Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “The Plots of Man,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 427-453 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 427:]

XVIII  •  The Plot of Man

 

IF the universe as a whole was the perfect plot of God, the great question, as Poe saw it, had to do with how the human artist, hampered by the resistance of matter to thought, could create microcosms that would reflect something of the perfection of the whole and thereby give a temporal experience of divine pleasure. Frequently in his book reviews and in the “Marginalia,” Poe had described the pleasure that attended the recognition of artistic design. He had said that perfection of plot was a “rigidly artistic merit” to be appreciated only by the. sophisticate. In his view a perfect design was not even desirable in those genres which based their appeal upon the imitation of life — the novel and the drama. Going still further in Eureka, he stated that perfection of plot was impossible in “human constructions”: “The pleasure which we derive from any display of human ingenuity is in the ratio of the approach to this species of reciprocity. In the construction of plot, for example, in fictitious literature, we should aim at so arranging the incidents that we shall not be able to determine, of any one of them, whether it depends from any one other or upholds it. In this sense, of course, perfection of plot is really, or practically unattainable — but only because it is a finite intelligence that constructs.”(1) Plot construction, then, was not an instinctive process but the ordering act of the intelligence limited on the human level by the resistance of matter to thought. The predicament of the human artist was that the desire for perfect order, which the God in him knew was “right,” would always be frustrated. Objects did not yield themselves readily to the metamorphosis which the artist wished to impose.

A practical solution to this problem was for the artist to represent, not the objects themselves, but the ideas and feelings the objects inspired. A “finite intelligence” could not transfer a sensation [page 428:] from one mind to another without duplicating sensory stimuli, which was impossible. Therefore he should endeavor to arouse the effect of the stimuli without attempting some crude approximation of sensory experience in words. Poe knew, as many of his generation did not, that an artistic experience could never be an equivalent of sensory experience. The traditional psychology had taught him that sensations were vivid and that ideas were shadowy and indefinite. But whereas Locke's psychology had impelled some writers to try to increase the vividness of their work by the use of concrete imagery, Poe, with his dedication to efficiency, refused to permit the artist to attempt the duplication of sense experience. Truth in description was impossible, even in sculpture, the most imitative of the arts. Therefore it should not be attempted.

If nature could not be duplicated by human art, the only way the artist could create microcosms would be by composition, or the arrangement of the raw material of art in a preconceived design, knowing in advance that his design must be limited by the ability of other minds to take it in. Poe's clearest description of the artist's role in adapting the raw materials of nature to the finite intelligence appears, strangely enough, in two essays upon the principles of landscape gardening. The first of these, “The Landscape Garden,” was published in 1842 but was expanded and printed as “The Domain of Arnheim” in 1847. That Poe took landscape gardening as a fine art was indicated by his statement in “The Poetic Principle” that the poetic sentiment could “develop itself in various modes — in Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance — very especially in Music — and very peculiarly, and with a wide field, in the composition of the Landscape Garden.”

Although it is usually classified among Poe's tales, “The Landscape Garden” is really a dissertation upon the imitation of nature in the fine arts. In his literary criticism Poe had denied that an artist should attempt to imitate nature directly, and he employed the same principle for the gardening art. Accordingly, he disparaged what his contemporaries called the natural garden, which was supposed to duplicate the “wilderness” of nature, and described the art as an effort to improve the composition of the landscape. [page 429:] Poe's landscape gardener, Ellison, achieves happiness by constructing a garden that adapts nature to the finite intelligence by arranging it in an order that can be taken in by the human mind.

Before constructing his garden Ellison finds it necessary to distinguish between nature and art. He concludes that nature does not give us complete aesthetic satisfaction because of the limits of our perception. To “angels,” unlimited by the organs of sense, the “great landscape garden of the whole earth” might appear to be perfection, but men are not angels, and it is the duty of the mortal artist to adapt the natural scene “to the eyes which were to behold it on earth.” Only in such a way can Ellison succeed in the “fulfillment of his destiny as Poet.”(2)

Poe carried the speculation of Ellison a step further in “The Domain of Arnheim” by giving a teleological explanation of the “apparent” deformities of nature. He also restated the principles of the gardening art and illustrated the principles by giving a description of Ellison's perfect garden.

It must have been the original intention of God, the narrator surmises, to have “so arranged the earth's surface as to have fulfilled at all points man's sense of perfection in the beautiful, the sublime, or the picturesque,” but “geological disturbances” had altered form and color grouping. Yet to admit that natural occurrences could frustrate the intention of the God who created nature would be absurd, so Ellison suggests that the apparent imperfection of nature is the sign of mortality — “prognostic of death.” The earthly immortality of man was God's first intention, and the “primitive arrangement of the earth's surface had been adapted to his blissful estate, as not existent but designed.” The disturbances, then, “were the preparations for his subsequently conceived death-ful condition.”(3) Thus Poe's God had changed his mind. Ellison does not mention the Fall in the Garden, but it is obvious that Poe was still using the myth of the Fall as he had in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una.” Paradise was behind and ahead. The art of the [page 430:] Creator could still be recognized in the universe as a whole, but it was “apparent to reflection only.” It lacked immediacy of effect, just as the design of an overly complex drama or an overly long poem could be discovered only by analysis, not by an immediate intuition of the whole. Only in landscape gardening, Poe claimed, could nature be improved, and then only by composition:

This quotation reveals both Poe's strength and his weakness as a theorist. He was aware, as every landscape painter is, that the beauty of nature lacked composition. Furthermore he was aware that the experience of an art object was different from the experience of the “living and breathing beauty,” so that the true beauty of art — that which appealed to the “fraternity” of the artists — was in the artistry itself, the “apparently arbitrary arrangements of matter.” His mistake, as has been emphasized in this study, lay in his assumption that a highly developed taste was infallible. The sense of beauty, Poe thought, would recognize an error in design as easily as normal eyesight would distinguish between white and black. Therefore all true artists would see the same errors and suggest the same corrections. This is perhaps the reason why Poe was so deeply pained when his own attempts to point out errors were greeted with charges of personal bias and ill temper. No one had the right to make moral judgments of a critic who described errors and suggested corrections any more than one should make a moral judgment of a mathematician who demonstrated that two and two were not five.

