The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry

From the PREFACE.THIS study of Poe's poetry has been made in the spirit suggested in Walter Pater's Preface to his "Renaissance." These quotations are appropriate to the purpose:--"The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals -- music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life -- are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in...
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From the PREFACE.THIS study of Poe's poetry has been made in the spirit suggested in Walter Pater's Preface to his "Renaissance." These quotations are appropriate to the purpose:--"The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals -- music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life -- are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or book, to me? What effect does it really have on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realize such primary data for oneself, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience -- metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere.""And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyze, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced."I have kept, whimsically, to a study of Poe's poetry and known no other poet the while; I have therefore no opinions to venture on questions of comparative merit....