Text: John Phelps Fruit, “The Artist,” The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (1899), pp. 47-69

[page 47, unnumbered:]

POE claimed that poetry was with him a passion, and his handiwork in verse corroborates the claim. One would suppose that because he set so much store by passion, that he would let passion find its own utterance; but he was keenly cognizant of the value of the technique of verse. The evidence of this we have in his being a constant reviser of his poems. Conspicuous in the edition of 1829 is the revision of Tamerlane, and further revisions of other poems in 1831 and in the volume of 1845.

We are to discuss in another section Poe's art; but here, where we are taking account of his thoughts, it seems opportune to recognize the fact that, apart from his theme and the thoughts that coursed about it with a fervor that makes him a poet, he had also thoughts about poetical expression that, in the end, make him an artist.

The collection of 1845 is entitled, The Raven and Other Poems (W. 248). Besides fourteen new numbers, we find the following revisions of poems of 1831: The Valley of Unrest was The Valley of Nis; Lenore was A Pæan; The Sleeper was Irene; The City in the Sea was The Doomed City; Israfel is unchanged in title. To all this is added “Poems in Youth,” — with a foot-note (10: 96).

The Coliseum (10: 26), first published in 1833, recalls the verses to Helen of 1831, in which the wayworn wanderer is brought home by her classic face. [page 48:]

The verses to Helen are his tribute to the glory that was Greece, while The Coliseum is his tribute to the grandeur that was Rome.

The Coliseum is the —

After many days the weary pilgrim kneels, an altered man, amid the shadows of that type of antique Rome, and lets his soul drink in the very grandeur, gloom, and glory.

He asks if the “mouldering plinths,” “vague entablatures,” “shattered cornices,” and the wreck and ruin are:

These lines, as well as those to Helen, show that he could look back upon another than his own imagined past, and gather inspiration from its Beauty and its Grandeur. [page 49:]

The Catholic Hymn (10: 28) has a different ring from that of 1827, which claimed that revelations were given in beauty to some who would otherwise fall from life and Heaven. After addressing the Mother of God he says,

That is in the past, and —

It is easy to sec how fate overcasts the present, but how can it extend to the past? As explained in the Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour, and in Tamerlane? If “fate” can overspread with black a bright past, it is not clear how ho could, with hope, supplicate the Virgin for a radiant future. His philosophy and religion hang awry.

The Scenes from “Politian” (10: 49), published in 1835, is a story — in dramatic form — of passionate love. The scene is laid in Rome. Count Castiglione and Alessandra are betrothed; he is, however, “heels over head” in love with Lalage. The Duke, the Count's father, announces that Politian, the Earl of Leicester, is hourly expected from England in Rome, and they must have him at the wedding. Politian, in Rome, is captivated by the sentiment of a song that he had often heard in merry England. Going into the gardens of the Palace to seek the singer, he finds Lalage. who, upon a declaration of his love, agrees to fly with him to —

but before she can take this step —

Politian rushes out to find Castiglione, challenges him, but knowing no cause why he should fight, Castiglione declines. Politian insults him to his face, when they both draw. Politian advances with a formula to the effect that he devotes Castiglione to the untimely sepulchre in the name of Lalage. At the sound of that name, Castiglione is nerveless, and refuses to fight. With a vow from Politian to insult him in public, they part. Castiglione reflects, — on his falseness to Alessandra, —

The sonnet, To Zante (10: 24) is colorless like The Happiest Day. At the name of the “fair isle,” what memories of radiant hours awake!

What scenes of departed bliss? Picture them yourself. What entombed hopes? Say yourself. What visions of a fair maiden? Imagine them yourself. Do your best, and then think of them as being “no more,” and the charms of the island are gone; it becomes accursed ground. “No more!” is the magical sad sound that transforms all. [page 51:] Thus is the sentiment of the luxury, pure and simple, of sorrow communicated.

