variability of taste, not only among individuals but also among different nations and periods; but he relied upon his assumption of a common human nature to resolve the dilemma: “By the principles that constitute the sensitive part of our nature, a wonderful uniformity is preserved in the emotions and feelings of the different races of men; the same object making upon every person the same impression, the same in kind, if not in degree. There have been, as above observed, aberrations from these principles; but soon or late they prevail, and restore the wanderer to the right track.” Elements of Criticism, 473. Alison's subjectivism seemed to remove any possibility of a universal standard, but even he assumed that members of a given society or class would have similar experiences and hence similar associations and that the diversity of taste could be corrected by cultivation. The standard, then, would be the approbation of cultivated gentlemen, with the only observable variance being that which derived from temperamental differences. Poe's position was similar to Alison's, but, like Kames, he assumed a common human nature governed by laws that could be analyzed and applied. He agreed with Blair that “in every composition, what interests the imagination, and touches the heart, pleases all ages and all nations. There is a certain string, which, being properly struck, the human heart is so made as to answer to it.” Blair, Lectures, I, 34. Poe advanced this particular proposition in his later criticism, where occasionally he echoed Blair's metaphor.

16.  Works, VIII, 234-3.

17.  T. O. Mabbott (ed.), Introduction, Merlin, by Lambert A. Wilmer (New York, 1941), 26.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 127:]

18.  Works, VIII, 229-34.

19.  Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 539.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 128:]

20.  Conti the Discarded: With Other Tales and Fancies (American ed.; New York, 1835), I, x.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 130:]

21.  For an illuminating discussion of this point, see Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, 105-20.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 131:]

22.  Letters, I, 81.

23.  Works, VIII, 252-55.

24.  Articles in American journals were quick to point out these uses. One such article was entitled “Application of Phrenology to Criticism” and appeared in Annals of Phrenology, I (1834), 200-23. Five years later the American Phrenological Journal ran a series called “Predominance of Certain Organs in the British Poets.” II (December, 1839-June, 1840).

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25.  John D. Davies, Phrenology: Fad and Science (New Haven, 1955), 17. A biographical sketch of Spurzheim, prefixed to the third American edition of his Phrenology, published in 1836, gives a full account of his death and subsequent events. In accordance with his own wishes, Spurzheim's skull was preserved by the Boston Phrenological Society. The sketch also describes Spurzheim's Edinburgh triumph. See Phrenology, ed. Nahum Capen (Boston, 1836), 50, 152.

26.  See Poe to Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham, May 4, 1833, Letters, I, 53.

27.  A defense of phrenology was published in the Knickerbocker for August, 1833, but the editors became skeptical of the “science” in a few years. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 449-50.

28.  The term “moral” in Poe's statement should be interpreted as roughly equivalent to “mental.”

29.  For Poe's specific use of Mrs. Miles's work, see Edward Hungerford, “Poe and Phrenology,” American Literature, II (1930-31), 209-31.

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30.  Works, VIII, 258.

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31.  At White's request, Poe wrote to Robert Montgomery Bird twice, to Cooper once, and to Fitz-Greene Halleck once, soliciting contributions. See Letters, I, 75-76, 93, 94-96.

32.  See White to Tucker, January 19, 1837, in Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger, 112-13, for a description of his financial problems.