The Portable Edgar Allan Poe

by Edgar Allan Poe

  I suppose you have seen that affair—the “Fable for Critics” I mean. Miss Fuller, that detestable old maid—told him, once, that he was “so wretched a poet as to be disgusting even to his best friends”. This set him off at a tangent and he has never been quite right since:—so he took to writing satire against mankind in general, with Margaret Fuller and her protégé, Cornelius Matthews, in particular. It is miserably weak upon the whole, but has one or two good, but by no means original, things—Oh, there is “nothing new under the sun” & Solomon is right—for once. I sent a review of the “Fable” to the “S. L. Messenger” a day or two ago, and I only hope Thompson will print it. Lowell is a ranting abolitionist and deserves a good using up. It is a pity that he is a poet.—I have not seen your paper yet, and hope you will mail me one—regularly if you can spare it. I will send you something whenever I get a chance.—[With your co-editor, Mr (unreadable) I am not acquainted personally but he is well known to me by reputation. Eames, I think, was talking to me about him in Washington once, and spoke very highly of him in many respects—so upon the whole you are in luck]—The rock on which most new enter-prizes, in the paper way, split, is namby-pamby-ism. It never did do & never will. No yea-nay journal ever succeeded.—but I know there is little danger of your making the Chronicle a yea-nay one. I have been quite out of the literary world for the last three years, and have said little or nothing, but, like the owl, I have “taken it out in thinking”. By and bye I mean to come out of the bush, and then I have some old scores to settle. I fancy I see some of my friends already stepping up to the Captain’s office. The fact is, Thomas, living buried in the country makes a man savage—wolfish. I am just in the humor for a fight. You will be pleased to hear that I am in better health than I ever knew myself to be—full of energy and bent upon success. You shall hear of me again shortly—and it is not improbable that I may soon pay you a visit in Louisville.—If I can do anything for you in New-York, let me know.—Mrs Clemm sends her best respects & begs to be remembered to your mother’s family, if they are with you.—You would oblige me very especially if you could squeeze in what follows, editorially. The lady spoken of is a most particular friend of mine, and deserves all I have said of her. I will reciprocate the favor I ask, whenever you say the word and show me how. Address me at N. York City, as usual and if you insert the following, please cut it out & enclose it in your letter.

  Truly your friend,

  EDGAR A POE.

  Poe here expresses his commitment to the life of writing as he reflects on the rush for California gold. He also urges Thomas, then a newspaper editor in Louisville, to perform a literary service by criticizing the “Frogpondians” (Bostonians) as a group; his animus toward Lowell has been occasioned by Lowell’s caricature of Poe in “A Fable for Critics.” Poe describes himself as “full of energy and bent upon success” prior to a striking decline in physical and mental health during the spring and summer of 1849.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE TO MARIA CLEMM

  New York [Philadelphia] July 7. [1849]

  My dear, dear Mother,—

  I have been so ill—have had the cholera, or spasms quiet as bad, and can now hardly hold the pen. . . .

  The very instant you get this, come to me. The joy of seeing you will almost compensate for our sorrows. We can but die together. It is no use to reason with me now; I must die. I have no desire to live since I have done “Eureka.” I could accomplish nothing more. For your sake it would be sweet to live, but we must die together. You have been all in all to me, darling, ever beloved mother, and dearest, truest friend.

  I was never really insane, except on occasions where my heart was touched. . . .

  I have been taken to prison once since I came here for spreeing drunk; but then I was not. It was about Virginia.

  [UNSIGNED]

  Poe’s drinking in Philadelphia earned him a night in Moyamensing Prison, from which he was liberated by literary friends. The illness to which he refers may have been delirium tremens; while in prison he reportedly had a nightmare in which Mrs. Clemm was mutilated. His explanation of the binge drinking is poignantly succinct: “It was about Virginia.”

  EDGAR ALLAN POE TO MARIA CLEMM

  Richmond Va Tuesday—Sep 18—49.

  My own darling Muddy,

  On arriving here last night from Norfolk I received both your letters, including Mrs Lewis’s. I cannot tell you the joy they gave me—to learn at least that you are well & hopeful. May God forever bless you, my dear dear Muddy—Elmira has just got home from the country. I spent last evening with her. I think she loves me more devotedly than any one I ever knew & I cannot help loving her in return. Nothing is yet definitely settled and it will not do to hurry matters. I lectured at Norfolk on Monday & cleared enough to settle my bill here at the Madison House with $2 over. I had a highly fashionable audience, but Norfolk is a small place & there were 2 exhibitions the same night. Next Monday I lecture again here & expect to have a large audience. On Tuesday I start for Phila to attend to Mrs Loud’s Poems—& possibly on Thursday I may start for N. York. If I do I will go straight over to Mrs Lewis’s & send for you. It will be better for me not to go to Fordham—don’t you think so? Write immediately in reply & direct to Phila. For fear I should not get the letter, sign no name & address it to E. S. T. Grey Esqre.

