Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “Standards Achieved: The Poet's Art,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 192-208 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 192:]

VIII  •  Standards Achieved: The Poet's Art

 

THE Poems of William Cullen Bryant were worthy of extended analysis and invited the application of all the criteria by which Poe could evaluate poetry. With a distinguished reputation of some years’ standing, Bryant could not be disposed of on the basis of a single glaring deficiency. He was known as a master of versification who showed exquisite appreciation of both physical and moral beauty; in fact, he was the best America had to offer for comparison with the great British romantic poets. Accordingly, it was incumbent on Poe to examine every aspect of Bryant's art. In so doing, he eliminated the critical generality that he had occasionally practiced by investigating theme, versification, diction, metaphor, grammatical construction, and the implied range of the poet's imagination. Except for a brief digression on metrics, Poe confined himself to the poems themselves. In its close adherence to the text, his review is anticipative of the “new” criticism of the twentieth century; but, ironically, his approach must have seemed antiquated to some of his readers. Twenty or thirty years earlier, American critics had focused their attention on diction and versification, but by 1837 the general essay was in vogue, and a review of a single book was likely to be a dissertation on the life and works of the author, or, if in a monthly magazine, an “appreciation” that attempted to catch the author's “spirit.”(1)

Poe rarely explicated a complete poem in the modern manner, but a book review was no place for such a technique. The best he could do in specific analysis was to single out particular passages as illustrations of merits or defects, but the fact that he did analyze [page 193:] some of these passages represented an improvement over the usual reviewing method of simply pointing out “beauties” and “faults.” Considering the limitations of his medium, Poe's review of Bryant is quite detailed, remarkably so for his time and place.(2)

Poe began by examining one of Bryant's longer poems, “The Ages,” first commenting on its theme. “It is, indeed, an essay on the perfectibility of man, wherein, among other better arguments, some in the very teeth of analogy are deduced from the eternal cycles of physical nature, to sustain a hope of progression in happiness.” Had he been so inclined, Poe had an opportunity for a long digression on the subject of progress and perfectibility, ideas which he considered totally invalid.(3) Then too, he might have inserted a lecture on the fallacy of didacticism in poetry; but he announced that “it is only as a poem that we wish to examine The Ages,” thus enforcing by example his precept that a review should not be an essay on the subject of the item reviewed.

Proceeding directly to metrical analysis, Poe conceded that there was melody and force in Bryant's versification, but, he said, there were also defects. As might be expected from a critic who emphasized the musical qualities of verse, Poe found a lack of fluency in Bryant's lines. For instance, “The line ‘When o’er the buds of youth the death-wind blows’ is impeded in its flow by the final th in youth, and especially in death where w follows. The word tears cannot readily be pronounced after the final st in bitterest; and its own final consonants, rs, in like manner render an effort necessary in the utterance of stream which commences the next line.”

In Poe's phonetic discriminations liquids were preferred over other consonants, and all combinations difficult to pronounce were [page 194:] considered flaws. Only combinations which were smooth, melodious, and harmonious were acceptable, since the harmony of sound was a primary consideration. It is obvious that Poe was completely sound-oriented and that he expected poetry to be read aloud.

Poe was equally concerned with the time of a poetic line; he thought of feet as being equivalent to measure in music.(4)

To equalize the time of a given foot with others in the line, Poe continued, it may sometimes be necessary to add syllables not called for by a strict interpretation of the meter. The only stipulation is that the lines containing extra syllables must lend themselves to easy pronunciation in the same time as the metrically regular lines. For example, “Lo! to the smiling Arno's classic side / The emulous nations of the West repair!” is metrically sound even though the second line contains eleven syllables instead of the normal ten of iambic pentameter. Any variation such as the one above should be accommodated to the temporal requirement of the line, as a minimum, but a really superior poet would succeed in the “balancing ... of time, throughout an entire sentence.” The longer the sentence so balanced, the more skillful the poet!

