Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “The Province of Poetry,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 296-314 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 296:]

XII  •  The Province of Poetry

 

POE'S reviews during the first five months of 1842 illustrate as clearly as do “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle” an apparent divergence between his attitude as a literary critic and his attitude as a romantic poet. As a literary critic he attempted to use science and reason in his proofs. As a romantic poet he found value in the experience of a transcendent, visionary beauty. When these two orientations conflicted, his theoretical statements sometimes became obscure and even contradictory, as he attempted to accommodate the vision of beauty to a practical methodology. As a literary critic Poe found it necessary to assume that each event had its rationale, not only in terms of its existence but also in terms of its purpose; the final cause of an event determined its mode of being. Thus, in his criticism he was prone to examine an artistic event not only for its immediate cause but also for its hypothesized place in the scheme of things.

An art work, constructed by man, was thought by Poe to follow the order of nature insofar as it exhibited design, a rational plan to implement a preconceived end. That art did have a place in the universal design was not to be doubted, because God had given man faculties for the production and the appreciation of art. But art was not nature; it was “artificial,” made by man, and it had its own final cause and its own mode of being. Art could not duplicate nature, but the human could imitate the divine artist by recognizing the purpose of art and by developing a design that would carry out this purpose.

In April and May of 1842 Poe proceeded from his justification of the function of the critic to the justification of art itself, more specifically the validation of poetic feeling as an innate human need. In this Poe's orientation was toward romantic transcendentalism, particularly its Platonic elements. Had he been guided solely by the aesthetic ideal of the Enlightenment, he would have assumed that [page 297:] the end of art was to create a formal imitation of the order of the universe, and unquestionably this ideal appears in Poe's aesthetics; but in terms of value Poe thought that art must attempt to convey the soul's vision of beauty, for man could not duplicate the Great Design. He could only attempt to reproduce the effect that an intuitive perception of perfect order would stimulate. This concept, though it has its historical origin in Platonic aesthetics, became one of the aspects of the nineteenth-century yearning for absolute experience uncontaminated by the here and now. Among the English romantics it is conspicuous in Shelley's poetry, which helps account for Poe's approval of Shelley. But unlike Shelley, whose A Defence of Poetry, published in 1840, could conceivably have influenced him,(1) Poe was determined to devise or discover a rationale of vision and a means for its communication. It is also possible that he was influenced by Friedrich Schlegel, whose Lectures on the History of Literature was available in English.(2) Schlegel's statement, “The proper business of poetry is to represent only the eternal, that which is, at all places, and in all times, significant and beautiful; but this cannot be accomplished without the intervention of a veil,” reminds us of Poe's insistence that the absolute beauty perceived by the poet could only be rendered in terms of the vague and the indefinite. Yet Schlegel's “veil” has reference to the necessity of a poet's using the national past and present in order to shadow forth the eternal within temporal limits. Poe's purposeful “vagueness” is an expedient to obscure time and place in order to allow the eternal beauty to shine more brightly. Schlegel was writing philosophically. Poe was trying to develop a methodology for the communication of vision. His role as a critic and his Enlightenment orientation demanded it. If the need to enjoy beauty is an aspect of human nature, then there must be a way to insure the fulfillment of this need, and the way must be based upon something permanent in the psyche — a universal psychological principle. [page 298:] Poe's best-known reviews, published in April and May of 1842, are devoted to a description of the human need for the experience of beauty and propositions for a rationale of gratification.

In the March number of Graham's, as we have seen, Poe had published a brief review of Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems. His chief point was made in a dogmatic statement that taste could be analyzed and reduced to law: “These principles ... are as clearly traceable, and these laws as really susceptible of system as are any whatever.” Unable to complete his exposition in the March number, Poe continued his review in Apri1,(3) and this continuation contains his most elaborate statement of the nature and final cause of aesthetic feeling. It also contains his most extensive justification for his rule that the didactic has no place in a poem.

Poe opened his April review with an exposition of what he regarded as Longfellow's primary defect, his didactic purpose. This was his usual strategy of selecting an author's characteristic idiosyncrasy as his point of attack. His objection to didacticism had been stated as early as his “Letter to Mr. —— ——,” but never before had he undertaken to explain it fully on psychological grounds. Longfellow's aim is wrong, Poe said. “His invention, his imagery, his all, is made subservient to the elucidation of some one or more points ... which he looks upon as truth.”

