SOURCE: Davidson, Edward H. “Aspects of a Philosophy of Poetry.” In Poe: A Critical Study, pp. 43-75. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1957.

[In the following excerpt, Davidson discusses Poe as one of the major philosophic voices of nineteenth-century America.]

Poetry is a form of philosophy. It distills the major philosophic precepts of its time. One poet is not expressing his whole age and time: not even Shakespeare was the total record of the Elizabethan age; yet we rightly consider Shakespeare as the distinctly summarizing and even philosophic voice of his age.

Some poets are apparently aware that they are the “voices” of their age, and, like Tennyson and Longfellow of Poe's own time, are deeply conscious of their poetic place and destiny in their age. To be aware of such distinction is, however, not to have it. In order to explore the intellectual and philosophic poetic temper of the nineteenth century in America, one should not go to Longfellow, Lowell, or Bryant. He should go to Poe, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, not one of whom was a “philosopher” (much as Whitman tried to be one), but all of whom form the record of the American poetic sensibility in the nineteenth century.

Different as at first consideration those three poets were, they were nonetheless very similar—certainly Poe and Whitman were—in their search for a unitary theory of the universe of man and God. Poe was different from them too; he was never touched by the profound reaches of the Puritan mind in quest of its own private center, as was Emily Dickinson; and, despite the influences of German transcendental thought and idealistic philosophy, Poe, unlike Whitman, always remained half-rationalist and half-organicist. In another term, he might be considered a return to the Middle Ages and to the schoolmen who fashioned the immense design of the “great chain of being.” Yet he was also a citizen of his age, keenly aware of the fracture which Cartesian logic and Lockean psychology had made in man's conception of himself and of his world. In its way Poe's problem was very much like that of Henry Adams or of Wallace Stevens: that of seeing unity in diversity, of conceiving the design behind the apparent chaos, of marrying matter and mind. Poe was not, strictly speaking, a “philosopher” any more than Henry Adams and Wallace Stevens were to be. Yet he regarded his world and employed his art “philosophically”; that is, his poems, short stories, and certain critical pronouncements were projections of the mind and the imagination toward a metaphysical order and were attempts to phrase not the “why” but the “what” of man, his mind, and his world. The poem, the short story, the novel like Pym became the symbolic enactment of man's search for logic and meaning.

What we shall endeavor to do in this chapter, which is intercalary to the main adventure through Poe's career, is to watch Poe respond and give expression to some of the major currents of his age and then to see what trends in his artistic career these forces shaped. The best and easiest point at which to begin is with the youthful mind of Poe himself.

2

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Romantic mind was that it wore itself out or even destroyed its own imaginative powers. Romantic poets have so frequently exhausted their inspiration, made barren their special subject matter, or contented themselves with their own private meditations that the “Romantic agony” has become, with whatever justification, a commonplace of historical inquiry and criticism. In a very real sense, Romantic poets have been susceptible to the “agony” because, as poets, they began with a potential of private destructiveness, namely, with the self. Poe belonged to the company of Shelley, Coleridge, Pushkin, Verlaine, and others too numerous to mention; it is a very large and yet a very select company, each member a special case in himself and accountable only on his own unique imaginative experience.

The “agony” character of poetry need not primarily concern us here. It is that frustration and terror a poet realizes when he knows that he has nothing more to say or when he gropes through that murky region that lies between what the imagination envisions and what the poetic rhetoric fails to resolve. Poe was a victim of both these failures, these terrors; and their roots lie deep in his mind and in the age of which he was, however unaware, a part.

Every youthful mind, especially every poetically romantic mind, is solipsistic; it begins with an intuitive necessity to give credence only to itself and to its own intense experience. It sees everything from within, and it sees even the universe as a kind of opaque mirror of itself. Such a condition of being is natural and even healthy; in a writer it produces the endless autobiographical narrative of the accumulating richness of consciousness on the part of a growing mind: Dickens' David Copperfield, Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym and “The Raven,” to Swann's Way, Buddenbrooks, and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In some respects Poe might be called the formulator of the theme: the subject of his poetry and of a great deal of his stories is the chronicle of the consciousness of a hypersensitive youth. One might also say that these “histrio” poses were means of his conducting his intellectual development in public.

Poe's development was limited to how far Poe could project or enlarge his own personality or his imaginative selfhood. His sense of self was, however, perilously close to an exclusive narcissism. The curiosity of this situation was not essentially its narcissism but its strangely hypertrophied emotional condition of always needing to be in another consciousness or being—as though he could continually invent imaginative protagonists of himself who would do what, imaginatively, needed doing in the poem or short story and all the while leave him safe and untouched. The drama always ended the same way: it was a double destruction, that of the Poe-self imaginatively and that of the invented self (woman, the visible world, God) substantively. Unless he could be “in” and wholly identify himself with that being or protagonist who was the doer of the poem, Poe had no subject at all; and the moment he achieved that state of identification—the moment when the self and its prototype were virtually indistinguishable—neither he nor that other being had any further imaginative existence. Poe's imagination reduced to complete disorder what it intended to use before any new shape or subject could arise; or, to put the matter another way, the imagination had to go through a process and come out on the “other side” before the original stimulus or insight had any usableness or meaning.

The rationale of this solipsistic act of annihilation is, admittedly, a matter for the most tentative speculation. Yet enough evidence survives to permit us to investigate further this question of an artistic mind delighting in its own destruction, the imagination destroying itself in the very act of creation, as a pervasive element in Poe's art.¹

One of the major themes in Poe's whole corpus of writing is his longing for the mother, for a kind of female night-shape, who is never there and will never come. The pretty Elizabeth Arnold Poe died in Poe's infancy; and though Mrs. Frances Keeling Allan lavished on him an affection which was strong as it was deep, Poe never bore the name of this putative mother: for a boy growing up in Richmond, Virginia, not to bear the name of the mother and father was socially worse than having no parents at all. Thus Poe sought the “dream” mother who was forever young, forever soft, and yet forever unworldly; the foster mother who died when he was a young man could claim in death more of his devotion than when she was alive. In the last year of his life Poe celebrated in a sonnet this vision of the dream-mother who was a combination of Mrs. Allan, his mother-in-law Mrs. Maria Clemm, and all the visionary ladies he had ever seen:

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
          The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
          None so devotional as that of “Mother,”
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you. …

This mother-image was, more importantly, one of the psychic projections of Poe's own inner world; the lost mother was a means of his acting out a number of themes which lay deep in his imaginative consciousness.

