Text: John Phelps Fruit, “The Obsession of Edgar Allan Poe,” Poet-Lore (Boston, MA), vol. XII, no. 1, January 1900, pp. 42-58

[page 42:]

THE term obsession is to be taken in this discussion in its generic sense. However natural the suggestion in the case of Poe, the thought is not to be entertained that he was, as the popular tongue would phrase it, possessed of an evil spirit.

Like unto every thinking soul, Poe was in thralldom to a theory [page 43:] of life and destiny. The conception mastered him; he did not possess it so much as he was possessed of it.

Since our mastering motives take root in our mastering conceptions, these motives, whether good or bad, are, in effect, spirits that reign in our members, and thus comes about our obsession.

The polarity of thought lay heavy almost as death upon Poe's soul. Night and day, heat and cold, wet and dry, plenum and vacuum, life and death: “The inevitable dualism that bisects nature “ was to his mind the most undisguised fact ; so naked, indeed, it was as to be almost cruel to his sensibilities. He yearned for the absolute, yet the relative was forever in evidence.

The old Sphinx in Emerson's poem gave the poet the parting reminder that he was a “clothed eternity “ and that to his ceaseless quest and questioning he would have “Time”’ for a “false reply.” When “the great mother” asked, —

Poe was not the poet to answer cheerfully

He was never Platonist and optimist enough to enjoy the resignation sung in that poem.

The first utterances of Poe are brimful of this ruling thought. The earliest edition of his poems came out in 1827, and has some stanzas entitled, from the first line, ‘The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour.’

His happiest day has been, is gone with the visions of his youth, of which visions one was “the brightest glance of pride and power.” He concludes his retrospect in this way: —

It is logically paradoxical to say that one's superlatively happy moment has been and was yet fraught with so much pain as to bring it to abhorrence. It was, however, an essence that he felt that was powerful to destroy. It was a sort of subconscious intuition that this was a “counterfeit presentment” of the genuine article called happiness. This subconscious misgiving in the moment of (objective) conscious happiness is admirably wrought out in ‘The Bridal Ballad,’ where the bride has the ring upon her hand as a token that she is happy now, but when her lord breathed his vow, his words seemed to ring as a knell, and the voice seemed to be his who fell in battle, and yet who is happy now by her side at the altar.

In this same volume of 1827 is the first version of ‘Tamerlane,’ in which there is an episode — not in the later versions — which pictures that happiest moment, when he left his Ada asleep in her matted bower to win for her in the strife of nations a queenly crown. At that blissful moment when a silent gaze was all the farewell he took, there was engendered the essence of his undoing. ‘Tamerlane’ is a story exemplifying the dire disaster that takes its rise in the moment of rapturous happiness.

Compare with this Poe's final utterances on the subject found in ‘Eureka,’ of 1848. He calls ‘Eureka’ a Prose Poem; the theme of it is the cosmogony of our Universe. He states after enunciating his theme, this general proposition:

“In the original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.”

With this proposition as his major premise he proceeds to determine the essence, the origin, the creation, the present condition, and the destiny, of the material and spiritual universe! The temerity of the undertaking makes one sensible of the dogmatism [page 45:] in the conception and statement of his general proposition; but being dogmatic is evidence of possession by a doctrine, or idea.

His possession, however, was not more complete in 1848 than in 1827. In the ‘ Tamerlane’ of his youth we have the poetical presentation of his doctrine of polarity, in which poem he sings, also, the intuitive power of the lover, — who is Poe — in these words, —

in the ‘Eureka’ of 1848 we have the analytical presentment of his doctrine. What he so forcefully felt as a factor in his early life, and which, in an applied form, characterizes his literary art, he discursively handled with reference to the wide range of things called the Universe.

Staring him, so to speak, out of countenance was the dual nature of phenomena, physical and psychical. That which was apparent was relative; not one thing alone, but two things in every mental apprehension: night implies, to the mind, day; heat, cold; sunrise, sunset; joy, sorrow; Heaven, Hell. The relation was, to Poe, one of contradiction. Behind the apparent he sought with

the mind's-eye that which was not relative, but that which was absolute.

He starts on his search by assuming that he intuitively knows that what God originally created was “that Matter which by dint of Elis volition, He first made from His Spirit, or from Nihility, could have been nothing but Matter in its utmost conceivable state of Simplicity.”

