But it is related; it is not purely artistic emotion. The form is burdened with an intellectual content, and that content is a mood that mingles with and reposes on the emotions of life. Imagine the shocked horror of Aristotle on learning this verdict. Plato, on the other hand, we can conceive admitting that Mr.
But if literature is to be in a category by itself, and is forever to be refused the denomination of art, what relation does it bear to its former sisters, music and painting and sculpture. And, above all, must poetry be condemned as Mr.
Bell seems to condemn it, because it is tainted with literature? Would it not be better to say that poetry is great as both literature and art, or as either one of them? But where they are silent, Poe, who felt acutely the whole problem of the relation of literature to art as it is present in poetry, expresses himself in no uncertain tones. He confronts the Aristotelian theory of imitation squarely. Literature must, indeed, imitate life, he says, and as it imitates it well or ill it is [page ] pleasing or displeasing.
But literature is not the only means by which creative genius expresses itself. There is a far higher and more perfect medium, and that is art. But this mere repetition is not poetry. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. And thus when by Poetry, — or when by music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, — we find ourselves melted into tears — not as the Abbate Gravia supposes — through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at 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.
The slightly florid language of this quotation must not blind us to the fact that it contains in a measure the key to the problem which modern theorists have not attempted to solve. The creative genius of the man of letters is imitative. The imitation is pleasing, however, not as Poe says because it repeats reality, but because by creating another reality it helps us to escape the terrible fact of everyday existence. And poetry, as literature alone , amply justifies its existence by the ever accessible doorway it [page ] offers to the realm of illusion and idea.
True poetry, as Poe points out, must, indeed, be more than this. It must aid us not only to escape but to transcend reality by virtue of its pure sound. Bell Poe has far and away the better of the comparison. For the moderns have rejected the word beauty altogether. And so they discard the word and substitute the somewhat cryptic adjective significant. The chief fault with the word significant is, as I have said, its esotericism.
The trouble with the word form is that it is too closely associated with the particular genius of classical art and literature readily to be dissociated from it in order to serve its new purpose. In other words, the phrase as a whole lacks catholicity. It smacks of artistic cliques, salons, receptions, elite. It is in some ways the merest of catch-words. No, the phrase is a bad one. Poe, on the contrary, has not despised the word beauty , but he has prefixed to it the adjective supernal.
It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels. Here the modern theorists come closer to the Platonic notion than does Poe, for both emphasize the ethical importance of art. Poe stands in the middle ground between these two. It may well be doubted, of course, whether Poe himself was fully aware that his own theory demanded for its fulfillment a close relation between religious mysticism and poetry.
Is not all poetry, all art but another mode of seeking that union? If we turn to his poem, we find an inkling that Poe was to some extent aware of the source of poetic sorrow: —. Still, this is a very shadowy conception.
Objective and subjective characteristics, external ones and internal ones, the quality of the created work and the quality of the creating mind now correspond with one another, now blend with one another, always explain one another. It would almost seem that between the intellect of the poet and the work of art Poe had rediscovered that perfect reciprocity of adaptation which, ignorant of biological laws, he observed with great astonishment in the physical order, and called divine. Today, this statement may appear to the supporters of this psychological method as the vulgar expression of a well-known truth and to its adversaries as a thoughtless concession to the usual bad practice.
Whoever knows anything of the vicissitudes of the unfortunate American writer knows how in him ideality of principles and practicality of aims were blended, how in his being poetic disposition and mathematical reason — with a slight predominance now of one and then of the other — did not conflict but fused into each other. And this coexistence and agreement of faculties, which normally are held to be antagonistic and irreconcilable, do not manifest themselves only in Eureka, where the beauty of the universe is made to spring solely from its geometric construction, but are invoked by Poe himself as a constituent element of the highest intellects.
Yet nothing can be farther removed from it. The mistake is but a portion or corollary of the old dogma that the calculating faculties are at war with the ideal; while, in fact, it may be demonstrated that the two divisions of mental power are never to be found in perfection apart.
