Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “Letter to B———; headnote and note on the text,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 1-4 (This material is protected by copyright)

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LETTER to B——.

 

In “Letter to B———.” Poe gives an early statement of his critical dictum that pleasure, not truth, is the end of poetry; he attacks the heresy of the didactic. He also reflects writers whose ideas he continued to espouse or dispute throughout his career and employs textural materials — anecdotes, quotations, sayings — which he would recycle in similar or in different contexts in fiction, criticism, poetry, and Eureka. Perhaps even some of the contradictions in his critical thought are present in “Letter to B——.,” though the evidence for that is somewhat less certain.

Poe's secure place in the history of criticism rests largely on his hostility to poetry as preaching, a hostility that is here fully developed by 1831. His argument has been taken as battle cry by generations of very different artists, especially in Europe and Latin America.

Although Poe was often very critical of the United States and of national cultural ambitions, he several times showed resentment against European snobbery or American subservience to continental tastes in literature; the complaint in paragraph 2 would be heard again in his writing.

Poe's work shows a notable continuity of influence. He adds to his store of ideas as his career develops, but the works that moved him in his youth continue to influence him. In “Letter to B——.” the attack on Wordsworth should not obscure the areas where Poe agrees with him, even in this very essay. Poe's discussion of the importance of indefiniteness, for instance, leans on Wordsworth's 1815 “Preface.” Wordsworth says of “the Imagination,” “She recoils from every thing but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite.” (The context in Wordsworth is a contrast between “the Imagination” and “the Fancy.”) One goes on hearing the familiar Wordsworth essays in later Poe.

Poe's deep debt to A. W. Schlegel is more evident in his later pieces, especially those which discuss unity. “Letter to B———.” does not, but there is good evidence that Poe had his nose in Schlegel as he wrote in 1831 (Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel”). Early as it is, “Letter to B——” thus shows the influence of critical thinkers whom Poe would continue to value. [page 2:]

There are continuities of tone, too — or perhaps one needs some clumsy locution such as “continuity of deliberate inconsistency of tone” — to define exactly what is found both in “Letter to B——.” and in later Poe. Poe's elfin humor and love of free association as well as his malicious willingness to cheat to make a point or cap a joke are all on display here. Misquoting Wordsworth is unforgivably unfair, but it is funny, and it sets up one of the best belly laughs in Poe, his laconic line about the love of sheep. The clowning was never to stop; Poe's playfulness was to be evident throughout his creative life.

Even more striking is what might be called “continuity of texture” or perhaps “continuity of material.” Poe was to go on reusing the same allusions, quotations, references, and anecdotes. Our notes suggest those we and other Poe scholars have noticed; there are undoubtedly more. He uses the same material in editorial columns such as the “Marginalia” and the “Pinakidia,” in poems, fiction, and criticism, and he sometimes uses the same items in contradictory arguments. One may believe that Poe is a greater short-story writer than a poet or that his criticism is his most — or least — important work, but one may not claim that the Poe of one genre is a different writer than the Poe of the next. They are all the same; the texture, the “stuff,” of his work is of a piece. The quantity of disciplined, polished work that this troubled and unhealthy man managed to compose in his brief career as a professional author is remarkable; perhaps he reused material so frequently in part because of the pressure to produce copy. We know enough now to suspect that had the great inventions of his lifetime — engine-powered transportation, photography, instantaneous communication, and so forth — included the office photocopier or the word processor, he might have produced even more. Armed with a photocopier as well as his trusty scissors and glue pot, Poe might have recombined his impressive repertoire of squibs, puns, jokes, oddities — the majority of them quotations from and adaptations of his own previous writing — into an even more astonishing funhouse and echo chamber.

For it should be made clear that demonstrating how steadily Poe reused and recombined the same material is not equivalent to demonstrating that he was a hack and a cheat. (Sometimes, but rarely, he was both: His unfinished novel of adventure beyond the western frontier, The Journal of Julius Rodman, for example, is largely plagiarized, and his completed novel, The Adventures [[Narrative]] of Arthur Gordon Pym, contains passages of purest padding.) Generally, the recycled material has been made Poe's own and functions splendidly in each new setting. Indeed, reusing it shamelessly [page 3:] is apparently a favorite private game of the author, who blithely quotes a phrase of his own, which he perhaps used in a comic context in one piece written in the morning, in a dead-solemn essay written in the evening.