The aesthetic value which is the proper end of art should not be dissipated by subsidiary values which would be better presented by means other than poetry.

Poe's assumption in this passage is what has recently been called by Northrop Frye the greatest fallacy in our present-day concept of literary education, the assumption that prose is the “normal” language of ideas and that the special characteristics of poetry inhibit the efficiency of communication. This error, if it is one, goes back at least as far as Lord Karnes(4) and, one must suppose, even farther. It was implicit in the psychology that assigned certain faculties as responsible for feeling and others as responsible for thinking. Characteristically, Poe based his argument on psychology, specifically on the hypothesis that the mental state appropriate for the composition of poetry is different from that which is conducive to the formulation of concepts. It is obvious that Poe's view of style, if anachronistic terminology may be forgiven, was that of a modern positivist. Prose style was valued in terms of its efficiency in communicating facts or ideas, but the style of a poem, insofar as it exhibited imagery, rhythm, and rhyme, was seen as ornamental. In a word, whatever is inessential in the expression of an idea — the gay robes, the gems and flowers — is mere decoration. Poetry, in Poe's [page 300:] view, could not have a form which communicated a special kind of knowledge; it was designed only to make us feel.

What Allen Tate has considered a prime aspect of poetic value, the tension that occurs between the logical meaning of figurative language and its rich store of implication,(5) was virtually ignored by Poe. There could not be any consecutive development of a concept in a poem, Poe said many times, without the risk of allegory. He had fumbled with the problem of meaning in previous reviews, and in this particular context he simply referred his readers to his earlier statements: “In our last number, we took occasion to say that a didactic moral might be happily made the under-current of a poetical theme, and, in ‘Burton's Magazine,’ some two years since, we treated this point at length in a review of Moore's ‘Alciphron’; but the moral thus conveyed is invariably an ill effect when obtruding beyond the upper current of the thesis itself.”

Few would question the validity of Poe's argument here, but the fact that he separated the “currents” of meaning is another indication that he did not escape what Philip Wheelwright has described as the “blind alley of empirical positivism.”(6) The positivist tends to obscure the cognitive potential of poetry by regarding it either as fiction or as allegory. Poe actually said elsewhere that a poem might enforce truth only by overturning a fiction, but this opinion appears in the present context only in the form of a definition borrowed from Baron de Bielfeld: poetry is “l’art d’exprimer les pensées par la fiction.” Poe evidently took this to mean that the fiction, the fable or scene of the poem, had to bear the weight of thought, and that the extension of meaning in the suggestive undercurrent was not really meaning at all but a configuration of congruent affects. If the undercurrent actually became meaning, it obtruded and had the force of a thesis. Poe had said in his review of Alciphron that the undercurrent was like an accompaniment in music. It was a “soul-exalting echo.” In other words, it had to do [page 301:] with the stimulative capacity of poetic form and was inhibitory to the communication of ideas. Poe did not describe an interaction between the two kinds of meaning, with each sustaining or qualifying the other; he was more concerned that they should not interfere with each other. Accordingly, symbolic suggestion should not have cognitive value or it would destroy the fable or fiction which was the poem; the undercurrent could only enhance the affective potentiality of the fiction. Such a proposition would remove the possibility of ironic indirection or indeed any other mode of tension in poetic form. To Poe, then, the poet was inevitably a liar, for his poem could not be the vehicle of any kind of truth other than the truth of feeling. With this Keatsian prolegomena, it is not surprising that Poe selected Keats as “the sole British poet who has never erred in his themes.” A poem had no heuristic capability except as it might provide a stimulus for that broad range of sentiments which Poe and his contemporaries were pleased to call moral.

Obviously Poe had made great concessions to science. His view of truth was restricted to that which might be conceptualized or represented, and a poem, in consequence, was only a pleasing organization of “inessentials,” gay robes and flowers. He had claimed that poetry was his passion, but in reference to truth he called his love a harlot. What, then, remained of poetic value? Actually, a great deal, but Poe had to resort to the psychology of taste to explain:

The first thing to be noticed in this passage is that Poe had renounced the jargon of phrenology and was using the traditional terms for the faculties, retaining the separation of the faculties in regard to function which was characteristic of the older psychology. In this context, two quotations from Thomas Jefferson bear repeating for their immediate relevance:

This is the substance of Poe's argument: taste “wages war” against vice by enabling us to distinguish between the beautiful and the disgusting in human behavior. The second half of the combined quotation above was contained in a letter written in 1771, shortly after the publication of Kames's Elements of Criticism, a book Jefferson considered authoritative. In “Exordium” Poe too had attested to the validity of Kames's principles. Our interest here, however, should not be in the location of another probable source for Poe's ideas, but in the use he made of an outmoded psychology to validate his argument. According to the faculty psychology, strictly interpreted, the only way in which the sense of the beautiful [page 303:] could implement morality was by an imaginative depiction of virtuous acts for their hedonic value. Beauty pleases; deformity disgusts. Far from introducing a new concept of poetic value, Poe merely reverted to the old, differing only in his polemically emphatic language.(7)

A significant change from the doctrine expressed in the review of Drake and Halleck is observable. In the earlier review Poe had attributed the value of certain lines from Shelley to their expression of moral sentiment. This was understandable in terms of the phrenological classification of Ideality as a moral sentiment. According to the strict separation of the taste from the moral sense in the older psychology, however, moral feeling derived from the conscience, not from the taste. Poe gave evidence of this distinction in statements that qualified his admission of a moral thesis as a secondary motif in art: “In common with all who claim the sacred title of poet, he [Longfellow] should limit his endeavors to the creation of novel moods of beauty, in form, in color, in sound, in sentiment; for over all this wide range has the poetry of words dominion. To what the world terms prose may be safely and properly left all else.” This should be clear enough, but Poe wanted to eliminate any possible misunderstanding. Trying to be fair, he praised Longfellow's ballad “The Luck of Edenhall” extravagantly, in spite of the “pointed moral with which it terminates,” because the moral was “perfectly fluent from the incidents.” Yet it was through images rich in physical rather than moral beauty that such a ballad made an appeal to the imagination: “It is chiefly ... amid forms of physical loveliness (we use the word forms in its widest sense as embracing modifications of sound and color) that the soul seeks the realization of its dreams of BEAUTY.”

In this qualification Poe did not violate the principles of the taste psychologists; he simply carried the implications of a separate faculty of taste further than would have been possible for Kames and Stewart, or for their American disciple, Thomas Jefferson. The Scottish philosophers had not wanted morality to become a mode [page 304:] of aesthetic gratification, as it appeared that Shaftesbury had permitted; instead, they had tried to show how the sense of beauty could serve the conscience. Poe, by the evidence of this review, would use precisely the same psychological principles to show that morality, properly depicted, could serve the sense of beauty. His analysis of the faculties and their function allowed him to proceed to his validation of the aesthetic end. If a poem attempted to communicate directly either the concepts of the intellect or the precepts of the conscience, it would fail because these faculties would usurp the office of the taste. The means would not be adapted to the proposed end. Aesthetic appreciation of the symmetry, harmony, and proportion of nature and of art was the sole function of the taste. This faculty was a link between the human and the divine because of the natural human yearning for perfect beauty: “An important condition of man's immortal nature is ... the sense of the Beautiful.” Why immortal? Because no beauty on earth fully satisfies man's longing for beauty. If this “thirst unquenchable” exists, it must have an explanation in terms of its cause. God has given it to us as a sign of our “perennial” existence. It is a token of a future life beyond the grave. If what we have here and now were all, man would not have dreams of something more beautiful beyond. But man does have such dreams, which proves that longing for this beauty was divinely established in human nature. Thus the true sentiment of poesy (by which Poe meant the fine arts) is “not the mere appreciation of the beauty before us.” Instead, he continued, “It is a wild effort to reach the beauty above. It is a forethought of the loveliness to come. It is a passion to be satiated by no sublunary sights, or sounds, or sentiments, and the soul thus athirst strives to allay its fever in futile efforts at creation. Inspired with a prescient ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, it struggles, by multiform novelty of combination among the things and the thoughts of Time, to anticipate some portion of that loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain solely to Eternity.”

When we encounter this rhapsody, we are immediately reminded of romantic Platonism. Love of beautiful earthly forms is only a preparation for love of ideal beauty, eternal and absolute. [page 305:]

This quasi-religious emotion is, according to Poe, an aspect of the natural constitution of man. As he expressed it: “Poesy is thus seen to be a response — unsatisfactory it is true — but still in some measure a response, to a natural and irrepressible demand. Man being what he is, the time could never have been in which Poesy was not. Its first element is the thirst for supernal BEAUTY — a beauty which is not afforded the soul by any existing collocation of earth's forms — a beauty which, perhaps, no possible combination of these forms would fully produce.”

