Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “Toward Standards,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 159-191 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 159:]

VII  •  Toward Standards

 

A professional book reviewer for an American monthly magazine had little opportunity to practice philosophical criticism, for he had to hammer out notices of the subliterary material that piled up on his desk. Poe did attempt to examine this material by literary standards, however. In May of 1836 he reviewed a travel book, Spain Revisited, by a Lieutenant Slidell, and revealed his dislike for fulsome dedications and bad grammar.(1) Poe considered himself an expert in matters of syntax and usage; and of all grammarians, he was one of the most prescriptive. The slightest ambiguity of reference or deviation into colloquialism provoked him into rewriting the passage to demonstrate correct English.(2) His reconstructions, however, did not always go unchallenged. The editor of the Newbern (North Carolina) Spectator deplored the tone of his reviews in general, and his penchant for demolishing dedications and his hypercriticism of grammar in particular. Poe answered the charge at length, not only defending himself as a grammarian but also subjecting his critic to a personal attack: “We are at a loss to know who is the editor of the Spectator, but have a shrewd suspicion that he is the identical gentleman who once sent us from Newbern an unfortunate copy of verses. It seems to us that he wishes to be taken notice of, and we will for the once, oblige him with a few words .... If the editor of this little paper does not behave himself we will positively publish his verses.”(3) [page 160:]

Poe was feeling his power. He had received letters of praise from Professor Charles Anthon, Mrs. Sigourney (now mollified), and James Kirke Paulding. Even Halleck, whose poems Poe had criticized severely, had complimented the Messenger and Poe. Further.. more, Poe's review of Drake and Halleck had been hailed as “one of the finest pieces of criticism ever published in this country.” All this praise was quoted or referred to in the July Supplement to the Messenger,(4) and if the notices that were published are a fair sampling of opinion, Poe's criticism was already respected, even feared, from Natchez to Boston; and his fiction was drawing almost equal praise. Yet it was disturbing to find a hometown newspaper, the Richmond Courier and Daily Compiler, objecting to the gloom of his tales: “Mr. Poe is too fond of the wild — unnatural and horrible! Why will he not permit his fine genius to soar into purer, brighter, and happier regions? Why will he not disenthrall himself from the spells of German enchantment and supernatural imagery? There is room enough for the exercise of the highest powers, upon the multiform relations of human life, without descending into the dark, mysterious, and unutterable creations of licentious fancy.”(5)

This had been the opinion of White's first editor, James Heath, and of White himself, and it illustrates a conventional American attitude that Poe found a perpetual source of frustration. Earlier American critics had wanted cheerful, optimistic accounts of the human condition, not morbid analyses of the darker recesses of the human soul.(6) Thus far, however, Poe gave little evidence that such opposition disturbed him. He wrote the kind of tale he wanted to write, and his inclination was reinforced by his knowledge of the [page 161:] success tales of psychological horror had had in British magazines. Accordingly, he was not disposed to heed the warnings of a few moralists in Richmond, Virginia. If his letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke three years later is honest, it was enough for him that the discriminating few appreciated tales like “Morella” and “Ligeia.” “As for the mob — let them talk on. I should be grieved if I thought they comprehended me here.”(7)

Meanwhile there were books to be reviewed, and Poe continued in his self-appointed task of reforming journalistic criticism in America. In May he challenged American provincialism by praising Mrs. Trollope, whose Domestic Manners of the Americans had offended the national sensitivity by intimating that those manners left much to be desired. “We have no patience with that atrabilious set of hyper-patriots,” wrote Poe, “who find fault with Mrs. Trollope's book of flumflummery about the good people of the Union.” A book should be judged as a book, he asserted, not as a national affront: “That our national soreness of feeling prevented us, in the case of her work on America, from appreciating the real merits of the book, will be rendered evident by the high praise we find no difficulty in bestowing upon her Paris and the Parisians — a production, in whatever light we regard it, precisely similar to the one with which we were so irreparably offended.”(8) In this vein Poe might appear to us as the champion of literary America, challenging the dragons of stupidity, false pride, and provinciality; but all too often he deviated from the path of principle to gratify a personal pique. He had been lying in wait for Colonel William L. Stone, editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser, ever since that gentleman had used his newspaper to reprimand the “Zoilus” of the Messenger for the scathing Norman Leslie review. In June the victim was at hand, in the form of Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman. No doubt Colonel Stone's book deserved to be “used up” (as Poe was fond of calling his destructive method), but, as usual when he was gratifying a grudge, Poe's review was splenetic rather than critical.

The first two pages of the review prodded what is always a tender [page 162:] spot, the potential market for the book. Poe announced the price, counted the pages, and concluded that purchasers would be bilked, intimating that the book was so worthless that it should be measured by its size only. A single issue of the Messenger, Poe claimed, was six times as long as Stone's book and cost less than half as much. Therefore, unless Ups and Downs were sixteen times as high in quality as the Messenger, Stone was presuming upon the “excessive patience, gullibility, and good nature” of the public. Poe added insult by naming the anonymous author and stating that the book “should have been printed among the quack advertisements in a space corner of his paper.”(9)

Poe had very little else to say about Ups and Downs. The stinging but amusing satire of his earlier destructive reviews is less marked in this one, which may indicate that the earlier reviews were prompted by a desire to be “wickedly” good humored after the manner of Christopher North. In this case, however, Poe's ire had been aroused, and the review is more vindictive than humorous. Most of the space is given to a plot summary with quotations designed to show the book at its worst. Very sensitive to harsh criticism of his own work, Poe's retaliation to such criticism was often equally ill tempered and made him a target for violent abuse.

Poe's book reviews in the June number, though generally undistinguished, should not be dismissed completely. A brief notice of Dickens’ Watkins Tottle and Other Sketches proves that Poe was developing his theory of the short tale.(10) A novel, he said, certainly requires a sustained effort, but this effort is merely perseverance and has only a “collateral relation to talent.” The short tale, however, must have unity of effect, a quality which is “not easily appreciated or indeed comprehended by an ordinary mind.” It is a quality difficult to attain, “even by those who can conceive it.”(11) [page 163:]

We have already noticed that Poe did not apply the criterion of a unified effect to the poems of Drake and Halleck, no doubt because he was more interested in being “philosophical” than in analyzing technique. Unity to Poe, insofar as it could be prescribed, was a question of technique, a logical and psychological strategy of adapting means to the proposed end. Because his reductionism was not so stringent for prose as for poetry, he was able to make a more satisfactory application of the principle to the short tale than he ever did to the poem. Poe did not explain here what he meant by unity of effect, but, remembering his use of Schlegel in the review of Mrs. Sigourney, we may assume that he meant total effect, or that correlation of feeling and thought that would be a unified response. If so, and it seems likely, he was demanding an interdependence among the various elements of form which would enable the objective structural unity, the relationship of part to part and part to whole, to be the vehicle of a subjective unity of impression. This interpretation is supported by his analysis of one of Dickens’ tales. Poe offered “The Pawnbroker's Shop” as an illustration of the unity of effect, making the claim that each sentence gives a fuller view of the picture the artist is painting. A novel, Poe asserted, does not lend itself to such a technique; it is admired for its “detached passages, without reference to the work as a whole.” As usual, Poe seized every opportunity to explain that the novel was not an art form, but in examining the short tale by the principle of unity of impression he elevated it to the traditional status of a fine art.

