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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)