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OK.

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We are now in a place
to hopefully get

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the full satire of James
Russell Lowell's stanza

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on Poe in this poem, "A
Fable for the Critics."

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"Here comes Poe, with his
Raven, like Barnaby Rudge,

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3/5 of him genius
and 2/5 sheer fudge.

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Who talks like a book
of iambs and pentameters

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in a way to make all men of
common sense damn meters.

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Who has written some things,
far the best of their kind,

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but somehow the heart seems
squeezed out by the mind."

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Of course Poe
reviewed this poem,

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and in particular, this stanza.

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He doesn't argue with the
proportion of fudge to genius.

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And I hope we have
shown today how

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Poe is both fudge and genius,
and genius in his fudge.

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But he does go after the
last bit, that opposition

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of heart and mind.

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He writes, quote,
"The highest order

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of the imaginative
intellect is always

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preeminently mathematical,
and the converse."

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This may sound today
as it did then.

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To say poetry is a
kind of mathematics

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strikes some as depressing, as
losing the ethereal and magical

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quality of emotional poetry.

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But Poe's point is that this
isn't a loss but a gain.

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To say math and
poetry are conversely

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identical is also to say that
math is a kind of poetry.

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Thus, this raises poetry from
being merely a subjective

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and extremely personal affair,
everybody their own poet,

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gushing about their
personal experience

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without any possibility
of being criticized,

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and raises it to a craft,
not unlike engineering.

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An extremely precise
science of form and number,

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of sound and idea, as objective
in its maxims as the laws

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of physics themselves
kinds of poems.

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Beauty for Poe was not
divorced from this world.

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It was not something
precious and singular

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that we carry around like
fragile strings of pearls

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to be protected from the
hard realities of the world.

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Beauty for Poe was that which
reached beyond reality, which

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joined us in an infinite
universe of stars and sound

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and number.

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As he put it, "Poetry
is no mere appreciation

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of the beauty before
us but a wild effort

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to reach the beauty above.

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It is the desire of
the moth for the star.

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Inspired by the ecstatic
prescience of glories

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beyond the grave, we struggle,
by multiform combinations

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among the things and
thoughts of time,

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to attain a portion of
that loveliness whose

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very elements, perhaps,
appertain to eternity alone."

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So what are we to take away
from these stories about Poe,

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the literary editor and
reviewer, the Tomahawk

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Man, the literary
analyst, and the hoaxer?

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What I think we discover
is a complex author

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who understood both the
possibilities and the dangers

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that the print explosion had
for literature and for poetry.

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His reviews and his analysis
write for the common reader.

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Whether he was
successful or not,

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he took on the role of
the literary outsider that

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fought the old
guard establishment,

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the literary cliques,
wherever he found them.

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He championed a pure and
objective criticism, a practice

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in which poems could be
read as words on a page,

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divorced equally from
the individual author

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and the subjective reader.

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Such objectification of art
was necessarily painful.

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Poe was desperate to show
that not everyone should

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write poetry.

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It was, for him,
a technical skill

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that required a great deal
of effort, discipline,

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and analytical ability.

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But in closing the
door on bad poets,

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Poe paradoxically opened
the world of poetry

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up to a critically
thinking public.

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Not everyone could write poetry,
but everyone could be a critic.

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And that, for Poe,
would be a good thing.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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