Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “The Universal Audience,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 350-375 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 350:]

XV  •  The Universal Audience

 

IN April of 1844 Poe and his wife Virginia left for New York and found a place to live in an old and “buggy looking” house at 130 Greenwich Street. He had no salary and depended for his income upon the articles he sold to magazines and newspapers. One outlet was a small newspaper called the Columbia Spy, published in Columbia, Pennsylvania. Poe's letters to the Columbia Spy have little interest for this study except for his reiteration of his high opinion of Orion and a mildly disparaging remark about Nathaniel Parker Willis,(1) from whom he was to receive his first regular employment in New York.

In effect, Poe was the New York correspondent of a small-town newspaper, and most of his letters were designed to give the country people impressions of life in the metropolis. In the meantime he was trying to get his stories and poems published in book form and even sought to have Harper's publish his stories without any royalties.(2) His correspondence during this period indicates that he had never abandoned his hope of starting a magazine of his own. In October, 1844, he wrote to James Russell Lowell, who had been damaged financially in his own abortive publication, the Pioneer, that a coalition of literary men should get together and form a [page 351:] stock company to publish a journal of high quality. Each member would take a hundred dollars’ worth of stock, and each would contribute, if necessary, one article a month.(3) Nothing came of Poe's proposal, and it was necessary for him to find a position in New York. Free-lance journalism was too precarious.(4)

Poe's aunt and mother-in-law, the indefatigable Mrs. Clemm, had come to New York to take care of Virginia, and she took the initiative to set things right. Nathaniel Parker Willis, who had joined with George Pope Morris in reviving the New York Mirror, received a call from Mrs. Clemm, who told him that Poe was ill and in serious financial straits. Had Willis been as vindictive as some of the other authors Poe had reviewed unfavorably, nothing would have come of her plea. In his Messenger days Poe had ridiculed Willis and had charged him with affectation, and one month after he arrived in New York he had said in one of his letters to the Columbia Spy that while Willis was “well-constituted for dazzling the masses — with brilliant agreeable talents,” he had no profundity and no genius. Willis was good-natured enough to accept these strictures without animosity, for he found a place for Poe in spite of the fact, as he revealed some years later, that he “had been led by common report to expect a very capricious attention to his [page 352:] [Poe's] duties, and occasionally a scene of violence and difficulty.” Because he had only the highest admiration for Poe's genius, he would let that “atone for more than ordinary irregularity.”(5)

By October of 1844 Poe had joined the staff of the Mirror, which was published in two formats, the Evening Mirror, a daily, and a supplement called the Weekly Mirror. Poe published in both. It is somewhat ironic that he was now employed by the same journal he had challenged in 1835 with his review of Fay's Norman Leslie. Both Willis and Fay had been associate editors of the journal at that time, and Morris had been the publisher. But apparently Morris was no more disposed than Willis to hold a grudge against Poe, perhaps because Poe had lavishly praised his book of songs in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1839. At any rate, the editorial management of the magazine was now left up to Willis, and Willis did not scruple to make use of Poe's capacity for controversy. He prefaced a series of articles by Poe called “Author's Pay in America” with this comment: “We wish to light beacons for an author's crusade. ... We solemnly summon Edgar Poe to do the devoir of Coeur de Leon — no man's weapon half so trenchant.”(6) Willis intended to get full advertising value from Poe's reputation for being a scathing critic, as is clearly revealed by a notice he published of a lecture Poe was to deliver:

Willis also gave some reinforcement to Poe's plan to establish his own journal, for in January of 1845 he wondered in print why some enterprising New York publisher did not “establish a [page 353:] Monthly Review, devoted exclusively to high critical purpose.” Poe, he continued, “has genius and taste of his own, as well as the necessary science, and the finest discriminative powers; and such a wheel of literature should not be without axle and linch pin.”(8) The statements above were published about the time Poe was preparing to leave the Mirror for the Broadway Journal. If Willis knew of his plans, which was likely, he may have been motivated more by a desire to help Poe than to advertise his own paper. Perhaps it disturbed him to see that “wheel of literature,” Edgar Poe, turning for a daily and weekly newspaper. In later years Willis described Poe's pedestrian position on the paper:

Regardless of the good grace with which he carried out his regular assignments, Poe had little chance to write for the Mirror the kind of reviews he considered valuable. A newspaper column is no place for an extended analysis, but there is room for disparagement. Poe's “Damascene slicing” was displayed in a review of Lowell's Conversations with Some Old Poets and in one of Longfellow's anthologies of neglected poems quaintly entitled The Waif. In spite of the fact that he and Lowell had been friendly and had exchanged favors, Poe deprecated Lowell's ability as a critic, a fact that was not lost on the young New England poet.(10) His review of The Waif intimated that Longfellow, in his capacity as editor, had carefully avoided including in his anthology any poets “who may be supposed especially to interfere with the claims of Mr. Longfellow.” [page 354:] Poe's conclusion was that The Waif was “infected with a moral taint.” In earlier reviews Poe had suggested that Longfellow was imitative to the point of plagiarism, but now he made a more damaging charge. Longfellow's friends took up the challenge, and the “Longfellow War” was on, mostly to Poe's discredit.(11)