The highest order of the imaginative intellect is always pre-eminently mathematical, and the converse. Baudelaire, especially, we have already noted, would take a bitter pleasure out of making Poe a creature in his own image and likeness, with the same vices, the same abnormalities, the same intemperances and the same hatreds. But everyone knows how the coupling of practical endowments to sentiments of the ideal is one of the most prominent characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon people, in whom the sharp practices of commerce and the fever of industry have not extinguished the poetic sentiment, which, on the contrary, has launched from English soil some of the most ardent flights toward the heavenly regions of the ideal.
Unchanged, however, in their general sense, not in the elements composing them. Because that beauty of which the German aesthetes speak is not the same thing as the beauty for which the soul of the American poet thirsts: one is a metaphysical concept; the other, a sentiment which a man claims from his divine origin; one is the cold expression of a philosophic idea — the other, ecstasy and vision.
It may be, indeed, that this august aim is here even partially or imperfectly attained, in fact. The elements of that beauty which is felt in sound, may be the mutual or common heritage of Earth and Heaven. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. This beauty, therefore, not only is not the metaphysical entity of the German philosophers, but it is something mystical, supernatural and superhuman; it is something even more ideal than that mysterious power to which [column 2:] Shelley intoned his hymn This beauty which Shelley celebrates is wholly intellectual; he senses its presence in every created thing, and its light does not rain from the empty heavens; instead, while the ardent American poet connects the sentiment to the divine origin of man, he sets the eternal splendor against the perishableness of everything else, human and divine.
The burning fever in the soul of Poe soon subsides, however, and the poet becomes the subtle thinker and the patient calculator. Then he no longer bestows ideality to thoughts, but seeks rather to free them of every kind of haziness, to posit them lucidly and firmly so that he can avail himself of them with that same care and that same mathematical rigor with which the clever chess player uses his pieces.
And like the latter he has his mind constantly directed to the solution and the effect, and toward these he concentrates every move. Those ideas, which through Coleridge he took from the German writers, we will scarcely recognize any longer. And not because they are changed, but because of their different disposition; as is appropriate to eminently practical spirits, he does not make every idea depend on a single principle, but, instead, he makes all of them aim at an identical goal.
And towards this, the effect, Poe applies all his industry, with an admirable acuteness, but with a persistence which sometimes gives rise to annoyance and suspicion. And did it not occur to him that the effect of the other poems would also be destroyed by the suspicion that they too were the result of a mere calculation? But at the same time he could not resist the temptation of making a display of such an exceptional faculty and of creating an impression with the strange and the unexpected.
A similar ratio of ideality and of practical reason is to be found in the distinction between imagination and fancy, which, at one time is sought in mysticism and symbolism, and at another in a subtle dose-measuring of the mental faculties. Is this the whole ideality of the tale, and does nothing more palpitate in that undercurrent, which should be rich in profound and eternal purports, but a life so mean? And Undine, the nymph rising from a spray of water, the ingenuous figure that smiled to the poet out of old legends and many times with her song brought peace back to his heart 61 , is she nothing more than the image of a wayward woman?
Coleridge reproduced in England the manifold German soul and was a perfect likeness of the first German Romantics. He preserved, however, unaltered, certain purely national traits, and his curious and complex temperament of theologian, philosopher, poet and social reformer exercised a very great influence on the younger poets, upon Shelley especially.
But the poet of Prometheus [column 2:] knew how to give to the new aesthetics an interpretation which was altogether his own, or better, he created an aesthetics belonging entirely to himself, free of every pre-established system or doctrine, in which the splendor of the images, the melody of the sounds and the profundity of the thoughts hide every doctrinal materiality from the mind of the listener.
Poe was the crier of the new message in America, where the old English literary tradition was still alive the school of good old Pope and good old Goldsmith. Literature, if not the actual soil of America, was still in fee to England, and the people, too occupied in seeing to their political and material needs, left this part of their life to be nursed by the old enemy. English criticism dictated laws and was proud and contemptuous; from the three Lake poets and from the first German Romantics it had extracted new principles of judgment and rigidly applied them.