As for the improvement of nature by art, the only way nature could be improved was by “arrangement.” The details of nature could not be improved; they could only be imitated, and even then the imitation would be imperfect. Imitative arts were at best only poor substitutes for nature. Yet since physical loveliness appealed to all mankind, the landscape garden, or the composition of nature in an art form, would have a wide appeal. Ellison, the “poet of the landscape,” undertakes to supply a design and to infuse this design with a meaning that will be transmitted by the association of ideas. His design is so vast “as to convey the sentiment of spiritual interference,” as if the “Almighty design” were “one step depressed” and “brought into something like harmony or consistency with the sense of human art. ...” The garden must “assume the air of an intermediate or secondary nature — a nature which is not God, nor an emanation of God, but which still is nature in the sense of the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God.”(5) [page 432:]

In 1847 as in 1842, Poe envisioned the possibility of an earthly paradise created by the human artist and adapted to mortal limitations; but before this vision could be realized the artist would have to be given power. Even in a fallen world, a poet could recover some of the joys of the lost paradise. He could develop a composition neither too great nor too complex for the human mind to grasp as a whole and yet great enough so that his art would seem to the uninitiated to be supernatural in origin. Allen Tate has described perceptively Poe's concept of the angelic imagination, but he overlooked the pessimism with which Poe surveyed the possibility of angelic creativity. Happiness might be possible on earth, Poe admitted, if a sensitive and imaginative person were given health, love, “contempt of ambition,” and an object of unceasing pursuit. Furthermore, he would have to have freedom from distraction. Ellison, the landscape poet, has such freedom only because of his four hundred and fifty million dollar inheritance. In a materialistic culture, the only power available to the poet was the power of money. Given the resources, the poet could do something about the alienation of man from God by re-ordering nature in an approximation of the beauty of the Great Design. His work would seem to be a product of the angelic imagination to ordinary eyes. All great art seems miraculous to the naïve, but to the sophisticated even the greatest work of art would give evidence of its human construction. The paradise of Arnheim would be constructed by the conscious intelligence employing thoroughly mundane principles of craftsmanship.

It is interesting to note Poe's conditions for mastery of art: good health, leisure, and money. How much these requirements reflected his own situation of having to do journalistic hackwork under conditions of psychic and physical misery is open to conjecture. Yet it is certain that he thought the artist could be and should be the master of his means. Even vision could be controlled and manipulated into expression, Poe thought, provided that the visionary were in a favorable mental and physical condition.(6) Great [page 433:] art did not spring from neurotic compulsion but was the end product of a balanced mind, with the intellectual faculties guiding and controlling the urgencies of expression.(7) This view explains Poe's objection to Hood's hypochondria; he claimed to have caught the intimation of the “death's head” in Hood's attempts to convey the comic. For all of his own fictional accounts of neurosis, Poe's theory of composition demanded the mens sana in corpore sano. Compulsion, whether from the divine madness of inspiration or from the agony within, had to yield to the control of the artistic will.

2

The poet of the landscape was limited to the materials of the physical universe and had to arrange these materials so as to suggest ideas. The poet of words, however, could use ideas directly because words appealed to the mind and were ineffective in conveying sense impressions. Words could evoke mental states, in Poe's psychology of art, without referring to the flux of phenomena that assaulted the external senses. A “made-up” landscape would evoke feeling better than a description of a natural one because such a description, however specific in detail, would be inferior to an imagined [page 434:] composition in which all elements would combine to create a total effect, an effect never found in the experience of nature. Accordingly, it was appropriate that Poe's essay on method, “The Philosophy of Composition,” should begin with a consideration of effect.

Poe's most complete account of the “preconceived design” had been given in his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales; he merely applied to the narrative poem the principles he had previously advanced for the short tale. The fact that he began his exposition of how he wrote “The Raven” with a summary of his principle of plot development indicates that his essay is what he called it, the “philosophy” of composition, “philosophy” being understood here in one of its secondary meanings as a theory underlying a particular activity. “Nothing is more clear,” Poe wrote, “than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen,” for, he continued, “it is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of ... causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.” Every element should contribute to the development of the intention, for only by such a total organization could the artist succeed in conveying a unified impression. Obviously Poe did not regard the writing of a poem as a process of discovery. His mechanistic view of the intellect presupposed a mechanistic method, and the author of a narrative poem, like a builder, had to have a blueprint in advance before he could put together members that would support each other. Poe's artist was both architect and builder. The poetic faculty — the capacity for feeling beauty — had to be implemented by a knowledge of the means of transmitting this feeling to others before a poet could count on the appropriate response. Without such knowledge, he would evoke the response only by accident. Poe proposed to demonstrate that in a good poem nothing happened by accident: “It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and [page 435:] rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” The plotting of a poem had to proceed in terms of cause and effect, and a causal relationship among parts could exist only when the poet knew in advance what he wanted to do. As Poe had said in his criticism of the drama, undue complexity of plot was frequently the result of afterthoughts which modified the preconceived design. The human artist, like the divine, should not have afterthoughts, for such afterthoughts would be likely to make the design inconsistent. Inconsistency of design, like a mistake in mathematics, would indicate the incompetence of the designer.