Poe's association with the Mirror lasted only from September, 1844, to February, 1845, but during this period he was also writing for other journals, chiefly the Democratic Review. By the time Poe contributed to the Democratic Review, it had relaxed somewhat from its initial position of trying to be a voice for the radical Democrats and was steering a moderate course, but it is doubtful that political affiliation had anything to do with Poe's contributions. He sold what he could where he could. In November of 1844 he began in the Democratic Review a series he called “Marginalia,” allegedly made up of notes he had made while reading books. Actually these notes, as published in the Democratic Review and later in Godey's Lady's Book, Graham's Magazine, and the Southern Literary Messenger contain, in addition to brief statements on various topics, excerpts from his published reviews. In the context of this study the “Marginalia” will not be considered as a separate publication but will be used to extend or qualify statements Poe made in his reviews or his essays. Occasionally an item from the “Marginalia” states in dogmatic terms a position that he had established tentatively elsewhere, and will serve as a clarification of his opinions. He said in his introduction to the series that he was only talking to himself, so it may be supposed that he was being sincere. There is no evidence to the contrary except that some of his notes are plagiarisms.(12) He continued the publication of his “Marginalia” for the rest of his life, the last installment appearing in September of 1849, a month before his death. Poe's financial [page 355:] difficulties made him publish whatever he had at hand, and it is reasonable to suspect that such forced publication was responsible not only for his occasional plagiarism but also for his use of excerpts from previously published reviews. At least we know from the “Marginalia” that Poe thought some of his opinions worth republishing out of the context in which they originally appeared.

Poe was able to leave the Mirror because of a recommendation from Lowell to Charles F. Briggs, editor of the Broadway Journal, a weekly which began publication in January of 1845. Lowell, a friend of Briggs, sent contributions to the new paper and recommended Poe as a contributor,(13) and Poe wrote reviews for the first and second numbers of the Journal while he was still on the staff of the Mirror. Briggs paid him only a dollar a page, however, and if Poe was to work for the paper he had to have more money. Accordingly, in March of 1845 Poe was announced as an assistant editor of the Journal; he was to receive one-third of the editorial profits, the other two-thirds going to Briggs and to Henry C. Watson. Watson was the music critic for the magazine, and Briggs and Poe took care of the other editorial duties. The publisher was John Bisco.

This alliance was a strange one for many reasons. Briggs, who had won local fame with his The Adventures of Harry Franco and Working a Passage (semi-autobiographical novels), had published in Lewis Gaylord Clark's Knickerbocker for many years.(14) Furthermore, Briggs's Knickerbockerish dislike for certain aspects of romanticism that Poe had at one time defended would have been irritating had Poe not begun to have second thoughts about romanticism himself, an attitude which his first reviews in the Broadway Journal reveal. At least his affiliation with Briggs offered him a measure of editorial authority, although Briggs wrote to Lowell that “Poe is only an assistant to me and will in no way interfere with my own way of doing things.” He went on to say that Poe had left the Mirror because “Willis was too Willisy for him.”(15) [page 356:]

Much of Poe's criticism in the Journal sheds light only upon his journalistic wars, but some of his reviews furnish evidence of a change in his literary allegiances and an increasing concern with universal appeal, marked by a growing insistence that a literary work avoid obscurity and profundity. Although while still with Graham's Poe had objected to obscurity, particularly in some of the tales of Hawthorne, the first striking evidence that he had begun to associate this quality with transcendentalism had appeared in his review of Horne's Orion. He continued the attack upon transcendental mysticism in a two-part review in the Broadway Journal of Elizabeth Barrett's The Drama of Exile, published in January, 1845. In reviewing Miss Barrett, Poe was placed in the same peculiar position that he had been in when he reviewed Horne. He had praised Orion extravagantly, but to be consistent he had had to deprecate its length, its didactic purpose, and its occasional obscurity. In The Drama of Exile he could admire certain passages that created what he considered the proper effect by management of rhythm, rhyme, and symbolic suggestiveness, but he deplored the tendency toward allegory, the effort at mysticism, and the disregard of what he considered poetic law. Reviewing Miss Barrett was a delicate problem, because she was a woman. He had just admitted in the November, 1844, installment of the “Marginalia” that “there seems to be but one course for the critic” in reviewing women — “speak if you can commend — be silent, if not; for a woman will never be brought to admit a non-identity between herself and her book. ...”(16) Poe had learned his lesson in 1836 from his tiff with Mrs. Sigourney. Accordingly, he prefaced his review of Miss Barrett by making an apology for treating her as a poet instead of as a mere female. This was a compliment, Poe implied, for he intended to speak the truth, which no other American reviewer had done.(17)

Miss Barrett had announced in a prefatory note that The Drama of Exile, though based upon the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, had been modeled after Greek tragedy. Poe, who believed in the progress of literary art and who [page 357:] was stringently to condemn the use of ancient models within the next few months, reproved Miss Barrett accordingly:

This harsh assessment of the mystical aspects of Miss Barrett's dramatic poem reveals that Poe had begun to emphasize more than ever before what he called a natural art: simple, comprehensible, and even to an extent realistic. As we shall see shortly, he demanded a realism in drama that he did not require in lyric poetry because drama was a mimetic art. Miss Barrett's poem was dramatic, and Poe required probability in the dramatic and narrative forms. He had just written “The Raven,” and in “The Philosophy of Composition” he declared that he had stayed within the limits of the real throughout the narrative phase of the poem.

