Text: Henry Marvin Belden, “Poe and Coleridge,” The Nation (New York, NY), vol. 90, whole no. 2323, January 6, 1910, p. 11, cols. 2-3

[page 11, column 2, continued:]

POE AND COLERIDGE.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:

SIR: Undoubtedly, as Professor Woodberry (“Edgar Allan Poe,” I, 178) and Professor Prescott (“Poe's Critical Essays,” xxxi) have pointed out, Poe had been reading Schlegel in Black's translation when he declared, in the Southern Literary Messenger for June, 1836, that in the short poem the “effect will depend, in a very great degree, upon the perfection of its finish, upon the nice adaptation of its constituent parts, and especially upon what is rightly termed by Schlegel, the unity or totality of interest.” Yet even here it seems likely that Coleridge had preceded Schlegel as Poe's teacher. Schlegel (in Black's translation) says: “De la Motte, a French author, . . . would substitute for Unity of action, the Unity of interest”; and approves the substitution. Totality — a rather unusual word then, if one may judge from the fact that the examples of its use in the Century and Standard Dictionaries (with one significant exception, a quotation from the seventeenth century divine T. Adams) are from later writers — is not used by Black in this connection. But Coleridge, as far back as 1796, had written and printed a little disquisition on the sunset in which the following passage occurs:

The sonnet then is a small poem, in which some lonely feeling is developed. It is [column 2:] limited to a particular number of lines, in order that the reader's mind, having expected the close at the place where he finds it, may rest satisfied; and that so the poem may acquire, as it were, a Totality — in plainer phrase, may become a Whole. It is confined to fourteen lines, because, as some particular number is necessary, and that particular number must be a small one, it may as well be fourteen as any other number. (Globe edition of Coleridge, p. 543.)

This little essay, originally printed in 1796, was reprinted as “Introduction to the Sonnets” in the 1797 edition of Coleridge's Poems. The book may not have reached the libraries of Baltimore or Richmond or the University of Virginia or West Point in Poe's time, but if it did we may be sure that Poe read it. There is something about the style of this youthful dash at criticism — its particularity, its assurance, what Coleridge afterwards characterized as its “petulant presumption’ — that sounds much more like Poe than Coleridge. And there is the apparently unusual word totality, marked as such by the explanatory parenthesis, “in plainer phrase, . . . a Whole.”

H. M BELDEN.

Columbia, Mo., December 27.