Matter in its absolute simplicity he conceives to be “a particle — one particle — a particle of one kind — of one character — of one nature — of one size — of one form — a particle, therefore, ‘without form and void’ — a particle positively a particle at all points.” Note the logical and rhetorical paradoxes required in order to talk about the Absolute with any degree of clearness.

While oneness is all that can be predicated of Matter as originally created, yet it is a principle abundantly sufficient to account [page 46:] for the constitution, the existing phenomena, and the plainly inevitable annihilation, of at least the material Universe.

The bringing into being by Divine volition, of the primordial Particle is Poe's conception of the completed act of creation. This particle is the unrelated one thing out of which arises all phenomena and back to which everything tends and is destined to reach.

Out of this absolute Particle the constitution of the universe is framed by forcing the One into Many. This diffusion of Unity into diversity is effected by a Divine impulse. There results action, and therewith the polar reaction. The principle of contradiction thus becomes operative in shaping the Universe.

He argues that the diffusion which is best conceived as Radiation, is determinate and into limited space; otherwise, being continuous it would call for unlimited space, and not being discontinued there could be no reaction.

Reaction being equal to action, there is, after the act of diffusion ceases, a tendency among the divided particles to regain their normal Unity. This tendency which may be well called a yearning, is strong as the original Divine impulse that forced them into the diversity everywhere apparent. There is, however, among the diverse particles a sort of war, a struggle, that prevent the immediate collapse into the original One. The polar forces of attraction and repulsion strive together. ‘No other principles exist,”’ he says, with emphasis.

The explanation is ingenious! He kept in mind Pascal's definition of the Universe, that it is “a sphere of which the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere,” and therewith interpreted the Newtonian law of Gravity to consist. The vulgar version of the law seems to express a tendency to diffusion rather than to oneness, he, therefore, states the law in this phraseology as being more suggestive of its character: ‘Every atom, of every body, attracts every other atom, both of its own and of every other body, with a force which varies inversely as the squares of the distances between the attracting and attracted atom.”

He would first impress the mind with the “complexity of relation [page 47:] involved in the fact that each atom attracts every other atom.” He says, at some length: “Had we discovered, simply, that each atom tends to some one point, a favorite with all, we should still have fallen upon a discovery which, in itself, would have sufficed to overwhelm the mind; but what is it that we are actually called on to comprehend ? That each atom attracts — sympathizes with the most delicate movements of every other atom, and with each and with all at the same time, and forever, and according to a determinate law of which the complexity, even considered by itself solely, is utterly beyond the grasp of the imagination. If I propose to ascertain the influence of one mote in a sunbeam on its neighboring mote, I cannot accomplish my purpose without first counting and weighing all the atoms in the Universe, and defining the precise positions of all at one particular moment. If I venture to displace, by even the billionth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now on the point of my finger, what is the character of that act upon which I have adventured? I have done a deed which shakes the moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their Creator.”

He calls these ideas soul-reveries rather than conclusions of the intellect, but they are ideas that must be entertained in any effort to grasp the significance of the principle of Attraction in its relation to a condition, to be imagined, out of which all observable phenomena have sprung.

Now, recur to Pascal's definition of the Universe and read this paragraph: “ Does not so evident a brotherhood among the atoms point to a common parentage. Does not a sympathy so omni-prevalent, so ineradicable, and so thoroughly irrespective, suggest a common paternity as its source? Does not one extreme impel the reason to the other? Does not the infinitude of division refer to the utterness of individuality? Does not the entireness of the complex hint at the perfection of the simple? It is not that the atoms, as we see them, are divided, or that they are complex in [page 48:] relations — but that they are inconceivably divided and unutterably complex; it is the extremeness of the conditions to which I now allude, rather than to the conditions themselves. In a word, is it not because the atoms were, at some remote epoch of time, even more than together — is it not because originally, and therefore normally, they were One — that now, in all circumstances, at all points, in all directions, by all modes of approach, in all relations and through all conditions, they struggle Jack to this absolutely, this irrelatively, this unconditionally One?”

He explains, furthermore, that the atoms, which he supposes to have been radiated from a centre, do proceed at once rectilinearly back to the central point of their origin, but they do not do so with respect to the centre as such. “They all tend rectilinearly towards a centre, because of the sphericity with which they have been radiated into space. Each atom, forming one of a generally uniform globe of atoms, finds more atoms in the direction of the centre, of course, than in any other, and in that direction, therefore, is impelled — but is not thus impelled because the centre is the point of origin. It is not to any point that the atoms are allied. It is not any locality, either in the concrete or in the abstract, to which I suppose them bound. Nothing like location was conceived as their orgin [[origin]]. Their source lies in the principle, Unity. This is their lost parent.”