  If possible I will get married before I start—but there is no telling. Give my dearest love to Mrs L. My poor poor Muddy. I am still unable to send you even one dollar—but keep up heart—I hope that our troubles are nearly over. I saw John Beatty in Norfolk.

  God bless & protect you my own darling Muddy. I showed your letter to Elmira and she says “it is such a darling precious letter that she loves you for it already”

  Your own Eddy.

  Don’t forget to write immediately to Phila. so that your letter will be there when I arrive.

  The papers here are praising me to death—and I have been received everywhere with enthusiasm. Be sure & preserve all the printed scraps I have sent you & keep up my file of the Lit. World.

  Having obtained Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton’s acceptance of a marriage offer, Poe seemed in a position to launch his journal (thanks to a young Illinois publisher named Edward Patterson) and to secure domestic stability through remarriage. Poe had been lecturing successfully on American poetry in Richmond and Norfolk; and he took a pledge of temperance to convince Mrs. Shelton of his serious purpose. But his relapses into alcoholic excess were numerous that summer. He may have been planning to bring Mrs. Clemm to Virginia for the wedding, unless an earlier date could be agreed upon. His insistence that Mrs. Clemm address his mail to an alias may reflect mere prudence after his recent misadventures in Philadelphia or it may betray growing paranoia. Less than three weeks after writing this letter, he was dead.

  CRITICAL PRINCIPLES

  As a magazinist, Poe reviewed scores of new books and commented extensively on contemporary poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Exacting and occasionally derisive, he became known as “the tomahawk man,” stirring controversy by attacking powerful literary figures. He lampooned a novel by an editor of the New-York Mirror and later accused the esteemed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. He deplored the shameless promotion of mediocre authors and in several fictional satires—as well as the final review in this section—indicted the practice of “puffery” then pervasive in the American publishing world. Poe believed that the literature of the United States could outgrow its provincialism only if literary critics applied rigorous standards rather than indulging in partisan favoritism. While he resented British condescension toward American writers, he himself did not hesitate to expose the “stupidity” of certain American books.

  Driven by economics to write more fiction than poetry, Poe helped to shape the conventions of an emerging literary form, the short story. Yet he never used that term—which came into use only late in the nineteenth century—instead concerning himself with “the short prose tale.” And although Poe grasped the peculiar d
emands of the form, he wrote about its generic principles only briefly in reviews of works by individual authors. His most famous statement about short fiction appears in his 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, where Poe devotes four extended paragraphs to a theory of the tale emphasizing “unity of effect.” This “totality” reveals itself, he asserts, only in narratives that can be read at a single sitting of at most “one or two hours.” Yet although this review figures as the starting point for modern short-story theory, Poe had been thinking about the importance of unifying effect at least since 1836, when he remarked in a review of Dickens that unity was more crucial in the “brief article” (or short narrative) than in the novel. An 1841 review of Lytton Bulwer’s fiction registers the same point by implication, insisting on the impossibility of achieving “unity or totality of effect” in a narrative as long as a novel. Here Poe suggests that plot is crucial to unity (though curiously not “essential” to storytelling). In “A Chapter of Suggestions” Poe returns briefly to the matter of plot and advances a theory of narrative construction that begins with the ending, the effect intended in the dénouement. In this view, plot becomes the unifying structure from which no individual element can be removed without destroying the totality of the tale.

  Poe’s critical reflections on poetry represent a more concerted attempt to articulate basic principles. His “Letter to B—,” which introduced the 1831 volume of Poems, reveals much about Poe’s values as a young poet in his comparison of Wordsworth and Coleridge, then the giants of English poetry. Poe’s disdain for Wordsworth’s philosophizing and his admiration for Coleridge’s “towering intellect” and “gigantic power” help to explain his personal definition of the poem as a work whose immediate object is “pleasure” created by “indefinite sensations,” toward which end the “sweet sound” of music is “essential.” As an editorial assistant, Poe inserted passing comments on the nature of poetry in critical notices such as the “Drake-Halleck” review of 1836, and in 1843 he began to lecture on poetry. But not until the success of “The Raven” did he confect a grand theory of poetry. His “Philosophy of Composition” (1845) amounts to a tour de force, a logical analysis of how he wrote his most famous poem by working backward from its intended final effect. Poe’s account of the composition process must be taken cum grano salis (with a grain of salt—one of his favorite Latin expressions), but his designation of “Beauty” as “the sole legitimate province of the poem” accords with his own practice and helps to legitimate the subsequent (and self-serving) claim that a beautiful woman’s death constitutes “the most poetical topic in the world.” The following year he expanded earlier notes on poetry into “The Rationale of Verse,” a lengthy and somewhat technical essay (not included here) on rhythm, repetition, meter, and line length, as they affected the sound of a poem.

