The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1013]
Earth has six truest patriots, four discoverers of ether. . . . .
Every cockboat that swims clears its fierce (pop) gundeck at him. . . . .
Is some of it pr —— no,’tis not even prose. . . . .
O’er his principles when something else turns up trumps. . . . .
But a few silly (syllo I mean) gisms that squat ‘em. . . . .
Nos, we don’t want extra freezing in winter. . . . .
Plough, dig, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all things new. . . . .
But enough: — we have given a fair specimen of the general versification. It might have been better — but we are quite sure that it could not have been worse. So much for “common sense,” in Mr. Lowell’s understanding of the term. Mr. L. should not have meddled with the anapæstic rhythm: it is exceedingly awkward in the hands of one who knows nothing about it and who will persist in fancying that he can write it by ear. Very especially, he should have avoided this rhythm in satire, which, more than any other branch of Letters, is dependent upon seeming trifles for its effect. Two-thirds of the force of the “Dunciad” may be referred to its exquisite finish; and had “The Fable for the Critics” been, (what it is not, ) the quintessence of the satiric spirit itself, it would nevertheless, in so slovenly a form, have failed. As it is, no failure was ever more complete or more pitiable. By the publication of a book at once so ambitious and so feeble — so malevolent in design and so harmless in execution — a work so roughly and clumsily yet so weakly constructed — so very different, in body and spirit, from anything that he has written before — Mr. Lowell has committed an irrevocable faux pas and lowered himself at least fifty per cent in the literary public opinion.
MR. GRISWOLD AND THE POETS.
THAT we are not a poetical people has been asserted so often and so roundly, both at home and abroad, that the slander, through mere dint of repetition, has come to be received as truth. 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 preëminently mathematical; and the converse.
The idiosyncrasy of our political position has stimulated into early action whatever practical talent we possessed. Even in our national infancy we evinced a degree of utilitarian ability which put to shame the mature skill of our forefathers. While yet in leading-strings we proved ourselves adepts in all the arts and sciences which promote the comfort of the animal man. But the arena of exertion, and of consequent distinction, into which our first and most obvious wants impelled us, has been regarded as the field of our deliberate choice. Our necessities have been mistaken for our propensities. Having been forced to make rail-roads, it has been deemed impossible that we should make verse. Because it suited us to construct an engine in the first instance, it has been denied that we could compose an epic in the second. Because we were not all Homers in the beginning, it has been somewhat too rashly taken for granted that we shall be all Jeremy Benthams to the end.
But this is the purest insanity. The principles of the poetic sentiment lie deep within the immortal nature of man, and have little necessary reference to the worldly circumstances which surround him. The poet in Arcady is, in Kamschatka, the poet still. The self-same Saxon current animates the British and the American heart; nor can any social, or political, or moral, or physical conditions do more than momentarily repress the impulses which glow in our own bosoms as fervently as in those of our progenitors.
Those who have taken most careful note of our literature for the last ten or twelve years, will be most willing to admit that we are a poetical people; and in no respect is the fact more plainly evinced than in the eagerness