Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “The Final Cause of Art,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 135-158 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 135:]

VI  •  The Final Cause of Art

 

THE review of Drake and Halleck(1) illustrates the three aspects of Poe as a critic which must be correlated before any assessment can be made of his place in the history of criticism: 1) the competitive journalist, 2) the critic who examined books for their literary quality, and 3) the psychological aesthetician who sought to define the response to art and to establish its final cause. It was this last endeavor which would qualify him to his contemporaries as a philosophical critic.

The first pages of the review show Poe as a journalist, answering his detractors and making prescriptions for the “health and prosperity” of American literature. Next he attempted to define aesthetic feeling, the sentiment of poesy. Finally, he made a detailed examination of the works at hand, with only a minimal display of the levity which had attracted readers but had made formidable enemies. Only the first part of the review can be considered irrelevant to the act of criticism, for the last two correlate in the sense that Poe was trying to formulate valid generalizations about the origin and end of poetic feeling and to apply them to the works under consideration.

Poe opened his review with a lengthy denunciation of the state of American journalistic criticism. “There was a time,” he wrote, “when we cringed to foreign opinion — let us even say when we paid a most servile deference to British critical dicta,” yet only the “excess of our subserviency was blamable.” It was reasonable to recognize a supremacy that only “prejudice or ignorance” would deny. Now, he continued, Americans go to the opposite extreme, and “so far from being ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our own inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities are of home manufacture, we adhere [page 136:] pertinaciously to our original blindly conceived idea, and thus often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.” However correct Poe was in his opinion, this was scarcely the kind of statement that would go unchallenged. Too many feathers would be singed among the literary nationalists. Yet Poe's great concern for American letters at large was perhaps disingenuous, for he was using it as a defense for his own book-reviewing methods: “Deeply lamenting this unjustifiable state of public feeling, it has been our constant endeavor, since assuming the Editorial duties of this Journal, to stem, with what little abilities we possess, a current so disastrously undermining the health and prosperity of our literature.”

It appears that the occasion for Poe's discussion of the state of literary criticism in America was the reaction of the New York clique to his Norman Leslie review. Colonel William L. Stone, editor of the Commercial Advertiser, had printed in his own newspaper an attack made on Poe by Willis Gaylord Clark in the Philadelphia Gazette. Clark, as Poe was quick to point out, was an editor of the New York Knickerbocker. Clark's charge against Poe was puerile; he merely stated that the “critical department” of the Messenger was “quacky” and that the critic could not write the works he condemned. Stone's own comment, which follows, would have to be taken more seriously because he invoked the alleged ethics of book-reviewing:

It is to Poe's credit that he printed the charges against him, but those made by Colonel Stone must have been too close for comfort, even though they exaggerated Poe's practice. When Beverley Tucker had questioned the levity of his satirical reviews, Poe, in a rather superior tone, had answered by citing the example of Blackwood's. Young and inexperienced, he had thought the critic had a perfect right to ridicule a ridiculous work. By April, however, he had learned that it was necessary for a book reviewer to be as well established as a Jeffrey or a Christopher North to be able to publish satirical reviews with impunity. He had gained notoriety, but at the expense of being charged with a deliberate attempt to gain it. To defend himself against Stone's charge, Poe stated his book-reviewing code and invited his detractors to employ the same standard:

Poe's legalistic rejoinder, which amounted to saying that he was innocent until proved guilty, was really an evasion. He had been flippant, sarcastic, and personal in more than one review. His motive may have been, as he claimed, to reform reviewing practices in America by being contemptuous of “stupid books,” but even his friend Tucker had intimated that the end did not justify the means. Poe had become notorious; he was admired in many quarters, but he had yet to prove that he was a philosophical critic instead of a hack reviewer. The review of Mrs. Sigourney had been a [page 138:] beginning, and now, in the remainder of the review of Drake and Halleck, Poe undertook to demonstrate that he could make judgments based upon principles.

2

Before the review of Drake and Halleck, Poe had made little attempt to use a psychological approach in his criticism, although he had the example of Coleridge and, more remotely, Kames, Blair, and Alison before him. Nor had he attempted to express a metaphysical basis for his theories even though Coleridge, his chief guide, had applied both philosophical and religious principles to poetry. In this review, however, Poe did both, possibly because he wished to be a critic instead of a book reviewer and almost certainly because he knew that “philosophical” criticism was secure against the Colonel Stones and the Willis Gaylord Clarks of the journalistic world.