More clearly than anything else, this review shows that Poe was changing with the times. Certain aspects of romanticism had been opposed by most critics in America during the 18zo's and 1830's, but Poe had defended romance during his early career as a critic. [page 358:]

By the 1840's a new attack upon romanticism was being mounted by the Victorians. John Stuart Mill, Macaulay, Carlyle, and even Tennyson objected to various aspects of early romanticism. Tennyson found that Wordsworth was too “diffuse and didactic.” Macaulay spoke of Wordsworth's The Prelude as having “the old crazy, mystical metaphysics.” Mill found Byron full of the complaints of a worn-out hedonist.(19) Poe, although he would have rejected any opinion from Mill (he detested Mill's utilitarianism) and from Carlyle (a transcendentalist), admired Tennyson and Macaulay. Increasingly stressed in Victorian aesthetics was the social and moral value of art, conceived, as Jerome Buckley has pointed out, in terms of the capacity of art to communicate full experience in the idiom of universal emotion.(20) Only part of this generalization is applicable to Poe. By 1844 he had begun to emphasize as never before the duty of the artist to use an idiom of high emotional value, but one which did not involve the reader in the difficulties of philosophical concepts. Poe's view of the social value of art was more limited than that of the Victorians, yet it was closer to Victorian moral aestheticism than it was to the transcendentalist concept of hieratic value. Then, too, he resembled the Victorians in demanding technical discipline in poetry. Like Tennyson, he declared his allegiance to the beautiful rather than the good. Tennyson, in the poems then available to Poe, had displayed consummate artistry, and few of his poems were overtly didactic. This made Poe think that at last a poet had appeared who had technical skill and a proper sense of audience. Poe showed, as always, a tendency toward aestheticism, but not of the art-for-art's-sake variety.

Poe's concept of the nature and purpose of art bears a resemblance to that of certain British critics whose aesthetic, like his own, developed out of the premises of the eighteenth century. Like Sydney Dobell and Charles Kingsley, he thought that the purpose of art was to evoke the perfection of the ideal and prefigure the beauty beyond. Like the Scots critics David Hay and John G. Macvicar, Poe thought that the principles of beauty could be derived from the laws of nature, and like Hay and John Addington [page 359:] Symonds (the elder), he thought that the “great harmonic law of nature” could be described mathematically.(21)

In conceiving of a static perfection which art could imitate but never copy, Poe revealed his heritage from classic aesthetics. His is a philosophy of being, not of becoming, yet for all of Poe's references to Plato, his artist does not draw unmediated inspiration from the absolute. The cosmos itself is his model, and the cosmos is characterized by invariable laws, whether manifested by the regularity of planetary orbits about the sun or by a hierarchy of life forms unchanging in respect to the human sense of time. The discoveries of science become the foundation of artistic rule, not the shaping power of the imagination working on the materials thrown up from the unconscious mind. To use Morse Peckham's terms, “positive romanticism” makes the form of an art work inevitable in that the intuition of a truth provides the “shape” of the work that reveals the truth. The imagination creates by bringing out the indwelling form. As a consequence, each work of art is unique and the old subspecies of art become meaningless as vantage points for the critic.(22) To Poe, however, the imagination could not create, because to the human time-sense all forms were fixed; they could only be rearranged. Accordingly the genres, although they could be modified in terms of the needs of a given culture, were still operant as universal types. They were arranged, by Poe's laws, in a hierarchy of value according to the appeal offered by each. Of the lowest value were those forms which imitated phenomenal flux or the character of a particular object. The highest forms were those which conveyed an impression of a harmony imperceptible to man's unaided senses.

Richard P. Adams’ essay, which describes Poe as exhibiting what Peckham called “negative romanticism,” is correct,(23) but a general essay is not the place for discriminations. “Negative romanticism,” as offered by Peckham, is the “expression of the attitudes, the feelings, and the ideas of a man who has left static mechanism but has [page 360:] not yet arrived at a reintegration of his thought and art in terms of dynamic organicism.” Yet Poe could not relinquish his premise of a universe static in human time; nor could he abandon the mechanistic approach conditioned by this premise. He did endeavor to incorporate a dynamism of process into his “new” cosmology, Eureka, whereby man's consciousness of Being evolved through the millennia, but he envisioned the end as catastrophic, neither a running down by energy loss nor an achievement of some ultimate perfection. Throughout his life Poe framed his theories according to the premise of a static universe. This topic will be discussed more fully in relation to Poe's philosophical ideas, but in this context it serves as an introduction to the aesthetic conservatism that characterized the criticism of his later years in respect to every form except the drama. Cosmic Toryism prefigures genre criticism, invariable rules that represent an ideal standard for every form of art. It views the universe in terms of physics instead of biology. To use Lovejoy's terms, it is the view that promotes “uniformitarianism” instead of “diversitarianism.” Poe employed genetic criticism in his theory, examining each art form in terms of its mental origin and its purpose, but in his applied criticism he was something of a genre critic, basing his standards for each genre partly on tradition and partly on rules he invented for himself.