Poe thus makes his theory of Attraction square suggestively with the Newtonian law of Gravity. At the outset of the discussion he discarded the term “ gravitation’‘ for “ Attraction,” as he did “electricity” for “repulsion,” but we can now see how Attraction means Gravitation.

But what of Repulsion? There could, of course, be no conception of attraction without the implied polar idea of repulsion. The atoms would immediately collapse into their original Unity upon the discontinuance of the diffusive impulse, did there not persist among them a separative power, the endeavor to overcome which is Attraction.

He considers this side of phenomena in the following language: [page 49:]

Thus he discusses the design of Repulsion. The fact exists evident to our senses. Man knows no force nor means by which two atoms can be brought into contact, in other words the impenetrability of matter is admitted by philosophy and proved by experiment. But Poe refrains from investigating the nature of this principle because of an intuitive conviction that it is spiritual, and that it lies beyond the reach of our present understanding. He says, “I feel, in a word, that here the God has interposed, and here only, because here and here only the knot demanded the interposition of God.”

He was aware that the Newtonian law of Gravity was coincident with Attraction only in a general way, it was applicable to a force [page 50:] that impelled Matter to seek Matter. But a closer view revealed a force among the atoms forbidding their conjunction. One force was great enough to bring the atoms into proximity to one another, but there was another force just as powerful that stood sentinel at a certain point to say “thus far and no farther.” The conclusion is that the nature of the two forces is contradictory. Attraction is peculiar to matter; atoms yearn, materially, for atoms; but Repulsion interposes to prevent the union, it, therefore, must be peculiar to Spirit.

We now have an understanding of Poe's conception of these two principles — “No other principles exists” — to which all phenomena are referable, it is, therefore, not necessary to follow him in his interpretation of the Nebular Hypothesis to make it agree with his doctrine. Here are, though, some conclusions, corollaries, and suggestions, that will throw light upon the enigmatic character of the man and poet.

It must be borne in mind that it is not the intention of this paper to discuss Poe's fallacies, logical and psychological, however patent or concealed they may be, but to get at the Notion that lorded it over him, and his analysis of it, and its reflex influence upon his life and literary labors.

The most obvious thing in his cosmogony is its Pantheism. The primordial Particle is first created by a Divine act, and then for a purpose it is diffused to constitute the Universe ; the diffused atoms, despite the struggle back to the parent Particle, will remain separated till the Divine withdrawal of the force of Repulsion.

Take in connection with this the logical inference as to right and wrong. “The irrelative Particle as primarily created by the Will of God must have been in a condition of positive normality, or rightfulness — for wrongfulness implies relation. Right is positive; wrong is negative — is merely the negation of right; as cold is the negation of heat — darkness, of light.”

We have here revealed the basal principle of the ethics of his Pantheism. Poe's career itself is a fine illustration of one of his [page 51:] atoms, ever sick of present condition, struggling towards something less tangible and more unrelated. He was pessimistic in life and utterance. What else could the self-conscious atom in such a system be?

It is worth while to consider the special endowments of the individual who can offer a rational explanation of his origin, life, and destiny, deducible from the dual nature of phenomena as the only data. He is cognizant of the difficulty, for it is the irrelative God that must be posited as the, at least, provisional starting point. He would at the outset say with Baron de Bielfeld, “We know absolutely nothing of the nature or essence of God: in order to comprehend what He is, we should have to be God ourselves.” Poe then would ask “if this our present ignorance of Deity is an ignorance to which the soul is everlastingly condemned?”

In developing his doctrine he speaks of the agency of matter in individualizing Spirit, and understands that particular masses of Matter through heterogeneity become sensitive to a degree involving Thought, thus becoming obviously self-conscious. (It may be added here by way of parenthesis that Poe says, “ The finest quality of thought is its self-cognizance”.) This end for which matter was created being fulfilled, it would be Matter no longer; it would sink “into material Nihility from which alone we can conceive it to have been evoked, to have been created, by the volition of God”, and so God will remain all in all.