Poe's analogy between the short tale and a painting is significant, for it explains his concept of unity more clearly than any of his abstract [page 164:] definitions: “the Pawnbroker's Shop engages and enchains our attention — we are enveloped in its atmosphere of wretchedness and extortion — we pause at every sentence, not to dwell upon the sentence, but to obtain a fuller view of the gradually perfecting picture — which is never at any moment any other matter than the Pawnbroker's Shop. To the illustration of this one end all the groupings and fillings in of the painting are rendered subservient-and when our eyes are taken from the canvas, we remember the personages of the sketch not at all as independent existences, but as essentials of the one subject we have witnessed — as a part and portion of the Pawnbroker's Shop.” If a narrative is regarded as a picture, it is a design extended in space, not a movement in time, and if characters are regarded as static groupings used as elements of a composition, there is little or no dramatic effect. It is the thematic design which is important, and character and setting are equivalent means by which the design is fulfilled. By Poe's theory one should not attempt to write a “character story” or an “action story,” because undue emphasis on person or event would cause an imbalance in the composition. An “atmospheric story” would be allowable, however, for a symbolic rendition of scene would be as adequate for thematic purpose as it would be in a painting.

It would be tempting at this point to analyze one of Poe's own tales to see how well he followed his own theory. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” published three years later, would be the obvious choice, for an interpretation of scene is just as necessary for apprehending the import of the tale as is the analysis of character. Yet this story has been competently analyzed many times,(12) and it should be enough to say that Poe's theory of unity works in “Usher,” but it works at the expense of certain qualities which many of us today have been taught to expect in fiction. Roderick Usher, for instance, is not so much a convincing character as he is the pictorialization of theme. He is a “symbolic” character, according to some interpretations. Since Usher's fears are revealed more [page 165:] by description than by dramatic action, there is little conflict and almost no tension or suspense. The story can be regarded as mechanical — utterly contrived. For such a reason Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren criticized it harshly in the first edition of their textbook, Understanding Fiction. This textbook divides stories into three types — plot, character, and theme — although the authors are careful to emphasize that the quality of a particular story “may depend upon the organic relation existing among these elements.” Thus, although Brooks and Warren, like Poe, would not approve of the isolation of any particular element in a story, their categories do permit the emphasis of one element over the other, which is pragmatically sound. Poe, however, a pioneer in the genre, was not describing the tale as it has come to be; he was prescribing the tale as he thought it ought to be, the ideal form as he conceived it.

“Usher” is a tableau, the illustration of an idea, in which the symbolic significance of scene is just as important as the sequence of events. In fact, it is more important, for temporal movement is relatively subordinate. The collapse and death motif is foreshadowed in the opening description, and significant change or development does not occur. Poe's own term for this type of tale, the “arabesque,” is appropriate. This term, used to describe a graphic design, signifies an ordering of space, not a chronological development.(13) [page 166:]

2

The review of Dickens was the only real effort at criticism Poe was to make for some time. The other reviews in the June issue and all of those in July were perfunctory notices of nonliterary or sub-literary material, although among them Poe did insert a tribute to Coleridge in the form of an announcement of the American publication of the Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge. Poe wrote: [page 167:]

This was the most unqualified praise that Poe ever gave to the critic whose work helped form his own critical theory and practice. Later he was to rebel consciously against Coleridge's influence and to complain somewhat petulantly about the British critic's “over-profundity” and “metaphysicianism,” as did other American critics who professed to be baffled by Coleridge's obscurities.(15) At the moment, however, he was an ardent admirer. If the Biographia Literaria were published in America, Poe concluded, the publishers “would be rendering an important service to the cause of psychological science in America, by introducing a work of great scope and power in itself, and well calculated to do away with the generally [page 168:] received impression here entertained of the mysticism of the writer.”

Mysticism, which in Poe's time could mean almost anything difficult to understand, was no bugaboo to him as yet; but in subsequent years, as he reacted against the New England transcendentalists, he began to display the usual American reverence for common sense and plain speaking and deprecated the “cloudland of metaphysics.” This tendency became pronounced during his second attempt to make a place for himself in New York journalism and must be regarded, at least in part, as his contribution to the journalistic rivalry between New York and Boston.(16) At the moment, however, he was relatively isolated and could speak his mind with no further inhibition than that imposed by his apprehensive employer. Praising Coleridge and damning two British journals would have disturbed White far less than incurring the risk of a lawsuit by abusing Theodore Fay and William L. Stone.

In August, Poe was able to return to literary criticism with a review of The Book of Gems,(17) an anthology of British poets from Chaucer to Prior. This review added nothing to Poe's stature as a critic, for he revealed a narrowly contemporaneous taste. At least a third of our affection for the “old” poets, he claimed, is “simple love of the antique.” Even when we do feel something like the “proper poetic sentiment” in reading their poems, he continued, the feeling comes in part from the quaint phraseology and grotesque rhythms, which are not the result of artistry but only the accident of time and place. The “old” English muse was without art, Poe declared, even though her devotees, such as John Donne and Abraham Cowley, might have been very learned in their own [page 169:] way. These so-called metaphysical poets were far from metaphysical in the proper sense, because with them ethics or moral truth was the end of the poem, which to Poe was inadmissible. Wordsworth and Coleridge used metaphysical knowledge properly, because with them the end of a poem was quite properly the stimulation of poetic feeling “through channels suggested by mental analysis.”(18) Donne and Cowley had failed where Coleridge, in particular, had succeeded brilliantly, because Coleridge knew what poetry was supposed to do and he knew how to accomplish his purpose. In contrast, Cowley and all the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century were “simple and single-hearted men” who wrote directly from the “soul” with complete “abandon” — i.e., without art.

With the revival of interest in metaphysical poetry in the twentieth century, we may be disposed to dismiss Poe's strictures as incredibly naïve; but to do so would be to betray our own lack of perspective. From the age of Pope to Poe's own time, most critics had been inclined to think of seventeenth-century poetry, with the one exception of Milton, as an artless exhibition of mental gymnastics, “One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit,” as Pope had described it. Without attempting to designate specific sources, we may be sure that Poe's attitude, though not the exact terms of his argument, was formed by such works as Dr. Johnson's Life of Cowley, Blair's Lectures, which denigrate Cowley (using Johnson as authority), and perhaps even Sir Francis Jeffrey's review of John Ford, who, though a dramatist, was contemporary with Cowley and in Jeffrey's opinion displayed the lack of taste characteristic of his period. From reading Kames and Blair, one would conclude that nothing happened in English literature prior to Shakespeare and that between Shakespeare and Dryden the only poet worth mentioning was Milton. The Book of Gems was an unusual anthology because it did contain the “early English poets.” It was not uncommon to [page 170:] find Milton in an anthology — along with such late eighteenth-century favorites as Young, Beattie, Gray, and Collins.