Poe, like some of his Victorian contemporaries, wanted to develop a science of beauty according to natural law, but he did not restrict himself to physics or the mathematically demonstrable; he also employed the empirical psychology that had been handed down from the preceding century, for to his mind the constitutive principles of human nature were laws too, and they had to be obeyed by an artist who wished to command an audience. Thus Poe bypassed some of the more revolutionary developments of romantic aesthetics and formed a connection between late eighteenth-century and Victorian aestheticism. His principles differed from those of the Aesthetic Society of Edinburgh,(24) founded in 1851, chiefly in his greater emphasis upon subjectivity, particularly in regard to the emotional receptivity of an audience. [page 361:] In a way his aestheticism was a moral aestheticism, in that he valued art because it aroused a sense of harmony and order as a corrective to vice, but he looked to science as a guide to method.

By the year 1845, although he had not lost his admiration for certain aspects of romantic idealism, Poe was becoming increasingly critical of the expressivist tendencies of romanticism, and he was insisting that art serve the need of the public for aesthetic experience. Poe's brief account of the history of English poetry since Shelley, done in the context of his review of Miss Barrett, reveals not only how closely he kept in touch with developments abroad, but also the first principle of his current criticism: that an artist should make a conscious effort to achieve universality of appeal.

In this passage Poe was probably referring to the Spasmodics. Since the “school” did not develop its rules until the 1850's,(26) he was somewhat premature in saying that they had a system, yet his adverse criticism of the group is not unlike that of Professor Buckley, who may be quoted in comparison: [page 362:]

Poe had pointed out similar faults in his review of Horne's Orion, although he considered it the finest modern epic (we should remember that he thought all epics faulty). He had blamed Horne's errors upon his connection with the “Orphicists,” which was no more than affirming that the Spasmodic doctrine of inspiration was a gross error. Horne's own connection with the Spasmodics was primarily his acceptance of their inspirational aesthetic,(28) but this alone would have been enough to annoy Poe. A poem should have an intelligible design, a requirement the Spasmodics grandly ignored.

Elizabeth Barrett also had her connections with the Spasmodic School (through Horne), and so did Tennyson, as Poe was quick to point out, perhaps recognizing some of the Spasmodic “passion” in “Locksley Hall.”(29) As Poe put it,

Thus Tennyson had shown admirable artistic awareness in perceiving and correcting his own stylistic faults. This, to Poe, was a proper development. The trouble with imitating Shelley was that the great romantic poet had no sense of audience. He wrote simply to please himself and exercised no control over his idiosyncrasies. Those without his special genius would merely ape his mannerisms, for Shelley's “art” was unconscious and therefore inimitable.

For all of Poe's frequently expressed contempt for the mob and the mere popularizer, he thought that a writer had a duty to his public; at the very least, his works should be felt and understood. Tennyson had developed a “pure poetical style,” which to Poe meant that he had avoided overt didacticism, that he had disciplined rhyme and rhythm, and that he had achieved a limpid clarity of import. Tennyson's Poems of 1842, from which Poe would have formed his opinion, were addressed to the public, not to a select audience of dreamers, either transcendentalist poet-priests or alienated aesthetes. Even though Tennyson did not have Shelley's natural gift of song, he was a craftsman, and this made his effects available to both the naïve and the sophisticated reader. Poe still cited Shelley as a type of the inspired genius, but he thought that inspiration had to be controlled by taste and by a sense of audience limitations. Only by being aware of his audience's capacity could an artist have any effect in making his readers mindful of beauty, and this, to Poe, was his divine task. [page 364:]

As with Tennyson, so with Elizabeth Barrett, who had imitated Tennyson's early manner. No doubt her choice of the wrong models originated in her secluded life — she was relatively out of touch with the literary world(31) — Poe wrote with a New Yorkerish air of sophistication. Provincial no longer, he proclaimed the value of the up-to-date. Miss Barrett had a fine native poetic sense, but it had been contaminated by the obsolete. Her imagination was more vigorous than Tennyson's, and, if she had studied his later style, she would have avoided the turgid, the obscure, and the mystical. She would have been able to use the later Tennyson as a bridge to cross “the disgustful gulf of utter incongruity and absurdity, lit only by miasmatic flashes, into the broad open meadows of Natural Art and Divine Genius.”(32) Poe's metaphor is significant. The Muse no longer explores the dark caverns and subterranean corridors of the sublimely terrible. The gulfs that had figured so prominently in his own tales and poems, the hidden meanings that flash up in murky light from the depths, the incongruities that arouse sensations of horror, are all declared disgusting. The Muse romps in the sunlit meadows of classic art, or, as Poe would prefer, in the simplicity and clarity of nature.

2

Poe's attack upon the “school” of Shelley, his warning against imitating the inimitable, signals an attempt on his part to adjust his view of the imagination to his increasing emphasis upon the public duty of the artist. Shelley had imagination in excess, yet his “rhapsodies” were but “the stenographic memoranda of poems.” The problem was, how could a poet share his vision with the world at large?

