W.H. AUDEN

VI There'll Always Be a Teachers' College.

"How is it possible that human sense should conceive there ever were in the World such multitudes of famous Knights-Errant, so many Emperors .. . palfreys, rambling damsels, serpents, monsters, giants, unheard-of adventures, so many sorts of enchantments . . . . As for my own particular, I confcss, that, while I read them, and do not reflect that they are nothing but Falsehood and Folly, they give me sorne satisfaction, but I no sooner remember what they are, but I cast thc best of thcm from me and would deliver them up to the ftames if I had a fire near me .. . . If, led away by your natural inclination, you wi11 read books of heroism and great exploits, read in the Holy Scripturcs tbe Book of Judges, where you wiH find wonderful truths and glorious actions not to be ques­tioned, the reading of which divcrts, instructs, pleases, aod sur­prises the most judicious readers."

"Very well," cried Don Quixote, "then all those books must be fabulous, though licensed by kings, approved by the Examiners, read witb general satisfaction, and applauded by thc Better Sort and the Meaner, rich and poor, Iearned and unlearned . . .. "

"For shame, Sir, forbear uttering such blasphemies. And do you, good Sir, believe me, and, as I said to you befare, read these books, which you may find will banish ali melancholy, if you are troubled witb it, and sweeten your disposition if it be harsh."

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What every author hopes to receive from postcrity-a hope u.sually disappointed- is justice. Next to oblivion, the two fates whtch he most fears are becoming the name attached to two or t~ree fam.ous pieces while the rest of his work is unrcad and beco~mg the tdol of a small circle which reads every word he wrote wtth the .same uncritical revcrence. The first fate is unjust because, even If the pieces known are indeed his best work, the rea~er has n?t. earned the right to say so; thc sccond fate is embarrassmg and ndJculous, for no author belicves he is that good. .

Poe's shade must be more disappointed than most. Certam pieces-how he must hate these old war hor~es-are probably more familiar to non-Americans than are any p1ece.s by any other American author. I myself cannot remember beanng a~y poetry befare hearing "The Raven" and "The Bells"; and The Plt and the Pendulum was one of the first short stories I ever read. At the same time the known works of no other author of comparable rank and ~roductivity are so few and so invariably the same. In preparing to make this selection, for example, I asked a n~m~er ?f persons whom I knew to be widely read, but not spec1ahsts . m American Jetters, if they had read Gordon Pym and Eureka, wh1ch seem to me to rank among Poe's most important works; not one

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of the?1 had. On the other hand, I was informed by everyone that to om1t The Cask of Amantillado, which for my taste is an inferior story, _would be commercial suicide. Poor Poe! At first so forgotten that lus grave wcnt wi thout a tombstone twenty-six years-when one was finally erected the only American author to attend the ceremony was Whitmau; and today in danger of becoming the life study of a ~e'~ profcssors. The professors are, of course, very nec­essary, for 1_t 1s through the ir devoted Iabors thnt Poe may finally r~ach the kmd of reader evcry author hopes for. who will read hm1 all,. goo? -humoredly willing to wade through much which is dull or tnfenor for thc dclight of discovering something new and admirable.

The Tales: Varied in subject, treatment, stylc as Poe's stories are, they have o ne negative charncteris tic in common. Thcrc is no ?lace in any of . tl1cm for thc human individual as he actua lly cxist<; m space and time, that is, as simultaneously a natura] crcature subject in his feclings to the intluenccs and limita tions of the natural o~dcr, and ~n historical _ pers~n, creating novelty and reJations by h1s free cho1cc and mo<11fied 111 unforeseen ways by the choices of others.

