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conscious of its white collar and clean cuffs surrounding Poe,
a
fact which his biographers never fail to notice, which makes its
presence felt in his lecture on
The Poetic Principle.
It can be
said that the lecture itself resembled a series of delicately timed
dramatic entrances and scenes, each bringing to a close its moment
of suspense by the recitation of an unfamiliar piece of verse.
The small anthology within the lecture was one that suited
his own taste and with this preliminary hint of
som~thing
about to happen, Poe contrived to make the lyrical verses of
Shelley, Willis, Longfellow, Bryant, Pinkney, Moore, Hood, Byron,
Tennyson and Motherwell sound very like his own. Between the
silent pauses of surprise-and perhaps an approving hand-clap
from his audience-one almost hears Poe's
apologie pour mon vie:
one listens to his remarks on the critics of
The North American
Review,
that "magnanimous cabal" which encircled Boston, "the
little .Athens" of the mid-nineteenth century, one waits to hear
the next entry in the charge of dulness against them and suddenly
one catches the name of Coleridge, and one remembers that Poe
was among the first in America to read the
Biographia Literaria
with conscious respect, if not the profoundest understanding. From
then onward, the lecturer speaks of the "elevation of the soul"
and the "excitement of the heart" through the reading of lyric
poetry, and though I suspect that Poe's eloquent use of such pas–
sionately abstract terms bewildered the ladies and their gentlemen
who heard them, I am nearly certain that his utterance flattered
their ability to understand and to applaud him. He had charmed
them at the opening of his lecture by the promise that he had no
design to 'be either thorough or profound, but before he stepped
down from the platform he had pursued an able course against
"size" and "bulk" in poetry, and in general, against "the curse
of bigness," which even today-and many times within the past
twenty years-has found its echoes in criticism of American life.
Though it may seem a wilfull paradox to read any moral
implications whatsoever in Poe's critical commentaries, yet some–
thing that has the sound and color of literary morality has a voice
among them-and it is heard even as he satirises moral judgment
of poetic merit in
The Poetic Principle.
In speaking for himself
and for the position of the poet in a world where commercial en·
terprise received an overwhelming share of its own approval
and