Throughout most of his career Poe had had difficulty in arriving at a definition of imaginative power that would serve as a criterion of the highest value and at the same time offer something for the [page 365:] undiscriminating who could not reach the higher levels of perception. At first he had followed Coleridge and Schlegel in associating imagination with the presence of reverberations of symbolic meaning, but this test involved him in a dilemma. If the presence of imagination in a poem was signaled by a mystic meaning, then a highly imaginative poem could not be universal. It would appeal, as Shelley himself had said, only to “the selectest of the wise of many generations.” It was not that Poe did not recognize this melancholy fact, but that he did not believe that it was a law of nature. A poet should have some appeal to everyone. Yet if imagination were marked by meaning, and if this meaning were so simple and obvious that all could understand, then a poem would become an allegory, a didactic form that did not reside in the province of taste. The poems of both Horne and Miss Barrett exhibited mystic meaning, or imaginative power, and yet they could not be understood. They were either imperfect allegories or defective poems. As we have seen, Poe treated them in both ways by saying that the allegorical purpose made them defective as poems. But this was no solution. The imagination had to be redefined so that mysticism and obscurity could no longer be mistaken for evidence of poetic value.

Poe's occasion was a review of the achievement of Nathaniel Parker Willis as a prose writer.(33) It did not matter that Poe should have been analyzing prose style instead of discoursing on the imagination; he made his statements of theory in whatever context he could, and his excuse was that Willis, both in poetry and in prose, was a man of fancy, not imagination. Poe's brief essay — it was not really a review — was published in the Broadway Journal of January 18. He was still a subeditor of the Mirror and probably did not wish to say anything derogatory about his employer, but he remained consistent in refusing to accord Willis the highest honor — that of imaginative genius. Actually Poe used Willis’ work in this review merely as a point of departure, for he made no examination of Willis’ writings but proceeded to make discriminations among the mental qualities evidenced in composition at large.

Poe was not unconsciously shifting his ground in this essay, for [page 366:] he paraphrased his refutation of Coleridge from his review of Moore's Alciphron and then proceeded to re-evaluate Moore on the basis of a new description of imaginative power. Showing his increasing antipathy toward the obscure and the metaphysical, he found that the test of the imagination was the harmony of combination of the various elements of which any work was composed. In this view the imagination has little to do with creation or with meaning. Instead, it is a discriminative agent guided by the aesthetic sense. It chooses the elements of a composition that may be “harmoniously” combined, and its combinations appear obvious and inevitable.

This account of the imagination indicates that Poe's previous refutations of Coleridge were nothing more than an attempt to reconcile conflicting assumptions in his own theory. He wished to attribute to the poetic imagination the power to penetrate the veil of appearances to the beauty beyond, yet his concept of a universe in which all forms are given denied the implicit creativity of the imaginative vision. A reproduction in finite terms of the beauty of the absolute would necessarily be creation, for no such beauty could be perceived by the senses. Heretofore, as we have seen, Poe wriggled out of this dilemma by invoking Platonic metaphysics: all human creations are imperfect imitations of the transcendental ideal. But even this was too metaphysical for Poe, for to him the source of the artist's feeling was not the absolute but a yearning inspired by beautiful earthly forms for a still greater beauty. This is Platonic enough, but it is also the Alisonian aesthetic of taste. The poet's refined taste rejects imperfection, so he must ceaselessly combine the objects of sense perception in order to create combinations so harmonious that his taste will be fully gratified. There is a perfect beauty somewhere, for one can imagine it, but a poet will never create it. He can only rearrange the given according to his innate sense of harmony. When he is most nearly successful, he produces works which reflect in some measure the universal harmony, and these works are natural. The harmony is obvious, because it is so agreeable to the constitutive laws of the taste that the naïve are prone to underestimate the artistry of the imagination in selecting and combining raw materials, just as the insensitive are blind to the artistry of the creation itself. The great thing, however, is that the artistry will be felt, even if it is not recognized for what it is.

Poe did not completely neglect that “mental chemistry” valued by the romantics as the agent of a dynamic organicism, but he depressed its value. The “something else” which is not inherent in the quality of the poet's materials must be accounted for, but Poe did not tell what this “something else” was; and his test of imagination [page 368:] is not the presence of an excess quality, but the harmony of combination. We may only presume that the “something else” appears when the artist combines “deformities” in order to produce beauty. This, of course, might appear to be Coleridge's reconciliation of opposites, but we should not forget that in Coleridge's system beauty is a means toward the end of truth, whereas in Poe's system harmony, order, and the relatedness of part to whole exist in terms of their appeal to the taste. The “something else,” then, is an added dimension of beauty not predictable from the quality of the materials used by the artist. It has little to do with meaning, as such. Since Poe's analog of the artistic process was physical chemistry, he was being consistent. Whatever is produced in a chemical compound is produced by physical law, the reaction of one element with another.

It is interesting that T. S. Eliot used the same analogy when he compared the creative process to what happens “when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.”(34) Eliot was specific whereas Poe generalized, but both indicated that the mind of a poet might combine the elements of experience in such a way that the compound might contain no trace of the experiences themselves. The only difference is that Eliot implied that this was a test of the poetic mind, but Poe thought that traces of the raw material would normally be found. The most Poe would say about the metamorphosis of the materials into something else is that it sometimes happened. Yet, like Eliot, he knew that the transformation which is art should take place, for the proper end of artistry is a work of art, not a revelation of personality.(35) [page 369:]

During his critical examination of Undine, Alciphron, Orion, and The Drama of Exile Poe had evidently begun to have serious doubts as to whether a didactic theme, however subordinated, could ever be reconciled with an aesthetic end. If the most active mental power of a poet was evidenced by meaning, it could be argued that truth was the final cause of a poem. On the other hand, if the imagination were only a selecting and harmonizing agent, as Poe claimed it was, then it would serve the sense of beauty, and its sole function would be the selection of the proper elements of art and the fabrication of those elements into a work that would arouse the aesthetic response. In this, his last description of the activity of the imagination, Poe finally broke free of Coleridge and made his own psychological theory consistent. Beauty was the province of art, and the imagination was the agent that erected harmonious structures throughout this province.