It is not surprising, then, that Poe considered Donne and Cowley as primitive in respect to art, for to him art began with the recent application of psychological aesthetics. To compare Poe's opinion of seventeenth-century writers with that of Jeffrey is instructive. Poe writes: “To elevate immeasurably all the energies of the mind — but again — so to mingle the greatest possible fire, force, delicacy, and all good things, with the lowest possible bathos, baldness, and utter imbecility, as to render it not a matter of doubt, but of certainty, that the average results of mind in such a school, will be found inferior to those results in one (ceteris paribus) more artificial [i.e., more conscious of art]: Such, we think, is the view of the older English Poetry, in which a very calm examination will bear us out.” Next, Jeffrey: “Unaccountable, however, as it is, the fact is certain, that almost all the dramatic writers of this age appear to be alternately inspired, and bereft of understanding; and pass, apparently without being conscious of the change, from the most beautiful displays of genius to the most melancholy exemplification of stupidity .... there is an inequality and a capricious uncertainty in the taste and judgment of these good old writers, which excites at once our amazement and compassion.”(19)

Historically, then, Poe was exhibiting a stock opinion. More to the point of his development as a critic, however, he was basing his concept of artistry upon the artist's grasp of the psychology of response, his knowledge of emotional reactions and effective stimuli. The complexity of tone of the metaphysical poets, the yoking of intellect with emotion, the ironic indirection of the better metaphysical poems, were all lost on Poe, who considered the unity of emotional effect the prime desideratum of a poem. Poe's constriction of the limits of poetry had previously appeared in his review of Drake and Halleck, but this review is an even more obvious demonstration of his reductionism in practice. The only poem of [page 171:] The Book of Gems he was able to praise without qualification was Marvell's “Maiden Lamenting for her Fawn,”(20) which contained none of the wit that would have offended the sensibilities of Poe's generation. His rhapsody about the poem reveals how completely his taste was that of sentimental romanticism: “How truthful an air of deep lamentation hangs here upon every gentle syllable! It pervades all. It comes over the half-playful, half-petulant air with which she lingers on the beauties and good qualities of her favorite .... The whole thing is redolent with poetry of the very loftiest order. It is positively crowded with nature and with pathos.”

Scarcely a line of the poem is analyzed, and Poe's rapturous language seems hardly appropriate for the Zoilus of the Messenger. He was much more forceful in analyzing the defects of what he did not like than in demonstrating the quality of the works his taste approved.

The readers of the Messenger might have thought that Poe's hatchet had lost its edge if he had not included one harsh condemnation among the generally bland reviews of the August number. Nathaniel Parker Willis, although only three years older than Poe, was already an established writer in America. He was an editor of the New York Mirror, the journal that had attempted to “puff” Norman Leslie into success. Willis had published three books of poems and three volumes of literary “letters” called Pencillings by the Way before Poe reviewed his book of sketches, Inklings of Adventure.

Willis was an aesthete, a literary fop about New York whose mannerisms irritated some of the critics who reviewed his work; but Poe, fresh from having announced in his review of Drake and Halleck that a work should be criticized by principle and not by prejudice, denounced the practice of attacking a book on the basis of the author's personality: “We cannot sufficiently express our disgust at that unscrupulous indelicacy which is in the habit of deciding [page 172:] upon the literary merits of this gentleman by a reference to his private character and manners ....”(21) Willis probably appreciated this attitude, for he had been subjected to a number of personal attacks, including two by Poe's enemies, Willis Gaylord Clark and Colonel William L. Stone. This in spite of the fact that the Mirror had “puffed” Colonel Stone's writings.(22)

Unfortunately for Willis, Poe found sufficient reason to demolish the book without reference to the author's character. The whole narrative was “disfigured and indeed utterly ruined by the grievous sin of affectation.” This charge has been examined in a previous chapter in reference to the romantic requirement of sincerity, but it also represented a stylistic fault. Blair had devoted an entire lecture to the definition of simplicity and its opposite, affectation. Simplicity of composition, he explained, was virtually the same thing as unity, for it represented a design distinguished by a relatively small number of parts, as could be illustrated by Greek tragedy and Greek architecture, in contrast to the Gothic modes. Simplicity of style “stands opposed to too much ornament, or pomp of Language,” whereas an affected style was overly ornate, or florid. Another way in which simplicity was manifested was in an easy and natural manner of expressing thought, “in such a manner, that every one thinks he could have written in the same way.”(23) Affectation, on the other hand, was not simply ornament, but the labored effort to achieve rhetorical effects.

Poe's charge of affectation was properly applied to Willis’ style. His striving for effect, his attempts at cleverness, elegance, and wit were the New Yorker's tokens of a sophistication that was unappreciated in the provinces;(24) but Poe judged Willis’ frivolity by a stylistic principle considered sound in his day. Furthermore, in terms of unity of effect, Willis’ mannerisms were productive of a [page 173:] greater flaw. There was an “utter want of keeping” in the book, for the “absurd fripperies and frivolities” prevented the reader from appreciating his more serious subjects, such as the grandeur of Niagara Falls. The trivial could not be mixed with the sublime, according to the Allisonian principle of the single emotion.(25)

In later years Poe was to make amends to Willis and was even to become his friend. Willis employed Poe to write for the New York Evening Mirror in 1844 and defended him from his enemies in 1846 and after his death; but Poe never had a high regard for Willis as a writer. He judged Willis as a man of fancy rather than of imagination. Few would question his verdict.

3

In September, Poe reviewed a novel which interested him, Sheppard Lee, by Robert Montgomery Bird, author of Calavar and The Infidel.(26) Sheppard Lee was a humorous fantasy, an “original,” Poe thought. Much of the book was social satire, but this element Poe ignored in favor of Bird's exploitation of the occult. The chief character experiences metempsychosis, his psyche inhabiting some seven different bodies (of persons who had recently died) in its transmigration. Poe himself had used metempsychosis in his tale “Morella,” and he was to use it again in “Ligeia” and in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” Consequently he was intrigued by Bird's strategy in using the occult. Yet Poe was disturbed, as we might expect, by the humor of Sheppard Lee. The journey of the soul should be treated seriously, and the author should have made an effort to secure the reader's assent to the supernatural elements. Instead Bird violated the tone of the novel with incongruities until the final page and then ruthlessly disposed of the problem by alleging that the whole thing was only a dream, thus depriving the reader of the emotional effect he had secured through identification [page 174:] with the character. Any use of the supernatural, Poe claimed, should be carefully planned. It should not be a mere structural device for stringing together six separate narratives. If Bird had caused his hero to preserve his identity through each successive existence, and if the events themselves had been contrasted in their effect upon an unchanging character, the book would have had a legitimate interest.

Such a method would be satisfactory, Poe asserted, but there was a superior stratagem:

Poe wins our respect here by constructing a rationale for the supernatural in fiction. Lame endings that revealed the author's subservience to common sense were frequent in popular fiction. The highly respected Washington Irving had provided natural explanations for the supernatural events of some of his tales, as had [page 175:] Charles Brockden Brown and Mrs. Ann Radcliffe before him. No such apology to reason and science is present in Poe's own tales of the supernatural. Morella's soul invades the body of her daughter, but the mystery is unexplained, as is the more startling transformation of the blonde Rowena into the brunette Ligeia. Poe's theory of unity of effect forbade the intrusion of materials that would dispel the illusion which all good fiction creates. He knew that readers give willing assent to the virtual existence which is the “life” of fiction, however incredible that existence may be when measured by ordinary experience.