If Poe's mechanistic theory seems absurd in the light of our knowledge of the part the unconscious mind plays in composition, we should remember that Poe, throughout most of his career and particularly during the period between 1842 and 1846, was attempting to refute the idea that artistic genius and skill were incompatible. Thus, as he always did in his literary campaigns, he tended to overstate and to underline. His qualifications, when he was willing to make them, existed in the context of his evaluative judgments, not in his theoretical statements. Thus he was able to praise Dickens for having genius that made the rules, but at the same time he pointed out instances wherein superior skill could have saved Dickens from errors. He had claimed that Shelley's soul was law, but he deplored Shelley's tendency to write only to himself.(8) To record the experience of vision solely for oneself was quite different from the process of transferring the emotional effect of the vision to the “unvisionary” mind. It was only vanity, he thought, that caused an author to claim that he was the instrument of some higher power.

This is a valid description of the process of composition as it ordinarily occurs, much more convincing even than Poe's reconstruction of his own method. Yet if Poe overstated the case for deliberate procedure, it was because he had to use everything he could to combat the transcendentalists, who made the artist the passive vehicle of Divine Truth. The artist was divine, Poe had claimed in Eureka, but it was only because God himself was an artist. Every man was divine, but only the creative man carried out his divine function. What the poet saw, if he were indeed a poet, was the beauty of the divine plan, but it required human technical virtuosity to convey some portion of the feeling attendant upon vision to the less acute sensibility of an audience.

Since Poe's concept of response involved a more or less mechanical associative process, it would appear that his preplanned effects would arouse only stock responses. Unfortunately they often do when his theory is applied as a formula by less able writers. A stock response depends upon psychological norms, and Poe used a normative psychology. His premise of normative reactions lay behind his assertion that a writer had no excuse if he failed to create the desired impression.

Poe's “subjects” consisted of his magazine audience and himself. He believed that the “mob” could be misled by dishonest critics, but he assumed that his own reaction was a reliable norm and that when a poem or a tale failed to impress him there was something wrong with it that could be revealed by analysis. Accordingly, much of his criticism was directed toward the end of showing the public the origin of their invalid responses in something like the way that I. A. Richards analyzed the responses of his students. A poem which properly marshaled emotional effects should appeal to both the popular and the critical mind, Poe thought. “The Raven” [page 437:] had exhibited this kind of universal appeal; it was his most popular poem and had earned plaudits from the sophisticated in America and in England. By analyzing his method of composition, Poe was demonstrating that this happy result could be brought about deliberately. Like Richards, Poe wanted fresh responses, which was the chief reason he stressed novelty. Yet Poe was more concerned with novelty of effect than with the freshness of experience that Richards found in a re-ordering of our impulses.(9) Even here, however, the difference is not so great as might be supposed. Poe attributed the highest value to the poet's transmission of a felt harmony. An intuition of order, if successfully transmitted to others, enables them to have an aesthetic experience, an experience which probably contributes as much to the ordering of impulses as do the moral and social imperatives that are obeyed under protest.

Early in his career as a critic Poe had concluded that there must be unity of impression to produce the desired effect of an artistic whole; hence, on an empirical basis he decided that a poem should be short. The single sitting which permitted an undiluted effect was obligatory. Yet a poem should not be too short, or it would not have the weight and momentum to create a strong effect. If the poem did what Poe thought it could do, detach the spirit from its mortal home by its incantatory and evocative qualities, then it must exhibit a certain “duration or repetition of purpose” for its powers to work. All safeguards must be taken to prevent the breaking of the spell. Arbitrarily he decided that a poem short enough to be read in one-half to one hour would not fatigue even the most delicate sensibility. Furthermore, it could probably be read without interruption; and it would be extensive enough to provide the sophisticate with the pleasure of recognizing a design of some complexity. On the other hand, if the poem were too long, the spell would be broken as far as feeling was concerned, and even a cultivated taste would be unable to take in the total design without an effort of the abstracting and organizing reason. Poe, like many of his contemporaries, did not believe that one could feel intensely and think at the same time. Therefore, if structural analysis had to [page 438:] be carried on while the poem were being read, the effect would be lost. Such labor would be unnecessary in a short poem, however, for the totality of the poem could be appreciated without undue strain on the cognitive faculties.

Given his premises, Poe's argument is sound. Edmund Wilson affirmed in The Triple Thinkers that Poe was correct in his prediction that a long poem would never be popular again, but Wilson argued that it was because verse technique had passed out of fashion in all genres except the lyric. Wilson ignored, as Poe did not, the limitations of the mass audience, who would not recognize technique if they saw it. Poe made allowance for the increased tempo of an industrial civilization, the duration of the attentive span, and the incapacity of a semiliterate audience to recognize a complex structure. He erred only in that he thought the duration of attention and response was predictable. They are, as experimental psychology has shown, but not within a range that would be particularly useful to a poet.

It would not do to say that Poe was completely unaware of the variation of response possible even within a given audience, but he thought it possible for an artist to appeal on all levels. He planned “The Raven,” he said, to take account of “that degree of excitement which I deemed not above the popular, while not below the critical taste. ...” The poem demonstrated the universal appeal that in his later reviews he had claimed entirely possible.

The remainder of “The Philosophy of Composition” embodies the practical rules Poe had already advanced in his reviews.(10) [page 439:] Beauty was the only proper effect for a poem, but beauty must not be considered as a quality of the object. It was recognizable only as a response. If an audience did not feel the beauty of a work of art, it was not beautiful. One could not argue with feelings; one could only stimulate them. In this Poe was not far from the position of Henry James, who admitted that one could not abolish the primitive test of liking or not liking a given work.

