Complete Essays, Literary Criticism, Cryptography, Autography, Translations & Letters. Эдгар Аллан По
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a versifier Halleck is by no means equal to his friend, all of whose poems evince an ear finely attuned to the delicacies of melody. We seldom meet with more inharmonious lines than those, generally, of the author of Alnwick Castle. At every step such verses occur as,
And the monk’s hymn and minstrel’s song-
True as the steel of their tried blades-
For him the joy of her young years-
Where the Bard-peasant first drew breath-
And withered my life’s leaf like thine-
in which the proper course of the rhythm would demand an accent upon syllables too unimportant to sustain it. Not infrequently, too, we meet with lines such as this,
Like torn branch from death’s leafless tree,
in which the multiplicity of consonants renders the pronunciation of the words at all, a matter of no inconsiderable difficulty.
But we must bring our notice to a close. It will be seen that while we are willing to admire in many respects the poems before us, we feel obliged to dissent materially from that public opinion (perhaps not fairly ascertained) which would assign them a very brilliant rank in the empire of Poesy. That we have among us poets of the loftiest order we believe — but we do not believe that these poets are Drake and Halleck.
1. This charge of indiscriminant puffing will, of course, only apply to the general character of our criticism — there are some noble exceptions. We wish also especially to discriminate between those notices of new works which are intended merely to call public attention to them, and deliberate criticism on the works themselves.
2. In addition to these things we observe, in the New York Mirror, what follows: “Those who have read the Notices of American books in a certain Southern Monthly, which is striving to gain notoriety by the loudness of its abuse, may find amusement in the sketch on another page, entitled “The Successful Novel.” The Southern Literary Messenger knows by experience what it is to write a successless novel.” We have, in this case, only to deny, flatly, the assertion of the Mirror. The Editor of the Messenger never in his life wrote or published, or attempted to publish, a novel either successful or successless.
3. We separate the sublime and the mystical — for, despite of high authorities, we are firmly convinced that the latter may exist, in the most vivid degree, without giving rise to the sense of the former.
4. The consciousness of this truth was by no mortal more fully than by Shelley, although he has only once especially alluded to it. In his Hymn to intellectual Beauty we find these lines.
5. Imagination is, possibly in man, a lesser degree of the creative power in God. What the Deity imagines, is, but was not before. What man imagines, is, but was also. The mind of man cannot imagine what is not. This latter point may be demonstrated. — See Les Premiers Traits de L’Erudition Universelle, par M. Le Baron de Biefield, 1767.
6. Chestnut color, or more slack, Gold upon a ground of black. Ben Jonson.
7. A review of Drake’s poems, emanating from one of our proudest Universities, does not scruple to make use of the following language in relation to the Culprit Fay. “It is, to say the least, an elegant production, the purest specimen of Ideality we have ever met with, sustaining in each incident a most bewitching interest. Its very title is enough,” &c. &c. We quote these expressions as a fair specimen of the general unphilosophical and adulatory tenor of our criticism.
8. 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. We have seen American poems evincing the faculty in the highest degree.
9. Among things, which not only in our opinion, but in the opinion of far wiser and better men, are to be ranked with the mere prettinesses of the Muse, are the positive similes so abundant in the writing of antiquity, and so much insisted upon by the critics of the reign of Queen Anne.
10. The expression “woven air,” much insisted upon by the friends of Drake, seems to be accredited to him as original. It is to be found in many English writers — and can be traced back to Apuleius, who calls fine drapery ventum textilem.
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