This longing for the mother was coupled with a fear of the dark and of the night. The child Marcel in Proust's Swann's Way suffered excruciatingly in the dark, but he could at least hear the voices below stairs, and eventually his mother did come to kiss him goodnight. Although we know nothing of the bedtime rituals in the Allan household,² we can understand that for the rest of his life Poe heard, over and over again, the voices of his imagination out of the dark and terrifying night of his childhood. In that strange blending of visions which were to possess him for a lifetime, Poe saw a mother-image cast in the dark night of fear and death. This night-shape was always young, a beautiful woman arrayed in the filmy dress of marriage or the funeral: the nightgown or wedding dress easily shifted into the grave clothes, and the innocent white of the bride was the pallor of death on the cheek. The early lyric, “I saw thee on thy bridal day,” was, with very little change in metaphor, a version of Irene in “The Sleeper.” In Poe the child became the man; and the mother who never came in the dark of the night grew into the demon lover, the poltergeist, who was to haunt him in all his poetry and in many of his short stories.

Such a mind is born or made an outcast. Poe later suffered a deepening of his feeling of displacement when, reared as a gentleman in a gentlemanly way of life, he found himself suddenly cast out when he returned to Richmond, in no very deep disgrace, from the University of Virginia at Christmas time of 1826. It was indeed one of the harshest blows life could deal him; biographers, for all their stress on facts, have not stressed it enough, for it split Poe's life in two.

Yet, like other outcasts or outcast minds, Poe enjoyed his special condition; he reveled not only in a “region of sighs” but in solitude. He developed early a capacity for introspection, and these private meditations, coupled with the power of self-expression, induced Poe to speculate on his own mind as outside of or as functioning apart from the world of men and reality. In that separation Poe sought, ultimately, the deepest meanings of his own existence—yet this speculation was going on all the while that Poe was setting up a number of barriers or defenses against final self-revelation.

The feeling of isolation or the sense of personal loneliness can actually become means of insight into the nature of the self and the world. They can become, not philosophies, but philosophic attitudes. Kierkegaard, whose mind was contemporary with and much like Poe's, put on his mask of the “either/or” whereby he could play the trifler in public and hold his mind in suspense and ready for speculation in the deepest privacy. Poe was similarly the histrio, the shaper of masks for the self and a teller of lies in order to conceal the cracks in a histrio's façade.³

Poe was also a citizen of the first half of the nineteenth century, a member of the generation which sought Waldens and brotherhoods of men whereby man might learn to express himself both in the privacy of his own mind and in the community of his fellowmen. He was of an age (it was an “age”: Hawthorne and Melville were distinguished citizens of it) which tried to solve a question central to the modern world: if man is a mind, he cannot live in a mindless or mechanistic world. Either he must be mechanistic man existing in a mechanical universe, or he must see himself as a mind living in a world which also functions according to some intelligence. The solution Poe reached, as did Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, may not have been a permanent one (what solution could be?) but it had certain validity until the impact of evolutionary and Pragmatic thought.⁴

The romantic mind—and Poe is almost a touchstone for it—sought the answer to the epistemological dilemma—does man as mind live in a mindless universe?—by consistently undertaking the journey of mind. Whatever this questing self could find would be truth for itself and for its time; but the quest had to be undergone alone; if it reached its goal in privacy, it might then turn outward toward the world. But the social message could come only after a private regeneration: witness Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Mill's Autobiography (and its famous description of the mind's rebirth in mid-life), Newman's Apologia, and Arnold's poetry. The private self was first mirror for the world and then the world could be seen as it truly was—a universe of mind which somehow was like the private self as a mind.

The first stage in this romantic quest was an act of destruction or renunciation: the real world was abandoned or reduced to the conditions imposed by the self as mind; then, and only then, could reality or world assume its being and actuality again. The writers I have just mentioned were ones who performed this double activity of intellectual making and reshaping. The curiosity of Edgar Poe is that he never came out of the first stage: the young mind's private indulgence in solitude and in terror and dream became the habit of a lifetime; his mind fulfilled itself—every time it wrote a poem or short story—by performing an act of destruction, a destruction of the sensible world as having any mind or reality whatsoever. What the child saw in its earliest impressions—the visions of the dying or dead girl-mother, then the youth's private longing for solitude, finally the literary capital which could be made from the terror of self-consciousness and the dark night of the seeking mind—these became the major imaginative enterprises of a lifetime.

Yet the “either/or,” the split between the inner self and the outer world, was never complete in Poe: the mind which employed itself in the discursive journey of self-exploration was never quite the total enterprise. There was another side of his mind which, as it were, remained apart from the activity of the other. While one side—that of the underveloped adolescent with its night fears and the dreams of the lost girl-mother—was engaged in an imaginative destruction of reality chiefly in the poetry and in a select group of tales, the other half of the mind was attempting to make sense of reality and to put logic back together: this side functioned in the tales of ratiocination, in the criticism, and in the philosophic prose-poem Eureka. The mind was split between, on the one hand, its delight in and horror at its own capacity for destruction and, on the other, its consciousness that the world was untouched all the time.

This fracture or dualism was, in Poe, only partly a question of his private mind or psychology; if it were wholly so, then all his writing would have been merely autobiographical, the outward expression of his own inner, private turmoil. The fracture was philosophical as well: it was part of the major stream of intellectual and artistic life from the seventeenth until well into the nineteenth, and even into the twentieth, century.

3

It was Cartesian dualism which left to future generations the problem of a split world. In science, the enlightenment derived from this division was enormous, but in art it willed to men's minds the question of the subject and its object, the artist and his material, the “I” and the universe. For the eighteenth century this division was a recognition of the highest convenience and potentiality: the world of reality left impressions on the mind, and those impressions, quite removed from the original stimulus in the world, were the subject of the artist's contemplation and composition. The artist thereby presented the general, the universal, the type, which existed in the human intelligence unquestioned by time and the variables of the world itself.

