Text: Gerald E. Gerber, “The Coleridgean Context of Poe's Blackwood Satires,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 87-91

[page 87, continued:]

The topicality of the satire in “The Psyche Zenobia” and “The Scythe of Time” (later entitled “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament,” respectively)(1) has received considerable exposure. Poe has been credited with satirizing contemporary fiction (both in and out of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine), contemporary editors, Martin Van Buren, Transcendentalism, and Margaret Fuller. Almost neglected as distinct considerations have been less topical subjects, the integrity of the artist and the condition of art — the subjects which I will focus on in this brief article. In this regard, especially “The Scythe of Time,” which is always slighted in discussions of the satire in the two tales, warrants another look.(2) Toward these ends, Coleridge, who has been called “the most important of poets and the most important of critics” for Poe,(3) is helpful. Coleridgean materials, especially the Biographia Literaria, provide a context which illuminates Poe's own predicament in the literary marketplace and especially his fictional treatment of the pseudo-critic, Mr. Blackwood, and the pseudo-artist, the Signora Psyche Zenobia.

For Poe the idea of writing for the marketplace in the mode of Blackwood's had a distinct Coleridgean coloring. Two years before “The Psyche Zenobia” and “The Scythe of Time,” in his review of Allsop's Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge,(4) Poe emphasized the magnitude of Coleridge's mind and character in relation to the ignobility of worldly standards. “Richly-gifted with all the elements of mental renown” and “worthy of the love and veneration of every truly [page 88:] good man, Coleridge, Poe said, “sought no immediate worldly advantages. To use his [Coleridge's] own words, he not only sacrificed all present prospects of wealth and advancement, but, in his inmost soul, stood aloof from temporary reputation.” Still Coleridge felt commercial and other worldly pressures. And it is significant that Poe quoted most of a long letter in which Coleridge described the tormenting trial of becoming a philosopher-poet rather than a hack writer. “Anxious to perform the duties of the day arising out of the wants of the day,” Coleridge some times feared that he “must abrogate the name of philosopher and poet, and scribble as fast as I can, and with as little thought as I can, for Blackwood's Magazine. ...”

Poe closed the review with a plea for the publication in America of the Biographia Literaria, “perhaps, the most deeply interesting of the prose writings of Colerlidge,” which includes many warnings about the literary marketplace. In chapter xi, “An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors,” Coleridge declared flatly, “NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.” “Money, and immediate reputation,” Coleridge argued metaphysically, “form only an arbitrary and accidental end of literary labor.” Money and reputation occasionally might be valuable as stimulants to industry, but even as peripheral causes of literary labor, they often become narcotics and “stun and stupify the mind.”(5) Throughout the chapter, in fact, runs Coleridge's assumption that the trade of literature was not compatible with the development of one's mind and character (and presumably with the development of one's ability to write, since great poets are also profound philosophers).(6) In this regard, he closed the chapter with an exhortation from Herder to young writers: “With the greatest possible solicitude avoid [the trade of] authorship. Too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty; even were there no other worse consequences. A person, who reads only to print, in all probability reads amiss; and he, who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor.”(7)

Poe probably knew that Coleridge's life had already been related to his own by Beverly Tucker. On November 29, 1835, Tucker had written to Thomas White that he was glad Poe had found a position (with the Southern Literary Messenger) “in which his pursuit of fame may be neither retarded, nor, what is worse, hurried by necessity. His history, as I have heard it, reminds me of Coleridge's, — with the example of Coleridge's virtues and success before him, he can need no other guide. Yet a companion by the way to hint that ‘more haste makes less speed” may not be amiss .”(8) Coleridge's example would have been particularly meaningful to Poe in 1838, when he had no position and evidently had to rely on earnings from writing. On July 19, he appealed to James Kirke Paulding for help: “Could I obtain the most unimportant Clerkship in your gift — any thing, by sea or land — to relieve me from the miserable life of literary drudgery to which I, now, with a breaking heart, submit, and for which neither my temper nor my abilities have fitted me, I would never again repine at any dispensation of God. I feel that I could then, (having something beyond mere literature as a profession) quickly elevate myself to the station in society which is my due.”(9) The exigencies evidently did not force Poe to give up his high literary standards. On September 4, Poe told Nathan C. Brooks, who published “Ligeia in the September number and “The Psyche Zenobia” and “The Scythe of Time” in the November number of the American Museum of Literature and the Arts, that he could not write a review of Irving's works primarily because he did not have time to execute the task well.(10) Earlier he had defended popular tales in the New Monthly Magazine and in Blackwood's only if they were original, had “great attention ... paid to style,” and had “much labour spent in their composition.(11) He was guided, as he said later in his ‘Prospectus of the Penn Magazine,” “by the purest rules of Art.”

