Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “Interlude with Billy Burton: The Artistic Conscience,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 209-248 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 209:]

IX  •  Interlude with Billy Burton

The Artistic Conscience

 

POE had reason to hope that things might be better in Philadelphia than in New York. His first tales had been printed in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, and nearly ten years earlier he had gone there to meet Robert Walsh, then editor of the American Quarterly Review. Back in 1829 Poe had taken his poem “Al Aaraaf” to William Wirt, a Virginia writer and orator. Wirt could not understand the poem and advised Poe to go to see Robert Walsh, one of the best-known critics in the country at that time. Poe had craftily dropped Walsh's name in a letter to Isaac Lea,(1) of Carey, Lea, and Carey, and apparently it had carried enough weight to make the publisher read Poe's manuscript, Al Aaraaf and Other Poems, although he had refused to publish it without a guarantee.

Perhaps in Poe's mind Philadelphia was a city that was not hostile to unbiased criticism. Robert Walsh had not written the milk-and-water critiques favored by White and Heath on the Messenger, and he had often aroused the ire of sensitive authors, including William Wirt, for his forthright reviews. In fact Walsh was something of an analytic critic, which was rare in America, and Poe had praised him in 1836 as one of the “finest writers,” “most accomplished scholars,” and “most accurate thinkers” in the country.(2) So to the city of Robert Walsh came Edgar Poe, but the American Quarterly Review had been defunct for a year, and its editor, in search of health, had taken up permanent residence in Paris. There were other journals, of course, but none of them immediately made an editorial chair vacant for the former hatchet man of the Messenger.

Even Philadelphia was not completely free of enemies. Willis Gaylord Clark, who had attacked Poe in his Philadelphia Gazette, [page 210:] was still alive, although he was to die in 1841, and it was his twin brother, Lewis Gaylord Clark of the New York Knickerbocker, who began harassing Poe in 1838. Whether Morris Mattson, the gentleman from Philadelphia whose Paul Ulric Poe had destroyed in a Messenger review, was able to cause difficulties, we do not know; but Poe's reputation had preceded him, and the Philadelphia magazines were cautious.

The first opportunity for publication came not from Philadelphia but from a new Baltimore journal edited by Nathan C. Brooks and Joseph Evans Snodgrass. Dr. Snodgrass thought well of Poe and gave him assistance in later years. It was in Snodgrass’ magazine, The American Museum, that Poe published “Ligeia” in September, 1838. Poe considered this his finest tale, and in it he concentrated all that he had developed as the principles of the short story. Like Bird's Sheppard Lee, the novel that Poe had reviewed in 1836, “Ligeia” was based upon metempsychosis; but, following his dictum in the review, Poe preserved the identity of his heroine through the change of bodies. Rowena's body as well as her spirit becomes that of Ligeia. Nor did Poe use the common device of explaining the supernatural event as a dream or hallucination. The theme of the tale is personal victory over death through the instrumentality of a powerful will, a will subservient to neither disease nor mortality. Chiaroscuro, the quality Poe had found so attractive in Peter Snook, is also a characteristic of his own tale. It has “that blending of light and shadow where nothing is too distinct, yet where the idea is fully conveyed.” Meaning is conveyed indirectly, either through symbols or through suggestive description. Thus the narrator of the tale, instead of naming the strange feeling he experiences when looking into Ligeia's eyes, uses analogies to convey his import, mentioning other objects that arouse the same feeling — a rapidly growing vine, a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water, the ocean, the falling of a meteor, glances of unusually aged people, and a changeable double star in the constellation of Lyra. Though Poe's analogies may not be rigidly confined to a single interpretation, they have one aspect in common, the preservation of identity through apparent physical [page 211:] change. The changeful ocean is still the same body of water; the chrysalis, becoming a butterfly, is still the same insect. Only the falling meteor does not seem to be appropriate to the theme, because it is destroyed in the process of becoming visible. Most of Poe's correspondences are apt, however; and, suggesting the ancient belief that the eyes are the window of the soul, Poe made the expression of Ligeia's eyes illuminate the theme of his story.

We have already seen that Poe considered the short story as a painting — an arrangement of details in space to convey an idea. The effects of this concept are illustrated by “Ligeia.” There is little temporal movement in the story action. Time passes, but events are summarized rather than given in detail. Only two events are brought into the foreground, the death of Ligeia and the subsequent death of Rowena and her resurrection as Ligeia. The tale is heavy with description focusing upon the appearance of Ligeia and the furnishings of the chamber to which the narrator brings his second wife, “the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion.” No other details are given of Rowena's appearance, since Poe needed only to distinguish her from Ligeia.

The home to which the narrator brings Rowena is a bedlam of decorative styles, particularly in the bridal chamber. Poe, whose interest in such matters was fairly keen, always prescribed absolute harmony or “keeping” in interior decoration, but in this bridal chamber “there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold on the memory.” In his detailed inventory of house and chamber Poe was suggesting two things: first, that the narrator did not want to remember, and second, that he was mad. In both “Usher” and “Ligeia” the qualities of the houses are identified with those of the owners, so the grotesquerie of the bridal chamber signifies a disordered mind. The ceiling is ornamented by medieval carvings. It is luridly lighted by a “Saracenic” censer that supplies a “continual succession of parti-colored fires.” The chamber itself is rude — early Gothic — whereas its furnishings are Byzantine. To complete the confusion of styles, in each corner of the room stands a gigantic Egyptian sarcophagus of black granite, suggesting the preservation of the body against the ruin of time. However, the [page 212:] most significant feature of the room is the draperies, which are “spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures.” These figures are arabesque from only one point of view. From other vantage points they are changeable, implying the theme already introduced in the expression of Ligeia's eyes. Upon entering the room, the visitor sees in the draperies only “simple monstrosities,” but upon closer examination he finds himself “surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk.”

The Gothic decor of this tale functions as more than an atmosphere in which something terrible happens. It suggests not only the madness of the narrator, but also medieval superstition, Egyptian mysteries, and esoteric learning devoted to the service of evil. These Gothic trappings are conventional, but they are not used simply to explain what happens. They suggest a Faustian theme of the evil associated with the human will in its aspiration to surpass the limits of mortality. The story is heavy with the sense of guilt and evil. The narrator loathes his new bride and feels that the hours they spend together are “unhallowed,” but even more unhallowed is the narrator's morbid brooding on his dead wife. The suggestions of black magic and mysterious ritual imply that the narrator would be quite willing to use such means to repossess Ligeia; and it is through his active psychic cooperation that Ligeia accomplishes her purpose. Rowena's illness is caused by the ghastly surroundings of the bridal chamber and the undisguised loathing of her husband.

Though the story is marred by Poe's overt use of magic (ruby-colored drops that fall into the glass of wine Rowena drinks) to bring about the possession of Rowena by Ligeia, it is a tale of psychological horror with the Gothic trappings used to give us an insight into the narrator's mind rather than a simple Gothic tale designed to create the effect of terror with ghosts and witchcraft. The moral implication is that Ligeia's idolatry of the narrator, her will to live, and the narrator's neurotic obsession with her are essentially evil passions, and what they accomplish is murder. It is [page 213:] appropriate that the story should end not with a cry of joy at the recovery of the dead wife but with a shriek, as the grave wrappings of Rowena fall away and the narrator sees the wild, black eyes of the ghastly revenant, Ligeia.(3) [page 214:]

Poe's art in what he called the “arabesque tale,” which may as well have been called the picturesque tale, since it represents a design in space rather than a dramatized action, reached maturity in “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”; but he had not yet managed to present his theory of short fiction fully in his reviews, probably because there was little opportunity to review short stories for the journals. He did have a chance to criticize the writings of Washington Irving for the Museum, but he declined on the grounds that he could not do the review on short notice since he had read nothing of Irving's since he was a boy.(4) This is not quite the truth, for he had reviewed The Crayon Miscellany and Astoria for the Messenger; but we may suppose that he excused himself because he would not have had time to do justice to a collected edition of a famous author, which was true.

