We are lamentably deficient not only in invention proper, but in that which is, more strictly, Art. What American, for instance, in penning a criticism, ever supposes himself called upon to present his readers with more than the exact stipulation of his title—to present them with a criticism and something beyond? Who thinks of making his critique a work of art in itself—independently of its critical opinions?

Who indeed? Surely not I, and few of my colleagues aspire even to scholarly elegance. But Poe did write criticism that can be spoken of as not high art, but art all the same. From professors like myself, the world does not want art, but from poets, even when they thump out reviews, something more has come to be expected. Poet-critics, for instance, have certainly been more amusing than professors; sometimes they have even seemed to joke about their own efforts, though I never understood why they wanted to do so. It would be difficult to stipulate all the differences between the criticism produced by scholars and that of poet-critics, yet the distinction between these ways of writing about literature is commonly felt by both sorts of writers. It should be possible to indicate some of the special procedures and objectives of poet-critics. One justification for this effort is that American poet-critics have rather thoroughly shaken up literary opinion in this century; another is that the lessons academic critics might take from poet-critics have special force now that literary criticism is a major academic industry, the most prestigious branch of which is devoted to the study of itself. More particularly, the connection between Poe's criticism and his poetry shows not only how his poems rest on general poetic principles—we always expect that from poet-critics—but, much more interestingly, how impossible it was for him to write the sort of poetry he admired most.

Poe's literary achievement seems especially hyphenated—much more so than that of other poet-critics; his place in American literary history is still a bit anomalous. He remains a popular poet, but as Eliot has remarked [in To Criticize the Critic, 1965] he is read largely by the young and untutored. Sophisticated readers, like Eliot, often seem to regard his popularity as an embarrassment. And yet some poets, such as William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, or Richard Wilbur and Daniel Hoffman, take Poe as a figure who cannot be ignored by later writers. In the history of American fiction, he seems more a pioneer of secondary genres—detective and gothic tales—than the master of a primary one. As a man of letters—poetry, fiction, and criticism—his place is secure, though as a poet he will always seem to many a mere verse-writer. More particularly, Poe can now be said to be along with Emerson one of the two earliest American poet-critics whose work continues to matter to contemporary writers. Since Poe's first literary critical effort in 1835—also the year in which Emerson began to lecture on English literature—an extraordinarily distinguished line of poet-critics has established this particular combination of talents as somehow distinctly American, and perhaps especially modern.

Insofar as Poe stands at the beginning of a line of poet-critics, this is a provisional sort of writing. These critics resist tradition in the name of independence; they attack the centre from the peripheries of the literary culture. By at least 1835, Poe wrote expressly as a Southerner, aiming his judgements against the literary centres established in Boston and New York. Once he himself had made his way to New York, in 1844, he directed his barbs against Boston. However detailed were his criticisms of Emerson for obscurity, and of Longfellow for indolence, he never lost sight of their being established in Boston.

[Bostonians] may yet open their eyes to certain facts which have long been obvious to all the world except themselves—the facts that there exist other cities than Boston—other men of letters than Professor Longfellow. . . . The fact is, we despise them [Bostonians] and defy them (the transcendental vagabonds!) and they may all go to the devil together.

When he was invited to speak at the Boston Lyceum, he read a piece of juvenilia out of contempt for the taste of his audience (he may even have been drunk at the time), and later did what he could to publicize the gesture. How pointed was his sense of being an outsider can be guessed from the half-truth on the title-page of his first book: Tamerlane and Other Poems, By a Bostonian.

Henry James spoke of Poe's criticism in 1879 [in Hawthorne] as 'probably the most complete and exquisite specimen of provincialism ever prepared for the edification of man.' A half-century later, Eliot said that Poe was 'a critic of the first rank'. Eliot had reason by then to know that the great American poet-critics would seem in retrospect to be mainly proud provincials: they have spoken from Hayley, Idaho; St. Louis, Missouri; Nashville, Tennessee; Gambier, Ohio; and Palo Alto, California. Poet-critics seem always to aim at independence of mind, an intelligence free of the corruptions of the centre. They have been unbeholden to publishers and reviewers and without the need to promote academic careers. One small sign of how they have insisted on their outré status is typified in Poe's unseemly habit of name-calling.

In itself, the book before us is too purely imbecile to merit an extended critique. . . .

The book is despicable in every respect. Such are the works which bring daily discredit upon our national literature.

