Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “Letter to B------ - Notes,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 12-19 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 12, continued:]

Notes

Footnote to title: Although it is possible that this editorial footnote to the title is by T. W. White, who owned and edited the Southern Literary Messenger, it has the ring of Poe to our ears: the rhythm of the last sentence especially seems Poe's. Playing at being “Ed.” in order to disown one's own ideas (but not saying which ideas) also seems the sort of “mystification” Poe enjoyed.

Title: There is at present no way to be sure who “B——.” was, or indeed whether Poe really intended to refer to anyone. General George W. Cullum, an ex-West Point cadet who knew Poe when he was at the Point, reported many years later, in Harper's Magazine for November 1867, that Poe meant Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It is not really clear why an essay on poetry should have been put in the form of a letter to a novelist, but Mabbott felt that General Cullum's testimony “cannot be lightly dismissed” (TOM). The book of poems for which Poe composed “Letter to B———.” was published by Elam Bliss; Bliss is also a candidate for “B——.” The keen referee for the University of Illinois Press sees Bliss as “the most likely of these three candidates,” though he agrees that Poe may be engaging in “pure mystification.” A third possibility is William Cullen Bryant, nominated by a kinsman, William Cullen Bryant III; although there is no firm evidence — not even family tradition (TOM) — the idea is not unreasonable. Bryant was the first American poet to achieve widespread international reputation. Bliss was Bryant's publisher, too; Poems came out of his office in 1832. In [page 13:] that era of acute national self-consciousness in the arts it would not have been unusual for an aspiring poet to have in mind a distinguished and very famous contemporary: Bryant was by then brilliantly successful as journalist and “personality” as well as poet.

3-4

Milton is a great example. ... justly: Poe repeats a story about Milton that has no foundation in fact, though it is true that Milton did not want the briefer epic poem slighted. Since Poe stressed the intensity of the reader's reaction, of course, he was skeptical of poems too long to be read at a sitting: See the opening pages of “The Poetic Principle,” where he again connects Milton, epics, length, and intensity.

5

Coleridge and Southey ... exemplified: Poe here initiates what will be a career-long battle against didactic poetry. A useful inventory of his statements on the subject appears in Prescott's edition of Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (341-42). There is a buried allusion to Southey several paragraphs further into the essay. See our explanatory note to ¶8.

6

Aristotle ... writing: In the Poetics, IX, 3, Aristotle explains that the “difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse,” but rather that “one tells what happened and the other what might happen.” Aristotle goes on, in the sentence that Poe excerpts, “For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.” See the next item.

Wordsworth: In the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) Wordsworth wrote, “Aristotle, I have been told, has said that Poetry is the most philosophical of all writings.” Poe repeats that idea a number of times in different places; there is a useful inventory of them in Prescott's edition of Poe, Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (324). Authorities agree that Poe follows Wordsworth in distorting Aristotle (Prescott, in Poe, Selections; TOM). It is true that Poe is less an Aristotelean than a Platonist. In his satirical story “Mellonta Tauta” (1849) and in Eureka he has his narrator spell Aristotle's name incorrectly in a context in which correct spelling is an indication of lasting worth (Short Fiction, 548; Thirty-Two Stories, 346, 349n). In the present passage, however, Poe may in fact intend not to repeat Wordsworth's distortion but rather to correct it, for in context, Aristotle's distinction is akin to Poe's belief. Aristotle links poetry to underlying truth and knowledge. So does Poe, consistently and systematically. In Eureka he argues that the poetic intellect is the true font of scientific truths, praising scientists who, like Alexander von Humboldt, are able to grasp almost instinctively the most general truths that underlie visible phenomena. In his cosmological fantasies Poe speaks of the literal power of poetic inspiration to create; he pointedly makes his great detective Dupin a poet in order to contrast his means of attaining knowledge to the more prosaic methods of the Prefect of Police. Dupin's poetic perception works; he can solve the most “outré” of crimes. The prefect's “science,” lacking poetic insight, does not.

7

ceteris paribus: Everything else being equal.

he ... obtaining: see the explanatory note to ¶9.

