OK.
We are now in a place to hopefully get
the full satire of James Russell Lowell's stanza
on Poe in this poem, "A Fable for the Critics."
"Here comes Poe, with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
3/5 of him genius and 2/5 sheer fudge.
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters
in a way to make all men of common sense damn meters.
Who has written some things, far the best of their kind,
but somehow the heart seems squeezed out by the mind."
Of course Poe reviewed this poem,
and in particular, this stanza.
He doesn't argue with the proportion of fudge to genius.
And I hope we have shown today how
Poe is both fudge and genius, and genius in his fudge.
But he does go after the last bit, that opposition
of heart and mind.
He writes, quote, "The highest order
of the imaginative intellect is always
preeminently mathematical, and the converse."
This may sound today as it did then.
To say poetry is a kind of mathematics
strikes some as depressing, as losing the ethereal and magical
quality of emotional poetry.
But Poe's point is that this isn't a loss but a gain.
To say math and poetry are conversely
identical is also to say that math is a kind of poetry.
Thus, this raises poetry from being merely a subjective
and extremely personal affair, everybody their own poet,
gushing about their personal experience
without any possibility of being criticized,
and raises it to a craft, not unlike engineering.
An extremely precise science of form and number,
of sound and idea, as objective in its maxims as the laws
of physics themselves kinds of poems.
Beauty for Poe was not divorced from this world.
It was not something precious and singular
that we carry around like fragile strings of pearls
to be protected from the hard realities of the world.
Beauty for Poe was that which reached beyond reality, which
joined us in an infinite universe of stars and sound
and number.
As he put it, "Poetry is no mere appreciation
of the beauty before us but a wild effort
to reach the beauty above.
It is the desire of the moth for the star.
Inspired by the ecstatic prescience of 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."
So what are we to take away from these stories about Poe,
the literary editor and reviewer, the Tomahawk
Man, the literary analyst, and the hoaxer?
What I think we discover is a complex author
who understood both the possibilities and the dangers
that the print explosion had for literature and for poetry.
His reviews and his analysis write for the common reader.
Whether he was successful or not,
he took on the role of the literary outsider that
fought the old guard establishment,
the literary cliques, wherever he found them.
He championed a pure and objective criticism, a practice
in which poems could be read as words on a page,
divorced equally from the individual author
and the subjective reader.
Such objectification of art was necessarily painful.
Poe was desperate to show that not everyone should
write poetry.
It was, for him, a technical skill
that required a great deal of effort, discipline,
and analytical ability.
But in closing the door on bad poets,
Poe paradoxically opened the world of poetry
up to a critically thinking public.
Not everyone could write poetry, but everyone could be a critic.
And that, for Poe, would be a good thing.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]