Your poem is a curiosity, Mr. Jack Downing; your 'Metrical Romance' is not worth a single half sheet of the pasteboard upon which it is printed.

That any man could, at one and the same time, fancy himself a poet and string together as many pitiable inanities as we see here, on so truly suggestive a thesis as that of 'A Lady Taking the Veil,' is to our apprehension a miracle of miracles.

But we doubt if the whole world of literature, poetical or prosaic, can afford a picture more utterly disgusting than the following. . . .

Mr. Channing must be hung, that's true.

What can we do but laugh outright at such phrases . . . such an ass as the author of 'Bug-Jargal?'

Robert Lowell said that Eliot had admitted taking particular delight in Poe's severity when it was directed against two of Eliot's own relatives. Poe, altogether deliberately, set an example of impolite, even reckless criticism—'pretentious, spiteful, vulgar', James said. Nearly a century later, Ezra Pound opened Guide to Kulchur with this promise:

.. . I shall make a number of statements which very few men can AFFORD to make, for the simple reason that such taking sides might jeopard their incomes (directly) or their prestige or 'position' in one or other of the professional 'worlds'. Given my freedom, I may be a fool to use it, but I wd. be a cad not to.

One American poet-critic after another has displayed independence by speaking without respect for the makers of reputation, though no one has been more acutely aware of the finer shades of renown than Poe. Built right into this kind of literary criticism is an inclination to locate principles beyond the competition of contemporary interests. The tradition of poet-critics encourages transcendental rather than historicizing criticism. Poe's attempts to speak of Ideality in particular poems is just one particularly clear instance of this practice.

Poe repeatedly expressed contempt for the literary politics of his own moment. As a provincial he did not have access to the institutions that provide recognition, and there can be no question about his ambition to achieve renown. (He was not too discreet to say in print that his criticism, in a year's time, brought the circulation of the Southern Literary Messenger from 700 to nearly 5,000.) He criticized his own literary milieu on two principal counts. The first was its apparatus of boldly reciprocal promotion:

The corrupt nature of our ordinary criticism has become notorious. . . . The intercourse between critic and publisher, as it now almost universally stands, is comprised either in the paying and pocketing of blackmail, as the price of simple forbearance, or in a direct system of petty and contemptible bribery. . . .

Pound and Yvor Winters later made the same point about London and New York literary life: outsiders are especially sensitive to this particular corruption of criticism. But beyond the moral turpitude of his contemporaries, Poe condemned other literary critics for a lack of independent judgement. 'Few American writers', he said, '. . . have risen by merely their own intrinsic talents, and without the a priori aid of foreign opinion and puffery, to any exalted rank in the estimation of our countrymen.'

His thoroughly American response to this state of affairs was to attempt to establish the world of letters as a meritocracy. He made a point of praising demonstrated achievement rather than capability. And he tried to encourage Americans to attend to details in the examination of literary works:

. . . Our criticism is nevertheless in some dangersome very little danger—of falling into the pit of a most detestable species of cant—the cant of generality. The tendency has been given it, in the first instance, by the onward and tumultuous spirit of the age. With the increase of the thinking-material comes the desire, if not the necessity, of abandoning particulars for masses. Yet in our individual case, as a nation, we seem merely to have adopted this bias from the British Quarterly Reviews. . . .

Poe was conscientious about examining details to the point of tedium; he wanted to cite evidence, like a detective, for all that he claimed about the works he examined, especially since he often criticized poets for plagiarism. The editor of the Virginia edition of Poe's collected works could not afford the space to reproduce Poe's extensive quotations. Poe can certainly seem picayune, but his motive was to free American writers from the domination of British litterateurs, and their American imitators, who cared more for their own notions and opinions than for the poems, novels and stories under review.

Like other poet-critics, Poe was extremely explicit. He did not hesitate to formulate definitions of poetry, drama, and the novel—though he suggested, too, that words cannot hem poetry in. His most celebrated critical essay, The Philosophy of Composition, sets out to render explicit every detail of artistic production, for in the best poems, he seems to have believed, all details can be articulated to general principles, however humble those principles may look when they are spelled out. 'If the practice fail,' he said, 'it is because the theory is imperfect'. Circumstance, the chance find of an apt word or phrase, counts for nothing.

It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its ["The Raven"'s] composition is referrible either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.

In Eureka he claimed that what is commonly taken as intuition could certainly be explicated logically—given sufficient perspicacity and patience. He tried always to demystify literary criticism in order to free writers from those who claim to constitute an aristocracy of taste.

