Text: John Phelps Fruit, “Introductory,” The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (1899), pp. 1-4

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THE artisan in letters is apt to exaggerate his ability as a critic. He is almost sure to assume the judicial attitude towards the Artist, and become dogmatic. He forgets that the creative Imagination is no denizen of his own “pent-up-in-Utica” sphere, and proceeds to deal with its products accordingly.

As to poetry, Hugo would remind him: “The poet is only limited by his aim; he considers nothing but the idea to be worked out; he recognizes no sovereignty, no necessity, save the idea: for since Art emanates from the Absolute, in Art, as in the Absolute, the end justifies the means. This is, it may be said in passing, one of those deviations from the ordinary terrestrial law which make the higher criticism muse and reflect, and which reveal to it the mysterious side of Art. In Art, above all, is visible the quid divinum. The poet moves in his work as Providence in its own. He excites, dismays, strikes; then [page 2:] exalts or depresses, often in inverse ratio to your expectation, ploughing into your very soul through surprise. Now, consider, Art, like the Infinite, has a Because superior to all the Whys. Go and ask of the Ocean, that great lyric poet, the wherefore of a tempest. What seems to you odious or absurd has an inner reason for existing.”

“Genius,” Hugo says further, “is an entity like Nature, and requires, like Nature, to be accepted purely and simply. A mountain must be accepted as such, or left alone. There are men who would make a criticism on the Himalayas, pebble by pebble. . . . We take things as they are; we are on good terms with what is excellent, tender, or magnificent; we acquiesce in masterpieces; we do not make use of one to find fault with the other. . . . We are so far whimsical as to be satisfied if a thing is beautiful.”

Coleridge remarks that “Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art.” But, can we not find something in the way of criteria in the nature of poetry, and in the nature of the imagination, to avail us in determining if a given poem be a work of Art?

As an approach to something more definite, recall Spenser's dictum, —

The prosaic researches of the psychologist and philologist corroborate the poet, demonstrating that thought works organically, absolutely conditioning the form of its expression.

Here is a clear statement of the difference between form that is mechanic, and that which is organic: “The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties [page 3:] of the material; as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.”

“A poem,” to quote Coleridge again, “is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each compound part.”

A poem is an organic whole, and whatever be the remoter purpose, the immediate end must be pleasure. This pleasure must be permanent; but “nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.” Beauty has its own excuse for being; a true poem is a thing of beauty.

Instead of calling that “high spiritual instinct impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment,” imagination, Coleridge coined the word esemplastic, meaning “to shape into one.” It is apt to express that power of personality which shapes fugitive thought into artistic wholes.

“An immortal instinct,” says Poe himself, “deep within the spirit of man, is . . . a sense of the Beautiful.” It is this sense of the Beautiful that finds occasion for exercise of the esemplastic power.

So much is said to indicate the attitude of the writer, not ^ as a critic, but as an interpreter. He believes that every genius has a message for the world and stands more in need of interpretation than of having his measurements taken by dogmatic criticism. He is of the opinion that to [page 4:] trace the lucubrations of a poet's brain from their first manifestation to their full flowering in his finished work is not only fascinating, but profitable as fascinating; and that to get “the right good” of the poet is to “plunge soul-forward, headlong” into his works.