Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “Politics and Poetry: The Problem of Meaning,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 329-347 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 329:]

XIV  •  Politics and Poetry

The Problem of Meaning

 

THE reviews of Longfellow and Hawthorne were Poe's most impressive theoretical statements during his editorship of Graham's Magazine. From January through May of 1842 he had made an attempt to validate the role of the critic, the function of poetry, and the right of the short tale to be considered as an art form; but his most characteristic reviews, as distinguished from his statements of theory, had been those of Brainard and Dickens. In the first he had demonstrated the faults of Brainard's verse by using conventional rules of rhetoric; in the second he had attempted to show that a good novel could have been better had the author made use of a sound method to implement his natural genius. Genius, in Poe's view, did not automatically produce perfection.

Poe's connection with Graham's Magazine was severed probably around the first of April, 1842; and the criticism in the May number was his last in the journal that represented editorial prerogative. From that time on be was a contributor, not an editor. The review of Zanoni in the June number was included by James A. Harrison in Poe's Works, but Poe indignantly denied its authorship in a letter to his friend Joseph E. Snodgrass.(1) His post at Graham's was taken by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, whose anthology, The Poets and Poetry of America, was reviewed in the June issue. Griswold was hired at a larger salary than that which Poe had received, but the story that he was employed without Poe's knowledge and that Poe walked in one day to find Griswold in the editor's chair is not true, although it has been revived recently.(2) The reasons for Poe's [page 330:] resignation are obscure, but they probably had to do with his desire to establish his own magazine. He had hoped that Graham would back him, but, since Graham refused, Poe sought other backers and alleged that his employer had held out false hopes of support.(3) At any rate Poe did resign from the best post he had ever had.

In September of 1842 Poe wrote to his friend Frederick Thomas stating that Graham had made him a good offer to return, not being “especially pleased” with Griswold. For the moment Poe considered the proposition seriously and even said that if he did return he would try “to bring about some improvements in the general appearance of the Magazine, & above all, to get rid of the quackery which now infects it.”(4) He also told Thomas that Griswold had tried to bribe him into writing a favorable review of The Poets and Poetry of America by promising to guarantee the publication of the review. Poe did write the review, but he claimed to have written it “precisely as I would have written it under ordinary circumstances.” Then Poe boasted that Griswold did not dare read the review in Poe's presence and that he had serious doubts that [page 331:] Griswold would publish it once he inspected its contents. The review appeared in the Boston Miscellany in November, and it should not have made Griswold angry unless he thought he had purchased unqualified commendation. Griswold's extreme hostility toward Poe in later years should not have been inspired by this particular review,(5) and the matter is mentioned here only to indicate that Poe's privately expressed opinion of a work or an author was not always duplicated in his reviews. He was a journalist out of work, and he had to live on his sales. The contempt of Griswold that his letters reveal might have cost him the opportunity to publish in Graham's if it had appeared in his reviews. As it was, he continued to publish occasionally in the journal for the next few years. Poe was courageous and frequently vitriolic, but sometimes he had to restrain himself because of financial necessity. Undoubtedly this was one of the reasons he wanted his own magazine, so that he would not have to cater to editors and literary cliques who could cut off his income if they were offended.

One other review Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1842 is worth attentions.(6) It shows him descending from the high theoretical plane of the review of Longfellow in order to examine the means by which ordinary poetry could succeed or fail. He had written a harsh review of Rufus Dawes for Burton in 1839, but Burton [page 332:] had not published it. Possibly the review in Graham's was the old one, revised for the occasion. If Poe revised it, he removed very little of its bite. His strategy was his customary one of asserting that the poet in question had a high reputation and then demonstrating by analysis that he did not deserve it. But before he devoted himself to the destruction of Dawes, he made some generalizations that could surprise anyone who had read no more of Poe's criticism than the review of Longfellow's Ballads and his lecture “The Poetic Principle.” In his theoretical statements he asserted that the value of poetry was in the glimpses it afforded of a perfect beauty beyond appearances. As a practicing critic, however, Poe was insistent that the poet's vision was valueless unless it was communicated, and that communication required method: “The wildest and most erratic effusion of the Muse, not utterly worthless, will be found more or less indebted to method for whatever of value it embodies; and we shall discover, conversely, that, in any analysis of even the wildest effusion, we labor without method only to labor without end.”

Difficulties, Poe affirmed, did not spring from the principles upon which composition and criticism were based, because these principles were “founded in the unerring instincts of nature” and were “enduring and immutable.” Difficulty in composition or in analysis came from a faulty application of those principles; hence a knowledge of method was indispensable. Using the correct method, a critic would have no difficulty in demonstrating the good or bad qualities of a particular poem, and, furthermore, he would be able to correct the errors of the poet himself, which Poe immediately proceeded to do in the case of Rufus Dawes.

