Text: Michael Allen, “Learning and Journalism,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 74-100

[page 74:]

V

Hervey Allen suggested in 1926 that Poe's “curious tendency to the semi-classical and the pedantic is largely to be explained by a reference to the magazine literature of his boyhood,” that is, to the “robust ... classically minded [magazine] literature of the old school.”(1) But he did not amplify or qualify this remark. In fact, Poe's most obvious articles of this kind draw on an earlier magazine convention than those we have been discussing. His “Pinakidia” and “Marginalia” articles are written within one of the most primitive conventions of learned journalism. And the combination of esoteric allusiveness with the appeal to intellectual snobbishness is as apparent as in the later examples.

 

I. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PRECEDENTS

The editor of a similar erudite compilation in the New Monthly for June 1832(2) traced the form back to the [page 75:] “Drossiana” series contributed to the European Magazine by William Seward from 1789 to 1799. He also provided a rationale for the convention very like that Poe was to use:

Poe introduces “Pinakidia” and ‘”Marginalia” in almost identical terms.(3) He does say, however, that he relishes everything about such articles “save their pretensions to originality,”(4) and for his own collections disclaims originality. In the “Pinakidia” (which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger) and the sections of ‘”Marginalia” which appeared in the Democratic Review(5) and the Messenger,(6) Poe shows off a variety of scientific, classical, linguistic, and antiquarian knowledge, including erudite notes on the Hebrew of Isaiah 34.10 and Ezekiel 35.7(7) which he gleaned from Professor Charles Anthon.(8) The selections of “Marginalia” which appeared in Graham's,(9) and in Godey's(10) (under the title “Marginal Notes”), are more literary and topical and not so esoteric, as befitted the ethos of these journals. But much of Poe's writing, not just the “Pinakidia” and later “Marginalia,” is, as W. C. Brownell put it, “bedizened with the frippery of learning.”(11) And the most important ways in which Poe tried “to decorate his own writing with the unconventional and the recondite” are clearly related to the innovations in “learned” journalism of the earlier nineteenth century. [page 76:]

 

II. THE BLACKWOOD'S BLEND

The Reviews, with their broad common-sense scholarship and criticism, had, to some extent, broken with the older magazines like the Gentleman's and the European by placing less stress on the curious and the antiquarian. The early numbers of Blackwood's at first picked up the older tradition and intermingled it with the newer rationalism: Volume III (1818) contains articles on the poor laws of England and “The Present state of Germany,” “The History of the Great Sea Serpent,” natural religion, the Kraken, phrenology, “M. Biot's Observations to determine the Figure of the Earth,” Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature ... , Menil's edition of Antara (an Arabic poet), and “On the Use of Petrifications as a Character in the Discrimination of Rock Formations.” But a brighter and more entertaining way of presenting such material seems to have been required by the new “‘quality-popularity” audience. Among the many advantages of the dialogue form of the “Noctes Ambrosianae” was the way it personalised and gave conversational vitality to the kind of snatches of erudition which had previously been soberly collected in articles like the “Drossiana.” In the course of their discussions, the group gathered at Ambrose's touch on the philosophy of apparitions, Milton's radicalism, German allegorical romances, phrenology, natural history, or the tenets of deism,(12) interspersing such issues among their lighter and more topical preoccupations.

When Bulwer took over the New Monthly, he put into his first number an imitation of the “Noctes” called “Ourselves, our Correspondents and the Public.”(13) But Bulwer must have felt that he could not provide sufficient variety of [page 77:] tone, topicality, and intellectual interest to compete on its own ground with the Blackwood's series. In his second and subsequent issues he substituted instalments of a protracted dialogue called “Asmodeus at Large.” This series of solemn conversations with the devil was much more readily within the limits of Bulwer's serious sonority. Nevertheless he claimed that it, too, was intended to