It is difficult to think of Poe writing tales which deal with popular fiction of the Blackwood stamp and the low literary standards it often suggested without assuming his awareness of Coleridge's relevance to the tales. Furthermore, since Poe was greatly indebted to Coleridge and to the Biographia in many other ways, one is encouraged to look for Coleridgean aspects of the tales themselves. “The Psyche Zenobia” and “The Scythe of Time” suggest the possibility of an illuminating Coleridgean context, especially for Poe's satire on low literary standards expressed in the ineffective rules of art exported by the pseudo-critic, Mr. Black wood, and practiced by the pseudo-artist, Psyche Zenobia. The working out of Poe's satire on pseudo-critic and pseudo-artist sometimes echoes arguments presented and in a few instances language used in the Biographia. [page 89:]

In “The Psyche Zenobia” Mr. Blackwood is an unprincipled critic and literary adviser; that is, his comments on art are not grounded in the principles of art, as were Coleridge's and Poe's. Not knowing that a work of art has ‘a logic of its own, as severe as that of science,” as Coleridge said in chapter 1, (12) Blackwood does not tell Zenobia about structural unity or unity of effect. Instead he encourages her to get in a predicament and immediately record her sensations. “Sensations are the great things after all,” he says. “If you wish to write forcibly ... pay minute attention to the sensations.” Then he tells her to select arbitrarily a tone and to fill up the article with odd bits of information. With this formula, he encourages her to write “a genuine Blackwood article,” but not art. “The Scythe of Time,” the tale Zenobia writes following Blackwood's advice, appropriately is only a burlesque of the art of the tale.(13)

Poe objected to the mindlessness of this approach to art; throughout the two tales he argued that the true artist is not as passive as Blackwood's poetic suggests and Zenobia's example demonstrates. Coleridge takes the same position when he objects to the idea that inventors do not really invent — they merely look on “while the blind [external] causes, the only true artists, were unfolding themselves.”(14) The objectionable idea is, for Coleridge, one of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian theory of association. While Poe may not be responding directly to the Hartleian associationists, some of the detail of Coleridge's argument serves to illuminate the tale Zenobia writes about her encounter with a clock in the belfry of a cathedral where she struggles against external causes which she at first characterizes as “fate” and “destiny” and later as the “Scythe of Time.”

Hartley had concluded that all mental life comes from sensations and that complex mental. states arise simply by the process of association of sensations and impressions (which are experiences derivative from sensations).(15) These sensations and impressions, or their neurophysiological equivalents, according to Hartley, are “associated together! when they “are either made precisely at the same Instant of Time, or in the contiguous successive Instants.”(16) Coleridge objected that Hartley's and similar systems reduced all forms of thought to the one law of time and resulted inevitably in undermining the functions of the will, the reason, the judgment, and the understanding. These would be no longer “the determining causes of association” in Hartley's system; they would be among the “mechanical effects” of association. Instead of being manipulators, the will, reason, judgment, and understanding would be manipulated. In Hartley's scheme, Coleridge argued, “Our while life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory. Take his law [of association] in its highest abstraction and most philosophical form, viz. that every partial representation re calls the total representation of which it was a part; and the law becomes nugatory, were it only for its universality. In practice it would indeed be mere lawlessness. Consider, how immense must be the sphere of a total impression from the top of St. Paul's church; and how rapid and continuous the series of such total impressions. If therefore we suppose the absence of all interference of the will, reason, and judgment [and their governing function] ... any one part of [an] impression might recall any other part, and ... any part of any impression might recall any part of any other, without a cause present to determine what [the pattern of Impressions] should be.. There is in truth but one state to which this theory applies at all, namely, that of complete lightheadedness. ”(17)