Poe's next choice of a necessary condition for universal effect was tone. In this he displayed a tendency to accept the taste of his times. An audience in Poe's time liked melancholy; therefore, it was the most nearly universal tone: “all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness.” Poe's tendency to accept the sentiments of his age as universal was his greatest weakness as a theorist. The Victorian sensibility might have been moved to tears by beauty, but modern aestheticians are prone to regard the response to a work of art as cold. Aesthetic appreciation has to be learned, and today we attempt to elevate the mass audience by offering classes in music and art appreciation. Poe, a practical journalist, recognized that there was little evidence that the education of the taste would ever be carried on as a public enterprise, except by the literary critics, and concluded, somewhat like Jonathan Edwards in respect to religion, that devotion to art could be stimulated on the mass level only by moving the emotions. The art object might impress the connoisseur with its perfection, above and beyond all desire, but to Poe a brief glimpse of perfection stimulated a yearning to experience it fully; and unless this yearning were stimulated, the work of art failed. As he wrote in “The Poetic Principle,” “when by Poetry, or when by Music, ... we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not ... through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys. ...” Poe did not consider a mass audience capable of a pure aesthetic response, disinterested and serene. People were like [page 440:] children, petulant and impatient to possess whatever they enjoyed, whether it was an experience or an object. The important thing for an artist was to make his audience desire the appropriate aesthetic experience, not the passion of sexual love, nor the pangs of conscience, nor the exhilaration of intellectual exercise. The divine function of the poet was to make his audience desire a beauty greater than any that could be experienced through ordinary activities, thus stimulating a hope for the future and a concomitant dissatisfaction with the gratifications of phenomenal existence. The contemptus mundi theme, though indirectly expressed in Poe's work, was unquestionably there. The poet was a priest, but only in his own way, anticipating for his audience the glory beyond the grave while demonstrating the evanescence of all earthly joys. The raven is correct in replying “nevermore” to the lover who hopes to clasp his Lenore in heaven, for sexual love cannot exist beyond the grave.

If we explain Poe's requirement of melancholy in terms of Eureka, we see that it was the yearning of the God in man for his former estate, and even if the unimaginative man could not experience this yearning unaided, it was potential in his soul and could be awakened by the magic of verse. Presumably even the dullest would feel melancholy at the death of a beautiful woman, and presumably even the sensual man might be stimulated to an awareness that the soul could not content itself forever with dreams of sexual delight.

Such an argument would seem to Poe only the commonest of common sense, and he had the contemporary popularity of elegiac poems as empirical evidence. The journals were full of mournful lyrics lamenting the deaths of fragile ladies with names such as Lenore, Isabella, and Rosalie Lee. If the beloved woman were unequivocally dead, then the poem would not be marred by sexual passion, which Poe claimed was alien to the true poetical effect. Poe applied the steps toward ideal beauty that he had learned from the Symposium, but he introduced into his application the pessimism of experience. Man will not naturally gravitate from the love of one beautiful form to the love of all beautiful forms and then to [page 441:] the love of the idea of beauty itself. Instead, frustration and pain — the loss of the loved one — will lead him to a yearning for beauty absolute and eternal. Man is dominated by his senses, and detachment from the senses is achieved only by what today we call sublimation. Thus the “meaning” of “The Raven,” which Poe claimed to have poured into the poem toward the end almost as if he were pouring condiment into a stew, has to do with the predicament of a lover who is so infatuated with an earthly love that he lives throughout his life with “mournful and never ending remembrance.” By implication, the only hope for him is the “glory beyond the grave,” which he will never glimpse so long as his mind is captive to the passion of the heart. Poe used the same theme with a different strategy in his “Ulalume,” published two years later. In “Ulalume” the poet is tempted by Astarte, the goddess of fleshly love, to forget the dead Ulalume, even though his soul protests against the temptation. Only by encountering the tomb of Ulalume and by remembering the horrors of the grave, which Poe vulgarly illustrated by a reference to ghouls, can the poet rise above sensuality and experience the beauty of the idea. The last stanza of the poem is confusing because Poe endowed the ghouls, ordinarily the eaters of the dead, with the quality of pity. It appears that the “pitiful, the merciful ghouls” are responsible for conjuring up the vision of Astarte to keep the poet from remembering the horrors of the grave. Yet it is only by remembering the evanescence of earthly love, its frustration and pain, that his soul can be freed for its search for heavenly beauty. The ghouls, eaters of flesh and thus associated with the inevitable destruction of the body, exhibit a misplaced mercy, for they tempt the poet to fall in love all over again and once more experience the pangs of loss. Poe, as poet-priest, was once more telling us what he had intimated in “The Raven,” that the frustration of earthly love forces us to seek something immutable and imperishable, something we experience only partially on earth, but which we must yearn for as the emotional attribute of our divinity.

There is no need to examine in detail Poe's explanation of the more mechanical aspects of his strategy in “The Raven.” Whether [page 442:] we accept his philosophy or not, he was perfectly clear about his method. Starting with the assumption that he wanted to write a narrative poem, he described a procedure which would observe the “laws of human nature.” These laws are displayed by the morbid self-torture of the bereaved lover as he deliberately asks the raven questions which must invariably be answered by “nevermore,” since this is the only word the raven knows. Poe claimed that he had not overstepped the “limits of the real” in the narrative incidents, but in accordance with his theory that a narrative was merely an “array of incident” unless the incidents had some meaning, he proceeded to introduce a metaphorical expression, “Take thy beak from out my heart,” that would stimulate the reader to seek a symbolical suggestiveness in the events of the narrative which would give the tale that “richness ... which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal.”

This last statement invites comment. In Poe's reviews of Undine and Alciphron, he had himself confused the undercurrent of meaning with the ideal, but by 1845 he had clarified his own interpretation of the term. The ideal, as Poe interpreted it in his later years, was to be found only in music or in lyric poetry. It was something that happened in the mind and could only be recognized as a psychic response. Meaning that could be rendered in a prose redaction was not ideal. The ideal could only be felt, but the feeling could be deliberately stimulated. If, however, the feeling could be attributed to any cause other than the poem itself, then the poem was not ideal. The poem need have no transferable meaning, as such; it was simply an experience. Thus the sentiment of “ideality” could be evoked, but it was unrelated to anything that happened outside of the experience of the poem.