Poe began by attempting, as Coleridge had in Chapter XIV of the Biographia Literaria, to formulate a definition of poetry, taking poetry, as Coleridge had, in its larger sense as embracing all genres of art. Then, still following Coleridge's method, Poe undertook to define poetry in psychological terms; but unlike Coleridge, who focused upon the creative mind of the poet, his power of reconciling opposites, Poe focused upon poetic feeling, which he claimed could be described distinctly enough “for all the purposes of practical analysis.” Before attempting to analyze this feeling, however, he provided a teleological explanation of its existence:

This passage has been quoted at length because it illustrates Poe's tendency to make a teleological justification of aesthetic feeling. What he gave was nothing more than the old argument from design, commonly used in post-Newtonian religious apologetics but derived here from the phrenological description of the human mind. The use of such an argument in aesthetic speculation had been characteristic of the analysts of taste, for none of them had been quite prepared to permit hedonic value to be its own justification. It had to lead to something more worthy, religious feeling, and the Scottish philosophers did not hesitate to employ a quasi-Platonic argument when they discussed taste, in spite of their dislike of metaphysics.(2) This tendency was most obvious in Archibald Alison. Acknowledging that his opinion coincided with that of the “Platonic school” — Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Reid(3) — Alison concluded his Essays with an account of the final cause of aesthetic [page 140:] feeling. The beauties and sublimities of the material world, he said, did not exist as actual qualities, but only as signs of such qualities, intended to awaken in us a hunger for more perfect beauty than any existing in nature. Aesthetic feeling would lead us at last to religious sentiment. The mind, seeking perfection, eventually would rest in God.(4)

Such speculation would seem entirely alien to phrenology, the “science of mind,” and Poe's own statement that it is more instructive to inquire into God's intention than to investigate the mental powers would appear to be a renunciation of scientific procedure. The phrenologists had employed dissection and had actually examined the brain and the skull. Yet George Combe, an admirer of the Scottish philosophy before he undertook to improve upon it with the findings of Spurzheim, displayed his intellectual heritage by an emphasis on moral feeling characteristic of the Scots.(5) Nor did he neglect aesthetics; his account of the purpose of Ideality, except for his terminology, is identical with Alison's account of the purpose of taste. No vulgar utilitarianism or selfishness contaminated the pure pleasure generated by Ideality. As Combe expressed it, “IDEALITY delights in perfection from the pure pleasure of contemplating it .... the picture, the statue, the landscape, or the mansion on which it abides with the intensest rapture, is as pleasing, although the property of another, as if all its own. It is a spring that is [page 141:] touched by the beautiful wherever it exists; and hence its means of enjoyment are as unbounded as the universe.”(6)

What Poe would have learned from Combe, then, even if he had not already learned it from the analysts of taste, was that the sense of the beautiful was one of the higher sentiments of the mind, closely associated with religious feeling. As Combe explained, Ideality had a capacity for “endless moral and intellectual refinement ... by which we may arise in the scale of excellence, and, at every step of our progress, reap direct enjoyment from this sentiment. Its constant desire is for something more exquisite still.”(7) This pleasure was to Combe, as it had been to Alison, a moral sentiment, an ideal pleasure. It had nothing to do with sensuous pleasure or passion; other faculties took care of these.(8) Poe's use of this essentially moral justification of aesthetic feeling is immediately apparent: [page 142:]

It is obvious from this passage that Ideality to Poe's mind was little more than the old faculty of taste, commonly called the “sense of the beautiful.” The fact that Ideality could be considered one of the imaginative faculties, along with Hope and Marvellousness,(9) allowed Poe to employ next what he had learned from Coleridge: “Imagination is its [poetry's] soul. With the passions of mankind — although it may modify them greatly — although it may exalt, or inflame, or purify, or control them — it would require little [page 143:] ingenuity to prove that it has no inevitable, and indeed no necessary co-existence.”(10) Except for the first sentence, however, this passage owes little to Coleridge, who was not so insistent upon idealization that he would banish passion from poetry. Instead, as his admiration of Shakespeare's “Venus and Adonis” indicates, Coleridge recognized the unifying power of passion, which stimulated the imagination to its proper business of “reducing multitude into unity of effect.”(11) Poe, however, struggling to arrive at a philosophical definition of aesthetic feeling as an intellectual delight, drew upon the Platonic tradition for his teleological principle and used the phrenological description of Ideality as his “scientific” proof.(12) This may seem to us today to be the most naïve of eclectic [page 144:] procedures, but it would not have seemed naïve in Poe's time. Phrenology, particularly as it was popularized by Combe, appeared to validate scientifically the kind of secular idealism cherished by most Americans and previously supported only by the imprecise faculty psychology of the Scots. The existence of an actual organ for man's capacity to idealize was an exciting proposition even for the transcendentalists,(13) and to be able to use it in his defense of poetry was exciting to Edgar Poe.

After the “philosophical” portion of his review was complete, Poe undertook to discuss the practical result of poetic feeling as it was expressed in language, poetry itself. The only proper test of a poem, he affirmed, was “its capabilities of exciting the Poetic Sentiments in others.” At first glance this would appear to be equivalent to A. E. Housman's gooseflesh symptom as the measure of poetic excellence. If a poem makes you feel the shiver down the spine or the prickling of the scalp that are the neurological indices of poetic feeling, then the poem is a good one. Poe was not so naïve as to eliminate the act of criticism, however. Instead his words suggest an anticipation of I. A. Richards’ early experiments with the evaluation of student responses.(14) The response to a poem can be [page 145:] measured, Poe asserted, by the use of observation, experience, “ethical analysis,” and common sense. Only the term “ethical analysis” is troublesome. As Poe used it, it could hardly refer to moral behavior; he must have been using the word in its original Greek sense as having to do with character, and we may substitute “character analysis” in a manner appropriate to the phrenological approach.

