48 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



the main purpose of creating" a definite and overpowering im- 

 pression of beauty. The soul is to be nourished and enriched 

 not by ethical impulse, nor by the vision of larger knowledge, 

 but by the dilation of the imagination. It must be added 

 that beauty, in Poe's view, was a witness to the presence of 

 the divine in the world, and had, therefore, a spiritual sig- 

 nificance and quality. Poetry he defined as " the rhythmical 

 creation of beauty"; he insisted upon brevity as essential to 

 lyrical perfection, and went so far as to affirm that " a long 

 poem does not exist " ; he did not exclude ethical or allegorical 

 conceptions, as his Haunted Palace and The Conqueror Worm 

 show, but he held that the poet should aim to produce a single 

 and perfectly definite effect, and that any secondary meaning" 

 should arise inevitably out of a clear impression of a beautiful 

 creation; and he insisted that every piece of verse ought to 

 have some marked quality of metre or rhythm. 



If these principles or maxims are applied to Poe's verse, 

 it will he found that it stands the test. Xo artist has made 

 his work more consistentlv embody and express his conception 

 of the aims and methods of his art. Unlike Wordsworth and 

 Whitman, Poe gains by the approach of his poetry to his 

 philosophy. So far as his philosophy of art was concerned, 

 there was nothing" original in it; it was. however, exactly 

 suited to his temperament and his genius. So far as his 

 maxims of construction are concerned, they are the laws of 

 his own nature rather than of art. They so nicely bring out 

 the structure of his own work that the suspicion of the 

 ex post facto origin cannot he avoided. 



Within the limits which Poe set to the poetic art, there was 

 ample room for the deepest and noblest activity of the poetic 

 impulse; for Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tenny- 

 son. But this field was greatly narrowed by his maxims for 

 verse production. In this narrower field of artistic vision and 

 power he made his great and lasting success. In at least half 

 a dozen poems he has shown a skill akin to magic in producing 

 a single striking" and unusual effect, by concentration of in- 