By this definition, Poe did not regard “The Raven” as a highly imaginative poem. It was a narrative designed to appeal on two levels. A naïve audience could understand the grief of a bereaved lover and could learn that earthly joys end with the grave and are not to be renewed in Heaven. The sophisticated could appreciate the form of the poem and interpret the symbolic suggestion contained in the single metaphor that occurs near the end, perhaps [page 443:] even rereading the lines with the symbolic meaning diffusing its richness throughout the poem.

For all of his insistence upon the needs of the mass audience, Poe had doubts that a purely ideal poem would ever be popular, because participation in the experience of such a poem required a highly developed sensibility. This did not mean, however, that the poet had to ban himself forever from popular approval. If he knew his audience psychology, he could compose a poem that would gratify both the vulgar and the sophisticated taste, but he would have to aim deliberately at a lower level of appeal than the purely imaginative, while at the same time evidencing enough artistry to please the aesthete.

“The Philosophy of Composition,” then, was illustrative of Poe's contention in his later criticism that the artist should not neglect the man in the street. Scornful though he was of popularity as an end in itself, he felt that it was the duty of the artist to educate the public in beauty, while at the same time pleasing the critically minded. His account of how he wrote “The Raven” shows how it could be done. It was the application of his theoretical statements. Whatever the claim of the romantic genius that he wrote only to please himself, Poe knew that a poet wrote to be read, and he had little patience with the artistic flower that was born to blush unseen.

3

Poe never wrote an essay on method for the short lyric as distinguished from the narrative poem, probably because he thought no method could be prescribed. The lyric, originating in the “soul” or “mind” of the poet, had to obey only the general laws of composition: it must not exceed the human capacity to sustain poetic feeling; it must have an aesthetic purpose; it must obey metrical rules; and it must create a unity of effect. Poe had advanced these propositions in his reviews and essays, concerning himself more extensively with validating the aesthetic purpose of the lyric than with any other requirement. Even his metaphysics was simply an [page 444:] elaboration of his teleology of art, so we may properly regard Poe's efforts to develop a theory of poetry as being directed toward the end of instructing the public; the enjoyment of beauty was not only a permissible but even a necessary element in human experience. Poe's concern with the more technical aspects of verse was displayed in his reviews, particularly in his 1837 review of the Poems of William Cullen Bryant, but he was not prone to elaborate his theories of prosody in an ordinary review. After all, it was a technical subject and Poe was not writing to an audience of specialists. Usually in his reviews he confined himself to the rules that would be recognized by any schoolboy who had studied his textbook in rhetoric.

As early as 1835 Poe claimed in a letter to Beverley Tucker that he had made a special study of prosody; this study was centered on the relation of music to poetry. Not until 1843, however, did Poe publish an essay on prosody, and in this essay, “The Rationale of Verse,” he attempted to show that the laws of rhythm were structured into the universe and would be the same everywhere regardless of variations in language and verse conventions. Linguistically naïve, Poe would have thought that a poem written in Bantu or Chinese should employ the same metrical system and have the same effect on the ear as a poem written in English. Accordingly, he attempted to develop a system of scansion for verse as accurate as that of musical notation. Music was the “universal language of the soul,” and in Poe's opinion verse should be a universal language, as far as the effect on the ear was concerned. All human ears are constructed the same way, Poe argued; the universe itself exhibited periodicity and balance. Therefore all of the poets in the world should employ the same metrical system.

It goes without saying that Poe did not understand that a metrical system involved something more than rhythm.(11) He ignored linguistic discriminations and cited the law of nature as his principle [page 445:] in prosody just as he claimed it was his principle in all other aspects of his literary theory. “Verse originates,” Poe wrote, “in the human enjoyment of equality. ...” By equality he meant “similarity, proportion, identity, repetition, and adaptation or fitness.” The human enjoyment of music came from the recognition of “equality of sounds,”(12) and this enjoyment could be increased by experience. The “practised ear” could enjoy complex patterns of sounds, detecting similarities even though intervals of time separated them. The musically naïve would fail to appreciate complex patterns of sounds because they could not recognize the repetition of a theme amidst its variations. In terms of enjoyment, then, undue complexity encountered the law of diminishing returns. Only the “scientific” ear could apprehend the unity of a pattern when the variety was too extensive; therefore there was no “intrinsic merit” in “scientific” music.(13) Since music should appeal to everyone, the simpler harmonies were best.

Once again Poe employed the criterion of universality. The enjoyment of art should be for everyone. In his 1839 review of Morris’ Songs and in “The Poetic Principle,” Poe had found great merit in the ballad, and now we see why: “Unpractised ears can appreciate only simple equalities, such as are found in ballad airs.” Thus when Poe stated in his review of Morris that he would rather have written the best song of a nation than its noblest epic, he was simply stating his credo that art should be for the public. Like Vachel Lindsay, who absorbed Poe's poetry through his very skin, Poe preached the gospel of beauty throughout the land. Though he was an intellectual snob in many ways, he never thought that the experience of beauty should be confined to the elect. It should be a formative influence on the hearts and minds of the people. [page 446:]

Without going into the details of Poe's metrical system, which was adequately summarized by Gay Wilson Allen over thirty years ago,(14) this discussion will center on the correlation between Poe's prosody and his theory of the universe. To Poe the universe was the great machine described by Newton's physics. Regularity was the law. Man's mind was not able to apprehend the complexity of the great machine, but by knowing that the design was perfect he could extrapolate from the observable periodicity and assume that balance or equality was the law of nature. The regularity of the seasons, the alternation of day and night, attraction and repulsion — all proved that the “omnipresent law of laws” was the law of periodicity. Thus, if prosody were to follow the law of nature, it had to embody equality or balance. Each long syllable should be balanced by two or more short ones within a line, each long line by two or more short lines within a stanza, and stanzas should be balanced with each other throughout the poem. The complexity of the microcosmic poem would vary with the skill of the poet, but it should be limited by the capacity of the audience to “remember” equivalent sounds and temporal units.