Nathaniel Parker Willis had been censured by the American Monthly for using trisyllabic substitutions in iambic verse, but the [page 195:] reviewer had erred, Poe claimed, in scanning each line out of the context of the grammatical unit, the sentence. Poe was aware that scanning by sentences instead of by lines would be a startling innovation and immediately said so:

Poe's theory of extended temporal balance throughout an entire sentence is well exemplified in his own verse. His grammatical units are frequently entire stanzas, though sometimes he used semicolons and dashes where others might consider the full stop more appropriate. Extended temporal balance is present in “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf”; and in “Israfel” each stanza is a grammatical unit. Of his later verse, “The Raven” shows Poe experimenting with temporal balance in longer lines, although of the eighteen stanzas only nine may with some justification be considered as sentences. In “Ulalume” only four of the ten stanzas are grammatical units, but this poem, like “The Raven,” is a dialogue. It would have been difficult for Poe to make each stanza into a grammatical unit unless he allotted each speaker a stanza in turn, and obviously he made no such attempt. When the poem employed only one speaker, however, Poe's tendency in the late verse as in the early was to extend the sentence throughout the entire stanza. The first four stanzas of “Annabel Lee” are grammatical units, and the last two stanzas together form a single sentence.

Poe's own substitution of trisyllabic feet to balance a temporally longer line of dissyllabic feet may be observed in the first two lines [page 196:] of “The Raven”: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. —.” The first line is perfectly regular trochaic octameter; the second line is seven and a half feet, with the caesura represented by the dash at the end taking the place of the unstressed syllable in the final trochee. The second foot, however, contains three syllables. As Poe had said in his review of Bryant, words like “many,” although dissyllabic, do not constitute a true iambic foot. Consequently he added another syllable, “many a,” to compensate.(5) There are also three syllables in the fourth foot, “curious.” Thus, in making trisyllabic substitutions, Poe chose words that might be rapidly pronounced so that he could achieve balance with preceding and succeeding feet. The effect is perfectly regular verse, as far as the ear is concerned, with the only variation in the rhythm being caused by the omission of the unstressed syllable in the final trochee of the second line. It is no wonder that Poe's “walloping rhythm” has offended such modern readers as Aldous Huxley, however much it may appeal to those who like pronounced rhythmic effects.

Poe's discussion of metrics and his digression on the poetry of Nathaniel Parker Willis represents his only departure in this review from the text of Bryant's poems. It was the only way he could introduce his theory into the review; and since he had announced that he was going to condemn or praise on principle, it was necessary for him to state the principle as he used it. Contemporary reviewers sometimes pointed out what they considered metrical flaws, but the discussion was rarely developed on a theoretical basis. The reviewer simply assumed that the reader knew the rules and exhibited the violation as an example of undue poetic license. To introduce a new system based upon extended temporal balance [page 197:] instead of simply counting syllables or stresses was a daring act in a review.

After examining the metrics of Bryant's poems, Poe analyzed the figures of speech, applying some of the familiar rules of rhetoric but also making interpretations of import. When he merely pointed out an error, Poe's standards resembled Blair's rules for propriety of figure, but he went far beyond Blair when he examined metaphors for their extended implication. The old rhetorician had categorized figurative language as ornamentation, or “the dress of our sentiments”;(6) but Poe revealed an inclination to assess it in terms of concepts. He did not always explain the bases of his judgments, however, and we must reconstruct them on scanty evidence. For instance, he cited as an “unjust metonymy” a fragment of an extended personification from Bryant's “The Ages”: “Cradles, in his soft embrace, a gay / Young group of grassy islands.” Certainly the two words Poe italicized are not metonymic in the usual sense of the substitution of an attribute for an object. Blair, however, defined metonymy as a substitution of an effect for a cause,(7) and it is probably in this sense that Poe used the term. The islands are in the water of a bay as infants are in a cradle. Evidently Poe thought that the bay, which might appear something like a cradle for islands, should not be treated as an active agent, or cause, of the embrace. If this was his reasoning, he obscured it by quoting only part of the figure. The complete personification is as follows:

It would seem that Poe should have found fault with the inconsistent personification — a bay, masculine gender, being treated as the mother of islands — but he merely pointed out the error and did not explain it.