Poe contributed two other short tales to the Museum, both of which were published in November; but his poverty must have been extreme, in spite of his claim to Nathan Brooks that he had “gotten nearly out of ... late embarrassments.”(5) He received only ten dollars for” Ligeia,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which had been published by Harper's in July, was not selling well. So during the winter of 1838-39 Poe did some hackwork, The Conchologist's First Book: or, A System of Testaceous Malacology Arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools. The textbook was a job of wholesale cribbing, agreed to by the publisher, with Poe listed as the editor simply because he was well known. When a charge of plagiarism was brought against Poe, he defended [page 215:] himself by saying that all textbooks were done that way. This slave labor perhaps kept him from starving during the winter, and by May of 1839 he was negotiating with William E. Burton, an actor turned publisher who had just acquired a magazine.(6)

2

Billy Burton, a transplanted Englishman, had been successful as an actor in England before he came to America, where he made his first stage appearance in Philadelphia in 1834, as Dr. Ollapod in The Poor Gentleman.(7) A popular comedian, he was also a good stage manager and leased theaters in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, and finally in New York, where in 1848 he leased Palmo's Opera House, a theater Poe attended several times in 1845. Burton renamed it Burton's Theater, and under his management it became one of the most successful theaters in America. Although the theater was Burton's profession, he tried his hand at journalism, for pleasure and profit. In 1837 he founded the Gentleman's Magazine, which was designed to appeal to men-about-town. It focused upon sports, art, literature, and the theater. Poe was to write for it an article entitled “A Chapter on Field Sports and Manly Pastimes.” Other articles were written by Burton himself, and he also prepared a miscellaneous column “consisting of unconnected paragraphs on morals, wines, conversation, manners, food.”(8)

It would have been easy to predict that Poe, who was ambitious to found a superior literary journal, would be contemptuous of the Gentleman's Magazine and its editor. Poe was dedicated to journalism as a literary profession, whereas for Burton it was an avocation. [page 216:] Still Billy Burton was not as vulgar as Poe sought to make him out a year or so later.(9) At the time of his death in 1860, Burton's personal library was one of the largest in New York, and he had a fine collection of paintings in his home. In addition to his magazine writings and two plays, he published two collections of humor, one in 1848 and one in 1857.(10) Lacking the intense concern with literature that Poe demanded, however, Burton would inevitably clash with his assistant editor, who felt a continuous frustration at being unable to publish in the Gentleman's Magazine the kind of articles he wished to write.(11)

Poe met Burton early in 1839 and solicited a position on the staff of the magazine. Poe's proposal was rejected, but on May 11 Burton made a counterproposal, offering Poe ten dollars a week for the remainder of the year and stating that Poe's own proposition would be in effect for 1840 if mutual satisfaction were achieved. Two hours a day, Burton estimated, would be sufficient for Poe's editorial duties, plus any time he wished to spend on his own writing. It was Burton's presumption that Poe would not use his surplus time working for any of Burton's competitors. Poe did not accept this offer immediately but made another proposal which Burton answered on May 30. Unfortunately Poe's letter to Burton has been lost,(12) but Burton's reply reveals that Poe's temperament and his severe reviews were already known to the editor and that friction between the two began before Poe was actually employed. Burton's letter must be quoted in full because it shows the difficulties that Poe faced in accommodating himself to journalistic necessities.

From this letter it appears that Poe's reputation for “uncalled for severity” had indeed preceded him to Philadelphia. Burton was acute enough or kind enough to attribute the tone of Poe's letter to a state of depression and was willing to overlook Poe's imputations of critical expediency. It is evident that in the lost letter Poe was bitterly resentful of the attacks against him and that he thought that Burton himself was guilty of “puffing” his friends because he [page 218:] had not liked Poe's review of Rufus Dawes. Although a brief review of Dawes's Nix's Mate was published in the December issue of the Gentleman's Magazine, it could not have been the one referred to in Burton's letter, because by any standard it was neither severe nor “word-catching.” Probably it was not written by Poe.

The first review that Poe did for Burton appeared in the June, 1839, issue of the Gentleman's Magazine.(14) It was of Captain Marryat's The Phantom Ship, an adventure story evidently intended for young readers. Poe had no sympathy for limited aims, however, and condemned the novel without reservation. It displayed “a miserable mental inanity, a positive baldness of thought, an utter absence of all lofty imagination, an inconsequence of narration, and a feeble childishness of manner which would be unpardonable in any school boy of decent pretensions.” The style was flat and exhibited a “deficiency of education.”

Obviously Burton, as he had claimed, was not unduly disturbed by severity, or this review would not have been printed. As a matter of fact, some of the reviews in the Gentleman's Magazine, even before Poe was connected with it, were as abusive as anything Poe ever did. In the April number a critique of a book by Samuel F. Glenn, Criticism: Its Use and Abuse, outdid even Poe's review of Norman Leslie for sheer scurrility of attack. Burton's own review of The Adventures of Robin Day, by Robert Montgomery Bird, was a wholesale condemnation of the book, even though Bird was a Philadelphia physician and a personal friend.

Thus Burton was not guilty of “puffing” his friends, and he had no objection to severity in a review when the accepted general standards were applied. Poe, however, was prone to make detailed analyses of figures of speech and grammatical constructions, or he might devote an entire page to comment on a florid dedication or a misleading title. It was this concentration on minor details that was responsible for Burton's opinion that Poe's reviews were “word-catching.” [page 219:]

It is clear that Poe's method, rather than his severity, was responsible for Burton's objections. In turn, it appears that Poe's criticism of the reviews in the Gentleman's Magazine — Burton's letter implies such criticism — would have been that they were mere “puffs,” or uncritical praise of the publisher's friends. Poe could have criticized them for other reasons. They were impressionistic, padded with quotations and abstracts, and they levied praise or blame without analysis. Furthermore, Burton treated with condescension “the metaphysical subtleties and abstruse niceties of the German schools,” and admired the “chaste and classical” style in poetry. He even advocated a “return to those purer models in the most elegant and difficult of the fine arts,” while he castigated “that school whose characteristic is a morbid and turbulent excitement,”(15) the romantic “school” that Poe liked.

Burton's taste was that of Heath and White. Once more Poe had to submit to the supervision of a publisher who abjured the extremes of romantic expression but who had acquired enough of the romantic attitude toward criticism to dislike close analysis. Burton, like the young Poe in 1831, thought that analysis was “deliberately pulling to pieces a beautiful moss rose in order to point out its botanical characteristics.”(16) Yet in spite of the mutual misgivings of publisher and prospective employee, the July, 1839, number of the Gentleman's Magazine listed the name of Edgar Poe as editor, and he wrote all of the reviews for that issue.

As he admitted to Philip Pendleton Cooke, however, most of these reviews were merely paragraphs.(17) Only one, of Fenimore [page 220:] Cooper's History of the Navy, requires comment. Poe had reviewed Cooper somewhat favorably in 1836(18) and had applauded the New Yorker's criticism of the “bull-headed and prejudiced” American public, but in the Gentleman's Magazine review he echoed the hostility of the press toward the irritable novelist, saying that even Cooper's friends were “ashamed of the universality of his cynicism.” In addition, Poe claimed, “a flashy succession of ill-conceived and miserably executed literary productions, each more silly than its predecessor, and wherein the only thing noticeable was the peevishness of the writer, the only amusing thing his self-conceit — had taught the public to suspect even a radical taint in the intellect, an absolute irreparable mental leprosy, rendering it a question whether he ever would or could again accomplish anything which should be worthy of the attention of people not positively rabid.”(19)

Whether Poe's attitude had been changed by the publication in 1838 of Cooper's Homeward Bound and Home as Found, two novels of social criticism, or whether he was simply copying Burton's harsh line with Cooper, is not certain. In January, Burton had reviewed Home as Found in savage terms: “Considered as a novel it is flat, stale, and miserably dull; as a literary composition it is puerile and commonplace; as a national disquisition it is marked with undeniable stains of prejudice and ill-temper.”(20) Burton went on to suggest, as Poe did, that Cooper might be mentally ill.

Ordinarily Poe did not feel bound by the editorial policy of the magazine on which he worked. He certainly had not with the Messenger. Why in this case he should have echoed Burton is difficult to understand. If Cooper's opinions about America were the reason for Poe's attack, it is not apparent in the review. The condescending moral tone does not even sound like Poe, and without his letter to Cooke claiming all of the reviews of the July issue we [page 221:] would have grounds for attributing the review to someone else. Perhaps it was only part of the “twaddle” he described in his letter to Cooke as characterizing the reviews of the Gentleman's Magazine, or perhaps he was only trying to win the good graces of Burton.

Poe also wrote all of the criticism for the August number, but it was not much more impressive than that for July. He did manage a fairly long review of Tortesa, the Usurer, a play by Nathaniel Parker Willis.(21) In August of 1836 Poe had handled Willis’ Inklings of Adventure severely in the Messenger, but he was able to find certain merits in the play: “These merits are naturalness, truthfulness, and appropriateness, upon all occasions, of sentiment and language; a manly vigour and breadth in the conception of character; and a fine ideal elevation or exaggeration throughout — a matter forgotten or avoided by those who, with true Flemish perception of truth, wish to copy her peculiarities in disarray. Mr. Willis has not lost sight of the important consideration that the perfection of dramatic, as of plastic skill, is found not in the imitation of Nature, but in the artistical adjustment and amplification of her features.”