. Poe's major_stories fall roughly into two groups. The first group 1s concerned w1th s tates of willful being, thc destructíve passion of tl~e loncly ego to _mcrge with the ego of another (Ligeia), the passwn of thc consc_w us ego to be objective, to discover by pure reason the true rclatwnships wh ich sensory appearances and emo­~Ions ~ould con cea! ( The Purloined L etter), self-dcstructive sta tcs m wh1ch the ego and the sclf are passionately hostile ( The Jmp of t~e Perverse), cven the state of chimcrical passion, that is, the passwnate unrest of a self that lacks all passion (The Man of the Crowd) · The horror tales and thc tales of ratiocination belong together, for the heroes of both exíst as unitary states- Roderick Usher reasons as little as Auguste Dupin feels. Personages who are ~he e~bod~ment of such states cannot, of course, change or vary in mtcnstty c1ther through changes in tbemselves or their environ­ment. The problem in writing stories of this kind is to prevent the reader ~rom cver being reminded of historical exis tence, for, if he once thmks of real peoplc whose passions are interrupted by a necd for lunch or whose beau ty can be temporarily and mildly im-

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paired by the common cold, the in tensity and timelessness become immediately comic. Poe is sometimcs attacked for the operatic quality of the prose and décor in his tales, but they are essential to preserving the illusion. H is herocs canoot exist cxcept operati­cally. Take, for example, t.hc fo llowing seutence from Wil/iam Wilson:

Let it suflice, that among spendthrifts I out-heroded H erod, and that, giving name to a multitude of novel follies , I added no brief appendix to the long catalogue of vices thcn usual in the most dissolute university of Europe.

In isolation, as a prose sentc ncc, it is te rrible, vague, verbosc. the sensl: a t the merey of a convcntional rhetorical rhythm. Bu t dra­matically, how right; how we ll it reveals the William Wilson who narrates the story in h is real colors, as the fantastic self who bates and refuses contact with reality. Some of Poe's successors in stories about states of being, D. H. Lawrcnce for example, have tried to be realistic with fatal results .

In the sccond group, which includes such tales as A Descent illto the Maelstrom and Cardan Pym. the relation of will to en­vironment is rcverscd . While in thc first group evcrything that happens is thc conscquence of a volition u pon the frcedom of which there are no natural limits. in these storics of pure adventure the hero is as purely p assive as thc I in dreams; nothing that happens is the result of his personal choice, cverything happens to him. What thc subject feels-interest, excitemen t, terror-are caused bv events over which he h as no control whatsoevcr. The fi rst kind of hcro has no history because he refuses to change with time; this kind has none becausc he cannot change, he can only expericncc.

The problcm for thc writer of adventure stories ís to invent a succession of cvents which are both intcresting and varied and to make the o rder of succcssion plausible. To secure variety without sacrificíng coherence or vice versa is more difficult than it looks, and Gordon Pym , one of thc finest adventure stories ever written, is an objcct lesson in the art. Every kind of adventure occurs­adventures of natural origin like shipwreck; adventures like mu­tiny, caused by familiar human beings, or, like thc adventures on the ísland, by strange natives ; and, finally, supernatural nightmare events-yet each Ieads credibly into the ncxt. While in the stories

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of passíonatc states a certain vagueness of description is essential to the illusion, in thc adventure story crcdibility is secured by thc minutest dctails, figures, diagrams, and various other deviccs, as in Poe's description of the rnysterious ravines.

The totallength of thís chasm, commencing at thc open-ing a and proceeding round thc comer h to the extremity d is five hundred and fifty yards. '

Both thcse types of Poe story havc had an extraordinary influence. His portraits of abnormal or self-destructivc statcs con­tributed much tó Dostoevsky, his ratiocinating hero is the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and his manv successors his tales of the futurc lead to H. G. Wells, bis advc~ture storie~ to Jules Vcrne and Stevenson. lt is not without intercst that the development of such fiction in which the historical individual is missing should have coincided with thc c.Icvelopmcnt of history as a science, with its own laws, and thc appearancc of the great ninetecnth-century his­torians; further, that both these developments should accompany the industrialization and urbanization of social life in which the individual scems more and more the crcation of historical forces while he himself feels less and lcss capable of directing his Jife by any hisrorical choice of his own.

