Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “The Rationale of Verse - Headnote,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 77-80 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 77:]

 

Viewed in the terms in which we customarily think of English verse, “The Rationale of Verse” seems perverse and not very sensible. If, however, Poe was really hearing poetry very differently, his strange system could be defended. Eric Carlson says that Poe had in mind “the incantory effect of monotone . . . a cumulative expression . . . achieved in the successive waves of distended sound” (“New Introduction,” xv). He wanted to understand meter quantitatively, that is: de-emphasizing accent, emphasizing “the ‘flow’ of the line, as in music.” Carlson goes on to connect this incantory manner of hearing poetry with Poe's thoughts on the tie between indefiniteness and “spiritual effect,” and that in turn to “the American transcendental aesthetic.”

And yet, and yet . . . . Poe is so slippery one can never be sure. When Poe invents an aspiring and ungifted author in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” he has “Mr. Blackwood” advise her to read The Dial, organ of the American Transcendentalists, and suggests that she put “in something about the Supernal Oneness. Don’t say a syllable about the Infernal Twoness.” That seems an unambiguous attack on the transcendentalism that Poe elsewhere advocates. It implies that there is an “Infernal Twoness.” If, then, “The Rationale of Verse” has transcendental underpinnings, these, too, are undercut. Two lines of poetry in paragraph 35 that Poe seemed to have composed himself to illustrate a point remind us that Poe is a contemporary not just of Emerson but of the doubters Hawthorne and Melville as well.

Like all of Poe's criticism, this essay is built out of the texture of his other writing. It does not always repeat the same theses, but it often uses the same examples and is tied together by the same strings of association. In the opening paragraphs, for example, Poe complains that there is nothing useful in print about versification. He is repeating a “Marginalia” item that he wrote for Graham's (November 1846). From the same place he picks up the term Prosodies, for reuse later in “The Rationale of Verse.” Poe's review of The Poetical Writings of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (New [page 78:] York, 1840) in Godey's Lady's Book for December 1845 contains the remark that the poet “seems to be totally unacquainted with the principles of versification — by which, of course, we mean its rationale” (Poe's italics). Prescott lists several other precedents in his edition of Poe's criticism, but there are so many that any list is to some extent arbitrary.

J. Arthur Greenwood's thoughtful, eccentric, and invaluable edition of this essay shows so much of the bluffing and shoddy scholarship that went into “The Rationale of Verse” that a reader might conclude from it that “The Rationale.. .” has nothing to teach. That does not really follow, however. For one thing, my (SGL's) professors at Harvard and Brown seemed to think it important, for we were repeatedly assigned it to read, though I cannot recall that, having had us read it, they ever said anything about it in class. For another, almost all of Poe's prose is spliced together from here and there, and the presence of reused material, undigested ideas, or references to works that he had not seen somehow does not destroy the effectiveness of his best pieces. There is no denying, though, that this essay is less effective as prose than “Letter to B———.”, “The Philosophy of Composition,” or “The Poetic Principle”; it lacks the dramatic development found in those essays and seems almost cranky in tone.

Filled with objections to pedantry, it is itself pedantic. More than one scholar, noting that the first version of this essay, “Notes upon English Verse,” ran in Lowell's promising but short-lived The Pioneer, has wondered whether Poe's deadly prose helped kill the magazine.

Poe's hypothetical history of the development of poetry suggests to Roth (“Poe's Divine Spondee”) a philosophical kinship to Eureka. Everything, Poe figures, began with the spondee; over the ages poets have added complexities. As the universe began in unparticled “one-ness,” so poetry began with an individual foot. And, of course, since Eureka is presented as a “poem” and stresses the importance of poetic perception, the suggestion is less forced than one might suppose. “Poetry and Truth are one,” Poe writes in Eureka. Poe's mind worked that way; repeatedly he saw oneness evolving toward complexity. It is likely, for example, that such a pattern accounts for his continued fondness for Jacob Bryant's Mythology (1774-76), a book that strongly influenced his fiction, probably in large part because Bryant's comparative history of ancient religions saw them all as complex variations that grew from a single monolithic primordial myth. Eureka argues that the present universe is the complex phase of a creation that began in simplicity and oneness and will return to that state. “The Rationale of Verse” follows a parallel logic; the passage [page 79:] describing the push and pull of monotony and variety, indeed, even sounds like Eureka.

The system of rhythmical notation that Poe finally recommends is explained in the passage beginning with paragraph 68. Readers who find it confusing might try visualizing it this way: Poe imagines the words of a poem as the horizontal lines in fractions. When he writes numbers only beneath syllables, he visualizes a 1 above each syllable. Thus his

co₂ntrol

if we supply the missing 1s would read

co¹₂ntro¹l [.]

His

i₄n th₄e rain

would be

i¹₄n th¹₄e ra¹in

and so on. So the first syllable of the word control is half as long as the second. “In” and “the” are each a quarter as long as “rain.” When Poe writes numbers above syllables, he means common numbers-2 means “twice as long as 1.” And when he writes 3/2, he means 1 1/2. In all cases, as he says, 1 is equal to the length of a long syllable.

His system posed terrible problems for typesetters. Had it caught on, of course, foundries, would have cast special type to handle it. Since it did not, each reprinting of “The Rationale of Verse” has involved improvisation, errors, or both. In the age of cold type this is less of a problem; in a pinch, one can simply write Poe's numbers in longhand on the camera-ready copy. Poe's scheme, however, did not catch on. And, in truth, if one wanted a system that would prescribe such strict mathematical proportions in rhythm, a widely understood one already existed: musical notation. It can effortlessly handle all the ratios Poe discussed and more besides.

Having said that “The Rationale of Verse” is pedantic without being learned, philosophically slippery, constructed largely of recycled material, and impractical, we feel it only fair to add that it is also clever, witty, and sometimes downright funny, as when the straight-faced author points out, in paragraph 80, that “by blazes!” in Alfred Street's “The Lost Hunter” “is not intended for an oath.” Poe inserted the exclamation point; that was mean and unfair but made the gag work. Poe's essay may be too long, too grumpy, and too uninformed — those pedants and learned prosodists [page 80:] whom Poe so bitterly batters turn out to be one unoffending compiler of a grammar book — but it is much more entertaining than it should be and provides a fine cross section of its author's methods and attitudes, his wit, and, alas, his bigotry.

A Note on the Text

“The Rationale of Verse” is unusually difficult to edit. In “the last version printed under Poe's guidance,” which would normally be our working text, there are a number of typographical or proofreading errors. Because several are important — especially those in Poe's examples of how his system of scansion works — we have corrected them, following those parts of Poe's manuscript which have survived, and, where there is no manuscript, checking the Griswold edition (which may have been based on Poe's own corrections). We have also fixed the obvious mistakes, such as the error in copying in paragraphs 96 and 97, where Longfellow's word appears as “foot” in paragraph g6 and “feet” in paragraph 97. In paragraph 3 we follow the unusual punctuation found in Poe's manuscript. Because the Latin “Fallis” or “Fallit” in paragraph i o poses a special problem, we explain the situation in the notes to paragraph 10 rather than in the variant readings. “The Rationale of Verse” must have been a nightmare for the typesetters who set up the Southern Literary Messenger; most of the substantive errors were probably made by harried print-shop employees faced with Poe's complicated and idiosyncratic system. Usually, however, one can tell Poe's intention; that was the ultimate authority. As always, we note each alteration we have made and list the variants so that each reader can judge.