Text: Charles Leonard Moore, “Poe's Place as a Critic,” The Dial (Chicago, IL), vol. XXXIV, no. 400, February 16, 1903, pp. 111-112

[page 111, column 1, continued:]

In the world's literature there are only two absolutely great critics — Aristotle and Lessing. The “ Poetics “ of the one and the “Laocoén”’ and “Dramaturgerie” of the other are the fountains at which all secondary critics must fill their pitchers. Aristotle is limited in certain directions by a lack of material to work upon; and, similarly, Lessing is circumscribed by dealing too exclusively with Latin and French authors. But they have the genius of divination, and their work is final. Amongst the ancients, Longinus was an inspired appreciator. He felt so fully the greatness and charm of literature that he communicates a like thrill and fervor to his readers. He is exalting and stimulating to the last degree. But except a few oracular utterances about style, and some dry remarks on grammatical forms, he gives us no information as to the underlying principles of art. English literature can boast of a long succession of critics only inferior to the great Greek and German — giant planets to that double sun. Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, Lowell, — these and others have left us a body of criticism more varied and weighty than any other modern nation, save Germany, possesses. Does Poe deserve to rank with these men?

Poe unquestionably performed one of the most difficult feats of criticism. With almost unerring instinct, he separated the wheat from the chaff of his contemporary literature. Hawthorne, Dickens, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, and others, received from him some of their earliest and most valuable appreciation. If he erred, it was on the side of enthusiasm. His position was analogous to that of an expert in precious stones, who can pick out by instinct the real and perfect gems from a mass of flawed stones or paste imitations. But such an expert is not necessarily a practised mineralogist or chemist, acquainted with the composition of minerals and capable of reproducing them in the laboratory. And the literature which Poe practised upon is certainly not of the first importance. His few casual utterances about really great books are wrong. His attempts to postulate principles of poetry are ludicrously wrong.

It is unpleasant to have to act as Devil's Advocate toward a writer whom one loves and reveres, — [column 2:] but the truth is best. Poe's pseudo-poetic principles have had a great influence, and one decidedly detrimental to the development of the best and greatest in literature. It is worth while, therefore, to examine some of them.

One of his most elaborate, and, in a way, brilliant, articles is that on “The Rationale of Verse.” It is logically argued, and if its premise were sound it would be a valuable little treatise on versification. Bat it is vitiated by the assumption that English verse is founded on quantity. Poe's master, Coleridge, knew better, and when he was casting around for a method of formalizing verse he hit upon the metre of “Christabel.” This is simply accentuation systematized, — the four beats or points of emphasis in each line answering the purpose of a succession of quantitative feet. It would be a hard thing to say that there is no quantity in English poetry, — bat it certainly does not perform the office that Poe imagined it did. I doubt whether any great English poet ever thought of quantity when writing his lines, or, save in exceptional cases, scanned them after they were written. It is only by the most forced construction and conventional application of the rules of prosody that the ordinary iambic line — the most natural to our language — can be made to sean —

There is a typical line of blank verse, and unless I am greatly mistaken it is composed of four spondees, with an anapest, — truly a curious iambic measure. But even when you have got an approximation to your iambic line (it is trochaic really)

you can alter every quantity and the line will run just as well, — e. g. (my amendment of course not being intended to make sense),

Poe was a great lyric metrist, but the beauty of his verse is largely due to his marvellous caprices and daring feats of accentuation. Scanned by a master of Latin prosody, his verse would look queer indeed.

In justice to Poe, I would say that if the quantitative system is untenable the theory of accented and unaccented syllables disposed in feet after the classic fashion is equally so. There are lines, mainly monosyllabic, where every syllable: is accented, which would give ten feet to a line of heroic verse. And there are other lines where polysyllables are crowded so closely together that there are only four, three, or may be two accents in the verse. This last statement may be doubted, so I will give an example, and it is easier to make than to find one: Euripides, the Eleusinian.

Here the is certainly not accented and the other two words have the normal accent on the antepenultimate and no others that I can detect. The accents are fixed in the metre of “ Christabel,” but in no other English metre known to me.

