Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “The Poetic Principle - Notes,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 200-211 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 200:]

1

a long poem does not exist: In Poe's last major essay on literary theory he reiterates a point he made in earlier essays, notably in an extended digression in his 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales: “unity [of effect] cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed in one sitting. ... All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox.” See also “The Philosophy of Composition,” ¶10. The idea appears in Coleridge, too (Biographia Literaria, ch. 14), whose influence Poe acknowledged in his first important theoretical essay, “Letter to B———.” See also our notes to ¶28 in the present essay.

2

half an hour: Poe's elevation lasts less long in 1849 than in 1842; in the Hawthorne review he recommended as appropriate work for “the highest genius” “the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour.”

3

“Paradise Lost”: The extent to which Poe reused the same ideas and clusters of associated ideas is suggested strongly by a comparison of the ‘opening paragraphs of this essay, perhaps his most transcendental critical statement, with “The Philosophy of Composition,” probably his most mechanical and mundane. Much of what appears in these paragraphs is a reshaping of ¶10 of the earlier essay, where unity, brevity, elevation, and Milton's epic are connected.

4

Iliad ... lyrics: Poe reaches back to material he used in the Southern Literary Messenger, August 1836. His “Pinakidia,” a series of brief squibs on literary and scholarly topics, included an item on this theory of Hédelin concerning the nature of The Iliad. Poe learned of François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac (1604-76), via Henry Nelson Coleridge's Introduction to the ... Greek Classic Poets (1830). Details on how Poe borrowed from and tampered with his source are in Collected Writings, 2:23.

5

cæteris paribus: More evidence of the reuse of material. Poe thought of the same Latin phrase (“all things being equal”) in “Letter to B———.” in 1831 and in that same ¶10 of “The Philosophy of Composition” (see our note to ¶1).

“The Columbiad”: a long epic poem (1807) by Joel Barlow (1754-1812), an enlarged revision of his “Vision of Columbus” (1787). Though Poe scorns it here, The Columbiad was widely admired: Thomas Paine, whose Age of Reason Barlow had gotten published when Paine was in prison in Paris, admired it, as did George Washington and a man Poe knew, if the story in James Grant Wilson's Bryant and His Friends (1886) is to be believed: “Poe once told my father of having somewhere fallen in with a man who thought the Bible, Don Quixote, and Barlow's volume of now forgotten poems, the three greatest books ever written” (TOM). If the volume contained shorter poems it might have included some that have held readers. Barlow's mock epic “The Hasty Pudding” (1793) is deservedly successful.

Lamartine by the cubic foot: Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) was a French poet noted, as Poe implies, for a massive volume. A 1925 Paris edition of his Jocelyn (1837) runs 265 pages, plus about 50 more of notes in small type that Lamartine added for an 1849 edition. And the 1887 Paris edition of La [page 201:] chute d’un ange goes 403 pages. Lamartine planned for both poems to be parts of a vast “Epic of the Ages.” For other references to Lamartine, see Collected Writings, 2:151.

Pollock: Robert Pollok (1799-1827; the c is incorrect), Scottish poet, and author of a lengthy and preachy religious poem, The Course of Time (1827). Poe might have added the c deliberately to suggest the name of the fish, which sells by the pound.

6

Béranger ... attention: Poe's judgment is correct, though one cannot prove that it was the brevity of Béranger's poems that led to his eclipse. In Poe's day, Pierre Jean de Béranger (1780-1857) was among the best known and respected of French poets; today he is considered minor. Poe alludes to him a number of times. When Poe first published his poem “Israfel” in 1831, it had as its motto “And the angel Israfel who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures. — KORAN.” In revising the poem, Poe brought up the second line of the poem, “Whose heart-strings are a lute,” and worked them into his “quotation” (already altered from the Koran translation he used) so that the motto read, “And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures.” The source of the heart-strings/lute image is not George Sale's Koran translation but Beranger's poem “Le Refus”:

Poe used those two lines as motto for his major story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). His familiarity with at least some of Béranger's work does not establish his general knowledge of French literature. Béranger was very popular in the United States as well as France; the energetic anthologist Rufus Griswold, whose career intersects Poe's repeatedly and often unpleasantly, had brought out, for example, a set of translations of Béranger in 1844 (TOM; Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe; Pollin, “Politics and History”; Thirty-Two Stories, 87-103, esp. 88n1; Short Fiction, 64-65, 88-98,104-6, esp. 88,104n1; Collected Works, 2:392-42 2, esp. 397,417, note to “Motto.”).