Poe desired to liberate his country from this bondage and to establish an American literature and criticism; and he sought for this purpose to reanimate aesthetic doctrines with new ideas and new explanations and adaptations of previously known concepts.
The Biographia Literaria, the work in which Coleridge gathered together the scattered aesthetic doctrines of German Romanticism, tempering them with his ideality, is the center around which he moves. From there he extracts his materials, but one at a time, without order, almost without nexus, and then he elaborates and transforms them, leaving on each the stamp of his own intellect.
From this gathering of many systems there does not issue one system, but a series of thoughts and rules which follows just one thread, the search for the poetic effect. In him the American aesthete admired, besides the high ideality and the richness of the images of beauty his independence of every law and his abandonment to song. It appears — and this is a most peculiar trait — in his criticism rather than in his poems.
Or else they are verses which in the most beautiful images idealize human emotions or deeds; or which, as is often customary with Shelley and the major poets, draw from physical and external life elements [page ] not previously regarded to describe with lucidity and vivacity the joys, anxieties and changes of our inner life. But Poe cannot reach what he esteems so highly in the poems of others.
The distinction which he has made between an imaginative, a fanciful and a fantastic work can be applied, to his prejudice, in saying that his poems belong not to the first but to the second or the third category, and that in them the search for the novel and the unexpected, the preoccupation with difficulties happily overcome, prevails over the profundity of the thought and the magnitude of the meaning. As a critic and aesthete Poe desired to tear up the network of aesthetic-metaphysical systems, but he did not know how to extricate his own self from them; he was among the first, perhaps, to desire to institute a positive criticism of works of art proceeding from the effect produced on the spirit of the reader, but he did not sufficiently work out the principles and the requirements thereof.
Still, he often — unconsciously it is true — draws materials from the German doctrines, not always in order to smash them to pieces, but to assemble them and place them as a foundation for the edifice of his own ideas.
Thus, instilling new concepts, renewing old ideas, tempering both the one and the other with the originality of his own intellect, Poe prepared in America the revival of English poetry which already had begun a long time ago on this side of the Ocean.
At almost the same time Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, [column 2:] whom Poe — notwithstanding some slight censure — acknowledged as the first among American poets, was, with his admirable facility and his rich ideality, opening new paths for the poetry of his land and welcoming to it the voices of all the countries of Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia.
But if Poe has two contemporaries succeeding him, he has just two Englishmen preceding him with whom he can be connected as an aesthete and a poet: Coleridge and Shelley. He does not have the vast but turbid mentality of the former, nor the profound, throbbing heart of the latter, but like both of them, in a country and at a time when an official school reigned uncontested, he broke the chain of old traditions and developed his own singular individuality, to the point of seeming something miraculous in nature and something almost demonic.
John Ingram, 4th ed. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, , which restored the critical essays, changed in the preceding editions, to the original imprintings in the various American magazines of which Poe was a collaborator.
Poe is not aware of the German source Kantian philosophy of this idea and attributes it simply to Coleridge. Haym, Die romantische Schule Berlin: Gaertner, , pp.
Defence of Poetry. VII, No. I The clamor over Edgar Allan Poe and his work has not yet spent itself. O sweet illusions of Song, That tempt me everywhere, In the lonely fields, and the throng Of the crowded thoroghfare!
I approach, and ye vanish away, I grasp you, and ye are gone But ever by night and by day, The melody soundeth on. III The external and sensible qualities in which a work of art should be rich should correspond to the nature of poetry and to the continual working of the combining mind.
Let no bell toll! He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely. IV From the general conception of art, observe that we have come down to the laws of composition, and from these, to the external qualities of a work of art.
V Beauty is order, measure and proportion; only an ordered, proportioned and well-balanced mind therefore can compose its forms. The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us, — visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, — Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance Like hues and harmonies of evening, — Like clouds in starlight widely spread, — Like memory of music fled, — Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
And in addition, not an intellect almost miraculous, without forebears and without traditions. Turin, November-December Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.
Institutional Login.
0コメント