Poe's minor fiction also falls into two groups. The first is com­poscd, not of narrativcs, but phys.ical descriptions of Eden, of the Great Good Place The Domain of Arnheim. Such descriptions, whoevcr they may be written by, are bound to be more intcresting as revelations of their authors than in themselves, for no one can imagine the ideal place, the ideal home, except in terms of bis prívate fantasies and the good taste of his day. In Poe's case, in particular, his notíons of thc stylish and luxurious, if they are not to seem slightly vulgar and comic, must be read in the Iight of bis history and the America of the first half of the nineteenth century. And, lastly there is thc group of humorous-satiric pieces unrepre­sented in this selection. Though Poe is not so funny in them as in sorne of his criticism, at least one story, A Predicament, is of inter­est. A parody of the kind of popular horror story appearing in Blackwood's, it is, in a scnsc, a parody of Poe's serious work in this veín; and it actually uses the same notion of the swinging

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descending knife which he was later to employ in The Pit and the Pendu!um.

The Poems: Poe's best poems are not his most typical or original. "To Helen," which could have been written by Landor, and "The City in the Sea," which could have been written by Hood, are more successfully realizcd than a poem hke "Ulalume," which could have been written by none but Poe.

His diftlculty as a poet was that he was intercstcd in too many poetic problems and experiments at once for the time he had to give to thern. To make thc result conform to the intcntion-and thc more experimental the intention, the more this is true-a writer has to kcep his hand in by continua) practicc. The prose writer who must earn his living has this advantagc, that even the purest hack work is practicc in his craft; for thc pennilcss poct thcre is no cor­responding exercisc. Without the lcisure to write and rewrite he cannot develop to his full staturc. When we find fault with Poe's poems we must never forget his own sad preface to them.

In defcnce of my own taste, it is incumbent upon me to say that I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself. Events not to be con­trollcd have prcvented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, undcr happicr circumstances, would have been the field of my choice.

For faulty they must be admitted to be. The troublc with "The Raven," for example, is that the thematic intcrest and the prosodic interest, both of which are considerable, do not combine and are even often at odds.

Tn The Philosophy of Composition Poe discusscs bis difficulties in prcvcnting thc poem from becoming absurd and artificial. The artificiality of the lover asking thc proper series of qucstions to which the refrain would be appropriate could be solved by mak­ing him a self-torturer. The difficulty of the speaker of the refrain, howcver, remained insoluble until the poet hit on the notion of something nonhuman. But the cffect could still be ruined unless thc narration of the story, as distinct from thc questions and an­swers, flowcd naturally; and thc meter Poc chose, with its frcquent

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feminine rhymes, so rare in English, works against this and at times defeats him.

Not the lcast obcisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But with míen of lord or lady, pcrched above my chamber door.

H cre it is thc mete r alone and nothing in the speaker or the situa­tion which is responsiblc for th e redundant altematives of "stopped or stayed he" and " lord or lady.''

Similarly, "Ulalume" is an intcrcsting expcriment in diction but only an expcriment, for thc poem is about something which never quite gets said becausc thc scnse is sacrificed to the vowel sounds. lt is an accident if the sound of a place name corresponds to the emotion the place invokes, and the accidental is a comic quality. Eclward Lear, thc only poet, apparently, to be directly influenccd by Poc. succccds with such namcs as "The Hills of the Chank.ly Bore" because he is frankly writing " nonscnse" poetry, but "Uialume" has a serious subjcct and the comic is out of place. "The Bells," though much lcss intcres ting a conception than "Ulalu me," is more succcssful beca use the subject is nothing bu t an excuse for onomatopocic cffccts.

Thcre rcmains, however, Eurcka. The man who had f!atly as­scrted that no poem should much excecd a hundred lincs in length -"that music (in its modifications of rh ythm and rhyme) is of so vast a moment to Pocsy as never to be ncglected by him who is truly poetical," that neithcr T ruth, the sat isfaction of thc Intcllect, nor Passion, the excitement of the Heart, are the province of Poetry but only Beauty, and that the most poetical topic in the world is the dcath of a beautiful woman-this man produces at the end of his life a work which he insists is a poem and commends to posterity as his erowning achievement, though it violates evcry article in his critica! creed . 1t is many pages in Jength, it is written in prose, it handlcs scientific ideas in thc truth of which thc poet is passionately convinced , and thc general subject is thc origin and destiny of the universe.