7

I arise ... at last!: Poe quotes Shelley's “Lines to an Indian Air” (1819), a poem which, Poe told Thomas Alfriend, was “the very soul of passion” (TOM). Its title in an 1822 publication was “Song, Written for an Indian Air”; it is also known as “The Indian Serenade.” The poem is usually printed without the indentation of alternate lines and with roman numerals to number the three stanzas. In a number of places the text in Sartain's Union Magazine differs from modern versions of the poem, but sometimes this seems to be because Poe had seen the variant versions published in his time. The next-to-last line, for example, reads

in standard editions, but Poe's

is legitimate; that is how it read in the periodical The Liberal in 1822. Poe's “beloved” in line 16, however, is just an error; all the versions we have examined of texts with any authority read “belovèd.” There are also a number of variations in punctuation in Sartain's. The complex story of variants in the poem is told by Forman in his edited volume of The Works of Percy Bysse Shelley. Because a comparison of Poe's Sartain's version to the variants that Poe might have seen would be unconscionably lengthy, we refer the interested reader there.

8

southern: Poe first gave this talk in New England. His insertion of the favorable allusion to the South indicates that the Sartain's version had been revised to flatter southern audiences. It is, indeed, a very southern lecture; see our note to ¶25.

9

Willis: See our note to ¶42 of “The Rationale of Verse” for information about Poe's enduring relationship with Nathaniel Willis.

The shadows ... alway!: Poe quotes Willis's “Unseen Spirits” (1843), a poem he repeatedly quoted and praised. On February 27,1845, he made it part of his talk “The Poetry of America,” for instance; it is referred to also in a letter to J. R. Lowell (March 30, 1844); in the seventh letter of his series for the Columbia Spy, “Doings of Gotham”; and in a “Literati” sketch of Willis (TOM). Poe's praise for this sentimental poem will surprise readers unfamiliar with the popular literary scene of the 1830s and 1840s. The implied sympathy for the downtrodden is unusual in Poe but not entirely isolated: see, for example, his powerful tale “The Man of the Crowd” (1840; Short Fiction, 253-54, 283-89, 292-93, esp. 293n9; Thirty-Two Stories, 120-29, esp. 120; Collected Works, 2:505-18). Usually more snobbish and condescending than other major authors, Poe on occasion is capable of showing a certain compassion and even social concern. Poe's quotation of the poem is quite accurate; the differences between his text in Sartain's and the version in Poems of Nathaniel Parker Willis (New York, 1882) are small. They could well be present because Poe saw an earlier version of the poem and/or because of the style-sheets of periodicals that carried it. Whether to spell words such as color and honor with a u was something of a nationalistic concern in this era, and magazine policies varied. Poe spelled “honor” both ways in various places.

line		Sartain's		Poems, 1882
5		walked		walk'd
7		charmed		charm'd
8		Honour		Honor
10		called		call'd
17		honoured		honor'd
23		walked		walk'd
29		Heaven		heaven

10

“Verses of society”: Poe's estimate of the worth of most of Willis's poems seems very fair. Many are, in fact, “verses of society”; in such poems one hears the voice of a rich young man (Willis was wealthy) looking out almost voyeuristically at a world of pretty women. A group called “City Poems” is set in New York; in one, the speaker worries whether the lovely girl in the omnibus is in fact “genteel.” If [page 203:] not, he can’t have her; he would have to know who her father is. The situation is made to seem unfortunate, but there is no evidence that the poet means to challenge it. “Love in a Cottage” is, the poem declares, buggy and inferior and should not be idealized; the poet prefers “a shy flirtation / by the light of a chandelier” with a lady more elegant than a milkmaid. The tone of other poems suggests imitations of Byronic wit, but sometimes dashes and exclamation points are heavily used as props to cleverness. It is only fair to say, however, that Poe exaggerates; “Unseen Spirits” is not Willis's only serious poem.