His objection to Bryant's personification of the Past is more understandable. [page 198:] The lines singled out are, “And glorious ages gone / lie deep within the shadow of thy womb.” Here the reference was “disagreeable” to Poe: “Such things are common, but at best, repulsive.” Squeamish as any Victorian about matters of sex, he was able to censure the line on principle according to Blair's dictum that “an author should study never to be nauseous in his allusions.”(8) He went beyond Blair, however, in examining the conceptual implication of the lines: “The womb, in any just imagery, should be spoken of with a view to things future; here it is employed, in the sense of the tomb, and with a view to things past.” Such close reading was characteristic of Poe at his best. It shows that he took into account the possibility of metaphorical extension and required a coincidence between the import of the controlling image and that of subsidiary comparisons. Bryant began his poem by invoking the Past as a kind of personification of Death, monarch of a “dark domain” where the dead are fettered. Then, in the second stanza, which Poe quoted, the image of the womb is not only inconsistent with the original figure but introduces conflicting concepts by metaphoric extension.(9) In the fourth from the last stanza, [page 199:]

Bryant introduced the theme of resurrection by asserting that the Past would yield up its dead: “Thy gates shall yet give way, / Thy bolts shall fall, inexorable Past!” Then, trying to suggest the process of resurrection, he returned to the womb image to bring in the conventional idea of rebirth. Poe was being almost too kind when he concluded his discussion with the mild comment, “it seems that The Past, as an allegorical personification, is confounded with Death.”

One of Bryant's poems aroused Poe's almost unqualified admiration. “Oh, Fairest of the Rural Maids” was commendable for its “rich simplicity” and its “ideal beauty,” a quality which Poe admitted was not easy to analyze. He undertook to analyze it, nevertheless, and quoted the poem in full, italicizing the “ideal” passages. Bryant's “original conception,” Poe affirmed, was highly imaginative:

When we remember Poe's praise of Shelley's Queen Mab in the review of Drake and Halleck, we are able to interpret his argument. Physical resemblances as such are unimaginative. However, if the qualities associated with or expressed by objects are identified with a subject, then both subject and object are “idealized.”(10) The [page 200:] phenomenal separateness of things is obliterated, and subject and object become one in a unity of effect. If Bryant's maiden — the subject — were merely influenced in character by the objects of her environment, then separateness would have been emphasized; but by a happy use of metaphor Bryant identified the qualities of her environment with the traits of the maiden herself.

Poe italicized only the metaphors of the poem. The similes, as he was careful to point out, were not italicized, and we are entitled to inquire into his reason. It appears that he considered metaphor a more appropriate vehicle of the ideal than simile because the two terms of the comparison are identified with each other. In a simile the use of the preposition — Poe italicized it to show the fault — weakens or qualifies the identification. Accordingly, the lines, “Thy step is as the wind that weaves / Its playful way among the leaves,” were ineffective. Not only is the comparison hackneyed but also the separateness of the things compared is made obvious. Bryant's maiden walking in the woods trips here and there like a playful breeze stirring up the fallen leaves; but, in Poe's opinion, her step should actually have been the playful wind. To see one object entirely in terms of another is identification in Poe's sense, and the verbal structure should express this ideal conception. Yet even metaphors are limited in the expression of the ideal. “The image contained in the lines ‘Thine eyes are springs in whose serene / And silent waters Heaven is seen — ‘ is one which, we think, for appropriateness, [page 201:] completeness, and every perfect beauty of which imagery is susceptible, has never been surpassed — but imagery is susceptible of no beauty like that we have designated ....” Again we are entitled to ask, why not? Poe was willing to concede a certain superiority to metaphors, but he was well aware that no comparison, whatever its rhetorical structure, could force identification upon the reader. No one would assume that the girl's eyes were actually springs, no matter how many resemblances Bryant's ingenuity discovered. In the remainder of the stanza, which Poe did not bother to quote, Bryant compared the girl's lashes with the herbs around the springs, thus, as Poe would have seen it, diminishing the ideality of the original concept by a fanciful yoking of physical details barren of suggestive import.