Bulwer still hoped to introduce swift changes of mood and to counterbalance the topicalities of the day against allegorical situations and snatches of metaphysical disquisition. But apart from his knowledge of fashionable manners and politics, Bulwer had little interest in topical events, and the “metaphysical” material became, after the first number, increasingly overweight. After the reader has been carried to the centre of the earth for a cosmic meditation, and has confronted a metaphysical allegory of Life and Death, Bulwer does try to restore the topical note, reminding us of his aim to change “from grave to gay, — from mystery to plain dealing”(15) and introducing more gossip of politics and the aristocracy. But the fate of the series was determined. He threw into number nine a hint that he might continue it; and presumably getting no response from his correspondents, he concluded the series with a simple romantic tale as number ten. As if aware that the series had not been a success as a topicality, Bulwer now claimed that it was a “fiction” with a metaphysical and allegorical meaning.(16) Later he was to [page 78:] call it the first version of a philosophical prose-poem in which, “through the means, sometimes of humour, sometimes of terror, certain social and metaphysical problems will be worked out.”(17)

The territory which Bulwer opened up in the New Monthly with his most deliberately pursued magazine series is clearly akin to that of many of Poe's articles. Poe acknowledged(18) that he was influenced by Bulwer's earlier metaphysical allegory “Monos and Daimonos” in his search for original ideas for articles (an influence which shows most clearly in the apocalyptic visions “Shadow,” 1835, and “Silence,” 1839). And Bulwer's attempt to combine dialogue and apocalyptic metaphysics in the “Asmodeus” series is parallelled by Poe's similar combination in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmian” (1839), “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841), and “The Power of Words” (1845).

If the lack of topical interest was one reason for the failure of “Asmodeus”’ to survive, another must have been Bulwer's sonorous periods. Conversational verve and variety had been one of the most attractive features of the Blackwood's series. Wilson's success in maintaining the balance between “learning” and entertainment in the “Noctes” was very much dependent on his ability to maintain in his prose the control he approved in conversation:

But dialogue, in the hands of both Bulwer and Poe, tends to develop into monologue (by the narrator, the devil, or the [page 79:] magician Kosem Kesamin in ‘”Asmodeus,” by Eiros, Monos, and Agathos respectively in Poe's articles). Poe's habitual rhetoric, like Bulwer's, had little conversational flexibility, and his views of conversation might be usefully compared with Wilson's as a clue to his dialogue style. “Men of very high genius,” he said, self-assertively,

Poe's self-identification with Coleridge, who “could not talk unless he were uninterrupted,”(21) may be involved here as well as his own conversational style, as reported by Mrs. Gove Nichols(22) and others. There is no necessary connection between spoken and written style, but Poe's attitude is illuminating. And Poe does not, in his dialogue articles, even make a conscientious attempt (as Bulwer does) to introduce topicalities in which he was not very interested. He seems to have been determined to make a virtue of his inability to write easily on the level of the desultory and the trivial; his sole concession in his cruder dialogues like “Some Words with a Mummy” was the importation of a cruder pseudo-science. Duyckinck had argued in the Democratic Review that topicality “immediate and local”(23) was the essence of the magazine paper; Poe commented that he “places too low an estimate on the capability of the Magazine Paper. ... He is inclined to undervalue its power — to limit unnecessarily its province — which is illimitable.”(24) [page 80:]

 

III. FICTIONALISED LEARNING

In the earlier nineteenth century, of course, the most immediate expedient for vivifying and diversifying learning was to fictionalise it. Indeed, if one reverses the formulation, it becomes more exact: it was essential in the respectable journals which attempted to reach a “quality-popularity” audience that their stories be graced with factual, scholarly, or poetic attributes which would justify them against the disapproval currently directed against romantic fiction.(25) The writer or editor who wished to embrace the “many” and the “few” in one audience had to devise ‘a defence against the ‘Worthy Reader’ who liked stories but was contemptuous of story tellers,”(26) and perhaps also a strategy which would justify the serious minded reader in his continued addiction to fiction.