11

the heresy of The Didactic: One of Poe's frequently repeated points. The “Letter to B———.” puts it this way: “A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.” But it is odd to modern readers to encounter Poe's manifesto against preachy poetry in the paragraph following one in which he lauds Willis's moralistic “Unseen Spirits.”

we Bostonians: Poe was in fact born in Boston but generally had only negative things to say about the “frog-pond,” as he called it. His including himself among a group of widely influential and well-known writers is rhetorically clever: he can then criticize the school in which he has just enrolled himself “from inside,” so to speak. But his stance is likely also both whimsical and wistful, for he was, as he knew, philosophically very close to the Transcendentalists, and he envied the fame of the Household Poets.

12

With as deep ...: “The Poetic Principle” is largely based on ideas Poe developed earlier, especially in his review “Longfellow's Ballads” (1842). Sometimes the connection involves almost verbatim quotation. In 1842 he wrote, “Now with as deep a reverence for ‘the true’ as ever inspired the bosom of mortal man, we would limit, in many respects, its modes of inculcation. We would limit to enforce them. We would not render them impotent by dissipation.”

13

Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense: G. R. Thompson shows that Poe derives his divisions from Immanuel Kant's introduction in The Critique of Judgment (1793) (Poe, Essays and Reviews).

Aristotle ... themselves: Aristotle, in fact, does distinguish between the sort of “good” one achieves in a work of art and the “good” one refers to in ethics. There are passages in the Nichomachean Ethics reasonably close in sense to what Poe argues; see the discussion of happiness, for example, in Book 1, chapter 9. Aristotle, moreover, connects aesthetic beauty with correctness, rightness. See, for instance Book 3, chapter 8, where bravery is seen in such terms, or Book 4, chapter 1, where generosity is as well.

14

the desire ... star: Poe quotes Shelley's “To ———” (“One word is too often profaned.”):

we weep ... glimpses: Poe alludes to Della Ragion Poetica (1708) by Giovanni Vincenzo Gravini (1664-1718) in which there appears (1, xi) this passage: “But the arousal of emotions, even if they are painful, is always intermingled with delight, when it stimulates slowly and with a slight titillation; so that delight is usually grafted to many emotions, even those which are sad” (TOM). Pollin (Dictionary) notes four other allusions by Poe to Gravina.

16

the Landscape Garden: A critical document of Poe's taste is his story “The Domain of Arnheim” (1848), first published in shorter form in 1842 as “The Landscape Garden.” Although Poe contradicts himself repeatedly in his theoretical statements about the creative process, the “look” of what artists produce remains quite constant throughout his work. Compare, for example, the last portions of “The Domain of Arnheim,” where Poe describes the appearance of the ideal garden, with the ideal room described in “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840; Short Fiction, 3-4, 14-18, 35-36; Collected Works, 2, 494-504) or with the description of the guitar music that Roderick Usher improvises in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). “The Poetic Principle” shares a number of characteristics with “The Domain of Arnheim” (see the next item). It shares many, too, with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” such as an allusion to Béranger (see ¶6). For “The Domain of Arnheim,” see Levine, Edgar Poe, esp. 10-15; Short Fiction, 4-5, 5-15, 32-35; Thirty-Two Stories, 200-215; and Collected Works, 3:1266-85. For “The Fall of the House of Usher,” see Short Fiction, 64-65, 88-98,104-6, esp. 65 and 105n7; Thirty-Two Tales, 87-103, esp. 87 and 94n8; and Collected Works, 2:392-42 2, esp. 397 and 417, note to motto. See also ¶35 of “The Poetic Principle.”

