Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “The Poetic Principle - Headnote,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 175-178 (This material is protected by copyright)

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MacLeish's line line from “Ars Poetica” (1926) and the turn-of-the-century, avant-garde credo “Art for Art's sake” are only two of the many later rewordings of the important manifesto contained in paragraphs eleven and twelve of Poe's late lecture “The Poetic Principle.” Taken by itself, that statement is strong medicine. But it is too often quoted out of context. Read in its setting in this piece, it seems far less polemic. And if “The Poetic Principle” itself is placed in its setting, with the other works by Poe to which it is intimately connected, the forceful manifesto does not seem part of a consistent critical position.

It seems less strong in part because some of the examples that Poe recited to illustrate his argument seem to contradict it. Seen on the page, with Nathaniel Willis's sentimental and moralizing poem quoted approvingly just above it, for example, Poe's forceful declaration changes. A modern reader wonders how a poetic purist who insists that the “truthful and . . . poetical modes of inculcation” are like “oil” and “water” could praise such a poem as Willis's.

Both the lecture “Eureka” and the lecture “The Poetic Principle” were fund-raising efforts for a magazine Poe wanted to found. Seen next to Eureka, paragraphs eleven and twelve change even more, for Eureka claims that poetic inspiration is the main source of truth, that scientific truth and the visionary perceptions of the artist are the same: the truly great scientists have been in essence poets. Seen against Poe's “The Philosophy of Composition,” these poetry-for-poetry-alone statements seem to contradict his preachment that 90 percent of poetry is planning, craft, and sweat, not inspired perception.

Such strong passages, however, made for effective essays and public talks, and Poe was always concerned for the powerful effect. This explains why “The Poetic Principle” contains a section on how long a poem should be. [page 176:] That section also is often misunderstood, for there is an interesting twist in what Poe says in it about undue brevity. A poem should not be too short, he argues, or it will not produce “a profound or enduring effect.” Yet that somehow does not mean that a very brief poem cannot be a good poem. It means rather that the public will not keep it famous. Poe plainly loves the brief Shelley poem he quotes in paragraph seven; he intends it not as an example of how brevity ruins a poem but only to show how brevity encourages readers to forget it. Poe thinks in terms of effect on the reader; this is another aspect of his homemade reader-response criticism.

Indeed, if he really meant that only poems of middling length are worthy, he would have been hard-pressed to make up a good lecture and reading: such poems take too long to recite. Thus his lecture examples are mainly too brief to be model poems — as indeed are most of the poems he himself wrote. Tucked unspoken into this lecture, in short, there may be some wistful self-analysis perfectly consistent with what he judged to be the limitations of his work in the 1845 preface to The Raven and Other Poems, where he said that although he would have liked to have devoted himself to poetry, circumstances prevented it: his poems are “trifles,” of little value to the public.

In paragraph twenty-three Poe confesses that he, like others of his era, blends sadness — it usually means thinking about death — with perception of beauty. Strictly speaking, there is a contradiction here, for poems about sadness and death are almost inevitably — one wants to say “automatically” — also about mortality and “the tragedy of the human condition.” So in defending sadness he is defending content, truth, and moralizing, which he has just finished saying must always be subservient to the beautiful effect. Is this particular truth to be subservient, or is it “inseparably connected with all the higher manifestations of true Beauty”? Poe, of course, invites logical nit-picking because of his pose as the logician and his evident pleasure in exposing apparent (or even nonexistent) logical gaps in other authors.

Poe was one of many nineteenth-century authors, good and bad, who concluded that beauty and death are inextricably linked. Modern commentators add sexuality: beauty, death, and sex, since it is generally, as Poe says, the death of a beautiful woman which is found most moving (or “elevated”), and, as Freudian critics used to point out, the women were often in sexually suggestive situations. If that string of connections seems unwholesome, it is worth saying that it has continued to seem important to important artists. Beauty-death-sex is what Robert Frost had in mind [page 177:] when he wrote “there's only one subject for a poem,” which line moved Bernard Malamud's thoughtful character Dubin to lay a “small white stone” on Frost's “marble tombstone.” That is what Jews do when they visit the graves of people they love.

Perhaps it would be fair to say of Poe as a literary critic that though his work is plainly of his time and place, is never consistent, sometimes not even very logical and perhaps not always very sincere, it has endured because it is so intelligent. Poe was very smart, and he perceived a number of critical insights that still seem very important to us.

Mrs. Elmira Royster Shelton wrote, in a letter to Poe's mother-in-law, Maria Clemm of September 22, 1849, “Edgar's lecture a few weeks since, on the Poetic Principle, was very beautiful, he had quite a full, and a very fashionable audience — He will repeat his lecture Monday next, and I sincerely hope he may be patronised by a very large attendance — “.

A Note on the Text

Poe did not live to see “The Poetic Principle” in print. The texts we have are all based on a manuscript, long lost, of a lecture Poe delivered a number of times, probably tinkering with it, as speakers do, each time he gave it. Surviving printings are very close to a version Poe used in the Exchange Concert Rooms in Richmond, Virginia, on August 7, in Norfolk, Virginia, on September 14, and then again in Richmond on September 24, 1849. But he seems to have had a usable draft available about a year earlier.

“The Poetic Principle” appeared in print first in the August 31, 1850, Home Journal with an introductory note by Nathaniel Willis, one of whose poems, of course, Poe quotes and praises in the piece. Willis explained that he was making use of advance sheets of Rufus Griswold's forthcoming third volume of Poe's works. John Sartain, however, said that he had paid $30 for the right to use it in his magazine. And Bayard Taylor had written a letter to George Graham dated “July 1850” in which he tried to convince Graham to buy it for Graham's for $50, the money to be given to Maria Clemm (TOM). Apparently, Graham wouldn’t nibble, while Sartain, at a lower price, would. Thomas Ollive Mabbott figured that Sartain actually had the manuscript in his shop, that Griswold might have gotten it back for his edition, and that Willis, although the first to get it in print, may have had it, so to speak, thirdhand.

We have decided, therefore, to consider the Sartain's Union Magazine version as our basic text because it is the version most probably prepared from Poe's manuscript. The case is special, of course, given that our policy is to use the last version Poe is likely to have authorized.

Poe's quotations of poetry are inaccurate, sometimes inconsistent even within “The Poetic Principle.” Our editorial practice has been to present in the reading text what we take to have been Poe's intention, not that of the poets “quoted,” and then to note differences between Poe's versions and the poets’ own in the notes. In some cases Poe knew versions of the poems different than those currently accepted; we tried to note [page 178:] such variations. We changed the Sartain's texts to the poets’ versions only when faced with apparent printers’ errors. In Edward Coote Pinkney's “A Health,” for instance, we allowed changes in format and punctuation to stand, but we restored “there” four lines from the end where Sartain's had “they.” That is obviously a typographic error. To help the reader use our notes on Poe's alterations, we have added line numbers in the right margins for some longer poems.

We also corrected obvious typos in the text itself, as in paragraph 33, where Sartain's reads “I regret him” when Poe obviously meant “I regard him.” But we did not alter the spelling of “develop” with a final e in paragraph 16 because Burton R. Pollin's Word Index shows Poe using it elsewhere.