In this, Poe's first review of the drama, there is nothing distinctive. The merits he praised would have been recognized by the critics of the eighteenth century, and, in contrast to the opinion he was to express in 1845, he saw the drama as an imitative art only in its imitation of the ideal. The truth of the drama did not consist in copying nature's peculiarities but in the elevation of character, event, and language in the direction of what we may presume to be the rational ideal, at the same time preserving the probabilities. The Flemish painting which he had praised in his Messenger reviews in reference to the short tale he now disparaged; and his standards would have appeared familiar to Joseph Addison or to Dr. Johnson.

Poe's conception of the plot of drama was Aristotelian, and he found Willis’ play defective because of incidents that were not connected with the main action: [page 222:]

All in all, Poe's criticism of Willis’ play was perfectly conventional. He applied principles that he could have learned from Dr. Johnson, from Aristotle, or from Hugh Blair's redaction of Aristotle in number forty-five of his famous Lectures. That he had as yet developed nothing original in dramatic criticism is scarcely surprising. Critics in America had paid little attention to the drama, and when they did they failed to analyze form and technique.(22) In 1836 Poe had recognized the need in America for dramatic criticism and had stated that it should be rescued “from the hands of illiterate mountebanks” and placed “in the hands of gentlemen and scholars,”(23) but heretofore he had had no opportunity to show what a gentleman and a scholar could do. Apparently a gentleman and a scholar would simply apply the principles he had derived from classical and neoclassical sources. It was admitted by most critics that American drama was inferior and derivative. Willis’ play, as Poe pointed out, borrowed liberally from Romeo and Juliet and The Winter's Tale, but he still considered it the best American play in spite of all its blemishes. Considering the competition, this was not an extravagant claim.

3

Although Poe deprecated his own reviews in the July and August numbers of the Gentleman's Magazine, he came up with something [page 223:] better in September. All of the reviews except the first three are his. Most of them were short notices of ten or fifteen lines, but he was granted enough space for one review of considerable length (24) of a work that he admired. This was the prose romance Undine, by Baron De La Motte Fouque, a book James E. Heath would have called a mere fairy tale.

In the “Letter to Mr. —— ——” Poe had distinguished the romance from the poem by saying that the former aimed at a definite pleasure instead of the indefinite pleasure of poetry, but the review of Undine was the first opportunity he had had to review a pure romance instead of the mixed genre, the historical romance, which combined fiction and fact. Accordingly, if he still retained the early distinction, it would be necessary for him to explain the definite sensations which could be derived from this prose romance, while at the same time he would have to account for its effect upon the imagination, wherein it would resemble poetry. The criteria for the novel or the realistic Dickensian tale, which he had used previously, would not apply to Undine, and he was faced with the proposition of having to define its import both as prose and as poetry. As we shall see, this task involved him in obscurities and contradictions, but his general purpose may be discerned.

Poe revealed in the opening sentence of his review that he was engaging in literary polemics instead of simply analyzing Undine as a work of fiction: (25) “The republication of such a work ... in the [page 224:] very teeth of our anti-romantic national character, is an experiment well adapted to excite interest. ...” It was the duty of lovers of literature, Poe went on, to speak out against the prejudices in America which had kept the romance from receiving full appreciation. Aware that Undine had an excellent “foreign reputation,”(26) Poe insisted that the tale should be defended against the “evil genius of mere matter-of-fact” that haunted America. Americans were prone to ask questions about the utility of literature, irrelevant queries as far as Poe was concerned; therefore it was his duty to impress “upon the public mind ... the exalted and extraordinary character” of this romance.

Poe knew quite well the strength of the opposition.(27) Romance dealt with the passions; it created admiration for outlaws and pirates and the manners of the “superstitious” ages. In Graham's Magazine, as late as 1851, one writer attacked the “Satanic and sensual school of romance” as being “a compound mass of passionate nonsense, immorality, and irreligion passing under the nickname of popular literature.” Knowing that American critics were likely to claim that romance was immoral, Poe based his strategy of defense accordingly. He set out to prove that this particular romance had a utilitarian moral value. In its allegorical meaning, Poe asserted, Undine was a sort of treatise on conjugal relations. From internal evidence he deduced that the author had suffered greatly from a bad marriage, from the “interference of relations,” and from public quarrels with his wife. Thus in its definite aspect, or its prose import, the fairy tale became a dramatization of the causes of marital unhappiness!

Having appeased the hunt-the-moral critics by asserting that Undine [page 225:] did have moral utility, Poe turned the tables on the opposition by claiming that this, the “allegorical” meaning, was the only radical defect of the romance. If it were to succeed as high art — like poetry — it should not be allegorical, for allegory was the “most indefensible species of writing.” The “under-current of meaning” in this case did not “appertain to the higher regions of ideality.” Poe then concluded his review by describing the poetic or imaginative aspect of the tale to demonstrate that the pictorialization of moral beauty subserved a purpose infinitely higher than that of mere domestic advice:

Thus to Poe whatever was spiritual, whatever exalted the soul, was morally formative by its beauty, even though it violated the local ground rules of moral behavior. Such a concept, of course, was patently un-American, though it was as readily derivable from the Scottish Platonistic aesthetic as was the more characteristically American requirement of sententious moral statement or moral action that could be emulated. How, Poe was asking his audience, can a romance such as Undine be condemned when it enacts the highest moral ideals — the development of a soul through the power of love, fidelity even when it was not deserved, grief, and finally sincere repentance? This romance, then, depicted the sublimest moral concepts under the aspect of beauty; it failed only when its “allegorical” import lowered it into the category of the patently didactic.

Poe's disparagement of the allegory, distinctive in this review, [page 226:] needs to be noted. The Reverend Hugh Blair had had no objection to such a morally useful form, but he had proclaimed that the meaning should not “be too dark.” The moral, Blair had said, was the “unfigured sense or meaning,” although the form was only a “continued Metaphor.” However simple in form, an allegory was not easy to compose, for “the proper mixture of light and shade, ... the exact adjustment of all the figurative circumstances with the literal sense, so as neither to lay the meaning too bare and open, nor to cover and wrap it up too much, has ever been found an affair of great nicety; and there are few species of composition in which it is more difficult to write so as to please and command attention, than in Allegories.”

It is easy to see why romantic critics, including Poe, objected to the form. The contrived point-by-point equivalence between the objects, characters, and events of the fable and the system of ideas they were intended to illustrate left little room for suggestiveness. If the meaning were left “too dark,” the composition failed in purpose; on the other hand, if the meaning were too obvious, it was an unimaginative exposition of ideas inhibited by the metaphorical form. Poe reserved his discussion of the problem of meaning in a poem for a later review, and even then he was unable to solve it satisfactorily. As a romantic poet he could not resort to Blair's requirement of perspicuity as a test for figurative language; and he had learned from Coleridge and Schlegel that the imagination of a poet was somehow revealed by the import of his poems. Poe had to answer the question, How can imaginative import be properly rendered? Figures of speech had to obey the rules; “unfigured meaning” was mere prose. The meaning of a poem, like the feelings it inspired, must be indefinite, yet clear enough to be understood. Poe attempted to answer this question four months later, but in the interim other books raised other questions, and the discussion of meaning had to be delayed until an appropriate occasion arose.

4

The criticism in the October issue of the journal was less interesting than that in September. The notices were brief, and, with [page 227:] one exception, the books reviewed were nonliterary. Poe did take an opportunity to reprove Longfellow for his prose romance Hyperion, not because it was a romance but because it was a careless performance. It was a sad fact, Poe admitted, that men of talent were sometimes irresponsible; actually they tended to be “indolent,” but this temperamental bent did not relieve them of their duty to the public and to their art:

Poe was beginning to assume a more responsible attitude as a literary critic. When he first joined the Messenger he could glibly defend his horror stories by claiming that people would read them and that they would make the magazine successful. And he could defend his satirical reviews by citing the example of Blackwood's. Now, however, he assumed that it was the duty of the critic to educate the public taste and to refuse to tolerate mediocrity or self-serving. Therefore he claimed that works like Hyperion were the “grief of all true criticism,” for they undermined the popular “faith in Art,” which needed the support of all men of letters. Of equal interest is Poe's argument that “genius” must submit to the necessity of “unremitting toil and patient elaboration.” Though he was to object to the kind of criticism that validated a work of art by the sustained effort it manifested, as if the value could be estimated by the pound, he was consistent in his concept of the duty of the artist.