8

the devil in Melmoth: Charles Robert Maturin's gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is an immensely complex series of interlocking tales — some [page 14:] based on fact — tied together by Maturin's strong sense of religious and social injustice and by the character of John Melmoth. Melmoth, having made a classic bargain with the devil for earthly reward and longevity in return for his soul, “is doomed to roam the face of the world in fruitless search of salvation, spiritually tortured by the isolation from the rest of humanity conferred by his immortality and the ironic punishment of being condemned to life” (Axton, “Introduction”). Poe's range of associations follows those of other writers in the era. In Melmoth the Wanderer, the reader first meets Melmoth in a portrait in the dark closet of a dying descendent. A younger descendent sees it in the dim light: “the eyes ... were such as one feels they wish they had never seen, and feels they can never forget. Had he been acquainted with the poetry of Southey, he might have often exclaimed in his after-life, ‘Only the eyes had life, — gleamed with demon light.’ — THALABA.” Poe seems to have had Maturin, the devil, and Southey connected in his mind as he wrote “Letter to B———.” See ¶5. “THALABA” refers to Southey's poem “Thalaba the Destroyer.”

9

poetry a study ... childhood: Poe probably had William Wordsworth's “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” open on his desk as he wrote “Letter to B——.” See our notes to ¶13. In the “Essay Supplementary ... ,” Wordsworth writes about readers who “have found leisure, after youth was spent, to cultivate general literature; in which poetry has continued to be comprehended as study.”

“Trifles ... below”: Poe quotes from the Prologue of John Dryden's All for Love (1677), altering the first line: “Errors like straws upon the surface flow; / He who ... [the rest is identical].”

truths ... well: This is one of Poe's pet allusions. The materialist philosopher Democritus (ca. 460-ca. 360 B.C.E.) was supposed to have said that Truth lies at the bottom of a well. In his mystical story “Ligeia” (1838), Poe's narrator says that there was in the expression of his wife Ligeia “something more profound than the well of Democritus.” Democritus actually said, “Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in an abyss,” but other versions rendered by different authors were current as proverbial sayings. Poe probably associated “truth in deep places” with Francis Bacon, whose version runs, “The truth of nature lieth hid in certain deep mines and caves” (Short Fiction, 103n5; Thirty-Two Stories, 57-58n5). See the next item.

light which Bacon has thrown: Further evidence that Poe associates strings of ideas and writers in patterns that recur throughout his career — see “truths ... well” above in this paragraph. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is also referred to in close proximity to an allusion to truth in a well in “Ligeia.” The allusion in that story is to Bacon's sentence, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion” (which line Poe characteristically slightly misquotes). But in “Letter to B———.” Poe probably has in mind Bacon's general rational approach to knowledge. Bacon argued for analysis and induction, believing that pooled learning would produce progress. Poe kept Bacon in mind throughout his career, though he perhaps approved of him less later in his career than here in 1831. In Eureka (1848) and “Mellonta Tauta” (1849) he has his character Pundita call Bacon “Hog” in a context in which the error indicates lack of respect. See “The Rationale of Verse,” our note to ¶3. [page 15:]

Poe, whose work reverberates with echoes not only of authors he has read but of his own works as well, reused material from ¶¶ 7 and 9 in “Letter to B——.” in a review he wrote for the January 1842 Graham's Magazine of Henry Cockton's Stanley Thorne (Pollin, Dictionary; TOM). There is continuity in Poe's thought, especially his critical thought, in part because he obviously kept rereading his own words.

10

de omni ... aliis: “About everything that can be known, and some other things, too.”

the contemplation of a star: Poe reused this idea repeatedly. See, for example, his long poem “Al Aaraaf,” his stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Island of the Fay,” and his cosmological prose poem Eureka.

12

his youth: In this paragraph and the one preceding it, Poe continues to play variations on the Wordsworth passage to which he alluded in ¶9.