Poe's next statement may seem to be one of the most outrageous ever made by a supposedly responsible critic, for he went on to say that a poet “highly endowed with the powers of Causality,” even if “deficient” in Ideality, would compose a finer poem than the poet who had Ideality without Causality. This jargon must be interpreted. Poe defined Causality as “metaphysical acumen,” which out of context makes as little sense today as Causality, but his illustration — that a metaphysician can analyze the responses of others — makes it clear that he meant something like psychological discernment. Causality was one of the “Reflecting Faculties” and had to do with the comprehension of cause and effect relationships; this, in terms of stimuli and responses, would have been a branch of metaphysics for Poe.(15) What Poe was saying, then, was that an unimaginative poet with great ability in practical psychology would produce a finer poem than an imaginative poet without such ability. He “proves” his point by appropriating a story told about Coleridge's being analyzed by Spurzheim; the phrenologist had concluded that Coleridge was deficient in Ideality but quite well developed in Causality. Poe passed this off as his own interpretation, but the incident was well known among enthusiasts of phrenology.(16) His point was that Coleridge's poems, the “purest of all poems,” appealed exclusively to the imaginative faculties in spite of the poet's personal lack of imagination, as evidenced by the shape of his skull! Accordingly, he could only have written these poems as a metaphysician would, by using the psychology of effect. [page 146:]

Seen in the phrenological context, Poe's argument may seem ridiculous, but we should try to understand his purpose in making it. In his attempt to rescue American literature from the amateurs, he had already begun to emphasize, as we have seen, the artist's purpose and his dedication to his art. The popular romantic notion, that a poet needed only genius, was to Poe a fallacy that must be exposed. As he put it, “the Poeta nascitur, which is indisputably true if we consider the Poetic Sentiment, becomes the merest of absurdities in reference to the practical result.” This much of his argument would have been acceptable even to T. S. Eliot, who was no admirer of Poe.(17) Unfortunately, however, Poe confined himself to the test of effect and implied that a good grasp of audience psychology was about all that a poet needed to produce good poems. This reduces the poet at best to a rhetorician, at worst to a popular hack. Yet Poe meant to do neither, as is evidenced by his teleology of art. To him poetic feeling was next in the hierarchy of value to religious feeling, and to arouse it, by whatever means, was an inestimable service to all mankind. Although he contradicted himself blatantly by declaring in one paragraph that imagination was the soul of poetry and in the next that a poet deficient in imagination could still stimulate the Ideality of others if he understood psychology, all that he was really doing was distinguishing between means and ends. In terms of its end, imagination is the soul of poetry. In terms of means, one needs far more than imagination if he is to write good poetry; he needs to know how to appeal to an audience, a necessity which the great romantic poets, in Poe's opinion, sometimes forgot. Poe was a practical American and a journalist, and he was very dubious about the value of expression for its own sake. He overstated his case, as he did frequently, but his subsequent examination of the poems of Drake and Halleck reveals that, far from thinking of the poet-psychologist as a popularizer, he was trying to correct the popular taste by showing how easy it was to [page 147:] mistake the power of comparison for imagination, the sponsor and agent of “Ideality.”

Without reference to Poe's phrenological sources, we would find his shift back and forth from Ideality to imagination very confusing. In the phrenological system, as has already been noted, there was more than one imaginative faculty, but it was Ideality that was peculiarly concerned with transforming sense impressions into mental images. In other words, it “idealized” perception by making objects into ideas, but it did more than this; it also organized associated feelings into a unified response as did Alison's faculty of taste.(18) Thus in its passive aspect it recognized beauty, as Poe claimed, but since, like the faculty of taste, it was capable of refinement, it had an active heuristic function in leading the soul toward perfection. The faculty seemed enough like Coleridge's imagination, as Poe interpreted Coleridge, to warrant using the terms synonymously. Poe made an unacknowledged appropriation from Coleridge in a footnote, defining imagination as “in man, a lesser degree of the creative power in God.”(19) This probably means that [page 148:] Poe was considering Ideality as an active power, creative in the sense that it provides glimpses of a more nearly perfect nature than is revealed to the physical senses. With this meaning in mind, one can understand Poe's criticism of Drake and Halleck. In spite of his confusing phrenological jargon, it is a reasonably competent application of Coleridge's distinction between the imagination and the fancy.

Drake's The Culprit Fay was a narrative poem, so Poe first summarized the plot, as was his custom when space permitted. Then he undertook to examine the poem for evidence of imaginative power and declared that, contrary to popular opinion, the poem was “utterly destitute of any evidence of imagination whatever.” All Drake had done was provide “mere specifications of qualities, of habiliments, of punishments, of occupations, of circumstances ... which the poet has believed in unison with the size, firstly, and secondly with the nature of his Fairies.” These specifications, Poe asserted, indicated that the poet had only a “very moderate endowment of the faculty of Comparison — which is the chief constituent of Fancy or the powers of combination.” The Coleridgean provenance of Poe's last clause is obvious, as is his denigration of fancy.(20) In phrenology, fancy, like Causality, was one of the “Reflecting Faculties” and had nothing to do with Ideality, so Poe uses Coleridgean and phrenological opinion as mutual reinforcement.