The poetic imagination, then, is not a means of communicating intuitions of moral or metaphysical truth, say of the kind expressed by religion or myth. It is the artistic faculty of creating a beautiful composition, a re-ordering of the given, “the things and thoughts of Time.” The given is the same for every artist; it is the stuff of experience, and the only originality the poet can achieve inheres in his compositional effects. Even here, Poe was only rephrasing what Archibald Alison had said before him:

Platonic idealism was common property. Were this all that Poe shared with Alison, the quotation above would be pointless, merely another in the list of possible sources, which already include Coleridge, the Schlegels, Shelley, and perhaps actually Plato himself. The significance of Poe's reversion to the eighteenth-century psychology of taste and its teleology of art is that it offered him a way out of the dilemma imposed by his interpretation of Coleridge. If the imagination actually created something new out of elements [page 306:] alien to human experience — which appears to be Poe's interpretation of Coleridge — then the empirical approach would have to be discarded and the poet would not be an artist but a prophet or seer — a Moses on the mount or a Saul on the road to Damascus — and poetry would become revelation. In a very few years Poe was to employ his most pungent invective in discrediting the transcendental hero, the poet-seer,(9) but in this review he accomplished his object by placing a limitation on the purpose of art. By making “Poesy” (understood in its generic sense as “art”) the “handmaiden” of the faculty of taste, Poe limited its function, as Alison had done, to the production of exquisite delight. Yet this delight itself was blended with and productive of moral feeling, Alison had said, for admiration of the beauty of earth inevitably led the soul toward the author of that beauty and resulted in religious feeling. Poe went beyond Alison only in the emphasis achieved by his rapturous rhetoric. Alison did not specify that the artist had a vision of absolute beauty, but he implied it when he required the artist to investigate the source of temporal beauty in order to imagine forms and compositions “more perfect” than any in nature. The proposition is the same. Aesthetic delight leads the mind toward the source of that delight; and the artist, with his exquisite sensibility, his refined taste, will not be satisfied with any ordinary gratification — the sights and sounds that greet all mankind; he will be content only with perfection itself.

However much Poe may have drawn from the aesthetic of high romanticism, as represented by Shelley, he still imposed the old psychological limitation upon the artist. He was the man of taste, not the legislator for all mankind, and his vision was limited to the imagination of perfect beauty. He could improve on nature in his composition of forms, but he would never truly create; he would only invent new combinations of old forms. The second element of poetic feeling was an attempt to satisfy the thirst for beauty which was the first element. The poet would attempt to satisfy his thirst [page 307:] “by novel combinations among those forms of beauty which already exist — or by novel combinations of those combinations which our predecessors, toiling in chase of the same phantom, have already set in order.” Thus, he went on, we “clearly deduce the novelty, the originality, the invention, the imagination, or lastly the creation of BEAUTY (for the terms as employed are synonymous) as the essence of all Poesy.”(10) Certainly Poe was implicitly extending the refutation of Coleridge which he had introduced in the review of Alciphron. Like Coleridge, he saw imagination as the essence of poetry, and, like Coleridge, he considered two aspects of this essential power. Yet Coleridge's primary imagination was a mode of perception, common, in greater or lesser degree, to everyone. His secondary imagination was the esemplastic power which brought the many into one. Poe's first element was not the imagination but the taste, the appreciation of beauty which induced one to desire even greater beauty; Poe's second element was imagination, but, as is obvious in the passage above, the imagination in its creative aspect was equated with invention, as was customary in the eighteenth century. An ordering of the forms experienced in nature and a re-ordering of previous artistic “combinations” were equally valid as imaginative art. Poe had taken the statement he had found in Bielfeld, that the mind of man can imagine nothing new, as irrefutable psychological doctrine.(11) Yet presumably man can imagine whatever exists, even if it exists only in the mind of God, so man can imagine absolute beauty. The trouble is, he cannot invent it. The visionary capacity of the imagination far exceeds its creative capacity.