Poetic Sentiment ... widest field: In “The Domain of Arnheim” (see previous item) Poe notes that landscape gardening is “the fairest field for the display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty.” It provides the ideal creative spirit “the best means ... in the fulfillment not only of his own destiny as a poet, but of the august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic sentiment in man.” The two works, in short, share a number of ideas and images though differently applied.

Thomas Moore ... songs: Moore (1779-1852) began in 1807 to publish a series of “Irish Melodies” with music, some of which he composed himself; he was a good singer and performed his own airs. Poe made the same observations about poetry, music, and Moore in 1842 in the Longfellow review (see our note to ¶12).

17

The Rythmical Creation of Beauty: Poe restates a definition he had offered a number of times before, notably in the review of Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems.

18

the incitements of Passion ... advantage: Another point Poe had made repeatedly is that a poem could concern itself with truth, duty, or passion, provided that its basic goal, “exciting the Poetic Sentiments in others,” was achieved. The phrase comes from his thoughtful 1836 review of Joseph R. Drake's Culprit Fay, and Other Poems and Fitz-Green Halleck's Alnwick Castle and Other Poems, but the idea is also present in the review of Longfellow's Ballads and a number of other places. On the other hand, Poe also wrote of the act of creating poetry [page 205:] itself, “With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence.” That is from his Preface to the 1845 collection of his poems; see pages 52-53 of this volume.

19

Longfellow's ... away: Longfellow's poem (1844) is now called “The Day Is Done.” Poe's quotation varies from Longfellow in several details and also varies from Poe's own requotation of parts of the poem in the next paragraph. Editorial carelessness is one's first reaction, but do not rule out the possibility that Poe wants to suggest throughout that he is quoting from memory — perhaps he is; see ¶28. The differences, line by line, are as follows:

line		Sartain's		Longfellow
7		me,		me
8		resist;		resist:
20		time		Time
29		Who		Who,
29		labour		labor
42		cares		cares,
44		As they		And as

Our source for Longfellow is F. O. Matthiessen, ed., The Oxford Book of American Verse.

20

The bards ... Time: Poe, who rarely reproduces anything, his own or others’, without some alteration, has tinkered (perhaps accidently) with the lines just quoted. “Through” has become “Down” and “time” has been reprovided with a capital T.

“The North American Review”: Butt of a number of sarcastic remarks by Poe, who once called it the “North American Quarterly Humdrum.” The magazine extracted bitter vengeance after Poe's death when it accepted all of Griswold's slanders as fact and called for some “potent chemistry to blot out from our brain-roll forever, beyond the power of future resurrection, the greater part of what has been inscribed upon it by the ghastly and charnel-hued pen of Edgar Allan Poe” (Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 685). But the prayer inadvertently acknowledges Poe's success at producing potent effect; he thought in terms of reader response, and inscribing upon the reader's brain is just what he intended. See also ¶25.

exquisite: a pretentious fop.

21

There through ... voice: Poe quotes line 19 to the end of Bryant's “June.” He had quoted parts of the same poem in 1837 in the Southern Literary Messenger in a review of a collection of Bryant's poems. Poe's version in Sartain's varies from that in Bryant's own edition, Poems by William Cullen Bryant: Collected and Arranged by the Author (New York, 1876) in the following details:

line		Sartain's		Bryant
6		love-tale,		love-tale
9		housewife-bee		housewife bee
19		humming bird		humming-bird
10		what,		what
10		noon,		noon [page 206:]
12		moon,		moon
14		what, if		what if,
15		Betrothed		Betrothèd
19		I know, I know should not see		I know that I no more should see
32		part		part,
34		Is — that		Is that

23

sadness and longing: Poe or his typesetter introduces yet another variation in lines just quoted: the comma after “longing” in paragraph 19 is gone.