The Bridal Ballad (10 : 12) sets forth a little story of subconscious foreboding. The bride is at the altar with ring on her hand and wreath on her brow, and she is consciously happy. She knows her lord loves her; but when he first breathed his vow, then the subconscious story begins. His voice sounded as the knell of one who fell in battle down the dell, and yet he is the one who is before her, happy now. He spoke to reassure her, and kissed her brow; then revery seized her again and bore her to the church-yard ; she sighed to him, standing there before her, thinking him dead : she sighed, “Oh, I am happy now!”

The two concluding stanzas are, —

Lest the dead who is forsaken, in revery, at the churchyard, may not be happy now with me here.

This is a recognition in a new form of the importance — the fearful importance! — of the subconscious in our life.

The title, The Haunted Palace (10: 31), is significant in view of the fact that it is designedly a piece of self-portraiture. In Adonais Shelley calls dead Keats's brain “a ruined Paradise.” Poe's brain was anything but a [page 52:] Paradise; it is fittingly named a palace, — a Haunted Palace.

We have in this poem, published first in 1839, a portrayal of that young man of genius of 1827 grown older. It is not difficult to see how that boy was father to this man.

It was once a fair and stately palace, a radiant palace, that reared its head in the monarch Thought's dominion; by good angels it was tenanted; in the greenest of our valleys it was situate.

“Porphyrogene,” born to the purple, echoes “the mystic empire and high power of genius” of 1827, and in particular it revoices, under the figure of royalty, the sentiment of Tamerlane.

This was all in the olden time long ago before the demon-light shone round his throne.

This poem is quoted in The Fall of the House of Roderick Usher [[The Fall of the House of Usher]] (1:143) as one of the rhapsodies of Roderick Usher, one of his “rhymed verbal improvisations.” The context gives us a psychological analysis, so to speak, of the soil out of which this flower of song grows. Here is one sentence from the context: “If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher.” Was an idea ever better painted than in the Haunted Palace?

The lines on Silence (10: 25) mention in a speculative tone something about a “twin entity” that comes of matter and light evinced in solid and shade, then runs, —

That means the silence of the grave. In Al Aaraaf he speaks of “A sound of silence on the startled ear,” and then says —

Personify this shadowy sound of the tomb in the name, “No More;” he is terrorless, —

“That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done.”

Poe was deeply impressed with the idea of Silence as the eternal voice of God, as the music of the spheres. In Silence — A Fable (1: 242), the Demon cursed the elements with the curse of tumult that he might observe the actions of the man upon that lone gray rock: the man trembled in his solitude; the night waned and he sat upon the rock.

“Then I grew angry and cursed, with the curse of silence, the river, and the lilies, and the wind, and the forest, and the heaven, and the thunder, and the sighs of the water-lilies. And they became accursed, and were still.

“And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man and his countenance was wan with terror. And hurriedly, he raised his head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock and listened. But there was no voice throughout [page 55:] out the vast illimitable desert, and the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, in haste, so that I beheld him no more.”

When things around one are cursed with such a silence as the Demon pictures, one might question if he himself is not passing away.

We may conjecture that the No More! of To Zante, and the “No More” of Silence are the germinal form of the “Nevermore” of The Raven.

‘The expression also indicates a change of mental attitude from that of 1827 in The Happiest Day, where he would hot live over that happiest hour, were it given him again. Here it is the sorrow that it can be no more. Then it was the luxury of sorrow for a happiness that, simply, had been, now it is the luxury of sentiment for a happiness that can never be again.