Coleridge had qualified the concept of purely inspirational composition with his description of the secondary imagination, which coexisted with the conscious will and the judgment; but others [page 228:] considered genius in the light of Shelley's skylark, who sang in “profuse strains of unpremeditated art.” Poe had seen examples enough of unpremeditated art submitted to the Messenger, and perhaps for this reason he concluded that no artist, however talented, could produce a work of art without “unremitting toil and patient elaboration.” A year later he was to explain that a work of genius would appear to have been composed without effort, but he was fairly consistent in demanding that innate ability be controlled by the artistic conscience. In the South of Poe's youth some essayists, like William Wirt and Francis Walker Gilmer, had considered the development of compositional skills as a public duty, invoking the Ciceronian ideal of character plus art; but these essayists were concerned with oratory. It remained for Poe to transfer the ideal to literary composition.(29) It was the ethical duty of the writer, he maintained, to pledge himself to the highest standards and to refuse to betray his public trust by “scattering ... rich thought” in a formless book.

Those writers who committed themselves to the idea that message was all — that the poem would find its own shape to express the intuitive insight of the poet — were less likely to recognize the obligation to maintain artistic standards. To Emerson, for all of his ethical concern, artistic craft was not a duty because the form was given, not made. Whitman, of course, exploited this attitude to the limit. He pretended to be one of the “roughs,” an uneducated bard uttering his “joyous leaves” as naturally as a tree; and only the scholarship of later years has revealed that Whitman projected a spurious image. In contrast to the romantic emphasis on inspiration, Poe's attitude was distinctly Horatian. A poem or a novel was a made thing, not simply something given. Burton's notion that the faults of genius must be forgiven earned Poe's contempt.

Correlated with the concept of natural genius in romantic criticism was the value of originality. Originality was one of the tests of inspiration. What was inspired could not have been imitated from someone else, so a high premium was placed upon originality as the [page 229:] hallmark of genius. Poe, too, saw value in originality but, as one might expect from his demand that a genius observe high artistic standards, his definition of originality placed the burden upon the artist's knowledge, skill, and ethical standards rather than upon his inspiration. Eventually Poe was to claim that true originality was not a matter of “impulse or inspiration” as was commonly supposed. Instead, it was “carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine.”(30) This remark, buried in a discussion of journalistic practices, is a key to the attitude Poe frequently displayed in his reviews. Since originality was not necessarily an innate quality of the mind, since it could be achieved by patient skill, the artist who tamely imitated someone else was guilty of self-indulgence or laziness and shirked “the stern demands of high art.” This, to Poe, was unforgivable and merited the reproof of the critic.

In November, Poe brought up this failure of duty in a review of a novel by William Gilmore Simms.(31). In 1836 he had reviewed Simms's The Partisan quite unfairly. Now he was more nearly prepared to acknowledge Simms's achievement. His first novel, Martin Faber, deserved a permanent success, Poe thought. However, the novel at hand, The Damsel of Darien, suffered from imitativeness. Every sentence reminded Poe of something he had read before. The chapter headings were “Bulwerized,” and the characters were reminiscent of Scott. Although the defects of the novel “were few and seldom radical,” Poe could not bring himself to praise an author who let other authors supply his ideas. Poe had his own views of how to achieve originality in characterization, and he had expressed them in his review of George Balcombe two years earlier. A writer of fiction could create original characters by the presentation of “qualities known in real life but never before depicted,” but this was very nearly impossible. More practicable would be the presentation of hypothetical qualities which were “so skilfully adapted [page 230:] to the circumstances which surround them, that our sense of fitness is not offended. ...” Thus, in Poe's opinion, a novelist could develop original characters, and it was his duty to do so.

The remainder of Poe's review is conventional. He found Simms guilty of grossness of language and applied the rules of rhetoric accordingly. Like Blair, Poe objected to images “which repel and disgust,” such as, “ ‘The Sabueso has no keener scent for his victim, and loves not better to snuff up the thick blood with his nostrils,’ ”or, “ ‘I will advance to the short banyan that stands within the path, and my dagger shall pick his teeth, ere he gets round it.’ ”

Simms was also guilty of bad taste in a more strictly literary sense. Poe quoted a passage in which the novelist professed to find something “true and poetical” in lips painted upon partly opened oysters, as if the pearls inside were teeth. “Now we can have no doubt in the world that the artist was a clever fellow in his way,” Poe wrote, “but it is really difficult to conceive what kind of poetical beauty that can be which Mr. Simms is so happy as to discover in the countenance of a gaping oyster.” On this jocular note Simms was disposed of again, and he could hardly have derived much more satisfaction from this review than he had from Poe's previous notice of The Partisan.

5

In spite of the fact that the Gentleman's Magazine was by no means a literary journal, Poe managed to introduce some of his theories into his reviews. Each issue during the fall and winter of 1839 contained at least one fairly lengthy review in addition to the customary short notices. In December, among a dozen or so brief reviews, was an analysis of the song poem as genre,(32) occasioned by George P. Morris’ National Melodies of America. Morris, who is remembered today, if at all, only as the author of the sentimental appeal “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” was in Poe's opinion America's best writer of songs. This meant that he ranked high as a poet. [page 231:]

Yet in Poe's review Morris’ poems were scarcely mentioned. Poe used the review to explore the relatedness of music and poetry, a topic on which he had strong opinions. He had not really had an occasion to go into the matter since his republication of the “Letter to Mr. —— ——” in the Southern Literary Messenger, and now he made the most of his opportunity.

Songs, Poe asserted, should be examined by different criteria from those used for ordinary poetry. The conceits that Dr. Johnson had found objectionable in poetry and that were still condemned by most critics, including Poe, were at home in the song: “These views properly understood, it will be seen how baseless are the ordinary objections to songs proper, on the score of ‘conceit’ (to use Johnson's word), or of hyperbole, or on various other grounds tenable enough in respect to poetry not designed for music.” The emotional pleasure derived from music, Poe claimed, was “nearly in the ratio of its indefinitiveness.” This much he had said in 1831, but now he explained more fully: “Give to music any undue decision — imbue it with any very determinate tone — and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal, and, I sincerely believe, of its intrinsic and essential character.” Again we are confronted with a problem of jargon. In the “Letter to Mr. —— —— “ Poe had denied ideas to music; here he claimed that the ideal was characteristic of music. We must remember, before we can make sense of his statement, that he had acquired the idiom of phrenology, and that the “ideal” was now a sentiment, or an idea of emotion, properly expressed even by instrumental music. That he was thinking of instrumental music is indicated by his illustration, “The Battle of Prague,” in which imitations of battle noises were provided. Such imitation, Poe argued, deprived music of its true character and eliminated its proper effect. Music had no reference to objects and events in the external world.(33)

Music was, or should be, purely expressive. Consequently a song, even though in words, would be as close as language could come to [page 232:] the nonreferential quality of music. A songwriter would be relieved of the rhetorical requirements of perspicuity and consistency in his figures because the feeling was all, and if he chose to compare his breaking heart with the breaking dawn he should be permitted to do so, because he felt that way. Thus the conceit which certain critics had objected to by the rules, “Her heart and morning broke together / In the storm ... ,” was “merely in keeping with the essential spirit of the song proper.”

This review enables us to understand how strictly Poe made his discriminations in terms of genre. Although he declared many times that the same general principles applied to all the arts, these principles had to do with the artist's purpose and with the psychology of effect; they did not prescribe all details of execution, which differed with each form. That a lyric poem was not to be confined by the rules was a commonplace of neoclassical criticism — except that Dr. Johnson had opposed this kind of license in one of the numbers of The Rambler.(34) Poe, we see, accepted the old commonplace in regard to the song, but he validated it by the new expressivist aesthetic that was emphasized by the German romantic critics far more than by the British. Yet in criticizing lyric poems other than songs, Poe objected to conceits and hyperbolic expression just as strenuously as Dr. Johnson or Hugh Blair. In his review of The Book of Gems he had deplored the wit of the metaphysical poets, claiming that Donne and Cowley had lacked art; but now, seemingly reversing his opinion, he commended the “fervid, hearty, free-spoken songs of Cowley and Donne.” This is only an apparent reversal, however, for a genuine song, such as Donne's “Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go,” would fit Poe's criteria, as would some of Cowley's imitations of Anacreon.