Concerned, as always, with questions of technique, Poe explained how to secure the reader's acceptance of the occult by using the “arts” of verisimilitude. No longer did he generalize by referring to the power of identification, as he had in his review of Robinson Crusoe. Instead, he indicated that the illusion of reality could be achieved by the multiplication of minute details, even though these details were not directly relevant to the plot. The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, on which he may have been working at this time (the first installment was published in the Messenger only four months later) makes use of such details. The technique itself was not new. The “sensation” stories of Blackwood's, from which he had learned part of his craft, had given minute details of bizarre experiences and the consequent emotional reactions; but Poe could not be content with a technique unless he could support it in theory.

The achievement of verisimilitude in action and setting, Poe had perceived, was possible through the multiplication of detail. How to achieve it in characterization was a problem he did not examine in this review but to which he addressed himself in a review published four months later. His own tales, however, furnish evidence that he was aware that the reader's assent to the incredible could be achieved, in part, by the plausibility of the narrator. Most of the sensation stories, including Poe's, made use of first-person narrators. If the character telling the story is obviously psychotic, the bizarre experience may be taken as hallucination, and verisimilitude is destroyed. This credibility-destroying device had been used [page 176:] by Irving in Tales of a Traveller, in which the “Adventure of the German Student” is narrated by a “nervous gentleman” who claims to have heard it from the student himself in a madhouse! Poe used the gambit in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” with its opening sentence that testifies to the madness of the narrator. There is nothing wrong with such a device if the author has no intention of securing verisimilitude on external terms and wishes only to record the experience of a deranged mind. If, however, the purpose is to describe a strange adventure in an incredible setting, the author must in some way vouch for the sanity of the narrator. Poe went to extreme lengths to accomplish this in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, even writing a preface in which Pym, the character, makes the claim that Poe, the author, fictionalized the facts presented straightforwardly by Pym himself; then Poe added a postscript, claiming that Pym and his companion were still alive.

Such tactics are crude and indefensible. More to Poe's credit is his effort to establish Pym's plausibility by distinguishing the character's periods of near insanity from his periods of self-possession. In other words, the reader is informed of the times at which the character is subject to hallucination. In an earlier tale, “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” Poe had endeavored to accomplish the same object by making his narrator unimaginative and skeptical. Pym does have imagination, but he insists that he retains his “powers of mind” at a time when his companions have been reduced to “a species of second childhood.” Even when he encounters the wonders of the South Sea region, Pym merely records details instead of trying to explain the marvels. This technique is that of writing “as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth,” the requirement Poe had proposed in his review of Sheppard Lee.

Poe's devices worked in a way that he did not expect. Pym was reviewed as an attempt at a realistic travel story that neglected probability,(27) surely an indication that his clumsier tactics annoyed [page 177:] his reviewer. For all of his theorizing, Poe had no gift for realism and the super-rationality of some of his narrators strikes most readers in a way quite opposite to what was evidently intended. James W. Cox furnishes this explanation: “He [Pym] is not the observer but forever the actor, and his experiences come more and more to seem the hallucinations of a madman.”(28) To read Pym in terms of the Crusoe-like verisimilitude Poe invokes is unrewarding, to say the least. The novel assumes interest only if we interpret it as Patrick Quinn has done, as a symbolic journey of the mind.(29) Surely, however, it deserves better than Mr. Cox's comment that it is something between “a practical joke at the expense of the reader on one hand and a parody of the sensational adventure tale on the other.”(30) Poe undoubtedly wrote the novel to sell and exploited relatively crude effects, but in this case his unconscious is better than his conscious art.(31) It may be taken as a crude thriller with a technique which foreshadows that of the modern science fiction adventure, such as A. E. Van Vogt's The War Against the Rull, but a search for symbolic meaning in Van Vogt's work yields no return, whereas both Patrick Quinn and Edward [page 178:] Davidson have found the “sensations” of Pym richly joined in implication.

4

In spite of the relatively inoffensive reviews that Poe had written for the July and August numbers of the Messenger, there was trouble in the office. On August 5, 1836, White had written to a contributor, William Cowper Scott, proprietor of the New York Weekly Messenger, that the next issue of his journal would be delayed because of illness. Again on August 25 he wrote that the November number was not ready because of “sickness among my most material hands,”(32) which evidently meant Poe. In September, White himself was ill. An editorial note in the September issue stated that since both editor and publisher had been ill, there would be no notices of new books. In a letter to Sarah J. Hale, dated October 20, Poe admitted that he had been “sadly thrown back by late illness”(33) and would be unable to contribute anything to the Ladies Magazine, which she edited in Boston. About this time White was on the verge of discharging Poe and retained him only on the fulfillment of “certain conditions.”(34) What these conditions were, we do not know. Perhaps they had to do with Poe's drinking. At any rate, with a slowly dying wife, financial difficulties, and illness of his own, White was evidently finding the vagaries of his brilliant editor too much to bear. Poe did recover from his indisposition in time to prepare the reviews for the October number — a full seventeen pages, though all of them may not have been Poe's — but in November there were further difficulties. White made a trip to New York about the middle of October, but on his return found his wife very low and his office in a state of [page 179:] confusion.(35) If, as seems certain, he had left Poe in charge, Poe had violated the conditions White had imposed.

The November number was not ready for the press. It did not appear until December, and even then there was an apologetic note in the book review section: “A press of business connected with some necessary arrangements for Volume the third, has prevented us from paying, in this Messenger, the usual attention to our Critical Department. We have many books now lying by us which we propose to notice fully in our next. With this number we close Volume the Second.”

The charitable conclusion is that Poe could not manage all of the work in White's absence — write the critical notices, handle the correspondence, pass judgment on contributions, prepare the magazine for the press, and read proof. His normal duties, if we can take White's letters to Lucian Minor as evidence of what he expected from his editor, would have been to handle book reviews and notices and furnish from fifteen to twenty pages of original material a month. But White had expected Minor to work only twenty-four to thirty hours a week,(36) and it is likely that Poe did much more than this. Normally he handled much of White's correspondence and read proof. Though he could be overruled by White, he passed judgment on contributions and wrote letters of acceptance and rejection. Probably Poe's work week was far in excess of thirty hours. When we add the time necessary for his own creative work and for the careful analysis he preferred to give the books he reviewed, it is no wonder that occasionally he took refuge in a bottle and got the reputation of having “bad habits.” R. M. T. Hunter, a contemporary observer, gave his impression of the situation, and although we cannot always trust a memory of forty years, Hunter's account in 1875 squares with the impression we get from White's letters to his confidants. Hunter wrote, [page 180:]

