Text: Eric Carlson, “New Introduction,” Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Frederick Clarke Prescott, New York: Gordian Press, 1981, pp. viii-xxiii

[page vii:]

Every student of Poe will welcome this reprint edition, there being no other one-volume selection of Poe's criticism in print or in prospect for the near future. Both in its generous selection and in its editorial guidance, this anthology far surpasses the now out-of-print Selections from Poe's Literary Criticism, ed. John Brooks Moore (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co, 1926) xix; 199 pp.) and Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Robert L. Hough (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, xxviii, 155 pp.), though each has its special value. Prescott's edition is distinguished also by its long, excellent introduction, the many excerpts quoted therein, and the scholarly Notes. The Notes are particularly helpful: in addition to the customary source notes are definitions, emendations, and cross references, including some to the Harrison and the Stedman-Woodberry editions. Prescott, moreover, cites and freely quotes from the writings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Shelley, Longfellow, the Schlegels, and others, thus placing Poe in the context of some of the Romantics most influential on his thinking and writing. Finally, the reader will be pleasantly surprised to discover unsuspected riches under the general titles “Marginalia” and “Detached Passages” (a miscellany of review excerpts), which appear without any interpretative topical headings.

“What, then, is the value of Poe's criticism?” This question posed by Professor Prescott remains a challenge and deserves an answer that reflects the thinking of the past seventy years. No one will quarrel today with Prescott's [page viii:] modest claims that Poe's criticism is part of our literary history; that his theory of poetry and fiction has more thana passing value; and that it “may have a relative value in connection with his own original work.” With Andrew Lang, whom he cites, Prescott believed that Poe's aesthetic theory was consistent with his imaginative writings, the latter a product of the former. Only occasionally has this view been questioned, and then chiefly on technical grounds — with reference, for example, to whether Poe's poetry exemplifies his views on meter and rhyme. As the selections in this volume are about evenly divided between theoretical and practical criticism, it is possible to study the relations of these in both directions, with an eye, however, to chronology. The chronological arrangement also encourages a developmental approach and interest.

For most readers the primary question undoubtedly is how much light Poe's criticism throws on his tales and poems. Apart from the Marginalia and the Detached Passages, nine of the thirteen main selections treat poetry; by comparison, Poe had less to say directly about fiction and drama, though that less is not insignificant. From 1831, when “Letter to B — ” appeared, until his late lecture, “The Poetic Principle,” he thought long and hard about the nature and function of poetry. As so well summarized by Prescott in part IV of his introduction, Poe distinguished true poetry from humorous verse, satiric verse, and verse drama; from “truth” as fact, statement, or moralizing; from “passion” or raw feeling, though he allowed transmuted feeling (cf. Wordsworth's “emotion recollected in tranquillity”). He defined the two fundamentals of poetry: (1) “poetic sentiment” as sensibility and inspiration; (2) artistic skill as the power of expression or craftsmanship. He distinguished fancy from imagination, the latter being synonymous with invention, novelty, and originality, but professed to disagree with Coleridge by claiming all creative imaginative acts to be “novel combinations” of known elements. Through a “chemical combination,” or imaginative reaction, [page ix:] those elements are transformed into a new substance, a new realization. This process, he noted in “Letter to B — ,” took the form of intuitive insight, likened to seeing a star with half-closed eye or to viewing a painting with “the cursory glance of the connoisseur,” that is, with the immediate intuitive certainty of the trained expert. Also significant are Poe's attack on didacticism (the “Heresy of the Lake School”) and the concluding definition of poetry, with its emphasis on “music” as providing the essential “indefinite” quality of true poetry.

The review of Drake's “The Culprit Fay” (1836) introduces Poe's objections to literary chauvinism, a concern which led to a more mature view of literary nationalism in “Exordium” (1842). The descriptions of the poetic sentiment as a radiant Paradise and of Ideality as the sense of the beautiful, the sublime, the mystical (the Beauty of Earth and of Heaven) suggest the strong link in Poe's mind between poetry and the Neoplatonic, Transcendental conception of Beauty. The creative poet, however, must also have the power of stimulating the poetic sentiment in others through the “organs of Causality and Comparison,” making the “poem as means” subject to rational control.

