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Preface
AT this late date an investigation of the literary criticism of Edgar Poe requires some excuse, if only to provide the investigator with a justification for concentrating his energies for a number of years. I started this study with no more in mind than an interpretation and reconstruction of what Poe actually said as a critic. At the time I began transforming my notes into a manuscript, there were no full-length studies of Poe as a critic, and many of the essays that did explore the subject were concerned exclusively with his aesthetic principles. Taking my cue from Poe's own statement that a theory is only as good as its practice, I intended to examine his book reviews with the purpose of evaluating his success in applying his own literary theories to the work of others. Intentions often change as a study progresses, however, and during the years that passed before this study reached its final form, others anticipated some of my findings with equivalent or superior insights. Consequently the purpose and form of this book changed, as it became necessary to take into account the constantly increasing fund of Poe scholarship and criticism. Even as the pages of my final revision were being typed, significant articles on Poe were appearing in scholarly journals, articles that demanded my consideration and acknowledgment.
Nevertheless, I was able to retain the opinion which motivated this study — that all too often evaluations have been made of Poe as a literary critic that misinterpreted his idiom, failed to consider the often intolerable pressures of a journalistic career, and ignored the application of his theories to the work of others. Conspicuously neglected, though often mentioned in passing, has been the operative effectiveness of the critical theories of the last half of the eighteenth century in determining Poe's approach to the critical act and even in shaping some of his principles. Edward Davidson's [page viii:] brilliant study placed Poe within the context of romantic aesthetics and focused upon his poems and his tales to reveal a unitary principle informing all of Poe's creative work from his youthful poems to his cosmogony, Eureka. I have quarreled with few of Professor Davidson's insights, in some respects the most valuable that have ever been offered regarding Poe; instead I have sought to fill in missing data by showing that Poe as a working critic looked backward toward the mechanistic psychological aesthetic of the previous century and forward toward the dynamic organicism of the romantic period. My method, like that of Professor Davidson, is both thematic and chronological, but instead of aesthetic principles I have chosen to examine the operative regulations of Poe's practical criticism.
As a journalistic critic, Poe made his reviews a vehicle for his literary principles. He was a polemicist who sought to enforce his doctrine through the mass media, the journals and lecture platforms of his time. He used the techniques of mass persuasion. One such technique is dogmatic and unqualified assertion, and he used this technique toward a specific end. He was, if you will, a propagandist in the service of art. As a consequence, those who have examined only his most oracular pronouncements out of the context in which they were made have frequently misinterpreted his position. In the context of the occasion for the review, the particular journal in which the review appeared, and the urgency of the issue debated, Poe's more dogmatic assertions may often be seen as growing out of the necessity of polemical emphasis. When “the matter in hand is a dunce to be gibbeted,” Poe wrote in his “Marginalia,” “Speak out! — or the person may not understand you.”
Poe did speak out, but often the rigor of his pronouncements was mitigated upon other occasions when he no longer felt it necessary to press a particular doctrinal issue. Since the initiation of my study, books by Professors Edd Winfield Parks and Sidney P. Moss have done much to reveal the journalist whose voice speaks through the tone of the critic. While I acknowledge a full debt to these prior publications, I believe that my focus is different [page ix:] and that my investigation of the ideological framework within which Poe's opinions found expression allows alternative conclusions or at least emphases.
I have chosen to investigate. Poe's criticism chronologically in spite of all the handicaps such a method entails, for I cannot believe that a writer as intelligent as Poe would not exhibit some process of maturation. This method, detailed as it is, requires the tedium of viewing the same topics from different angles as Poe repeated, qualified, or modified his views. Yet only in such a way may we see his development as a critic. The man of 1845 who invoked reason and common sense to guide the artist's taste was not much like the boy of 1831 who claimed that it was the poet's duty to protest, not to think. A restricted examination of Poe's aesthetics obscures this difference, for both the boy and the man declared that the end and the only end of art was hedonic value. Still, as Poe matured as a critic, he had to answer such questions as how this value could be transmitted and to what persons. In answering these questions he was inevitably led to an examination of the quality of the aesthetic response as a mode of experience and to speculation concerning its final cause.