Romantic psychology and epistemology were, in great measure, an attempt to bridge this gap and to resolve this split. The artist's material could not be always conveniently “out there” as a matter for detached or even absent contemplation; the artist was an artist because, primarily, he underwent a continual process of reanimation by virtue of his very contact with the world. What the world contained, the mind knew; what reality stimulated, the artist could reduce to some order: but the knowledge and the order were not a set of determinants which philosophers, critics, and artists had agreed as existing (the leaf was not simply a generalized leaf, knowable from Aristotle to Pope) but were rediscovered, almost as if they had never existed before, every time an artist's mind and imagination sensed and knew them.

Philosophically, the question pertained to the relationship between the mind and the world. Do I know the world (to put the matter another way) because I have a mind which is capable of sensing and reflecting on the world apart from reality? Or is my mind an extension and still a part of what I might term “the world”? One question is rationalism or mechanism, the other idealism or organicism. And the answer which a writer or artist makes, instinctively or logically, determines the kind of art he will produce. On the one hand he may be Alexander Pope; on the other, Coleridge, Poe, or Wallace Stevens.⁵

The romantic artist has, generally speaking, subscribed to what Santayana termed “the higher superstition,” which he further defined: “This views the world as an oracle or charade, concealing a dramatic unity, or formula, or maxim, which all experience exists to illustrate.”⁶ That is, the “unity” exists as an ideal which the artist or philosopher seeks to realize, but always he is haunted by the necessary recognition that the world is sense and mind, matter and soul, thing and idea which he can never quite bring into any permanent, ultimate coherence. He is forever tantalized by a split universe which is, he keeps insisting, really one.

Poe attempted one more solution to this dualism within a unity.⁷ Subject and object, mind and matter, the artist and the world ought to exist in some functional and apprehensible design. If there is a split, then the artist's main business might be employed in demonstrating that there is one containing Reality within which are other modes and elements of being. Poe is an interesting example of one who acknowledged this fracture, the Cartesian dualism, and yet aimed to resolve some comprehensible and knowable design. Melville, as Mr. Charles Feidelson has shown, is an interesting example of another approach to the dilemma: Melville sensed that, if he permitted his own mind (as he almost did in Pierre) to shape the world in terms of his own private vision, the world of sensible reality was virtually annihilated; nothing would remain except the white foam from which Ishmael arose at the end of Moby-Dick; thus to render only the individual attitude toward the world would mean a retreat into introspection and loss of communication with the world. Melville's solution was only partial—and somewhat like Poe's: he allowed the Confidence Man his worldly masquerade and then assumed a private mask which he wore in his shorter poems, in Clarel, and in Billy Budd. The fracture was complete: the knowing mind was all; the world as perception was nothing or a chaos.⁸

Poe was more daring; he began where, as it were, Melville had left off. If Melville rejected the substantial world because it was a mass of unyielding, unknowable stuff, Poe early abandoned any organic conception which his basic monism told him ought to exist. Consequently, he had several methods of resolving the problem of a dualism within the One: he could, as Melville did eventually, abandon the world of substance and retire into the loneliness of the single perceiving self; or he could, as Emerson proposed and Whitman fulfilled, make the sensible world unite with or conform to the perceiving mind or self. Poe did neither. He was too much a rationalist, a child of the eighteenth century, to allow any condition but an epistemological separation between the mind and reality. But instead of retiring into the private imagination and making the world conform to the inner reason, or denying any existence to reality except what the imagination allows, Poe sent his imagination on a series of journeys which were means and acts of conquest of the mind over the material world.

Yet these were not always acts of “conquest.” The action might be reversed and the conquered might overcome the conqueror. For somehow, in Poe's art, the imagination tended to lose itself in the process of going out or of making the material world conform to the imaginative premise. The material world was too often unyielding; instead of the mind's willing a comprehension, the mind lost itself and became the object (as in “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”). By contrast, we might for the moment consider Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” as an act of submergence and identification: the actors in this symbolic drama—the lilac, star, bird, the land, even the poet himself—all succumb to and go through death but, at the last, come out on the other side of death in a total transformation wherein the perceiving self has been able to reassert itself and its identity in the act of dying and being reborn.

Poe's usual method, from the time he abandoned the intensely autobiographical expression of his early poetry, was to send another self on the journey, an invented self which becomes or wills or understands; all the while the central “I” is detached, observing, and aware that what it knows or invents may be only an illusion, a fascinating masquerade which, for the moment, the imagination has been able to fashion from that reality which is ever diverse and separate from the knowing self.

In order further to explore and understand the implications of this “split,” both philosophical and artistic, which determined much of romantic art and, more especially, Poe's verse and prose, we should consider two formulations. The first is, What is the nature and condition of any art that renounces the world of sense and the accredited language of discourse which men for centuries have assumed as “real” and meaningful? Or, what happens to poetry, or to art in general, when it denies the perceptual world and takes for granted that what the mind makes is the only reality? The second and one more pertinent for Poe is, What might happen if the imagination not only rejected the world of sense and meaning but attempted to enter a range of expression and experience where the artist could make any word or sign mean anything he wanted, either a nothing or a completely abstract symbol? These two questions are means not only of describing Poe and his poetry but also of linking him with Coleridge, his critical mentor, and one of the main streams of early nineteenth-century philosophical thought. Our present problem now turns on the nature and act of the creative process; in Romantic idealism, the mind is not a mere reflector of the world, a dark closet into which jets of knowable light are projected and made into ideas, but is itself a creator and knower.