That Poe mitigated the rigor of his rules in criticizing the song does not imply that he deprecated the genre. On the contrary he [page 233:] wrote, perhaps unconsciously echoing Addison,(35) that he “would much rather have written the best song of a nation than its noblest epic.” This is not saying too much, for he disliked epics, and, as a subsequent explanation reveals, he did not consider the song as representing the highest poetic art, whatever its evocative capacity.

When verse is “most strictly married to music,” Poe went on to say, it was characterized by abandonnement (a term he was to use pejoratively in reference to Shelley's habits of composition). In other words, the lyricist was directed by emotion instead of by conscious artistry. Ordinarily such a practice would have to be condemned, but since the lyricist had no object but the expression of feeling, his figures should be “independent of merely ordinary proprieties” and should be considered chiefly for the evocative capacity of “sweet sound.” Music, whether instrumental or vocal, evoked sentiments beyond the “reach of analysis,” and to analyze these sentiments, if it were possible, would be to destroy their effect, which was to bewilder and enthrall. If Morris’ songs were judged as poems, Poe concluded, there would be two or three which might be considered superior to the two songs he had selected for illustration, but it was for these latter that Morris was “immortal.”

The question might be asked, if the answer is not already too obvious, just how did Poe distinguish the song from the ordinary lyric poem? The song is vocal music, usually accompanied by instrumental music. Old English ballads and carols, the verse of Anacreon, Homer, Aeschylus, the French lyricist Béranger, Cunningham, Harrington, Carew, and especially the Irish “Anacreon,”(36) Thomas Moore, exhibited the essence of song. In America there was only George P. Morris! Poe's list might seem a little puzzling in its inclusion of Homer if we did not remember that Poe, like his predecessors, cherished an image of the blind bard of Nature, chanting his poems to the accompaniment of a lyre; and in selecting [page 234:] Aeschylus he obviously had in mind the singing of the Greek chorus. Of the limitations that the “marriage” of verse to music places on the poet, Poe said nothing, nor did he attempt to account for the fact that songs are frequently inferior on grounds other than the “wild license” he considered characteristic of the genre; but, as always, we must take into consideration his medium. He had expended his space to make one point, that the song was worthy of esteem. He had room for no further discussion.

6

The beginning of the new year, 1840, found Poe restless and irritable, but occasionally he wrote a good review. His review of Alciphron,(37) a verse romance by Thomas Moore, appeared in the January number and must be considered the most important criticism that he wrote for Burton's magazine. His method of using a critique as a vehicle for theory is well illustrated by this review, in which he renewed his discussion of the psychology of creativity which he had initiated in his earlier review of Drake and Halleek. He was now prepared to dispute Coleridge's definition of the imagination, which he had cited in a footnote to the Drake-Halleck critique.

Whether Poe failed to comprehend Coleridge's extended definition or whether he simply reduced it in order to set up a straw man for easy destruction is impossible to say. From what we have seen of his work, he was capable of either. Considering his admiration for Coleridge, however, it is more likely that he made a superficial reading and fixed upon Coleridge's explanation of the primary imagination (“the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and ... a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”) as affirming the power of the human being to create an image of elements alien to human experience. In this respect, of course, Poe was right. All imaginary images are made up of the elements of experience, however distorted these elements may be. Yet to refute Coleridge, he had to misinterpret him. Coleridge never claimed that the imagination created substantially. Instead it was “that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the sense by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.”(38)

It is possible, of course, that Poe had never seen this passage from The Statesman's Manual (1816), which is much less obscure than the definition from the Biographia Literaria which Poe refuted; but it is still necessary to examine Poe's own attempts to define the imagination for the light these attempts shed on his criticism. Coleridge saw nature as process; for him, the creative activity that is art imitates the creative activity that is nature.(39) Poe, on [page 236:] the other hand, still saw nature as an aggregation of fixed elements which are known to man only through his senses. He was attempting to refute Coleridge on eighteenth-century premises.

In the eighteenth century the imagination had often been equated with invention, and in this sense demons, witches, chimeras — creatures that did not exist — were regarded as evidences of the imagination. Thus this power, as Addison affirmed in Spectator No. 419, could make “new worlds of its own.” Joseph Warton, writing of Shakespeare, had praised his creative imagination in the depiction of such a monster as Caliban. It was undoubtedly this idea of creativity which Poe thought he had found in Coleridge and which he undertook to refute on the basis of Lockean psychology. Since, according to Locke, all ideas originated in experience, the mind could contain nothing outside of experience. A creature like Caliban would be a combination of empirical elements. Bielfeld, whom Poe quoted, was in the Lockean tradition, but Poe's example of the griffin, like the more familiar one of the chimera, goes back to Hobbes. It was customary in the eighteenth century to distinguish the imagination from the memory, for the memory was bound to a certain extent to the order of perception, whereas the imagination could transpose, recombine, or totally re-order prior sensations by making obscure associative linkages. But so could the fancy, and in many eighteenth-century discussions of the power the terms were interchangeable. According to Gordon McKenzie, James Beattie's definition of the imagination was typical: “In the language of modern philosophy, the word ‘imagination’ seems to denote: first, the power of apprehending or conceiving ideas, simply as they are in themselves without any view to their reality; and secondly, the power of combining into new forms or assemblages, those thoughts, ideas, or notions, which we have derived from experience or from information.”(40) [page 237:]

Thus in the old view the imagination, like the fancy, simply combined the elements of experience or information. Poe was not the only romantic writer who clung to Locke's psychology. Even Wordsworth, qualifying Coleridge's definition, had said in his Preface to the 1815 edition of his poems that “to aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy,” and he then went on to make his personal distinction between the two as did Poe.

Poe did think that there was a difference between the two faculties, even though he was unable to accept either Coleridge's distinction or the more familiar one — that the imagination is more “loftily employed” than the fancy. In Poe's opinion the fancy would remain the fancy no matter how elevated the theme with which it engaged. To illustrate, he reverted to The Culprit Fay, the allegedly imaginative poem of Joseph Rodman Drake, and quoted pertinent passages from his review of 1836. He then went on to make his own distinction, which is not so different from that of Coleridge as his refutation would lead us to believe.

Though Poe's use of the term “mystic” may be misleading, it is obvious that he considered the presence of suggestive or symbolic meaning as the distinction between an imaginative and a fanciful poem, a conclusion not essentially different from Coleridge's. Poe had intimated as much in his review of Drake and Halleck, but he had confused the issue by declaring in his review of Undine that an “under-current of meaning” in a romance was to be deplored — it was too much like allegory. Does this mean that symbolic meaning was appropriate for a poem but not for a prose romance? Apparently not, for Poe continued, “If we carefully examine those poems, or portions of poems, or those prose romances, which mankind have been accustomed to designate as imaginative ... , it will be seen that all so designated are remarkable for the suggestive character which we have discussed. They are strongly mystic, in the proper sense of the word.” Then he gave the list of imaginative works he had previously cited in the review of Drake and Halleck [page 239:] and added to it the recently reviewed Undine, classifying it with Shelley's “Sensitive Plant” as an example of the purely ideal.

At this point one is tempted to abandon Poe's criticism and leave him with the obscurantists, where Yvor Winters located him.(42) In one review he deprecated an “under-current of meaning” as being too like allegory, and only four months later, using the same phrase, he demanded it. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, however, we may explore to see whether he was describing the same phenomenon in the different reviews. The fault may lie in Poe's idiom instead of in his thought.

In the review of Alciphron Poe attempted to explain his terminology: “With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august and soul-exalting echo. In every glimpse of beauty presented, we catch, through long and wild vistas, dim bewildering visions of a far more ethereal beauty beyond. But not so in poems which the world has always persisted in terming fanciful. Here the upper current is often exceedingly brilliant and beautiful; but then men feel that this upper current is all. No Naiad voice addresses them from below.”

In the review of Undine Poe had used the phrase “under-current of meaning” in reference to the domestic situation of an unfaithful husband and interfering relatives. This was, in his interpretation, the “unfigured sense” or moral of the romance and as such was to be deprecated — it had no business in an imaginative work. In the review of Alciphron, however, his “under-current” must be translated as symbolic rather than allegorical import, since it is not limited to a specific idea or a particular situation. Poe's rhapsodical language in the quotation above intimates some kind of Platonic beauty beyond appearances that could be communicated by symbolic suggestion; and since such suggestion could be achieved only by the ability to imagine the beauty beyond, its presence denoted imaginative power in the poet. Thus, in refuting Coleridge, Poe actually made his closest approach to interpreting the imagination as Coleridge had defined it — as a symbol-making power. The only [page 240:] difference is this: Coleridge saw the imagination at work in symbolizing truth; Poe recognized its activity in symbolizing a beauty beyond appearances. A small difference, if truth and beauty were one, but Poe would not have it so. Truth, to Poe, meant logical deduction, useful information, or accurate representation; or it meant didactic precepts such as those that could have been derived from reading Undine as an allegory. Reading it as a poem, however, one obtained suggestions of moral beauty more “divine” and “soul-exalting” than any examples of rectitude ever observed in the real world. This was the beauty beyond; this was the ideal.

