Text: John Phelps Fruit, “Poetry,” The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (1899), pp. 36-46

[page 36:]

IN the prefatory letter to the edition of 1831 (10: 144), Poe says he believes that only a portion of the former volume is worthy of a second edition. He includes, of course, Al Aaraaf and Tamerlane, and adds: “Nor have I hesitated to insert from the ‘Minor Poems’ now omitted, whole lines, and even passages, to the end that, being placed in a fairer light and the trash shaken from them in which they were imbedded, they may have some chance of being seen by posterity.’” Following out this idea, he has inserted in Tamerlane, bodily, The Lake (10: 127-(225)), and four teen lines from To — - (10: 228) — second version of Imitation of 1827. There are two other poems, namely, Introduction (10: 231) (Preface, of 1829); and Fairy-Land, both extended. Add to these six new poems: To Helen, Israfel, The Doomed City, Irene, A Pæan, The Valley of Nis, we have the volume of 1831, of 124 pages, entitled Poems (W. 58).

The expansion found in Introduction is significant. In the first version of it — Preface, 1829 — he spoke of Romance as, to him, a painted paroquet and a most familiar bird, that taught him to lisp his earliest word while he, a child, was in the wildwood, with a most knowing eye. Then the eternal Condor years with their tumult gave him no time for idle cares, and forbade him to while away a little hour with “lyre and rhyme.” [page 37:]

This is the sum of Preface, on which we have already said a word.

After representing himself as a child with a most know ing eye, he inserts twenty-four lines, descriptive, first, of the succeeding years, and then of himself as an idle boy. These lines contain his reasons for the sober conclusion of his prefatory letter, that only a small portion of his former volume was worthy of a second edition. He says, —

This is indeed a graphic picture of the course of his life from boyhood to young manhood, when he wrote these lines. He was in his twenty-third year!

Now note his review of himself during these years, —

This is Poe's unmasked confession, and it tracks the thoughts of his objectified genius of 1827. We shall see if he gets entirely away from these sentiments later, as the confession naturally leads us to expect.

Then thirty lines are added where the version of 1829 ends. These lines consort well enough with the preceding insertion to have followed immediately. He says that his soul now has too much room, and that the glory and gloom are gone, that the black has mellowed into gray, and that all the fires are paling. With a word to the effect that he has revelled, and his draught of passion has been deep, he very meaningly says, —

We recall that he wrote in 1827 as one looking back upon a life full of bitter experiences, but he says that if he should swear he meant only, —

that no imp of old gray-bearded Time will thrust his shadow across his way, but that the graybeard himself will connivingly overlook his dreaming book. How could old Time be offended with his book since it gives voice merely to the vapid joy and grief that is tintless of the sere and yellow leaf? The old graybeard only laughs.

Awakened to the significance, or insignificance, of his past dreaming, he turns to the saner question of what constitutes [page 39:] true poetry, and formulates a theory in opposition to the heresy of the Lake School. It is in the prefatory letter that we have the discussion. As against instruction being the end of poetry, he says, “ceteris paribus, he who pleases js of more importance to his fellow-men than he who instructs, since utility is happiness, and pleasure is the end already obtained which instruction is merely the means of obtaining.”

Continuing: “I see no reason, then, why our metaphysical poets should plume themselves so much on the utility of their works, unless indeed they refer to instruction with eternity in view; in which case, sincere respect for their piety would not allow me to express my contempt for their judgment, — contempt which it would be difficult to conceal, since their writings are professedly to be understood by the many who stand in need of salvation. In such case I should no doubt be tempted to think of the devil in ‘Melmoth,’ who labors indefatigably through three octavo volumes to accomplish the destruction of one or two souls, while any common devil would have demolished one or two thousand.”

Again: “Against the subtleties which would make poetry a study — not a passion — it becomes the metaphysician to reason — but the poet to protest. . . . As regards the greater truths, men oftener err by seeking them at the bottom than at the top; the depth lies in the huge abysses where wisdom is sought — not in the palpable palaces where she is found. The ancients were not always right in hiding the goddess in a well; witness the light which Bacon has thrown upon philosophy; witness the principles of our divine faith — that moral mechanism by which the simplicity of a child may over-balance the wisdom of a man.”

These lines are italicized for emphasis: “Poetry above [page 40:] all things is a beautiful painting whose tints to minute inspection are confusion worse confounded, but start boldly out to the cursory glance of the connoisseur.”

In other words, six inches off is too close to feel the force of Beauty expressed in the Venus of Milo, however much of the texture of the marble that range may reveal. Art and science look at the same thing from quite different standpoints.