The melancholy that comes from this sort of criticism Poe knew all too well; his mind habitually doubles back on itself. On the one hand, he believed, in Enlightenment fashion, that '. . . the finest quality of Thought is its self-cognizance. On the other, he felt that it is a

curse of a certain order of mind, that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.

Behind The Philosophy of Composition is that accursed sadness of self-consciousness, as though he had always to suspect himself of prefabricated poems, of mannerism. This self-destructiveness, he suggests, is an inevitable burden on poet-critics:

To see distinctly the machinery—the wheels and pinions—of any work of Art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist:—and, in fact, it too often happens that to reflect analytically upon Art, is to reflect after the fashion of mirrors in the temple of Smyrna, which represent the fairest images deformed.

Poet-critics, then, turn against their own kind. Poe indicated that the most appropriate recognition of great artistic achievement is restraint, or even silence, on the part of critics and explainers.

Poe's constant reach for general principles usually makes him seem driven by abstract policies. He strove so to write logically—rather than tastefully—that his observations often sound woodenly consistent and categorical rather than deeply earnest or knowing; one often suspects this methodical critic of irony, especially when one recalls his belief that 'the style of the profound thinker is never closely logical'. His criticism repeatedly turns on a simple distinction between the true and the false, as though he were speaking mainly for effect. His obsession with plagiarism is just this, though in a characteristically doubled sense, because the greatest poets, he said, are those who, so absorbed in their art, are most prone to plagiarism and least damaged by the indictment. Poe's testing of texts for true and false properties can seem crude, mechanical, and not entirely in good faith. He was indeed a categorical critic in the sense that his distinctions aim at these all-or-nothing discriminations. Seldom is he at pains to identify and somehow name a quality. Like a prosecutor, he rather pushes for conviction, which leaves him a dangerous model for other critics. Yet his bluntness has its rationale: for a critic committed, as Poe vigorously and honourably was, to tracking the literary culture, commenting on it monthly, this winnowing of the authentic from the ersatz is just the job at hand.

The most notorious of Poe's categorical conclusions is that a 'long poem is a paradox', since 'All high excitements are necessarily transient'. With that observation, a great deal of literary history recedes into darkness: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth appear to have been unfortunately confused. This is Poe's point exactly. Insofar as his claim is valid, English literary history loses hegemony over American poets. Like a lawyer, Poe marshalled rhetoric and logic, more than wisdom or truth, to gain liberty for his own poetic ambition, and that of his countrymen. The history of American poetry through the 1840s, as he certainly knew, did not suggest that American poets were likely to be remembered in the way that British poets were. The best an ambitious young American poet might do in 1830, one might have thought, would have been to strive through imitation and self-education to live up to standards set on another continent.

Poe, however, for obvious reasons, preferred to argue that some recent American short poems excel 'any transatlantic poems. After all, it is chiefly in works of what is absurdly termed "sustained effort" that we fall in any material respect behind our progenitors.' These are the words of a poet whose longest poetic effort, a blank-verse drama entitled Politian (1835), he had the good sense not to bother to finish. The charge that American poetry was deficient in works of 'sustained effort' was put forward by critics writing for the quarterly reviews—the North American Review and the Dial. Poe framed his argument against this charge so as to attack the very idea of a quarterly review as he had three years earlier attacked the idea of a long poem. Journals, he claimed, were better suited than quarterlies to the contemporary American milieu because one sign of the times is that

men are forced upon the curt, the condensed, the well-digested in place of the voluminous—in a word, upon journalism in lieu of dissertation. We need now the light artillery rather than the peace-makers of the intellect. I will not be sure that men at present think more profoundly than half a century ago, but beyond question they think with more rapidity, with more skill, with more tact, with more of method and less of excrescence in the thought. Besides all this, they have a vast increase in the thinking material; they have more facts, more to think about. For this reason, they are disposed to put the greatest amount of thought in the smallest compass and disperse it with the utmost attainable rapidity.

Hence short poems and magazines are faithful to the moment, which is no small advantage in the eyes of one who, like many Enlightenment writers, saw progress wherever he looked. 'The day has at length arrived', Poe thought, 'when men demand rationalities in place of conventionalities.' With this 'rationality' about the advantages of short poems, he tried to think his way out of a mediocre literary milieu.

