Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “The Plot of God,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 402-426 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 400:]

XVII  •  The Plot of God

 

POE wanted to be a philosophical critic. He wanted his modes of validation not only to be empirically sound but also to be in accord with a metaphysical system. In his first reviews for the Messenger, instead of developing a system of his own, he was prone to rely on authority, citing Coleridge, Schlegel, and Bielfeld to provide theoretical support for his method. Very early, however, he showed an interest in philosophical speculation. Sensitive to the charge that he gave merely the “physique of the horrible” in his tales, he began to preface them with epigrams that intimated a serious metaphysical import in even his most fantastic narratives. Prefixed to “Morella,” published in 1835, was a quotation from Plato's Symposium: “Itself, by itself solely, ONE everlastingly and single.” Since the theme of “Morella” is passionate longing for immortality, the epigram is appropriate because in the Symposium the cause of sexual love is seen as the human desire to be immortal. People begot children because they lived in their offspring. Poe simply pushed this idea to its logical extreme by having Morella's soul pass into the body of her daughter.

Three years later he published another tale on the same theme. The epigram to “Ligeia,” attributed spuriously to Joseph Glanvill, implies that death can be conquered by the will: “And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth, the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” This quotation, wherever Poe got it, was germinal to his metaphysics; he eventually ascribed pleasure to the free exercise of volition and pain to its frustration. In the tale “Ligeia” the power of the will overcomes death, and Ligeia not only invades the soul of her successor but transforms the body also, accomplishing an absolute transmission of identity. [page 403:]

In these tales Poe of course was writing fiction, and by his own theory a fiction was never to be taken as a truth. Yet the tales reveal his almost obsessive concern with the horror of death, particularly the loss of personal identity after death.(1) During the early 1840's he envisioned a personal immortality and in his “philosophical” tales he attempted to imagine the quality of life after death.

“The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” published a year after “Ligeia,” describes the fiery end of the world after it collides with a comet, but the two “angels,” Eiros and Charmion, retain not only the attributes of personality but also their memories of precatastrophic existence. Soon, however, Poe began to explore in his fiction the possibilities of pantheism, which carried him close to the position that the soul after death would be absorbed into the World Soul. In “The Island of the Fay,” published in 1841, he struck a Wordsworthian note by having his narrator look at the objects of the landscape and say, “I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole. ...” One might dismiss this little fantasy about the death of a fay as simply Poe's exploitation of a familiar motif,(2) except that the idea of the nature of God advanced in the story was later given as an “imagined truth”: “As we find cycle within cycle without end — yet all revolving around one far-distant center which is the Godhead, may we not analogically suppose, in the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine?”(3) The phrase “life within life, ... and all within the [page 404:] Spirit Divine” was Poe's epilogue to the drama which had been presented in “Ligeia,” the tragedy Man, with its hero the Conqueror Worm. Ligeia's dying question to God, “Are we not part and parcel in Thee?” is answered affirmatively in “The Island of the Fay.” Everything is part and parcel of God.

Poe's speculation about the nature of God is related to his teleology of art. As early as 1836, in his first “philosophical review,” that of the poems of Drake and Halleck, he had claimed that aesthetic feeling — “the sentiment of Poesy” — was one of man's greatest pleasures in life and that this feeling engendered a hope of a greater “Intellectual Happiness” after death. His phrase “Intellectual Happiness” obviously did not mean the satisfaction of the reason alone. As he put it somewhat ineptly in the review, “mingled up inextricably with this love and this admiration of Heaven and of Earth” was the “unconquerable desire — to know.” Thus we can be justified in assuming that Poe's “Intellectual Happiness” should not be confused with the satisfaction that one feels from having arrived at the truth by a logical process. Instead it is an unmediated cognition, an intuition that has the force and immediacy of our recognition of beauty.

In his review of Drake and Halleck, Poe had claimed that God had given man the capacity for aesthetic feeling not only to provide happiness for his creatures but also, since Poe conceived of God as an artist, to insure admiration for God's art, the creation itself. Presumably then, the “unconquerable desire — to know” was associated in Poe's mind with the desire to understand the source of our pleasure, the nature of the universe. Aesthetic pleasure, if perfected, would spring from comprehensive cognition of the aesthetic object, yet this was not possible to mere mortals. The passive “sense of taste,” or the artistic sensibility, merely stimulated a desire for such knowledge.

Within five years after the publication of the review of Drake and Halleck, Poe began to grapple with the question of why nature, viewed as art, would always appear to be imperfect to the unaided senses of man. In other words, if the primary attribute of God as evidenced by his creation were his artistry, why did the creation [page 405:] exhibit deformity, pain, and death, those flaws in the artistic design? Poe did not ask this question in his book reviews during this period, but he did ask it in his philosophical tales, and of course he had as much trouble with the answer as metaphysicians have always had in their theodicies. It was difficult for him to explain why an omnipotent artist would create an apparently imperfect art, and it was also difficult to explain why there was a human need for an experience of beauty more satisfying than that furnished by unaltered nature. Poe explored, but could not maintain, the romantic notion that the earthly paradise before the Fall would have fully gratified the sense of beauty.(4) His eventual solution was to bring God into the world in a state of comparative imperfection. Poe's God was not the transcendent and eternal One whose being was absolute, nor was he the benevolent but distant architect of the Deists who created a perfect design for the physical universe but allowed his creatures to suffer for no apparent reason. Instead Poe, like Schelling, whom his narrator cites in “Morella,” began to view God as a World-Spirit or a Life-Force limited by his temporal existence.

