82 



Was once the locust's coat of gold, 



His cloak, of a thousand mingled hues, 



Was the velvet violet, wet with dews, 



His target was the crescent shell 



Of the small sea Sidrophel, 



And a glittering beam from a maiden's eye 



Was the lance which he proudly wav'd on high. 



Such a picture, says Poe, can be made by any one tolerably 

 acquainted with the qualities of the objects to be detailed, and 

 possessing a very moderate endowment of the faculty of com- 

 parison. Fancy, said Coleridge, combines the facts of experi- 

 ence into new forms ; and the stanza which I have quoted from 

 The Culprit Fay is plainly what Coleridge would have called 

 a product of fancy, rather than a work of creative imagina- 

 tion, like Tint cm Abbey, blending its materials into ideal 

 visions touched with " the light that never was on land or sea." 

 To Poe this distinction between fancy and imagination was 

 unreal ; and his favored example, as it happened, for exempli- 

 fying the lack of poetic ideality in a poem composed appar- 

 ently within the provisions of the Coleridgean definition, was 

 none other than The Culprit Fay. s Frankly speaking, the 

 limitation of The Culprit Fay, from the point of view of larger 

 and permanent things, lies in a relative deficiency in what Poe 

 calls ideality, or " the Poetic Sentiment " ; in what today we 

 frequently call the connotation of spiritual values. It is the 

 relative deficiency of this quality that fixes a gulf between 

 Keats and Drake, so broad that any real comparison is im- 

 possible. It is this that essentially differentiates the Fairy 

 magically bodied forth in Shelley's Queen Mab — the passage 

 is quoted by Poe — from the Culprit or the Sylph in the poem 

 of Drake. This is Shelley: 



The Fairy's frame was slight; yon fibrous cloud 

 That catches but the faintest tinge of even, 

 And which the straining eye can hardly seize 

 When melting into eastern twilight's shadow, 



8 Cf. review by Poe of Moore's Alciphron, in Burton's Gentleman's 

 Magazine, January, 1840. 



