By David Gosselin (an original contribution to The Rising Tide Foundation)
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away—forbidden things!
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Romance”
While Edgar Allan Poe’s prominence in the world of arts and letters is undeniable, his deeper philosophy, aesthetics and character are still conspicuously misunderstood. In popular culture, Poe remains type cast as some kind of character from a Stephen King film adaptation. Otherwise, he’s often just caricatured as some sort of disturbed genius whose haunting works were simply the product of his own incurable madness. In the critical sphere, Poe’s reputation hasn’t fared much better; he’s considered less of an authority than, say, a T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden, who command almost unlimited literary cachet.[AS1]
But what if both critical and general audiences have been reading Poe all wrong?
More often than not, the sophisticated psychological and spiritual level with which Poe approached poetry and literature is treated as if it were something conceived for histrionic performances at a Vincent Price spook fest. Poe is depicted as the composer of spooky jingles and memorable sing-song poetry, all of which has only managed to remain relevant thanks to the popular tastes of “the masses.” So T.S. Eliot believed Poe was “somewhat of the inferior school”; Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to him as the “jingle man,” while Henry James believed “an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
The latest film Edgar Allan Poe’s Final Mystery: A Tale of Two Murders takes a fresh look at Poe’s legacy by addressing the many misconceptions surrounding his life and work. New revelations concerning the often concealed biographical details of his life (and death), as well as the nature of his enemies and political connections, cast Poe in a profoundly different light — one that will undoubtedly astonish Poe-admirers from all corners of the world.
Now, this essay takes things a step further by offering a few additional insights into Poe’s philosophy of composition, and the significance of his Poetic Principle in respect to both the spiritual and artistic questions of our age.
So, what do the popular and critical readers of Poe usually miss?
One of the keys to understanding Poe’s work is his use of the principle of the Sublime. In his tales, the Sublime is primarily expressed in its tragic form. Gruesome crimes, vengeance, murder, adultery, pacts with the devil, madmen are all prominently featured. In these cases, the principle of the Sublime usually makes its appearance in the form of a negation, where the principle of Justice asserts itself over the perverse inclinations of villains and madmen.
Thus, the murderer in the famous “The Tell-tale Heart” thinks he hears a throbbing heart, which he believes to be the heart of the old man he’s just murdered and hidden under the floorboards. However much he tries, he can’t seem to silence the gnawing, throbbing sound of a beating heart inside his head. Nothing less than his own confession offers a way out, which is exactly what he yells out before the authorities who have suddenly appeared after reports of strange sounds coming from the old man’s house.
In “The Masque of the Red Death,” an oligarchy revelling in unbridled luxury within its fortified castle during an outbreak of the plague confines itself in the perfect space for the Red Death to ravage everyone. While they thought their castle of earthly delights could save them from the fate ravaging the masses beyond their castled precincts, the Red Death finds its own uncanny way of reaching the decadent congregants. Amid a brilliant ball and masquerade, the celebrants find themselves masquerading with none other than the Red Death itself, which quickly devours them all without mercy. The story reminds us that none are immune from the ravages of Fate, and our attempts to escape such things may oftentimes become the very thing that invites these forces to reap their vengeance.
Regardless of the subject, in tale after tale, Poe always introduces a higher system of law which announces itself by overruling the perverse desires and hubris of wily characters.
In his essay “On the Sublime,” the poet Friedrich Schiller provides an apt description of the principle at work in Poe’s tales, and the reasons for the strange delight we take in them.
Schiller describes the feeling as follows:
“The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It is a combination of woefulness, which expresses itself in its highest degree as a shudder, and of joyfulness, which can rise up to enrapture, and, although it is not properly pleasure, is yet widely preferred to every pleasure by fine souls. This union of two contradictory sentiments in a single feeling proves our moral independence in an irrefutable manner. For as it is absolutely impossible that the same object stand in two opposite relations to us, so does it follow therefrom, that we ourselves stand in two different relations to the object, so that consequently two opposite natures must be united in us, which are interested in the conception of the same in completely opposite ways. We therefore experience through the feeling of the sublime, that the state of our mind does not necessarily conform to the state of the senses, that the laws of nature are not necessarily also those of ours, and that we have in us an independent principle, which is independent of all sensuous emotions.”
—On the Sublime, Friedrich Schiller
Given Poe’s fondness for Schiller and his close study of the German poet’s work (which we previously explored here), we shouldn’t be surprised that Poe developed his own masterly way of applying the principle of the Sublime, and pioneered a new field of literature in the process.