Poe had difficulty in reconciling the Newtonian universe of perfect order with the phenomenal disorder he observed on every side. His characteristic solution was to bring in the artist as mediator, which of course was in keeping with the romantic tendency to regard the artist as the transcendental hero who would save us all. But to do this Poe found it necessary to formulate a concept of nature, of God, and of man that would allow the creature to improve the work of the creator without surpassing it, a logical impasse. Poe solved the problem, to his own satisfaction at least, by denying man the power of apprehending the creation as a whole and by assigning to the artist the duty of adapting the raw materials of art to the human condition. His speculation after 1841, whether disguised as fiction or expressed in letters to friends, was related to his purpose of validating the artist as the creator of microcosmic totalities that would gratify the sense of taste and at the same time not [page 406:] exceed the human capacity for cognition. If the human art work could be simple in design and limited in scope, and if its details exhibited the harmony and symmetry of nature taken as a whole, then the human mind could experience the pleasure of totality, which to Poe meant not only the immediate pleasure that came from beautiful sights and sounds but also the pleasure that the artistic sensibility experienced when confronted with a perfect design. This dual pleasure should be immediate; it should be an effect. One should not have to think about it, as in analyzing a work of extended scope, for reasoning about it lessened the pleasure. The critic could analyze, but the analysis should take place after the experience, and whatever pleasure derived from the exercise of the reason was an impure pleasure unrelated to the gratification of the taste. The taste could be fully gratified only by an almost instantaneous recognition of design, with part related to part and to the whole in perfect symmetry. God's art, however it pleased the senses in some of its details, was too vast in scope to be known as a whole. It could be apprehended as a whole only as a concept, not by an immediate intuition of the relatedness of its parts.

In “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” published in 1841, Poe's attempt to validate the role of the artist as mediator between the divine and the human is obvious. His narrator, the angel Monos, interprets the Fall in the Garden not as an immediate catastrophe but as a progressive alienation of the human soul from the order and beauty of nature. Moral evil, as distinct from natural evil, was brought into the world by man's pride in his reason and in his practical accomplishments. Man “stalked a God in his own fancy” and laid claim to dominion over nature. By using his practical reason and by neglecting the intuitions of his poetic faculty, man came into disharmony with the creation. The poetic mind could still apprehend the beauty and harmony of the creation and would have used these qualities as a guide for human behavior, but the intuition of the poets was scorned by the utilitarians, the rough pedants, who could see nature, to use Emerson's term, only as commodity.

In “The Island of the Fay” Poe had toyed with the idea of a cosmic [page 407:] democracy, speculating that all objects in the universe might be equal in the eyes of God. In “The Colloquy,” however, Poe discovered the implication of the Chain of Being. He declared that “gradation” was the order of nature and that man's “wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy” based upon the concept of “universal equality” was “in the face of analogy and of God. ...” In this way he was able to reconcile his Whiggish conservatism with pantheism. God was in everything, Poe thought, but in different degrees. Each form of life had its place in the scale of being in relation to consciousness and even within each link of the chain there was a hierarchical order. Organic life varied from inferior to superior in terms of mental endowment.(5)

God's plan, Poe asserted, was for man to live forever in an earthly paradise, but in exercising his reason man had not followed the intention of nature and nature's God. Instead he had applied his scientific knowledge to subvert the natural order. In the cultural crisis that ensued, Poe speculated, “taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life.” The taste, in Poe's system, was the faculty that supplied intuitions of God in his purest attribute, beauty. A culture that gave priority to the practical reason frustrated the divine plan and of necessity had to be destroyed.

In 1841, then, Poe granted the poet the capacity for imaginative insight into God's plan because the poet could perceive analogies between the natural order and the ideal moral order. In this Poe was at one with the transcendentalists, both European and American, who found correspondences between natural law and moral law. His great difference, however, was in his interpretation of the analogies. To Emerson, the poet's insight into the universal as manifested in the particular was ground for hope that man would be able to attune himself to the higher laws and come out from under the dominion of the law of things. Pessimistically viewing the history of mankind, Poe had no confidence that the world [page 408:] would ever be guided by the poet's vision. To Poe, the history of man as interpreted by the “disenfranchised reason” of Monos after his death, was a record of sickness, of infection that could be purified only by death: “for the infected world at large I could anticipate no regeneration save in death. That man, as a race, should not become extinct, I saw that he must be ‘born again.’ “Ruin was the price of civilization because man had devoted himself to the utilitarian arts instead of the cultivation of the “sentiment of the natural” — which to Poe meant a feeling for the order of nature. Only by some visionary system of education such as that proposed by Plato in The Republic could man have become “beautiful-minded.” If man's soul had been formed by the experience of music — which Poe defined as “the general cultivation of the taste” — he would have assimilated into his own condition the harmonies of the universe; he would have dwelt forever in an earthly paradise. But instead, he had cultivated the “harsh mathematical reason of the school” and had “scarred” the surface of the earth with “rectangular obscenities.” “The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease.” Only a purification by fire would supply the antecedent condition for the earthly paradise.