  Poe’s late lectures included “The Poets and Poetry of America” (of which no full manuscript has been located) and “The Poetic Principle,” his last and arguably most important meditation on the key elements of poetry. Here he asserts that the long poem is “a contradiction in terms” because the “elevating excitement” necessary to poetry is by nature transient. Countering the notion popular in his day that poetry must be morally instructive, Poe rails against “the heresy of the didactic” and insists again that beauty is the poem’s only legitimate object. He construes poetry as the “rhythmical creation of beauty” while beauty itself is precisely the “supernal Loveliness” of “glories beyond the grave” for which the immortal soul yearns. Poe finds intimations of this heavenly beauty in many earthly images and sounds and most tellingly in the “divine majesty” of a woman’s love.

  If Poe’s critical assumptions prevented him from fully appreciating longer forms such as novels and epic poems—to say nothing of drama, about which he occasionally wrote—they nevertheless enabled him to achieve a remarkable consonance between the literary principles that he advocated and the literature that he produced over slightly more than two decades.

  ON UNITY OF EFFECT

  (from a review of Watkins Tottle and Other Sketches by Charles Dickens)

  It is not every one who can put “a good thing” properly together, although, perhaps, when thus properly put together, every tenth person you meet with may be capable of both conceiving and appreciating it. We cannot bring ourselves to believe that less actual ability is required in the composition of a really good “brief article,” than in a fashionable novel of the usual dimensions. The novel certainly requires what is denominated a sustained effort—but this is a matter of mere perseverance, and has but a collateral relation to talent. On the other hand—unity of effect, a quality not easily appreciated or indeed comprehended by an ordinary mind, and a desideratum difficult of attainment, even by those who can conceive it—is indispensable in the “brief article,” and not so in the common novel. The latter, if admired at all, is admired for its detached passages, without reference to the work as a whole—or without reference to any general design—which, if it even exist in some measure, will be found to have occupied but little of the writer’s attention, and cannot, from the length of the narrative, be taken in at one view, by the reader.

  —Southern Literary Messenger, June 1836

  ON PLOT IN NARRATIVE

  (from a review of Night and Morning by Lytton Bulwer)

  The word “plot,” as commonly accepted, conveys but an indefinite meaning. Most persons think of it as of simple complexity; and into this error even so fine a critic as Augustus William Schlegel has obviously fallen, when he confounds its idea with that of the mere intrigue in which the Spanish dramas of Cervantes and Calderon abound. But the greatest involution of incident will not result in plot; which, properly defined, is that in which no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole. It may be described as a building so dependently constructed, that to change the position of a single brick is to overthrow the entire fabric. In this definition and description, we of course refer only to that infinite perfection which the true artist bears ever in mind—that unattainable goal to which his eyes are always directed, but of the possibility of attaining which he still endeavors, if wise, to cheat himself into the belief. The reading world, however, is satisfied with a less rigid construction of the term. It is content to think that plot a good one, in which none of the leading incidents can be removed without detriment to the mass. Here indeed is a material difference; . . .

  The interest of plot, referring, as it does, to cultivated thought in the reader, and appealing to considerations analogous with those which are the essence of sculptural taste, is by no means a popular interest; although it has the peculiarity of being appreciated in its atoms by all, while in its totality of beauty is it comprehended but by the few. The pleasure which the many derive from it is disjointed, ineffective, and evanescent; and even in the case of the critical reader it is a pleasure which may be purchased too dearly. A good tale may be written without it. Some of the finest fictions in the world have neglected it altogether. We see nothing of it in Gil Blas, in the Pilgrim’s Progress, or in Robinson Crusoe. Thus it is not an essential in story-telling at all; although, well-managed, within proper limits, it is a thing to be desired. At best it is but a secondary and rigidly artistical merit, for which no merit of a higher class—no merit founded in nature—should be sacrificed. . . .

  In the wire-drawn romances which have been so long fashionable, (God only knows how or why) the pleasure we derive (if any) is a composite one, and made up of the respective sums of the various pleasurable sentiments experienced in perusal. Without excessive and fatiguing exertion, inconsistent with legitimate interest, the mind cannot comprehend at one time, and in one survey, the numerous individual items which go to establish the whole. Thus the high ideal sense of the unique is sure to be wanting:—for, however absolute in itself be the unity of the novel, it must inevitably fail of appreciation. We speak now of that species of unity which is alone worth the attention of the critic—the unity or totality of
effect.