Considering the state of affairs in the Messenger office during November, it is not surprising that the November number, when it finally appeared in December, contained only four pages of criticism, of which the only point of interest was another expression of Poe's admiration for Dickens in a review of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club — and this review was chiefly quotation. By January, ‘White had made good his threat to discharge Poe, and among the critical notices in the first number of Volume III was the announcement: “Mr. Poe's attention being called in another direction, he will decline, with the present number, the Editorial duties of the Messenger.”(38) [page 181:]

5

This account of Poe's difficulties between August and December of 1836 has been given in order to illustrate the problems he faced being a critic instead of a journalistic book-reviewer. Poe wanted to be a critic, to analyze the books that crossed his desk thoughtfully and at length;(39) but the exigencies of his routine tasks were a [page 182:] formidable obstacle. It is to his credit that during these exasperating months he still managed to write reviews, a few of them good ones. In the October number, among notices of nonliterary publications such as Dr. Haxall's Dissertation on Diseases of the Abdomen, Hall's Latin Grammar, and S. A. Roszel's Address Delivered at the Annual Commencement of Dickinson College, there is a review of a book of short stories, Peter Snook ... and Other Strange Tales.(40) If we remember that collections of tales were not customarily honored with serious reviews during Poe's time, we can see that this review not only reveals the progress of Poe's ideas concerning the short story as a literary form but also indicates his efforts to establish the genre as worthy of criticism. For once he thought he had found a perfect example of the form: “The incidents of this story are forcibly conceived and even in the hands of an ordinary writer would scarcely fail of effect. But in the present instance so unusual a tact is developed in narration, that we are inclined to rank ‘Peter Snook’ among the few tales which, each in their own way, are absolutely faultless.”

Reviewing Dickens’ Watkins Tottle in June, Poe had compared the short story to a painting. Now he developed the analogy in detail:

To anyone familiar with Poe's aesthetic principles the statement above is astonishing. Usually vehement in his opposition to mimetic realism, he compared “Peter Snook” approvingly with a “Flemish home-piece,” in spite of the fact that the Flemish school of painters was normally censured in his time for uncritical literalness and a delight in the commonplace. Their work was marked by accuracy and precision of outline, a result of a tradition of miniature painting, yet these are precisely the qualities that Poe denied to the best of the Flemish work. His use of the term chiaroscuro, however, suggests that he was referring not to the distinctive Flemish paintings of the fifteenth century but to the genre painting of the seventeenth century, after the influence of the Italian artist Caravaggio had made itself felt, particularly in the thematic use of light and shadow. That Poe was making an accurate comparison is indicated by his description of “the slight tone of exaggeration prevalent, yet not amounting to caricature.” The Flemish genre painters had retained enough of Pieter Bruegel's passion for the details of homely life, invested with a certain amount of humor, to justify Poe's comparison. The author of “Peter Snook,” Poe noted, “has some of the happiest peculiarities of Dickens”; then he quoted enough of the tale to show that these peculiarities had to do with a humorous presentation of a London clerk and his financial and amatory misadventures. The story is a “home-piece” in its exaggeration of low life and uses the technique of chiaroscuro to emphasize elements of character.

Obviously Poe did not object to Dickensian realism in a short tale, provided that details were organized into a total design — a composition that would convey a unity of impression. More surprising is the last sentence of his quotation, that “the principal rules of the plastic arts, founded as they are in a true perception of [page 184:] the beautiful, will apply in their fullest force to every species of literary composition” (italics mine). After 1831 he customarily denied, along with most other romantic critics, that poetry resembled painting, for painting was a mimetic art and poetry was not. However, when Poe referred to “principal rules,” he was thinking in terms of the psychology of effect. The unity of effect was a first principle, to be observed in all arts. As he was to explain in a later review, effects differed according to genre, but the principle was always the same.

Poe continued to describe the short tale as a design or a composition rather than as a narrative characterized by action and drama. The pleasure to be derived from it was similar to the response to a painting — say by a master of the picturesque such as Salvator Rosa — in which the management of light and shadow is thematically significant. Details that call attention to themselves are to be avoided because they get in the way of the apprehension of the design, the idea of the story. We do not know whether at this time Poe had read any of Hawthorne's tales which S. B. Goodrich had published in The Token, but, whether he had read them or not, he described with precision what has been accepted as a chief characteristic of Hawthorne's symbolic art — the blending of light and shadow so that object, character, and event are never seen in insulated detail but only in a kind of relatedness that, taken as a whole, intimates the idea. The review of Peter Snook reveals that six years before Poe was to review Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales he was prepared to do them justice. Hawthorne was practicing the technique for which Poe was attempting to formulate a theory. Where Poe's theory and Hawthorne's practice came to terms was in the picturesque tradition, which valued natural objects selectively for their picturesque qualities and their capability of being combined into compositions that would create a unified impression.(41) It is [page 185:] not at all surprising that in the few remarks Poe made about painters he showed preference for Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa, whose paintings had helped establish the vogue of the picturesque in the eighteenth century.

6

Since the November number of the Messenger did not appear until December and even then contained only four pages of perfunctory notices, the last work of any significance that Poe accomplished as editor of the Messenger appeared in January, 1837. The first five reviews in this issue are his; the others are by Judge Abel P. Upshur and Beverley Tucker. Of Poe's five reviews, two merit examination.

Poe gave George Balcombe, a novel published anonymously by his friend Beverley Tucker, a full measure of attention. Some months later White wrote to Tucker alleging that the “eulogistic review” was written only because Poe suspected that Tucker was the author of the novel. “Poe seldom or ever done [sic] what he knew was just to any books,”(42) White charged. Since this charge was made in retrospect, after White should have had time to cool off from whatever heat the immediate friction with Poe had caused, it may have been a firm conviction. As has been shown, Poe did write some caustic reviews, flippant in tone, of what White called “some trashy novels.” But White went on to say that Poe rarely read through the books that he reviewed, and this accusation is quite unfair in view of the circumstances. Poe's reviews demonstrated that he read very carefully the books that he thought merited attention. Even when he resorted to plot summary instead of analysis, he appears to have read the books concerned, unless he lifted the summaries from other magazines. When Poe did borrow from other reviewers, which he did infrequently, he was more scrupulous than many of his contemporaries in mentioning his [page 186:] sources. Considering his duties at the Messenger office, however, and the number of books he had to review, it is unlikely that he was able to read them all. Any professional reviewer is likely to compile a review of an unimportant work from publisher's notices or previous reviews if he has a deadline to meet. Whenever Poe concentrated on peripheral matters such as dedications, footnotes, or slips in grammar (which could be culled by skimming), he was unjust, in White's sense, to the book reviewed. Otherwise White's charges have to be based on the five books that Poe reviewed harshly: Confessions of a Poet, Paul Ulric, Norman Leslie, Ups and Downs, and The Partisan. Poe himself had stated in September that he had reviewed ninety-four books for the Messenger and that in only five reviews had censure been “greatly predominant.” In seventy-nine cases he had praised more than he had blamed.