24

I fill ... a name: Pinkney (1802-28), in a very brief lifetime, served ten years in the U.S. Navy, practiced law, edited, and wrote poems that Poe strongly admired and praised. Poe usually misspelled his name. Perhaps the staff at Sartain's fixed it; it is correct in the magazine. The poem is called “A Health”; Pinkney wrote it in the album of his fiancée, Georgiana MacCausland, on August 10, 1824; it was published in a collection of his poems in 1825 (TOM). Poe in quoting it cut Pinkney's lines in two; the opening of the original, for instance, reads, “I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone.”

The lines are equally indented in Pinkney. Besides providing capitals and indenting the newly made lines, the version in Sartain's contains the following changes:

line		Sartain's		line		Pinkney
15		burdened		8		burthened
20		freshness		10?		freshness,
28		remain;		14		remain,
29		memory,		15		memory
29		her,		15		her
37		they		19		there (Mabbott and Pleadwell, The Life and Works of Edward Coote Pinckney)

The word on line 37 looks to be a simple typographical error; we have corrected “they” to “there” so the stanza makes sense.

25

born too far south: Poe made the same comment in a “Marginalia” item about Pinkney, an item published earlier but actually taken from this lecture. Poe is dead wrong: Pinkney was born in England, where he lived until his family came back to Baltimore. After serving in the Mediterranean and in campaigns against pirates in the Caribbean, he himself settled in Maryland. For more on the southernness of “The Poetic Principle,” see ¶36 and our notes to it. Pinkney will do well as a model of a rash, daring, and doomed young southerner; although it was likely that he never actually fought a duel, he repeatedly came close. Poe associates him with duelling — see the entry on Charles Fenno Hoffman in “The Literati” (Complete Works, 15). In the “Marginalia” comment [page 207:] about Pinkney, Poe said that George Hill stole from “A Health” (Poe this time properly included the article in the title) in a poem in Hill's The Ruins of Athens and Other Poems (Boston, 1839) (Collected Writings, 2:348-49). Writings, 2 has more about Poe's connections to Pinkney. Poe seems more indebted to him than does Hill, although Poe does show in parallel “quotations” how much a portion of Hill's poem leans on Pinkney. Poe's case would have been stronger had he not doctored the quotations.

It was ... “The North American Review”: See our note to ¶20. Poe, having called himself a Bostonian earlier, here speaks as a southerner. In fact, however, the October 1825 North American Review review of Pinkney's Poems (which included this one) praised Pinkney's shorter poems (TOM).

26

Boccalini ... reward: Trajano Boccalini (1556-1613), Italian satirist. In James Puckle's book The Club (1711) is an article called “Critic” from which Poe several times used material; The Club was available in an 1818 reprint. It was where Poe learned about Boccalini's Ragguagli di Parnaso (1612). The story about Zoilus and Apollo appears there as item 100 or 101 — editions are inconsistent (TOM).

28

“Melodies”: Poe's attribution is correct.

come, rest ... too!: Poe quotes quite accurately here. In Moore's own edition, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore: Collected by Himself (London, 1841), the poet notes that his poems have appeared “in various shapes” in America and that there is a Dublin edition “full of typographical errors.” Poe's version differs from Moore's as follows:

line		Sartain's		Moore
2		Though		Tho’
3		smile		smile,
6		Through		... Thro’ ...
		through		... thro’ ...
		through		thro’ ...
9		called		call'd
11		Through		Thro’

a distinction originating with Coleridge: In Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, chapter 14, is a discussion of the origins of his collaboration with Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge uses the topic as a springboard for an attempt at defining the nature of poetry. Coleridge labels his discussion a “disquisition on the fancy and the imagination” and concludes his chapter as follows: “Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.” The distinctions in Coleridge have not always been clear to his readers.

the great powers of Moore: Coleridge does in fact respect Moore, ranking him, however, a bit below the greatest of the poets; see, for instance, Coleridge's list of “poets whose general style possesses the same excellence” as Wordsworth's in chapter 22 of the Biographia Literaria. [page 208:]

“I would I were” ... remember them: Poe's game here is apparently to imply that he has been quoting all the other poems from memory. His inaccuracy makes one almost willing to believe him. Remember also that nineteenth-century education included hefty feats of poetic memorization and that adults in social situations recited for one another, as they still do in parts of Great Britain and Ireland. Although Poe read his lecture, it is perfectly possible that he wrote down much of the poetry in it from memory.