4

Kant had shown, by his distinction between phenomena and noumena, that the mind does not operate upon brute matter and form ideas out of mere sense-impressions, as though it were putting together an elaborate jigsaw puzzle; if that were so, then the mind were forever a prey to outer circumstance and deprived of any ideas in continuity. The individual human mind knows because it is itself a part and product of a unifying thought manifested throughout the universe; there is both the individual mind and the all-ordering mind which “think into” each other.⁹ For Kant the mind is both actor and creator; and in formulating this function of the mind in answer to Humean skepticism, he stipulated three elements of mental activity: Sensibility, by which we become aware of spatial and temporal objects; Imagination; and Understanding. The two latter functions are “transcendental,” in that they take their origin in sense-data but go beyond the limitations of human knowledge which Lockean rationalism had sought to impose. They are truly creative, and they make known to the mind the only final perceptions which the mind ever achieves of the world.¹⁰

The line from Kant to Coleridge is straight and direct. In the Biographia Literaria Coleridge took over bodily these three functions of mental activity and then put his special emphasis on the second, the Imagination; for Coleridge was concerned less with what the mind knows and more with what that special faculty of the mind known as the imagination does when it is creating a poem or any work of art.¹¹

The imagination is itself, for Coleridge, dual. The “primary Imagination” is the first stage of perceptual insight and illumination; it is the fullest, the most complete agency of perception, for it is the all-comprehensive, “esemplastic,” or “building-up” faculty which takes the infinite diversity of experience and makes it into a whole; it does not leave experience a set of sporadic jets or flashes, as in Lockean thought, but instinctively combines experience into that continuity which men know exists. There is nothing special, Coleridge (and Wordsworth too) insisted, about this faculty; it is not given just to poets. It is the very basis of the most prosaic knowledge of the world; all men have it and use it. Poetry, though different as an expression of the mind, is only one way by which man has been able to make sense for himself of the sensible world; it is, in that respect, very close to science, philosophy, ethics, and religion.¹²

The primary imagination is, therefore, virtually an instinct in man: it is his faculty not only of deriving some sense of comprehensive unity in the world but also his capacity to “think back into” the world his own awareness of belonging in that whole. It is the highest reach of man's attempt to understand himself as participating in the design and as being shaped by the multiplicity which, nonetheless, he can know as a functioning one. Poetry is in this respect no different from other studies and knowledges: so to consider poetry as an expression of the primary imagination is to make it part of the same quest for understanding as can be derived from the science of the natural world or the philosophy of the mind itself. Here, then, romantic theory was sometimes content to leave poetry—in that nebulous range of expression and comprehension which might be all, or nothing.

Coleridge apparently saw the danger of such a program: of necessity poetry was different from other investigations, and its procedure was something distinct, if not unique. With the “secondary Imagination,” which is Coleridge's own term, we enter the special domain of poetry; it was this concept which required of Coleridge his most searching analysis; for Poe the implications of this Coleridgean view are enormous. The secondary imagination was the destructive force; it was the operation of the mind antecedent to poetic creation, even to the imaginative stimulus which might eventually lead to poetic activity. This secondary faculty breaks through the range of everyday perception: that world which Coleridge termed “familiarity and selfish solicitude” must be destroyed. The primary imagination is the mind's first comprehension; it sees all things put together, but that apprehension cannot produce poetry.¹³ The mind must pass through the world-as-all; “that world,” in the words of D. G. James, “is dissolved and dissipated; and, out of the same materials, operated on however by a revivified imagination, a new world is made. The first is adequate to the demands of ‘practical’ life; but the creative re-ordering of the secondary imagination results in a world adequate to the demands of the ‘contemplative’ life which, if sufficiently developed, issues in artistic creation.”¹⁴

This aspect of the life of the imagination may be regarded from another point of view. The primary imagination presents the world to the mind as substantively known and ordered. There may indeed be more for the mind to know, but such knowledge is merely the addition or further sense and intellectual data to the amount of knowledge already obtained. The secondary imagination is, contrariwise, a disordering or reordering of what is the known world and the mind's ideas. It consists, as it were, of a reverse process from the one by which the mind has reached its “primary” awareness. It brings to the attention of the mind, or imagination (the two are virtually synonymous in this respect), a constant skepticism and review of the world. The secondary imagination may very well end in dissolving what is “known” and end by creating a wholly new conceptual realm of idea quite on its own; and this new range of perception may become so “real” that the imagination or mind can live simultaneously in two dimensions or two worlds.

Poe's adherence to Coleridge's design was almost slavish; he never went beyond it or added to it but simply emphasized one element at the expense of several others. In nearly identical terms Poe made a tripartite division of the human faculties. The first is the Heart, the sensory or feeling organ (and is almost the same function as Coleridge's “sensibility”); its satisfaction is “Passion” or the “excitement of the heart.” Its operation is within a “homeliness” or common-placeness. The second is the Imagination, the perceiving or discovering power. The third is the Intellect or understanding; its satisfaction is “Truth”; its best realization is achieved in prose which “demands a precision.”¹⁵ These two latter functions, as in Coleridge's schema, are transcendental and therefore nonsensory; yet they alone can make the world fully known to the mind. Poe placed the imagination as the second or mediating faculty in order to denote its blending or esemplastic function between the other two; it is, however, a separate faculty whose principles and action form the domain of art.¹⁶

Poe's one significant departure from the Coleridgean design is in his assumption that these three distinctions are not so much components or parts of the human mind as they are separate actions of man's power of expression and communication. The imagination is, for Poe, the one truly creative or discovering faculty of the mind; the other two are either speculative, analytical, discursive, or descriptive.¹⁷ They are not “lower”; they simply employ a different idiom and vocabulary of conveyance. Thus the mind lives not so much on different levels or ranges of experience: experience is all “there” from the first or is developed as life goes on; the mind lives in varying ranges of expression or means of making things known to itself and to others. The heart or sensory faculty is the everyday and may not be expressive at all but mutely knowing, as with habit. The intellect deals in scientific formulas, with precise instruments of measuring, and with the inductive method of verifying what the mind regards as true and permanent. The imagination, however, both orders and destroys; it goes through the world of reality or “selfish solicitude” and conceives some comprehensible reality which only the rhetoric (Poe thought of it as music or poetry) of the imagination may express and convey. The heart and the intellect are barred from such expressive understanding simply because they do not have the right language. The mathematical symbol for the square root of minus-one may be a marvelous tool of intellectual perception, but it cannot do what a bar of music or a poem can do to convey the something-other which lies beyond mathematics or the sciences.