Poe's description of the materials with which the imagination works is much broader in theory than his previous criticism would allow us to recognize. Now he stated that the imagination might combine elements of deformity as well as those of beauty, whereas in many of his reviews he had objected to unpleasant or inappropriate materials because the end was beauty and because it was a law of nature that an effect would inherit the character of its cause. Now, at least in theory, he permitted the ministry of the imagination to transform even unpromisingly ugly elements into something beautiful. This freed the artist from the necessity of choosing inherently “poetic” materials. Yet even this freedom was limited.

Poe qualified his statement by claiming that the combination, as a general rule, would “partake” of the “sublimity or beauty of the things combined.” To be on the safe side, it appears, the poet would feast his mind on beauty, not on deformity: Lord Jeffrey had said as much over thirty years earlier.

We should not overlook the stress that Poe placed upon novelty in his description of the imagination. During this period Poe used “novelty” more frequently than “originality,” possibly because his theory really outlawed originality. To originate something, in the strict sense of the term, would be to create it, and the artist could [page 370:] only combine. The love of novelty, however, was an “indisputable element of the moral nature of man.”(36) Since the artist had to meet human needs, his combinations had to be new, although their elements would be common to human experience. Poe made little allowance for the light that never was on land or sea, for “the mind of man can imagine nothing which does not exist.”

Though less significant than his account of the imagination, Poe's description of the operation of the fancy deserves some comment, because it gives further evidence of his shift from his earlier position. In his review of Alciphron in 1840 he had admitted that imagination was not the chief characteristic of Moore's poetry, but that he possessed the power in “no little degree.” He claimed to have found imaginative passages in Alciphron; in fact, he said he was “bewildered” by the beauty of the poem and could think of no poem which greatly excelled it.

In 1845, however, having decided that the imagination was a harmonizing power instead of an agent of meaning, Poe removed Moore from the high place he had originally assigned him: “When Moore is termed a fanciful poet, the epithet is precisely applied; he is. He is fanciful in ‘Lalla Rookh,’ and had he written the ‘Inferno,’ there he would have been fanciful still: for not only is he essentially fanciful, but he has no ability to be anything more, unless at rare intervals — by snatches — and with effort. What we say of him at this point, moreover, is equally true of all little frisky men, personally considered.” Poe probably had Willis in mind when he made the remark about “little frisky men,” but he was condemning Moore on the basis of his new definition. If Moore were imaginative at rare intervals, and then only by effort, then one could [page 371:] scarcely call him imaginative at all, because one does not become imaginative by effort. The appearance of effort belongs to the fancy: “when the harmony of the combination is comparatively neglected, and when in addition to the element of novelty, there is introduced the sub-element of unexpectedness — when, for example, matters are brought into combination which not only have never been combined, but whose combination strikes us as a difficulty happily overcome — the result then appertains to the FANCY — and is, to the majority of mankind more grateful than the purely harmonious one — although, absolutely, it is less beautiful (or grand) for the reason that it is less harmonious.”

The problem for Poe here, in respect to his opinion that an artist should be able to reach a universal audience, was to explain why a merely fanciful writer should have a broader appeal than an imaginative one. He knew that the fanciful Moore had been more popular than the imaginative Shelley. Why? His answer was that an imaginative poem, constructed according to the harmonic laws of the universe, appeared so right, so inevitable in its combinations, that the crowd, titillated by the unexpected and incapable of appreciating the artistry of a harmonious design, would be drawn to the ingenuities of a fanciful writer rather than to the natural art of an imaginative writer. Yet, as always, Poe did not think that this condition necessarily had to obtain. A combination of the natural genius of a Shelley and the artistic skill and audience sense of a Tennyson would produce a poem that would please both the crowd and the cognoscenti. Poe had said this in his review of The Drama of Exile, and he was to attempt to prove it in “The Philosophy of Composition,” but in the review of Willis he was mainly concerned with establishing the imagination as the power which enabled the poet to imitate the harmonies of the universal design, or, in Poe's words, to develop a natural art. Fancy was unnatural because it gave the appearance of conscious effort; one could detect the artist's intention to force elements together which did not belong together. Elsewhere Poe characterized the metaphysical conceit as a product of the fancy, no doubt following Dr. Johnson's description, in his Life of Cowley, of the “discordia concors: a [page 372:] combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” Dr. Johnson had complained that the thoughts of the metaphysical poets “are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.”