The lines of the poem that Poe italicized as imaginative, when they are figurative at all, employ general or even abstract terms that suggest a moral condition rather than a physical resemblance. Poe admired these pairs: “And all the beauty of the place / Is in thy heart and on thy face,” followed by “The twilight of the trees and rocks / Is in the light shade of thy locks.” Undoubtedly he interpreted these lines as expressing moral sentiment, even though the first pair is abstract statement and the second would have high associative value only to someone like Poe, who was capable of attaching considerable meaning to the various aspects of light and shade. He used an odd device to illustrate the quality he saw in the lines, printing them not as they appear in the poem, as the concluding and beginning lines of separate stanzas, but as if they were one stanza.

Whether Poe's substitution of her for Bryant's thy is a misprint, a careless error, or an intentional rewriting is impossible to determine without his manuscript; but the fact that he made a new stanza out of lines culled from two stanzas, and then printed the new stanza [page 202:] twice, is patently deliberate. Generally tactful in this review, he was demonstrating without comment how Bryant should have written the poem to achieve increased suggestiveness. The maiden's “twilight” hair in Poe's reordering of the lines becomes an aspect of the general beauty with which she has been identified.

For those who insist that Poe was the first American advocate of art for art's sake, it will be instructive to cite his opinion of Bryant's concluding stanza, which he offered as a specimen of “the most elevated species of poetical merit.”

During this particular period Poe validated poetry by its expression of moral sentiment, which had been an essential quality of Ideality to the phrenologists and an aspect of taste to Archibald Alison. Poe was even willing to forgive Bryant's didacticism (elsewhere censured) when the message was an appropriate conclusion to the illustrative material which had preceded it. “To a Waterfowl” was not worthy of the admiration that had been accorded it, but “its rounded and didactic termination has done wonders.”

It is fortunate that Poe explicated a few passages from Bryant's poems. Otherwise we would have to deduce his criteria for imaginative verse from the lines he italicized, a procedure of more value in illustrating his taste than in defining his principles. Since his principles were inevitably associated with his taste, however, the lines he chose for admiration are worth comment. Unless they are intended to illustrate technique, they invariably express what Poe considered to be appropriate poetic thought or concepts. By thought Poe did not mean philosophical import translatable into a prose paraphrase of theme. The lines he singled out as expressive of thought were usually pictorial renditions of the beautiful, the weird, the melancholy, or the spiritual. A few specimens will suffice (italics Poe's): [page 203:]

It is evident that by thought Poe meant pictorial concepts, ideas that could be depicted as “framed” compositions. The nearer Bryant's poems came to the landscape conventions of the picturesque,(11) the better Poe liked them; but there was one signal difference. As a rule, nature itself was the origin of Bryant's pictures, however he may have “improved” nature for compositional effect. Poe, with his concept of the ideal, preferred imaginary landscapes and shunned the representational. There is a deprecatory tone in his commendation of “The Prairies”: “as a local painting, the work is, altogether, excellent. Here are, moreover, evidences of fine imagination.” The lines that Poe italicized as imaginative are not at all characteristic of “local painting,” however.

There were too many naturalistic details in the poem for Poe's taste, so he chose from it only conceptualized images, “figures of thought.”(12)

We may dismiss Poe's hair-splitting discriminations in word choice and versification simply as evidence of his close reading and turn to his concluding evaluation of Bryant as an indication of his standards. Using Coleridge's approach, Poe made an estimate of Bryant's capacities. The poems reviewed gave tokens of an “ardent” appreciation of the beautiful and the ability to perceive and discriminate among the “legitimate items of the beautiful.” Something more was needed, however, before Bryant could be placed in the highest rank of poets. This something was range of vision; “the relative extent of these peripheries of poetical vision must ever be a primary consideration in our classification of poets.” Poe would not place Bryant with the “spiritual Shelleys, or Coleridges, or Wordsworth, or with Keats, or even Tennyson, or Wilson, or with some other burning lights of our own day, to be valued in a day to come.” With this statement, if Wilson (Christopher North) were eliminated, we would have to agree. Poe's judgment is sound, but the judgment does not necessarily validate the criteria used in forming it. The test of poetic vision is appropriate for the use of a disciple of Coleridge, but did Poe equate vision with insight? Apparently not, at least not in the same way Coleridge did.