Such strategies were abundant at the time. Scott said that the fiction-habit “is apt to generate an indisposition to real history, and useful literature’: the most that he could allow for fiction was that it “may sometimes instruct the youthful mind by real pictures of life, and sometimes awaken their better feelings and sympathies by strains of generous sentiment, and tales of fictitious woe.”(27) But his own great “experiment on the public taste”(28) introduced that invaluable historical dimension which was to give an air of scholarly utility to fiction for the next thirty years.(29) Irving indicated the pressure placed on the writer when he paid his respects to “the labours of the learned” in the address “To the Reader” of Tales of a Traveller before claiming half seriously that in his own lighter undertaking he had “digested the instruction I would convey into a number of tales.”(30) It is in this context that an earnest defender of [page 81:] Joseph Andrews in the Edinburgh Review for 1815 could claim that the novel gave an authentic account of the general state of society in its period and was “a perfect piece of statistics.”(31) And this was the situation which produced Bulwer's “overloading of story ... with sheer knowledge,” his infusions into his fiction of “layers of philosophy and period-knowledge,” sociology, archaeology, and classical allusion.(32) It also resulted in the conventional publishing habit of the twenties which passed off novels as autobiographies or collections of letters (that is, as factual documents) if no other strategy was available.

The miscellanies of the early years of the century had printed a great deal of romantic fiction and lost prestige in consequence. R. D. Mayo has described how their large proportion of undisguised fiction exposed them to a great deal of criticism from the educated minority among their readers.(33) The small amount of fiction in the early numbers of Blackwood's is thus indicative of its owner's caution in this respect, his determination not to produce merely another miscellany: less than a thirtieth of each volume was fiction, at first. And such fiction as he did introduce in those early years was usually presented in the form of essay, historical anecdote, or factual reminiscence.(34) Then, as Margaret Alterton has pointed out, there is a frequent correlation between the learned preoccupations of essays and reviews in Blackwood's and its most characteristic fiction. “We know of no romances half so interesting as the real ‘tales of terror’ to be found scattered over these pages,”(35) said the reviewer of a book on medical jurisprudence; and Samuel Warren's highly successful series ‘Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician” might almost have taken this formula for its rationale. Warren disguised violent sensationalism [page 82:] with a semi-scientific medical framework, and claimed that his materials were factually interesting, and instructive, particularly with regard to psychology and the psychology of the last moments.(36) The pseudo-scientific preoccupation of the time with experiments and experimentation was reflected in Blackwood's in the whole series of stories culminating in “The Involuntary Experimentalist,” which could be read as intellectual investigations of the mode of behaviour of a human animal isolated under certain extreme conditions. One element in the appeal of De Quincey's “Confessions” articles (which were originally written for Blackwood's) is the assumption that they will prove not merely “interesting” but ‘useful and instructive”(37) because of De Quincey's opportunity to conduct a scientific experiment on the physical and psychological effect of opium (with graduated applications of the drug and tabulation of results).(38) Another article in Blackwood's concerned itself scientifically with “the means for discovering whether such a person found dead has been murdered by another's hand, and by whom,”(39) and some tales(40) work out this theme. De Quincey's long interest in the scientific investigation of the more gruesome murders(41) finally graced the pages of the magazine with the famous analytic articles “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”(42)

Of course, by the mid-‘thirties, Blackwood's, like all the other magazines, was printing a great deal of fiction, and most writers had no hesitation about the writing of freely romantic fiction, simple narrative, which allowed characters and action a large degree of autonomous freedom from mental control. Fiction, largely due to Scott's influence,(43) had become respectable. But Poe's basic attitude to fiction [page 83:] was much more like the more cautious ones I have just described.