In January of the next year, the review of Bryant's Poems appeared. Of the half dozen poems considered, “The Ages” is chiefly critized [[criticized]] for being defective in its meter according to the theory of “equalization,” which Poe later developed into a long essay, “The Rationale of Verse.” At this time, Poe made no reference to Bryant's essays on trisyllabic verse, essays which had helped establish Bryant as the country's foremost prosodist; but in his September 1834 critique of Halleck (Works 11:190-204) Poe revived the argument by rejecting Bryant's sensible position on “roughness” and “discords” as forms of variation.

The next review, of Moore's “Alciphron,” is one of the most important in the entire Poe critical canon. Fancy and imagination are differentiated in the manner of Coleridge, whose Biographia Literaria Poe as well as Emerson had [page x:] read with the highest admiration. The term “mystic,” a borrowing from the Schlegels, is introduced to mean an “under or suggestive” current of meaning: “the moral of any sentiment is its mystic or secondary expression. It has the vast force of an accompaniment in music. This vivifies the air; that spiritualizes the fanciful conception, and lifts into the ideal.” Examples follow in the next paragraph (59). Then the analogy to music continues: “With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august and soul-exalting echo. In every glimpse of beauty presented, we catch, through long and wild vistas, dim bewildering visions of a far more ethereal beauty beyond.” A final allusion, to “the according tones of the accompaniment,” completes the analogy to music as a way of describing the impressionistic effect made possible by the musical elements in poetry. This description is not only central to Poe's conception of poetry but also indicative of the essentially incantatory nature of his own best poems — ‘To Helen,” “The City and the Sea,” “Ulalume,” “For Annie,” “Eldorado” — resonant as they are with tonal, emotive, and thematic overtones. In several of the miscellaneous passages — on Tennyson (308-10), song-writing (295-99), and the older English poetry (308-10) — it is to this tonal impressionism that Poe attributes the “power” of lyric poetry and song.

The essay on Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems (1842), also recognized as a landmark in American criticism, represents a decided advance over the earlier brief but caustic review of Hyperion: A Romance (1839) and the critique of Voices of the Night (1840), marred by the concluding charge of plagiarism. Objecting to Longfellow's tendency to inculcate a moral, Poe defines poetry as the expression of man's unquenchable “thirst for supernal BEAUTY.” Two paragraphs beginning “Dividing the world of mind” (75) not only reinforce the distinction between “truth” and “beauty” in poetry but also define the tripartite self in terms of pure intellect, taste, and moral [page xi:] sense. These paragraphs are fundamental to any understanding of Poe's epistemology, his faith in intuitive insight, and the symbolism of his moral allegories, his poems and tales of psychic conflict. Poesy, Poe writes, is “not forbidden to moralise — in her fashion. She is not forbidden to depict — but to reason and preach of virtue,” later adding that “a didactic moral might be happily made the undercurrent of a poetical theme” and labeling the error of didacticism as “essentially German.” Beauty may be heightened into the sublime by forms of physical loveliness or by terror — the latter one of the few allusions in Poe's criticism to the function of terror in his work.

In “The Poetic Principle,” his final and most developed essay on poetry, Poe borrows heavily from the 1842 review. Yet here he speaks with a new assurance on a series of related topics: the epic or long poem as an artistic anomaly, judged by “the effect it produces”; the unduly brief poem as lacking a sustained cumulative effect (“the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax”); the heresy of the Didactic; “the world of mind”; music in poetry; beauty as the “pleasurable elevation, or excitement, of the soul.” Here the passage on man's immortal instinct and unquenchable thirst for the Beauty above ends with the sad realization of “our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.” And, he added near the end, it is through the sensuous beauties in nature and in woman that the poet nourishes his soul. As these beauties enable the poet to glimpse a vision of the supernal, so the poem itself stimulates the appreciator to experience, in some measure, the poet's trance-like ecstasy. Is this experience simply an experience, a psychic response that is only felt, with no transferable meaning, no undercurrent of meaning? Jacobs, (p. 442). Robert Jacobs further maintains that by 1845 Poe's “ideal” Beauty or Love could be realized only through music and lyric poetry. [page xii:]

The Marginalia essay on “psychal fancies” (275-78) is of first importance as a point of reference for the meaning of “brief, indeterminate glimpses,” “dim, bewildering visions,” “elevating excitement of the soul,” etc. Not only does it clarify the term “psychal,” which Poe coined, but also “supernal beauty.” Indeed, it opens up a whole network of connections — forward to “The Poetic Principle,” “Ulalume,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” and Eureka, and backward to “ligeia,”“ ”Mesmeric Revelation,” and the colloquies.

