is unquestionable as we see it framed, in the story of Ligeia, like "The Haunted Palace" in that of the fated Usher. The skilful interblending of these poems with the doom and mystery of the prose romances, and that of the stanzas, "To One in Paradise," with the drama of a Venetian night in "The Assignation," render it a question whether the three stories, each so powerful in its kind, were not written as a musician might compose sonatas, to develop the utmost value of the lyrical themes. They do this so effectively as to strengthen the statement that Poe's record as a poet goes beyond his verse bequeathed to us. The prose of his romances, at the most intense pitch, seems to feel an insufficiency, and summons music and allegory to supplement its work. Thus, in the origin and evolution of verse written before his thirty-fifth year, we find his natural gift unsophisticated, except in the case of a single lyric, by the deliberate methods which he afterwards and successfully employed. If, now, we consider the spirit of all his work as a poet, it is, in fact, consistent with his theories of poetry in general and of his own in especial, as set forth at the outset, and in time supplemented in "The Poetic Principle" and other essays. His verse is based in truth, as a faithful expression of his most emotional mood to wit, an exquisite melancholy, all the more exquisite because unalloyed by hope. The compensation given certain natures for a sensitive consciousness of mortality and all its ills involved is that of finding the keenest pleasure in the most ruthless pain. Poe, wholly given to "the luxury of woe," made music of his broodings. If he did not cherish his doom, or bring it on determinedly, that which he prized the most was of a less worth to him when not consecrated by the dread, even the certainty, of its impending loss. His themes were regret, the irreparable, the days that are no more. His intellectual view of the definition and aim of poetry has been briefly noted in an Introduction to the Criticism, but may properly be considered again. It was not so much borrowed from, as confirmed by, what he found in his readings of Coleridge, Mill, and others, who have discoursed upon imagination, emotion, melody, as servitors of the poet and his art. We have his early generalizations upon the province of song. Not truth, but pleasure, he thought to be its object. The pleasure depended upon the quality of lyrical expression, and must be subtile-not obviously defined. Music, he said, is its essential quality, "since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception." To this it may be rejoined that the hearer's definiteness of comprehension depends largely upon his knowledge of music, both as a science and as an art. On the other hand, many who are sensitive to musical expression will accord with Poe's maturer avowal that "it is in music that the soul most nearly attains the supernal end for which it struggles.' From the first he was impatient of "metaphysical" verse and of its practitioners. Many years later, he laid stress on his belief "that a long poem does not exist." This statement had been made by others, but seemed to him a necessary inference from any definition of poetry as the voice of emotion; moreover, it tallied with a sense of his own capacity for sustaining an emotional tide, whether of influx or outflow. In Mr. Lang's comment, the point is made that this theory or paradox "shrinks into the com monplace observation that Poe preferred lyric poetry, and that lyrics are essentially brief." Short poems, in lyrical measures, were in truth the only ones in which he did anything out of the common. Thus he restricts an art to the confines of his own genius, and might as well forbid a musician to compose a symphony or other extended masterpiece. We say "the musician," because music is that other art which, like poetry, operates through successive movements, having as a special function prolongation in time. As for this, all Poe's work shows him as a melodist rather than a harmonist; his ear is more analytic than synthetic, and so is his intellect, except in the structural logic of his briefer forms of poetry and prose narrative. The question turns on the capacity for sustained exaltation on the part of poet or musician, reader or listener. With respect to Poe's lifelong abjuration of "the didactic," honor is due his memory; none attacked its abuse so consistently, and at a time so opportune. Declaring poetry to be the child of taste, he arrives at his clear-cut formula that it is "The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty." If in his analysis of this, the rhythm of human language being implied, — he had made his last word sufficiently inclusive, the definition would be excellent. But he confines the meaning of "beauty" to æsthetics, and to the one form of sensibility which he terms "supernal," that of ecstatic sadness and regret. -- In the end, continuing from the general to the particular, he still further limited his supernal beauty to the expression of a single motive, by reasoning toward a theme that must be its highest excitant. This he did most fully in the "Philosophy of Composition," with "The Raven" for a paradigm. Since, he argued, the extreme note of beauty is sadness, caused by the tragedy of life and our powerlessness to grasp its meaning or avail against it, the tone of beauty must relate to the irreparable, and its genesis to a supremely pathetic event. The beauty of woman is incomparable, the death of a beloved and beautiful woman the supreme loss and "the most poetical topic in the world." Upon it he would lavish his impassioned music, heightening its effects by every metrical device, and by contrast with something of the quaint and grotesque - as the loveliness and glory of a medieval structure are intensified by gargoyles, and by weird discordant tracery here and there. The greater portion of Poe's verse accords with his theory at large. Several of the later poems illustrate it in general and particular. "The Raven" bears out his ex post facto analysis to the smallest detail. We have the note of hopelessness, the brooding regret, the artistic value supported by richly romantic properties in keeping; the occasion follows the death of a woman beautiful and beloved; the sinister bird is an emblem of the irreparable, and its voice the sombre "Nevermore." Finally, the melody of this strange poem is that of a vocal dead-march, and so compulsive with its peculiar measure, its refrain and repetends, that in the end even the more critical yielded to its quaintness and fantasy, and accorded it a lasting place in literature. No other modern lyric is better known; none has been more widely translated into foreign tongues or made the subject of more comment. While it cannot be pronounced its author's most poetic composition, nor render him a "poet's poet," it still is the lyric most associated with his name. His seemingly whimsical account of its formation most likely is both true and false. Probably the conception and rough cast of the piece were spontaneous, and the author, then at his prime both as a poet and a critic, saw how it best might be perfected, and finished it somewhat after the method stated in his essay. The analysis will enable no one to supersede imagination by artifice. It may be that Poe never would have written it that he would have obeyed the workman's instinct to respect the secrecy of art, lest the voluntary exposure of his Muse should be avenged by her had he not ruminated upon the account given him by Dickens, of the manner in which Godwin wrote "Caleb Williams," namely: that he wrote it "backwards." He "first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what he had done." -- Poe's faculties as a poet being evidently in full vigor when he composed "The Raven," its instant success well might have inclined him to renew their exercise. He did produce a few more lyrics, of which two "The Bells" and "Annabel Lee" are almost equally well known, and they were written in the last year of his life, the time in which he was least equal to extended work. If his career had gone on, and he had continued, even at long intervals, to write pieces so distinctive, there would now be small contention as to his rank as an American poet. Apparently he never even attempted to compose unless some strain possessed him in that mysterious fashion known to poets and melodists alone; and this most likely at the abnormal physical and mental crises that recur throughout periods of suffering and demoralization. |