As an outgrowth of this insistence on the comprehending or rhetorical power of the imagination, the romantic mind was led to consider the question of originality. Did the imagination know or shape the same known world in different modes of expression (as Wordsworth thought), or was it a faculty of making things known which had never been known before (as Coleridge, and Emerson too, considered)? If the imagination is a faculty for originating and discovering, then does it make known only what it knows within itself or does it have the capacity of really penetrating to something and a somewhere “beyond”?

The imagination is original; and it is not original. This paradox Poe could never resolve. Perhaps his most concise statement is in some of the “Marginalia” of 1844, wherein, discussing the “pure Imagination,” he noted that the work of the imagination is, first of all, to “combine things hitherto uncombined; the compound … partaking, in character, of beauty, or sublimity, in the ratio of the respective beauty or sublimity of the things combined”; these are, nonetheless, simply to be regarded as restatements of “previous combinations.” Secondly, “the admixture of two elements results in a something that has nothing of the qualities of one of them, or even nothing of the qualities of either. … Thus, the range of Imagination is unlimited. Its materials extend throughout the universe.”¹⁸

By a curious twist of his critical terminology, Poe discussed imaginative originality under the heading of the “mystic.” This issue led him into some confusion: he had difficulty adjusting one view, as derived from Baron Bielfeld's Elements of Universal Erudition, that the mind can know nothing outside its own experience (therefore, the imagination is a chimera of the self) and that, contrariwise, the mind does receive impulses from the Ideal which it can reduce to shape and metaphor.¹⁹ In other words, the mind, or imagination, cannot know the world outside itself, and it can. The imagination is supernatural, and it is mundane. Or: the world is itself insensible to its own dissociation and atomism, and so too are most men in it; the poet, however, is so keenly aware of this dislocation of parts within the whole that he attempts, imaginatively, to put the universe as an idea back together again. Poe considered this faculty and exercise of the poet or artist as “invention”: the creative imagination makes the infinitely diverse knowables assume some conjunction and order. Poetry was, for Poe, the supreme act of inventive conjoining, and it was “mystic,” as Schlegel had demonstrated beforehand, because it could convey only a suggestive or even ambiguous meaning.²⁰

A poem, or for that matter any act of the imagination, is really two poems or acts: there is the primary expression or “story”—that the generality of readers can receive; and there is the “mystic or secondary expression” (conforming to the Coleridgean distinction of the secondary from the primary imagination) which Poe defined in his review of Moore's Alciphron: “With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august and soul-exalting echo. In every glimpse of beauty presented, we catch, through long and wild vistas, dim bewildering visions of a far more ethereal beauty beyond.”²¹ The aim of poetry is to penetrate the barrier of resistant fact or the merely ostensible relationship of things and enter the range of the Unknowable—a range which, in another phrasing of the idea, Poe relegated to the limbo of illusion.

Yet this paradox and confusion were not major questions in romantic critical thinking. The solution was really made on the basis that what the mind perceived was something quite different from what the imagination made into art. Art was a different reality, a “something from ourselves.” The imaginative insight and action was a “something from within” back upon the object which had given the imagination its first stimulus; “we imbue the object,” Washington Allston wrote, “making it correspond to a reality within us.”²² In the subject-object relationship, the object achieves artistic reality only by a subject's perceiving it and making it known. What Poe further attempted to show (with the whole Coleridgean logic behind him) was that there is some mysterious, indefinable faculty, inherent in all men however varying in its intensity. Owing to this universal, innate principle all men can basically agree on what constitutes human or poetic truth. The ultimate finality and proof of this agreement are not in nature or in changeless ideal forms, but in men.

Poe's aesthetic principles simply put this faculty and principle farther inward. He removed it beyond history or science and allotted it only to an “Eden” which the artist or true lover of beauty can know. So far, in fact, did he remove it from the world of cause and effect that only in the destruction of that substantive world could the artist, or poet, find his center and thereby build his imaginative vision of reality. Only that special endowment of originality gave man the power to penetrate the actual world and create ever anew, each time the poem was written or the work of art was made, something-other than what the object or idea once was, not because the object or idea changes the mind nor because the imagination subjectively makes the thing into its own image, but because the imagination is able to make something wholly new: the poem, the painting, the sculpture, the musical composition never existed before.²³

A poem is therefore the imagination's report on that exploration and comprehension; it becomes a symbolic construct of Unity, but it should not be taken as being that Unity. A poem is not “like” the Unity; it is an illusion or a “something about” that Unity. This is an important distinction which keeps the poem or language from ever becoming “real.” The poem is a report by the imagination, but it is not what the imagination perceived. Words and language are man's reminder of his failure ever to make his own cognition real.

The logical end to this question regarding what poetry is and does is either failure or skepticism. The activity of the imagination is toward a powerful sense of the world's cohesion and unity as that world displays itself to the mind. Yet, contrariwise, as D. G. James has remarked, the “movement of the poetic mind … is towards a powerful sense of the world's limits; but it is compelled by an inward necessity to try to penetrate beyond those limits, and therefore to involve itself in inevitable defeat.”²⁴ Skepticism is the realization that if words are not “real” in their conveyance of idea, then nothing is real; the poem and the imagination are illusory.

Poe could never escape the implications of this dilemma: either the imagination is real and reports reality in real words which have some durable meaning, or there is a world of fact that, though words are not “real,” forever resists any means of bridging between itself and the mind of man. In the later “Philosophy of Composition” Poe tried to reduce one verbal reality (that of the imagination) to understandable terms of another (skepticism or human rationality); the analysis attempted to retrace rationally what had once occurred imaginatively by means of “The Raven.” But, fully to appreciate the analysis, one must be where Poe was when he wrote the essay—on the other side of the imaginative journey on which the poem had taken him; yet one need not know the poem at all. “The interest of an analysis,” Poe confessed in “The Philosophy of Composition,” “… is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analyzed.”²⁵ The analysis or reconstruction is not the poem; each is a separate exercise, one of the imagination, the other of the skeptical intellect.