Some of his run-of-the-mill tales are not even conceived fictionally in the modern sense: like many magazine articles of the older type,(44) they begin as informative or speculative essays out of which the story sprouts as an illustration.(45) In an 1836 review Poe still did not distinguish between fictional and non-fictional magazine articles. “The Magazine writer” is, for him, “the writer of the brief and piquant article, slightly exaggerated in all its proportions. ... ”(46) In his revision of that review in 1845, Poe separates out “that class of Magazine papers which come properly under the head of Tales. ... ”(47) But his theory remained confused as to the exact role and status of fiction. His most important theoretical distinction was between poetry, which was metric and carried emotional significance, and prose, which was the medium of truth.(48) It was quite easy for him to see his detective stories in the latter category, and to claim for them a scientific purpose. In “The Mystery of Marie Roget” he told George Roberts,

His main purpose, he adds, was “an analysis of the true principles which should direct enquiry in similar cases.”(49) His psychological purpose in his “case study” stories could place them in the same category if necessary, as is indicated by his contention that his horror was “of the soul” (i.e. psychological).(50) [page 84:] His reading of Hawthorne's “The Minister's Black Veil” as a story involving the reader in analysis, with clues to be caught or missed, is significant in this respect:

Many of his own best-known stories, such as “Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and ‘The Man in the Crowd,” involve similar clues for the ratiocinative reader, leading into the tale's psychological centre.

Poe's essentially conservative tendency, in the light of his own practice, to see fiction as a species of learning, is apparent in his treatment of his great contemporary, Dickens. He twice locates Dickens's great achievement in his short psychological case-studies like ‘”The Black Veil”(52) (obviously because these resemble his own similar pieces). When he reviewed Barnaby Rudge, Poe discussed it as if it had been one of the analytic murder mysteries which he himself was writing at the time; he ignored its panoramic quality and dismissed Dickens's original historical pretext, the Gordon Riots, saying they have “no necessary connexion with the story.” After admitting that the novel is “done ... well,” Poe concludes that Dickens was, nevertheless, not on the most advantageous ground for “his own very great yet very peculiar powers” in writing a murder mystery: “He has a talent for all things, but no positive genius for adaptation, and still less for that metaphysical art in which the souls of all mysteries lie.”(53) Poe offers Godwin, a more philosophical fictionalist of the earlier generation, as Dickens's superior [page 85:] in this respect; and one sees Poe engineer a personal triumph over the author he is reviewing too often not to recognise the implicit recommendation of his own ‘”metaphysical gifts” here.

 

IV. THE ROLE OF EXPERT

An article in the Democratic Review in 1845 was still recommending as the ideal magazine style the gentlemanly negligence of “Christopher North.”(54) But Wilson's indolent display of learning, his refusal to be unduly serious, had not been earnest enough for some British writers who preferred the newer tone of the sober intellectual expert, or the philosopher. This new tone, reflecting the rise of science as well as the influence of German philosophy, appeared early enough in Blackwood's: one needs only to contrast Coleridge's article of 1821, “On the Philosophical import of the words OBJECT and SUBJECT”(55) with any of Wilson's articles of the time, to become aware of it. Wilson gently mocked the new tendency in his presentation of the “Opium Eater” in the “Noctes”:

And De Quincey himself was the great magazine exponent of the expert role — taking up in his articles on Greek literature, [page 86:] German philosophy, Roman history, theology, or political economy a very different tone from that which Wilson would use, a tone of expert knowledge which could hardly be supported by research in the time at the disposal of the journalist. There is, as René Wellek says, an “element of bluff and downright charlatanry in De Quincey's constant promises of elucidation, announcements of profound understanding, and disparagements of all other commentators.” And he suggests that De Quincey's

These qualities are apparent enough in De Quincey's most famous articles. “Upon all that has been hitherto written on the subject of opium ... ,” he writes, “I have but one emphatic criticism to pronounce — Lies! lies! lies!” There may be the merest jocular hint to his more educated readers here that his authority is not so absolute as he pretends, but the tenor of his exposition is fundamentally serious and has all the rhetorical appeal of expertise:

And in his less engaged miscellaneous articles De Quincey's tendency to take up the expert stance to flatter the intellectual pretensions of the audience is very obvious. In his “Historio — Ceritical Inquiry into the Origins of the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons’ he says revealingly:

The word “display” here is the operative one. A similar idea of display clearly animates Poe's disquisitions on subjects as distant as Hebrew, physiology, mathematics, metaphysics, and cosmology from his earliest reviews to Eureka.