To illustrate Ideality in poetry, Poe had to leave Drake and cite a greater poet — Shelley, who had also described a fairy, Queen Mab. Poe quoted a passage and made an appropriate commentary: “It will be seen that the Fairy of Shelley is not a mere compound of incongruous natural objects, inartificially put together, and unaccompanied by any moral sentiment — but a being, in the illustration of whose nature some physical elements are used collaterally [page 149:] as adjuncts, while the main conception springs immediately or thus apparently springs from the brain of the poet, enveloped in the moral sentiments of grace, of color, of motion — of the beautiful, of the mystical, of the august — in short of the ideal.” Again Poe's language needs to be translated. Under “moral sentiments” both Combe and Mrs. Miles had included “Benevolence,” “Veneration,” and “Imitation,” but “Form” and “Color” were classified under “Observing Faculties,” a subdivision of the “Intellectual Faculties.” If Poe was adhering to the phrenological description of the mental activity necessary for creative work, he would have known that a great many “organs” of the mind must cooperate to produce works of art. The “grace, color, and motion” he listed in the quotation above would be perceived in the natural world by the “Observing Faculties” and would arouse the moral sentiment of Ideality. Thus “idealized,” this raw material would be appropriate for artistic expression, but still other faculties must be employed before the conception could be enacted in an art form that would arouse the moral sentiment in others. Combe had listed Coloring, Time, Tune, Constructiveness, Form, Locality, Ideality “and other faculties” as being necessary for the fine arts.(21) Poe, as we have already seen, added Causality, a “Reflecting Faculty,” which was supposed to trace “the relation of cause and effect.”(22) In brief, art was the end product of feeling plus intellectual effort, and the mere fact that Shelley's poems aroused the “sentiment of beauty” gave evidence of the intellectual activity of the poet: “the main concept springs immediately or thus apparently springs from the brain of the poet, enveloped in the moral sentiments ....” The “ideal” in a poem, then, would be essentially what is defined in aesthetics as meaning or significance, as contrasted with the formal or sensuous elements of the work of art. It is not the changeless archetype of Platonic metaphysics.

The fact that Poe chose “grace, color and motion” as moral sentiments suggests that he was not strict in observing the phrenological classification, for the phrenologists would have placed all of [page 150:] these under the “Intellectual Faculties” of perception.(23) If we turn to Archibald Alison, however, we find these qualities treated as effects, and it was as emotional effects that Poe used them. To Alison, no color or motion was beautiful unless it aroused moral feeling or suggested moral ideas.(24) If we examine the passage from Queen Mab which Poe quoted, we will see how completely it fulfills Alison's definition of moral beauty.

The “purpureal halo” would inevitably be associated with royal dignity,(25) and since it radiated from the fairy, it would have to be regarded as a moral quality of the Queen, an aspect of character rather than merely clothing. Drake, in contrast, had used colors in The Culprit Fay without regard for their associational value.

As for “grace,” Alison had explained that the qualities of grace and beauty in a human form were different, and that the sentiments aroused by these qualities were different. Grace “seems to demand some higher and more uncommon requisites than those which are necessary to mere beauty.” It arouses respect and admiration, for it implies “something dignified or exalted in the mind of the person” whose attitudes or gestures are graceful.(26) This feeling is entirely appropriate when associated with Queen Mab. Drake's [page 151:] Ouphe, on the other hand, becomes ludicrous not only in his appearance but also in character; for he commits the egregious error of falling in love, as Poe put it with a touch of his customary levity, “with a mortal maiden, who may, very possibly, be six feet in her stockings.” The Ouphe is one inch tall!

Alison devoted an entire chapter to the effect of motion in arousing the sentiment of beauty. Motion in curves was beautiful, whereas rapid motion in straight lines expressed power, an aspect of sublimity. Since the light radiating from Queen Mab undulates and sways with her graceful motion, it could be said to wave gently, which according to Alison was expressive of “tenderness, interest, and affection” — all moral sentiments.(27) All of these expressive qualities, then, constituted the Ideality of Shelley's concept. He had not merely provided “specifications,” which would imitate the hypothetical physical form of a fairy; instead, as Poe claimed correctly, he had used the physical elements as “adjuncts” to enact an idea. Such a procedure was the proper evidence of imagination, evidence not to be found in Drake's poem.