Poe is often taken as an extreme exemplar of American Romanticism. Yvor Winters, William K. Wimsatt, Jr., Cleanth Brooks, and Edmund Wilson all criticize his poetry and criticism in just these terms. From this view, he is interesting only as an illustrative figure, not influential as a poet or critic. If instead, however, one attends especially to his procedures as a poet-critic, he seems much less pure a Romantic; some of his principles and suppositions rather reflect what can be spoken of as Enlightenment notions. One might note, for instance, his frequent efforts to derive critical judgements from firm distinctions of genre and suppositions of decorum. But the most important of Poe's Enlightenment beliefs was simply the notion that his epoch was 'emphatically the thinking age;—indeed it may very well be questioned whether mankind ever substantially thought before.' From this faith in the power of clear, sceptical thought came the belief that a poet or critic can begin with first principles rather than precedents and, by a train of logical propositions, arrive at truths formerly obscured by blind prejudice. Moreover, one's explanations can fully prevail, because poetry, like all the world, is susceptible to clear, sceptical explanation. From the belief that general laws govern the details of literary history, it is but a short step to the notion that a critic's task is less importantly that of closely describing particular literary works than that of discovering and formulating the general laws that determine literary history. Poe's work is the first instance of a still strong tendency in American literary criticism to hold literary theory in higher regard than literary history.

This is another way of saying that however forceful Romanticism was in literary Europe of the 1830s and 1840s, American letters were still bound up with the Enlightenment ideals that brought nationhood to this former colony. Many of Poe's most distinctive literary ideas were, as he understood them, joined to national ideals. He was not an especially political poet-critic, but to overlook his nationalistic views renders his criticism and his poetry a bit peculiar. His poems and some of his criticism do now seem odd; but they are not properly regarded as incoherent, for they followed from a policy. Moreover, his strength as a model for later poet-critics has been sufficiently great that we still labour with some of his procedures without fully recognizing the policy they were once meant to implement. For instance, in order to sidestep the relative weakness of literary tradition in America, Poe argued that the power of the individual talent is supreme; the poet, for Poe and for many of our contemporaries, is above all an ingenious maker, and the lines of a poem are traces of—as we now say—strategies. Nor would Poe countenance the claim that poems cannot be fully understood independent of a context of thought, belief, or shared experience; poems were autotelic for him, as they have seemed to many modern American critics. And more than ever now, American critics give their pragmatic credence, as Poe urged, to details, especially those of stylistic analysis. Poe's reasons for this particular focus were nationalistic. Of course he hoped, as poet-critics always do, to encourage a taste for his own sort of poetry, but he also wanted to establish a distinctly American type of literary criticism—and the record indicates that he succeeded.

What Poe treasured most in terms of style is range, not merely of subject matter, but more particularly of tone. Although he returned to the term 'tone' repeatedly, he never claimed anything extraordinary for his sense of its meaning:

Without pausing to define what a little reflection will enable any reader to define for himself, we may say that the chief constituent of a good style . . . is what artists have agreed to denominate tone. The writer who, varying this as occasion may require, well adapts it to the fluctuations of his narrative, accomplishes an important object of style.

There is a special reason why Poe would not bother to say that by tone he meant to refer, as I. A. Richards later did, to the attitude expressed by a writer; to presume a common understanding was just the point, because the measurement of range is made possible only by a prior sense of neoclassical decorum—of which attitudes are fitting to which subjects. One way of assessing a prose writer's command of tonal range is whether he or she can always seem not only various but, in diverse settings, just. The natural or easeful style—that commanded by Addison, as well as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne—

is but the result of writing with the understanding, or with the instinct, that the tone, in composition, should be that which, at any given point or upon any given topic, would be the tone of the great mass of humanity.

Fairness and civility, not novelty, are the objectives of this prose style.

Poe praises two sorts of writers very highly. First are those prose writers who give themselves so generously to their subjects that they seem to write naturally, without art—Defoe sets this standard.

Men do not look upon it [Robinson Crusoe] in the light of a literary performance. . . . The powers which have wrought the wonder have been thrown into obscurity by the very stupendousness of the wonder they have wrought! We read, . . . close the book, and are quite satisfied that we could have written as well ourselves. . . . Indeed the author of Crusoe must have possessed, above all other faculties, what has been termed the faculty of identification. . . . Defoe is largely indebted to his subject.

Such a writer makes no compromise with the mere appurtenances of imaginative writing—with the bitter consequence, as Poe put it, that 'books thus written are not the books by which men acquire a contemporaneous reputation'.