Dawes's longest poem, “Geraldine,” Poe asserted, was a “servile imitation” of Byron's Don Juan. Imitation itself was a serious error, because it deprived the poet of a chance for originality, but even more serious was tactless imitation. Dawes imitated Byron's method — systematic digression — but Byron knew the limits of digression and used it purposefully. Dawes did not know what he was doing, and the result was “a mere mass of irrelevancy, amid the mad farrago of which we detect with difficulty even the faintest [page 333:] vestige of a narrative.” To prove his point Poe made one of his devastating satirical summaries of the narrative, quoting lines occasionally either to ridicule their sense or to parody their style. Frequently he used prose paraphrase to show that the quoted passages were logically absurd. “It is impossible,” Poe wrote, “to put the latter portion of it [the stanza quoted] into intelligible prose.”

Why should a poem, we are entitled to ask by Poe's own criteria, be reducible to prose? He had stated in his review of Longfellow's Ballads that nothing which could be better communicated by prose should be handled in verse. The contradiction can be resolved if we note the kind of poem that Poe was examining. “Geraldine” is a narrative poem; hence it should have an intelligible sequence of events. If in a narrative poem extended metaphors or conceits are used, they should be analyzable in terms of what the poem has to say — its total import. If they are not connected with the narrative meaning, then they represent pointless difficulties for the reader. Poe quoted case after case to prove that the entire narrative was “pervaded by unintelligibility.”

Remembering Poe's review of Morris, we will understand that he allowed a lyric poem a certain license. Since its aim was to evoke the aesthetic response and not to tell a story, it could be forgiven for some of the obscurity caused by difficult conceits and metaphors. A narrative, on the other hand, should be judged at least in part by its story value. “Simplicity, perspicuity, and vigor, or a well-disciplined ornateness of language, have done wonders for the reputation of many a writer really deficient in the higher and more essential qualities of the Muse. But even upon these minor points of manner our poet has not even the shadow of a shadow to sustain him.” It is evident that in demanding simplicity and clarity Poe was invoking what he would have called the “lower qualities” of the Muse, the ability to tell a story in verse. There was no point in judging Dawes by any higher standard. Sic transit Rufus Dawes.

Although it is not readily apparent from his reviews, Poe did not have the highest regard for narrative poems, either epic or romance. He wrote to James Russell Lowell in 1843 saying that the highest poetry must “eschew narrative,” because the merely narrative portions [page 334:] were prosaic.(7) This is the reason why he put Dawes's poem to the test of a prose paraphrase. A narrative poem could be reduced to prose, in Poe's opinion, and its principles of composition were scarcely different from those of the tale. It should have a unified effect; there should be an undercurrent of meaning that was not too obscure for comprehension; and the narrative movement should show the connectedness of a good plot. In such a poem clarity and orderly development were essential.

2

Poe's personal difficulties during the remainder of 1842 and through 1843 and 1844 are not the concern of this study but will be summarized briefly to indicate the conditions under which he published a few reviews as a free-lance journalist. He was, of course, without a regular salary and had to support himself by writing. He even tried through Frederick Thomas and through Rob Tyler, a minor poet who was also the son of President Tyler, to obtain a sinecure at the Philadelphia Custom House, but he did not succeed. In 1843 he seemed confident that at last his own projected magazine, now to be called the Stylus, would come into being. He wrote Thomas that he had secured a partner with ample capital and that he himself would have “the entire control of editorial conduct,” which of course was what he had always wanted. The backer was one Thomas C. Clarke,(8) but either the capital was insufficient or badly managed, because Poe continued trying to interest President Tyler in his project. Since both Clarke and Poe apparently felt that political patronage was necessary, for a time Poe professed a great interest in Whig politics. He even wrote to Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers, whose support he was also soliciting, that he was assured of government patronage if he admitted “occasional articles” in support of the administration.(9) In March of 1843 it was [page 335:] arranged for Poe to go to Washington, make some lectures, visit various government departments, and have an audience with the President. Poe, Clarke, and Poe's friends Frederick Thomas and Jesse E. Dow were very optimistic about his prospects. Poe wrote Clarke from Washington on March 11 that he believed that he was making a “sensation which will tend to the benefit of the magazine.”(10) Unfortunately he made too much of a sensation. His Washington indiscretions ended his chances for patronage, though he and his friends continued to seek it. The agreement with Clarke was dropped,(11) but throughout the remainder of the year Poe kept alive his own hopes for publishing his magazine.