Like Johnson, Poe commented disparagingly upon the appearance of effort and the lack of naturalness, but he differed in thinking that the surprise effect of unusual combinations would please the reader. Johnson had said that the reader would sometimes “admire,” but would be “seldom pleased.” Poe's account of the fancy is somewhat closer to Johnson's definition of wit than it is to Coleridge's description of the fancy, but Coleridge too had characterized Cowley as being fanciful.(37) Both Johnson and Coleridge prefigured Poe's definition.

Perhaps to outdo his predecessors, Poe extended his discriminations to include still other predispositions or capacities.

Poe intended his distinctions to be applied in criticism, as is evidenced by his review of the poems of Thomas Hood some seven months later. In this review he placed Hood in “a kind of border land between the Fancy and the Fantasy.” Since fantasy was abnormal, he claimed that Hood's work was “the result of vivid [page 373:] Fancy impelled, or controlled, — certainly tinctured, at all points, by hypochondriasis.”(38)

Surprising as it may seem in view of his own neurotic tendencies, Poe regarded genius as a reflection of perfect mental health which operated in accordance with nature's laws. The alleged irritability of the genius, Poe claimed, sprang from his sensitivity to disorder and deformity. The genius shuddered at imperfection; a work of art produced by a genius would have harmony and proportion as its leading features, because the mental equipment of the genius, his faculties, were balanced in their development and operation. Therefore fantasy would not be employed by a genius. Certain aspects of Hood's works left a “painful impression,” for they represented “the hypochondriac's struggles at mirth — they are the grinnings of the death's-head.”(39)

As far as Willis was concerned, however, Poe still had a problem of tact in rescuing him from the category of “little frisky men” in which he had placed him by implication. Poe's tact was tactless enough, even at best; but in this case he softened the impact of his implications by exalting Willis’ qualities: Willis’ “well merited popularity” came from his “brilliant FANCY,” with which his prose style “perpetually scintillates or glows.” But, unlike Moore, Willis did not possess merely fancy, “to the exclusion of qualities more noble” (an implication that Willis had imagination also). Furthermore, Willis possessed fancy “to an extent altogether unparalleled, and of a kind both relatively and intrinsically the most valuable, because at once the most radiant and the most rare.” No doubt Willis was undisturbed by this comment because it was loaded with honorifics. Yet fancy was an error, “or Nature lies.” The products of the fancy were never art; they represented artifice. The purest art was a microcosm that reflected the cosmic harmony and as such was a human effort to imitate the art of God. Works of fancy, fantasy, and humor could be enjoyed, but they did not appeal to the aesthetic sense. In the hierarchy of forms they descended, grade by grade, from the natural and the beautiful. [page 374:]

During this period Poe emphasized harmony, control, and order — which he called “simplicity” and “nature.” Almost from the first he had demanded that the artist control his materials. In 1836 he had required control of effect, but he had said little about the nature of that effect. Now in 1845 he was stressing the artist's ability to discriminate among his materials and to impose artistic form upon his carefully selected raw elements of beauty. There is no difference between the concept of aesthetic value he expressed in 1836 and that expressed in 1845, if we judge only by the broad predetermined end of pleasure; but there is a signal difference in his description of the psychological process by which this end is achieved. In 1836 he had naïvely proclaimed, after Coleridge, that imagination was the soul of art and had then asserted blandly that a poet who possessed the “metaphysical” faculty of “constructiveness” did not need imagination. Now, eschewing metaphysics, even the “metaphysics” of phrenology, he made imagination once more the soul of poetry, but it was not, as in Coleridge, the agent of the intuitive reason; it was a discriminatory power vested in the taste. It neither created nor enabled us to know anything we did not know before, but it made harmonious combinations that appealed to the sense of beauty. Poe's reversion to the older psychological idiom, first evidenced in his review of Longfellow's Ballads, now permitted him to disallow the transcendental as the Scottish philosophers had disallowed metaphysical speculation. He began to use the terms “reason” and “common sense” increasingly in his reviews. These were the faculties that kept the artist in touch with reality and prevented him from soaring with Shelley into the white radiance of eternity, where no one but an Orphicist would even attempt to follow. The taste, Blair had said, must be corrected by the reason. With a significant change in implication which made him even less romantic than Blair, Poe was soon to assert that the taste had to be guided by the reason and common sense, at least in respect to those forms which had a right to be called natural. And in a higher sense, even the poem and pure music were natural in that they fulfilled the intention of nature in giving man the aesthetic value he needed in a world in which pleasure was the necessary [page 375:] concomitant of pain. The purest of art, adjusted to the receptive capacity of the human mind, was the most exquisite pleasure that man could experience.

“Positive romanticism,” in Morse Peckham's words, was characterized by “radical creativity,” and it could be observed in the work of the poet-philosopher who not only brought “new artistic concepts into reality,” but also new ideas.(40) Certainly no positive romantic, Poe in his last phase is not accurately described by the term “negative romanticism,” either. In the reviews to be discussed next he proclaimed, almost boastfully, that he followed the precepts of common sense. If any descriptive term fits his attitude in these reviews, it would have to be “anti-romantic.”