If, therefore, poetry is finally beyond analysis, if it is not subject to the norms of inquiry and judgment, then what is its domain and what should it do? Poetry, as Coleridge stated before Poe, aimed at “awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.”²⁶ It was the action of the imagination outside itself and it reached toward endowing objects with existence and with relationship. Just as primitive man took for granted that his visible world was alive with voices and spirits, so the poet engages in a series of imaginative readings of earth. Ruskin's pathetic fallacy is not a “fallacy” at all but the demonstrative ascription of continuity and existence to sensible form around us. As Bacon long ago and Whitehead more recently have shown, there cannot be “just an apple” or “just a crocus” in a toneless, fragmented reality. Sensible objects are not fixed and dead.²⁷ They are brought to life and made known to us by acts of the poetic imagination. This act is a difficult and complex ritual which presumes to render the material world, not to the sense or rational faculties, but to itself. But the poem was not so much the act or ritual as it was two acts of perception: one was the poet's, the other was the reader's. The two joined in order to make the poem, for without completing that metaphoric and symbolic cycle the poem had no existence.

5

In the language of poetry might be the answer to the question of whether objects are real or whether they become real because a mind “thinks” reality into them. The romantic poet, or any artist for that matter, faced the Cartesian dilemma of the relationship between thinker and object, mind and matter. Locke had long ago failed to answer the question of whether the mind knows an object or whether the mind is confined only to its own consciousness and thus, as Hume demonstrated, is lodged totally within its own illusion.

This, then, was the rift of nearly two hundred years and extended from Lockean rationalism to Coleridgean idealism. The implications of this rift were, for Poe, enormous. With hardly a question he assumed that there was a split between the mind and reality and that separate functions of the mind made known one or the other: the understanding or the rational faculties supplied the mind with sense impulses and, eventually, with knowledge of the world; the imagination, that other faculty (with its two aspects which we have already seen) of perception beyond mere resistant fact, offered enticements to and then visions of the infinite, the ideal. The imagination may take its start from and even overlap the rational understanding; but the understanding can never encroach on the special domain of imaginative comprehension. In Locke's epistemology the charts and boundaries of the rational mind were so clearly defined that an Age of Good Sense was content to remain within them.

It was not Locke's separation of the faculties which was so much at fault; the special weakness of his ideas in which a century put its trust was the “tabula rasa” theory, the concept that the mind enters the world as a blank on which life wrote the lessons of “experience.” Epistemology and psychology were thus happily joined—only to stimulate further confusion. At this point the German idealists and, more especially for Poe, Coleridge showed that the process or the “how” of knowing might be distinguished from the “what” of the mind's knowledge. The language question might be a means of solving this dilemma: for the rationalist words are not “real” because they are the links the mind establishes both sensorily and intellectually with the external world which, anteriorly, had impinged upon it; words are simply “made.” For the romantic like Coleridge and Poe words are “real” because they are the inevitable, organic result of the mind's and the imagination's apprehension of itself and reality. Or, stated another way, the post-Lockean made words only fictions of things; the idealist, from Coleridge through Emerson to Poe, assumed that words are not only images of natural facts but signs of essences and absolutes. One may find the statements for this concept where he may—in Emerson's chapter on “Language” in Nature or in Horace Bushnell's Introductory Discourse on language in his God in Christ; whatever the location, in Poe as elsewhere, words were more than splendid fictions and signs; they could become the only reality man knew; all else was illusion.²⁸

Poe, for his own ill or good, was part logician and part psychologist, part philosopher and part semanticist. He inherited and then elaborated a crux in the nature of cognition which he was never able to solve. The idealist or organicist, as we have seen, considered that language was “real” not only because it was the only way the mind could make things and its own ideas known to itself but because words were the inevitable necessity of the interaction of the mind on the world and of the world on mind. The word “stone” must, of all possibilities for naming that object, be in English the word “stone.”

But the language-problem became acute when, however, the word “stone” need no longer have any relationship with the object stone; words could become stimuli for and avenues of meaning between mind and mind and might never again need referring to the object stone. One need never see a stone nor know what weeping is to be able to conceive of a “weeping stone.” On this condition of divorcing language from the objects they denote, words can become anything the user of words wants them to be.

Thus any word had a double purpose and existence. On the one hand, a word had a very immediate, denotative meaning; it was a divisible thing of sounds and precise demonstration in dictionaries. On the other hand, the word was a “something-other,” a suggestiveness, an abstraction, and a way into the farther range of perception beyond logic and beyond the normal discourse of man. By means of the poetic or incantatory process, the imaginative response of any reader could be enticed toward an ultimate symbolic meaning which defied the language of prose or rationality to define. Yet, all the while, this farther range of expression and thought was continually under the review of a critical, logic-making intelligence which was, of necessity, using the very same words, in whatever differing contexts, that had been employed in the poetic or imaginative discourse.

In addition to this view that language, even the same words, might have double functions, whether as precise meaning or as suggestive incitement to abstract, imaginative thought, Poe further complicated the language problem by conceiving that a poet could make words exist in a kind of third or separate dimension: a poet could make words, in the highly variable connotativeness of poetry, mean anything he might want. He could precondition what response the reader should have to the mood, texture, idea of a poem, and he could, even more, induce the same responses in all readers of his poem. If readers had differing ideas about or responses to a poem, then the fault was the poet's; the poem was not correctly made. Poe's savage attacks on his fellow poets were based, in most respects, on this assumption that poems are murky and confusing simply because poetasters have not properly exercised the techniques of their craft. Poems can even be original, quite unlike poems ever made before, by virtue of a poet's revitalizing the old or even inventing a new symbolism, a new use of language, out of which absolutely new poetic meaning could be obtained.

