Text: John Phelps Fruit, “Resume,” The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (1899), pp. 82-86

[page 82, unnumbered:]

IT seems good at this point to call attention again to the fact that the attitude of the critic towards a poet and his poetry determines the results of his study. If he bring with him some foot-rule of Taste with which to measure, his opinions will be judicial, charged, as a rule, with excess of blame, rarely with excess of praise.

It is one thing to study a fact in its relation to other facts, for the sake of classification, gaining thereby, according to the logical scheme, clearness of knowledge; it is quite another thing to study the same fact in itself, apart from other facts, in order to get distinctness of knowledge. The one enables us to say, merely, what a thing is not; the other, by separating it from an embarrassing variety, enables us to know, positively, what the thing is.

Think what you may of this procedure from a logical or scientific point of view, it is the especial prerogative of Art to disentangle the individual from the crowd in order to interest us in the individual. To illustrate: Who has read Lowell's Dandelion, can ever again think of it as a weed to be plucked up and to be rid of? It is a “dear common flower,” and “fringes the dusty road with harm less gold!”

Poe stands out from the crowd through the uniqueness of his genius; he challenges at once the interest of the [page 83:] lover of letters. Lowell presents him in a rather grotesque way, —

It has been with somewhat whimsical intention of enjoying what Poe felt as a poet and thought about its expression, that we have followed him thus, and thus far. Now we may gather up into more definite compass the mental content of the poet.

The pronominal personage of the edition of 1827 has the passion and the sense of fatality that belongs to genius. It is Poe's early gratulatory recognition of himself. The primary end of this verse is to interest us in the gifted but ill-fated young man. Incidentally with the poetry we have a deal of instruction as to what genius is and how it behaves itself. Thus early we get a hint of the discursive power of Poe's mind.

Genius feels the silent tone of its self-supremacy; claims by innate right a mystic empire and high power; knows the fate it will inherit, yet finds pride the ruler of its will; discriminates in favor of the poet's dreams against the dull realities of waking life; not of the commonalty, he has nevertheless a token of what in other worlds shall be, given in beauty: isolated thus by natural endowments, he lives alone, in a world of moan. He is a Platonist and yet pessimistic in tone. He revels in dreams of living light and loveliness; he leaves his heart in climes of his own imagining, apart with beings of his own thought.

While Genius, ratiocinatively considered, is theme of the volume of 1827, it is Genius luxuriating in sorrow that is the poetical conception as it was in Poe's mind. This young genius, though, is presented as being in alliance with Beauty, for solace, — having revelations through Beauty that saves him to life and Heaven. [page 84:]

One feels that Poe, in the edition of 1829, speaks in his own proper person. He has had, in the person of Young Genius, visions of beauty, but he is disenchanted now; they have “faded into the light of common day.” The years of dreaming are past, the day of reflection has come. The scientific, or critical, spirit preys upon his heart. He turns to that Beauty through which he had tokens of other worlds. Beauty thus becomes the theme of this volume.

This new direction of thought finds its poetical expression, after the very method, spirit, and doctrine of Plato, in the mythus, Al Aaraaf. “The Idea of Beauty” becomes his inspiration. In the lines to the maiden Ligeia, he celebrates his thought as to Harmony, that great essential of Beauty, and exemplifies it at the same time in the verse, —

That is the thought: transforming the harshest idea into melody. This very lyric is melody itself. Poe here lights upon his forte in the way of technique, namely, the har mony of sense and expression. The lyrics of his Al Aaraaf are characteristic of his best verse.

The thought of the volume of 1831 is about Poetry. In his prefatory letter he speaks of rejecting all but a small portion of his former volume, considering little else but Al Aaraaf and Tamerlane worth a second edition. He finds occasion for defining poetry as perceptible images giving indefinite sensations through association with music.

The poet is poetically conceived as a spirit “whose heartstrings are a lute.” An unimpassioned song is despised. [page 85:]

Enamored of the idea of Beauty, as in Al Aaraaf, and later, of Beauty that is classic, as in stanzas to Helen (10: 77), Israfel seems the most natural, logical, sequent. The lines above suggest Poe's theory of poetry that expression and sentiment should agree.

Poe, in the lines, To the River (1829), conceived under the aptest of figures the effect of Beauty upon the observer, and therewith suggested that Beauty is an entity, manifesting itself through concrete forms. In 1831 Beauty is lord; the poet is passive: after 1831 the poet is conceived as the creator of Beauty, that is, he is an artist, consciously working to produce an effect, to wit, the pleasurable sense of the Beautiful. Means and methods come to view. Workmanship becomes a prime consideration.

If Poe had not persuaded us of this in his analysis of The Raven, it were discoverable in the half dozen best poems of the edition of 1845, where his use of allegory and his verbal artifices for the sake of melody stand in evidence. What before this had cropped out, in his happiest instances, as predilections, have become, in a sense, working rules.

Though Poe claimed that poetry was with him a passion, he yet disclaimed that he could dash off a poem in a frenzy. After he had thought of the modus of his mind's play in the composition of The Raven, he discovered he had a method, which was to choose, first, the effect to be produced; this effect, in turn, determined the choice of a poetical topic as well as the treatment of that topic. “Onomatopoetic” describes the technical handling of the topic.

One can almost imagine that The Bells is his own exult ant exhibition of his skill in onomatopeia. For a display of [page 86:] simple onomatopeia he might have found something that gave out noises, as “How the Water Comes down at Lodore,” but his finer instinct which had listened to “the music of the spheres” sought its satisfaction in the tones of bells.