This passage suggests an element of the setting in “The Scythe of Time” and provides a key to the method of some of Poe's rhetoric and to the significance of the apparently whimsical plot. Coleridge's idea that an ascent to the top of St. Paul's church will provide a “sphere of a total impression! which is ‘immense’ suggests the setting. Zenobia wants “to ascend the giddy pinnacle [of a cathedral] and thence survey the immense extent of the city.” More important for an interpretation of the tale, Coleridge's remarks about the despotism of “outward impressions” and “senseless and passive memory! illuminate the character of Zenobia's mind which is reflected in Poe's rhetoric. In the first paragraph, Zenobia is something of an associationist, dominated by her impressions and memory rather than by the will, reason, judgment, and understanding. She offers a succession of impressions: Men were talking. Women were screaming. Children were choking. Pigs were whistling. Carts they rattled. Bulls they bellowed. Cows they lowed. Horses they neighed. Cats they catterwauled. Dogs they danced.” Then she emphasizes that “in the mind of genius and imaginative contemplation” “a host of recollections are stirred up by a trifle,” that is, by the impression that the dogs danced. But Poe burlesques her process of association and underscores her mindlessness when he has her exclaim [page 90:] only “The dogs danced! ... I — I could not! They frisked. I wept. They capered. I sobbed aloud.” Zenobia concludes the paragraph by unexpectedly associating her “touching circumstances! (the impression that the dogs danced and her weeping response because she could not) with “that exquisite passage in relation to the fitness of things which is to be found in the commencement of the third volume of that admirable and venerable Chinese novel, the Jo-Go-Slow.” The inclusion of this incongruous material not only burlesques Blackwood's advice on “the filling up” but also seems to illustrate Coleridge's conclusion that when the mind is not properly governed, “any part of any impression might recall any part of any other” impression without a cause (reason, e.g.) to determine what the pattern of impressions will be.(18) Because Zenobia's mind is passive (that is, controlled by such impressions and her “senseless and passive memory’), her rhetoric is chaotic.

Coleridge contended that the only state to which this theory of association applied was one of “complete lightheadedness.” Not only is Zenobia's “lightheaded ness” apparent in the chaos of her rhetoric, but also in the plot of “The Scythe of Time.” During her adventure in the belfry (an adventure which was to be suitable for a Blackwood article of the “sensation stamp”) Zenobia observes an aperture which might afford a grand impression of the landscape. Standing on the shoulders of Pompey, her Negro servant, Zenobia thrusts her head out of the aperture and finds that it is really “an opening in the dial-plate of a gigantic clock.” Too late she realizes that the huge, sharp, steel minute hand of the clock pinions her neck. The minute hand eventually beheads her. The agent of destruction is appropriately “the ponderous and terrific Scythe of Time” not only because she is being cut down by the reaper but also because Poe perhaps is saying that art is much more than sensations and impressions which, according to Coleridge's criticism of Hartley, are subject only to the one law of time. Whether or not Poe actually was influenced by Coleridge's comment on the law of time, Zenobia's beheading seems to be poetic justice for the pseudo-artist who is governed by impressions and her passive memory, who has, in short, metaphorically lost her head in the pursuit of sensation (the pursuit Mr. Blackwood had advised) .(19)

One cannot conclude definitely, of course, that Poe consciously drew on Cole ridge for “The Psyche Zenobia” and “The Scythe of Time.” But Coleridgean materials, at the least, provide a highly appropriate context which illuminates the satiric treatment of the pseudo-critic and especially the pseudo-artist in a manner more intimately related to Poe's philosophy of art than the topical satire of Black Wood's or Transcendentalism or Margaret Fuller suggests. Furthermore, in this Coleridgean context the satire in “The Scythe of Time” appears to be more substantial than has been recognized. The Coleridgean context of the two satires has an additional virtue. It helps to fill in the picture of Poe's attitude toward Coleridge. Floyd Stovall has pointed out that Poe's critical pronouncements on Cole ridge fall into three groups: four references in “Letter to B—— ” (1831); a number of complimentary references from December, 1835, through January, 1837; and the less favorable references in the 1840's.(20) A Coleridgean context which illuminates some important aspects of Poe's position on art and the artist is not surprising in 1838. As one would also expect, a few revisions in the later versions of “The Psyche Zenobia!” also coincide with this grouping of Poe's critical pronouncements. In “The Signora Zenobia” (1840) Poe has Mr. Blackwood offer Coleridge's Table Talk as a model for “the tone metaphysical,” which Poe satirizes. In “How to Write a Blackwood Article! (1845) Poe added to his discussion of this tone material which perhaps satirizes the Biographia Literaria. Poe has Blackwood advise, “Say some thing about objectivity and subjectivity, as Coleridge did at length, especially in chapter xii. Blackwood also advises Psyche Zenobia that absurdities in her writing need not be scratched out if they are accompanied by footnotes, for example, to Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft and Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Natur wissenschaft. In chapter ix Coleridge mentiomed — in a footnote — Kritik der reinen Vernunft and later in the same chapter both titles in English. This criticism of Coleridge, however, is clearly peripheral. Like Coleridge, in the Biographia, Poe, in all the versions of these two tales, emphasizes the integrity of the artist and the importance of a poetic which satisfactorily accounts for the nature and effects of art. In this regard, the tales, which are sketches of Zenobia's literary life and opinions, are the negative counterpart of the Biographia.