Poe's metaphor describing the pleasure experienced from the metrics of a poem is revealing. To him it was like the pleasure obtained from examining a crystal. “We are at once interested by the equality between the sides and between the angles of one of its faces; the equality of the sides pleases us, that of the angles doubles the pleasure. On bringing to view a second face in all respects similar to the first, this pleasure seems to be squared; on bringing to [page 447:] view a third it appears to be cubed, and so on.” Arguing from the premises of a mechanistic psychology, Poe had no doubt that the amount of pleasure derived from meter could be calculated with mathematical precision. He would perhaps have agreed with Edna St. Vincent Millay that Euclid alone saw beauty bare. Unlike some of his contemporaries among the romantic poets, Poe took no pleasure in the fecundity, the variety, the growth and development, the sheer plenitude of biological nature. He retained the attitude of the previous century that one of the greatest pleasures to be enjoyed by the human mind was the perception of order and regularity within the inconceivable variety of temporal flux.

In his essay on metrics, Poe illustrated his theory that the work of art should be a microcosm which adapted to the human perceptive apparatus those laws described by the physicists and astronomers of the past two centuries. He identified the poetic imagination with that of the scientist; it was an ability to perceive equivalent relationships within a world of phenomenal diversity. Thus the artist, glorying in his perception of a perfect system, would mediate between the “imagined” cosmic order and the disorder that assaulted the senses. He would not imitate the complexity of the Great Design; he would reduce it to a simplicity that could be taken in by the ordinary human mind. In such a way he would anticipate, here on earth, the beauty of eternity, wherein all relatedness would disappear and the soul would glory in the experience of perfect unity.

4

Edgar Poe was unique among nineteenth-century American critics because he not only evaluated literary works but also developed an aesthetic theory and a theory of nature to support it. It has sometimes been said that Poe developed his theory of literature merely to defend the kind of poetry and fiction that he wrote. Even if true, this charge is not necessarily a basis for damnation. Most poet-critics work out a theory more favorable to their own practice than to anyone else's. As a rule the practice comes before the theory. [page 448:] Cases like that of T. E. Hulme, who wrote poetry to illustrate the kind of poetry he thought should be written, are rare. The question we should ask when evaluating Poe as a critic is whether his theory yields a larger return than the validation of his own work. In this respect Poe will inevitably be judged as inferior to Coleridge, whose pronouncements, open as they are to varying interpretations, have been seminal in the development of modern organicism. Poe made his own contribution to organicism, chiefly in connection with the short narrative, but since the short narrative has not yet achieved the status of the novel or the poem, Poe's contribution, though recognized, has not been awarded high value. Nor has his limitation of the purpose of poetry to beauty been highly regarded within the English tradition, however much it has appealed to the French. Henry James once remarked of the British novel that it had been too self-consciously engaged with the moral purpose. To a certain extent the same thing is true of English verse. For all of the protests of poets like Archibald MacLeish and Allen Tate that poetry is its own excuse for being, our critics have wanted poetry to bear some responsibility for the human condition. Few have agreed with Walter Pater that to burn with a hard gemlike flame is success in life. And even Pater is being rescued from the “art for art's sake” category by critics like Walter Jackson Bate, who sees Pater as coming close to the great humanistic tradition of art for life's sake.

Critics in the English tradition have wanted poetry to engage in some way with our problems and give us insights if not solutions. Poe's notion that poetry should merely arouse poetic feeling is considered decadent,(15) and his qualification that poetic feeling has an indirect bearing upon behavior has been largely ignored. Yet this is one of the more significant aspects of Poe's theory of art as it relates to society. He did think that the experience of beauty was [page 449:] formative, and with typical American enthusiasm he thought that such experience should be made available even to those who seemed least susceptible. In this Poe was as innocently American as Walt Whitman or, in later days, Vachel Lindsay.

It should not be argued that Poe counseled the artistic genius deliberately to cater to a mass audience. Yet he did think that an artist failed in his public responsibility if he did not consider the needs and limitations of his audience. More than anything else, Poe contested the right of the genius merely to express himself. No matter how valuable we think our thoughts and feelings are, Poe maintained, they serve no purpose unless we can communicate them at large. If the poet deserves to be honored, he must make himself felt; and he will never make himself felt unless he stirs the commmon [[common]] heart of humanity. More than any other critic of his time, with the possible exception of Hazlitt, Poe sought to bring art to the people without lowering its quality to such an extent that it would be offensive. In his own way he succeeded, though his art still offends many.

Poe expended relatively little effort in the criticism of criticism, though he did not hesitate to challenge any critic, even one as great as Coleridge, when he detected a shaky premise or an unwarranted conclusion. A theory to Poe was worthless unless it could be reduced to practice. In this, more than in anything else, he showed himself in the American grain. His reduction to practice was often faulty, because he was inhibited by some of the older rules of rhetoric and by his reliance upon a rudimentary psychology that was decidedly primitive in its analysis of cognition. Yet, given the tools he had to work with, Poe's evaluation of his contemporaries has stood the test of time in most cases. Only his overpraise of Richard Hengist Horne is likely to cause much astonishment today.