Thus there was no help for man in his present condition, Poe maintained. Paradise lay behind and ahead, and in its temporal condition the world was a vale of tears. If, then, the poet had been rejected as a legislator of the world, what could be his significance in human affairs? Only to resurrect memories of the perfection that had once existed and to supply a foretaste of the perfection that was to come. Thus the poet had no business aiming at the truth which could be discovered by the reason or the senses. His only duty was to supply some pleasure in a painful world and to stimulate hope of a return to paradise.

Paradise could not be enjoyed, however, unless there were memories of suffering. In Poe's economy of value, pleasure could be achieved only by paying for it with pain. Accordingly it was necessary for the mind, after death, to be cognizant of previous pain, even of the pain of the transitional stage between flesh and spirit. Monos recites the history of the world and of his own death to Una [page 409:] because the “memory of past sorrow” is the aliment of “present joy.” The transition between the temporal and the eternal was not unrelieved anguish, however, for there was some pleasure as the soul effected its release from the body. The boundaries between the “organs of sense” were gradually erased, and the mind could delight in undifferentiated sensation. As the five senses became one with the decay of the body, a sixth sense, “all perfect,” arose. This sixth sense was the sense of duration,(6) and it conferred a “wild delight” in which the understanding had no part. It “was the first obvious and certain step of the intemporal soul upon the threshold of the temporal eternity.” Man's mind, after death, gradually became conscious of “entity,” and his only feeling was that of duration. As the matter of the body decayed, the sense of being dominated the mind until the soul departed, and then for the body there remained only the sense of time and place — the grave.

Monos dwells upon the horrors of the grave because these memories are necessary for the enjoyment of immaterial existence. Monos and Una are perfectly happy in the “temporal eternity,” but only because they are able to contrast their heavenly state with their antecedent earthly condition.

One striking thing about “The Colloquy” is that Monos experiences pleasure from the derangement of the senses, a condition most of us would regard as the threshold of madness. Yet we are aware that synaesthesia was exploited by the French symbolists and that Poe preceded them in suggesting that a deliberate derangement of the senses might be a source of pleasure. He once claimed that the orange ray of the spectrum affected him in the same way as the buzzing of a gnat.(7) Thus it would appear that he correlated one of the delights of poetry with the imagined process of transition [page 410:] between the temporal and the eternal. No longer limited by the organs, the mind could experience all sensation unitarily and eventually would sense duration. The poem, in a limited way, could duplicate this experience by coalescing sense impressions and by abstracting the mind from the “movements” by which we are aware of time.(8) The poem that successfully “excited” the soul would provide a brief escape from temporality into eternity.

By 1844 Poe was ready to describe in more specific terms the pantheism he had introduced in “The Island of the Fay.” In the tale “Mesmeric Revelation” his strategy was to allow ultimate questions to be answered by a subject under hypnosis. Mesmerism, Poe thought, might free the mind from the bondage of the senses and exalt the reason so that unmediated cognition would be possible. So long as the mind was dependent on the senses, one could know only what the senses perceived and could deduce causes only by an examination of effects. The hypnotic trance was a “sleep-waking” condition in which the sensory apparatus was quiescent and vision or perfect cognition was possible.(9)

The subject of the mesmeric experiment, Mr. Vankirk, who suffers from phthisis, is fond of metaphysical speculation. He has read all of the “abstractions” of the philosophers but feels that abstractions take no hold on the mind and cannot induce belief. One cannot look upon qualities as things, so abstractions have no meaning to minds that know the world only through sense perception. [page 411:]

The mind can know qualities only if they are experienced as directly as the senses experience phenomena. Free from its organic dependency, the mind can know itself. Accordingly, Mr. Vankirk asks to be put in a hypnotic trance, believing that in such a state he can attain “profound self-cognizance.” Thus cognition of identity — Poe would say “of the soul” — can be achieved only when mind is not subservient to matter.

Once under hypnosis Vankirk answers questions about the nature of God and man and describes the state of immortality. He can answer such questions because the mind of man is part of the mind of God and in knowing itself also knows God. God exists, Vankirk reveals, as universal mind. This mind is not spirit, for spirit is an abstraction and hence nothing. God is but the “perfection of matter.” Perfect matter is “unparticled,” and permeates all things and impels all things. Thought is this matter in motion. Being unparticled, this matter is too rarefied to be perceived by the senses, but the mind can conceive it simply by extending the range of analogy from substances already known, from the least to the most rarefied. If atomic matter exists in a range of density, say, from metal to the “ether” of outer space, then by extrapolation we can assume a nonparticled matter, or a state of perfect unity. This nonatomic matter is what people ordinarily call spirit.