Outside Francc the poem has been neglected, but 1 do not think Poe was wrong in thc importance he attachcd to it. In the first place, it was a very daring and original notion to take the oldest of the poet ic themcs-oldcr even than the story of the epic hero-namely, cosmology, the story of how things carne to exist

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as they do, and treat it in a completely contemporary way, to do in English in the ninctcenth ccntury what H esiod and Lucretius had done in Greek and Latín centuries befare. Secondly, it is full of remarkable intuitive guesscs that subsequent scientific discov­eries ha ve confirmed. As Paul Valéry says:

It would not be exaggerating its importance to recog­nize, in bis theory of consistency, a fairly definite attempt to describe thc universe by its intrinsic properties. The fol­Iowing proposítion can be found toward the end of Eureka: "Each law of nature depends at all points on all the other laws." This might easily be considcrcd, if notas a formul a, at least as the expression of a tendency toward generalizcd rclativity .

That its tendcncy approachcs rcccnt conceptions be­comes evident when one discovers, in the poem under dis­cussion, an affirmation of the symmetrical and rec iproca! relationship of m atter, time, space, gravity, and light.

Lastly, it combines in o nc work ncarly all of Poe's characteristíc obsessions: the passion for merging in union with the one which is at thc root of tales like Ligeia, the passion for Jogic which dom­inates the detective and cryptographic studies, the passion for a final explana tion and rcconciliation which informs the melancholy of much of his vcrsc-all are brought togethcr in this poem of which the prose is as lucid, as untheatrical, as the best of his criti­ca! prose.

The Critica/ Writings: Poe's critica! work, like that of any significant critic, must be considered in the literary content which provokcd it. No critic, however pontifical bis tone, is really at­tempting to lay down eterna! truths about art; he is always po­lemical, fighting a battle against the characteristic misconceptions, stupidities, and weaknesses of his contemporaries. H e is always having, on the one hand, to defend tradition against the amateur who is ignorant of it and the crank who thinks it should be scrapped so that real art may begin anew with him and, on the other, to assert the real novclty of thc prcscnt and to demonstrate, against the academic who imagines that carrying on the tradition means imitation, what modcrn tasks and achievcments are truly analogues to those of the past.

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Poe's condemnation of the long poem and of the didactic or true poem is essentially a demand that the poets of his time he themselves and admit tbat epic themes and intellectual or moral ideas did not in fact excite their poetic faculties and that what really interestcd them were emotions of melancholy, nostalgia, puzzlcd yearning, and the likc that could find their proper expres­sion in neither epic nor epigram but in lyrics of moderate length. Poe was forced to attack all long poems on principie, to be un­fair, for example, to Paradise Lost or An Essay on Criticísm, in arder to shake the preconceived notions of poets and public that to be important a poet must write long poems and give bardic advice.

His rejection of passion is really a variation of Wordsworth's observation that, to be capable of embodiment in a poem, emo­tion must be recollected in tranquillity; immecliatc passion is too obsessive, too attachcd to the self. Poe's attack is further directed against the popular and amateur notion of poetic inspiration which gives the poct himself no work to do, a rcminder that the most inspired poem is also a contraption, a made thing.

We do not hesitate to say that a man highly endowed with thc powers of Causality- that is to say a man of mctaphysi-cal acumen-will, even with a very deficient share of Ideal-ity, compase a finer poem than one who without such metaphysical acumen, shall be gifted, in the most extraordi­nary degrec, with the faculty of ldeality. For a poem is not the Poetic faculty, but the means of exciting it in mankind.

Through its infiuence on the French, Poe's general aesthetic is well known. The bulk of his critica! writing, and perhaps that which was of the greatest service, is concerned with poetic tech­nique and practica! criticism of details. No one in his time put so much energy and insight into trying to make his contemporary poets take their craft seriously, know what they were doing pro­sodically, and avoid the faults of slovcnly diction and inappropriate imagery that can be avoided by vigilance and hard work.