Goths: The ultimate source of Poe's story about the drunken Goths is chapter 22 of the Germania of Tacitus (Arms, “Tacitus and Those Goths”). Tacitus was “an academic staple”; the passage in question is, if anything, overly familiar to classicists. It was quoted by numerous writers Poe knew. Pollin (Dictionary) shows eight allusions by Poe to Tacitus. Other likely secondary sources are Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy, 8 (TOM); Heredotus’ History, where the Goths are replaced by Persians (Thornburg, “Poe's ‘Letter to B———.’ ”); and Washington Irving's A History of New York (O’Neill, “A Closer Source”). The Knickerbocker version is, “We are told that the ancient Germans had an admirable mode of treating any questions of importance; they first deliberated upon it when drunk, and afterwards reconsidered it when sober.” Good stories, true or not, get retold, one concludes.

13

“Of genius ... done before”: Poe's quotation is from Wordsworth's “Essay Supplementary to the Preface,” a half sentence (ending in a colon but followed by a capitalized word) four paragraphs from the end. Poe's smart comments are, of course, unfair. Wordsworth's context makes it very clear that by “genius” he does not mean “brilliant virtuosity” (he would probably have agreed with Poe that a pickpocket can show “genius” in that sense). Wordsworth's full sentence (with a comma that Poe deleted restored) reads, “Of Genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before: Of genius, in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honour, and benefit of human nature.” Poe's claim that he found this passage by opening one of Wordsworth's volumes “at random” is a joke. See our note to ¶14.

Barrington, the pick-pocket: George (Waldron) Barrington (1755-1804) was a famous transported felon. Sent to Australia, he “rose to high position in New South Wales.” Great Barrington Reef is named after him; he also wrote two autobiographical lines that are famous: “True patriots we, for be it understood / We left our country for our country's good” (TOM).

14

in estimating ... controversy: Poe refers to a section of Wordsworth's “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” in which Wordsworth, as part of an extended survey of popularity and merit in the history of British poetry, spends approximately two long paragraphs (not “many pages,” as Poe claims) in negative comments [page 16:] about the Ossianic poems of James Macpherson. Published in 1760-63, these purported to be translations from Gaelic manuscripts of a third-century bard and hero, Ossian.

Tantæne animis: A phrase from Virgil's Æneid, 1:11, variously translated as “Can such wrath be in heavenly minds?” (TOM) and “Why such anger?” (Poe, Essays and Reviews).

“Temora”: Macpherson published “Ossian's” Temora in 1763.

“The blue waves ... breeze”: Poe copied these lines from Wordsworth's “Essay Supplementary ...”

selected for his contempt: Wordsworth's exact words are worth quoting because Poe, always playful and often unfair, intends to mock Wordsworth's idea of opening a bad book at random. See our notes to ¶13. Wordsworth's comments on “Temora” follow: “Open this far-famed Book! — I have done so at random, and the beginning of the ‘Epic Poem Temora,’ in eight Books, presents itself.” Wordsworth then quotes several more lines than does Poe, using periods instead of Poe's semicolons, and concludes sarcastically, “Precious memorandums from the pocket-book of the blind Ossian!”

“And now ... Doctor!”: Poe tampers with a passage from William Wordsworth's “The Idiot Boy” (1798). Betty Foy has sent her beloved idiot boy Johnny alone and at night to fetch the doctor for an ill neighbor. When pony, doctor, and Johnny fail to return, Betty searches wildly; Poe selects the section at which Betty has found boy and pony. He reverses some lines, omits others, and condenses stanzas. The passage reads (to establish context, we give two stanzas before Poe's “quotation” begins):

Poe plainly had Robert Southey on his mind as he wrote this lecture and was almost certainly aware of a famous review by Southey in which he said of “The Idiot Boy,” “It resembles a Flemish picture in the worthlessness of its design and the excellence of its execution’ ” (quoted in B. R. McElderry Jr., “Southey and Wordsworth's ‘The Idiot Boy,’ ” Notes and Issues, new series, 2 [1955]: 490-91). Southey's review was not as severe as that sentence implies, but the line of association (see our notes to ¶¶5 and 8) may well have been what prompted Poe to make fun of “The Idiot Boy.”

“The dew ... a stone”: The second Wordsworth poem is “The Pet-Lamb: A Pastoral” (1800). Poe again tinkers maliciously, altering punctuation, ignoring a stanza break, and adding dashes. The first two stanzas should read,

16

Stamboul: Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, in ancient-times Byzantium. Poe repeats this proverb in his comic short story “The Spectacles” (1844), further sign of continuity of allusion in his works.