Thinking, at this point, of the principle of Rhythm, which he calls the omniprevalent law of periodicity, he asks, “ But are we here to pause?”“ Answer: “Not so. On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue; another creation and radiation, returning into itself ; another action and reaction of the Divine Will. Guiding our imaginations by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief — let us say, rather, in indulging a hope — that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and [page 52:] forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?”

What is this Heart Divine? Poe says emphatically: “It is our own.” Then he adds: “Let not the merely seeming irreverence of this idea frighten our souls from that cool exercise of consciousness, from that deep tranquility of self-inspection, through which alone we can hope to attain the presence of this, the most sublime of truths, and look it leisurely in the face.”

With more detail he explains: “No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding or believing that anything exists greater than his own soul. The utter impossibility of any one's soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought; these with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity; are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what man terms demonstration, that no one soul is inferior to another; that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul; that each soul is, in part, its own God — its own Creator; — in a word, that God — the material and spiritual God — now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe : and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God.”

Such a view makes clear to Poe's mind the riddles of existence; makes Evil intelligible and tolerable.

But his thought reaches its climax with reference to the creatures who are “conscious Intelligences.” They are conscious, first, of a proper identity ; and, second, of an identity with God. “Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended — when the bright stars become blended — into One.”

Note this: “Think that the sense of individual identity will [page 53:] be gradually merged in the general consciousness; that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah.”

The conclusion of the matter is that the conscious Intelligence, Man, can know God, because he can and will become God. What other conclusion could be drawn from the Pantheism of Poe's cosmogony ?

This is but an analytical interpretation of a conviction that Poe felt and gave expression to in his earliest volume. The “ratio of heterogeneity” of the Matter in him clothed him with Godlike intuitive power.

We have already quoted from ‘The Happiest Day,’ and from ‘Tamerlane’ we may quote again:

More to the purpose are some stanzas to the ‘Reply of Nature to our Intelligence.’ The first stanza runs thus: —

Thinking on the sovereignty of this power and that its quickening spell is manifest in the contrast of the strange amid the common, the poet concludes, —

The law of periodicity has its special significance in his system. As is suggested in the quotations on the forgoing topic, it means transmigration. He has a short paragraph to this effect:

This and more that he writes on this topic accords well with the doctrine of Wordsworth's ‘Ode,’ but it is difficult to understand the poems of his first volume entitled ‘ Dreams,’ ‘ he Lake,’ ‘Spirits of the Dead,’ ‘A Dream Within a Dream,’ without attending to his doctrine of Immortality set forth discursively in ‘Eureka’ in connection with the mention of the law of periodicity. In not a few of his prose Tales the spring of interest is to be found in some (psychological) aspect of his theory of transmigration.

It is apart from the intention of this paper to consider how closely Poe tracked the Platonic doctrine of Reminiscence, or to show from what other sources he drew his thought and inspiration. It is enough to know that certain thoughts possessed him with a grasp that shaped his career. [page 55:]

Another important deduction from his original proposition, suggested in his study of the Universe of the Stars, is the “absolute reciprocity of adaptation.”

He finds in the density of the globes the measure in which their purposes are fulfilled. “As density proceeds — as the Divine intentions ave accomplished — as less and still less remains to be accomplished — so, in the same ratio, should we expect to find an acceleration of the End; and thus the philosophical mind will easily comprehend that the Divine designs in constituting the stars advance mathematically to their fulfilment.”

He is more explicit in this paragraph: “Not only is this Divine adaptation, however, mathematically accurate, but there is that about it which stamps it as Divine, in distinction from that which is merely the work of human constructiveness. I allude to the complete mutuality of adaptation. For example, in human constructions a particular cause has a particular effect; a particular intention brings to pass a particular object, but this is all; we see no reciprocity. The effect does not react upon the cause; the intention does not change relations with the object. In Divine constructions the object is either design or object as we chose to regard it — and we may take at any time a cause for an effect, or the converse — so that we can never absolutely decide which is which.”

He illustrates the point by calling attention to the fact that the human frame in polar climates requires for combustion an abundance of highly azotized food, as train-oil. ‘Now, whether is oil at hand because imperatively demanded, or the only thing demanded because the only thing to be obtained? It is impossible to decide. There is an absolute reciprocity of adaptation”

This he recognizes as the ideal to be sought in literature. “The pleasure which we derive from any display of human ingenuity is in the ratio of the approach to this species of reciprocity. In the construction of plot, for example, in fictitious literature, we should aim at so arranging the incidents that we shall not be able to determine, of any one of them, whether it depends from any [page 56:] one other or upholds it. In this sense, of course, perfection of plot is really, or practically unattainable — but only because it is a finite intelligence that constructs. The plots of God are perfect — The Universe is the plot of God.”