While the Sublime doesn’t easily lend itself to description, one can observe that we as limited beings in both perception and discernment on occasion find ourselves in moments where we catch glimpse of a higher system of law operating out of sight. While perhaps absent from our quotidian lives, under the right circumstances, events or actions beyond our control remind us that we too are subject to a higher system of law — which no man can overrule — and which everyone must ultimately serve. And indeed, nothing invites such revelations like hideous crimes and gruesome betrayals.
For the Classical Greeks, this principle was embodied by the goddess Nemesis, who in Greek
tragedy represented the divine retribution exacted from mortals for their hubris (excessive pride or arrogance) and their turning away from the higher principles of Natural Law. Thus many of Poe’s tales may be rightly viewed as adaptations of the Nemesis principle and its dark consequences.
As Schiller reminds us, “although it is not properly pleasure, is yet widely preferred to every pleasure by fine souls.”
In contrast to his tales of the grotesque and arabesque, we find in Poe’s poetry the purest expression of the Sublime in service of what he terms “supernal Beauty.” Rather than expressed dramatically through negation, we find the poetical principle expressed in its idealized form, thanks to Poe’s apt choice of subjects, images and melodies.
Perhaps the best encapsulation of the philosophy underlying his poetry appears in one dense paragraph from his essay “The Poetic Principle.” Given the passage is essentially the perfect distillation of Poe’s poetic principle, we quote it in full:
“An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors, and sentiments amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments, a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and sentiments, which greet him in common with all mankind — he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us — but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry, —or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods — we find ourselves melted into tears — we weep then — not as the Abbaté Gravina supposes — through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.”
Said otherwise, in its highest expression the poetic principle acts like a spectre, riveting our senses and reminding us of that which dwells beyond our mortal grasp. So Poe uses Shelley’s lines “the desire of the moth for the star” to capture the spirit of poetical longing which ultimately sits on the throne of all our souls, whether we embrace it or not.
The fact that we may — at least temporarily — cast off our tightly bound mortal coil and learn to feed this desire with the aid of music and poetry’s supernal rhythms, remind us of our dual nature: we are the only creatures uniquely capable of partaking in both the mortal and immortal spheres. But while the necessity of partaking in the former comes without any choice, the latter necessarily comes as a choice — or a desire — which we can choose to pursue and cultivate within ourselves.
Interestingly, Christian theologian, philosopher and author C.S. Lewis describes the nature of this very same desire in his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” using the German word “Sehnsucht”:
“Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Thus, Poe’s philosophy of verse arguably isn’t so much an aesthetic theory as it is a philosophy of Man applied to poetry. And even beyond simply the domain of wisdom or wisdom literature, or didactic forms of poetry, Poe’s poetical ideal pertains to that principle which is necessary to awaken and cultivate that indwelling desire for Beauty, Truth, and Goodness in the first place. Poe knew that if a population wasn’t in a disposition to receive beautiful and impassioned conceptions in the realms of the arts, they could never pursue them in the real world.
Beauty awakens those deeper desires; the Sublime inspires us with the will and courage to pursue them in the real world.
Poe implicitly understood poetry and spirituality as two facets of the same reality; both pertained to man’s relationship to the mysterious source of Beauty from which all creation springs, which mundane life and its quotidian rhythms often drown out. Poetry serves to lift that veil of mutability and familiarity, and to shine light on those eternal things which are always there and always waiting.
As Percy Bysshe Shelley writes in his Defence of Poetry:
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists.”
And indeed, Shelley, whom Poe greatly admired and ready very closely, argued that the poetic principle was essential to any living spiritual tradition. In his “Defence of Poetry” Shelley observes the natural poetry abounding in the teachings of Christ:
“When Jesus preached, he told stories, spoke poems, and offered proverbs. The Beatitudes are a poem about the merciful Kingdom of God in contrast to the selfish world of mankind. Jesus was not much concerned with theology. He left that to posterity. He did not ask his listeners to think their way to salvation; he wanted them to taste and see the goodness of God. He told them stories in which they could see themselves. He spoke to people as creatures with both a body and soul. He addressed them in the fullness of their fallen humanity, driven by contradictory appetites, emotions, and imagination.”