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 349:]

1.  Poe, Doings of Gotham, ed. Jacob E. Spannuth (Pottsville, Pa., 1929), 24, 34.

2.  Poe to Charles Anthon, before November 2, 1844, in Letters, I, 271. Anthon, a professor of Arabic languages at Columbia University, had assisted Poe previously by translating some lines of Hebrew in connection with Poe's review of a travel book by J. T. Stephens. Later Poe occasionally presented the translation as if it were his own. At Poe's request Anthon attempted to persuade the Harper brothers. to publish Poe's collection, but he wrote Poe, “The Harpers ... have complaints against you, grounded in certain movements of yours, when they acted as your publishers some years ago.” November 2, 1844, in Works, XVII, 193. These “complaints” show how easy it was for a writer to alienate a publisher. Whether they were based upon Poe's own erratic behavior or upon reviews the Harpers considered damaging to their own interests is not clear.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 351:]

3.  Letters, I, 265. In a letter dated March 30, 1844, Poe had proposed a similar plan, except that each member of the elite literary group was supposed to contribute two hundred dollars to the enterprise. Ibid., 247. These letters describe Poe's concept of an ideal literary magazine. It should be a monthly instead of a quarterly, should be well printed on good paper, should adhere to high standards, and should express independent opinion. Such a magazine, Poe thought, would be “irresistible” to the public and would protect writers against inept or unscrupulous publishers. It would not be the organ of any particular group but would represent the best writers, regardless of political or sectional affiliations. Needless to say, Poe's dream was not realized in his own time and only provisionally by the Atlantic Monthly during the second half of the century.

4.  Poe's letter to Anthon (see Note 2, above) speaks of the “sad poverty & the thousand consequent [ills] ... which the condition of the mere Magazinist entails upon him in America.” The chief reason he wanted a collection of his work published was that a journalist would inevitably be judged by occasional pieces, some of them “mere extravaganzas,” rather than by his total achievement. Poe was correct. Not often has he been evaluated by his work as a whole.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 352:]

5.  Quoted in Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 434.

6.  Quoted in Hull, “A Canon,” 402.

7.  Evening Mirror, February 20, 1845, quoted in Hull, “A Canon,” 408.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 353:]

8.  Ibid.

9.  Hull, “A Canon,” 404.

10.  Lowell to Charles F. Briggs, January 16, 1845, in H. E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1901), I, 163.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 354:]

11.  The review of Longfellow's The Waif is not in Poe's Works, but his editorial replies to “Outis,” Longfellow's defender, may be found there. Works, XII, 41-106. The fullest account of this controversy is in Moss, Poe's Literary Battles, 157-82.

12.  See George E. Hatvary, “Poe's Borrowings from H. B. Wallace,” American Literature, XXXVIII (1966), 365-72. Most of the plagiarisms from Wallace occur in the later installments published in the Southern Literary Messenger.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 355:]

13.  Woodberry, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, II, “5-23. See also Lowell to Poe, December 12, 1844, in Works, XVII, 194-95.

14.  Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 47-58.

15.  Briggs to Lowell, March 8, 1845, in Hull, “A Canon,” 492.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 356:]

16.  Works, XVI, 12.

17.  Ibid., XII, 2-3.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 357:]

18.  Ibid., 4-5.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 358:]

19.  Buckley, The Victorian Temper, 17-18.

20.  Ibid., 159.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 359:]

21.  Ibid., 144-45.

22.  “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” PMLA, LXVI (1951), 5-23.

23.  “Romanticism and the American Renaissance,” American Literature, XXIII (1951-52), 431.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 360:]

24.  Cf. Buckley, The Victorian Temper, 145.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 361:]

25.  Works, XII, 33.

26.  Buckley, The Victorian Temper, 43.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 362:]

27.  Ibid.

28.  Ibid., 46.

29.  Ibid., 61-62, 78. Poe was uncomfortably aware that Tennyson's poem had displayed intense passion, and he had mentioned it in his review of Orion. Considering the conditions under which he worked, it is remarkable that Poe knew as much as he did about contemporary developments in England, but in New York he possessed advantages he had not had before of participating in the international literary dialogue.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 363:]

30.  Works, XII, 34.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 364:]

31.  Poe's assumption here is nearly correct. During the early 1840's Elizabeth Barrett had kept in touch with current movements at least partly through correspondence with Horne.

32.  Works, XI I, 35.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 365:]

33.  “American Prose Writers, No. 2. N. P. ‘Willis,” ibid., 36-40.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 368:]

34.  Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York, 1932), 7.

35.  See Eliot's statement, “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.” Ibid., 7-8. To the best of my knowledge, Poe has been given credit for this valid insight into the artistic process only by Emerson Marks, “Poe as Literary Theorist: A Reappraisal,” American Literature, XXXIII (1961), 302. Mr. Marks has noted the anticipation of Eliot, citing different evidence.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 370:]

36.  The love of novelty is often associated with nineteenth-century romanticism, but this, like so many other categorical assignments, may be misleading. Lord Kames had devoted an entire chapter to novelty, alleging that it had more capacity to “raise emotion” than any other stimulus. Kames attributed the effect of novelty to curiosity, “a principle implanted in human nature for a purpose extremely beneficial.” Elements of Criticism, 131. Poe, in his employment of “principles,” did not hesitate to invoke the traditional psychology which assumed that the proper gratification of any basic human need was beneficial, according to the premise of a benevolent God.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 372:]

37.  Biographia Literaria, I, 62.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 373:]

38.  Works, XII, 216.

39.  Ibid., 215.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 375:]

40.  “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” 12.