Poe, then, had not reversed his position; he had simply used a phrase carelessly to signify one thing in one review and something different in another, a signal fault in a critic but one which can be explained in Poe's case. Like Coleridge, Poe had to devise a vocabulary to describe the values he sought in a poem.(43) There was no idiom which adequately described symbolic value, and Coleridge's coinages were incomprehensible to Poe's public and perhaps to Poe himself. Poe showed a certain amount of daring in appropriating the term “mystic” (allegedly from German criticism), for this term was used pejoratively by American critics and occasionally by Poe to mean the obscure and the unintelligible. Struggling to rescue the word from its unfortunate associations, he attributed the [page 241:] usage to Schlegel and then proceeded to define it as an “undercurrent of meaning,” perhaps forgetting for the moment that he had used the phrase for a different kind of meaning in a previous review.

It is easy enough to determine what Poe considered to be an imaginative “under-current of meaning” by examining the passages he quoted from Moore's poem. The sense of these passages is either commonplace or hackneyed. Moore intimated 1) that guardian angels communicate with the soul, 2) that at the end of the world Time (personified) will take his last look from the pyramids of Egypt, and 3) that man, redeemed, is immortal. Actually these ideas are presented with minimal suggestiveness. Only one of the quoted passages lends itself to symbolic interpretation:

Poe did not explain what meaning he found in these lines, but one may presume that since the pyramids are an apt symbol of human time, having endured for ages, their shadows invading the eternal hills suggest the fall of night, or the end of time. Poe, like his romantic peers, found full associative value in the play of light and shade.

If we were to credit Poe with an anticipation, in theory at least, of richly meaningful symbolic verse, we would be in error. His examples of imagination from Alciphron contain no treasures of symbolic implication but merely conventional poetic associations; yet the affective content was enough for Poe and validated certain portions of the poem as imaginative. “In truth, the exceeding beauty of ‘Alciphron’ has bewildered and detained us. We could not point out a poem in any language which, as a whole, greatly excels it. ... While Moore does not reach, except in rare snatches, the height of the loftiest qualities of some whom we have named, yet he has written finer poems than any, of equal length, of the greatest of his rivals.” Yet, in spite of these superlatives, Poe's general [page 242:] opinion of Moore is defensible. “A vivid fancy, an epigrammatic spirit, a fine taste, vivacity, dexterity, and a musical ear have made him very easily what he is, the most popular poet now living — if not the most popular that ever lived — and, perhaps, a slight modification at birth of that which phrenologists have agreed to term temperament, might have made him the truest and noblest votary of the muse of any age or clime. As it is, we have only casual glimpses of that mens divinior which is assuredly enshrined within him.”(44) Even today few would object to a description of Moore as a popular poet who now and then achieved a felicity of expression which suggested abilities that were never developed, and really this is about all that Poe was saying. Imagination could be estimated only by expression, and occasionally Moore produced lines that compared favorably with those of greater poets.

One other point in the review of Alciphron requires discussion. In his criticism of Bryant in 1837, Poe had deprecated figures of speech that adduced “mere resemblance” between the objects compared and had praised the metaphorical identification of one object or quality with another. In the review of Moore he continued his argument:

Since Poe had claimed that the imagination, like the fancy, only combined the elements of experience, it is hard to see why he [page 243:] claimed that all similes were merely fanciful. If we understand that the meaning he attributed to the imagination was a kind of generalized symbolic import, however, his denigration of figures of speech is understandable. A figure of speech, insofar as it specifies resemblance between objects, belongs to the real world, the phenomenal world that can be perceived by the senses. A novel figure of speech, to Poe, was merely an effort of the wit to put together combinations that had not been put together before — say by comparing an inconstant lover to an abacus. Such a novelty “must fail in essential particulars” because it would be a logical absurdity. Whatever was put together by intellectual effort had to be examined logically. If it did not make sense, then by the rhetorical rules it would have to be declared faulty. The only escape from this dilemma was to refrain from using sense metaphors altogether and instead to use evocative language that would arouse the desired emotional response without yielding to logical analysis. This was the basis for Poe's demand for the vague and the indefinitive in poetry. Logical meaning, he thought, was better communicated by prose. Figures, since they merely combined the elements of experience, were likely to be hackneyed. The meaning of a poem, on the other hand, should be something like the meaning of music, felt but untranslatable, a “soul-exalting echo.” Poe would have had the imagination soar completely beyond actuality and give us emotional experience that by its very nature was inimitable and untranslatable, experience that could be gained by the unimaginative only through art. To supply this experience in some measure was the high purpose of the true artist.

7

A work of art, for Poe, originated either in a state of feeling or in an idea. The feeling or the idea was to be patiently elaborated into artistic form by the combination of various elements in accordance with a controlling purpose; and this purpose was to produce an appropriate effect. The idea preceded the design, the design preceded the execution; and of these three only the idea or the emotive [page 244:] meaning could be said to spring from the unconscious mind by inspiration, intuition, or whatever agency. Thus the idea of a poem was its imaginative element. Given the idea, Poe thought, any skillful artist could work out an appropriate design and carry it into execution.

This concept of the way a work of art comes into being is responsible for Poe's seemingly ill-tempered attack on Longfellow for plagiarism in his review of Voices of the Night in the February, 1840, issue of the Gentleman's Magazine.(45) Longfellow's “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year,” Poe claimed, was plagiarized from Tennyson's “The Death of the Old Year,” although scarcely a word or image is identical:

There is little evidence that Poe thought of “form as proceeding” — a process of evolution in the mind of the poet. Coleridge had said that form as proceeding “is its self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency.” To Poe, however, form was imposed, which to Coleridge was the “death or imprisonment of the [page 245:] thing.”(46) Longfellow, according to Poe, had stolen the idea of the controlling image and the manner of the execution. Since form was n a itrary shape imposed on the material by the poet's will, a another poet, borrowing the idea and the tone, could be expected to execute the design. In later years Poe was to state that an artist could impose any design he wished upon a given material.(47) It is enough to say here that this concept was at least partly responsible for his vehemence in condemning the “theft” of a poetic idea.

Also revealed in Poe's review of Longfellow is his concept of unity, and again it will be instructive to compare him with Coleridge. To Coleridge, unity was indwelling, organic. The poet saw beneath surface identities and was able to “imitate that which is within the thing. ... The idea which puts the form together cannot itself be the form. It is above form, and is its essence, the universal in the individual, or the individuality itself, — the glance and the exponent of the indwelling power.” To Coleridge unity was not imposed; it sprang from the perception of the oneness beneath diverse appearances, the “coalescence of the diverse.” The artist did not merely achieve a rhetorical unity but communicated an intuition of the essence, “the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man.”

Unlike Coleridge, Poe did not conceive of an indwelling organic unity. His criterion of unity tended to vary depending upon the nature of the work he was reviewing. In a true poem, which had to be tested by emotional response, it was the unity of effect that he emphasized. In a short narrative he required an Aristotelian formal unity, in which no part might be removed or transposed without dislocation of the whole. In a poem which had a cognitive import, a logical meaning, Poe looked for conceptual unity, the unity of idea. He did not care for such poems, but when he examined them he employed rational analysis. Longfellow's poems, usually equipped with a paraphrasable moral, fell into this last category and were judged accordingly. [page 246:]

Poe found a violation of the unity of idea in Longfellow's “Hymn to the Night.” The sensitive reader, Poe claimed, would find that in the poem he would waver “disagreeably between two ideas which would have been merged by the skilful artist into one.” Longfellow had personified the night as a woman in his poem:

First, Poe stated, we are conveyed to a palace “tenanted by the sable-draperied, by the Corporate Night.” But the “single epithet celestial” refers us “to the natural and absolute quality or condition, the incorporate darkness.” Had Longfellow substituted for “marble halls” something like “azure halls” or “heavenly halls,” unity of idea would not have been violated. The personification would have remained intact.