Consequently, Shelley argues that the corruption of Western spiritual institutions shouldn’t be attributed to any intrinsic institutional failure, but to the extinction of the poetic principle within said institutions:
“The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman Empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle…”
These observations beg the question: can any religious or spiritual movement truly survive and thrive without the poetic principle? Was Poe’s choice of compositional method just a matter of poetic taste, or was it a spiritual intervention on poetry itself?
Arguably, centuries of critical analysis and exegesis have done as much to obscure as to clarify the essential teachings and poetry of the West’s great spiritual movements.
As Shelley reminds us in the same essay:
“Jesus did not offer a creed composed of ideas. He mostly offered a vision: the Kingdom of God, a divine father who loves his children. In this new covenant, God rules not by laws but by love. Laws are ideas written in prose. (The oldest surviving examples of Near Eastern prose are inevitably legalistic—regulations, financial accounts, political appointments, dispositions of property.) Love is an emotion—the traditional venue of poetry. Theologians still argue about exactly what the “Kingdom” means in conceptual terms, but the appeal of Jesus’s proclamation was to the primal emotions and experience of familial love, not to schoolmaster’s logic.”
And indeed, there is much evidence to support Shelley’s claims and Poe’s underlying philosophy regarding poetical composition and its spiritual function. As Dana Gioia observes in “Poetry and Christianity,” the role of sacred hymns, song and poetry have always occupied a fundamental place in Christianity’s sacred texts:
“No believer can ignore the curious fact that one-third of the Bible is written in verse. Sacred poetry is not confined to the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and Lamentations. The prophetic books are written mostly in verse. The wisdom books—Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes—are all poems, each in a different genre. There are also poetic passages in the five books of Moses and the later histories. Prose passages suddenly break into lyric celebrations or lamentations to mark important events.”
In the same way poetry has always animated man’s spiritual institutions in their living forms, a spiritual principle has always animated Poe’s living verses. Arguably, his work cannot be truly appreciated unless we’ve wrestled with this same principle ourselves. Otherwise, all we’re left with are repetitive verses and meaningless jingles, much like a spiritual life reduced to turgid liturgies, rigid superstitions, and pretensions of piety — without ever experiencing the real thing within ourselves and others.
One of the clearest ways of analyzing Poe’s own poetical approach to the spirit is by reading some of his early poetry. Poe’s early poems reflects his guiding philosophy most transparently — which in later works appears veiled, visible largely only through its effect on the audience.
A notable example is the early poem “Israfel” (1831), which Poe composed while he was still studying at West Point when he was 22 years old. In “Israfel,” we find perhaps the most explicit treatment of the Poetic Principle per se. While in “The Raven” the poetic principle is expressed through the narrator’s longing for a departed beloved, whom he now hopes rests “in the distant Aden,” in “Israfel,” the longing is spurred by the beautiful music of an angel in Heaven, whose music surpasses all “mortal melody.”
The poem begins with a verse from the Qur’an:
And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures. —KORAN
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
“Whose heart-strings are a lute”;
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamoured moon
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven,)
Pauses in Heaven.
And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli’s fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings—
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.
But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty,
Where Love’s a grown-up God,
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.
Therefore, thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest!
Merrily live, and long!
The ecstasies above
With thy burning measures suit—
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervour of thy lute—
Well may the stars be mute!
Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely—flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.
The poem is ostensibly about music, and those who sing with passion versus those who lack passion in their song. At first, the poem is laudatory, praising the remarkable strains of the angel Israfel. However, by the penultimate stanza the tone shifts from laudatory to plaintive.
Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely—flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.
At the heart of “Israfel” lies the tension between two worlds: the sidereal realm of angels and the sublunary realm “of sweets and sours,” the mortal vale we all inhabit.
The narrator recognizes the limitations of his own song, which serves as the ultimate reminder of a music which transcends the capabilities of even the world’s greatest bards and musicians. The thought that his songs might fall short of the beauty and passion which animates Israfel’s lyre weighs heavily on the narrator. Yet he musters a defence: the discrepancy between the two qualities of song isn’t due to a lack of desire on his part, but the condition of his own earthly lot.
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.
Now, if Poe were a minor poet, the significance of the poem could be summed up by a literal interpretation of the final stanza. The angels sing better songs in their heavenly abode because they inhabit a perfect world. But familiarity with Poe’s deeper philosophy allows us to recognize that the tension between the two worlds of “Israfel” and the narrator is what makes us conscious that we are all stricken by the same desire. The tension between our desires and abilities, the weight of our limitations and the boundlessness of our dreams, creates precisely the kind of poetical tension that awakens something transcendent, supernal, within us.