It became increasingly apparent, however, that there was nothing for Poe in Philadelphia, unless he returned to Graham's. By early 1844 he decided to go to New York, hoping to have better luck than he had had in 1837. In an effort to establish connections in New York, he began to court the politico-literary group headed by Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews. Toward this end he wrote a conciliatory letter in March of 1844 to Mathews, whose Wakondah he had tomahawked in Graham's in 1842. Professor Quinn has called this letter a “manly apology,”(12) but Poe was not ordinarily given to apologies, manly or otherwise. In the letter Poe described his own review as “impudent and flippant.”(13) This it was, but it was also a trenchant condemnation of a worthless poem. Poe even went so far as to praise Mathews’ novel, The Adventures of Puffer Hopkins, which he had previously disposed of with a slightly veiled sneer.(14) The apology was only the desperate [page 336:] expedient of a man out of work and with a sick wife to gain allies who would support him against Lewis Gaylord Clark. Poe had to suppress his pride, repudiate his own opinions, and mollify Mathews out of necessity.

Poe moved to New York in April of 1844, and his work from this time on rarely approached the standards he had called for in Graham's. Virginia's worsening condition, journalistic controversy, poverty and overwork, together with his own declining energies, resulted in inferior critiques, in which he often repeated earlier reviews or indulged in pointless vituperation. Of Poe's later criticism only those reviews which illustrate shifts of emphasis in his literary theories or changes in his tactics will be examined. He did engage in a new enterprise, however; he reviewed live drama, and these reviews too will be examined.

3

Poe published a number of reviews between the time of his resignation from Graham's in 1842 and his joining the staff of the Broadway Journal in 1845. His March, 1843, review of Thomas Ward,(15) a minor poet who published in Clark's Knickerbocker, is in Poe's satirical manner, what he called his “funny” criticism, but it does analyze the defects of Ward's poetry according to the rules of rhetoric. Mixed metaphors, lapses from good taste, inappropriate language, shifts of tone, and unpronounceable consonant combinations were Ward's defects. Most damaging of all in Poe's opinion was Ward's attempt to communicate matters in poetry that should have been confined to prose: “He descends into mere meteorology — into the uses and general philosophy of rain, &c. ...” However “funny” Poe's review may be, he employed his usual criteria for condemnation, and his animus against the Knickerbocker shows itself only at the end of the review, where he announced that the Whig journal had praised and published an incompetent poet.

In August of 1843 Poe reviewed the poetry of William Ellery [page 337:] Channing,(16) nephew of the famous Unitarian minister of the same name and an inferior poet whose style Thoreau had described as “sublimo-slipshod.” Poe's prejudice against New England was to become more obvious and it is possible that in this review he was identifying himself with the New Yorkers, who sneered at the transcendentalists. At any rate Poe was to rail against the obscure and the metaphysical as stridently as did the Knickerbocker and the American Review, both Whig publications. Certainly Poe was not catering to the prejudices of his enemies — it would have been impossible for him to curry favor from Lewis Gaylord Clark — but from 1842 on Poe did show a conservative strain in his literary opinions. He assailed “undue profundity” and objected to difficult symbols and recondite metaphors.

In the case of Channing, Poe found that the New Englander erred in imitating Tennyson's “quaintness.” Quaintness, Poe affirmed occasionally, could be an adjunct to the beautiful, but it should not be used excessively. Tennyson could be quaint, but he was never obscure. A more grievous error lay in Channing's imitation of the obscurities of Carlyle. Carlyle was an ass, Poe said, because he took all possible pains to keep himself from being understood. Channing in turn had tried to set himself up as “a poet of unusual depth” by imitating Carlyle. Such an attempt alone would be enough to prove that Channing was no poet, but he had also used the loosest of rhythms. It was impossible to scan his lines, and his grammar was far from perfect.

Poe ended the review with a satirical diatribe accusing Channing of borrowing the fame of his illustrious uncle to gull the public; but one suspects that not the least of Channing's faults was his affiliation with the transcendentalists. Poe associated him ironically with the “logic” of Emerson and the “Orphicism” of Bronson Alcott. Poe's quarrel with New England and especially with the transcendentalists was to grow, and no unprejudiced judgment of their writings could be expected in his reviews. [page 338:]

In September, Poe appeared again in Graham's with an essay on Fitz-Greene Halleck,(17) whom he had previously examined in the Messenger in 1836. Poe used the essay to introduce a discussion of metrics. ‘William Cullen Bryant had reviewed his friend Halleck favorably and had praised his metrical skill. As far back as the 1820's Bryant had argued for trisyllabic substitutions in iambic verse to relieve the monotony of the iambic measure. Therefore Bryant considered it a merit when Halleck introduced occasional roughness in his meter. Poe, with his predilection for smoothly fluent verse, challenged Bryant immediately. Monotony was not relieved by deliberate roughness, Poe claimed, but by discords. These discords “affect only the time — the harmony — of the rhythm, and never interfere ... with its smoothness or melody. The best discord is the smoothest.”