More damaging to Poe's reputation as a critic was his tendency to undervalue the great works of the past. Basing his opinion upon the premise that no work was great unless it could appeal to an audience other than the one for which it was composed, Poe was inclined to think that Greek tragedy was primitive. He reasoned similarly about the epic. Paradise Lost would appeal only to the academic [page 450:] few who had the leisure and the interest to work out Milton's vast design, and even then the pleasure would be more that of an intellectual exercise than the pleasure of taste. A general audience would have neither the capacity nor the time to appreciate an epic. Since in Poe's system a poem was effective in terms of its appeal, and since he believed that a skillful artist could always manage to appeal, he declared that Paradise Lost and all other epics proceeded from an imperfect sense of art. Poe's chief failure as a theorist came from his simplistic test of effect, yet this test, however we scorn it, is inescapable. A work does not live in the public domain unless it gives pleasure to a great many people. Anyone who claimed that a work could live because of its message or because of its technical perfection Poe would classify as a pedant who spoke only for his own class.

Poe earned the disapproval of the elite when he claimed that art was or should be a public affair, and yet he saw more clearly than most the alienation of the artist that would occur if he neglected his public function in the interest of self-expression, if he engaged in technical frolics that would appeal only to the aesthete, or if he plunged into obscurities that only the philosophically apt could comprehend. Poe would have approved of Finnegans Wake or Pound's Cantos no more than he approved of Paradise Lost.

Poe is a crucial figure in the history of literary criticism, not because he oversimplified important issues, but because he raised a question that still has not been answered satisfactorily: Can art as art ever be brought to the general public? Ortega y Gasset has claimed that the dehumanization of modern art has alienated it from the masses because mass appreciation depends upon the recognition of human elements in the art work. Astonishingly, Edgar Poe went very far in eliminating the human element from the art work — and made the public like it. Poe argued that a fiction was a fiction and nothing else. It was not life, and it had no business with the truth that applies to our everyday affairs, except indirectly. He knew that it was impossible to imitate the reality of the thing with words, sounds, shapes, or colors, something that William Hazlitt, for instance, never appeared to find out. Yet we [page 451:] are still so much inclined to seek the living reality or the inspiring insight in an art work that we are inclined to dismiss Poe as a charlatan or a sleight-of-hand performer.

Poe did not demand art for art's sake. He demanded art for the soul's sake, but he mitigated his demand by recognizing that art would have to be impure to reach the public,(16) even going so far as to provide us with a formula for popularity. He knew that a composition devoid of the human element would appeal only to the trained sensibility, and yet, with a certain optimism, he engaged in the act of criticism in the belief that the public mind could be educated to respond at least to the simpler artistic forms. He thought throughout his career that a critical journal of high quality would gain public approval, and he believed that an artist who understood psychology could wring an appropriate response even from a dull sensibility. We cannot declare unequivocally that he was wrong.

His own work occasionally approaches the abstract, the dehumanized. His tales are “arabesques,” heavily pictorial, with characters who represent ideas, not human beings. Few of us can empathize with Poe's suffering heroes or even recognize the nature of their suffering without excursions into abnormal psychology. The beauty of Poe's Ligeia is not a human beauty. His women are not drawn from the “living, breathing” reality admired by Hazlitt. They are art objects. The tales in which they appear do not permit the pleasure of identification, yet the popularity of these tales would seem to support Poe's theory that novelty of characterization, even when pushed beyond the limits of the natural, would meet the test of public approval when that novelty was exhibited under conditions that allowed assent.

Similarly with Poe's poems. They, too, exhibit a measure of that dehumanization we find in pure poetry, but many of them are impure, and Poe knew it. He recognized the impurity of his most popular poem, “The Raven,” and claimed that he deliberately invoked the natural to appeal to the public taste. Yet in theory more than in practice Poe advocated a poetry that avoided the materials of nature and, so far as possible, all emotions except that attendant [page 452:] upon the recognition of beauty. Ortega y Gasset has stated that Mallarmé was the first poet in the nineteenth century who wanted to be nothing but a poet.(17) Poe started with the idea of being nothing but a poet; he became a fiction-writer and a critic out of necessity. But as he engaged in the act of criticism he began to think about poetry rather than write it, a predicament which is certainly not unusual. In his criticism at least, he held up before the public the proposition that a poet might worthily be a poet and nothing else, and he assigned to the critic the task of making the situation of poet as poet possible. Poe's concept of the task of the critic must always be reckoned with, for he imposed upon the American critic a new duty. Before his time American critics had felt that they had to protect the public from the rakehell voluptuosities of Europe or the dangerous ideas of the political revolutionary. Poe, with a vehemence unmatched in his time, declared it the duty of the critic to protect the public from bad writing and to remind the writer that he had a public responsibility to live up to the genius with which nature had endowed him. The poet could be a poet and nothing else, in Poe's book, so long as he wrote good poetry.

Poe was remarkable in his time and place for his argument that art could exist only as the result of an aesthetic purpose. His mistake, as far as the application of his theory is concerned, sprang from his assumption that by deliberately avoiding external reference the poet could force his poems to appeal only to the “soul.” Adding to his confusion, at least in respect to the lyric, was his premise that music, since it was nonreferential, was a pure art. He failed to recognize that the kind of music he admired was as expressive of human feeling as the most passionate poem, and that its universal appeal originated in its expression of feeling. He betrayed his own cause when he advocated the ballad as the most appealing form of poetry. This choice proves that Poe, if he really intended to champion a pure art, had only the vaguest notion of what it was, for the ballad is the most human, the least abstract, of all poetic [page 453:] genres. The only conclusion that may be drawn is that Poe was not an aesthete at all. He wanted art to be expressive of human feelings, but not representative of human feelings, for representation was not art.