In The Statesman's Manual Coleridge had said that the imagination functioned in “incorporating the reason in images of the [page 205:] sense.” Such an incorporation resulted in symbols which suggested correspondences between isolated fact and universal significance, but the facts themselves remained as images. Poe, on the other hand, demanding conceptual images, found facts very troublesome. In Poe's view opposites were irreconcilable in the context of a poem, and poetic vision was manifested by the presence of pictorialized ideas which were evocative of feelings that could be generally classified as responses to the beautiful or the sublime in objects or in thought. Poe demanded unity even more emphatically than did Coleridge, but, for all of his use of Schlegel, Poe's unity remained the old unity of impression which was achieved by a careful composition of objects or ideas that expressed a single emotion. Since by thought Poe meant a concept, mood, or attitude that could be depicted, it is not surprising that he commended Bryant's sonnet “November” for unity of thought. The poem is almost entirely pictorial, and the single thought that “pervades and gives unity to the piece” is the idea that the smile of the November sun enables man to bear the winter frost.

Poe is usually classified as a symbolist, but his review of Bryant reveals that his construction of symbolic meaning was different from that of Coleridge. Poe did not like clusters of symbols in the context of a single poem; instead, the whole poem should symbolize or be the expression of an idea, which, as we have seen, might well be a mood or an attitude, or even a suggestive image. The elements of the poem did not have to be meaningful themselves, but they had to contribute to the compositional effect, the pictorializa-tion of the idea. This is why explications of Poe's more pictorial poems, such as “The City in the Sea,” are usually unsatisfactory. We have been taught by the Coleridgean organic approach to examine a poem line by line and image by image for a correlated development of meaning that can eventually be more or less adequately presented in a prose paraphrase. There is no more meaning in a pictorial poem than there is in a landscape by Salvator Rosa. The compositional theme is all. Poe's criteria, then, were perfectly valid for the judgment of a certain kind of poem, the kind that he admired and occasionally wrote. By the process of selection, he [page 206:] could find some that met his standards in nearly all of the great English romantics, but, as we shall see his choices revealed in subsequent reviews, relatively few of them are taken today as the most representative poems of the respective authors. Poe's final estimate of an author, then, is generally more acceptable today than are his evaluative procedures. For all of his borrowing from Coleridge, his test remained the test of effect, and in his practical criticism he tended to examine the rhetorical means by which the effect was stimulated. The organic approach, at least as it is used today, tends to eliminate the distinction between tenor and vehicle, the import of a figure and the image by which the import is rendered, but Poe maintained the distinction. He felt himself capable of judging an idea as imaginative even though the symbolic expression of the idea gave little evidence of imaginative power. To Poe a bad poem did not necessarily signify an absence of imagination in the author; it might well indicate a lack of skill that could be demonstrated by rhetorical analysis. This approach was both Poe's weakness and his strength. The weakness stemmed from his employment of rules that prescribed an elevated poetic diction; the strength was manifested by close analysis that offset the tendency, current in his time, to resort to vaporous “appreciations” of the beauties and sub-limities of a work of art. The Coleridgean test, as Poe understood it, would have led him only to an evaluation of the ideas of a poet. A book reviewer, however, had to demonstrate the validity of his judgments if his criticism was to be taken as something other than mere opinion. Accordingly, Poe had to appropriate or invent rules for the detection of imaginative power which could be more easily understood than Coleridge's perplexing statement that the imagination was revealed by “the balance or reconciliation of opposites or discordant qualities,” a test alien to Poe's concept of unity of impression.