If Poe never developed to his potcntial full stature as a critic, this was entirely his misfortune, not his fault . Much of his best criticism will never be read widcly because it líes buried in reviews of totally uninteresting authors. lf he sometimes overpraised the

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second-rate like Mrs. Osgood or wastcd time and energy in de­molishing nonentitics likc Mr. English, such were inevitable con­sequcnccs when a critica! mind, cquipped by nature for digesting the toughest of foods, is condemned by circumstances to feed on literary gruel. Thc first-rate critic needs critica! issues of the first importance, and these were denied him. Think of the subjects that Baudclaire was granted-Delacroix, Constantin Guys, Wagner­and thcn of the kind of books Poe was assigned to rcview:

Mephistopheles in England, or rhe Confessions of a Prime Minister The Christian Florist Noble Deeds of Women Ups and Downs in the Lije o! a Distressed Gentleman The History of Texas Sacred Philosophy of the Seasons Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters in France Dashes at Lije with a Free Pencil A !ice Day; A Romance in Rhyme Wakondah; The Master of Life Poetical R emains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson

One is astoundcd that he managcd to remain a rational critic at all, let alone such a good onc.

The Man: Tf the Muses could lobby for their interest, all bíographical research into the Iives of artists would probably be prohibíted by law, and historians of the individual would have to confine themselves to those who act but do not make-generals, criminals, eccentrics, courtesans, and the like, about whom in­formation is not only more interesting but less misleading. Good artists-thc artist manqué is anothcr matter-ncver make satís­factory heroes for novelists, because their life stories, even when interesting in themselves, are peripheral and less significant than their productions.

As a person, for cxample, Poe is a much less interesting figure than is Griswold. Since Professor Quinn published side by side the original versions of Poe's letters and Griswold's doctored versions, one is left panting with curiosity to know more about thc latter. That one man should dislike another and spcak maliciously of him after his death would be natural enough, but to take so much

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trouble, to blacken a reputation so subtly, presupposes a sustaincd hatred which is always fasc inating bccause the capacity for sus­tained emotion of any kind is rare, and, in this instance, par ticu­larly so since no reasonable cause fo r it has yet been found.

In his personal reputation, as in so much clse, Poe has been singularly unfor tunate. Bcfore the truc facts were known, he was dismissed by respcctable mcn of Jetters as a dissolute rakc and hailed by thc antirespectablc as a romant ically doomed figure, the Flying Dutchman of Whitman's clre::un.

In a dream I once had , I saw a vessel on the sea, at midnight in a storm . .. flying uncontrolled with torn sails and broken spars thro ugh the wild slect and winds and waves of the night. On thc deck was a slender, slight, bcau­tiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying aJl the terror , the murk, and the dislocation of which he was thc centre and the victím .

Today this portrait has hccn shown to be fal sc, but the m oral clímatc has changcd, and Poe would be more respcctcd if it had bcen true. l-Iad he becn a really bad lol like Villon or M arlowe o r Verlaine, someone who drank Iikc a fish and was guilty of spec­tactilar crimcs and vices, we should rathcr admire him ; h ut it turns out that he was only thc kínd of fcllow who m one hesitates to invite to a pa rty bccause after two d rinks he is apt to becomc tiresome, an unmanly sort of man whose love-life scems to have been largcly confincd to crying in laps and playing house, that his weaknesses were of that unromantic kind for which our agc has least tolerance, perhaps becausc thcy are typical of ourselvcs.

If our presen t conccption of Poe as a person is corrcct, how­cver, it makes Poe the artist a much odder figure. Nobody has a good word to say for his foster father, John Allan, who certainly does not seem to havc been a very attractive gentleman ; but if we imagine ourselves in his place in the ycar I 83 I , what sort of view would we havc takcn of Poe's futu rc?

