The Essays of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe

First published: 1850

Type of work: Literary criticism

Critical Evaluation:

In his youthful ESSAY ON CRITICISM, Alexander Pope contended that only a demonstrated talent for creative writing gives a man the right to assess the literary productions of others. The history of criticism, of course, affords some notable exceptions. We are happy to accept the credentials of such distinguished literary critics as Aristotle, Longinus, George Saintsbury, or, to cite a modern example, I. A. Richards, even though none of these men has produced a substantial work of creative literature. Sometimes the reverse happens. The critical essays of Wordsworth, for example, are sometimes dismissed as the left-handed scribblings of a poet whose own practice repudiates his theory. But the criticism of Edgar Allan Poe is another matter. For whatever it may be worth, he meets the criterion of Pope; he had produced a number of poems and short stories before turning to criticism in the years that followed 1830. Furthermore, in spite of the fact that his criticism is often vituperative, narrow, derivative, or vague, he writes it with the authority of an accomplished master of composition, and it is here that he has something of value to say.

Most of Poe’s critical essays appeared in The Southern Literary Messenger and Graham’s Magazine, both of which he edited for brief periods between 1835 and 1842. Before he began his work as an editor and reviewer, however, he set forth a kind of prospectus of his critical theory in a “Letter” which first appeared as the preface to his POEMS of 1831 (later published with slight revisions in the Southern Literary Messenger for July, 1836). The essay is youthful, impudent, and slight, but it definitely adumbrates the major themes of Poe’s maturer criticism. And it is riddled with a number of inconsistencies. Like Pope, Poe begins by asserting that poets alone possess the ability to judge poetry—and shortly after cites a critical opinion of Aristotle. He denounces the reverence paid to foreign writers in preference to American ones, and he delivers a tirade against Wordsworth and Coleridge; but he concludes his essay with a definition of poetry that is lifted verbatim, and without acknowledgement, from the BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. His attack on Wordsworth is spiteful and even sophomoric. At one point he quotes a passage from Wordsworth’s Advertisement to the LYRICAL BALLADS of 1798 and embellishes it with jeering, parenthetical interspersions of his own. Nevertheless, in his complaints about the didactic implications of Wordsworth’s statements on poetry, he begins to suggest the direction of his own views—that poetry should seek to communicate pleasure rather than truth. He tells us also that music is essential to poetry because of its indefiniteness and that poetry is therefore the combination of music with a pleasurable idea.

In the reviews that began with his editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, Poe exercised his vituperative energies with considerable gusto, but at the same time he worked toward increasing refinement and precision in his formulation of literary principles. First of all, he sought to persuade the public that criticism of the literary art is a science, founded on the fixed and immutable laws of human reason and emotion, rather than simply an expression of opinion which might include any vague generalization about the work under scrutiny. He denounced especially the chauvinistic tendency of American reviewers, who gave indiscriminate praise to native writers and to books on “American” themes, regardless of their artistic quality, and who instinctively denounced any book with a foreign subject. For his own part, Poe gave no quarter to his own countrymen. He struck with a scalpel at Theodore S. Fay’s NORMAN LESLIE, a novel by the influential editor of the NEW YORK MIRROR, mercilessly dissecting its preposterous plot and extravagant language. Yet while the review of NORMAN LESLIE is largely an ad hoc expose of Fay’s inadequacies as a novelist, Poe’s other reviews are often buttressed by an appeal to critical and literary principles, to considerations which transcend the work in question and which therefore provide a sounder criterion for judgment. His examination of poems by Joseph Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck in 1836, for example, moves beyond the immediate subject for review into a discussion of poetry in itself. Poetic sentiment, he says, is the sense of the beautiful, the sublime and the mystical; and the only means of evaluating the merits of a poem is by gauging its power to elicit this sentiment in the reader. He introduces, therefore, the principle that becomes a keystone in his poetic and literary theory: a work of creative literature must be analyzed in terms of its total effect.

This principle forms the basis of his critical perspective in all the essays that follow. In a review which appeared in Graham’s Magazine in April, 1841, he applies it carefully to NIGHT AND MORNING, a novel by Bulwer-Lytton. Poe admires the novel because of its perfection of plot, which he defines as an arrangement of incidents so interdependent that none can be displaced without destroying the fabric of the whole. Bulwer-Lytton, Poe conjectures, has written his story backwards, because he has first conceived his denouement and then designed his incidents to act as causes for the final effect. But Poe dislikes the episodic character of the book. He complains that its complexity is too great for the mind to comprehend at one time, so that it does not strike the reader with a single, unified effect. For its failure to produce such an effect, according to Poe, the length of the book is also responsible; this is the reason why he was so dissatisfied with anything long in poetry or fiction. Again and again he asserted that an overextended narrative destroys the unity of effect which he thought essential to a literary work.