In the passages quoted so far, along with others yet to come, the recurrence-in-context of certain terms suggests their special significance in the criticism: idea, ideal,* mystic, sublime, supernal, ethereal, spiritual, spirit, soul, vision, visionary, dream, sleep, sleep-waking, moral, moral energy, moral sentiment, vitality, Ideality, nature, natural, intense, intensity, fancy, fanciful, beautiful, imaginative, imitative, fantasy, wild,* sentiment, poetic sentiment, force, elevation, elevated, identity, truth, passion, original, originality, simplicity, harmony, effect, unity or totality of effect,* transcendental, psychal, dim, shadowy, indeterminate glimpses, nature, natural, artificial,* inartificial,* affectation,* hypochondriac,* capability,* indefinite,* vague, metaphysical, indefinitiveness, picturesque, arabesque, grotesque, grotesquerie, bizarre, bizarrerie, point, quaint, impression, totality of impression (those marked * were discussed by Robert Jacobs in a lecture on Poe's critical vocabulary. See also J. Lasley Dameron and Louis C. Stagg, An Index to Poe's Critical Vocabulary, 1966). Many of these are also part of Poe's metaphoric or symbolic vocabulary in the poems, tales, colloquies, and allegories, in which, by repetition, Poe turns certain other words, phrases, and images into motifs or partial symbols — words such as eye, hand, voice, low voice, hair, angelic, holy, “born again,” will, divine. \n the criticism and the imaginative writings, these vocabularies function as a kind of artistic-critical inter-textual fabric or frame of reference. [page xiii:] The “figures in the carpet” of Poe's writings have yet to be fully studied out, especially the subtle patterns weaving in and out of the symbolic gothic stories. (Poe's use of the term and the image of the arabesque has been analyzed by David Ketterer in The Rationale of Deception in Poe, 1979, actually less for “deception” than for artistic indirection in Poe's visionary quest. See also my “Poe's Vision of Man” in Papers on Poe, ed. R. P. Veller, 1972.) “The Philosophy of Composition” has been called “one of the most masterly examples of literary criticism in the language.” Certainly, if measured by its impact on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valery, Par Lagerkvist, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Gottfried Benn, among many others, it is Poe's most influential essay. Regardless of whether it is “a hoax, or a piece of self-deception, or a more or less accurate record,” T.S. Eliot notes, it led Valery to ask “What am I doing when I write a poem?” Thus Poe's essay acquired “capital importance” for Eliot, as did Poe's work as a whole when seen through the eyes of the three French writers. (T. S. Eliot, “From Poe to Valery,” Hudson Review, Autumn 1949, reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. E.W. Carlson, 1966. See also “E.A. Poe and the Aesthetics of Work” in Carl Fehrman, Poetic Creation: Inspiration or Craft, 1980.)

In describing Poe's qualifications as a critic (xli-xvi), Prescott states that Poe was endowed with both the analytical faculty and the poetic gift, that for him criticism and poetry were one. As demonstrated in this introduction also, the creative process to Poe depended on conscious artistry and control as well as sensibility.and intuitive insight. When the vulgar theory of romantic inspiration degenerated intoa distrust of rational controls, Poe sought to correct the bias or imbalance by extolling disciplined craftsmanship. Unfortunately, he claimed to have reduced the whole process to “the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” In reality, Poe the polemicist and analyst was not able to suppress Poe the intuitive poet. For example, [page xiv:] when he insists that the poem be neither too long nor too short, so that it “intensely excites, by elevating, the soul” and such excitements must, of “psychal necessity,” be brief, one wonders how the composing poet realizes this psychal intensity while in a state of cool calculation. Similarly, with his choices of a preconceived effect, of a sad tone, a refrain, and a theme — all seem to be of unconscious origin rather than of any “unquestionably” right conscious decision, the adverb begging the question, in any event.