R emembering his behavior at the uníversity, his pointlcss en­listment in the arrny, his behavior at West Po int, his bchavior to ourselves, would he no t havc scemed to us an obvious case of a certain kind of neurotic with which we are q uite familiar-the

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talentcd youngster who nevcr comes to anything bccause he will not or cannot work, whose masterpieces never get beyond the third page, who loses job aftcr job because he cannot gct to work on time or meet a date line? Wc might find psychological excuses for him in his heredity and carly chilclhood-the incompetcnt, irre­sponsihle fathcr, the death of bis mother when he was two-but our rrognosis for his future not only as a man but a!so as a writer would hardly havc becn sangu inc . At thc vcry best we might have hoped that in the cnurse of n Ii fctime he would produce one or two cxquisitely polishcd lyrics.

But what in fact did happcn? While remaining in his personal life just as difticult and sclf-destructive as wc forcsaw, he quickly became a very hard-working and conscientious professional writer. None of his coiieagues on magazines seems to have had any pro­fessional difficulty with him. lndccd, whcn onc compares thc qual­ity of most of thc books he had to rcvicw with the qualíty of h is rcviews, onc is ínclincd to wish that , for the sakc of his own work, he had been less conscienlious. Thc defects wc find in his work are so oftcn just thc defects we should havc least expected- the errors of a profcssional who is ovcrtaxcd and working against the clock .

As to bis prívate life a nd personality , had it been more roman­tically wicked , his work would not havc the importance it has as being, in sorne senses, the first modcrn work . He was one of the first to suffcr con rciously the i mpact of the destruction of the tra­ditional community and its values, and he paid the heaviest price for this conscio usncss. As D . H . Lawrcnce says in an essay con­spicuous for its insights:

Poe had a pretty bitter doom. Doomed to seethe down his soul in a great continuous convulsion of disintegration, and doomed to regíster the process . And then doomcd to be abuscd for it, when he hacl performcd sorne of the bitterest tasks of human expe ricnce, that can be asked of a man . Necessary tasks too. For the human soul must suffer its own disintcgration, consciously, if cver it ís to survive.

To which one might add : "Abused?" No, a worse doorn than that. Doomed to be used in school textbooks as a baít to in tcrest the

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young in good literature, to be a respectable rival to the pulps. Still, he has had sorne rewards. Not many authors have been

invoked as interccssors with God in an hour of nced, as Poe was named by Baudelairc when he felt hirnself going mad; not many have been celebrated in pocms as beautiful as Mallarrné's Sonnet, of which this is Roger Fry's translation.

THE TOMB OF EDGAR POE

Such asto himself eternity's changed hirn, Thc Poet arouses with his naked sword His age fright-stricken for not having known That Death was triurnphing in that strange voice!

They, with a Hydra's vile spasrn at hearing the angel Giving a sense more pure to thc words of their tribc Proclaimcd aloud the sortilege drunk In the dishonored flow of sorne black brew.

Oh, Grief! From soil and from the hostile cloud, If thence our idea cannot carvc a relief Wherewith to adorn Poe's shining tomb

Calm block fallen down here frorn some dark disaster May this granite a t lcast show forever their boum To the black ftights of Blasphemy sparse in the future.

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TENNYSON

During the latter half of the eighteenth century there lived in Grirnsby, Lincolnshire, a successful solicitar and businessman called George Tennyson. Robust, chccrful, intcrested in gencalogy, he made and married money, became a mernber of Parliament, bought a country estate, and begat two sons, George and Charles. For reasons unknown he disinherited the elder and sent him, against his will, into the Church, making him Rector of Somersby. In r8os the Revcrend George Tennyson married Elizabeth Fytch, a clergyman's daughter with a taste for Felicia Hemans, begat eight sons and four daughters, and died in 183 r. His sixth child and fourth son, born at midnight of August 6, 1809, was the poet.

Alfred Tennyson was sent to Louth Grammar School, where he was unusually unhappy; he was taken away and educated at home until 1828, when he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. There he met Arthur Henry Hallam, belonged to a group of earnest young intellectuals who called themselves The Apostles, won the Chancellor's medal for a poem on Timbuctoo, and went clown in r 831 without taking his degree. He had, however, already pub­lished two books. Poems by Two Brothers, written in collaboration with his brother Frederick, had been published by a Louth book­seller in 1827, and his Poems, Chiefl.y Lyrical, by Moxon, a Len­don publisher, in 1830.

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