Duke University

[page 90, continued:]

[[Notes]]

1 American Museum of Literature and the Arts, I, (November, 1838), 301-317; revised in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Phila., 1840), I, 213-243; revised again [page 91:] in Broadway Journal, II, (July 12, 1845), 1-7. Since I am interested in Coleridge and Poe primarily in 1838, I have followed the American Museum [[American Museum]] text except when noted otherwise.

2 The most thorough discussions of the satire in the two tales are in William Whipple's “A Study of Edgar Allan Poe's Satiric Patterns” (unpublished dissertation, Northwestern University, 1951), pp. 33-41, 122-127, and in Thomas H. McNeal's “Poe's ‘Zenobia’: An Early Satire on Margaret Fuller,” MLQ, XI (June, 1950), 205216.

3 Edward Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend (N.Y., 1963), p. 122. The primary treatments of the Poe-Coleridge relationship are Floyd Stovall's “Poe's Debt to Coleridge,” Texas Univ. Studies in English, X, (July 8, 1930), 70-127; Albert J. Lubell's “Edgar Allan Poe, Critic and Reviewer” (unpublished dissertation, N.Y. University, 1950), ch. 1; and George Edward Kelly's “The Aesthetic Theories of Edgar Allan Poe” (unpublished dissertation, Iowa, 1953), pp. 78-90.

4 Southern Literary Messenger, II, (June 1836), 451-453.

5 Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), I, 152-153.

6 Biographia, II, 19.

7 Biographia, I, 159-160.

8 Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (N.Y., 1941), pp. 235-235. In his own letter to Tucker, December L, 1835, Poe said that White “read me some portions of Tucker's letter.

9 The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (N.Y., 1966), II, 681.

10 Letters, I, 111-112.

11 Letters, I, 58.

12 Biographia, I, 4.

13 The characterization of Zenobia as a pseudo-artist seems to echo a few aspects of Coleridge's discussion of the poetic psyche (Biographia, I, 57-58). First, Coleridge, like Zenobia, calls attention to the fact that in Greek Psyche means both the “soul” and the “butterfly.” Second, he does so in order to suggest that the butterfly is an apt emblem for the soul of the artist. Zenobia, who contends that she is “all soul,” is similarly identified by the butterfly figure; but her butterfly costume which is merely ostentatious indicates that the quality of her soul, which expresses itself in her feeble art, is suspect. Third, in the same paragraph of the discussion of the poetic psyche Coleridge mentions Wordsworth's poem, “The Female Vagrant.” Zenobia, who is Poe's female artist as vagrant, like the subject of Wordsworth's poem, gets caught in a predicament without a helpmate.

14 Biographia, I, 82.

15 Erwin A. Esper, A History of Psychology, (Phila., 1964), p. 178.

16 Observations on Man, Part I, ch. 1, Prop. 10.

17 Biographia, I, 77.

18 Zenobia also concludes the fifth, sixth, and seventh paragraphs with incongruities which have the same dual significance.

19 Coleridge's discussion “of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian theory” (Biographia, I, 80-81) could have suggested a connection between the “lightheaded ness” produced by Hartley's theory of association and a beheading. Among the con sequences is the depreciation of the soul. Coleridge called this treatment of the soul the “caput mortuum” of the Hartleian process. Coleridge also contended that the blind mechanism of Hartleian association is itself ‘the slave of chances.” Zenobia, the female associationist and pseudo-artist, appropriately chances upon the church which lures her to her fate. She is the victim of chance, just as she leaves art to chance, for which Poe provides a Miltonic context with the 1845 epigraph, “What chance, good lady, hath bereft you thus?”

20 “Poe's Debt to Coleridge,” 70-73.