29

O saw ye ... more!: “Fair Ines” was first published in 1823. Poe sometimes said less favorable things about Hood. The differences between Poe's version and what is taken as standard today are minor. We follow John Clubbe's edition, Selected Poems of Thomas Hood (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), which bases its text on Hood's The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, Lycus the Centaur and Other Poems (London, 1827), in which each stanza bears a roman number and there are no line indentations.

line		Sartain's		Hood
11		moon		Moon
12		unrivalled		unrivall'd
20		whispered		whisper'd
20		near!		near! —
28		waved		wav'd
30		more;		more: —
35		music		Music
39		farewell, farewell,		Farewell, Farewell,
40		loved		lov'd
44		danced		danc'd
45		Alas, for		Alas for

Poe had obviously seen some version after the first published form of “Fair Ines,” for that first version in the January 1823 London Magazine lacked the third stanza.

30

“The Haunted House”: Poe praised and quoted from this Hood poem in the Broadway Journal for August 30, 1845.

“Bridge of Sighs”: First printed in 1844 in Hood's Magazine. It is strikingly similar in rythmic structure to Poe's “For Annie” (1849). Poe's text for “The Bridge of Sighs” varies from Hood's Poems (London, 1846) as printed in Clubbe (see our note to ¶29) in that Hood includes a motto from Hamlet — “Drown'd! drown'd” — and in the following small details:

line		Sartain's		Hood
3		Importunate		importunate
6		care; —		care;
7		Fashioned		Fashion'd
20		Now,		Now
23		undutiful;		undutiful:
50		motherly,		motherly [page 209:]
69		hurled		jurl'd
70		Anywhere, anywhere		Any where, any where
76		Picture it, —		Picture it —
78		of it		of it,
82		Fashioned		Fashion'd

Between lines 83 and 84 Hood provides a stanza break not in Sartain's.

87		Smooth,		Smoothe,
91		Through		Thro’
94		Fixed		Fix'd
96		Spurred		Spurr'd
99		rest, —		rest. —

Between lines 102 and 103 Hood provides a stanza break not in Sartain's.

32

Though the day ... spirit of thee: Poe quotes Byron's “Stanzas to Augusta” (1816). Thomas Moore's edition of Byron, The Works of Lord Byron (London, 1832), which Moore says he did with Byron's manuscript in hand, notes that Byron's original manuscript differs from the finished version in a number of significant ways. Poe quotes the revised text; his version varies from Moore's text in that in The Works each stanza bears a roman numeral (a typographic error in Moore numbers the last stanza W. instead of VI.) and in the following details:

line		Sartain's		Moore-Byron
17		shivered		shiver'd
19		delivered		deliver'd
24		them. [typographical error in Moore]		them.”
28		slandered		slander'd
32		Nor		Nor,
39		that		that,
41		perished		perish'd
43		cherished		cherish'd

33

Alfred-Tennyson: Poe's opinion of Tennyson changed; in 1842 he was critical, but in other comments he praised Tennyson warmly.

“The Princess”: Tennyson's poem was published in 1847; he is said to have written it at Tintern Abbey. Poe quotes it with unusual accuracy, altering only the words “half-awaken'd,” “remember'd,” and “feign'd” in lines 12, 16, and 17 by replacing each apostrophe with an e.