This was Poe's reaction to the charge of “regular cutting and slashing” which had been made by the Richmond Courier and Daily Compiler in August of 1836.(43) Poe had answered the editor of the Compiler by supplying the facts, as he interpreted them, but from ‘White's letter to Tucker we must assume that White was not convinced by Poe's facts. Either his troubles with Poe had made him incapable of being fair or Poe's reviewing standards were so strange to White that the publisher had no real basis for judgment. Since Poe judged on literary grounds and White on moral, they were obviously at cross-purposes much of the time.

The review of George Balcombe(44) was not blatantly eulogistic. Poe did call Tucker's work the “best American novel,” an opinion time has not sustained; and he claimed that no other American novelist had succeeded as well as Tucker in creating female characters. This last was only relative praise. The inability to portray women realistically had been characteristic of the best of the novelists of Poe's time — Cooper, Simms, and Bird. Women thought worthy of portrayal in a novel were usually ladies, paper-and-paste specimens of sensibility. Poe quite rightly took exception to “Elizabeth, [page 187:] the shrinking and matronly wife of Balcombe,” who rises “suddenly into the heroine in the hour of her husband's peril.” As Poe said, “She is an exquisite specimen of her class, but her class is somewhat hackneyed.” The character of Mary Scott, who has the chief female role in the novel, was better, but “her nature is barely sketched.” Even in the sketch, however, the novelist showed an unusual “creative vigor.”

Unless we are aware that the American critics of Poe's time demanded a measure of realism in the portrayal of character, we would be disposed to grant Poe more credit than he deserves for seeing the defects of the female characters in the American novel. Actually, a number of critics had objected to Cooper's females, and the charge made recently by Leslie Fiedler — that American novelists were unable to present “full-fledged, mature women”(45) — was first intimated in the 1830's. This is not to say that the critics of the period would have accepted Fiedler's definition of a mature woman, but they were aware that American novelists were deficient in the characterization of women. The claim that Poe made for Tucker was that no other American novelist had depicted female character “even nearly so well,” and this praise, considering the competition, must be regarded as qualified. Other characters in the novel were less effective:

To anyone familiar with Poe's theories of art, it is apparent that the quotation above is a subtle compliment to the author of the novel as a person but by no means a tribute to his ability as a novelist. Three characters are described as types. Two are said to be indistinguishable except for circumstances. Three are said to be natural, but that this represents limited approval is revealed by Poe's last sentence. Originality in characterization displayed the imagination at work, not mere observation. The question that had been occupying Poe's mind for several months was how to achieve verisimilitude in highly imaginative prose fiction. As we have seen, it was to be secured in terms of setting by the multiplication of detail. What about character? The unimaginative, skeptical type who narrated “Ms. Found in a Bottle” would have been to Poe's mind a nonentity, a species of Everyman. How, then, could an author win the reader's assent to a tale that presented a character so unusual as to be called an original? Although Poe's solution was irrelevant to the novel under consideration, he proposed it, following his customary practice of using the particular issue at hand as a point of departure to advance his own theory.

This “latter species of originality” began to appear in Poe's own tales, particularly in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In “Berenice” he had made a rudimentary effort to prepare the reader for the unusual character of Egaeus by summarizing his long isolation in the “gloomy, grey, hereditary halls” of his fathers, but few details were given, and Poe himself admitted that “Berenice” was not successful.(46) In the character of Roderick Usher, however, Poe presented hypothetical qualities — neurotic sensitivity and fear exaggerated beyond the probable — but created in Usher's house a microcosm in which such a being could be expected to live, “skilfully” adapting Usher's qualities “to the circumstances which surround them.” Such a technique, to Poe, was genuinely creative. An original character was “ideal” in the sense that the concept sprang from the mind of the author, instead of being copied from life like the characters of George Balcombe. Yet to secure verisimilitude (this quality was required in prose, but not in poetry), an environment must be invented in which the character would seem natura1.(47) To increase plausibility, Poe made the narrator of “Usher” a commonplace Everyman much like the narrator of “Ms. Found in a Bottle.”

It will be seen by the above that Poe, quite tactfully, was arguing that the author of George Balcombe had displayed little imagination. The characters were true to life, but hackneyed. Other aspects of the novel were less objectionable. The style was “bold, vigorous, and rich,” and there were few faults of grammar. The thought of the novel was not impeccable, but since it was voiced by the main character, the author should not be held responsible. Poe understood quite well that it was possible for a fictional character to be [page 190:] an independent creation, not the author's voice. This does not mean that he was fully aware of the problem of identifying the “voice” of a novel, which is still a controversial issue. He customarily located the author voice in the commentary that appeared in the nineteenth-century novel as part of the privilege of the omniscient convention; and in a later review he attributed the chief value of a novel to just such comment.

Finally, Poe commended the plot of George Balcombe, but since he did not regard an ingenious plot as necessary or even desirable in longer works of fiction, this must not be taken as anything other than a tribute to the author's skill — his “ingenuity and finish in the adaptation of its component parts.” Since a novel did not convey a unity of impression, Poe was to say in other reviews, such skill was only a secondary merit and usually went unappreciated.

Except for the unjustified claim that Tucker's was the best American novel, Poe accorded it no more praise than he had Bird's The Infidel and far less than he had given Bulwer. He concluded his review by stating that he did not wish to be understood as ranking George Balcombe with “the more brilliant fictions of some of the living novelists of Great Britain.” White's accusation that Poe deliberately wrote a eulogistic review to gratify Tucker is unfair. Not that Poe never eulogized his friends. He did so more than once. In this particular instance, however, it is unlikely that White would have made the accusation had he not been making excuses to Tucker for his dismissal of an editor Tucker had praised; either this, or he failed to understand Poe's attempt to judge by literary principle. Remembering Poe's ridicule of Simms, White may have mistaken a tactful employment of standards for unqualified praise.

It is ironic that Poe's last review of a book of poems during his editorship of the Messenger was the one in which he most nearly approximated the standards he had announced in the review of Drake and Halleck. It may be, as has been suggested earlier, that Poe's criticism suffered because he rarely examined a book that possessed the qualities he demanded. Rigidly contemporaneous in his taste, he was unable to cope with the eccentricities of the metaphysical poets of The Book of Gems, but he could judge the merit [page 191:] of the poets of his own time with considerable accuracy. Yet until William Cullen Bryant's Poems, Fourth Edition appeared on his desk,(48) only Drake and Halleck had deserved serious attention. In reviewing Bryant, he had an opportunity to examine the work of the best American poet of the period, except for himself. Poe profited by the opportunity. As practical criticism, his review of Bryant is superior to anything else he had written for the Messenger, not excepting the critique of Drake and Halleck. It deserves a separate chapter, for it shows that Poe was capable of a more sophisticated method than he had demonstrated in his disposal of Mrs. Sigourney's mottoes and Drake's frogs and fireflies.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 159:]

1.  Works, IX, 1-13.

2.  According to Charvat, this had been a routine practice of American reviewers some years earlier. American Critical Thought, 87-88.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 159, running to the bottom of page 160:]