To Poe the supreme test of the quality of versification was ease of pronunciation. Surprisingly, however, he admitted that the sense of a poetic passage was its most important element. If there was a choice between sound and sense, it was the sound which had to go. Nevertheless, a skillful poet should not find it necessary to make such a choice. The colloquial emphasis necessary for a natural reading should always tally with the chosen rhythm, and in this Halleck had failed. It was impossible to give a natural reading to some of his lines. The remainder of Poe's essay was adapted from his Messenger review and advanced no new opinions. If journalistic politics were involved, the evidence is slight. Bryant was a prominent New York Democrat, and Halleck had virtually retired from writing. It is likely that Poe, having become aware of Bryant's metrical theories, seized the opportunity to publicize his own. In his review of Bryant in 1837, published in the Messenger, Poe gave no indication that he knew of the elder poet's advocacy of trisyllabic substitution in iambic verse, so he may have considered it necessary in the 1843 essay to make the proper discriminations. [page 339:]

Otherwise, the public might have assumed that he was merely following the lead of Bryant, then considered America's foremost prosodist.

4

Poe's reviews during 1843 and 1844 have literary significance only as he continued to address himself to the problem of meaning, and they reveal various reallocations of emphasis as he attempted to accommodate conceptual value to forms designed to please. But these reviews must also be viewed in relation to his efforts to survive in journalism. Only necessity can explain one of the strangest reviews, in respect to his usual theories and practices, that he ever wrote. In March of 1844 Poe published in Graham's a long review of Orion,(18) an epic by the British poet Richard Hengist Horne. Horne was affiliated with the Spasmodic School of poets, who were strongly influenced by Byron and Shelley.(19) It is possible that Poe was attracted to Hornme because he believed, along with the Spasmodics, that the divinely inspired poet had a right to indulge in egocentricity and self-contemplation. As a younger man Poe himself had displayed these attitudes, but they had not proved to be viable in the hard world of competitive journalism, and they were especially unwelcome among those conservative gentlemen, the New York Whigs. Philip J. Bailey, one of the Spasmodics, had published in 1839 an epic-drama called Festus, which had annoyed the Whig American Review with its obscure symbols and analogies.(20) The Spasmodics were prone to use metaphors, conceits, and extended analogies in abundance. Furthermore, none of them [page 340:] seemed capable of constructing a poetic whole. Undisciplined and careless, they often neglected what Poe called the unity of effect in order to exploit feelings quite at variance with the dominant mood of the poem. When they were good, they were good only in selected passages. In short, Poe should have been as severe with Horne as the American Review was with Bailey, even more severe, because Orion purported to be an epic. Its purpose was truth, and its method was allegorical.

Poe's review can possibly be explained by the maneuvering he was engaged in at the time. He wrote to Cornelius Mathews for the address of Mathews’ “friend” Horne, stating that he wished to send Horne a “letter and a small parcel.”(21) The parcel was Poe's tale “The Spectacles,” which he wanted Horne to publish in England. Mathews, apparently on his own initiative, sent Horne a copy of Graham's containing Poe's review, and though Horne did not agree with Poe's strictures, he felt that since they appeared “amidst such high praise” it would be ungrateful of him to attempt to justify himself in detail. Horne offered to send Poe copies of his own works and expressed his “obligations to the boldness and handsomeness of American criticism,”(22) meaning Poe's.

It is obvious that Poe was attempting to ingratiate himself with Horne. He should have condemned Orion out of hand because it violated all of his own rules. He admitted this (even quoting from his review of Longfellow's Ballads) to the effect that truth had no place in a poem. Then, rather than concede directly that Horne was in business as a transcendental seer, he attacked Horne's admirers and burlesqued a “transcendental” review — one that might have been written by a Spasmodic:

Poe's tactics in this burlesque are clever. He called the alleged reviewer an Orphicist, thus associating him with Bronson Alcott, at least to the American mind, but perhaps reminding erudite readers of the ancient Orphic doctrine that time produced an egg from which the gods proceeded. The Orphic religion was ecstatic and transcendental, affirming that the progress of time would liberate man from his earthborn limitations. The modern Orphicist also believed in the progressive liberation of the soul, and Horne's poem used the ancient myth of Orion to affirm the necessity of progress. Atypical of the nineteenth century in his denial of progress, Poe also satirized the transcendentalists by burlesquing a poet-prophet who was made to speak as follows: “am a SEER. My IDEA — the idea which by providence I am especially commissioned to evolve — is one so vast — so novel — that ordinary words, in ordinary collocations, will be insufficient for its comfortable evolution.’ (24) Then Poe proceeded to chastise the hypothetical seer with his customary sarcasm:

While mounting this attack upon the transcendentalists in the name of common sense and clear English, Poe managed to apologize for Horne by alleging that the British writer was “unhappily infected with the customary cant of the day — the cant of the [page 342:] muddle-pates who dishonor a profound and ennobling philosophy by styling themselves transcendentalists.”(26) Horne had been infected, Poe went on to say, only because sensitive and imaginative intellects were drawn toward mysticism. The poetic intellect was drawn toward the mystic because the unknown and the obscure were associated with the sublime, a legitimate object of poetry. Thus Horne, surrounded by a “junto of dreamers” with intellects far inferior to his own, had fallen into the error of thinking that “a poem, whose single object is the creation of Beauty — the novel collocation of old forms of the Beautiful and of the Sublime — could be advanced by the abstractions of a maudlin philosophy.”(27)

And having been taken in by the muddle-headed dreamers, Horne did not do justice to his own high powers by composing a “poem written solely for the poem's sake.” Instead he had composed an allegory, “with an under and upper current of meaning.” Four years earlier, in his review of Alciphron, Poe had said that the presence of a mystic undercurrent of meaning was the mark of an imaginative poem. Had he changed his mind? Probably not. Poe occasionally invented rules to defend poems he liked, and this may have been the case with Alciphron, but his seeming shift of position was occasioned by the nature of the poems he was reviewing. As has already been indicated, Poe did not regard narrative as the highest form of poetry. Both Alciphron and Orion are narrative poems. Given the narrative form, however, there must be an infusion of thought to prevent it from being a barren account of events. Thought, merely suggested, formed the undercurrent of meaning. If the meaning were too obvious, then the story element was lost, but fortunately Horne was gifted with a poetic sense which “softened this allegory ... to keep it ... well subject to the ostensible narrative.” Whenever his desire to enforce his allegorical message overpowered Horne's poetic sense, the result was the kind of “bombast, rigmarole, and mystification” to be found in the last “paragraph” of the poem.(28)

Thus, throughout the entire first part of his review Poe maintained his theoretical position. The unusual aspect of the critique is [page 343:] that he made excuses for Horne as a man of genius who had fallen into error. Then he proceeded to examine Horne's poem and found passages in it to which he gave the most extravagant praise he ever tendered any author:

By this statement we see that Poe did not object indiscriminately to meaning, particularly in a narrative poem which was worthless without it, but he did specify the mode by which it should be rendered. The tamed stag in Horne's poem symbolizes the subduing of the animal nature of Orion by love. Yet Poe admitted that Horne was by no means successful in his method, for the reader “is always pausing, amid poetical beauties, in the expectation of detecting among them some philosophical, allegorical moral.” The burden of a search for an allegorical thesis, Poe thought, prevented the reader from feeling the unique effect of poetry.(30) All of Horne's errors sprang from his original error of [page 344:] conception, when he chose truth instead of beauty as his object. This was unfortunate, because “in all that regards the loftiest and holiest attributes of the true Poetry, ‘Orion’ has never been excelled.” Indeed, Poe continued, “we feel strongly inclined to say that it has never been equaled. Its imagination — that quality which is all in all — is of the most refined — the most elevating — the most august character.”(31) High praise indeed for a transcendental allegorist! But Poe had his reasons for not attacking Horne too ferociously, and he had preserved his standards by pointing out both the beauties and the faults of the poem. Furthermore, although he shared the distaste for allegory which was common among romantic symbolists, Poe's objection was to the genre as genre. When he was required to review an allegory, he examined it as a poem according to his rules for the management of meaning.

These rules had been stated concisely some months earlier in Poe's review of “Death; or Medorus’ Dream,” an allegorical poem by Robert Tyler.

In contrast to Orion, in which the allegorical meaning was subordinated, Tyler made it into the “main thesis,” and Poe condemned the poem without reservation. The allegorical import was “handled in the crudest, most inartificial, and most commonplace manner.” The only excuse that Poe could make for the poem was that it was intended as “a philosophical essay in verse,” but this was really no excuse because there should be “no such anomalies.” Thus, in terms of its object and its technique, “Death” was indefensible; but after making this judgment Poe proceeded, just as he had in his review of Orion, to examine the poem in detail, pointing out its few excellences and its many defects.