Of course Poe's mental equipment for taking up this role was less sophisticated, if sometimes more intuitively brilliant, than De Quincey's. And as a journalist Poe eventually, as we shall see, made various attempts to adapt his style and preoccupations to suit the mass-audiences on which he was increasingly dependent. But while he was ready to disguise it a little, to mock his own learned pretensions as a defensive gesture, or to inject a sensational or a hoaxing interest for his readers, his determination to play the expert remained intense. Thus the pseudo-scientific hoax material [page 88:] in “Mesmeric Revelation” is not the central concern of the piece as it is in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and no real intention to deceive can be detected. Mesmerism here is no more than the sugar on a very serious pill, a metaphysical enquiry into the nature of matter and of human existence. Poe demonstrated the seriousness of his intention by calling the piece an “Essay” in a letter to Griswold of 1845; and the fact that he wanted Griswold to include it in what would inevitably be a quite short selection of his prose works (in the Prose Writers of America), “even if something else is omitted,”(60) suggests how important he thought it. The whimsical futuristic setting of “Mellonta Tauta” is similarly a camouflage for Poe's fundamentally serious thesis that Aristotelian deduction and Baconian induction were not “the sole possible avenues to knowledge.”(61) And the latter article finally becomes the first part of Eureka, in which Poe liberated himself entirely from the limitations which publication in magazines had imposed, and went, in fact, considerably beyond what would have been accepted in the British magazines also.

A comparison, of Eureka with De Quincey's article in Tait's Magazine, ‘System of the Heavens,” illustrates the continuity of the convention (whether Poe knew De Quincey's article or not) if it also shows the occasional extravagance and idiosyncracy of Poe's learning by comparison with British magazine writing on a similar subject. Both essays are tactfully whimsical in their initial stages,(62) then modulating to tones of awed seriousness. Both present a considerable amount of contemporaneous cosmological material, argue out its implications by reference to the popular theology and philosophy of the time, and embody their conclusions in a prose-poem meditation.(63) Both rely a great [page 89:] deal for their effect on passages of allusive reasoning, which will dazzle and impress their readers, but at the same time use concrete and commonplace images for the purposes of analogy and illustration. The difference between the two is immediately a difference of tone and finally a difference in the way the two writers carry the role of philosopher-expert. De Quincey's tonal sobriety and flexibility here are those of the “universal philosopher” who understands the work of contemporary astronomers like J. P. Nichol but remains “one belonging to the laity, and not to the clerus, in the science of astronomy.”(64) Poe, on the contrary, discounts the specialised qualifications of the scientist as well as the recognised processes of deduction and induction: he proposes that only intuitive imagination is essential, that the great scientists theorise and leave it to lesser men to remove their inconsistencies and perform experiments;(65) and he clearly feels that he has thus placed himself on equal terms with Kepler, Laplace, and other astronomers, agreeing or arguing with J. P. Nichol, to whom De Quincey deferred, as it suits him. Admitting that he cannot prove his hypothesis (although many lofty intellects are completely convinced by it), he nevertheless claims that it “not only reconciles [the astronomical] conditions with mathematical accuracy, and reduces them into a consistent and intelligible whole, but is, at the same time, the sole hypothesis by means of which the human intellect has been ever enabled to account for them at all.”(66) The sense we have of Poe as expert in Eureka is borne out by his words to Eveleth: “What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical and Metaphysical Science.”(67) But Poe was too readily self-aware in other moods to leave himself unprotected in such a stance, and afterwards he claimed [page 90:] that although the essay was “true,” it was to be understood as an “Art Product,” a “Romance,” or a “Poem.”(68) The strategy is a familiar one for the learned journalist. De Quincey provided an afterword for the “System of the Heavens” which similarly claimed poetic rather than scientific significance,(69) for a piece which relied for much of its appeal on simulating the latter.