Poe's most famous critical dictum is the one which asserts that in the nature of things there can [page 112:] be no long poem, — that a work of poetic art, to produce the proper effect, must be capable of being read at a single sitting. There is a delightful uncertainty about this. What is a long poem? and how many minutes or hours may a sitting last? There is nothing in the world to prevent one from reading “ Paradise Lost” at a sitting, if one wants to; and the “Iliad” is a baby among epics compared with the “Shah Namah.” But Poe evidently intended to set up as his standard of the short poem, the ballad or lyric. There would be a slight measure of truth in his assertion, if the whole effect of a work of literary art were confined to the first instantaneous, momentary shock, — if we were then to forget the piece and never read it again. But a poem worth reading at all is worth reading many times, and our minds are not so feeble that we cannot carry the impression on from timetotime. In reading a long poem, our pleasure is, in great cumulative; we can look before and after, and detect those leit-motifs — to borrow a phrase from a sister art — which consolidate the work together. No one questions the unity of impression produced by a long novel — “ Don Quixote,” for instance, — though nobody may read it at a single sitting: why, then, should we doubt that a poem or a play may be as much or more concentrate. But the mere statement of Poe's theory is an exhibition of its absurdity. It rales out of art all the great poetic creators, — Homer, schylus, Dante, Shakespeare, — and leaves the field to the lyrists and ballad-mongers.) The common-sense of mankind would reject such a preposterous conclusion, were it backed by an authority ten times as potent as Poe's. And the greatest authority of all, Aristotle, specifically demanded “a certain magnitude” as a condition of greatness in a work of literature. The lilt of the thrush and the blossoming of the rose have their place in nature, — but so have the mighty foldings of the mountains, and the wheelings, cycle upon cycle, of planets and suns. If Poe had merely asserted that the ordinary average human intellect is only capable of assimilating brief impressions of greatness or beauty, he would have been right enough. But that is the fault of the ordinary average intellect; and it has nothing to do with the comparative greatness or value of works of art. Again and again Poe asserted that beauty was the sole province and object of poetry. It is true that he sometimes qualified his axiom by admitting that a certain strangeness was a necessary ingredient of beauty. But he could not or did not recognize that the deities who preside over poetry are twin, — one female, Beauty, — the other, male, Power, Greatness, Sublimity. It is curious that his own work is lacking in just the quality he deemed all-important — beauty. Even in diction, his phrase has seldom the perfect grace and haunting charm and massy weight which are almost habitual with Keats and Coleridge and Tennyson, and of which Wordsworth and Arnold and Emerson have such frequent use. The lines “To Helen,” [column 2:] “The Haunted Palace,” some phrases from “Israfel,” and this, from “To One in Paradise,” —

are almost all that occur to me of weight and magnificence in his expression. He got his effects by wholes rather than details, and by music rather than phrase. When it comes to the matter of Poe's work, — his conception and design, whether in prose or verse, — beauty is conspicuous by its total absence. What beauty, in any sane use of the word, can there be in the horrors and glooms, the Rembrandt-like chiaro-oscuro, of the confined charnel-houses, or vast illimitable spaces which Poe's imagination created and peopled? Bat there is immense sublimity. Poe is the most sublime poet since Milton. Sublimity stirs even in his most grotesque and fanciful sketch, — like Milton's lion “pawing to get free his hinder parts.” It rears full-fronted in the concluding pages of “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” — in the sentences which describe the enormous bulk and battlelanterns of the ever-living ship in “The MSS. Found in a Bottle.” It is predominant in the mighty sweep, the ordered disorder, of ‘The Descent into the Maelstrom.” It thrills us in the many-colored chambers of “The Masque of the Red Death.” It overwhelms us with horror in “The Murders of the Rue Morgue.” It is solemn and awe-inspiring in “Berenice,” “Legeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” — in “Ulalume” and “The Raven.” Metaphysic, which Poe derided, — the great problems of life, death, and the universe, wherein sublimity most resides, — haunted his mind continuously. He reaches his climax of almost too profound thought in the colloquy of “Monas and Una,” “The Power of Words,” and “Eureka.” No has so continuously tried to outreach the possibilities of human experience; none has so assiduously avoided the ordinary facts of human life. His sublimity accounts for his fate with the American public. A true democracy, it abhors greatness and ridicules sublimity. Yet Poe fascinates it with antipathic attraction. It follows him very much as Sancho Panza flounders after Don Quixote.

In spite of its sublimity, Poe's theatre of tragic abstractions is of course inferior to the flesh-andblood theatre of the great creators. They include him, — they are as high as he, and they have many times his breadth and weight. But he is very great even in his one-sidedness — his silhouettedness. One-sidedness may indeed make an artist more intense and effective. But it is a crime in a critic. Despite his fine instinct for what was good, Poe had not the breadth of view or the knowledge necessary for a great critic. It is better that a critic should err in judgment in a concrete case than that he should lay down principles which are provably wrong.

CHARLES LEONARD MOORE.