One of his first attempts to devise a test for imaginative expression is evident in his review of Bryant. To Poe, opposites could be reconciled in idea alone. The phenomenal separateness of things was always apparent in expression, particularly in the figures of comparison, the metaphor and the simile. However, if one object [page 207:] were described entirely in terms of another — Bryant's maiden as a forest — then separateness would be disguised and unity of impression would be achieved. Such imaginative identification was present in Bryant's “original conception,” Poe claimed, but the poet was not completely successful in expressing his idea. Poe was to continue to wrestle with the problem of devising rules by which he could judge imaginative power in a poem, but he was able to do so to his satisfaction only by eventually dispensing with Coleridge. Four years after his review of Bryant, Poe refuted Coleridge's definition of the imagination on the basis of an interpretation that diverts our attention from his real problem — the enormous difficulty, as it seemed, of reconciling opposites in a composition that was to convey a unified impression.

Poe's review of Bryant was the last important one he wrote as editor of the Messenger, and it was to be three years before he had an opportunity to evaluate by his newly achieved standards in the context of a review. In the meantime he had to support himself as well as he could by free-lance writing. Since there were no other opportunities for an editorial position in Richmond, he left in February of 1837 for New York, then as now the publishing center of the nation. On the face of it, his prospects should have been good, for his name was known throughout the East, and he had even received commendation from some of the New York journals. Yet he had made formidable enemies with his reviews of Theodore Fay and Colonel William L. Stone. Whether these enemies were influential enough to shut editorial doors against him is hard to say,(13) but he did not find work. Probably the panic of 1837 had something to do with his lack of success. Most of the journals had precarious financial backing and ofen [[often]] failed when money was tight. Poe had had some hope of being employed on a religious quarterly, the New York Review, but he wrote only one review for the journal, a nonliterary critique of a travel book.

Besides this review Poe published little in 1837, only the tales “Von Jung, the Mystic” in the American Monthly Magazine and “Siope — A Fable” in a gift book. Two installments of The Narrative [page 208:] of Arthur Gordon Pym had been printed in the January and February numbers of the Messenger, but White, financially hard pressed and still full of hostility toward Poe,(14) had refused to publish the remainder of the novel. Poe's income was meager. Mrs. Clemm, his mother-in-law, was taking in boarders, and from one of them, William Gowans, we learn that Poe was working very hard to complete Pym.(15) But unpublished manuscripts bring in no cash, and finally Poe was forced to leave New York. In the summer of 1838 he took his family to Philadelphia, probably hoping that the City of Brotherly Love would prove more hospitable than Manhattan.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 192:]

1.  See Charvat, American Critical Thought, 86-119, for a description of American journalistic criticism of verse technique during the two decades preceding Poe's review. Poe's concern for diction was similar to that of the rhetoricians, but his metrical theory, sound or unsound, was a daring innovation.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 193:]

2.  Works, IX, 268-395.

3.  Poe consistently denied belief in progress and perfectibility, apparently basing his opinion upon the old concept of a biological hierarchy of forms which exhibited what he called in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” the “laws of gradation.” This is nothing more than the Chain of Being in which each life form was supposed to have its fixed place. Poe appears to have been little affected by the early evolutionary ideas which in the 1830's transformed the chain into a kind of conveyor belt that moved onward and upward. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, 1936), for a definitive discussion of the concept.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 194:]

4.  Poe's metrical system will be discussed in a later chapter in connection with “The Rationale of Verse.” A summary description is given here as an illustration of the criteria he used in the review. His minute discriminations among various phonetic qualities were unprecedented in American criticism.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 196:]

5.  Poe seems to have been unaware that Bryant had argued for the substitution of trisyllabic feet in iambic verse in an article published in the North American Review nearly twenty years earlier (IX [September, 1819], 426-31). Bryant based his argument upon precedent and cited the practice of Shakespeare and Milton. Trisyllabic feet gave a more natural, livelier melody, Bryant contended, but he advanced no metrical “principle” in support.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 197:]