By whatever source it may have been transmitted, it was the Symposium, that marvelous parable of the soul ascending the ladder [page 308:] of beauty until it is able to grasp the idea of beauty, that influenced Poe. Art, like religion, led toward Heaven, but not all the way. All things on earth, natural or artificial, are imperfect; thus the relative and contingent beauty of any combination, however novel, will be at last unsatisfying, for the soul, in its aesthetic as well as its moral aspect, can rest only in its immortal home.

But Poe had also read the Republic, and he knew that in the sphere of social utility all poets were liars; the beauty of their vision was true, and yet it could be expressed only by a fiction, or what the men of fact called a fiction. Accepting the positivist's version of truth, Poe could defend the poet's lies only by affirming that they were necessary lies; they served a basic human need. The fiction of beauty which the poet created would be recognized as nearly true only beyond the grave, after man experienced the reality of the absolute.

All of Poe's speculations about the value of the taste were not expressed in this review, no doubt because he limited himself to what he could support by a traditional aesthetic psychology. Yet in his philosophical fantasy, “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” published in Graham's the previous August,(12) he did make a provisional allocation of redemptive potential to the poet's mind. Poetic truth could have saved mankind, had man listened to the poets instead of the scientists. The scene in the “Colloquy” takes place after the destruction of the earth by fire. The fable is a retrospective survey by an angel, Monos, and of course must be accepted as true in the only way in which a fiction can be true. Monos accounts for the destruction of the earth as a cleansing or purification. Man had cultivated his practical reason instead of his poetic instinct and had infected the earth with his partial knowledge. Among other errors, he had attributed value to scientific progress and to a manifestly unnatural condition known as universal democracy; this was a defiance of nature and of nature's God, but in his pride man did not submit to nature. Instead, he attempted to enforce “dominion over her elements.” He would have been saved had he been guided by his taste instead of his practical reason: [page 309:]

In his fantasy, where he was not burdened with polemic necessity, Poe permitted the poet to discover truth through the perception of analogies, a cognitive mode not different in principle from that employed by Emerson. Significantly, the poet's vision projected an unfallen world, the world described in the myth of the garden. In a fallen world, however, the only paradise that the poet could imagine was that beyond the grave. Applied science had created “huge, smoking cities,” and “the fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease.”(13) Cultivation [page 310:] of the aesthetic sense, which the “majestic intuition of Plato” had seen as man's salvation, would have made man “beautiful minded,” and he would have been able to dwell forever in an earthly paradise.

Poe's “fiction,” then, allowed the truth of myth which his psychology denied, for Monos affirms the value of the “mystic parable” of Genesis. Yet with hard common sense Poe knew that his audience relied on scientific procedures rather than the perception of analogies for the production of truth. Besides that, the history of mankind showed that very few were interested in becoming “beautiful minded,” so Monos can only cry, “Alas for the pure contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato!”

In his very first poems Poe had associated art with the paradisal vision. In “Al Aaraaf” he had located the artist's paradise in a wandering planet, and in his “Sonnet — To Science” he had described the way in which reality vanquished dream. Yet however true these “fictions” were under the aspect of eternity, his proofs had to be accommodated to time and place. Shelley had erred when he claimed that the poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. If they were unacknowledged, they could not legislate. A conditional capitulation is the best defense when one is outnumbered. Then one at least has a voice in the terms of the surrender. Poe could use an accepted psychology to limit the poet's province to the aesthetic. Art created the beautiful. Everyone admitted that. Accordingly, let the poet at least be the man of beauty, or, in terms of the faculty psychology, the man of taste. Let his sole function be the giving of pleasure, but then assert, with an authority stemming from Plato but reiterated down through the centuries, that the pleasure in beauty is a necessary pleasure — indeed, that the aesthetic response is a link between earth and heaven. Allow science and reason to have what they had already successfully claimed, the truth, but leave the poet his gems and flowers. The great romantics, in assigning poetry the province of truth, had demanded more territory than the world would allow and in effect had isolated the poet-prince from his people. Poe, on the other hand, claimed only the province of beauty, a province he [page 311:] could defend with the very weapons of the enemy, the laws of nature and the constitution of the human mind. It is for this reason that he used familiar proofs in his review of Longfellow, carrying them only the one step farther that was necessary to validate his own ends.