Poe's devotion to musicality set up a conflict in his theory of poetry that he was never able to resolve. He attached great value to the apprehension of an art object as a completed design, an achieved purpose, but the design itself was not the purpose. To stimulate feeling was the purpose, and value was attached to the quality of the feeling; it had to be love without passion, melancholy without grief, or virtue without an object. Such to Poe were the sentiments of the soul, the sentiments expressed in music. Yet in his zeal to bring art to the people he had to advocate the expression in poetry of feelings they could understand, the grief of a bereaved lover or the passion of a betrayal, feelings frequently expressed in the ballad. In the final analysis it must be said that Poe effected the democratic compromise: give art to the people, but only so much art as they can stand. He could never reconcile himself to the alienation of the artist from the public that art for art's sake entails. Could he have fled to Europe, as did Henry James, perhaps he could have remained secure in his dedication to the artistic idea; but he would have had to recognize, as did James, that most people would “agree that the ‘artistic’ idea would spoil their fun.” As it was, Poe became the advocate of an impure art, while at the same time striving to remove as much excess baggage as possible from the artist's motivational load.

We can credit him with one significant accomplishment. He described the purpose of the artist in terms which would make a purer art possible, and for this reason he has been more honored in France than in any country that follows the English tradition. He never became what Ortega y Gasset called the “pure nameless voice” of lyricism, but he entertained the possibility. Whether he be honored for it or condemned, Poe was the first critic in America to speak out boldly for the aesthetic purpose, even though he understood it imperfectly.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 427:]

1.  Eureka, in Works, XVI, 292.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 429:]

2.  “The Landscape Garden,” Works, IV, 265-71.

3.  “The Domain of Arnheim,” Works, VI, 184.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 430:]

4.  Ibid., 182-83.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 431:]

5.  Ibid., 187-88.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 432, running to the bottom of page 433:]

6.  Cf. “Marginalia,” Works, XVI, 88-89. Poe described his ecstatic fancies as “a glimpse of the spirit's outer world” and went on to say that he had [page 433:] conducted experiments to control the condition of these fancies so that he could make them occur at will: “I mean to say ... that now I can be sure, when all circumstances are favorable, of the supervention of the condition, and feel even the capacity of inducing or compelling it. ...” If the vision was experienced, it could be communicated: “Now, so entire is my faith in the power of words, that, at times, I have believed it possible to embody even the evanescence of fancies such as I have attempted to describe.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 433:]

7.  Cf. “Fifty Suggestions,” Works, XIV, 175-78. One flaw that Poe found in the artistic genius has to do with his sensitivity. He has an exquisite sense of beauty and will be depressed by the “deformities” of the world about him. As a consequence he will frequently lack motivation: “Give to genius a sufficiently enduring motive, and the result will be harmony, proportion, beauty, perfection ... synonymous terms.” “Marginalia,” Works, XVI, 121. However, such enduring motivation “has ... fallen rarely to the lot of genius.” Poe's landscape gardener, Ellison, illustrates a genius with an enduring motive.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 435:]

8.  “Marginalia,” Works, XVI, 148-49.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 437:]

9.  Richards, Practical Criticism, 268-71.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 438:]

10.  I consider the debate about whether Poe actually wrote the poem as he said he did irrelevant. Kenneth Burke has made the most sensible statement on this question: “He [Poe] really did ask himself, as a critic, what principles he found (or thought he found) implicit in his act as poet. ... In effect, he thus formulated the aesthetic principles (including a theory of beauty and of lyrical effects) which seemed to him the conceptual equivalent of the principles that had implicitly guided him in the writing of the poem.” Burke went on to say that Poe “tricked himself” into explaining his act in “terms of a purely ‘genetic’ (narrative, temporal) series” and left himself open to the distrust that followed. Even so, Burke said, we should “recognize what an admirably sound critical procedure was struggling for [page 439:] expression there.” Burke, “The Principle of Composition,” Poetry, XCIX (1961), 46-53.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 444:]

11.  Although his own prosody was based upon a similar principle, Sidney Lanier dismissed Poe's essay with scant courtesy, saying that Poe erred in assuming that stress makes a syllable long. “Preface,” The Science of English Verse, in Sidney Lanier, Centennial Edition (Baltimore, 1945), II, 11n.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 445:]

12.  Poe did not understand that the recognition of equality by the ear is only proximate, and that the human voice in reading verse never approaches the exactness of duration achieved by the reproduction of notes on a musical instrument. Lanier fell into the same error. See Paull Franklin Baum (ed.), “Introduction,” The Science of English Verse, xli-xlii.

13.  By scientific music, Poe apparently meant an extended composition technically accurate according to the laws of harmonics; the scientific ear would be that of a trained musician.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 446:]

14.  American Prosody (New York, 1935), 56-61. Professor Allen discounted Poe's prosodic theory because Poe did not recognize the accentual basis of English verse. Poe's system of scansion would have to be like musical notation. Such a method would appear to have limited value because the duration of a given syllable in oral delivery depends upon interpretation, a subjective factor. No one reads to the beat of a metronome. Yet even in the twentieth century the late Morris W. Croll developed a system of scansion by musical notation. See his “The Rhythm of English Verse,” in J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans (eds.), Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm (Princeton, 1966), 367-429. Poe, Lanier, and Croll are only a few of the many prosodists throughout history who have sought to establish a more accurate mode of scansion upon a temporal base.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 448:]

15.  Elio Chinol, in an essay published in 1946 but translated and republished recently, rightly claimed that Poe should not be classified among the decadents because his aesthetic remains within the English tradition and his “poetry is still far from dissolving into mere musical atmosphere.” Elio Chinol, “Poe's Essays on Poetry,” trans. B. M. Arnett, Sewanee Review, LXVIII (1960), 390-97.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 451:]

16.  Cf. ibid., 394-96.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 452:]

17.  The Dehumanization of Art (Doubleday Anchor ed.; New York, 1956), 29.