Poe was not mistaken as to “the mystic empire and high power” innate to his soul; he had genius, and he wrought much in verse and prose that has the divine stamp of mutuality of adaptation.

His ex post facto analysis of ‘The Raven’ given in the essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ shows the modus of securing the self-consistency that characterizes a piece of Art. An effect to be reproduced through some concrete form is suggested. This effect kept definitely and vividly before the mind is creative of its own adequate and therefore best form of expression. The effect so conceived is “the soul” of which “the body form doth take.” This is the way in which every work of the creative imagination is produced, whether the artist be willing to confess it or not. It is the way in which the fundamental esthetic principles, unity, harmony, completeness, are exemplified. A poem, or a piece of prose, produced after this manner of Genius, has within itself its own excuse for being. There is to be found self-consistency, or in those other words “reciprocity of adaptation.”

Consider the effect, the mental state, wrought in you by the reading of ‘The Raven.’ What is it? In general you will say it is pleasurable. But, specifically, why pleasurable? Because of the adequacy of the form to the sentiment. You feel that the form is so exactly adapted to the sentiment, and that the sentiment could not find so precisely its proper expression in another form.

In several poems besides ‘The Raven’ and in many of his Tales the charm of the master holds you; the key to which charm is “the reciprocity of adaptation,” The secret of this charm he discovered in the Great Creator's poem of the Universe, and there with in youth felt his own “self-supremacy “ and knew his own “high power,” and strove “though not with Faith, with godliness.” [page 57:] Poe watched the Great Master work and caught “the trick of the tool's true play.”

From this idea of self-consistency as the stamp Divine, Poe derives his definition of an absolute truth, namely, “A perfect consistency is an absolute truth.” He ridicules the Aristotelian and Baconian “roads” to truth, and then speaks of “the majestic highway of the Conszstent.” Hesays: “Is it not wonderful that they should have failed to deduce from the works of God the vitally momentous consideration that a perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth?”

We have heard it sung by Emerson that “ Beauty is its own excuse for being.” There is no reason for the existence of Beauty other than it is Beauty, but. to our senses it must exist in some concrete form. This form, so far as there is any sense in speaking of Beauty apart from concreteness, is reciprocal in adaptation to Beauty. There is, therefore, within every true poem, or other piece of Art, the why and the how of its existence. Such a work can be said to be irrelative to everything except, remotely, to the artist that fashioned it. It is an example of absolute truth within the scope of the definition.

The poetic fervor with which Poe, at seventeen years of age, expressed himself as to the import of the polarity of thought, and as to his intuitive power to discern what lay behind the show of things, is matched by the logical discrimination, at the close of his career, with which he would enforce conviction for the truth of his conclusions.

He claims that it is not an hypothesis which we are required to admit in order to explain the principle at issue, but that it is a logical conclusion which we are invited to deny if we can; it is a conclusion so accurately logical that there is no escape for the mind, turn which way it may. It is logical suicide to doubt it. The same result confronts us, at the end of a long inductive journey through phenomena, or at the close of a deductive course from the most rigorously simple of all conceivable assumptions.

He took the deductive route aware fully that only deductions [page 58:] from axioms are indisputable. We recall that he took as his starting point absolute simplicity. He argues that this is the most axiomatic of all beginnings, for every Science except Logic, is the Science of certain concrete relations ; as, Arithmetic, of number; Geometry, of form; Logic, however, is the science of Relation in the abstract — of absolute Relation — of Relation considered solely in itself.

Poe had what is called a living faith in his deductions. In the preface to ‘ Eureka’ read these words : — “What I here propound is true: — therefore it cannot die; or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the Life Everlasting.”

The logical conviction in the end of his career tallies so well with the passion of his poetical faith in the beginning, that it seems eminently proper to claim that he was possessed. There seems to be not so much a growth in knowledge as such, as a growth in the clearness and distinctness of a knowledge that fully, but intuitively, possessed him from the start. He had much to say in his early verse of “mystery” and of a “spell” that bound him. He was possessed after the manner that every genius is possessed.

John Phelps Fruit.

WILLIAM JEWELL COLLEGE.