Believing that such a development could be traced and described, I have devoted most of this study to Poe's career as a journalist — a book reviewer. Only in my concluding chapters do I fully engage with Poe's aesthetics by attempting to interpret his “philosophy,” which was nearly always expressed as fiction, keeping in mind his own premise that a fiction should never bear the burden of truth except in the transcendental sense that the orderly, the consistent, and the symmetrical are always true. Order was the principle; disorder was the condition in which the principle must be discovered and revealed. The principle was true under the aspect of eternity, but the “truth” which man acknowledged, the truth of the conditioned and the contingent, could not be expressed by fiction. In his practical criticism Poe dealt with the conditioned and the contingent, the books produced by particular writers with particular temperaments, with varying degrees of skill, for particular purposes that could be lauded or deprecated. Poe [page x:] railed against inept procedures and irrelevant purposes and refused to consider a work of art validated by its quality of vision. In dealing with the conditioned, he refused to invoke the unconditioned as a proposition from which value judgments could be deduced. Instead he relied upon the “truth” which his audience could recognize, the truth of nature's laws and of exact demonstration. The ultimate truth, he said in his preface to Eureka, would be accepted only by “those who feel rather than ... those who think,” by those who “put faith in dreams as in the only realities.”
In Poe as critic, then, we have something of the schizoid condition the characters of his fiction exhibited, insofar as the split was indicative not of mental disorder but of the necessity of accommodation to two kinds of truth, the kind apprehended by the imagination and the kind necessary for conducting the business of life. As a practicing critic, he had to use what he thought of as science, the psychodynamics of stimulus and response and rules grounded in this correlation. He declared that all evaluations must be made in terms of effect, the effect of a work of art upon an audience. Bad grammar, mismanaged figures, incongruous associations, episodic plots, crude versification, failures to maintain the fictional illusion — all must be condemned as injurious to effect. In his practice of criticism Poe was a rhetorician whose rules were as strict as those of one of his sources, the Reverend Hugh Blair; but as a theorist who sought to analyze the nature of beauty and to ascribe a final cause for the hedonic value of art, Poe eventually went beyond all rules and rested his apology for poetry in the imagined nature of an artist-God whose greatest pleasure came from the contemplation of his own perfection, but who had to experience the pain of phenomenal existence before he could fully enjoy his own being.
Poe's work as a critic thus proceeds as a type of dialectic between two kinds of truth, the temporal and the eternal; only toward the end of his life did he achieve a synthesis by attempting to prove that the laws of physics demonstrated the truth that he had imagined. Tracing the course of this development eventually became my intention, although I have endeavored to carry out my [page xi:] original purpose as well by making a historical reconstruction of Poe's work as a practicing critic.
Any investigator of Poe's work has a heavier burden of acknowledgment to prior investigations than he can adequately show without a dismal parade of footnotes. My own notes march in battalions, yet I am aware that my acknowledgments are less than complete. I have resorted to bibliographical and explanatory notes that may not be worth the attention of Poe scholars, but I have tried to make this study useful for the non-specialist. The already published and forthcoming bibliographies of Poe criticism by J. Lasley Dameron obviate the necessity of a listing of secondary sources for any purpose other than to show that I have consulted them, and of any glaring omissions I can only say that when I have been conscious of a debt I have acknowledged it.
To obtain a reliable text for Poe's reviews is a matter of some difficulty. Except when otherwise indicated, I have used the 17-volume edition of Poe's works edited by James A. Harrison, but I have corrected obvious errors by collating with other editions or with the original magazine publications. Since most of Poe's reviews are brief, I have generally confined page references to the entire review, noting particular pages only in a few extended reviews and in Eureka. I have not used footnotes for quotations from tales and essays which are available in a number of good modern editions, for in such cases it is easy for the reader to locate the passages for himself. For reviews not in the Harrison edition I have cited the magazines in which they were originally published. The text used for tales, poems, and critical essays is Arthur Hobson Quinn and Edward H. O’Neill (eds.), The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, with Selections from His Critical Writings (2 vols.; New York, 1946).
My debts for direct and indirect assistance are many. To Louis D. Rubin, Jr., friend and supervisory editor of this series, I owe much for his encouragement, his patience, and his incisive criticism; to Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Sidney P. Moss, who read my manuscript in its next-to-final draft, for their careful criticism and advice; to the late T. O. Mabbott, for his [page xii:] generosity in sending me a list of the reviews he considered secure in the Poe canon; to Jay B. Hubbell, for the use of notes he made concerning Henry F. Chorley; to J. Lasley Dameron, for the use of his bibliography of Poe criticism prior to its recent publication; to Arthur Wrobel, for making available to me materials on phrenology which he had accumulated in his own research; and to William S. Ward, for materials and bibliographical help on the British periodicals.
A heavy debt for the most practical kind of assistance is owed to the American Council of Learned Societies, for it was during my tenure as an A.C.L.S. Fellow that the actual writing of this study began. I was able to complete my work with the aid of two summer fellowships awarded by the University of Kentucky Research Foundation, which was also responsible for grants that expedited the final preparation of the manuscript.
R. D. J.
Lexington, Kentucky
January, 1969
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PJC69, 1969] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe, Journalist and Critic (Jacobs)