The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [295]
—The Opal, 1845
IMAGINATION AND INSIGHT
(from “Chapter of Suggestions”)
That the imagination has not been unjustly ranked as supreme among the mental faculties, appears, from the intense consciousness, on the part of the imaginative man, that the faculty in question brings his soul often to a glimpse of things supernal and eternal—to the very verge of the great secrets. There are moments, indeed, in which he perceives the faint perfumes, and hears the melodies of a happier world. Some of the most profound knowledge—perhaps all very profound knowledge—has originated from a highly stimulated imagination. Great intellects guess well. The laws of Kepler were, professedly, guesses.
—The Opal, 1845
POETICAL IRRITABILITY
(from “Fifty Suggestions”)
That poets (using the word comprehensively, as including artists in general) are a genus irritabile, is well understood; but the why, seems not to be commonly seen. An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty—a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity of disproportion. Thus a wrong—an injustice—done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice—never where it does not exist—but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to “temper” in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to Wrong:—this clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perception of Right—of justice—of proportion—in a word, of το χαλον.1 But one thing is clear—that the man who is not “irritable,” (to the ordinary apprehension,) is no poet.
—Graham’s Magazine, May 1849
GENIUS AND PROPORTIONATE INTELLECT
(from “Fifty Suggestions”)
Let a man succeed ever so evidently—ever so demonstrably—in many different displays of genius, the envy of criticism will agree with the popular voice in denying him more than talent in any. Thus a poet who has achieved a great (by which I mean an effective) poem, should be cautious not to distinguish himself in any other walk of Letters. In especial—let him make no effort in Science—unless anonymously, or with the view of waiting patiently the judgment of posterity. Because universal or even versatile geniuses have rarely or never been known, therefore, thinks the world, none such can ever be. A “therefore” of this kind is, with the world, conclusive. But what is the fact, as taught us by analysis of mental power? Simply, that the highest genius—that the genius which all men instantaneously acknowledge as such—which acts upon individuals, as well as upon the mass, by a species of magnetism incomprehensible but irresistible and never resisted—that this genius which demonstrates itself in the simplest gesture—or even by the absence of all—this genius which speaks without a voice and flashes from the unopened eve—is but the result of generally large mental power existing in a state of absolute proportion—so that no one faculty has undue predominance. That factitious “genius”—that “genius” in the popular sense—which is but the manifestation of the abnormal predominance of some one faculty over all the others—and, of course, at the expense and to the detriment, of all the others—is a result of mental disease or rather, of organic malformation of mind:—it is this and nothing more. Not only will such “genius” fail, if turned aside from the path indicated by its predominant faculty; but, even when pursuing this path—when producing those works in which, certainly, it is best calculated to succeed—will give unmistakeable indications of unsoundness, in respect to general intellect. Hence, indeed, arises the just idea that
“Great wit to madness nearly is allied.”
I say “just idea;” for