God exists as nonatomic matter, the creation as atomic matter. The thought of God is motion in the nonatomic matter, and this motion creates the material universe. Thus the entire universe in its unceasing motion is invested with the mind of God: “To create individual, thinking beings, it was necessary to incarnate portions of the divine mind. Thus man is individualized. Divested of corporate investiture, he were God. Now the particular motion of the incarnated portions of the unparticled matter is the thought of man; as the motion of the whole is that of God.” Obviously Van-kirk is able to “know” the mind of God because the hypnotic trance takes him outside of himself. He knows God because in the trance he is God.

Even after death man will have a body, Vankirk reveals, but it will no more resemble his “rudimental” earthly body than a worm [page 412:] resembles a butterfly. It was the design of God for man eventually to have a perfected life, but perfection was impossible so long as mind was subject to the conditions and laws of atomic matter. In the perfected life man would no longer have the organs of the body. Existing as mind, he would enjoy “nearly unlimited perception,” knowing everything except the mystery of God's will. In the rudimentary life we know on earth, however, the “organs are the cages necessary to confine” our perceptions. Each organ has its assigned province or area of operation. Such is the natural constitution of the human mind.

In his rudimentary condition man had to obey physical laws, the laws of the material universe. In the “inorganic life” beyond the grave, there would be only one law, the “Divine Volition.” Organic life — constituted of matter — acted as an impediment to the Divine Will, so, paradoxically, even God's will was hampered by the laws of his own creation — the laws of atomic matter. When God's will was impeded, as it was in the sensible universe, the result was “imperfection, wrong, positive pain.” Thus Poe solved the problem of evil by asserting that it was the result of the resistance of matter to the will of God. Somewhat like Mary Baker Eddy, Poe regarded matter as error, but he did not believe that matter could be subservient to mind so long as mind existed in its “corporate investiture.” Even God in his temporal manifestation had to obey the laws of the physical universe. These laws were necessary because through them the wrongness of matter was “rendered, to a certain extent, practicable.”

In brief, Vankirk's revelation was that the life of what we call the spirit would be, eventually, perfection, but perfection was a negative state — “negative happiness.” Positive happiness could be enjoyed only if it could be measured against misery. Imperfection was necessary before we could appreciate the perfect. “The pain of the primitive life of Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven.” Pain merely provided the variety in God's otherwise monotonous existence.

That Poe intended the metaphysics of his fiction to be taken seriously is indicated by his letter to James Russell Lowell in July [page 413:] of 1844.(10) In this letter Poe summarized the revelations of Van-kirk but prefaced them with conclusions that denied progress and perfectibility:

It is easy to connect these conclusions with Poe's speculation. If every soul, or mind, is a portion of the mind of God in “corporate investiture,” all souls must be on an “equal footing.” Yet perfection cannot be achieved because it is the result of the free operation of the Divine Volition, and the Divine Volition is impeded by matter. Each individual must be considered separately because identity is conferred by the body. Although Poe, like Emerson and Whitman, could conceive of a sort of cosmic democracy because the mind of God was in everything, he differed in his interpretation of natural law. Emerson could acknowledge that man was subject to the “law of things,” but he could envision mind as being superior to “Fate.” Whitman, while proclaiming that the body was equal to the soul, exulted in the perfection of the laws of nature and in his “cosmic consciousness” was prone to see pain and evil diminishing through the process of emergent evolution.

In Eureka Poe too gave evidence that evolution might be God's way of moving man toward perfection, but there was no perfection in matter, and the laws of matter were merely necessary and expedient, making organic life possible or, as he put it, “practicable.”(11) The very existence of matter as a “cage” for the spirit was [page 414:] a limiting factor. Man, like all the other creatures of the universe, was subject to the laws of matter. Man might progress in knowledge of the natural laws, but he could not progress in wisdom, for wisdom meant the mind's perfect comprehension of itself. Above all man could not progress in happiness so long as he possessed a body tributary to the pain and frustration that were necessary conditions in the organic life. They were part of the Divine Plan. Otherwise the joy of immaterial existence would be unrecognized.

Neither God nor man could call back a thought, Poe claimed in “Mesmeric Revelation.” It was the nature of thought to be irrevocable. God's thought was creative, and once it had created material forms, these forms would remain the same until the metamorphosis of death. Poe could not imagine God as having afterthoughts and then interfering with his plan. Consequently he did not temporalize the Chain of Being. The law of gradation was the law of nature, and however man might seek to alter his physical environment, this law would prevail. Attempts to evade the law, as he claimed in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” would merely increase the wrongness of man's temporal condition. Emerson and Whitman could celebrate the perfection of the Divine Plan, but Poe saw imperfection structured into the universe as part of the plan. In man's flawed condition only intuitive glimpses of the inorganic life beyond the grave could provide hope of perfect happiness. These glimpses were provided by the artist's imagination, and the end of art was properly pleasure. Neither practical knowledge nor exemplary conduct could bring happiness. Only the hope of perfect awareness unimpeded by the brutish atomic constitution of our physical bodies might alleviate our present pain. Therefore the artist, more than the priest and more than the philosopher, was God's agent, for he brought us the beauty of the idea, not pure, not perfect, but as nearly perfect as the human condition would allow.