6.  Blair, Lectures, I, 300.

7.  Ibid., 297.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 198:]

8.  Ibid., 302.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 198, running to the bottom of page 199:]

9.  Blair's rules for perspicuity did provide a precedent for this charge. The function of metaphor was “to make intellectual ideas, in some sort, visible to the eye, by giving them colour, and substance, and sensible qualities.” Ibid., 297. The metaphorical “picture” must be accurately delineated, or the idea could not be grasped. There are several other “Blair” rules which Poe occasionally employed for the detection of “unjust comparisons”: 1) All figures should be suited to the nature of the subject. 2) Avoid using “such allusions as raise in the mind disagreeable, mean, vulgar, or dirty ideas.” 3) The resemblance, “which is the foundation of the Metaphor,” should “be clear and perspicuous, not far-fetched, nor difficult to discover.” 4) Care should be taken “never to jumble metaphorical and plain language together.” 5) Avoid making “two different Metaphors meet on one object.” 6) “Avoid crowding them together on the same object.” 7) The metaphor should not be “too far pursued,” for if it is, it becomes an allegory, tires the reader, and makes the discourse “obscure.” Ibid., 300-314.

Blair's rule-of-thumb for testing metaphors was to try to visualize them as pictures: “We should try to form a picture upon them, and consider how the parts would agree, and what sort of figure the whole would present, when delineated with a pencil. By this means, we should become sensible, whether inconsistent circumstances were mixed, and a monstrous image [page 199:] thereby produced ....” Ibid., 311. Poe used these rules too frequently to warrant drawing attention to each instance, but the pictorial test is obvious in the review of Bryant, as well as his use of rules 1, 2, 4, and 5.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 199, running to the bottom of page 200:]

10.  “Expressed” is Archibald Alison's term. According to his associationist theory, each object or scene expressed certain qualities. However, even the [page 200:] “most beautiful scenes of real nature” exhibited a “confusion of expression.” Essays on Taste, 84. It was the duty of the artist to select “only such circumstances as accord with the general expression of the scene to awaken an emotion more full, more simple, and more harmonious than any we can receive from the scenes of nature itself.” Ibid., 85. In painting or in landscape gardening the artist removed from his composition whatever was “hostile to its effects or unsuited to its character.” Poe regularly employed variations of this aesthetic principle as a criterion of unity of effect, but he carried it one step farther than Alison in applying it to a poem. Alison did not require the “identification” Poe demanded as the absolute rhetorical expression of unity of idea. Elsewhere, however, Poe followed Alison by demanding the elimination of elements hostile to the proposed effect. Bryant was also a disciple of Alison in attempting to employ objects with congruent associations in a poem. Thus it is not surprising that Poe found many of Bryant's poems displaying a unity of effect.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 203:]

11.  For Bryant's poetic use of landscape conventions, see Donald A. Ringe, “Kindred Spirits: Bryant and Cole,” American Quarterly, VI (1954), 233-44.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 204:]

12.  Blair's term. “Figures of words” are commonly called tropes and signify words used to mean something other than their strict denotation. A “figure of thought,” however, employs words in their literal meaning, and the figure depends upon the concept or the “turn of the thought.” Lectures, I, 275. A metaphor originates in a concept, an idea of resemblance between two apparently unlike things, and in this respect it is a figure of thought. However, since the actual words of a metaphor are not taken literally, it is a trope, or a figure of words, in its semantic aspect. Ibid., 296. Trying to “idealize” poetry through conceptual images, Poe wanted as nearly as possible to obliterate any obvious difference between the literal and metaphorical meanings. The metaphorical meaning must be there, but, as he was to explain in later reviews, it must be submerged as an “undercurrent” of implication, not blatantly advertised as he thought was the case in most figures of speech.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 207:]

13.  For a discussion of this possibility, see Moss, Poe's Literary Battles, 61.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 208:]

14.  On January 31, White wrote to Beverley Tucker, “I am as sick of his writings, as I am of him ... and am rather more than half inclined to send him up another dozen dollars in the morning, and along with it all his unpublished manuscripts.” Hull, “A Canon,” 173.

15.  Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 267.