3.  Works, VIII, 336-37. No doubt Poe singled out this particular criticism for rebuttal because the Spectator had implied that Poe's assumption of the “tone of a Walsh, a Blackwood or a Jeffries [sic]” was Messenger policy. There was not enough concentration of talent in the South, the Spectator editor continued, to warrant support of a journal that pretended to such superior standards. Nevertheless, “the Messenger has boldly put itself [page 160:] forth as an arbiter whose dicta are supreme; and with a severity and indiscreetness of criticism, — especially on American works, — which few, if any, of the able and well established reviews have ventured to exercise, has been not only unmerciful, but savage.” In order to make a detailed reply, Poe quoted the entire criticism of the Spectator in the July Supplement of the Southern Literary Messenger, II (1836), 517. White would have been disturbed both by the accusation that undue severity to American authors was his journal's policy and by the hint that the South could not support a magazine with such relentless standards.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 160:]

4.  Southern Literary Messenger, II (1836), 517-24.

5.  Ibid., 345.

6.  Charvat, American Critical Thought, 17-18,153-55.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 161:]

7.  September 21, 1839, in Letters, I, 118.

8.  Works, IX, 17-18.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 162:]

9.  Ibid., 33.

10.  Ibid., 45-48.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 162, running to the bottom of page 163:]

11.  Poe's concept of the unity of effect was not given in this particular review, but, as previously indicated, it was similar to Alison's unity of impression. A more immediate source was A. W. Schlegel. See Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel,” 7. George Kelly's interpretation of Poe's concept of unity is substantially the same as my own as far as the short tale is concerned, but he is overly ingenious in trying to make a case for unity of impression in a [page 163:] long work, such as a novel. See George Kelly, “Poe's Theory of Unity,” Philological Quarterly, XXXVII (1958), 34-44. Poe categorically denied that a novel could transmit a unity of impression, and Mr. Kelly's argument that the denouement works psychologically to bring about the effect of the single impression is alien to Poe's concept. Although Poe was capable of admiring a well-plotted novel as evidence of skill, he thought that unity of effect was impossible in a novel and that unity of plot was not essential. The chief value of a novel, he said a number of times, was the author's thought.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 164:]

12.  A recent analysis of the tale according to the approach I am suggesting is that of E. Arthur Robinson, “Order and Sentience in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” PMLA, LXXVI (1961), 66-81.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 165, running to the bottom of page 166:]

13.  In a recent article Cecil L. Moffitt contended that Poe used the term “arabesque” to suggest that the important influence on his work was not Germany but the East. See Moffitt, “Poe's Arabesque,” Comparative Literature, XVIII (1966), 55-70. This contention is questionable. Arthur Hobson Quinn was probably correct in pointing to an essay by Sir Walter Scott, published in 1827, as Poe's source for the terms “arabesque” and “grotesque.” Scott's essay describes the tales of E. T. W. [[E. T. A.]] Hoffman as being grotesque, saying that they resemble the arabesque in painting, in which “strange and complicated monsters are introduced.” Sir Walter Scott, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” Foreign Quarterly Review, I, (1827), 81-82. If Poe intended to deny German influence, it is unlikely that he would have used terms that suggested it. An essay by Scott would be well known, and the Foreign Quarterly no doubt had a good American subscription list.

We should take Poe at his word in his preface to the book publication of [page 166:] Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, in which he declared without explanation that the terms indicated the “prevalent tenor” of his stories. Apparently he assumed his readers would know the technical meaning of the terms. An “arabesque” is a surface decoration, painted or in low relief, in which fantastic figures are intertwined with flowers, leaves, branches, and scroll work. The entire design is called an “arabesque,” while the term “grotesque,” deriving from the grotta or excavations in which such decorations are found on ancient ruins, applies chiefly to the figures. In other words, the terms represent different aspects of a unified design, which was probably what Poe intended in his arrangement of the tales in his book, leaving the reader to understand that individual tales suggested the grotesque, while others, not monstrous, exhibited the beauty of the design itself. If Poe borrowed from Scott, he would hardly have overlooked the great novelist's remark that the public was surfeited by an overdose of oriental tales and by the “wild and fantastic tone.” In all of English literature, Scott could find only Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Washington Irving's “The Bold Dragoon” to illustrate a successful use of the “supernatural grotesque.”

Poe denied German influence only by saying that he had avoided the “pseudo-horror” employed by second-rate German authors, and that when he had depicted terror, it was “not of Germany, but of the soul.” This, of course, meant psychological terror, and Poe claimed to have deduced it “only from its legitimate sources,” which meant human nature. This, too, he could have derived from Scott, for Scott had declared that the only interest in fantastic creatures came from their expression of feelings and sentiments that would be natural to them under the circumstances in which they existed.

Poe's use of the term “grotesque” offers more possibilities for interpretation than this extended note can suggest. For one interpretation see Lewis A. Lawson, “Poe's Conception of the Grotesque,” Mississippi Quarterly, XIX (1966), 200-205. For Poe's use of the term in various contexts, his possible sources, and other interpretations, see Lawson, “Poe and the Grotesque: A Bibliography, 1695-1965,” Poe Newsletter, I (1968), 9-10.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 167:]

14.  Works, IX, 51.

15.  See Charvat, American Critical Thought, 78-81, 113, for an account of the reception of Coleridge prior to 1835. By 1835 a mixed reaction is evident that may be illustrated by two articles from the same journal. In April of 1835, G. B. Cheever, reviewing Coleridge's The Friend in one of those lengthy essays in the North American Review, had exhausted his vocabulary of praise on the British critic. See North American Review, XL (1835), 299-351. In October, however, A. H. Everett, an admirer of Dugald Stewart, had complained of Coleridge's “almost total want of clearness and precision of thought.” North American Review, XLI (1835), 371. This charge was made in Everett's review of a lecture by William Ellery Channing, a review which had aroused Poe's ire for its uncritical praise of a New England author as well as for the censure of Coleridge.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 168:]

16.  Like the South, New York was hostile toward Transcendentalism, but Poe showed relatively little concern about the New England isms until he moved to New York in 1844 and became more conspicuously involved in journalistic controversies. Not much disturbed by the political implications of transcendental thought, he had opposed it only as it manifested the idea of progress; and he was capable of referring to transcendental idealism as a “profound and ennobling philosophy.” Works, XI, 253. It was dishonored only by some of the “muddle-pates” who called themselves transcendentalists.

17.  Ibid., IX, 91-103.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 169:]

18.  Poe's praise of Wordsworth represents a reversal of attitude. See Chapter II of this book. By the 1830's Wordsworth had won wide acceptance in America, and Poe, maturing as a critic, found it necessary to revise his position.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 170:]

19.  Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 304. The first printing of this review was in August, 1811.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 171:]

20.  Poe's title; the exact title is “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 172:]

21.  Southern Literary Messenger, II (1836), 597.

22.  Moss, Poe's Literary Battles, 73-74.

23.  Blair, Lectures, II, 387-90.

24.  See Branch, The Sentimental Years, 141, for a lively description of Willis’ sophistication. For a more detailed account of Willis’ subject matter and Poe's reviews of Willis, see Richard P. Benton, “The Works of N. P. Willis as a Catalyst of Poe's Criticism,” American Literature, XXXIX (1967), 315-25.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 173:]

25.  Alison provided illustrations of the way in which the introduction of “trifling circumstances” destroys the effect of beauty or sublimity. Essays on Taste, 91-102.