“Letter to B———.” is an unusually rich example of the process. It is early, but it echoes even earlier pieces such as the poems it prefaces, and its material runs like leitmotifs through Poe's subsequent fiction, poetry, criticism, and journalism.

Continuity is easy to demonstrate in Poe's criticism. Consistency is another matter.

Poe's own practice sometimes flies in the face of what he says in his criticism. The matter of poetic length is an obvious example. His pronouncements in “Letter to B——.” are not isolated; in saying that people really do not like epics, Poe anticipates his later judgments about brevity and strength of effect. Epics are long, and any poem that cannot be read at a sitting, Poe will eventually claim, is no poem at all. Yet he published portions of an extended poetic drama, Politian, and called Eureka, which is very long, a poem. (For further discussion of Poe's continuing concern with poetic length see the headnote to “The Poetic Principle.”)

It would be unfair to accuse Poe of inconsistency because his later works fail to follow rules that he defined in an early essay were it not that Poe reiterated the rules throughout his career. It is not just the matter of poetic length: the “poem” Eureka is philosophical, didactic, argumentative. Far from insisting that pleasure is the true purpose of poetry, Poe came to say that poetry and the process of poetic inspiration were sources of truth as well: Eureka is but one place where the argument appears; in “The Purloined Letter” Poe has C. Auguste Dupin explain carefully that he is a poet and that is why he and not the prefect of police (who says that poets are fools) can solve the mystery. Poe takes up the cause in any number of tales and in later criticism as well.(1)

Poe was not tilting at windmills. If respected authors felt that “it is impossible to attach great importance to the words of a poet” (we quote a scientific treatise from later in the century, Alphonse de Candolle's Origin of Cultivated Plants [1883]), poets needed defenders. Like Blake, [page 4:] like Shelley — like Emerson for that matter — Poe insisted on the validity of poetic insight as a source of truth. Much of his poetry, fiction, and criticism can be understood as a defense of poetry, a defense especially of the role of the poet in society, not merely as a producer of pretties or, as he stresses here in “Letter to B———.,” a giver of pleasure, but also as a font of deepest insights and truths.

There are, incidentally, ‘a few hints in “Letter to B———.” that the argument that poetry is a source of truth — indeed, that there is a vital, almost sacred, tie between poetry and truth was already in Poe's mind even as he insisted on “pleasure, not truth.”

One hint comes in the discussion of Aristotle in paragraph 6. Wordsworth plainly distorts Aristotle. Poe attacks Wordsworth for perverting the nature of poetry. That does not necessarily mean that Poe follows Wordsworth in distorting Aristotle. Poe was a good classical scholar; he just may have intended to correct Wordsworth's error before turning to attack Wordsworth's didacticism. Does the “He” at the start of the second sentence refer to Wordsworth or to Aristotle? Does Poe agree that poetry in Aristotle's broad sense (see our note to paragraph 6 for Aristotle's context) is philosophical while insisting that it is not in Wordsworth's sense metaphysical? Poe's unfairness to Wordsworth and the main thrust of the “Letter to B———.” are more obvious and far more certain; we mean only to suggest the possibility that yet another idea that is present in Poe's later criticism may also be lurking beneath the surface here.

That Poe's ideas sometimes contradict one another should not upset readers overmuch; indeed, acquiring a feel for his inconsistency is a good first step toward getting to know Poe's mind. Certainly one does not want to waste energy on trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.

A Note on the Text

When Poems by Edgar A. Poe ... Second Edition appeared in New York in 1831, it contained by way of an author's preface Poe's first important critical essay, “Letter to Mr. ———————.” Poe revised it slightly for republication in the July 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. We decided to make that our basic text. The changes are not extensive, and since Poe made them himself presumably to improve the piece, we follow our usual practice of adopting the last corrections known to be his own. The essay is also in Rufus Griswold's edition of his works (1856; 4:390-96), with no significant changes.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 3:]

1. An excellent discussion of Poe's use of Dupin to dramatize his critical thought is Christopher Kearns's “Rehearsing Dupin.” Kearns focuses upon Poe's use of Coleridge to argue with Coleridge — “to double Coleridge ... while at the same time pretending to contest him” (12). For more on the Dupin stories as statements of literary theory, see also our discussions in Short Fiction (esp. 153) and Thirty-Two Stories (256). More extended discussion appears in Stuart Levine, Edgar Poe, especially in the section “Dupin as Transcendental Hero” (162-68).