The relative severity of Poe's criticism of the poem of Robert Tyler, the President's son, could be explained on the grounds that the Tylers had disappointed him. Yet to claim that Poe was seeking revenge would not be fair. He used precisely the same method in reviewing Horne. By Poe's rules for the management of meaning, Orion was superior to “Death,” and it was a far better poem in general. Since Poe usually reserved his extravagant praise for poets like Keats and Shelley, however, he may be suspected of lavishing superlatives upon Horne in order to remove the sting of his satire against Horne's admirers. He wanted an English audience, and for a time it appeared that Horne could help him.

5

The review of Orion was the last criticism of any importance that Poe wrote for Graham, and despite any element of self-serving it may have had, it shows that he was still concerned with the problem of symbolic technique. This review, read along with the reviews of Alciphron, Twice-Told Tales, and “Death,” express just about all that Poe had to say about narrative import. It is clear that [page 346:] to Poe's mind little pleasure could be gained from a tale or poem whose chief object was to make one think, yet meaning was necessary to prevent a narrative from being a barren sequence of events. The only way to manage meaning in this form, he concluded, was to allow an occasional symbolic suggestion. If this suggestiveness were systematic enough to overpower the story element, then the narrative became allegory, disgusting, Poe had said, to every man of taste. If his own tales yield a systematic symbolic import, it would appear that he could not have been fully aware of it, for he liked tales of effect, and certainly he wrote them. Some have considered Poe's tales of terror as mechanical psychodramas devised to stimulate sensation, yet Poe was a better artist than his theory implies, or at least he appears to be according to modern methods of exegesis.

One other review published in 1844 deserves comment, not because it was first-rate criticism but because Poe picked up a topic he had introduced gratuitously in the review of Orion and enlarged it. For the first time he explained why he considered passion discordant with poetry. The poems of Mrs. Amelia Welby were not worth extended analysis, but they did give Poe an opportunity to explain his position: “True passion is prosaic — homely. Any strong mental emotion stimulates all the mental faculties; thus grief the imagination: but in proportion as the effect is strengthened, the cause surceases. The excited fancy triumphs — the grief is subdued — chastened — is not longer grief. In this mood we are poetic, and it is clear that a poem now written will be poetic in the exact ratio of its dispassion. A passionate poem is a contradiction in terms.”(33)

This insight into the creative process shows that Poe, for all of the mechanistic procedures he occasionally recommended, knew what happened in an artist's mind in the act of composition. Unquestionably he had learned something from Coleridge's account of the way the imagination was subjected to the artist's will so that the strong feeling that was the subject did not dominate the expression of the subject. If it did, the moans or cries which are normal manifestations of intense feeling would be proper in a poem. [page 347:]

Poe also knew, as did Wordsworth and Coleridge, that the presence of metrical form, one could say any artistic form, changed the expression of intense feeling into an expression of something else. Wordsworth, thinking in terms of his audience, had said that the regularity of metrical form subdued painful feelings and provided the necessary pleasure that art was supposed to produce.(34) Coleridge, shifting the emphasis to the poet's mind, had described the way in which the imaginative process separated the poet's feelings from those which he analyzed and depicted. One of the marks of poetic genius, Coleridge wrote, was the “alienation, and ... the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst.”(35) Poe's position was similar. It prefigured what T. S. Eliot said in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that it was not the intensity of the feelings but the intensity of the artistic process that was significant. If it was still necessary in 1917 to make such a statement, we can estimate the persistence of the romantic notion that feeling was all that counted.

Poe had previously banned passion from poetry on the ground stated in the first sentence of the quotation above: that it was “prosaic — homely,” unsuited to the ideal. This is naïve aesthetics and, if taken literally, means that a poet can never write about any intense feeling, but when Poe finally explained that a poem could not imitate passion directly because the activity of the imagination transformed the passion into something else, his psychology of art was sound. The poetic mood and the passionate mood are incompatible. It may be noted that Poe's description of what happens in the poet's mind is not equivalent to Wordsworth's “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Instead, it has to do with the necessary activity of the imagination in transforming natural expression into artistic expression. By such a means, he would invalidate the cries of simulated anguish all too prevalent in inferior romantic verse. Mrs. Welby's verse, Poe explained, would usually be taken as passionate verse because of her elegiac subjects. Elegies, he continued, [page 348:] should not treat grief directly, but should either express melancholy regret “interwoven with a pleasant sense of the natural loveliness surrounding the lost in the tomb ... or dwell purely on the beauty (moral or physical) of the departed — or, better still, utter the notes of triumph.” This “latter idea,” Poe claimed, he had used “in some verses which I have called ‘Lenore.’ “(36)