In “The Rationale of Verse” Poe set forth another problematic theory, this time of versification. Because of its length (167-228), its thesis, and the opposite reactions it has engendered, it deserves more than passing comment. Although Prescott merely quotes the views of Stedman and Woodberry in his introduction (ix), his Notes (337-40) are excellent. Still standard as a critique is the chapter on Poe in Gay Wilson Allen's American Prosody. The most scholarly edition by far, complete with textual and critical notes, and cognate documents, is J. Arthur Greenwood's (Princeton: Wolfhart Book Co., 1968). Richard A. Rand, another student of the literature on prosody, in French and Spanish as well as English, has found that Poe's radical system (along with his verse) 1s “a real thorn in the side of Continental and Anglo-American Formalism and Structuralism.”

In his review of Bryant's Poems in January 1837, and in his call for a “Prosody Raisonnée” (279), Poe already had conceived his theory of “equalization,” although in the review he vacillated between “heresies” and desirable “deviations from the strict rules of prosodial art.” Now, in simplifying metrics to a metronomic five-foot line, each foot of equal duration, he attempts to naturalize and rationalize the form of verse (as line) on the basis of quantity rather than stress. Not denying the presence of the “accentual,” to a degree, he proposes a quantitative definition of meter within the “flow” of the line, as in music, so that each foot is equal in duration. Therefore, there can be no legitimate trisyllabic feet except as two short syllables (with one long) [page xv:] may be equivalent in time to the one short syllable in an iambic foot; such a foot would be a “bastard” iamb and its reverse a “quick” trochee. In verse, “an inferior or less capable Music, there is, happily, little chance for complexity” (178). In other words, through the incantatory effect of monotone, as in a refrain, “slightly varying the phrase at each repetition,” a cumulative expressionism is achieved in the successive waves of distended sound. In his Marginalia essay on Tennyson (262-64, December 1844), Poe defined the suggestiveness of “the true music” in poetry: “a suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning with the view of bringing about a definitiveness of vague and therefore of spiritual effect ... ” Suggestiveness, of course, became a fundamental tenet of the American transcendental aesthetic as expounded by Emerson and Whitman, and exemplified by Emerson's artistic essays, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Thoreau's Walden, and the fiction of Hawthorne and Melville. It became the key concept also of French Symbolist poetics derived from Poe's Ideal Beauty, undertones of meaning (les symboles suggesting les correspondances), indefiniteness (la poésie pure), musical evocativeness (la magie verbale), etc. (See Krishna Rayan, “Edgar Allan Poe and ‘Suggestiveness” British Journal of Aesthetics 9 (1969), 73-79. See also Prescott's note, p. 342, on 236:22. The best analysis is the long chapter on Poe's theory and poetry of the Vague in The Theory and Practice of the Vague: A Study in a Mode of Nineteenth Century Lyric Poetry by Joseph B. Cary, Jr. Ph. D. dissertation, New York University, 1962. Cary relates Poe's “poetic mesmerism” of “pure” sound, metrical regularity, echo effects, monotone, and smoothness of flow to the Bergsonian concept of consciousness as “a flux of fleeting shadows merging into each other.”)

The essay on Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842), praised by Tate as a brilliant statement of the necessity of organic unity in fiction, is here supplemented by passages on “intended effect” (320), “totality of effect” (312), “totality of beauty” (311), allegory) (318), the qualities of a good [page xvi:] plot (306, 310, 311, 320), Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (313), and Poe's own Tales (1845). At a time when criticism of fiction was in its infancy, Poe has some good things to say about the novel and especially the tale in the six volumes of book reviews (Harrison edition), the volume of sketches (Autography and Literati), the Marginalia, and an occasional letter. Poe's Art of Fiction has yet to be assembled from this mass of material, rich with insights on plot, verisimilitude, unity, originality, character, tone, and style.

In his introduction and notes (xlvi-l, 331-32) Prescott offers a cogent summary and comment on this essay. The tale of effect is governed by the same artistic impressionism, the same empirical psychology, as operates in the poem. As a source of unity, plot is secondary and “intended effect” primary, the unity of effect being an “immense force derivable from totality.” The “exaltation of the soul cannot be long sustained”; yet “there must be dropping of the water upon the rock.” In both poem and tale, intense imaginative consciousness is the mode for glimpsing the supernal (319).