If Poe learned anything from the science and reason that he deplored in his fictions, it was that means had to be adapted to ends, and that a theory was only as good as its practice. In the remainder of his review, Poe attempted to show that Longfellow had failed because he had misconstrued the purpose of poetry in using didactic themes. The test for appropriate themes was elementary; the poet asked himself if the matter could not “be as well or better handled in prose.”(14) If it could be, it should be left alone. When we examine Poe's actual judgments of Longfellow's poems, we see that his chief objection was to moral statement, not moral feeling. He commended “The Skeleton in Armor” almost without reservation because it exhibited “the beauty of bold courage and self-confidence, of love and maiden devotion, of reckless adventure, and finally of life-contemning grief.” These were beautiful sentiments to Poe, but they were also what his age called moral sentiments. Poe was more conventional in what he liked than his proclamation [page 312:] of the “heresy of the didactic” would imply. For all of his assertion that it was chiefly in physical beauty that the soul found its dreams fulfilled, he prized moral beauty as highly as anyone else,(15) so long as it was implicit in the fable and not explicit as an apothegm. In fact, Poe was more tolerant of Longfellow's didacticism than most of us are today.

Less defensible is his application of the test of affective value. Any critic who uses the test of effect must assume that his own reaction should be taken as universal. -What he feels, everyone should feel. This is patently not the case, as Coleridge himself asserted in his fragmentary essay on taste. Poe's reliance on normative psychology, which assumed a mechanical relationship between feelings and their causes, would lead him to this error. He made little allowance for individual differences in response because he assumed that human nature in its optimum development was always and everywhere the same. For instance, melancholy was much admired in Poe's time, and aspects of the grave were considered poetic; accordingly, much of the “beautiful sentiment” in Poe's own poetry was expressed by what today we consider a morbid preoccupation with the grave. Yet, astonishingly, Poe objected to what he considered to be the feeling of horror evoked by the poem “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” in the lines, “The salt sea was frozen on her breast, / The salt tears in her eyes.” Such a description, Poe [page 313:] claimed with what was probably an unconscious play on words, arouses “a chilling sense of the inappropriate.” Thus to him, and perhaps to his audience, a description of a painful death, which was “unpoetic,” was better treated in prose. It was perfectly all right to describe the grave of a beautiful woman and the “life-contemning” grief of her lover, but under no circumstances should one go into detail about the death agonies. The salt-encrusted corpse of the maiden made Poe feel disgust, so he assumed that everyone else would feel the same way, just as he assumed that any reader would feel the sentiment of beauty in the “childlike confidence and innocence” of the girl and in “the father's stern courage and affection.” When poetry is judged simplistically by the sentiments it expresses, critical standards are disallowed. Poe was more effective when he examined Brainard's poems by his rules.

Because in this review Poe's argument, based as it is upon psychological assumptions no longer considered valid, obscures the aesthetic principles that he advanced, it will be helpful to summarize his conclusions, which are implied if not always stated: 1) Art is a means of gratifying a natural and irrepressible human need for aesthetic experience. 2) The gratification of this need is formative in that it reinforces our sense of the harmonious. 3) Overt statement of any kind of truth is inappropriate in poetry, since precepts or facts may be more clearly communicated in prose. 4) Feelings that inflame or disgust are inappropriate in poetry.

Of these principles only the last is questionable, and eventually Poe recognized the seriousness of the limitation. Some years later he defined the imaginative process in such a way as to allow it to include the deformed. Yet this was in theory alone. Ordinarily Poe restricted the artist to the use of conventionally poetic raw materials. This was his greatest weakness as an apologist for poetry. He could find value only in the way poetry made us feel. Even if we grant that in his own fictions he was able to locate a form of truth in myth, he was able to justify the poetic enterprise to his public only by severe reductionism. To an audience still indignant at the “atheist” school of Shelley and perplexed by the obscurities of Coleridge, it was necessary for him to use the proofs of science and [page 314:] common sense. The enemy, Poe had said in “The Colloquy,” was the scientific reason; but in his reviews he infiltrated the ranks of the enemy in the service of art. Poe called his theoretical pronouncements from this time forward the “commonest of common sense,” and it is difficult to understand his approach as anything other than a strategy of defense. It required him to repudiate Coleridge, at least superficially, and eventually to dispense with Schlegel and to speak pejoratively of Shelley's “wild abandon.”