Poe drew upon the conventions of the elegy, of course, but his psychological principle is broader than the specific illustration of the moment. It is an apt description of the way in which the imagination transforms natural emotion into aesthetic feeling. That Poe intended such an interpretation is revealed by a generalization: “the higher order of genius should, and will combine the original with that which is natural — not in the vulgar sense, ... but in the artistic sense, which has reference to the general intention of Nature.” His idiom is that of the eighteenth century and can mean only that the artist purifies or exalts nature, a commonplace of eighteenth-century aesthetics. He meant this, but also something more, and we can understand what else he required by examining his concept of originality in the context of this review. He found fault with Mrs. Welby's poems, not because they reverberated with howls of anguish, but because her elegies simply served up the conventional sources of melancholy — the night, the grave, the roses and forget-me-nots. All of these are natural as the furniture of melancholy, appropriate in their associative value, but they are unoriginal. The “general intention of Nature” has to do with the power of [page 349:] the imagination, an aspect of human nature, to transform natural materials, which are inevitably commonplace, into art by a new or original mode of expression. A poet can “rejuvenate” the “common fancies” by “grace of expression, and melody of rhythm.” In other words, it is the artistic process which transforms nature. When Poe referred to the “intention” of nature in the context of the psychology of art, he meant the way in which nature intended the mind of the artist to work.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 329:]

1.  June 4, 1842, in Letters, I, 201-203. In this letter Poe composed a virulent repudiation to be published in Snodgrass’ magazine, together with a statement that Poe had “retired” from Graham's. The repudiation was to appear as if it were an editorial comment by Snodgrass himself.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 329, running to the bottom of page 330:]

2.  See William Bittner, Poe: A Biography (Boston, 1963), for a repetition of this story. Actually Poe had retired from Graham's early in April, and [page 330:] Graham did not contact Griswold until April 20. Griswold began work on the magazine early in May. This information is documented in Letters, I, 203 n., and in Hull, “A Canon,” 292-93.

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3.  Poe wrote to Snodgrass on September 19, 1841, saying that it was “not impossible that Graham will join me in The ‘Penn.’ ” Letters, I, 183. In a letter to Frederick Thomas dated October 27, 1841, he said that “Graham holds out a hope of his joining me in July.” Ibid., 185. By February 3, 1842, Poe was beginning to find fault with Graham and with the magazine itself. Poe to Thomas, ibid., 192. In a letter to Thomas dated May 25, 1842, Poe gave as his reason for resigning his “disgust with the namby-pamby character of the Magazine — a character which it was impossible to eradicate — I allude to the contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales.” Ibid., 197. Obviously Poe could not be content with what was essentially a family magazine, although one of very high quality. In a letter to David Bryan, dated July 6, 1842, Poe claimed that he had remained with Graham only because the publisher had promised to help him start the Penn, Poe's projected literary magazine, within a year. Poe claimed to have had a subscription list of a thousand to start with. Ibid., 205. For all of Poe's wishful thinking, it seems unlikely that Graham would have wanted to back a magazine that would be at least in partial competition with his own.

4.  Ibid., 211-12.

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5.  The virulent review that undoubtedly had something to do with Griswold's malice toward Poe appeared on January 28, 1843, in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum. It is probably not by Poe, although he may have had a hand in it. See Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 354 n. Both the Boston Miscellany review and the Saturday Museum review are printed in Works, XI, 147-60, 220-43. The first is a fair review in Poe's judicious manner; the second is a viciously sarcastic attack in which invective is allowed to supplant wit. It does repeat some of Poe's principles, but it is doubtful that even in 1843 Poe would have claimed that Longfellow was the best poet in America and that his poems were full of “ideality.”

6.  “The Poetry of Rufus Dawes — A Retrospective Criticism,” in Works, XI, 131-47. In a letter to me listing Poe's contributions to Graham's, Professor T. O. Mabbott failed to include this review, but I agree with Hull and others that it is Poe's. The review refers specifically to Poe's “A Chapter on Autography” as written by “ourselves,” and it seems unlikely that Charles J. Peterson, who also reviewed for Graham, would have taken such a liberty, even though Graham had persuaded Poe to “speak well” of Peterson in the “Autography.”

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7.  October 19, 1843, in Letters, I, 238-39.