Another flaw Poe found in the poem was that the last stanza was not readily intelligible. This quibbling seems odd in the light of his demand for vagueness and indefinitiveness in poety. However, the poem under consideration employed a conventional strategy of personification, and, whenever imagery was used, Poe examined the poem rhetorically and demanded precision of reference. Thus he found ambiguity in the following lines:

Poe interpreted the stanza to mean that “Peace is invoked to descend the Night — as we say descend the stair,” but that on a first reading one is likely to take the passage as containing “a double invocation, — to Peace and to Night.”

Thus it is clear that Poe used different approaches to different poems. The quality of suggestiveness, as he had explained in his review of Alciphron, was imaginative or ideal because it did not yield itself to logical analysis but simply enhanced the emotional effect of the poem as an accompaniment enhances a song. When the [page 247:] poem, by employing imagery, did open itself to analysis, however, Poe demanded precision, clarity, and unity of idea as firmly as would an eighteenth-century rhetorician. The poet who operates on this lower level must not neglect the conventions that make his work intelligible to an audience. Poe's objections to Longfellow were based on minor defects, he admitted, but he considered them representative of the “prevalent deficiencies of the writer.” Longfellow's poem could have been “richly ideal,” but he neglected the minor graces of composition. Thus, in spite of Billy Burton's advice to deal “leniently with the faults of genius,” Poe maintained his standard of criticism. Within two years he was to assert firmly that pointing out such minor faults was one of the inescapable duties of the critic.

8

The review of Longfellow's Voices of the Night was Poe's last for the Gentleman's Magazine that had any intrinsic critical interest. In the spring of 1840 the difficulties between Burton and Poe were coming to a head. Our information about Poe's activities during these months is scanty. We know that he was away from Philadelphia for a fortnight early in April(48) and that there were no criticisms from his pen in the April number, only a short paragraph on the copyright question. In May his contributions reappeared, among them a notice of the poems of William Cullen Bryant. This was one of the few he actually signed, but it contained nothing new. Poe merely summarized Bryant's career and then cribbed from his earlier Messenger review his analysis of “Oh, Fairest of the Rural Maids.”

Poe's final break with Burton occurred late in May of 1840. The actor-editor wrote to Poe on May 30 in a tone Poe bitterly resented, stating, among other things, that Poe owed him a hundred dollars. In a furious reply, dated June 1, Poe attempted to prove that the debt was considerably less and went into his grievances against Burton: the actor had attempted to “bully” him; the long critical articles he had written when he first joined the magazine had been [page 248:] rejected; Burton had enforced a deduction from his salary to pay the debt; the actor had spoken disrespectfully of Poe behind his back; and, lastly, Burton had advertised his magazine for sale without consulting Poe. This act, Poe said, was responsible for his own attempt to found a journal, which Burton had resented.(49) Seventeen days later Poe wrote to his friend Snodgrass that Burton was a liar, a scoundrel, and a villain.(50)

Poe's formal letter of resignation was submitted in June, and thereupon Burton turned down some six or seven critiques Poe had prepared for the journal.(51) Thus with mutual recriminations the two parted company, Billy Burton on his way to theatrical triumphs in New York, Poe to attempt to found a magazine of his own. But Poe was not yet through with the Gentleman's Magazine. In November, 1840, Burton had sold the magazine with its list of subscribers to George R. Graham, editor and owner of another magazine called the Casket, with which the Gentleman's Magazine was to be combined. Thus the last number of the Gentleman's Magazine — December, 1840 — was also the first number of Graham's. It contained Poe's story “The Man of the Crowd,” but the reviews were not his. It was not until April of 1841, after the combined Gentleman's and Casket had been titled Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, that Poe's reviews reappeared. He had found a position with the new owner. In the meantime he had worked energetically to establish his own journal, which he planned to call the Penn.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 209:]

1.  Before May 27, 1829, in Letters, I, 18-19.

2.  Review of Walsh's Didactics, in Works, VIII, 321.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 213:]

3.  I have not attempted a full explication of “Ligeia” since this reading is intended to serve only as an example of Poe's application of his theories. Essentially, my interpretation agrees with that of Roy P. Basler except for one point. Mr. Basler has argued convincingly that the drops of red liquid which fall into Rowena's goblet of wine are actual poison, administered by her psychotic husband. Not having read Mr. Basler's essay in advance, and interpreting Poe's tale only in the light of the reviews he had written up to this point, I have considered this seemingly supernatural event as a failure of technique caused by the necessity of bringing the tale to a rapid conclusion. This interpretation is supported by Poe's exchange of letters with Philip Pendleton Cooke, which Mr. Basler cited but discounted. Poe acknowledged what Cooke called a “violation of the ghostly proprieties” and agreed with Cooke that the possession of Rowena's body should have been a gradual and intermittent affair, not completely successful. See Cooke to Poe, in Works, XVII, 49-51; and Poe's reply, in Letters, I, 117-19.

In the light of Poe's theory, he would be endeavoring to make the supernatural credible by letting the narrator doubt the reality of the event and attribute it to imagination stimulated by opium. This was a conventional gambit, and Mr. Basler's argument that Poe's conclusion is perfect as a “revelation of obsessional psychology” makes Poe a better artist than he himself realized. See Basler, “Poe's Ligeia,” Sex, Symbol, and Psychology in Literature (New Brunswick, 1948)7 143-59.

Whatever may be valid in the interpretation of this particular event, Mr. Basler's reading of the tale is close to Poe's concept of the proper use of terror in fiction, whereas Richard ‘Wilbur's recent symbolic interpretation is not. Mr. ‘Wilbur has interpreted Ligeia herself as a personification of the sentiment of beauty, which, when lost, must be regained at all costs. The grotesque bridal chamber is seen, not as a revelation of insanity, but as a “dream room” which scorns the proprieties of interior decoration. To accept this view, one must ignore Poe's “The Philosophy of Furniture” and “Landor's Cottage,” in which he actually described “dream rooms” decorated in a florid but not outlandish taste. To accept Mr. Wilbur's interpretation in general, one must also ignore the tone of Poe's denouement. The narrator greets his resurrected Ligeia, his lost sentiment of beauty, with a shriek of terror instead of with the joy that should attend the “reunion of a divided soul.” Poe demanded a unity of tone in his tales, and usually achieved it. This is not to argue that Mr. Wilbur's interpretation is necessarily invalid. If his reading is accepted, however, it indicates that Poe was far more of an unconscious artist than a conscious one and that his obsessional devotion to “poetic sentiment” furnished the symbolic import of what the author himself thought of as a tale of psychological terror. It [page 214:] would also indicate that Poe's technique, as consciously developed, was slipshod indeed. The psychotic condition of the narrator is stressed in the tale, not only by direct statement but also by his taste. To Poe, the taste of the sane artist was characterized by its recognition of harmony and beauty, and if Ligeia is indeed the sentiment of beauty, the tale is a prose rendition of the theme of “The Haunted Palace,” in which the supervention of insanity changes the beautiful to the grotesque. This is a defensible interpretation, but it makes Poe's conclusion faulty. See Richard Wilbur, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in Perry Miller (ed.), Major Writers of America (New York, 1962), I, 374-79.

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4.  Poe to Nathan C. Brooks, September 4, 1838, in Letters, I, 111-12.

5.  Ibid.

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6.  According to Ostrom's check list (Letters, II, 577), Poe first wrote Burton between May 1 and May 10, 1839. Burton replied on May 11, making Poe an offer. See Works, XVII, 45-46. Poe wrote again between May 11 and May 30, and Burton answered on May 30.

7.  Poe evidently knew of this comic role, for he had cited the “graceful sermonic harangues of Dr. Ollapod” in his burlesque of a Blackwood's article, “A Predicament,” published in the American Museum in November, 1838.

8.  Mott, A History of American Magazines, 674.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 216:]

9.  In an angry letter to Joseph Evans Snodgrass, dated April 1, 1841, Poe called Burton a “buffoon and a felon.” Letters, I, 155.

10.  Dictionary of National Biography, VIII, 20-21.

11.  Poe made this complaint in a letter to Burton, June 1, 1840. See Letters, I, 131-32.

12.  See Letters, II, 577.

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13.  In Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 279-82.

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14.  Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, IV, 359. This journal had a variable title during the three and a half years of its existence, but will here be referred to as Burton's Gentleman's Magazine.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 219:]

15.  Review of Stanley, or The Recollections of a Man of the World, in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, IV, 65; and review of Indecision, A Tale of the Far West, and Other Poems, ibid., 353. The poem Burton admired was in heroic couplets!