17

“Those ... title”: Poe tinkered with a passage from Wordsworth's “Preface to the Second Edition of ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ ” Wordsworth had written, “They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title” (300). Wordsworth also produced an earlier version of this sentence in the “Advertisement” to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, but, while a little different from his 1800 wording, it is no closer to what Poe alleges that Wordsworth wrote.

18

a wagon: Poe refers to Wordsworth's 1805 “The Wagoner.” [page 18:]

the bee Sophocles: In ancient Greece, poets were called “bees” because they gathered nectar. Poe probably took the phrase from Lecture 7 of A. W. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808); he knew this work extremely well and was heavily influenced by it (Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel”).

a sore toe: In Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes, the hero is wounded in the foot.

a chorus of turkeys: Sophocles’ tragedy “Meleager” is, basically, lost, but there is a statement about it in Pliny's Natural History, 10, which says that in it Sophocles used a chorus of “meleagrides ayes” (probably guinea fowl and certainly not turkeys, but for Poe when in this sardonic mood, no matter). The birds lament Meleager's death (TOM).

19

“que ... ce qu’elles nient”: Poe likely had Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1816) open on his desk to chapter 12 as he wrote this paragraph, for the French quotation, which Coleridge attributes to Leibnitz's Trois lettres à M. Remond de Montmort (1741), appears there. It can be translated “that most sects are correct in a good deal of what they espouse, but not in what they deny.” Coleridge is discussing Leibnitz's “criterion of a true philosophy,” which would “explain and collect the fragments of truth scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous.” Poe used the same line a total of five times in his work. Full discussion of how he used it appears in Collected Writings 2: 271-72. The ultimate source of Coleridge's French is Leibnitz. One can be quite certain of Poe's source because of the contents of 121. See our note to that paragraph.

Nyctanthes: Night-blooming jasmine. The allusion ties “Letter to B———.” to Poe's poem “Al Aaraaf,” where he also mentioned nyctanthes and where he also made use of other material in this essay. See our note to ¶20.

20

Corcyra: Another name for Corfu. Poe learned of the many other names for this island from a translation by Frederic Shoberl of Chateaubriand's Travels in Greece. There were two American editions (Philadelphia, 1813, and New York, 1814); Poe is known to have used one or the other of them here and in “Al Aaraaf.” See our note to ¶19 (TOM).

“tres-volontiers”: very willingly.

Dr. Johnson ... definition: In Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) he defines poetry as “metrical composition”; his definition in the abridged Dictionary (1773) is “the product of versification.”

Ursa Major: A nickname — “The Great Bear” — for Samuel Johnson (TOM).

Think ... Titania: Poe probably intends a contrast between the gross eccentric of Boswell's great biography of Johnson and the delicacy of Shakespearean verse, but in fact Johnson had been a more than respectable poet early in his career and was an important Shakespearian scholar, critic, and editor.

21

a poem ... conception: Further evidence of the influence of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (chapter 14) on Poe's essay. Coleridge's definition is, “A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth.” Coleridge, like Poe, goes on to distinguish poetry from other works intended to give pleasure. Coleridge does not call these other works “romance” as Poe does; rather he speaks of other compositions intended to give pleasure. His sentence concludes by saying that [page 19:] poetry is different “from all other species (having this object [giving pleasure] in common with it) ... by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” See also Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), on which Poe also leaned heavily in “Letter to B———.” Wordsworth distinguishes between “poetry and matter of fact, or science”: “[M]uch confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose, that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even were it desirable.”

22

no music in his soul: In ¶20, Poe's example of a poet to contrast to the elephantine Dr. Johnson is Shakespeare; Poe has him still in mind here as he paraphrases Lorenzo's speech to Jessica from The Merchant of Venice (V, i, 83-88):

23

No Indian ... gallows: Poe quotes Butler's Hudibras (II, i, 273-74) in G. R. Thompson, ed., Poe, Essays and Review. The original reads, “No Indian Prince has to his Pallace more follow’rs then a Thief to th’ Gallows.”