After quoting Poe's famous definition of the tale (xlix; 94-95; cf. 310), Prescott surmises that the method of composition, “strikingly similar” to the method elaborated in “The Philosophy of Composition,” probably describes Poe's writing of his own tales. Both essays in method undoubtedly represent “the subsequent analysis of a mental process more or less unconscious and indeliberate” (Prescott, introduction, p. 1) On the face of it, Poe s wording implies a reductionist rational or technical theory of art in that the deliberately preconceived effect is developed by invented and combined incidents until “a picture is at length painted ... ” In the quoted phrase, however, there is at least a mild suggestion of an organic view, of an unfolding effect — of the picture in the process of becoming. Furthermore, if the “effect” is modal or emotional rather than preconceivedly thematic, then the story may not be wholly predetermined in meaning or in final formal structure. In contrast to his own “romantic expressionism” (Tate's term), Poe [page xvii:] complains that Hawthorne's tales (of 1837) lacked variety of tone and subject, and in his 1847 review he deplores Hawthorne's dependence on allegory. On the other hand, from his comments on “Wakefield” and “The Minister's Black Veil,” it seems that Poe badly misread some of Hawthorne's tales.

In 1847, after the publication of Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), Poe again reviewed Hawthorne's tale-writing. Except for the four paragraphs on “the tale proper,” essentially unchanged from the 1842 essay, this critique takes another look at Hawthorne. After an account of Hawthorne's lack of public recognition, it presents a new argument for “legitimate originality” as distinguished from “absolute novelty of combination.” Then comes this definition:

By contrast, Poe contends, Hawthorne's allegorical strain “completely overwhelms the greater number of his subjects,” unlike the allegory that is “properly handled, judiciously subdued, seen only as a shadow or by suggestive glimpses ...” Therefore, Hawthorne is “peculiar and not original,” with a fondness for allegory and the mystical that is traceable to the influences of New England transcendentalism. Today, most students of Hawthorne, far from deploring “the mysticism of his Goodman Browns and White Old Maids,” find the best tales rich with subtle subliminal and moral allusiveness.

Poe's criticism of the novel is here represented by only three review passages on Bulwer-Lytton's Night and Morning (312), Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (313), and plot in Godwin and Bulwer (320). A careful study of Poe's views [page xviii:] of the novel as a genre would require a close reading of the review essays in the Harrison edition, among them these: Theodore Fay's Norman Leslie, Baron de la Motte Fouqué's Undine, Bulwer-Lytton's Night and Morning, Rienzi, and The Last Days of Pompeii, Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie and The Linwoods, Beverly Tucker's George Balcombe, Cooper's Wyandotté, Robert Bird's Calavar, Sheppard Lee, and The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow, Simms The Partisan and The Damsel of Darien, and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn and Horse-Shoe Robinson. There are also reviews of sketches by Dickens, Washington Irving, and A.B. Longstreet. Beginning with mildly critical appraisals, Poe sometimes descends to personalities (his so-called “tomahawk” criticism), though even in his devastating piece on Fay's Norman Leslie, he also offers a brilliant analysis of Fay's usage. From 1839 to 1842 he weighs the novel for its appeal to a wide, popular audience as well as to the few who appreciate “totality of beauty.” He concerns himself with “true construction,” achieved by determining first the effect, then the cause (as in his theory of the tale), perfection of plot (not merely “involution of circumstance” or incident), coincidence, character, originality, verisimilitude, tone, diction, metaphor, style, allegory, and grammar. Usually, he supports his judgments, especially if negative, with analysis, specific examples, and comparative estimates. Like Emerson, he favors a clear, functional style over fancy rhetoric, and the novel of character over the novel of intrigue and costume. Unlike present-day writers, he believed in “the commenting power” of the author as the primary source of unity.

Poe's criticism of the drama is represented very generously by the short pieces on Shakespeare's Hamlet (316), the Greek drama (286), and the 42-page essay onthe American drama. In his 1839 review of Willis's Tortesa, the Usurer Poe charted new ground by taking this literary form seriously and by analyzing technique, incident, character, [page xix:] and language. Poe's reviews of Broadway plays distinguished the theatrical from the dramatic, the conventional from the inventive, the actable play from the closet drama, the plays of character from the plays of intrigue. As a magazinist in touch with the trends of his times, he sensed the need for a new American form based on a new grasp of “the capabilities of the drama” and on a shift in the creative process that would discipline Feeling and Taste with Reason and Common Sense. His call for a guiding “Natural Art” of the drama was tantamount to a plea for a rationale, a principled generic criticism.