“A poem, in my opinion, is,” he says, “opposed to a work of science by having, for immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having, for its object, an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.”

Here we have stated in clear enough prose what Poe knew instinctively all the while, and which he had exemplified first conspicuously, in portions of Al Aaraaf, namely, — that music and perceptible images combined was poetry. The music of the verse competes with the pictures of the words and phrases for the attention, and there results an indefinite conception that is pleasurable.

Rancor towards the metaphysical poets was the prime moulding force of his opinion. Didacticism in Art was to him intolerable.

Having made up his mind, in this edition of 1831, and expressed it in verse and prose as to his former poetry, and also having settled, discursively, what high art in poetry is, he writes in an exultant tone the three stanzas, To Helen (10: 77). Note how the sentiment of the poem [page 41:] reveals his state of mind with reference to Beauty and Art.

This is said too with an eye turned back to the past. And then, as if to emphasize that poetry is a matter of the heart and not an affair of the head, he wrote Israfel (10: 179,29).

We have the idealistic realism of Al Aaraaf in —

His “heart-strings are a lute,”

Then the poet says, —

“For passionate love is still divine,” is from the first edition of Tamerlane, and though the poet in Introduction, reviewing the past, says he could not love except where Death was mingling his with Beauty's breath, or Hymen, Time, and Destiny stalking in between — as if to quit these themes — yet passionate love and “dead Beauty” recur in A Pæan, first version of Lenore, and in Irene.

In the former (10: 167) the question is how shall the requiem for the loveliest dead be sung. Her friends are gazing on her gaudy bier, and weep! They loved her for her wealth, but hated her for her pride, and now that she is dead they love her. While they speak of her “costly broidered pall,” they tell the singer — the lover — he should not sing at all, unless so mournfully as to do the dead no wrong, but he says, — [page 43:]

Thinking of the heartless love of friends, he continues,

The indignity of heartless sympathizers caused him, “drunk with love,” to change his song from a requiem to a paean.

In Irene (10: 163), which is the first version of The Sleeper (10: 14), there is a description of a moonlight midnight in the sweet month of June, where a dewy, drowsy, and dim influence settles down upon the soul as one watches the gray towers wrapping the fog about their breasts to moulder into sleep; or the lake looking like Lethe; or the rosemary asleep upon the grave; or the million bright pines rocking lullabies to the lone oak.

On such a night all beauty sleeps, and behold, a casement open to the skies and therein Irene, with her destinies! The moon would question the wonder of her being there, and calls upon her to awake, but the lady sleeps.

Immediately after the expression, “The lady sleeps,” comes, the “dead all sleep,” with “dead” italicized, which furnishes the cue for eighteen lines omitted in the revised Sleeper. The dead all sleep, at least while love weeps; the spirit loves ‘to lie, entranced, so long as Memory [page 44:] cannot keep back the tears, but when light laughter can choke the sigh, —

Wholly parenthetical as this passage is, it speaks his bitter sneer at the transiency of earthly love.

She is worthy of all love, therefore he would have her sleep be deep as it is lasting. He would have —

In A Pæan, the vital soul of “the loveliest dead” is before the mind's eye: “She is gone above, with young Hope at her side;” “her life and love are riven from more than fiends on earth to the untainted mirth of heaven.” In Irene, it is the body of the “lady sweet” that is in attention: he would have that chamber with casement [page 45:] open to the skies, and to the “wanton airs” and “tinted shadows,” exchanged for one more holy, and for a bed more melancholy, where no icy worms could creep about her; such a place would be some tall ancestral vault, far away in a forest, dim and old.

The Doomed City (10: 174) has for its theme not love nor beauty, but such forbidding things as Death and Hell; yet the poem is one that ministers immediately to pleasure. There being no beauty in the topic itself, it must reside in the treatment.

Death has reared himself a throne in this strange city, where there are shrines and palaces and towers, but not like ours, for —

There are no stars there, no holy rays come down upon the long night-time of the place, but —

No ripples curve the surface of the melancholy waters, which are spread out around as a wilderness of glass.

Then comes a stir, a ripple, and a sinking of the turrettops that make a vacuum in the filmy Heaven; the waves grow redder; there are no earthly moons as down, down it settles, —

In The Valley Nis (10: 172), which is the first version of The Valley of Unrest (10: 21), there is a description of the Valley when once it smiled a silent dell, contrasted with it now when nothing there is motionless. These lines will serve to illustrate the point in the poem, —

It would be difficult to find the sentiment of unrest more picturesquely — poetically — presented.