There was, nonetheless, a limit even to this imaginative freedom. Any word or symbolism, however revitalized or invented, had to be anchored in the world of sense perception; its beginning had to be in some objectification which men know as “real” in place and time. Thereafter, the creative imagination could proceed anywhere, so long as its symbolic order maintained some coherent and known relationship with the intelligible order of sense and reality. The stone is, in this context, not only a key to a sensible image (the object “stone”) which should call up in every hearer or reader of the word a precise image of that object but is also capable of being joined to other words and ideas to set up in every hearer or reader a pathway and process toward some knowable, ultimate idea of which the stone-idea was only an impetus or a very small part. In poetry, where language becomes almost totally metaphoric and symbolic, this implicit connotativeness of words should mean that all readers of the same poem might, within certain indeterminate limits, obtain the same idea and response the words were meant to convey. Critics might carp and dispute, but the phrase, “the weeping stone,” if set properly in the design and progress of the poem, should be universally the same in making an idea known through the communication of language.²⁹

Here indeed was a paradox. Are words names for things or are they names for our ideas of things? If poetry were the symbolic expression only of our ideas of things, then the substantial world had been left behind or destroyed. The weeping stone is not an object; it is a metaphoric transference of the idea of weeping to a thing which has no power of itself to weep or feel any emotion. Is, then, the idea of a weeping stone existent only in the mind which is able to arrange words for the purpose of conveying the picture and the idea of a stone that weeps? The phrase and the attendant idea must lie either in the mind that can establish a set of congruences or in some extrasensory region neither of the mind nor of fact wherein the very words themselves have metaphoric existence.

Poetic language is therefore a denial of reality or the submergence of whatever seems real in the idea out of which the poem is made. Yet the destruction is only partial: it is the annihilation of the flat “given” world which threatens at all time to exercise its brute control over what the mind subsumes under meaning. Poetic language exists not in substance nor in the poetic mind which may have made the poem but in a neutral world, a kind of farther dimension wherein the mind or imagination functions as mediating between external reality and itself. Language, to rephrase our problem, is real and not real at the same time; in expressing an idea a poet is not expressing his view of that idea, for words are not inward nor even, as it were, mental. The neutral region of poetic language may, however, be so permitted to eschew any normal word patterns which designate the real that a poet might even be permitted to invent his own vocabulary—a vocabulary, it must be insisted, that could not be altogether his.

A century before these questions were fronting the Romantic mind Jonathan Edwards had raised the problem of the word as real, and he answered it in nearly the same terms. The word was, for Edwards, not itself “real,” but it was a comprehensible relationship established, in a variable realm of knowledge, between man here and God there. The image of the spider held over the candle-flame in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was not the actual condition of man but was the knowable situation of man held by a mere filament over hell.³⁰ The only difference between the language theories, if so they may be termed, of Edwards and Poe is that Edwards conceived the word as inevitably and necessarily that word, whether “spider,” “candle,” or “God's wrath”; and only through that one articulate word could man establish any knowable relationship with the infinite. For Poe, language was, however well man might agree on meanings, a world of itself, neither man's intelligible mind nor observed fact; the word or phrase did not possess a meaning; it obtained meaning the moment it was put in an arrangement with other words to form an apprehension. Prose conformed to a logic and habit of man's agreeing minds; poetry should obey only its own logic: whatever the poet made of language was ever a new creation.

In concluding these generalizations on poetic theory we might well consider one final point: if the poem exists in a neutral region, outside the world and mind of the poet and basically outside the private mind and substantial world of the reader, then what is going on when a poem is, as it were, releasing its meaning through the special, even the unique operations of language which the poet has somehow ordained? Poe reasoned, from such a question, that if he could find the norms of mental behavior in that special response men call “poetic” or imaginative, then he might be able to set forth valid distinctions between good poems and bad poems.

A poem, on any subject whatever, initiates a process which impels or drives the mind beyond even what the words themselves connote. The poet did not make that process; he may have been quite wholly unaware of precisely what he was doing when he was writing the poem—an unawareness of which Poe himself offers a superb example in his own “Philosophy of Composition.” This process, for all that Poe tried to make a consistent logic of it, is not regular nor continuous. It may begin, initiate a train of thought or poetic response, and then skip any number of intermediaries or blocks and subsequently, even all unaware, reach a stage of comprehension beyond anything the words themselves can convey. Poetic language can operate so effectively in that midway or neutral phase of cognition that the ultimate and perhaps farthest range of poetry is a potential wordlessness; it was at this stage of music or the ideal fusion of word and sound that mere verbalized meaning would be of no consequence. “Meaning” would be in that pure neutrality of which poetic language is the only possible expression. Poetry would no longer be a thing or a sense experience but a unique drama in which the poetic imagination engaged itself differently each time a poem was written.

Poe attempted a blend of eighteenth-century rationalistic epistemology and nineteenth-century or Coleridgean ontology. Knowledge and being—these he sought to merge into a final construct which would be art or the expression of the imagination. He found most to his liking Coleridge's profound insight into the dual nature of the imagination and especially the activity of the imagination in the act of poetic or artistic creation. But he tried to go farther than Coleridge by setting up the imagination-in-process of the mind-journey along which the imagination could move from the illusion that is this sensible world to the fuller perception that is the truer reality beyond. Language was one of man's ways of making that journey; and though the language problem might never be solved, Poe continued his experiments … in his later poetry, in his short stories, in Arthur Gordon Pym, and in his philosophic criticism. They were all stages in a design which meant for Poe a struggle to reach a unitary vision, not necessarily of the absolute, but of some comprehensible system wherein everything, prose and verse, real and unreal, mind and substance, somehow cohered. The poetry of his later years … is one of the major expressions of that hope and that vision.

Notes

1. Studies of Poe, like those of J. W. Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (New York, 1926), and Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (London, 1950), however stimulating they may be, rest a complete interpretation of Poe's writings on a single aberration of the man himself: find the aberration or the psychic dislocation and the total design of the writings becomes clear. Mme. Bonaparte represents an extreme of this mode of interpretation: Poe's imagination operated most characteristically in terms of his latent sado-necrophilism; thus the phthisic shade of the mother who died when he was an infant holds the key to the neurosis and to the art of the writer.

2. Professor T. O. Mabbott has made some interesting conjectures on the vision of Poe's foster mother, Mrs. Allan, as she became embodied in the vision of Helen; see “Poe's ‘To Helen,’” Explicator, I (June 1943), 60.

3. The “histrio” aspect of Poe has been the subject of N. Bryllion Fagin's absorbing study, The Histrionic Mr. Poe (Baltimore, 1949).