“The first version of the verses entitled To One in Paradise (10: 79) was published in January, 1834, as a part of that story of Venice, The Assignation (1: 258). In the edition of 1845, taken out of its connection with the story, the last stanza is omitted, and revisions made.

becomes

There is evidently a connection in thought between this poem and the sonnet To Zante: Zante was a fair isle. Here he says, —

And then we have an iteration of the “no more” mentioned above, —

The new attitude of mind is expressed in the last stanza,

The Conqueror Worm (10: 33) was published first in 1843, and made a part of Ligeia (1: 190) in 1845. It is an allegory: the conception is epic; the theme is “the tragedy, Man.” The time is within “the lonesome latter years,” which expression recalls the sentiment of Campbell's Last Man. It is a gala night, and there sit in a theatre a throng of angels “bedight in veils and drowned in tears,” to see —

It is a motley drama. The crowd chase a Phantom that returns ever in a circle to the self-same spot; and the soul of the plot has much of Madness, and more of Sin, and Horror.

The lights are out and the curtain falls over each quivering form —

Poe is not far from the climax in the treatment of his universal theme, Ruin, when he conceives for man a situation at which the angels are drowned in tears, and grow pallid and wan.

One reading Al Aaraaf (1829), Romance and Israfel (1831), can see that Fairy-Land (1831) is of a piece with them. So Dream-Land (10: 19) of 1844 is in perfect keeping with the spirit of The Haunted Palace and The Conqueror Worm.

The poet in the first stanza tells of his journey to Dream-Land, and in the last his return home. The route was obscure and lonely, it was beset by evil things. There the Eidolon, Night, reigned on a black throne. He came to this land —

Study this description of the Land, —

Here we have recalled the sentiment of Visit of the Dead and of The Lake of 1829. As in The Lake it was said, —

so Dream-Land continues, —

In 1827 he would not live over again his happiest day, his happiest hour: later it was sorrow that it could be “no more;” in Eulalie (10: 36) a different note is sounded: [page 59:] he is redeemed from a world of moan by the bright eyes of the gentle Eulalie, —

Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride. Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride,

There is no death and no hell in the last stanza, —

The two stanzas To F—— (10: 78) are supposed to be to Mrs. Osgood (1: 70). He calls her “Beloved,” and claims that, amid the earnest woes that crowd his drear earthly path, his soul finds solace in dreams of her; and then in lines that recall To Zante, he says, —

Here he has the same sort of consolation as in Eulalie. It is not a brooding over the dark past, but a fleeing to —

Poe had, naturally, a Platonic interest in Woman. Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood (W.: 259), a poet, appealed strongly to this side of his nature. He spoke at length and in much detail of her poetry in The Literati (8: 95). He said in one place of her: “In character she is ardent, sensitive, impulsive — the very soul of truth and honor; a worshipper of the beautiful, with a heart so radically art less as to seem abundant in art; universally admired, respected, and beloved.”

This enables us to appreciate the force of the lines entitled, To F——s S. O——d (10: 81), —

Before speaking of The Raven, the crowning piece of the edition of 1845, — the crowning glory of his whole career! — let us turn to his prose for a moment to learn how he has specialized the view of poetry expressed in the prefatory letter of the volume of 1831, and what he has to say about the “Idea of Beauty,” which, in Al Aaraaf, “lit on hills Achaian.”

The Poetic Principle (6:3), though written and delivered as a lecture, was not published till 1850; but the theory of poetry found therein formed a part of his discussion of Longfellow's Ballads (6:120), and was published in 1842. [page 61:]

It would be profitless to discuss here the fallacious claim that “a long poem is a contradiction in terms.”

He says: “An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors, and sentiments, amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or writ ten repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments, a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and sentiments, which greet him in common with all mankind — he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time to attain a portion of that Loveliness* whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.

“And thus when by Poetry — or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods — we find ourselves melted into tears, not as the Abbate Gravia supposes through ex cess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of [page 62:] which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

“The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness — this struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constituted has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.”

He says, in short: “I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.”

This strikes one as the prose of Al Aaraaf. It is mere theory, but it serves to show that he regarded Beauty not as a quality but as an effect; and that he considered Beauty the sole legitimate province of a poem. Moreover, an obvious rule of Art demanding that effects be made to spring from direct causes brought him to the appreciation of unity as the essential principle through which an effect must be directly produced. He illustrated this in his ex post facto analysis of The Raven, published in 1846, which is his essay on the Philosophy of Composition.

