[Text: Edgar Allan Poe, "Increase of Poetical Heresy," from The Weekly Mirror (New York), February 8, 1845, p. 281.]
[page 281, column 1:]
INCREASE OF POETICAL HERESY.
It has become evident, in many of our lately-published American poems, and compilations of
poetry, that, by the talk of the transcendentalists -- by its continuity rather than by any other
quality it possesses -- we are in danger of being badgered into the idea that a maudlin philosophy
(granting it to be worth enforcing), can be enforced by poetic imagery, and illustrated by rhythm
and rhyme; or, even more unpardonably, of being bullied into the belief that a poem, or, that
poetry, (of which the sole legitimate object is beauty,) can be advanced to its august end by the
abstractions of a maudlin philosophy.
But the question is not even this. It is not whether it be not possible to introduce didacticism,
with effect, into a poem -- or possible to to [[sic]] introduce poetical images and measures, with
effect, into a didactic essay. To do either the one or the other is merely to surmount a difficulty --
is simply a feat of literary legerdemain. The true question is, whether the author who shall
attempt either task, will not be laboring at a disadvantage -- will not be guilty of a fruitless and
wasteful expenditure of energy.
In minor poetical efforts, indeed, we may not so imperatively demand an adherence to the true
poetical thesis. We permit trifling, to some extent, in a work which we consider at best but a
trifle. Although we agree, for example, with Coleridge, that poetry and passion are discordant,
yet we quarrel not with Tennyson, when he brings to the intense passion which prompted his
"Locksley Hall," the aid of that terseness and pungency which are derivable from verse. The
effect he produces, however, is a purely passionate, and is not (unless in detached portions of that
magnificent phillippic) a properly poetic effect. His "none," on the other hand, exalts that soul
-- not into passion -- but into a conception of pure Beauty, which, in its elevation, its calm
rapture, has in it a fore-shadowing of the spiritual life, and as far transcends earthly passion, as
the holy radiance of the sun does the feeble and glimmering phosphorescence of the glow-worm.
His "Morte D'Arthur" is in the same majestic vein. The "Sensitive Plant," or the "Christabel" --
does this indisputable fact prove anything more than that the majority of mankind are more
susceptible of the impulses of passion, than of the impressions of beauty. Readers do exist,
however, and always will exist, who, to hearts of a fervor that maddens, unite, in perfection, the
sentiment of the beautiful -- that divine sixth sense, which is yet so faintly understood -- that
system which Phrenology attempts to embody in its organ of ideality -- that sense which is the
basis of all the dreams of Cousin -- that sense which speaks of God, through his purest, if not
through his sole attribute -- that sense which demonstrates, and which alone demonstrates, His
existence.
To readers such as these, and only to such as these, must be left the decision of what that true
Poesy is. And these, with no hesitation, will decide that its origin lies in a thirst for a [column 2:]
wilder beauty than the earth supplies -- that, in itself, it is the imperfect effort to quench this
immortal thirst; and that this thirst, when even partially allayed -- this sentiment, when even
faintly meeting response, produces emotion in comparison with which the most burning of all
merely human emotions are pulseless and insignificant.
We shall now lie understood. If, with Coleridge -- who, however erring at times, was precisely
the man to decide a question such as this -- if, with him, we reject passion from the true, from
the pure poetry -- if we reject even passion -- if we discard as feeble, as unworthy of the high
spirituality of the theme (which has its origin in a sense of the Godhead,) the nearly divine
emotion of human love -- with how much greater reason shall we dismiss all else? And yet there
are men who would mingle with this pure theme the merest questions of expediency -- the cant
topics of the day -- the doggrel sthetics of the time -- who would trammel the soul in its flight
to an ideal Helusion, by the quirks and quibbles of chopped logic. There are men who do this;
lately there are a set of men who make a practice of doing this, and who boast of the practice, on
the score of its advancement of what they suppose to be Truth. Truth is, in its own essence,
sublime; but her loftiest sublimity, as derived from man's clouded and erratic reason, (a reason
intended only to guide him here) is valueless -- is humble -- is utterly ineffective, when brought
into comparison with that unerring sense -- that proud intuition, which has never yet misled one
man -- the sense of God, and of the Beauty which God is -- the sense which is the basis of the
poem. But grant this Truth to be all which its worshippers forgotten that it is not Truth per se,
which they affect as a perpetual and tedious thesis -- not Truth, we say, but an argumentation,
often maudlin and pedantic -- always shallow and unsatisfactory (as from the mere inadaptation
of the vehicle it must be) -- and argumentation by which this phantom, Truth, in casual or
indeterminate glimpses, is, or is not, rendered manifest.
Our Orphic -- our sthetic bards experience, we believe, a species of shamefacedness in not
making the enforcement of some certain or uncertain dogmas or doctrines about what they call
PROGRESS, the obvious or ostensible object of their poems. They conceive, in fact, that to
compose a poem merely for the poem's sake, and to a acknowledge such to be the purpose,
would be to subject themselves to the charge of imbecility -- of triviality -- of deficiency in the
true dignity and force; but, would they listen to the dictates of their own souls, then would they
not fail to perceive, at once, that, under the sun, there exists no work more intrinsically noble,
than this very poem, written solely for the poem's sake.
~~~ End of Text ~~~
[S:0 - Weekly Mirror, 1845]