Poe quoted passage after passage to demonstrate that Drake was “inartificially” (inartistically) putting together incongruous elements by means of the fancy. He even resorted to a Coleridgean device — substituting other elements for the ones specified(28) — to prove that there was no necessary connection among these elements and that almost anyone could write as well “without exercising in the least degree the Poetic Sentiment, which is Ideality, Imagination, or the creative ability.” Only once did Poe find a measure of imagination in Drake's poem, in the line, “The earth is dark but the heavens are bright.” Poe explained that here Drake suggested the “moral sentiment of the brightness of the sky compensating for the darkness of the earth — and thus, indirectly, of the happiness of a future state compensating for the miseries of the present.” It would appear by this that Poe was endorsing a kind of [page 152:] free-floating symbolic import suggestive of religion but uncommitted to any specific frame of symbolic reference. Lacking a sense of value in the concrete, he wanted moral feeling to be aroused by a collocation of semantic elements with rich connotative significance but minimal specification. By a process of abstracting such elements from the welter of experience and using them pictorially, the artist could control his effects and achieve relatively pure feeling, which was obviously what Poe wanted. On the other hand, if the artist specified by imitating the actual, or by hypothesizing a nonexistent actual and then imitating it, as Drake did, the associative processes of the audience would be uncontrolled and unity of effect would be lost. Poe's unity of effect is quite different from that of Coleridge, for Coleridge saw the imagination as reconciling opposites, whereas Poe, like Alison before him, insisted that a unity of emotion should be achieved by a selection of terms or objects that have similar connotations. Accordingly, he preferred the use of loaded phrases like “the heavens are bright” to an exact description of a sun-lit sky. This was the basis of his condemnation of Drake. Drake gave details without considering their connotative import, and Poe quoted copiously to illustrate:

Then he rewrote the passage, substituting other specifications, to prove that if a poet did not take account of associations, any details would serve so long as they fit a fairy one inch tall.

Such a fanciful description as the one just quoted at least had a certain merit of congruity, Poe admitted, but it had no meaning. Even worse were the passages in which Drake, no doubt trying [page 153:] to imitate Shelley's cosmic imagery, described the beauty of a “Sylphid queen.”

It would appear that this description, which used the same physical elements as Shelley's, should have been equally appealing, but Drake had specified details of clothing — mantle, threads, buttons — whereas Shelley had generalized his description, allowing the connotations of his cosmic images — clouds, stars, and light — to function unimpeded by what to Poe would have been the vulgar associations with buttons and threads.

Poe quoted other passages, italicizing lines and even words and phrases that he considered imaginative. Most of the italicized lines would appear to us no better than the others if we examined them without reference to Poe's theory of the value of association. How, for instance, can the single word “lonely,” taken out of context, indicate imagination? Or the expression, “glimmers and dies”? This last comes from the lines, “And through their clustering branches dark / Glimmers and dies the fire-fly's spark.” Poe's explanation was that the phrase exalted the imagination “by the moral sentiment of beauty heightened in dissolution.” But it does so only out of context. In context the purity of the moral sentiment would have been violated by the specific reference to fireflies. Poe was bothered throughout by Drake's attention to insects, leeches, shrimps, crabs, and bullfrogs, and he made a list of them to illustrate Drake's departure from the Ideality that should arouse the poetic sentiment. Bugs and small animals did not gratify that faculty which yearned for a beauty more perfect than any to be found in nature, nor did they have associative value in arousing moral feeling. [page 154:]

The remainder of the review of Drake merely adds further illustrative material, and the only point of interest is Poe's objection to “the thunderdrum of Heaven” as bathetic. His concept of bathos was that of the eighteenth-century rhetoricians, a “sinking” from the sublime by making a comparison between the grand and awe-inspiring and the mean and contemptible. Thus to compare Heaven's sublime thunder to a drum was an inexcusable violation of figurative propriety.

Poe's review of the poems of Halleck is similar in its unilateral approach. He pointed out a few passages which he considered imaginative, invariably choosing those which employed such loaded abstractions as melancholy, glory, legend, and solitary. He objected strenuously to words with vulgar associations, claiming that no poet could “unite in any manner the low burlesque with the ideal, and not be conscious of incongruity and of a profanation.” Halleck made this tasteless error:

One shudders to imagine what Poe would have said about Eliot's typist and her carbuncular young man.

3

This review was Poe's first attempt at “philosophical” criticism, and it exhibits the reductionism that was his greatest weakness as a critic. He formulated a single first principle — that all poetry must be ideal — and defined idealism as a desire for pure hedonic value dissociated from any context which would make it meaningful. “Intellectual happiness” divorced from knowledge and construed as a sentiment evoked by a marshaling of effects denied any value to poetry except that of a stimulus to feeling. That Poe at least partially [page 155:] recognized this limitation is indicated by his conventional attempt to confer an aura of religious value on art by his psychological analysis of final causes and his quasi-Platonic argument that a recognition of ideal beauty leads us toward the perfection that is Heaven. Thus far, he was not conspicuously at odds with Shelley and Keats, but neither British poet displayed such a dislike for the phenomenal as did Poe, who tended to eliminate words that name and specify and retain those general terms that elicit responses without designating the details of perception. This flight from the real can be explained on psychological grounds, but it can scarcely be justified as a first principle of art. If the poet does not make some engagement with the human context, his symbols lose all vitality; they evoke nothing, for they have nothing to evoke. The moral sentiments Poe demanded as an added dimension of meaning are as barren of significance as his poetic sentiment, for they do not arise from any condition in which moral feeling has particular relevance. Poe wanted, via art, to move from becoming to being; but he wanted to do it all at once, without climbing Plato's ladder from the specific to the ideal.