In “The American Drama” (1845) Poe's critique of Tortesa, after an extended plot synopsis, emphasizes Willis's excessive use of intrigue and underplots, judged by the standard of organic plot. This play is also found deficient in its undeveloped characters, its improbabilities, overuse of asides, and trite conclusion. Only in his final paragraph does he mention its “capital points” and warmly praise its author. Next, Poe analyzes Longfellow's The Spanish Student as being weak in its denouement, its poetry, and its claims to originality. An unsparing summary of the author's “utter and radical want of the adapting or constructive power” is followed by a striking series of examples of stock incidents. Among other defects, four examples of bad grammar are cited, on two of which Poe's reasoning is erroneous. In conclusion, Poe finds meritorious only the poetic passages, and objects to the hybrid character of the play: “Let a poem be a poem only; let a play be a play and nothing more.” (For Poe's knowledge and criticism of the drama, see Robert Jacobs, 377-87, and N. Bryllion Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe (Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 1949), ch. III.)

“Exordium” (1842) is Poe's best statement on the nature and function of criticism as a genre. Published at mid-career, it was preceded and followed by other statements, satires, and miscellaneous commentaries on the critical function and the low quality of criticism at the time. A few [page xx:] of his commentaries touch on the nature of plagiarism (269), the need for negative criticism (271), the difference between analyzing and enjoying a work of art (306), and “totality of beauty” for the few (311). It was a time when criticism was still a vague field of thought, despite the new ground charted by the Scottish, French, German, and British aesthetic philosophers, Coleridge in particular. To criticize a literary work, Poe held, is to analyze it not for its opinion, as in an essay or philosophical speculation, but for its “mode” or vehicle of expression of those opinions. A true “review” requires an analysis — “a deliberate perusal, with notes, and subsequent generalization,” not merely “the cant of generality.” In his review of Longfellow's Ballads, also 1842, Poe maintained that “every work of art should contain within itself all that is requisite for its own comprehension.” Because of this emphasis on the “poem per se” and on the analysis of the object of art, Poe has been hailed as “First of the New Critics” by George Snell (Quarterly Review of Literature, I1, 330-40).

The earlier “Prospectus for the Penn Magazine” (1840) proclaimed the need for “an absolutely independent criticism” guided only by “the purest rules of Art,” in contrast to the personal bias and cant of the literary coteries. The mutual puffing of books by editors and reviewers led Poe to praise L.A. Wilmer for “The Quacks of Helicon” (1841), a satiric exposé of the corrupt, clique-ridden system that created and destroyed reputations. In “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” (1844), Poe offered his own parody of the quackery and collusion within the literary establishment. And in “The Literati” (1846) he characterized the most popular writers as charlatans and toadies who pestered editors until they received favorable notices totally at odds with private, honest opinions of their work. Sidney Moss, in Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu (1963), describes the long war that Poe waged so militantly in defense of traditional critical standards. He developed “critical principles and practices that, [page xxi:] for America, were unprecedented and brilliant — brilliant enough for him to be called our first great critic” (246). In the process, however, because the hucksters of commercialized journalism were then in the ascendant and made Poe the prime target of their venom and the most scurrilous of personal ridicule, they succeeded in inflicting upon him the loss of prestige, employment, and income until he was virtually hounded out of the profession.

As a “magazinist,” Poe of course worked as editor, reviewer, critic, and fiction writer for the American weeklies. Under the title “Magazine-Writing — Peter Snook,” he praised “the true Magazine spirit” and predicted that magazine literature would become “the most influential of all departments of Letters.” One of his Marginalia for December 1846 draws a sharp distinction between the Magazine Literature of America and that of the British Quarterly Reviews, the latter described as stilted, verbose, ponderous, inaccessible, and of interest to the few only, whereas the magazines satisfy the need for “the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused.” As with “the tale of effect” and the poetry of “spiritual effect,” here Poe is quick to sense the emergence of a new form and style. That he was also conscious of it as an American essay style serving a new audience need underscores the functional test by which he rejected the conventional rhetoric of the British quarterlies. The clarity and incisiveness of Poe's own nonfiction prose brought forth from Edmund Wilson and William Carlos Williams the tributes quoted at the beginning of this introduction. Since Sidney Moss's 1963 account of Poe as critic in the context of this milieu, several other studies have appeared that recognize the influence of the journalistic experience on Poe: Edd Winfield Parks, Edgar Allan Poe as Literary Critic (1964); Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (1969); Robert D. Jacobs, Poe: Journalist and Critic (1969); Stuart Levine, Edgar Poe: Seer and Craftsman (1972); Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Major Crisis: His Libel Suit and New York's Literary World (1970); [page xxii:] Roger Forclaz, Le Monde d’Edgar Poe (Berne, 1974); Claude Richard, Edgar Allan Poe: Journaliste et Critique (Paris, 1978).