Poe's last attempt to formulate a consistent theory of the universe that would correlate with his aesthetics came toward the end of his life in what he called a poem, even though it was in prose. In [page 415:] the preface to Eureka Poe made his final apology for art, in which he intimated that only what was beautiful was true:

By claiming that his prose treatise was a “Romance” or a “Poem,” Poe discarded all of his previous limitations of poetic form. In a sense he abdicated as a critic, for if he wanted Eureka to be judged as a poem, all of the criteria he had elaborated during fourteen years as a practicing critic would have to be disallowed. Most of Eureka is concerned with “scientific” proof of Poe's hypotheses; there is no unity of tone — the beginning is satirical, the middle is scientifically objective, and the end is ecstatic. Thus, by Poe's usual standards, unity of effect would be lost, particularly the totality of effect derived from the single sitting.

The only concession Poe made to his previous position as a critic was his affirmation that the beauty of his system made it true. Why should his system be regarded as both beautiful and true? Because “a perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth,”(13) and apparently a perfect consistency had to be beautiful. The beauty would be the beauty of design, the pattern discernible in chaos, or, as Henry James put it, the figure in the carpet. Poe could claim that Eureka was an art-product because he had imagined a cosmogony. He could consider it true because he had “proved” the consistency of his theory by Newtonian physics. Thus he was able to associate himself by implication with Johannes Kepler. Kepler [page 416:] “guessed” the “three omniprevalent laws of revolution,” but the truth of his guess was “subsequently demonstrated and accounted for by the patient and mathematical Newton.”(14)

It seems that Poe was now equating the poetic imagination with the scientific imagination. Already he had stated that the imaginative mind worked by the perception of analogies; now he assumed that it also had the power of extrapolation, or the ability to project or extend known data into a conjectural knowledge of the unknown. In his romantic youth he had deplored science as the agent which had replaced his dream with dull realities; now he applauded science because the increase of scientific knowledge extended the range of analogies open to the poetic imagination. Yet Poe still considered himself to be avoiding the “Cloud-Land of Metaphysics.”(15) To him metaphysics was deductive reasoning based upon a priori assumptions — self-evident truths — but he believed that “no truths are self-evident.” Nor did he consider his method inductive, for induction consisted only in the examination of phenomena to develop general laws.(16) The only way science had advanced was by intuitive leaps from the already known, by “guesses.” The ability of the scientist to proceed from the known to the unknown on the basis of an assumption of continuity or regularity was to Poe true evidence of the imagination. The poet or scientist started with empirical data and then launched his mind on a journey into the unknown, “intuitively” certain that one system prevailed throughout the universe. If a perfect consistency could be discovered, it had to be the absolute truth, and this truth would be susceptible of mathematical demonstration.

Poe had at last reached the point where truth and beauty became one. Beauty was the design of the universe itself, wherein each atom surged into being with the thought of God, diffusing outward from the center “in furtherance of the ultimate design — that of the utmost possible Relation,” until full heterogeneity would be realized. The diffusive energy, or repulsion, was the [page 417:] thought of God, which created the universe. The gravitational attraction, or the tendency to return to unity, was the characteristic of matter. “No other principles exist.” The only way in which matter could be “manifested to Mind” was by its properties of attraction and repulsion. The natural tendency of matter to draw together into one was the physical law; the tendency of mind to shape matter into an inconceivable variety of forms was the spiritual principle. The universe, then, represented a balance of two principles, the law of mind and the law of matter, and thus it would remain until the volition of God should be withdrawn. Then all atoms would draw together into the ur-stuff, the primal particle. Its property of resistance to mind would no longer be operative, and mind would recognize it no longer. Nothing would be left but mind, or unparticled matter, and the laws of the physical universe would rule no more. The beauty of the universe was the beauty of the plan — the utmost conceivable variety of parts held together in a unitary system. Consequently, the old aesthetic formula that beauty was unity in variety described the universe as an aesthetic object. In it there was “an absolute reciprocity of adaptation,” in which cause and effect were indistinguishable from each other. Only the universe showed a perfect organic relationship, part being related to part and every part being related to the whole, and all in accordance with the purpose of God. The universe was a perfect plot. There were no “interposed incidents external and foreign to the main subject”; all events sprang out of the “bosom of the thesis,” and every particle existed in terms of the preconceived end. “The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.”(17)

What was man's destiny in the plot of God? The individual mind was but a portion of the mind of God, incarnated in matter. Dreams, visions, experiences during “sleep-waking” or hypnotic trances were true because in such experiences the mind freed itself from its organic cage and knew itself as the mind of God. All of God's creatures possessed “more or less conscious” intelligence. They were conscious first of their mortal identity and next, “by faint indeterminate glimpses,” of an identity with God. As God's [page 418:] plan fulfilled itself temporally, the consciousness of mortal identity would grow weaker and the consciousness of an identity with God would grow stronger until individuality would be lost and the collective consciousness of the universe would once more be the mind of God. “In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life — Life — Life within Life — the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.”(18)

At last Poe had returned to the pantheism of “The Island of the Fay.” No longer did he think that the perfect plot of the universe was designed to promote the happiness of God's creatures. God became a hedonist who wished only to promote his own pleasure, and it was possible for him to do this only by varying the nature of his existence. The universe represented God's “expansive” existence, and He “feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures — the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite individualizations of Himself.” When God withdrew his volition — the repulsive force that caused the ur-stuff of the universe to radiate from the center — then God would resume his “concentrated” life as One, his existence as pure mind. God passed all eternity “in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion.”(19) The plot of God was solely for the purpose of giving him pleasure.