A wish to escape the flux of the phenomenal world does not necessarily produce abstract diction — witness Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium,” in which the desire to be gathered into the “artifice of eternity” is communicated in the humanly relevant symbols of physical decay. Yet an escapist temperament can manifest itself in a revulsion against the concrete and an inclination to experience feeling without the engagement with reality that ordinarily stimulates the feeling. Poe wanted moral feeling to be a psychic phenomenon divorced from ethical considerations. Experienced in such a way, the moral sentiment becomes pure hedonic value, uncontaminated by any utilitarian motive or, except indirectly, by any utilitarian consequence. Such a theoretical formulation is logical if one starts with the premise that the only purpose of art is to give pleasure, and, by the evidence of the “Letter to Mr. — —,” Poe did start with this premise. An even greater reductionism in artistic value concepts would be brought about by the use of a primitive [page 156:] psychology that assumed a particular faculty as the seat of aesthetic emotion. If the critic calls this faculty “taste,” then he would be able to argue that an artist must eliminate from consideration all subjects and diction that do not conform to a hypothesized standard, which, as we have seen the argument applied, meant the refined taste of cultivated gentlemen. If the faculty is called “Ideality,” then the artist would be restricted to depicting the ideal, which in Poe's words meant the beautiful, the “mystical,” and the “august.” In later years Poe dropped the term “Ideality” and referred to the poetic faculty in the traditional way as the “taste,” but his teleology of art remained unchanged. The imagination was restricted, at least in poetry, to a pictorialization of the ideal, and ideal beauty remained for him the aim and test of a poem.

Poe's application of his first principle of art is not without merit, considering the quality of the poems he reviewed. He at least knew that a poem should be meaningful on a higher level of apprehension than that required for a response to the verse of Drake and Halleck; but even with this knowledge he made no effort in this particular review to determine whether or not this extended import was developed organically through correlated symbolic modes. Instead he retained the Longinian habit of looking for impressive words, phrases, and lines that were touchstones of beauty or sublimity. Had the provenance of his method been thoroughly Coleridgean — or Schlegelian, for that matter — he would have known that a single word or phrase detached from its context no more demonstrates imagination than a single color illustrates beauty. It is the organization that counts. Poe had read both Coleridge and Schlegel in reference to organic unity and had used them to disqualify Mrs. Sigourney's mottoes, but he ignored the question in this review. Unity to him appears to have been a unity of tone, achieved by the management of connotative import. The lines he praised were devoid of any quality except that of a hackneyed “poetic” suggestiveness; but again, in fairness to Poe, we should remember that he was reviewing third-rate poets and that he cited Shelley as an illustration of pure Ideality, along with (in a footnote) Aeschylus, Dante, Cervantes, Milton, Pope, Burns, Coleridge, [page 157:] and Keats.(29) We would hardly expect Drake and Halleck to be welcomed into this company.

In spite of its defects as literary criticism, Poe's review of Drake and Halleck was the most impressive he had yet written for the Messenger, and it was well received, except by some of his New York enemies.(30) He had now demonstrated that he could write “philosophical” criticism and make evaluations on the basis of principle instead of prejudice. His range was not to remain so narrow as it was in this review, and eventually he developed a better understanding of the cognitive potentialities of the poetic enterprise, but unfortunately he continued his journalistic practice of seeking a “lead” for each review. That is, he would pick out a single merit or defect attributed to an author by allegedly popular critical [page 158:] opinion and then focus his analysis upon this particular point. In only a few reviews do we find Poe broadening his approach. As a rule he is guilty of the charge Ronald S. Crane once levied against Cleanth Brooks — “critical monism.”

During the months to come, Poe failed to maintain even the relatively low level of “philosophical” criticism that he reached in this review. He soon reopened his campaign against New York by destroying a book by Colonel William L. Stone. Perhaps for this reason, among others, the confidence of his employer steadily declined. Poe had only eight more months to remain with the Messenger.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 135:]

1.  Works, VIII, 275-318.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 139:]

2.  For the Scottish rejection of metaphysics, see Chapter I, Section 2, of this book.

3.  Essays on Taste, 444. Alison was a close associate of Thomas Reid, one of the founders of the Scottish common-sense school; the Essays were dedicated to Reid.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 140:]

4.  Ibid., 457-58.

5.  Combe acknowledged the affiliation in the preface to his most popular work, The Constitution of Man; he claimed that his method of inquiry was essentially that of the Scottish philosophers. In reviewing Combe, the Knickerbocker pointed out that the findings of the “new science” resembled the “brilliant metaphysical discoveries of Hutcheson, and Reid, and Stewart.” Knickerbocker, I (1833), 316. The use of the term “metaphysical” in this quotation is likely to be confusing, for both the Scottish philosophers and the phrenologists strenuously opposed metaphysical speculation as such. The term, however, was frequently used in the sense of “psychological.” Poe exhibited this ambiguity in his reviews, praising “metaphysical” ability in one context but disparaging “metaphysical” speculation in another. For the hostility of the phrenologists toward metaphysical speculation, see David Bakan, “Phrenology Is Foolish?” Psychology Today, I (1968), 45-46.

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6.  The Constitution of Man, 66.