8.  Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 368-70, describes the agreement between Clarke and Poe.

9.  September 27, 1842, in Letters, I, 214-16.

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10.  Ibid., 227.

11.  See Poe to James Russell Lowell, June 20, 1843, ibid., 234.

12.  Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 402.

13.  March 15, 1844, in Letters, I, 245.

14.  Poe mentioned Puffer Hopkins in his review of Wakondah. Perry Miller has described Mathews’ attempt to create a Dickensian picture of New York but declared that the novel “was and is unreadable” (The Raven and the Whale, 93). Poe could scarcely have referred to the novel as admirable, as he did in his letter, without temporarily misplacing his literary conscience. Curiously enough, in 1845 Poe did say that Mathews was unreadable. See “Fifty Suggestions,” Works, XIV, 184-85

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15.  “Our Amateur Poets, No. I — Flaccus,” Works, XI, 160-74.

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16.  “Our Amateur Poets, No. III — William Ellery Channing,” ibid., 174-90.

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17.  Ibid., 190-204. This is not a review but an essay in a series that Graham's was running on various contributors. Poe summarized Halleck's literary career before he disputed Bryant's opinion of Halleck's metrics. The essay concludes with a revised excerpt from Poe's Messenger review of Halleck.

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18.  Ibid., 249-75.

19.  For an account of the Spasmodics and Horne's relationship with the group, see Jerome H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper (Cambridge, 1951), 41-65.

20.  Poe reviewed Festus in the Broadway Journal for September 6, 1845. See Works, XII, 241-42. He confessed, however, that he had not read the entire poem and commented only on the excitement it had aroused: “The poetical and critical world of England were ... violently agitated (in spots) by the eruption of ‘Festus,’ a Vesuvius-cone at least — if not an Aetna — in the literary cosmos.”

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21.  March 15, 1843, in Letters, I, 245.

22.  See Horne to Poe, April 27, 1844, in Works, XVII, 167-69.

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23.  Ibid., XI, 251.

24.  Ibid., 52-53.

25.  Ibid.

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26.  Ibid.

27.  Ibid., 254.

28.  Ibid., 258.

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29.  Ibid., 267-68.

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30.  In this context Poe digressed from his subject in order to discuss the incompatibility of poetry and passion. Ibid., 255. He referred to Coleridge as his authority. To establish the psychological basis of his distinction, he described the “sentiment of the beautiful” as a “divine sixth sense.” Even if his usage is metaphorical, It reminds us of the old description of the taste as an inner sense. Probably Poe's reference to Coleridge was derived from Chapter XV of the Biographia Literaria (II, 15-16), where Coleridge praised Shakespeare's ability to portray animal passion in such a way as to preclude sympathy, maintaining that the poet himself was aloof from the emotions he depicted. In this particular case Coleridge gave a more [page 344:] valid account of the psychological process of composition than did most romantic critics, for Shakespeare did not identify himself with Venus and Adonis but analyzed and depicted their feelings. Coleridge did not declare that passion was alien to poetry but made it subject to the artistic will: “There must be not only a partnership but a union; an interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose.” Ibid., 50. Eventually Poe, as did Coleridge, described the way that raw emotion was transformed into something else by the imaginative process.

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31.  Works, XI, 266. As if this praise were not enough, Poe claimed that Horne's description of the palace of Vulcan was superior to Milton's description of Hell, and he concluded his review with the statement that “every man of genius” would admit Orion “to be one of the noblest, if not the very noblest poetical work of the age.” Ibid., 271, 275. It is not surprising that Horne was pleased with the review.

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32.  Graham's Magazine, XXIII (December, 1843), 320.

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33.  Works, XI, 277.

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34.  The statement is in Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800).

35.  Biographia Literaria, II, 15-16.

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36.  Poe's “Lenore” was published in 1831, and it contains in the last stanza the conventional consolation of an elegy, the “notes of triumph.” It is perhaps significant that this is rare in Poe's verse, and comparatively rare in Southern elegiac laments for beautiful dead women. As a rule, he preferred his first alternative — to interfuse thoughts of beauty, “moral or physical,” with melancholy regrets. Of his poems that may with some latitude be called elegies, “Lenore” is the only one that actually utters “notes of triumph.” “The Raven,” “Ulalume,” and “Annabel Lee” dwell upon the beauty of the dead girl and the anguish of her lover. “To One in Paradise,” written in his youth, is conventionally Byronic in the expression of blighted hopes, but the melancholy lover finds a kind of satisfaction in an aesthetic vision. The loveliness of the dead girl is perpetuated in “ethereal dances” by “eternal streams.”