The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (76 page)

I have been taken to prison once since I came here for spreeing drunk; but
then I
was not. It was about Virginia.

[UNSIGNED]

 

My own darling Muddy,

On arriving here last night from Norfolk I received both your letters, including Mrs Lewis’s. I cannot tell you the joy they gave me—to learn at least that you are well & hopeful. May God forever bless you, my
dear dear
Muddy—Elmira has just got home from the country. I spent last evening with her. I think she loves me more devotedly than any one I ever knew & I cannot help loving her in return. Nothing is yet definitely settled and it will not do to hurry matters. I lectured at Norfolk on Monday & cleared enough to settle my bill here at the Madison House with $2 over. I had a highly fashionable audience, but Norfolk is a small place & there were 2 exhibitions the same night. Next Monday I lecture again here & expect to have a large audience. On Tuesday I start for Phila to attend to Mrs Loud’s Poems—&
possibly
on Thursday I may start for N. York. If I do I will go straight over to Mrs Lewis’s & send for you. It will be better for me not to go to Fordham—don’t you think so? Write immediately in reply & direct to Phila. For fear I should not get the letter, sign no name & address it to E. S.
T. Grey Esqre.

If possible I
will get married before I start—but there is no telling. Give my dearest love to Mrs L. My poor poor Muddy. I am still unable to send you even one dollar—but keep up heart—I hope that our troubles are nearly over. I saw John Beatty in Norfolk.

God bless & protect you my own darling Muddy. I showed your letter to Elmira and she says “it is such a darling precious letter that she loves you for it already”

Your own Eddy.

 

Don’t forget to write immediately to Phila. so that your letter will be there when I arrive.

The papers here are praising me to death—and I have been received everywhere with enthusiasm. Be sure & preserve all the printed scraps I have sent you & keep up my file of the Lit. World.

CRITICAL PRINCIPLES

As a magazinist, Poe reviewed scores of new books and commented extensively on contemporary poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Exacting and occasionally derisive, he became known as “the tomahawk man,” stirring controversy by attacking powerful literary figures. He lampooned a novel by an editor of the
New-York Mirror
and later accused the esteemed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. He deplored the shameless promotion of mediocre authors and in several fictional satires—as well as the final review in this section—indicted the practice of “puffery” then pervasive in the American publishing world. Poe believed that the literature of the United States could outgrow its provincialism only if literary critics applied rigorous standards rather than indulging in partisan favoritism. While he resented British condescension toward American writers, he himself did not hesitate to expose the “stupidity” of certain American books.

Driven by economics to write more fiction than poetry, Poe helped to shape the conventions of an emerging literary form, the short story. Yet he never used that term—which came into use only late in the nineteenth century—instead concerning himself with “the short prose tale.” And although Poe grasped the peculiar demands of the form, he wrote about its generic principles only briefly in reviews of works by individual authors. His most famous statement about short fiction appears in his 1842 review of Hawthorne’s
Twice-Told Tales
, where Poe devotes four extended paragraphs to a theory of the tale emphasizing “unity of effect.” This “totality” reveals itself, he asserts, only in narratives that can be read at a single sitting of at most “one or two hours.” Yet although this review figures as the starting point for modern short-story theory, Poe had been thinking about the importance of unifying effect at least since 1836, when he remarked in a review of Dickens that unity was more crucial in the “brief article” (or short narrative) than in the novel. An 1841 review of Lytton Bulwer’s fiction registers the same point by implication, insisting on the impossibility of achieving “unity or totality
of effect
” in a narrative as long as a novel. Here Poe suggests that plot is crucial to unity (though curiously not “essential” to storytelling). In “A Chapter of Suggestions” Poe returns briefly to the matter of plot and advances a theory of narrative construction that begins with the ending, the effect intended in the
dénouement
. In this view, plot becomes the unifying structure from which no individual element can be removed without destroying the totality of the tale.

Poe’s critical reflections on poetry represent a more concerted attempt to articulate basic principles. His “Letter to B—,” which introduced the 1831 volume of
Poems
, reveals much about Poe’s values as a young poet in his comparison of Wordsworth and Coleridge, then the giants of English poetry. Poe’s disdain for Wordsworth’s philosophizing and his admiration for Coleridge’s “towering intellect” and “gigantic power” help to explain his personal definition of the poem as a work whose immediate object is “pleasure” created by “indefinite sensations,” toward which end the “sweet sound” of music is “essential.” As an editorial assistant, Poe inserted passing comments on the nature of poetry in critical notices such as the “Drake-Halleck” review of 1836, and in 1843 he began to lecture on poetry. But not until the success of “The Raven” did he confect a grand theory of poetry. His “Philosophy of Composition” (1845) amounts to a tour de force, a logical analysis of how he wrote his most famous poem by working backward from its intended final effect. Poe’s account of the composition process must be taken
cum grano salis
(with a grain of salt—one of his favorite Latin expressions), but his designation of “Beauty” as “the sole legitimate province of the poem” accords with his own practice and helps to legitimate the subsequent (and self-serving) claim that a beautiful woman’s death constitutes “the most poetical topic in the world.” The following year he expanded earlier notes on poetry into “The Rationale of Verse,” a lengthy and somewhat technical essay (not included here) on rhythm, repetition, meter, and line length, as they affected the sound of a poem.