7.  Ibid., 78.

8.  These were the “lower faculties” common to man and animal; they included “amativeness” (sexual feeling), “philoprogenitiveness” (desire for offspring), and the external senses, which Combe classified as Genus I of the “Intellectual Faculties.” These faculties were supposed to be responsible for simple perception (Genus I), for elementary ideas of shape, form, color, size, weight, and existence (Genus II), for the perception of relationships in the physical environment (Genus III), and for the discovery of abstract relationships such as the cause-effect nexus, analogies, and ideational differences (Genus IV). This last category was called the “Reflecting Faculties” and would correspond to the eighteenth-century “reason.” Genus II and Genus III would correspond to what the Scottish philosophers called “common sense.” The phrenologists had no “Intellectual Faculties” equivalent to Coleridge's higher “Reason,” but certain of the “Moral Sentiments” operating in conjunction with the “Intellectual Faculties” enabled the individual to desire the ultimate truths of revealed religion but at the same time to accept only such truths as met the tests of observation and experience. The result, so Combe explained, would be a viable “natural religion.” See Combe, The Constitution of Man, 75-81, for an explanation of the uses of the faculties.

Because Poe used the phrenological jargon, his terminology is difficult for us to interpret today. “Intellectual,” in Poe's vocabulary, did not necessarily signify rational, but merely something that happened in the higher faculties, as opposed to the feelings or propensities common to man and animal.

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9.  Mrs. Miles, whose work Poe had reviewed, classified “Ideality” as an imaginative faculty; Combe called it a moral sentiment. A confusion of terminology is evident among the phrenologists, for the term “faculty” implies creative ability, whereas “sentiment” implies a capacity for feeling. There was also a difference in the number of propensities, sentiments, and faculties, depending upon which phrenologist one read. F. J. Gall, originator of the system, had listed twenty-six organs of the mind, Spurzheim and Combe thirty-five. The Fowler brothers, most prominent of the American phrenologists, had expanded the list to forty-three. To be accurate, “Ideality” should be called a faculty if it were to be considered as creative, but a sentiment in respect to the appreciation of beauty. Gall, writing in French, had named the organ “Poesie” after having noted its prominence in the busts of several poets. “Phrenology,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th ed.), XXI, 534-40. Poe's term “poesy” may have come from Gall, and he was being phrenologically accurate when he defined it as “the sentiment of Intellectual Happiness here.” It would have to be combined with the moral sentiment, “Hope,” however, if it were to give “the hope of a higher Intellectual Happiness hereafter.” Combe had explained that “Veneration” plus “Hope” and “Wonder” gave us religious feeling. Mrs. Miles classified “Hope” and “Marvellousness” with “Ideality” as imaginative faculties, enabling Poe to consider all three as aspects of the imagination, while at the same time interpreting them, in their passive aspect, as sentiments.

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10.  Combe had declared that the passions, or “animal propensities,” must be guided by the moral sentiments before true happiness could be achieved. “No faculty is bad,” Combe wrote, “but each has a legitimate sphere of action, and, when properly gratified, is a fountain of pleasure ....” The Constitution of Man, 97. In other words, it is a law of human nature, instituted by a benevolent God, for us to enjoy our feelings. Since the response to beauty is a legitimate moral sentiment, no opprobrium should be attached to the hedonic value of art. Poe's argument that passion does not necessarily co-exist with the imagination is phrenologically correct, for indulgence of the animal propensities requires no imagination; furthermore, the imagination is abused when it is allowed to “inflame” the passions. It should be used only to “purify,” “exalt,” or “control” them.

11.  Biographia Literaria, II, 15-16. Coleridge's argument is complex and requires summary. He did not deny even the “animal impulse” as a subject for poetry, as Poe was increasingly prone to do, but explained that Shakespeare's feelings as an artist were “aloof” from the passions depicted in the poem. Then, using “passion” in a different sense, Coleridge gave an example of its unifying power. Poe apparently referred only to the animal passions (using phrenology instead of Coleridge) in his attempt to prove that poetry was concerned only with the ideal. The difference is more in application than in theory. Poe sought to achieve the ideal in part by a restriction of subject matter. Coleridge did not restrict subject at all but remarked that a genius would not use his “personal sensations and experiences.” In other words, it is not Shakespeare's “animal impulse” in Venus and Adonis, but an imaginative presentation of sexual love, a feeling “of which he is at once the painter and the analyst.” Even this would have been rejected by Poe, who eventually claimed that a poet should treat only ideal love.

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12.  Marvin Laser, who discussed phrenology briefly in connection with Poe's aesthetic theory, argued that the Platonic teleology appeared in Poe's [page 144:] criticism after he had read Shelley's A Defence of Poetry when it appeared in 1840. See Laser, “The Growth and Structure of Poe's Concept of Beauty,” English Literary History, XV (1948), 69-84. Certainly Poe's idiom thereafter resembled Shelley's, but this idiom was common to romantic aesthetics. The attempt to validate the response to beauty as a moral sentiment was equally characteristic of both the Scottish critics and the phrenologists, however, as was the use of a quasi-Platonic argument. Poe thought he had found an illustration of the argument in Shelley's “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” Works, VIII, 283n. This is not surprising, since Shelley's head gave phrenological tokens of “large” Ideality. See “Predominance of Certain Organs in the British Poets, No. 6,” American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 11 (1840), 461.

