Edgar Allan Poe: The Artist of the beautiful

American Poetry Review, The, Nov 1995 by Hoffman, Daniel

Poe's reasoning, or, as he called that faculty, his ratiocinative mind, represents one aspect of his sensibility--the opposite, as it were, of his Romanticism with its emphasis on both the exploration of extreme psychological states of terror and guilt, and the transcendence of such emotions inideality. Poe takes certain aspects of the Romantic movement to their limits--his tales of terror and poems of being haunted by lost loves probe and dramatise these states of feeling with a specificity and depth beyond their appearances in the poems of Coleridge or such Gothic novels as The Castle of Otranto. At the same time, Poe inherits the Enlightenment's rage for order, for systematization. His psyche is deeply divided; he adopts the eighteenth century's facultative psychology, separating intellect, emotion, and moral sense. In his critical writings he proclaims that poetry must deal only with Beauty, not with Truth or Virtue, the subjects fit for prose. Thus he fixes, as with an exclusionary lens, upon only one side of Coleridge's aesthetic, and debars from poetry almost all the materia poetica as the rest of the world apprehends it.

Despite, or because of, these divisions in his mind and psyche, Poe at the same time is driven by a need to unify all that his philosophy proclaims is divided. In his tales of detection and the best of his critical essays and reviews his mind quite brilliantly analyzes and constructs an intellectually comprehensible order. His criticism was the first in America rigorously devoted to enforcing literary standards.

Two brief lyrics define the poet's fate and his role. "Alone," inscribed in the album of a woman friend but not collected by Poe or published until 1875, twenty-six years after his death, described the poet's sense of his separation from mankind. "From childhood's hour I have not been/As others were," nor has he "seen/as others saw."

I could not bring

My passion from a common spring-

And all I lov'd--I lov'd alone-

Then--in my childhood--in the dawn

Of a most stormy life--was drawn

From every depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still-

From the torrent, or the fountain-

From the red cliff of the mountain-

From the thunder and the storm

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view-

This demon is the spirit compelling the poet to write down his vision. It will be seen that the particulars of nature enumerated here are listed only to be disregarded; his demon will compel him to obliterate the tactile world.

Like Poe's sonnet "To Science," his poem "Romance" was prefaced to "Al Aaraaf." This lyric also dwells on his fated childhood, in which "Romance, who loves to nod and sing/With drowsy head and folded wing" taught the poet his alphabet and earliest word. Romance appears to him "a painted paroquet"--this spirit of poetry is itself an image, not a real speaking bird. As in "To Science," the poet is menaced by a rival bird, "eternal Condor years" that "So shake the very Heaven on high/With tumult" that he has "no time for idle cares." Yet, although when a calmer hour invites him "with lyre and rhyme/To while away" his time in "forbidden things," his heart would feel it "to be a crime/Unless it trembled with the strings." Here the poet's heart is transfigured as an Aeolian harp, an image Poe will use again in "Israfel."