2

It is beside the point to debate whether or not Poe intended his cosmogony to be taken as truth. Its beauty, as he had claimed in his preface, was in its consistency. His intuition of the nature of God and the universe was a “romance” that made use of the laws of physics as he understood them. This was enough. Nevertheless, he was disturbed when he lectured on the subject and found that his audience misunderstood him. Patiently he undertook to simplify his system to one of his correspondents,(20) and he defended himself [page 419:] in a letter to Charles Fenno Hoffman, editor of the Literary World.(21) Poe hedged a bit in saying he had not meant to ridicule the Aristotelian or Baconian modes of reasoning; he merely wished to defend intuition as “a conviction arising from those inductions or deductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason, or defy our capacity for expression.” He went on to claim that he did not mean to assert that “each soul is its own God — its own Creator,” but that “each soul is, in part, its own God — its own Creator.” Poe knew quite well that he could be called “a pantheist, a polytheist, a Pagan, or a God knows what,” but he professed not to care unless someone dubbed him “a Student of Theology.” It was a student of theology who had challenged him in the pages of the Literary World.

Obviously Poe's audience did not take him at his word. They could not consider Eureka as a poem or a romance which was beautiful because it was consistent and true because it was beautiful. Poe had made God into an artist, and America would accept Him only as a moral judge. America was not ready for religion to be turned into an aesthetic exercise. The question before us in this study, however, is not Poe's capacity for metaphysical speculation but the correlation between his metaphysics and his teleology of art.(22)

Poe proposed that God was an artist and that the universe existed as a perfect plot designed for God's pleasure. Therefore the divine principle, insofar as it was exhibited in God's incarnation, was aesthetic pleasure. Man was serving God's purpose when he worked as an artist insofar as he made beauty his end. The artist-God enjoyed beauty more than anything else, so the sum total of all the pleasure men took in beauty was the pleasure of God in his expansive existence.

The artist-God also took pleasure in creativity and his thought was creative, resulting in the utmost multiplicity of form. Yet creativity [page 420:] was limited after the incarnation because the mind in its mortal cage could not think things into being. It had to confine itself to the manipulation of the already created elements of the universe, making new combinations of them in imitation of the symmetry and harmony of the system. On the other hand, direct imitation of the objects themselves was not creative, because God had already thought them into being precisely the way they should be. All things existed in a perfect reciprocity of adaptation, and since it was the nature of God's thought to be irrevocable, he would not “re-think” the universe. In his human incarnation, the most the artist-God could do was strive to make his art “ideal.” The artist's mind could not overcome the resistance of matter, but he could idealize it, that is, adapt it to thought. Hence all art should spring, as Poe had said in his review of Drake and Halleck, “apparently ... from the brain of the poet.” If the artist merely imitated the sights and sounds that were common to all mankind, Poe claimed in “The Poetic Principle,” he would “fail to prove his divine title.”

The divine principle in man, which Poe located chiefly in the aesthetic sense, had nothing to do with the truth that came from an exercise of the practical reason. This truth was merely expedient, for it dealt with man's use of nature. In fact, the reason was highly limited in its application, for the great discoveries, both in science and in poetry, had come from intuition. Truth could serve the aesthetic sense, Poe said in “The Poetic Principle,” only if “through the attainment of a truth we are led to perceive a harmony where none was apparent before.” If we learn something about the nature of God's perfect plot through the attainment of truth, then the aesthetic sense could be served indirectly, but generally speaking the practical reason was the agent of utility. Poe believed that science served the artist by extending the “range of analogy,” by which he meant the correspondences that signified a unitary system. In other words, the more the artist knew about the harmony of the Great Design, the more effectively he could plan his microcosmic work of art in accordance with the laws of nature. [page 421:]

However, the work of art itself could not serve science because it was a fiction. The reason, then, could be pressed into the service of art for planning and a posteriori analysis, but art itself could not be utilitarian.

The third mental faculty Poe cited in “The Poetic Principle” was the moral sense. He admitted that there was a long and authoritative tradition, beginning with Aristotle, that associated beauty and virtue. Virtue was beautiful, but the moral sense or conscience in its cognitive function recognized virtue only in terms of duty, whereas the taste or aesthetic sense recognized virtue in terms of beauty. It is clear, then, that Poe's teleology of art was grounded upon a rudimentary epistemology which in turn developed out of the faculty psychology which limited the various modes of cognition. In Poe's thinking, we have an intuitive knowledge of our duty because we have an inner sense called the conscience. We arrive at the truth through an exercise of the practical reason. We feel or intuit beauty because we have an inner sense called the taste. Each faculty is related to the other two in one way or another, but the office or function of each faculty is clearly marked, and each provides a different kind of knowledge.