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13.  Emerson called Combe's The Constitution of Man “the best sermon I have read for some time.” Ralph Rusk (ed.), The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1939), I, 291.

14.  Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (Harvest Book ed.; New York, n.d.). Richards’ method involves an assessment of appropriate and inappropriate responses to poetry. Poe's “poetic sentiment” would be an appropriate response; any feeling that arose from a lower level of apprehension would be inappropriate.

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15.  Gall had named this faculty “Esprit Métaphysique” and had found it very prominent on the busts of Fichte and Kant.

16.  The American Phrenological Journal saw fit to mention it twice: II (1839-40), 168, 359.

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17.  Cf. Eliot's famous statement in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that it is not “the intensity of the emotions ... but the intensity of the artistic process ... that counts.” Generally speaking, this was Poe's position.

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18.  According to Combe, the higher sentiments — Veneration, Hope, Wonder, and Ideality — could work together in a unified response, such as that manifested in religious adoration, but the rational faculties had to be employed to validate revealed truth before a natural religion would be possible or even desirable. The Constitution of Man, 95-97. It is obvious that some of the phrenologists, like the deists before them, considered that a natural religion, validated by science, could be the only true religion. Combe did not scoff at revelation, as did the radical deists of the eighteenth century; but he thought that revelation had to be subjected to the tests of science and experience, as did the men of the Enlightenment. It is worth noting that, like the Scottish philosopher-psychologists, the phrenologists did not consider a natural imbalance of the faculties an unalterable hereditary endowment. Instead, they thought the faculties could be exercised for improvement just as could the muscles. See Bakan, “Phrenology Is Foolish?” 48. Of course, a man with a complement of fully developed faculties would be a universal genius — and to Poe the only true genius was a universal genius, good at everything he tried. With his fear of hereditary mental imbalance, Poe attempted to become a universal genius or at least to pass himself off as one, equally gifted in imagination, reason, science, and even field sports. In the light of his unstable personality, his attempts at self-development should earn our compassion and our admiration.

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19.  This borrowing from Coleridge was exceptionally naïve, for it created a problem of definition that Poe ignored. On one page he defined “poesy” [page 148:] as a sentiment and claimed, quoting Coleridge, that “Imagination is its soul” and, again quoting Coleridge, that it is “creative.” Works, VIII, 283. On the very next page, using the term “Ideality” as synonymous with imagination, he asserted that Ideality alone cannot create, unless aided by Causality. This last would be sound according to Combe — a sentiment does not create unless aided by certain faculties or powers.

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20.  See Biographia Literaria, I, 202, for Coleridge's exact words.

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21.  The Constitution of Man, 81.

22.  Ibid.

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23.  Poe stated his dissatisfaction with Mrs. Miles's classification in his review: “This classification is arranged with sufficient clearness, but it would require no great degree of acumen to show that to mere perspicuity points of vital importance to the science have been sacrificed.” Works, VIII, 254. Unfortunately he did not suggest any improvement.

24.  Essays on Taste, 443-48.

25.  Ibid., 180.

26.  Ibid., 425.

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27.  Ibid., 331-36.

28.  Coleridge had said that “whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.” Biographia Literaria, I, 14.

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29.  Works, VIII, 299. Poe's list of “imaginative poems” is highly selective. The “poems of the purest ideality” are Prometheus Vinctus, by Aeschylus; the Inferno, by Dante; Destruction of Numantia, by Cervantes; Comus, by Milton; “The Rape of the Lock,” by Pope; “Tam O'Shanter,” by Burns; “The Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan,” by Coleridge; and especially “The Sensitive Plant” by Shelley and “Ode to a Nightingale” by Keats.

It is easy to see why Poe would consider the last four of his choices as specimens of “purest ideality.” Both by his criteria and by his taste, they would have to rank very high. “The Sensitive Plant” continued to be his favorite poem. It advanced what Poe considered the most proper theme for a poet, the yearning for immortal beauty. His other choices are more difficult to explain. His objection to the “low” should have eliminated Burns's poem, for it was written in Scots idiom. Pope's “The Rape of the Lock” should have seemed too frivolous for Ideality, although it could have been offered as an example of the Fancy. It is likely that the selection of Cervantes’ play derived from Schlegel's praise of “its unconscious and unlaboured approximation to antique grandeur and purity.” Schlegel, Lectures, 491. And it may be that his citation of Aeschylus came from Schlegel's opinion that Aeschylus was the “creator” of tragedy and that “terror is his element.” Schlegel also singled out Prometheus Bound as representing “Tragedy herself: her purest spirit revealed.” Ibid., 93.

30.  Joseph Rodman Drake, a native New Yorker, had been dead for sixteen years, but Fitz-Greene Halleck, also a New Yorker, was associated with the Knickerbocker group, the members of which were published in Clark's Knickerbocker during the 1830's. Some New York journals praised Poe's review, but it must be assumed that his enemies, the Clark brothers, were incensed. For the generally favorable reception of this review, see Moss, Poe's Literary Battles, 55-56,69-70.