Let us turn to The Raven first, and afterwards look into this essay.

Unmistakably there is a connection in thought between Lenore (10: 17) and The Raven. The first version of Lenore was published in 1831, under the title A Pæan, which has already been noticed. This first version does not contain the name Lenore, but in the version of 1843 the title becomes Lenore (10: 169). The edition of 1845 is substantially that of 1843. In the first stanza are these two lines, —

“And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? — weep now or nevermore!

See, on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!” [page 63:]

In the third stanza these lines, —

He wafts the angel on her flight, not with a dirge, but with a pecan of old days. The events of Lenore would legitimately induce the mental condition out of which The Raven grows and flowers.

In The Raven, the singer is introduced to us as vainly seeking surcease of sorrow for the lost Lenore, —

Towards the close of the poem he says, —

The simple story of The Raven, minus the embellishments of verse that contribute so largely to the weird pleasure of the poem, is interesting. The monologist relates the incidents with the fervor of a heart that has experienced them.

It was upon a dreary midnight in bleak December when, tired out with keeping company with “the spirit of Eld” in quaint volumes of forgotten lore, in which he was trying to find a balm for his heart that had lost the radiant Lenore, that he heard a gentle rapping at his door. Out side it was darkness and the ghostly, dreary wind; inside it was weakness and weariness and the weird shadows of the dying embers upon the floor. It must have been such a night, to him, as a child would know the De’il had business in, he was expectant of something. The rustling of the silken curtains filled him with fantastic terrors, and to calm the tumult of his heart, he kept repeating that the tapping at his chamber door was some [page 64:] late visitor entreating entrance. He hesitated to open, but soon his soul grew stronger, on thinking that he was, per haps, half-dreaming, since he was nodding when he heard the first gentle rapping. He opened, but there was dark ness, nothing more.

He stood there long, peering deep into the night, full of wonder, fear, and doubt, imagining things no mortal ever dared to dream before, but the silence was unbroken except by the one word he whispered, the name “Lenore”: an echo answered back “Lenore.”

He returned into his chamber with soul all a-flame. Soon there was the tapping somewhat louder than at first; at the window lattice it seemed to him. A moment's thought led him to conclude it was the wind; but he flung open the shutter, and in there fluttered “a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore,” and without ceremony perched upon the bust of Pallas above the chamber door.

The stern decorum of this ebony bird beguiled his sad fancy into smiling, and he asked the ancient Raven what his lordly name was “on the Night's Plutonian shore.” His answer was “Nevermore.” This recalls the lines on Silence, where, of a two-fold silence, “the corporate Silence” is named “No More.”

That was a strange spectacle, an ungainly fowl upon the sculptured bust above the door, and with such a name as “Nevermore!” But while he spoke only that one word, he poured out his soul in it. Nothing further was said, not a feather fluttered, so the host scarcely more than whispered to himself, —

He was startled by this apt reply, and felt that this one word was the bird's only stock and store, — [page 65:]

Then he set himself to guess what this ominous bird meant by croaking “Nevermore.” While thus engaged, not a syllable he uttered, though the fowl's fiery eyes burned into his heart's core. He reclined against the cushion's velvet lining which, it occurred to him, “she shall press, ah, nevermore.” With this suggestion dominant he says, —

When, from such a revery, he was startled by the Raven's apt and ominous “Nevermore,” he conceived the thing to be a prophet, though bird or devil, and said most beseechingly, —

The prompt “Nevermore” dashed the little hope in the midst of despair that he was entertaining. With no balm for his lot here below he urgently asks, —

The Raven's “Nevermore” to this ends all in utter despair, and he (the singer) would make it the sign of their parting; but when he says [page 66:]

the answer is still, “Nevermore.”