With his review of Longfellow’s BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS in Graham’s Magazine of April, 1842, Poe enters the final and most important phase of his career as a critic. In this essay he explicitly condemns didacticism in literature, specifically the tendency of Longfellow’s poems to inculcate a moral. Using terms and categories which he seems to have borrowed from Kant by way of Coleridge, he maintains that just as truth appeals to the intellect and duty to the moral sense, so poetry must appeal to taste alone, for taste is the sense which enables mankind to appreciate the beautiful, and especially that which is eternally or supernally beautiful. This is the first of three crucial ingredients in poetry as Poe conceives it. The second is novelty or creativity, and the third—recalling a statement in his early “Letter”—is music, because of its celestial quality. The combination of these ingredients produces the definition to which Poe is finally committed: poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty.

The remainder of Poe’s essays simply elaborate the principles he has already announced. In reviewing Hawthorne’s TWICE TOLD TALES in Graham’s Magazine of May, 1842, Poe uses the concept of unified effect to formulate his theory of literary composition. He pays tribute to Hawthorne’s genius (a generous gesture at the time), but he finds Hawthorne peculiar rather than original, because Hawthorne’s stories fail to satisfy the reader’s sense of the new. Also, Poe declares that Hawthorne’s strain of allegory is objectionable because it interferes with that unity of effect which is absolutely essential to the success of a tale. After these rather perfunctory statements, he proceeds to enunciate his views on the value of brevity in literature. In his review of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel he had criticized the assumption that length has any intrinsic merit; now he contends that if a poem is to produce the effect of intense excitement, it must be short. But it cannot be too short, he says, for it must have sufficient time to build the kind of momentum that makes a powerful impact. In poetry, as in the tale, the writer must have full control over the reader, and extreme length makes such control impossible. It militates against the fulfillment of the single effect which the writer must seek to establish with every word he writes. This is why Poe believes that a long poem is an impossibility. In his judgment, the hallmark of an effective composition is the evidence of design in every part of it, the ordering of all its aspects to a pre-established end.

Poe demonstrates the practical application of this axiom in what is perhaps the most famous of his critical essays, “The Philosophy of Composition,” first published in Graham’s Magazine of April, 1846. Here he offers a detailed, step-by-step analysis of the process by which he composed THE RAVEN. Whatever we may think of this cold-blooded dissection of the creative act, it is very probably true to the spirit (if not the letter) of what actually happened as Poe wrote the poem. In any event, the explication shows exactly how Poe intends a writer to achieve the all-important unity of impression; his composition of THE RAVEN is a paradigm of the creative process as he understood it. He began, he tells us, with the intention of creating a single impression, an intense, elevating excitement of the soul. Every piece of the poem was then selected and arranged with this effect in view. First of all, he decided that the poem must be brief. Second, because beauty is the province of poetry he determined to achieve it with a tone of melancholy, established in a single, sonorous word and continously repeated for maximum impact. Out of this grew the details of the poem—the refrain of “Nevermore,” the raven, the bereaved lover, the dead woman, the chamber at midnight, the antiphonal exchange of questions and answers, and the driving rhythm with its strong alliteration and internal rhymes. All of these details were designed to produce a preconceived effect upon the reader, a feeling of beauty tinged with sadness. According to Poe, therefore, the principles of composition are precise, logical, and impersonal, even though the end in view is the evocation of intense psychic excitement. There is no place in the writing of poetry for careless rapture or fine frenzy. Cool and detached, the poet constructs a formula for the kind of impression he seeks to convey.

In a lecture he delivered frequently during the last years of his life, Poe summarized the major tenets of his literary theory under the title, “The Poetic Principle,” and after his death the lecture was published as an essay in The New York Home Journal of August 31, 1850. He recapitulates here the points we have already seen in the earlier essays, condemning length and didacticism, and emphasizing particularly that the value of a poem can be measured only by the effect it produces. But the chief purpose of the essay is to show, by a number of examples from various poems, that the poetic principle itself is the human aspiration for supernal beauty and that the principle is always manifested in an elevating excitement of the soul. Poe thus concludes his literary criticism on a note of majestic vagueness, but he leaves us at the same time with a theory of poetry that springs from years of contemplation on his own practice. For all his generalities, his dogmatism, his vituperative harshness, and his intellectual debts abroad, Poe commands a prominent place in the history of literary criticism of America.

Bibliography

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