26.  Works, IX, 126-39.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 176, running to the bottom of page 177:]

27.  It was reviewed in this way in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, III (1838), 210-11. Walter E. Bezanson has described Burton's reaction to Pym and discussed the clumsier devices Poe used to achieve verisimilitude, [page 177:] at the same time giving him credit for a superficial credibility which “at its best ... gives much of his work what might be called a secondary charm.” Mr. Bezanson is correct in saying that we cannot take Poe's contrivances very seriously today. See Walter E. Bezanson, “The Troubled Sleep of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Rudolph Kirk and C. F. Main (eds.), Essays in Literary History (New Brunswick, 1960), 149-52. Another provocative study, together with a survey of critical opinion, is Sidney Kaplan's introduction to a modern reprint of the novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York, 1960).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 177:]

28.  “Edgar Poe: Style as Pose,” Virginia Quarterly Review, XLIV (1968), 73.

29.  The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale, Ill., 1957), 169-215.

30.  “Edgar Poe: Style as Pose,” 74.

31.  A recent article by Joseph V. Ridgely and Iola S. Haverstick casts light on the difficulties Poe had with the narrative structure of Pym. The novel was certainly not worked out with the “rigid consequence” of a mathematical demonstration, as Poe would have preferred. See Ridgely and Haverstick, “Chartless Voyage: The Many Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, VIII (1966), 63-80.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 178:]

32.  Both these letters are quoted in Hull, “A Canon,” 63.

33.  In Letters, I, 105.

34.  On December 27, 1836, White wrote to Beverley Tucker claiming that three months earlier (September?) he had given Poe notice, but that afterwards he was “overpersuaded” to retain him on the basis of these conditions, conditions which Poe had “again forfeited.” Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger, 110.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 179:]

35.  See White to Scott, November 24, 1836, in Hull, “A Canon,” 63.

36.  See letters to Minor, February 17 and March 2, 1835, in Hull, “A Canon,” 55. The letter of February 17 is quoted in full in Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger, 93-94, but the March letter is omitted.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 180:]

37.  R. M. T. Hunter to Henry Tutwiler, May 20, 1875, in Hull, “A Canon,” 49-50. Hunter may have been the person who “overpersuaded” White to retain Poe in September.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 180, running to the bottom of page 181:]

38.  Southern Literary Messenger, III (1837) 72. See ibid., 96, for an announcement, apparently written by White, stating that Poe had “retired” on January 3 and that “the entire management of the work devolves upon myself alone.” White then identified Poe's reviews in the January number. As late as January 9, however, Poe felt entitled to write a contributor, Allan B. Magruder, that his manuscript had been accepted. Letters, I, 106-107. White reacted indignantly and wrote Poe on January 17 (?) that Magruder's article was worthless and would not be printed, even though it had been set in type. Hull, “A Canon,”(58).

In a letter to Beverley Tucker late in January, White charged that Poe had injured the Messenger through poor management. Hull, “A Canon,” 61. The letter of January 24, printed in Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger, 112-13, does not contain this particular charge, but in it White deprecated Poe by alleging that a certain contributor would no doubt [page 181:] stick by him now that Poe was no longer editor. In another January letter to Tucker, White wrote that more contributions were coming in than ever before, “since the fact has eked [sic] out that Poe is not to act as Judge or Judge Advocate.” Hull, “A Canon,” 65. A last letter, dated January 31, contains sarcastic references to Poe: “Poe pesters me no little — he is trying every manouvre [sic] to foist himself on some one at the North — at least I believe so. — He is continually after me for money .... Tell me candidly what you think of his Pym Maryatt's [sic] style I suppose and his Poetry. Treat all of this as private which you think ought to be private. Let all be private about Poe.” Hull, “A Canon,” 65.

Both Jackson and Hull have interpreted Poe's relationship with White partly on the basis of White's letters — a valuable corrective to some of the overly sympathetic biographers who have relied upon Poe's famous defense of his conduct in his letter to William Poe, August 15, 1840, in Letters, I, 141. Poe implied that he deliberately resigned, but ‘White's letters indicate that he was discharged. The only original contribution I have made to this essentially biographical question has been my estimate of the taboos Poe violated both with his fiction and with his reviews and the effect on White, whom Poe called “an illiterate and vulgar, although well-meaning man.” By Poe's standards, this is a correct description; but in a letter to Heath, which has unfortunately been lost, he evidently charged White with malice. In his reply Heath denied the charge and asserted that few men were “more disposed to cherish kindly and benevolent feelings” than White. Heath to Poe, September 12, 1839, in Works, XVII, 47-48. A reasonable interpretation is that White, plagued by personal misfortune and financial difficulties between August and December, 1836, was driven beyond endurance by Poe's erratic behavior and in a temporary mood of hostility made certain charges that were only partly justifiable. There is no reason to doubt Heath's statement in 1839 that White had no ill will toward Poe. The hostility evident in ‘White's letters of January, 1837, had been forgotten.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 181, running to the bottom of page 182:]

39.  It must be remembered that Poe wrote reviews for a monthly instead of a quarterly. The essay-reviews of the North American Review often ran fifty pages or more. Poe rejected this kind of review because it amounted to a monograph-length study of the author and related topics; but rarely did he have space in the monthlies for which he wrote to examine more than one or two aspects of a work thoroughly, with ample quotations to illustrate [page 182:] his points. His longest reviews ran from 10,000 to 12,000 words, less than a third the length of those in the North American; but most of his reviews were as brief as those of our modern journals, an inadequate space for Poe's method.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 182:]

40.  Southern Literary Messenger, II (1836), 727-30. This review was printed in Works, XIV, 73-89, as an essay, but the text used was that of the Broadway Journal (1845). Poe added a long introduction on reviewing as an art and made minor revisions of the Messenger version. The text used here is that of the Messenger review.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 184:]

41.  See Leo B. Levy, “Hawthorne and the Sublime,” American Literature, XXXVII (1966), 391-402, for Hawthorne's use of the conventions of the picturesque and the sublime. The topic has not been thoroughly investigated, but Mr. Levy's notes list other references. It is interesting in this context that Henry James applied the term chiaroscuro to Hawthorne's tales and connected it with the picturesque. A valuable study of the vogue of [page 185:] the picturesque in England is Elizabeth W. Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1925).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 185:]

42.  In Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger, 115.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 186:]

43.  Poe's letter and the charge which provoked it are both in Letters, I, 100-102.

44.  Works, IX, 243-65.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 187:]

45.  Love and Death in the American Novel (Meridian ed.; New York, 1960), xix.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 189:]

46.  Poe to White, April 30, 1835, in Letters, I, 57.

47.  Poe's use of contemporary theories of biological adaptation was pointed out by Leo Spitzer, “A Reinterpretation of The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” Comparative Literature, IV (1952), 351-63.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 191:]

48.  The brief notice of Bryant's Poems that appeared in the Messenger for January, 1835, and was reprinted in Works, VIII, 1-2, was written by Heath.