The allegorical element of The Raven, of The Haunted Palace, of The Conqueror Worm, of any other poem, will find a proper place in the discussion of Poe's Art; here, we are considering the mind-content of his poetry.

The Raven is the masterful variation of his theme for which everything else heretofore has been preparatory. -It gives us a taste of the luxury of sorrow that is superla tively fine; there is no balm in Gilead for his troubled soul, as he takes his way among mortals here below, and no hope of clasping the rare and radiant Lenore in Heaven.

Aside from the thoughts that make part and parcel of his theme, Poe had thoughts concerning the art of poetry which are to be taken into account. These thoughts are not Poe's art itself, but the theory of that art, and are found in The Philosophy of Composition (6: 31), where he considers The Raven an exemplification of his theory.

He says, “Most writers — poets in especial — prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought, at the true purposes, seized only at the last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view, at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair [page 67:] as unmanageable, at the cautious selections and rejections, at the painful erasures and interpolations — in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps, the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary histrio.”

The free, creative, energy of the Art-impulses is limited only by the idea to be wrought out. Otherwise there could not be unity, that prime essential of a work of Art. “It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.”

He claims that the proper beginning of a poem is the consideration of an effect. “Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone — whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone — afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.”

After choosing an impression, or effect, to be conveyed, he executes it with the design of making the work universally appreciable. To this end Beauty must be held to be “the sole legitimate province of the poem.” “That pleasure,” he says, “which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect; they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul — not of intellect or of heart — upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating ‘the beautiful.’ [page 68:] Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes — that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment — no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to is most readily attained in the poem.”

“Regarding, then Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation; and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, in variably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.”

In connection with his discussion of “Nevermore” as monotonous and the most suitable refrain for a poem of melancholy tone, he asked himself: “‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy? ‘Death — was the obvious reply.’ And when is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?’ When it most closely allies itself to Beauty; the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

Combining the idea of a lover sorrowing for his deceased mistress with that of a Raven uttering the monotonous “Nevermore,” the effect sought is obtained. He speaks significantly of this in these words: “The raven addressed, answers with its customary word, ‘Nevermore’ — a word which finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving utterance aloud to certain thoughts suggested by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl's repetition of ‘Nevermore.’ The student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as I have before explained, [page 69:] by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer ‘Nevermore.’

“With the indulgence, to the extreme, of this self-torture, the narration, in what I have termed its first or obvious phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no overstepping of the limits of the real.”

“The luxury of sorrow,” “Self-torture,” are the key words to Poe's — every man's — pessimism.

Poe's attitude, intellectually at least, towards Beauty in 1845 is quite different from that of 1827. Beauty, now, is not a quality, but an effect, and poetry is the means by which it is produced. “Poetry in words is the rhythmical creation of beauty.” However much of passion, of duty, or of truth, may be introduced, incidentally and with ad vantage, into a poem, “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.” Such a view of Beauty and Poetry calls attention to the importance of Workmanship, — in the rhythmical use of words to create beauty. Between a poetical conception as it stands in the poet's mind and its finished expression in the concrete form of verse, there is, so to speak, the workman in his shop with material and tools. Poe meant, evidently, by his analysis of The Raven to give us this view of the workman, and to indicate thereby the true method of interpreting a piece of Art. What is the infallible test of a true poem? In a word, its self-consistency. Not by anything outside of itself can its worth as a work of Art be determined. A true poem realizes a definite effect, and must, perforce, be self-consistent.

While we are, seemingly, taken into Poe's confidence as to the composition of The Raven, and while it is doubtful if he went through with any such ratiocinative process in [page 70:] the detail he sets forth, still he thus convinces us that he is an artist, knowing how to work to secure the essential qualities, unity, harmony, and completeness, of high Art. A constant reviser of his verse, he came to know “the trick of the tool's true play.” Poe's discussion of The Raven is his avowal of his faith in himself as both poet and artist.