16.  Ibid., 354.

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17.  In the same letter in which he had discussed “Ligeia,” Poe told Cooke “Do not think of subscribing [to the Gentleman's Magazine]. The criticisms are not worth your notice. Of course I pay no attention to them — for there are two of us. It is not pleasant to be taxed with the twaddle of other people, or to let other people be taxed with ours. Therefore for the present I remain upon my oars — merely penning an occasional paragraph, without care. The critiques, such as they are, are all mine in the July number [page 220:] and all mine in the August and September with the exception of the three first in each — which are by Burton.” Letters, I, 118-19.

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18.  Review of Cooper's Sketches of Switzerland, in Works, IX, 163.

19.  Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, V (July-December, 1839), 56.

20.  Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, IV, 66.

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21.  Works, X, 27-30.

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22.  See Charvat, American Critical Thought, 130-31.

23.  Review of Walsh's Didactics, in Works, VIII, 322.

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24.  Ibid., X, 30-39.

25.  Poe's chief object in this review was to defend the romance against its American detractors. He even sent a copy of the number containing his review to Heath, whom he knew disliked “fairy tales” such as Undine. The issue also contained Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Heath reacted in a predictable way. In his letter of acknowledgment to Poe (Works, XVII, 47-48) he admitted that “Usher” showed great imagination, but it had no tendency to “improve the heart.” Heath did not mention the review of Undine, but he may have referred to it obliquely in advising Poe to use his “dissecting knife” vigorously to rid the country of the “silly trash and silly sentimentality” that poisoned the “intellectual food” which literature should provide. Poe's letter of September 5 to Heath has been lost, but apparently he had requested Heath to see if White would not reprint “Usher” in the Messenger. Heath replied that White had no space and doubted that his readers had “much relish for tales of the German School.” [page 223:] Without Poe, the Messenger could maintain its policy of moral improvement.

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26.  Undine had been published in German in 1811. Poe's review was of a translation by Grenville Mellen. The tale had been praised by Goethe, Heine, and Coleridge, among others.

27.  For a summary of the antiromantic attitude of many American critics, see G. Harrison Orians, “The Rise of Romanticism, 1805-1855,” in Harry Hayden Clark (ed.), Transitions in American Literary History (Durham, 1953), 171-78.

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28.  Works, X, 40.

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29.  On this point see Herbert M. McLuhan, “Edgar Poe's Tradition,” Sewanee Review, LII (1944), 24-33.

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30.  This remark appears in Poe's revision of his review of Peter Snook for the Broadway Journal. See Works, XIV, 73. He had implied much the same thing, however, when in the review of Drake and Halleck he argued that even without a high degree of imagination, a poet could create the proper effect by using psychology.

31.  Ibid., X, 49-56.

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32.  Ibid., 41-45.

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33.  See Chapter II of this book for a discussion of the background of this idea in British aesthetics.

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34.  In Rambler No. 158, Dr. Johnson explained the license granted lyric poets on historical grounds and complained that critics had set lyric poems “free from the laws by which other compositions are confined,” allowing them to neglect transition, to enter into “remote digressions,” and to move from one pattern of imagery into another.

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35.  Addison, in reference to the “Old Song of Chevy-Chase,” had quoted Ben Jonson as saying that he would rather have written it than all of his own works. Spectator, LXXX (May 21, 1711)

36.  Byron had dubbed Thomas Moore “Anacreon” Moore.

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37.  Works, X, 60-71.

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38.  “The Statesman's Manual,” in W. G. J. Shedd (ed.), Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 1853), I, 437.

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39.  An essay on Poe is not the place to discuss Coleridge's theory of the imagination, an enterprise which has demanded and received the full attention of critics and scholars. I have been guided in my interpretation of Coleridge by Walter Jackson Bate, “Coleridge on the Function of Art,” in [page 236:] Harry Levin (ed.), Perspectives of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), 125-59; I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (New York, 1935); and Gordon McKenzie, Organic Unity in Coleridge (Berkeley, 1939). The interpretation to which this particular note is appended is derived most specifically from Bate.

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40.  Quoted by McKenzie in Critical Responsiveness, 195.

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41.  Poe's parenthetical allusion in the first sentence of this statement is probably to Chapter IV of the Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge described the way in which he came to doubt that the fancy and the imagination were the “lower and higher degree of one and the same power” (I, 61). Poe was attempting to refute Coleridge's views in two ways, first by denying that the imagination could create, and next by affirming what Coleridge denied, that the distinction was one of degree. Poe was simply saying that the imagination and the fancy worked the same way, but that the result [page 238:] of the imagination at work was evidenced by a second level of meaning. In a fanciful poem the surface was all.

His reference to Schlegel may be very general, for the German critic discoursed at length on the way the advent of Christianity had caused men to lose what was “finite and mortal” in the “contemplation of infinity.” Modern poetry expressed the Christian's yearning for his immortal home, and Poe's “mystic” undoubtedly refers to the suggestion of a more perfect beauty beyond the grave. Schlegel did distinguish symbolism from allegory, and yet his distinction required symbolic poetry to have that reference to reality that Poe deplored. In fact, Schlegel's definition of allegory is a fair description of what Poe considered the proper way to enact a poetic idea: “Allegory is the personification of an idea, a poetic story invented with such a view; but that is symbolical which, created by the imagination for other purposes, or possessing an independent reality of its own [italics mine], is at the same time easily susceptible of an emblematical explanation; and even of itself suggests it.” Schlegel, Lectures, 88. Poe's confusion, as exhibited in his condemnation of the allegorical meaning in Undine and his subsequent praise of its undercurrent of meaning, may have derived from his interpretation of Schlegel. It is strange that Poe did not oppose symbolism to allegory, as did Schlegel; but if he had, it would have involved him in a reversal of all his convictions about the “indefinite” nature of poetry, because a symbol possessed an independent reality. Poe used the term “symbol” only a few times in the entire corpus of his criticism, but he did use “emblem” as an explanation of his infusion of meaning into “The Raven” (in “The Philosophy of Composition”).

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42.  See Winters, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism,” In Defense of Reason (New York, 1947), 234-61.

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43.  Attempting to defend himself against the expected charge of pedantry, Coleridge explained why he constructed the word “esemplastic” from Greek roots to describe the power of the imagination to shape the many into one. Biographia Literaria, I, 107. Poe, as a journalist, had to use words a general audience could comprehend. Even if he had had the scholarship to invent a precise new terminology, it is doubtful that he would have employed it, for to do so would have brought against him the same charges that were levied against Coleridge. Terms like “ideality” and “taste” could be understood by Poe's audience, for they came from the popular phrenological texts and the rhetorics, but there was no common idiom to describe symbolic import without confusing it with allegorical meaning on the one hand or the required perspicuity of figurative language on the other. Like Coleridge, Poe did not want poetry to be clearly and perfectly understood, and he may have derived his “under-current” metaphor from Coleridge's requirement of “depth”. Coleridge described Shakespeare's “creative power” and “intellectual energy” as being like two streams which eventually meet and “flow on in one current and with one voice.” Biographia Literaria, II, 19.

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44.  Spurzheim used the word “temperament” to refer to “mixtures of the constituent elements of the body” and used these alleged mixtures to estimate character traits much as some modern theorists have used somatic types. See Spurzheim, Phrenology, 191-93. This was not much more than an updating of the old theory of the “humours.”

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45.  Works, X, 71-80.

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46.  All quotations from Coleridge given in this context are from “On Poesy or Art,” Biographia Literaria, II, 257-62.

47.  “Marginalia,” Works, XVI, 99.

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48.  See Poe to Hiram Haines, April 24, 1840, in Letters, I, 128.

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49.  Burton's letter is unavailable, but its content may be deduced in part from Poe's reply. Ibid., 129-32.

50.  Poe to J. E. Snodgrass, June 17, 1840, ibid., 137-38.

51.  This information is given in Poe's letter to Snodgrass, cited above. See also Ostrom's notes to this letter and Poe's June 1 letter to Burton, ibid., 133, 139. Poe's ill-feeling toward Burton was intensified later when Snodgrass told him that a report had been circulated, allegedly from Burton, that Poe had frequently been drunk while working on the Gentleman's Magazine.

Furious, Poe wrote to Snodgrass on April 1, 1841, that he could not call Burton out as gentleman to gentleman because Burton was a “buffoon and a felon,” and that his only recourse was the law, but that Burton would enter a countersuit. Poe claimed that he could prove that he was never drunk while working for Burton, although he admitted drinking while he was employed on the Messenger. See Letters, I, 155-757.