34

Uranian ... Dionæan Venus: In a letter to Poe dated September 24, 1844, his friend Thomas Holley Chivers wrote, “The Venus Pandemos, who presides over the animal feelings, is then elevated, by the wisdom which is shed abroad upon her from the divine countenance of the Venus Urania, who presides over the intellectual faculties.” In some versions of Greek myth the earth goddess Dione is Aphrodite's mother; Zeus is the father (TOM). It is likely that Poe [page 210:] picked up his allusion from Chivers's letter, but Chivers's context is very different. Chivers begs Poe for more letters, for they give him “such intellectual delight — the highest pleasure that a man can enjoy on earth — such as the Angels feel in heaven.” The “intellectual” is more important in his letter than in Poe's paragraph. Chivers's sentence about the Venus Urania is followed by this: “Therefore, he who devotes the most of his time to the procurement of knowledge, tends, just in that proportion, to perfect his nature, or make his earthly-heavenly — his terrestrial-celestial — more like the wholly celestial.” Chivers's next paragraph, though it also argues for knowledge, “Truth,” was likely useful to Poe as well: “Wisdom is the Endymion who causes, while lying upon the Latmos of this world, the enamoured Angel Virtue — the Diana of Truth — to come down nightly from heaven to enjoy his company. This Diana of Truth, or the Moon of Peace, is the Urania of the soul, who presides over the constellations of the heaven of wisdom, which shine to light us back again into the Jasper-walled and many-gated City of Pure Gold of the Living God” (Chivers, Complete Works, 1: 32, 34).

Chivers alludes to the myth that Diana, enamored of the mortal Endymion, caused him to sleep eternally so that she could descend to “enjoy his company.” His letter mixes Christian and classic myth, contemporary poetry, history, and philosophy in a transcendental blend; St. Paul, Socrates, Jesus, and Plato lead us via Truth to heavenly poetry. “[M]ay you live forever,” Chivers concludes, signing himself, “Your friend forever more.”

35

simple elements ... unexplored: Poe's aesthetic and poetic theories are not consistent, but his taste is. “Beauty” in Poe always has the same “look”; often it is described in the same adjectives and phrases. Compare this passage especially to his short story “Eleanora” (1841) (Thirty-Two Stories, 174-80; Short Fiction, 76-79; Collected Works, 2, 635-47) and to his utopian aesthetic tale “The Domain of Arnheim” (see our notes to ¶16) (Stuart Levine, Edgar Poe, esp. 10-47).

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Motherwell: William Motherwell (1797-1835), a popular Scottish poet.

“The Song of the Cavalier”: “The Cavalier's Song.” The poem originally appeared with deliberately misleading attributions in Motherwell's Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern (1827), but Poe probably knew it from its appearance in the January 23, 1842, Saturday Evening Post. It was also included in Rufus Griswold's Poets and Poetry of England (1844). Griswold's comments about the great similarity between a Motherwell poem and one by Mrs. Sarah Anna Lewis (who used the pen names “Estelle Anna Lewis” or “Stella”) likely set Poe's synapses flashing. Plagiarism was a compulsively interesting topic to him, and he had all-too-close ties to Lewis: she had helped Mrs. Clemm. Poe edited her poems (for a much-needed fee) and tried to plug them in letters and favorable reviews. Poe wrote his poem “An Enigma” (1848) for her, yet privately he seems to have loathed her and the awkward situation in which Mrs. Clemm's indebtedness to her had put him. Connections to plagiarism and his uncomfortable links with Sarah Lewis made it likely that he had special reason for interest in Motherwell's poems (TOM; Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe).

our modern ... poem: Poe closes his last important critical statement quoting a poem praising fame, honor, blind courage, and death in battle, precisely the [page 211:] blend of pseudo-aristocratic (“Cavalier”) unrealism that Mark Twain said led the South into the bloody folly and waste of the Civil War. Poe calls himself a Bostonian in “The Poetic Principle,” but his ego lives in Dixie. Even the nationality is right: Twain blamed the heroic nonsense in Sir Walter Scott for southern self-deception; for Poe, who had himself been drawn to military glamor as an adolescent (Levine, “Masonry, Impunity, and Revolution”) and at West Point, Motherwell serves as well.