4. See A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1926), chap. v: “The Romantic Reaction.”

5. Treatments of this philosophical and artistic question are numerous. A summary mention might be made of these important discussions of the question: F. W. J. Schelling, Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature, 1807 (a convenient reprinting is in Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling, New York, 1953, pp. 323-364); Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, especially chaps. xiii and xiv. See also Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I (Yale Univ. Press, 1953); Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Harvard University Press, 1942), and Feeling and Form (New York, 1953); Martin Foss, Symbol and Metaphor (Princeton, 1949); Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1952); Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism (Indiana Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 8-100; S. C. Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1948), chaps. viii and ix; F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), especially “The Metaphysical Strain” and “The Organic Principle,” pp. 100-140.

6. Character & Opinion in the United States (New York, 1920), p. 22.

7. Important to an understanding of this problem in the mind and art of Poe are Margaret Alterton, Origin of Poe's Critical Theory (Iowa City, 1925), pp. 155-156, et seq.; Representative Selections, pp. xiii-xvi; and Marvin Laser, “The Growth and Structure of Poe's Concept of Beauty,” ELH, XV (March 1948), 69-84.

8. Symbolism and American Literature, pp. 162-212.

9. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by N. K. Smith (London, 1933), pp. 257-275, et seq.

10. Critique of Judgment, trans. by J. H. Bernard (London, 1931), pp. 45-100.

11. Coleridge wrote: “… grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you”; Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), I, 196. See also M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953), pp. 167-177.

12. Coleridge coined the word “esemplastic,” to mean “to shape into one,” “because having to convey a new sense, I thought that a new term would both aid the recollection of my meaning, and prevent its being confounded with the usual inport of the word, imagination.” Coleridge's fullest statement (and one very close to Poe's conception) of how the imagination works “to shape into one” was the following:

    The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and (as it were) fuses each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul … reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry

    (Biographia Literaria, II, 12).

    In so treating the imagination, we are necessarily concerned more with poetry than with prose. The imagination is not absolutely confined to poetry: Romantic theorists of literature thought it was, for they tended to assign poetry to the unifying and prose to the dispersive functions of the mind. Therefore, they judged poetry—Poe certainly did—against an indefinable and absolute standard which was the quality of the poet's imagination; and once having assumed that this special, expressive imagination was in a poet, then they easily veered away from criticism and into psychology as a means of finding what the poetry was and how it had been written by the special person, the poet; Romantic impressionistic criticism was born in this transfer.

13. Biographia Literaria, I, 202.

14. D. G. James, Skepticism and Poetry: An Essay on the Poetic Imagination (London, 1937), pp. 17-18.

15. Works, XIV, 198.

16. Poe's first major presentation of these Coleridgean ideas was in his review of J. R. Drake's The Culprit Fay and of Fitz Greene Halleck's Alnwick Castle, in the Southern Literary Messenger for April 1836; see Works, VIII, 281-284; see also XII, 36-37. Poe continued to elaborate and extend these ideas of the tripartite, yet unified, qualities of the mind until his most complete statement in “The Philosophy of Composition.”

17. See Works, X, 61-62, 65; XIV, 187, 189-190; XV, 13n-15n.

18. Washington Allston, whose critical theories closely paralleled Poe's, similarly divided imaginative originality, first, “by the combination of forms already known,” and, secondly, “by the union and modification of known but fragmentary parts into a new and consistent whole.” Originality is the degree of sovereignty the artist maintains over either “the purely physical” or “the moral and intellectual.” Allston was concerned with the history and criticism of art, chiefly among artists themselves; Poe was concerned with how art came to be. See Washington Allston, Lectures on Art, ed. R. H. Dana, Jr. (New York, 1850), pp. 75-110 passim.

19. Baron Bielfeld, The Elements of Universal Erudition, trans. W. Hooper (Dublin, 1771), I, 222-225, 236.

20. Works, X, 65.

21. Ibid., p. 66.

22. Lectures on Art, p. 86.

23. Allston, himself reared in the same aesthetic tradition as was Poe, denoted artistic or imaginative truth as of two kinds: “first, that the Idea of the Whole contains in itself a pre-existing law; and secondly, that Art, the peculiar product of the Imagination, is one of its true and predetermined ends.” Simply stated, the theory is very old, that of the microcosm and the macrocosm: the particle is a replica of the universe and the universe is itself sign and cipher of the particle. Whether one contemplates a planet or a grain of sand, he is instinctively impelled to move toward an awareness of something beyond that object: it is the whole or the All in which that object exists, not as separate, but as functional in a total design. The single object has the potential to call up a timeless, an absolute relationship with every other object and existence. This relationship is “absolute” in that it obtains only as a universal fact beyond human knowledge, beyond even good and evil. The human mind, by acts of its imaginative exploration and synthesis, is aware of this unity—a “law of Harmony,” “that mysterious power, which is only apprehended by its imperative effect.”

24. Skepticism and Poetry, pp. 8-9.

25. Works, XIV, 195.

26. Biographia Literaria, II, 6.

27. Science and the Modern World, pp. 74ff.

28. See W. M. Urban, Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism (London and New York, 1939), pp. 25-27. Urban noted: “This is one possible answer to the question of the relation of language to reality. Language is not ‘moulded on reality,’ to use Bergson's terms. It is either a veil that has been woven by practice between us and reality, and which must be torn away, or else it is a distortion of reality which must be corrected by the invention of other instruments and symbolisms” (p. 51).

29. Wordsworth, in analyzing the imaginative domain of language, employed the metaphor of the stone with telling effect in order to demonstrate that a poet uses language not merely to indicate objects but to compel his readers to create in their imagination the object as he himself imagined it. See Preface to the Edition of 1815; Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1944), II, 438-439. See also James, Skepticism and Poetry, pp. 75-81.

30. Although there are many expressions of this language problem in Jonathan Edward's ministry and thought, his major statements are in A Treatise of Religious Affections (1746) and in Images or Shadows of Divine Things, ed. Perry Miller (Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 44, 65, 93, 97, and esp. 119-120, wherein Edwards differentiates between the “liveliness” not only of “things” but of “images” by which man truly knows things.