The second sort of writer he praises is best exemplified by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, whose verse does not deliberately depart from the patterns of ordinary prose usage. Moore's

is no poetical style (such, for example, as the French have—a distinct style for a distinct purpose), but an easy and ordinary prose manner, ornamented into poetry. By means of this he is enabled to enter, with ease, into details which would baffle any other versifier of the age, and at which Lamartine would stand aghast. For anything that we see to the contrary, Moore might solve a cubic equation in verse. . . . His facility in this respect is truly admirable, and is, no doubt, the result of long practice after mature deliberation.

The question of poetic style was rather different for Poe than that of prose style. 'The inventive or original mind', he said, 'as frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty of matter'. Prose writers like Addison do not aspire to novelty of attitude; they rather rely upon a consensus about appropriate attitudes. But poets explore surprising feelings, and the tone of poems is often stunningly unsettling. This is not to say that a poet's novelty of tone will be reflected in novel phrasing or syntax. The best poetic style is, like Moore's, that which is simply not constrained by the differences between poetry and prose. Moore's commitment to a plain, clear style allowed a wide range of subject matter; he concedes no subject, no range of experience (not even cubic equations), to essayists. (T. S. Eliot's well-known praise of the Metaphysicals' possession of 'a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience' is much the same as Poe's admiration of Moore.) Poe's dream was less to write about the supremely melancholy subject, as he suggests in The Philosophy of Composition, than to be able to write, like Moore, about anything at all.

How eager and fretful Poe was to extend his own range can be sensed in his strenuous explanation of the oddities of the English Metaphysical poets. For understandable reasons, he argues that Donne and Cowley were exceptionally sincere poets:

They used but little art in composition. Their writings sprang immediately from the soul—and partook intensely of the nature of that soul. It is not difficult to perceive the tendency of this glorious abandon. To elevate immeasurably all the energies of mind—but again—so to mingle to greatest possible fire, force, delicacy, and all good things, with the lowest possible bathos, baldness, and utter imbecility, as to render it not a matter of doubt, but of certainty, that the average results of mind in such a school, will be found inferior to those results in one (ceteris paribus) more artificial: Such, we think, is the view of the older English Poetry, in which a very calm examination will bear us out.

The main line of English poetry is 'frank, guileless, and perfectly sincere'. Donne and Cowley are introduced here as the merely apparent exceptions that can nevertheless be accommodated to the general rule. The eclecticism of the Metaphysicals, their dangerously capacious range of tone, is meant to stand as evidence of their ultimate sincerity, for only poets thoroughly engaged by their subjects could skip over obvious incongruities as easily as they did. Poe strains so to resist reading the Metaphysicals ironically, because he has committed his own poetry and criticism to the belief that the best poems always express melancholy; the one kind of humour he would admit as legitimate to poetry was archness—just what one senses in his most ambitious critical pronouncements. His interest in stylistic range was a fascination for what he must have known he thoroughly lacked as a poet.

Sincerity for Poe, as for Victorian critics, was a term of high praise; or rather, since poets are seldom said to be more or less sincere, it is a test of authenticity in poetry. Self-consciousness is the great corrupter of style:

. . . had the mind of the poet [John G. C. Brainard] been really 'crowded with strange thoughts', and not merely engaged in an endeavor to think, he would have entered at once upon the thoughts themselves, without allusion to the state of his brain. His subject [Niagara Falls] would have left him no room for self.

A false poet displays his or her skills in the hope that they will be mistaken for imagination. An acute critic, however, exposes those skills as wilful, predictable moves, mannerisms. The mannered writer is locked into an inflexible way of writing: 'That man is a desperate mannerist who cannot vary his style ad infinitum . . . '. Mannerism and range, as Poe properly sees them, are exact contraries. The varieties of prose usage provide a proper model for verse-writers, a hedge against mannerism, but the prose manner must, as Poe said, be 'ornamented into poetry '.

Poe's way of thinking about poetic style involves this one central paradox: the best is a plain style, but poetry is distinguished from prose by its ornaments. His handling of this paradox had enormous impact on his own verse. Most of the aspects of figurative language that are commonly associated with ornamentation were fiercely suppressed by Poe.