 

V. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIC

The really significant thing about De Quincey's role of universal philosopher was the way it made him bring generalising methods and attitudes to the study of literature. Here, as he admitted, he was following the Germans and Coleridge in the attempt to bring “what have hitherto passed for merely literary or aesthetic questions, under the light of philosophic principles.” There were, he claimed, two ways of studying literature:

The intellectual stringency implied by the second alternative here is one of the qualities that attracts us sometimes in De Quincey's application to the literary work. His philosophic concern, however, also tends to encourage him to posture, to dispense absolute categories which he draws readily from scientific analogy. It is in this mood, for instance, that he [page 91:] distinguishes two aspects of style in an article in Blackwood's:

There was a whole tendency in the reviewing of the day to play the role of the philosopher expert rather than that of the gentleman connoisseur of good writing. In the “Noctes,” Wilson, speaking through the character of the “Shepherd,” writes of both kinds of reviewer: the systematic critic, “settin’ himself wi’ clenched teeth to compose a philosophic creeticism, about the genius o’ an owther that every man kens as weel as his ain face in the glass — and then comparing him with this, and contrastin’ him wi’ that — and informin’ you which o’ his warks are best, and which warst, and which middlin’ “ is inevitably seen by Wilson as very inferior to the belles-lettrist like himself who provides [page 92:] “short pithy hints o’ the characters that feegur throughout the story,” “a maisterly abridgement o’ facts and incidents, wi’ noo and then an elucidatory observation, and a glowing paneygyric,” and above all “lang, lang, lang extracts, judiciously seleckit.”(72)

A great deal of Poe's early criticism is of the belles-lettres type, involving précis, observation, and extract in the way Wilson describes. As a result of the exigencies of his profession, a considerable amount of slack eulogistic reviewing was part of his output throughout his career. The mode did not express his deeper temperamental urges, however, as did the more solemn and exact weighing and balancing which Wilson attributes to the “philosophical” critic. Poe wrote late in life that

To this view of the critic as expert, the authoritarianism of the British Reviews, their traditional role of literary watchdog, had obviously contributed; and Poe took delight in using the authoritative “we” of the Reviews. But the broader “philosophic” role which Coleridge (and the Germans) allowed the critic had also contributed to this view. The role of scientific expert allowed Poe to take up an authoritative stance and at the same time to repudiate all earlier authorities. Thus in 1843 he wrote of all extant approaches [page 93:] to versification that “they pretend to nothing like analysis; they propose nothing resembling system; they make no effort even at rule, properly so called; everything depends upon ‘authority.’ ”(74) The influence of Coleridge on Poe's life-style as well as on his criticism was immensely significant here. Poe rationalised his own capacity for destructive analysis by stressing the need to point out faults, whereas Coleridge had maintained that elucidation of beauties was the important thing: but often enough Coleridgean ideas transform the critical terminology Poe had picked up from the Reviews, and a heavier Coleridgean tone disturbs the Macaulayan balance of his prose. At his best Poe brought his critical expertise directly to the literary work in self-assertive, superior but shrewd textual analysis and comment. He rationalised this pragmatic critical tendency in his view that “‘excessive generalisation” is one of criticism's leading errors, that “the leading principles of true poesy” are implicitly understood, and that critical differences arise merely from the application of these. The methodical application of accepted principles in the act of discrimination, he said, was the critic's business. Taste was the critic's principal area of enquiry, although he could move incidentally into the areas of knowledge and morality which flanked it on either side.(75)