In the interest of cognitive efficiency, and Poe would be nothing if not efficient, the three different modes of knowledge should be observed in any form of communication. Those aspects of a poem which appealed to the aesthetic sense — meter, metaphor, and rhyme — simply got in the way of the communication of truth. Poe assumed that poetry was at least a way of knowing, but he could not consider it a better way of communicating knowledge than prose. When truth was the object, poetry was inefficient. Similarly, poetry was less efficient than a sermon in appealing to the conscience.

It is obvious that Poe was trying to demonstrate to a utilitarian age and to an audience concerned with practicality that it was more practical to assign each faculty its own province than it was to promote a confusion of purpose. His strategy was based upon his pessimistic assumption that his American audience, accustomed to [page 422:] impure art which justified itself by teaching or preaching, would never disallow these functions unless it could be proved “scientifically” that art was ineffective in its appeal to the reason and the moral sense. The poet-priest, as Poe intimated in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” had been displaced by the “rough pedants” in the public esteem and would never be able to assume his rightful role unless the public could be persuaded of two things: 1) that the way of knowing that poetry represented contributed a pleasure that could not be experienced in any other way, and 2) that this pleasure was divine in origin and formative in its moral effect. Poe's philosophy of art was thus intended to persuade the public that aesthetic pleasure allowed us to know God in his purest aspect, that of creator or artist, and that other cognitive modes were merely expedients which allowed man to cope with the contingencies of his organic or rudimentary life. The reason enabled us to deal with the world about us. The moral sense served as a guide to behavior, and benevolent behavior was necessary for society. The sense of beauty, however, enabled us to know a God who created the universe as a work of art. Like Jonathan Edwards, Poe reveled in the beauty of the creation and saw earthly beauty as a shadow of the divine; but unlike the worthy Puritan he could not conceive of a God of judgment who would endow each man with a divine soul that yearned for celestial beauty and then arbitrarily cast most of these divine souls into the hideousness of hell. To Poe, existence itself was bell enough, and the divine pleasure which could momentarily alleviate the pain of existence could come only from the artist, who would prove his divine title by adapting the given, the raw materials of art, to the limitations of man's cognitive apparatus in such a way that the pleasure would be as pure as possible. To do this the artist had to be relieved of the burden of truth. Truth enabled us to get along in the world, but it had little to do with our apprehension of the beauty of the creation. This beauty could only be felt, and it was the artist's duty to make us feel it. This was Poe's message in “The Poetic Principle,” and it was the summation of his teleology of art. [page 423:]

3

In his role as a practical critic Poe was fond of asserting that inspiration or intuition had no part in the composition or construction of a work of art, yet unless we understand his cosmogony we are likely to conclude that he was perversely contradicting his statements that imagination was the “soul” of poetry and that the artist was a visionary who strove to express his own dreams. Yet by reducing God to the limitations of the physical universe, Poe removed him as a source of inspiration. Poe's artist, unlike Emerson's, was not the passive servant of the Oversoul, because there was no Over-soul. In Poe's system there was no consciousness greater than the mind of man. Nature represented God extended in the unconscious or partly conscious, and the presence of God's thought in nature was recognizable by the mind only as the laws of motion. The life of God in his “expanded” existence was only the life of his creatures and was subject to the same limitations. Vision came as a “memory” of the unparticled existence of God before his incarnation. But since such vision was already “there” in the mind — it came to the surface in trance or in what Poe called the “sleep-waking” condition — it had nothing to do with the process of composition. It merely provided an intuition of perfect harmony, or rather a memory of a condition in which God's volition was unimpeded by matter. Fragmented and caged within material organs, God as man could not create by merely thinking things into existence. He had to work with the given. As Poe said in his “Marginalia” and again in Eureka, in “human constructions a particular cause has a particular effect; a particular intention brings to pass a particular object.” The poetical instinct of man was the “instinct of the symmetrical,”(23) but in achieving the symmetrical the human artist had to employ the principles of causation in order to fulfill his creative intention.

Composition was a deliberate process. The artist had an intuition [page 424:] of perfect symmetry. This intuition sprang from the soul, or the indwelling divinity, but, as Poe stated in the “Marginalia,” there was a difference between the capacity to be a visionary and the capacity to produce a work of art. There were many geniuses, but few works of genius. Genius, as Poe saw it, simply represented a superior consciousness or sensibility — a superior capacity to appreciate.

Often it appears that Poe agreed with Emerson and the other transcendentalists that genius was the divine element in man. Where he differed was in his concept of divinity. Poe's artist-God was creative when he thought the universe into being, but after his incarnation into the universe he became a mere aesthete, enjoying the variety of his expansive existence. He did not exist as a source of inspiration outside of the human mind, and the human mind itself was subject to the mechanical laws of the universe. The human body, like all material objects, was a mechanism. Its machinery provided sensations to the mind, and the mind knew the external [page 425:] world only through sensations. Vibrations moving through the nervous system to the brain provided our only knowledge of the world without. A superior consciousness could be intuitively aware of the symmetry of the whole by its “poetic instinct,” but this awareness could not be communicated to the duller consciousness except as an emotional effect. Vision could not be communicated, only the effect of vision, the feeling that attended the “memory” of unparticled existence. The transmission of feeling, however, was subject to the laws of matter, or, in this case, the psychological laws that governed man's perception in his organic life. Accordingly, analysis took over where vision failed, and the ability of the artist “to get full view of the machinery of his proposed effect” was necessary for him to produce a work of genius. He had to have a firm grasp of his intention, he had to know the machinery of the human brain, and he had to have the self-discipline to enforce his will. Thus only by a conscious, willed organization of the raw materials of art could the artist transmit to the dull sensibilities of the mass audience something of the emotional effect he had experienced when his “divine soul” had disengaged itself from its fleshly cage and remembered the perfect unity and harmony of the “immaterial” or “concentrated” life of God. The genius should not attempt to give to an audience what they could experience for themselves, the sensations of phenomena. His proper duty was to give them what they could not experience unaided, the feeling attendant upon the intuition of symmetry. The work of art was a microcosm, but it could not possess the fullness or variety of creation; it could only present a minute totality by organizing percepts and concepts to create a unified impression.