Similes (so much insisted upon by the critics of the reign of Queen Anne) are never, in our opinion, strictly in good taste, whatever may be said to the contrary, and certainly can never be made to accord with other high qualities, except when naturally arising from the subject in the way of illustration—and, when thus arising, they have seldom the merit of novelty. To be novel, they must fail in essential particulars. The higher minds will avoid their frequent use. They form no portion of the ideal, and appertain to the fancy alone.

Poe knew well how often similes derive from self-consciousness and quite wrongly suggest to many readers great imaginative powers; for him, similes always reflect mere pride of technique. 'An artist', he said, 'will always contrive to weave his illustrations into the metaphorical form'. Metaphor too, though, must be held in tight rein. Poe criticized Edward Bulwer severely for his 'mania of metaphor—metaphor always running into allegory'. Pure allegory he regarded as an 'antique barbarism' (though one of his own best poems, 'The Haunted Palace', is plainly an allegory), and personification as ludicrous (though his 'Stanzas [To F. S. O.]' are peppered with personifications). Metaphors should be used seldom and always kept from escalating into allegory or personification. At just those moments where modern readers have come to expect metaphor, Poe argues for literal expression: '. . . subjects which surpass in grandeur all efforts of the human imagination are well depicted only in the simplest and least metaphorical language '.

Even in poetry, Poe thought, the object of style is clarity and simplicity, certainly not impressiveness. 'What is worth thinking', he said, 'is distinctly thought: what is distinctly thought, can and should be distinctly expressed, or should not be expressed at all'. Where figurative language is not conducive to clarity, it is indefensible. Even more importantly, where poetic syntax impedes immediate clarity, it must be condemned:

Few things have greater tendency than inversion, to render verse feeble and ineffective. In most cases where a line is spoken of as 'forcible', the force may be referred to directness of expression. .. . In short as regards verbal construction, the more prosaic a poetical style is, the better.

The poetic style Poe admired most was one stripped bare of most, but not quite all, poetic devices. Quaintnesses of phrasing were admissible occasionally, as in poems on fantastic subjects. But most important of all, an American poet properly ornaments his or her language into poetry through prosodic invention.

Poe placed a great burden on prosody: each foot lands with a thud. His rhymes and meters are nothing if not insistent, as though he had not heard of counterpoint or off-rhyme. As always with Poe, there are general principles involved here. 'Verse originates' he claimed, 'in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness'. The more absolute the rhymes, and emphatically regular the rhythm, the closer a poet will be to the human origins of musical language. No purpose was served, as he reckoned, by concealing prosodic art. The opening lines of a poem he placed first on a list of his best poems rhymes 'moon' and 'June'. An earlier poem brought 'pass' and 'alas' together. He is always pushing so hard: 'trod upon' / 'Parthenon'; 'gala night' / 'bedight' (P, 325); 'Dian' / 'dry on'; 'linger' / 'sink her'. Even when the rhymes are not exact, they are emphatic for the effort behind them. No one reads Poe without understanding at once why Emerson called him the jingle man.

Poe presented himself as an American inventor among prosodists. Blank verse seemed 'hackneyed' to him, as it has to many later American poets. 'To break the pentameter', Pound wrote, 'that was the first heave'. William Carlos Williams's indebtedness to Poe is nicely indicated by the small fact that Williams took his most dubious and idiosyncratic prosodie term, the 'variable foot', from Poe. In The Philosophy of Composition, Poe said that his intention was above all to be original in the versification of 'The Raven'.

The extent to which [originality] . . . has been neglected, in versification, is one of the most unaccountable things in the world. Admitting that there is little possible of variety in mere rhythm [i.e., in the choice of a normative foot], it is still clear that the possible varieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite—and yet, for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing.

Beyond the question of his own originality was the matter of American poetry generally: if his countrymen continued to work in blank verse, for instance, they would have to stand comparison with the masters of that line (Milton is constantly on Poe's mind, when he considers his own accomplishment). In order not to produce a merely colonial literature, American writers had to concoct forms of their own, however homemade they might appear. Why Poe thought that the need to innovate bore so exclusively on prosody is not surprising:

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 further 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.

Americans were compelled by necessity, rather than inclined by temperament, to master the calculating faculties, Poe argued; but given that mastery, prosody was the one part of the art of poetry where it could be made to pay off. 'Faultless versification and scrupulous attention to grammar' were the two poetic virtues Poe was constantly trying to inculcate; he would test nearly every poet, tediously, for correctness. American poets needed to be correct in order to develop their own advantage over British poets, but also to avoid the condescension of their one-time colonizers.