Said otherwise, the only way to transcend our natural limitations is to embrace them.
Only through the artful wedding of music and poetry is this immortal instinct truly awakened in Man— and only through these mediums can it be truly cultivated and preserved. For just this reason, one isn’t without cause if he “despises an unimpassioned song,” or sheds tears when hearing a heavenly melody.
As Poe reminds us, nothing brings us closer to our desired object than music:
“It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles — the creation of supernal Beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels.”
For Poe the pairing of music and poetry was never a matter of artistic preference, convention or style. He understood that when music and poetry disappear, our deepest and noblest desires disappear with them.
As St. Augustine reminds us:
“The purpose of it [music ] is to lead young people of ability, and perhaps older people too, gradually, with Reason for our guide, from the things of sense, to God, in order that they may cling to Him who rules all and governs our intelligence, with no mediating Nature between. ... It is the ascent from rhythm in sense, to the immortal rhythm which is in truth.” (De musica)
Poe’s short but melodic piece of strophic poetry “To One In Paradise” (1831) is another transparent instance of his guiding philosophy. He composed the poem nearly 15 years before “The Raven” (1844):
Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine—
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.
Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
“On! on!”—but o’er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!
For, alas! alas! with me
The light of Life is o’er!
No more—no more—no more—
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,
Or the stricken eagle soar!
And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams—
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.
The narrator’s longing is personified by someone who has departed the mortal world and now dwells in paradise. Despite her absence from the sublunary realm and all its “fruits and flowers,” the paradisal figure continues to animate the narrator’s dreams and trances from beyond — breathing life into those moments where his creative spirit lives.
Poe’s supernal aesthetics remind us that in the face of the seemingly infinite gulf separating Heaven and Earth, we should not despair at our incapacity — we should embrace it. In such instances, on the part of “souls fittingly constituted,” a different music sometimes appears, which “cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels.”
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “One Word Is Too Often Profaned.”
Poe’s special appreciation for the works of Shelley and his overall vision for poetry shines the clearest light on Poe’s compositional method and its inspiration. In a review of Alciphron, a Poem, for Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in January 1840, Poe specifically references Shelley’s “The Sensitive Plant” as emblematic of the poetical ideal he pursued throughout his life:
“As examples of entire poems of the purest ideality, we would cite the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus, the Inferno of Dante, Cervantes’ Destruction of Numantia, the Comus of Milton, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Burns’ Tam O’Shanter, the Auncient Mariner, the Christabel, and the Kubla Khan of Coleridge, and most especially the Sensitive Plant of Shelley, and the Nightingale of Keats.” (Review of The Culprit Fay and Alnwick Castle, from Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836)
The conclusion of “The Sensitive Plant” reads:
Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat,
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.
Whether that Lady’s gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,
I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.
Poe’s very own ecstatic defence of the poetic principle specifically includes Shelley’s line “the desire of the moth for the star”, from his poem “One Word Is Too Often Profaned.” The poem was addressed to a very dear friend of Shelley’s, Jane Williams, to whom he addressed many poems.
The complete poem reads:
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
The word “love” is “too often profaned” for the poet to use it to describe his relationship with Jane. Only an original poem suitably conveys the poet’s true meaning and emotion. It expresses a profound love for his friend, which isn’t of the familial or erotic kind, but something spiritual and transcendent; they both share the same profound yearning and desire which moves all devotees of the Beautiful and Sublime.
In the words of Poe, this desire “has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.” Or as C.S. Lewis preached, “this hunger is better than any other fullness, this poverty better than all other wealth.”
In conclusion, while Poe’s life and work were tragically cut short, and many of his greatest compositions surely never made it on paper, let us inspire ourselves with the poet’s great vision; and let us to cultivate the same desire of the moth for the star which animated Poe until his dying day.
To learn more about Poe and the work to revive his legacy, watch:
Edgar Allan Poe’s Final Mystery: A Tale of Two Murders
David Gosselin is a poet, translator, researcher and filmmaker. He publishes a weekly journal of arts and letters on Substack called Age of Muses. Discover his new expanding Theatre of the Sublime too, which includes his latest films, The Devil at Woodstock, Reclaiming the Mysteries and The Jesuit Government in Paraguay. His latest book is titled, A Renaissance or New Middle Ages: Magic, Mystery and the Trance-formation of the West.