Poe’s late lectures included “The Poets and Poetry of America” (of which no full manuscript has been located) and “The Poetic Principle,” his last and arguably most important meditation on the key elements of poetry. Here he asserts that the long poem is “a contradiction in terms” because the “elevating excitement” necessary to poetry is by nature transient. Countering the notion popular in his day that poetry must be morally instructive, Poe rails against “the heresy of the didactic” and insists again that beauty is the poem’s only legitimate object. He construes poetry as the “rhythmical creation of beauty” while beauty itself is precisely the “supernal Loveliness” of “glories beyond the grave” for which the immortal soul yearns. Poe finds intimations of this heavenly beauty in many earthly images and sounds and most tellingly in the “divine majesty” of a woman’s love.

If Poe’s critical assumptions prevented him from fully appreciating longer forms such as novels and epic poems—to say nothing of drama, about which he occasionally wrote—they nevertheless enabled him to achieve a remarkable consonance between the literary principles that he advocated and the literature that he produced over slightly more than two decades.

(from a review of
Watkins Tottle and Other Sketches
by Charles Dickens)

 

 

 

It is not every one who can put “a good thing” properly together, although, perhaps, when thus properly put together, every tenth person you meet with may be capable of both conceiving and appreciating it. We cannot bring ourselves to believe that less actual ability is required in the composition of a really good “brief article,” than in a fashionable novel of the usual dimensions. The novel certainly requires what is denominated a sustained effort—but this is a matter of mere perseverance, and has but a collateral relation to talent. On the other hand—unity of effect, a quality not easily appreciated or indeed comprehended by an ordinary mind, and a
desideratum
difficult of attainment, even by those who can conceive it—is indispensable in the “brief article,” and not so in the common novel. The latter, if admired at all, is admired for its detached passages, without reference to the work as a whole—or without reference to any general design—which, if it even exist in some measure, will be found to have occupied but little of the writer’s attention, and cannot, from the length of the narrative, be taken in at one view, by the reader.

—
Southern Literary Messenger
, June 1836

(from a review of
Night and Morning
by Lytton Bulwer)

 

 

 

The word “plot,” as commonly accepted, conveys but an indefinite meaning. Most persons think of it as of simple
complexity
; and into this error even so fine a critic as Augustus William Schlegel has obviously fallen, when he confounds its idea with that of the mere
intrigue
in which the Spanish dramas of Cervantes and Calderon abound. But the greatest involution of incident will not result in plot; which, properly defined, is
that in which no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole
. It may be described as a building so dependently constructed, that to change the position of a single brick is to overthrow the entire fabric. In this definition and description, we of course refer only to that infinite perfection which the true artist bears ever in mind—that unattainable goal to which his eyes are always directed, but of the possibility of attaining which he still endeavors, if wise, to cheat himself into the belief. The reading world, however, is satisfied with a less rigid construction of the term. It is content to think that plot a good one, in which none of the
leading
incidents can be
removed
without
detriment
to the mass. Here indeed is a material difference; . . .

The interest of plot, referring, as it does, to cultivated thought in the reader, and appealing to considerations analogous with those which are the essence of sculptural taste, is by no means a popular interest; although it has the peculiarity of being appreciated in its atoms by all, while in its totality of beauty is it comprehended but by the few. The pleasure which the many derive from it is disjointed, ineffective, and evanescent; and even in the case of the critical reader it is a pleasure which may be purchased too dearly. A good tale may be written without it. Some of the finest fictions in the world have neglected it altogether. We see nothing of it in Gil Blas, in the Pilgrim’s Progress, or in Robinson Crusoe. Thus it is not an essential in story-telling at all; although, well-managed, within proper limits, it is a thing to be desired. At best it is but a secondary and rigidly artistical merit, for which no merit of a higher class—no merit founded in nature—should be sacrificed. . . .

In the wire-drawn romances which have been so long fashionable, (God only knows how or why) the pleasure we derive (if any) is a composite one, and made up of the respective sums of the various pleasurable sentiments experienced in perusal. Without excessive and fatiguing exertion, inconsistent with legitimate interest, the mind cannot comprehend at one time, and in one survey, the numerous individual items which go to establish the whole. Thus the high ideal sense of the
unique
is sure to be wanting:—for, however absolute in itself be the unity of the novel, it must inevitably fail of appreciation. We speak now of that species of unity which is alone worth the attention of the critic—the unity or totality
of effect
.

—
Graham’s Magazine
, April 1841

(from a review of
Twice-Told Tales
by Nathaniel Hawthorne)

 

 

 

The tale proper, in our opinion, affords unquestionably the fairest field for the exercise of the loftiest talent, which can be afforded by the wide domains of mere prose. Were we bidden to say how the highest genius could be most advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, we should answer, without hesitation—in the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. We need only here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very nature of prose itself, much longer than we can persevere, to any good purpose, in the perusal of a poem. The latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be long sustained. All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of an imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem
too
brief may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression. Without a certain continuity of effort—without a certain duration or repetition of purpose—the soul is never deeply moved. There must be the dropping of the water upon the rock. De Béranger has wrought brilliant things—pungent and spirit-stirring—but, like all immassive bodies, they lack
momentum
, and thus fail to satisfy the Poetic Sentiment. They sparkle and excite, but, from want of continuity, fail deeply to impress. Extreme brevity will degenerate into epigrammatism; but the sin of extreme length is even more unpardonable.
In medio tutissimus ibis
.
¹