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 297:]

1.  See Marvin Laser, “The Growth and Structure of Poe's Concept of Beauty,” 69-84.

2.  Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern (1811) had been translated into English by J. G. Lockhart in 1818. The following quotation is taken from Lecture XII.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 298:]

3.  Works, XI, 68-85.

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4.  Kames did not ban didacticism from poetry, but he assumed that prose was a more natural form of discourse because it was “not confined to precise rules.” The “chief end” of prose was instruction, Karnes wrote, and it should be valued accordingly. Using the same metaphor Poe used, Kames argued that we should not undervalue prose because it was in a “plainer dress.” Elements of Criticism, 291. Poe simply pressed the distinction by making the end govern the means, whereas Kames, who exhibited a neoclassic concern for the utility of art, allowed the artist the Horatian double motive of pleasing and instructing.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 300:]

5.  Tate, “Tension in Poetry,” in Reason in Madness (New York, 1941), 62-81.

6.  Wheelwright, “Poetry, Myth, and Reality,” in Allen Tate (ed.), The Language of Poetry (Princeton, 1942), 10.

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7.  See Chapter I, Section 2, of this book for the pertinent historical discussion.

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8.  Essays on Taste, 453-54.

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9.  For a discussion of the transcendental view of the artist as redeemer, see Morse Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision (New York, 1962), 163-226 passim.

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10.  The text in Works omits the very important statement in this quotation that a poet may make new combinations “among those forms of beauty which already exist.” Without this choice, the poet is limited to previous works as a source for his materials.

11.  Poe had first quoted Bielfeld in a footnote in his review of Drake and Halleck. See Works, VIII, 283. He had also paraphrased Coleridge in the same note without perceiving what later he took to be a contradiction. In his review of Alciphron, however, he quoted Bielfeld again in order to refute Coleridge's description of imaginative creativity. Ibid., X, 62.

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12.  Ibid., IV, 200-12.

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13.  Leo Marx mentioned Poe only once in his provocative study of the reaction of the American romantics to the machine, yet his discussion applies as well to Poe as it does to Hawthorne and Melville, provided that it is limited to Poe's creative work. See especially the discussion of Hawthorne's “Ethan Brand,” in Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Galaxy ed.; New York, 1967), 265-77. Like Hawthorne, Poe took the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge as unpardonable sin and found value in “pastoral harmony,” but perhaps even more clearly than Hawthorne, Poe realized that a restoration of the pastoral state would require a “reversal of history.” As was observed in the first chapter of this study, Poe's version of the pastoral in “The Domain of Arnheim” owes a great deal to his Southern origin.

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14.  Poe may have derived this test from Blair's Lectures. At least they used the same term, “province,” to describe the subject matter of literature. Blair cited the separation of poetry from other genres as historical fact. It no longer embraced history, philosophy, and persuasion (oratory) but was a “separate art, calculated chiefly to please, and confined generally to such subjects as related to the imagination and passions.” Lectures, II, 322. Blair took it for granted that an author who wished to communicate facts or concepts would use prose and that anyone wishing to persuade would compose an oration. The “province” of poetry to Blair as to Poe was defined by the taste, and Blair, like Poe, thought instruction secondary: “ ... the primary aim of a Poet is to please, and to move; and, therefore, it is to the Imagination, and the Passions, that he speaks. He may, and he ought to have it in his view, to instruct, and to reform; but it is indirectly, and by pleasing and moving, that he accomplishes this end.” Ibid., 312. Poe's “heresy of the didactic” only states in more emphatic terms a commonplace of criticism, and, as his reference to “ordinary opinion” in support of his view indicates (“Nor is this idea so much at variance with ordinary opinion as, at first sight, it may appear”), he was catering to the common sense of his reader.

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15.  An extremely able exposition of Poe's aesthetic moralism appeared as I was preparing to send the final revision of this study to the press. Joseph J. Moldenhauer has properly taken account of Poe's use of psychology in his assessment of the way in which Poe considered taste productive of virtue; and though he has ignored the background of Poe's concepts in eighteenth-century taste psychology, his conclusions are the same as my own. I disagree in some respects with his application of Poe's central concept to the short tale, but, unfortunately, the necessities of meeting a deadline prevent me from what, in view of Mr. Moldenhauer's amassed evidence, would have to be an elaborate attempt at a refutation of the point that to Poe unity is both death and art. Philosophically and psychologically, the equation is valid, but I consider it alien to Poe's premises of composition. It must be taken as an unconscious predisposition toward Thanatos on Poe's part. See Moldenhauer, “Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections Between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision,” PMLA, LXXXIII (1968), 284-97.