It is a mistake, however, to conclude that Poe's imaginative writing also is essentially journalistic or magazinist in purpose and quality. When Poe warned against “the dogma that no work of fiction can fully suit, at the same time, the critical and the popular taste,” he was reviewing Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, the vast popularity of which he attributed to the author's application of “certain well-understood critical propositions.” Neither popularity nor sales success could be an adequate test of literary value. The distinction clearly reflects Poe's awareness of different kinds of audience response and different levels of meaning as consciously or subconsciously “intended.” All the evidence points to the fact that in his poems and tales, as well as in his criticism, “Poe ‘is “not simply literalist or Gothicist: “Romantic” or German “Romantic Ironist,” “Rationalist” or “Demonist,” “Idealist” or “Absurdist.” No one of these labels or narrow approaches can account for the variety, complexity, and depth, or the symbolic, psychological, and moral dimensions of his imaginative writings. In fact, the reader of this introduction may have noted that, in Poe's aesthetic, elements not only of the classical and romantic, but of the modern as well, are generously represented. His anticipation of a modern, truly creative artistic function has yet to be adequately defined in terms of such elements as the impressionistic use of image, sound, tone, and rhythm, both in the poems and the tales; the organic “unity of effect” or “harmony of elements” in a work of art; the theory of the Vague (“indefinitiveness,” “suggestiveness”); motif, symbol, and “subdued” allegory as figures in the carpet; the subconscious or intuitive origin of creative ideas; the aesthetic experience as an intense imaginative realization; psychic conflict as a consequence of disintegration within the individual and within society (see “The Colloquy of Monos and Una”); the mediating function of “Taste” or “poetic intellect” [page xxiii:] in the “world of mind”; the “moral” or volitional self as crucial to the process of individuation, to the search for the “soul,” the reintegrated, primal self; cognitive and moral values as “undercurrents” in poetry and fiction; psychal transcendentalism as a visionary experience; the individual's relation to the organic Whole, “identity with God,” with “the universal Ens,” “the Divine Will.” These are some of the significant emphases that link Poe's writings, critical and imaginative, to authentic modernism in literature, art, and philosophy.

Prescott's conclusion that “his criticism adds something which none but Poe could have added ... ” seems overmodest in the light of the remarkable consistency, continuity, psychological insight, and philosophic perspective that distinguish the critical writings. Both Poe and Emerson, more than any of their contemporaries, tried to define an aesthetic consonant with the American experience, with the universally human, and with “the general intention of Nature.” For them, an honest, principled criticism would help assure the future of democracy and the arts.

Eric W Carlson

November 4, 1980

[page vi:]

Mr. Poe is at once the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America.

— James Russell Lowell, 1845

[Poe was] the finest of fine artists ... He was the greatest journalistic critic of his time, placing good European work at sight when the European critics were waiting for somebody to tell them what to say.

— George Bernard Shaw, 1909

His literary articles and lectures, in fact, ... surely constitute the most remarkable body of criticism ever produced in the United States ... His prose is as taut as in his stories, but it has cast off the imagery of his fiction to become simply sharp and precise: our only first-rate classical prose of this period.

— Edmund Wilson, 1942

The aspect of his critical statements as a whole, from their hundred American titles to the inmost structure of his sentences, is that of a single gesture, not avoiding the trivial, to sweep all worthless chaff aside. It is a movement first and last to clear the GROUND ...

His concern, the apex of his immaculate attack, was to detach a “method” from the smear of common usage — it is the work of nine tenths of his criticism. He struck to lay low the “niaiseries” of form and content with which his world abounded. It was a machine-gun fire; even

in the slaughter of banality he rises to a merciless distinction ...

— William Carlos Williams, 1925

He was the first committed, and perhaps still the greatest, American literary journalist on the high French model: a critical tradition represented today by Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley ... Poe's aesthetic theory has not been over-rated. ...

— Allen Tate, 1968