Poe's most perceptive critical writing falls within these pragmatic and traditional limits, but in his more flamboyant moods he wanted to play the expert on rather larger lines and with grander gestures, which would draw attention to his performances in the realm of knowledge. Thus throughout his life he tried in various ways to use his specialised knowledge, however peculiar it might be, to bolster up his role of critical expert. (He wanted criticism to be seen [page 94:] “more as an art based immovably in nature, less as a mere system of fluctuating and conventional dogmas.”(76) ) In 1842 he looked to phrenology to confute the idea that

Poe blames “the exceedingly vague and impotent treatises which are alone extant” for this “general error,” and suggests:

“These principles, in fact,” he asserts trenchantly, “are as clearly traceable, and these laws as really susceptible of system as are any whatever.” But the underlying need to justify his own tastes becomes clear when he proposes to illustrate these “principles” and “laws” by defending the Romantic poets he particularly favoured against the advocates of Pope and Goldsmith,

In 1836, Poe had attempted to establish “determinate principles by which to regulate a [critical] decision,” [page 95:] through a combination of phrenology with a metaphysical “argument from design.” The faculties of Veneration (which recognises superiority) and Ideality (the sense of the beautiful, the sublime, the mystical) alike were implanted by God and hence have a “primitive essence” which, by reference to primal causes, “may at any moment be determined,” although the faculties themselves are present in different men to different degrees. Ideality can be identified with the Poetic Sentiment. Its “soul” is Imagination. It is totally free of passion, involving only admiration of natural beauty and “the unconquerable desire to know.” Poetry, then, “in its every-day acceptation,” Poe argues, ‘is the practical result, expressed in language, of this Poetic Sentiment in certain individuals. ... ” But at this point Poe seems to lose track of his original aim of defining critical principles, in his excitement at the new notion of the analytic poet who writes good poetry as a result of audience research. Coleridge is his example, but he clearly has himself in mind. And it is several pages later that it becomes clear that the function of the critic is to correct those readers who have “an indistinct conception of the results in which Ideality is rendered manifest.” Reading over the passage again, one sees that the critic can do this because he is a man “highly endowed with the powers of Causality” (i.e. “metaphysical acumen’). He can thus presumably both derive the “primitive essence” of Ideality “by a reference to primal causes’ and also recognise the good poem, since

But the confusing switch of interest from critical principles to the poet-analyst suggests that it is his own role as expert with which Poe is primarily preoccupied, and that his role is already embryonically that in which the highest scientific and poetic gifts are combined.

Poe was always tempted to combine his critical insights with snatches of erudition in this way. Thus he uses the “argument from design” mentioned in the early review quoted above in an 1844 “Marginalia” to indict “all the Bridgewater treatises” (an academic series, one of which he had reviewed in the Messenger) for not recognising “the complete mutuality of adaptation” in the process of creation. By this Poe says he means the providential way in which whale oil is both the kind of food needed by men in polar climates and the only food available there. And into this metaphysical framework he fits one of his best-known formulations of literary holism:

The ambiguous status of this passage as both metaphysics and criticism is demonstrated by Poe's two subsequent uses of it as a critical illustration of plot in his essay on “The American Drama” and as part of the argument of Eureka.(80)