With Poe, as with rather few other poets, one can see that his poems suffer from a particular conception of poetry. He believed that poetry is plain, clear language, but ornamented into poetry. The ornamentation of poetic language is something isolable—a rhyme, a repeated phrase—added to the plain sense. Although the poems are not simply a demonstration of his critical notions, his criticism does throw a special kind of light on the poems. In the poems and in the criticism, the same contradictions assert themselves, at the cost of the poems. For all Poe's admiration of stylistic range, Eliot was surely right to say that Poe lacks just this ability to express different sorts of feeling. Poe must have thought that poems like "The Bells" and "The Raven", as he explains it, express range, but they display a merely mechanical sort of variation of tone: in these poems the semantic sense of one statement varies from stanza to stanza; the obvious irony is that a misunderstanding has occurred. But two people, or a bird and a person, construing words differently is not what is properly meant by range of tone; Poe has simply concocted a mechanism for producing difference, not range.

Poe was indeed capable of writing verse that is properly spoken of as plain in style. However, the plain passages in his verse come not at all where Poe wanted to write well. Here are two passages from Politian, separated by only a few pages:

Lalage. And dost thou speak of love
To me, Politian?—dost thou speak of love
To Lalage?—ah wo—ah wo is me!
This mockery is most cruel!—-most cruel indeed!
Politian. Weep not! oh, sob not thus!—thy bitter tears
Will madden me. Oh mourn not, Lalage—
Be comforted! I know—I know it all, And still I speak of love.
Sweet Lalage, I love thee—love thee—love thee;
Thro' good and ill—thro' weal and wo I love thee.
(P, 272)

Jacinta. I made a change
For the better I think—indeed I'm sure of it—
Besides, you know it was impossible
When such reports have been in circulation
To stay with her now. She'd nothing of the lady
About her—not a tittle! One would have thought
She was a peasant girl, she was so humble.
I hate all humble people!—and then she talked
To one with such an air of condescension.
And she had not common sense—of that I'm sure
Or would she, now—I ask you now, Jacinta,
Do you, or do you not suppose your mistress
Had common sense or understanding when
She gave you all these jewels?
(P, 276-77)

Poe's accomplishment cannot be measured by Politian, but my point concerns only the obvious difference between these two passages—and the point is best made with unrhymed verse. The first passage is intended to be dramatic: Politian delivers the last two lines quoted on his knees. The writing is poor because the emotions represented are bluntly named, not examined, and those names are simply repeated relentlessly in order to provide emphasis. Poe clearly thought this an important moment in the play. The later passage is less important to the dramatic action, and the writing is far superior. Jacinta, alone on stage, is not posturing as Politian and Lalage do, but rather thinking and talking in verse; the enjambments and the parenthetical syntax keep the lines moving variously toward the larger coherence of the speech. Jacinta reveals the mix of her own feelings by choosing just the right, telling phrases—'tittle' and 'common sense'. In the second passage, Poe seems to have felt less need to write remarkably, for the sake of the action, whereas in the first he is straining—by merely repeating blunt phrases—to elevate his subject. He was not an inept poet—as the second passage demonstrates—but his poems are inept just when he would have them be sublime. When he wrote without thinking about Poetry, he could write plainly, thoughtfully, and sensitively, as some of his slighter efforts, such as 'To—————' and 'Deep in Earth' show.

The great caution advanced by Poe's career as poet-critic is against the excesses of provincialism. Certainly being an outsider among men of letters enabled him to write independently, and fiercely, in ways that remain admirable. And yet his sense that he could concoct formal principles with rather little regard for literary precedents just as surely doomed his poems to remain, like Edsels, a species unto themselves. Effective advocacy of a plain style in American poetry had to wait for later poet-critics—Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Yvor Winters. At the outset of the American line of poet-critics is this extremist who took a purely intentionalist approach to writing, chiefly because the alternative could so easily have meant, in the 1830s and 1840s, subservience to British letters. This sense that the independent writer was free to write anything at all was enormously invigorating; Poe wrote about naval history, travel literature, middle eastern geography. The job of a literary critic was to educate himself and his readers in very broad terms; the work of Pound, Eliot and Charles Olson show that Poe's example has made a difference. However technical poet-critics can be, they continue to see the job of literary criticism in terms that are much broader, just in terms of subject matter, than academic critics ever dare to believe. Yet that very sense of independence is surely responsible for Poe's odd place in literary history—as a kind of tinkerer among poets.