In the light of Poe's metaphysics it is not surprising that he was more concerned with compositional method than he was with interpretation. Many of his book reviews are commentaries on method, but since these have already been discussed, the concluding chapter of this study will be limited to those essays in which Poe attempted to demonstrate how the artist could impress the less sensitive minds of the common run of humanity. It was the [page 426:] artist's divine function to adapt the materials of art to the receptive capacity of the mass audience. In such a way he mediated between the expansive existence and the concentrated existence of God, serving God by providing aesthetic pleasure, the “excitement of the soul” that was a foretaste of the “glory beyond the grave.”

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 403:]

1.  For a persuasive interpretation of the meaning of Poe's “horror,” see Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, Chapter IV. I must disagree, however, with Professor Davidson's description of Poe's view of nature as a “chaos wherein nothing exists according to any law or order that man can know.” Such an interpretation may easily be derived from Poe's poems and fiction, but it is alien to his philosophical thought.

2.  In a recent article Burton R. Pollin implies that this tale should not be taken seriously as a symbolic narrative because it was a “plate story” written to interpret an engraving made by J. B. Martin for Graham's. See Pollin, “Poe as Probable Author of ‘Harper's Ferry,’ ” American Literature, XL (May, 1968), 169-70.

3.  The last three phrases of this sentence were repeated verbatim in the conclusion of Eureka. See Works, XVI, 315.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 405:]

4.  For an account of this exploration, see my article “Poe's Earthly Paradise,” American Quarterly, XII (1960), 404-13.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 407:]

5.  Cf.. Eureka, in Works, XVI, 309-14. Life forms that possessed the highest sensitivity were the forms closest to God, since God experienced his “life” only in the pleasures and pains of his creatures.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 409:]

6.  This should not be taken as an anticipation of Bergson's durée. Poe in his melancholy awareness of human limitations believed that we are aware of time only through events. “Marginalia,” Works, XVI, 22. The experience of duration, or the sense of time as a quality, would have to be preceded by the decay of ordinary sense experience. The soul had to leave the body in order to experience pure quality; the sense of duration was the first step.

7.  Ibid., 17-18.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 410:]

8.  For a psychological explanation of synaesthesis, see C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards, and James Wood, The Foundations of Aesthetics (New York, 1922), 72-91. Poe's demand for totality presupposes the aesthetic state which Ogden, Richards and Wood called “equilibrium.” As they explained it, “sets of impulses are felt in relation to other sets, which, unless both were already active in the equilibrium, would not occur.” Perception is not limited to a single agency in such a condition, and “we are less dependent upon ... particular impulses.”

9.  The Fowler brothers, American phrenologists, accepted Poe's “Mesmeric Revelation” as scientific fact. See Madeleine Stern, “Poe: ‘The Mental Temperament’ for Phrenologists,” American Literature, XL (1968), 162-63. Poe, however, claimed that the story was pure fiction. “Marginalia,” Works, XVI, 71. Disguising his speculative thought as fiction was Poe's way of protecting himself against matter-of-fact critics, but his fondness for hoaxes may have had something to do with it.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 413:]

10.  Letters, I, 256-57. A portion of this letter also appears in a letter to Thomas Holley Chivers, July 10, 1845, ibid., 260.

11.  For an illuminating discussion of Poe's evolutionary theory against the background of current scientific thought, see Frederick Conner, “Poe's Eureka: The Problem of Mechanism,” Cosmic Optimism (Gainesville, 1949), 67-91.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 415:]

12.  Works, XVI, 184.

13.  Ibid., 196.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 416:]

14.  Ibid., 279.

15.  Ibid., 261. See also “A Chapter of Suggestions,” ibid., XIV, 191-92.

16.  Ibid., XVI, 188-89.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 417:]

17.  Ibid., 292.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 418:]

18.  Ibid., 315.

19.  Ibid., 314.

20.  Poe to George W. Eveleth, February 29, 1848, in Letters, II, 360-62.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 419:]

21.  September 20, 1848, ibid., 379-82.

22.  On this topic see Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, 223-53; and Carol H. Maddison, “Poe's Eureka,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, II (1960), 350-67.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 423:]

23.  Eureka, in Works, XVI, 302.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 424:]

24.  “Marginalia,” Works, XVI, 67.