Poe's critical expertise continually developed new forms [page 97:] to suit his various preoccupations and the image of himself which he was projecting. As we have seen, in 1841 and 1842 he was interested in the application of ratiocinatory techniques to criminal cases and saw himself as the expert analyst who, from the documents of the case of Mary Cecilia Rogers, could infallibly deduce the solution. It was in this spirit that Poe had deduced(81) from the early numbers of Barnaby Rudge who had committed the central murder, and how the plot would be subsequently resolved. His review of Barnaby Rudge celebrates his success in his attempt and suggests the high degree of confidence with which he operates: one of the two mistakes he has made in his predictions “has so much the air of a mistake on the part of Mr. Dickens” that he “can hardly speak of our own version as erroneous. ... if we did not rightly prophesy, yet, at least, our prophecy should have been right.”(82) And in the rest of the review Poe devotes his analytic ingenuity to retracing deductively the various stages whereby Dickens had plotted the novel, in very much the same kind of way as he was later to reconstruct in “The Philosophy of Composition” the stages whereby he himself had composed “The Raven.” The emphasis in both essays is upon tight logical interrelationships among the various elements of the literary work, on the assumption that both literary creation and literary criticism are highly ratiocinative deductive processes. And these two essays apparently represented for Poe the most important criticism of the years 1841 to 1845. In 1845 the Barnaby Rudge review was still the best example Poe could find of his “serious manner” in criticism, when he sent some essays and tales to Griswold to be considered for inclusion in Prose Writers of America(83) But he was not satisfied that his 1845 selection fully represented his critical powers,(84) and seems to have been much more pleased with [page 98:] “The Philosophy of Composition” which appeared in April 1846, and a copy of which he sent to P. P. Cooke (“my best specimen of analysis”) along with one of “Ligeia” (“my best tale”).(85) In these critical pieces one senses most forcefully behind the superior tone, an instinctive response, complicated by learning, to a society in which practical techniques were at a premium. Perhaps the most ironic reflection on Poe's expert pose in this period was his attempt to see even the embarrassing excursions of the “Outis” controversy about Longfellow as essays in scientific criticism. “The thesis of my argument, in general,” he wrote finally, “has been the definition of the grounds on which a charge of plagiarism may be based, and of the species of ratiocination by which it is to be established.”(86)

In his final years it was by bringing his knowledge of mathematics to bear on the study of prosody that Poe primarily played the omniscient role. He used mathematical analogy in his criticism quite early and the seeds of his more serious use of mathematics are probably to be found in his suggestion in 1839, writing of popular songs: “The sentiments deducible from the conception of sweet sound. ... ” derive from ‘that merely mathematical recognition of equality which seems to be the root of all beauty.”(87) He applied this idea to poetry in the March 1846 ‘”Marginalia,” claiming that rhyme appeals to “the human sense or appreciation of equality,” and attempting to raise both the pleasure and the analysis of poetry onto a purely mental level, through mathematical analogy:

In the November 1846 “Marginalia,” Poe says that while the metaphysical question “What is poetry?” cannot be settled to the satisfaction of the majority, the laws of versification can be more nearly established, since “although one-third of the topic may be considered metaphysical, and thus may be mooted at the fancy of this individual or of that, still the remaining two-thirds belong, undeniably, to the mathematics.”(89) Poe had, of course, advertised himself as a great analyst of prosody as early as 1843,(90) and towards the end of his life revised the essay on prosody of that year (“Notes upon English Verse”)(91) with this new mathematical slant as his pretext for pontification: there is no topic in polite literature, he says, introducing “The Rationale of Verse,” “ ... about which so much inaccuracy, confusion, misconception, misrepresentation, mystification, and downright ignorance ... ” exists. If it were a difficult, or a metaphysical problem this confusion would be easier to understand,

“Irrational deference to antiquity” and excessive discussion have complicated the issue so much that “the readiest mode of investigating it is to forget that any previous investigation [page 100:] has been attempted.” It is in this spirit that Poe, “employing from among the numerous ‘ancient’ feet the spondee, the trochee, the iambus, the anapaest, the dactyl, and the caesura alone,” engages “to scan correctly ... any true rhythm that human ingenuity can conceive,” and asserts, “Quantity is a point in whose investigation the lumber of mere learning may be dispensed with, if ever in any.”(92)

It is not within the scope of this study to decide the issue between George Snell, who sees Poe approvingly as “First of the New Critics,”(93) and W. C. Brownell, who sees Poe's criticism as illustrating the “technical temperament,”

But what Brownell has caught here are some of the characteristic gestures of the pose of expert; as he says Poe displayed them “on larger lines than common, with a certain sweep as well as system. ... ”(94) It is the way he did this that is our concern.