Poe’s Plate Articles

     An often impecunious writer who depended on publication for his income, Edgar Allen Poe sometimes wrote with a quick payment in mind. Amid the great poems and stories in the Collected Works the reader will see four “plate articles.” These were short essays describing engraved plates the publisher had already obtained. Apart from being expected to come up with something with broad popular appeal, the writer had a free hand. Thus these pieces, written to order like poems produced on a prompt at a workshop and tied essentially to the image they accompanied, could sometimes create the opportunity for an almost improvisatory composition, a sort of laboratory for creativity.
     They do not always fulfill this potential, though. The earliest of Poe’s plate articles, “Some Account of Stonehenge, the Giant’s Dance,” provides nothing but a factual description of the monument, including quotations from other writers both ancient and modern. His scheme allows very little space for the expression of Poe’s own sensibility. The flatness of the essay is evident in its banal concluding sentence: “The whole number of stones now visible, amounts to one hundred and nine.” The author was palpably anxious to finish up, turn it in, and get paid.
     By the time Poe was assigned another engraving, the result of the exercise was altogether different. The precious archaism of the word “fay” suggests the more self-indulgent style of Poe’s second such article, “The Island of the Fay.” Poe allowed himself a dramatic rush of words expressing a far more passionate and specific vision. His torrent of rhetoric however, is preceded by a sort of overture that might be considered its theoretical justification -- Poe’s sonnet beginning “Science, true daughter of old Time . . .” which indicts science for killing myth.
     He begins by quoting Marmontel to the effect that music is unique in that it may be best enjoyed alone, and proceeds to the quite simple next step of suggesting that to him the pleasures of admiring nature are likewise best pursued by a lone individual. Yet on the way to that point he tosses off a series of provocative propositions unrelated to what follows. In the very first sentence, in the middle in fact of Marmontel’s words, he throws into question the notion he has not even completed stating, saying that Marmontel speaks “with the same odd confusion of thought and language which leads him to give his decidedly equivocal narratives the title of ‘Contes Moraux.’” It may be called an “odd confusion,” but surely thought and language are always entangled. If they are entirely apart, would that not result in gibberish? If the French author is so “equivocal,” why cite him as an authority? But Poe’s American reader, concentrating perhaps on the French, is likely to slide forward past these diversions toward what seems likely to be the chief theme of the essay: the delectation of natural beauty.
     By the end of the article’s first paragraph the love of nature has gone far beyond a conventional picturesque sketch. It becomes a vision of the ancient rocks and mountains, the world itself, and the cosmos beyond as a vast organism upon which humans dwell as “animalculae” do upon our own bodies, and we are as ignorant of these great beings as the microbe – not on our skin in Poe’s imagining – but “those which infest the brain ” -- is of our own reality.
     He is only just warming up. Like a Hindu cosmographer, he goes on to conceive of “cycle within cycle without end – yet all revolving around one far-distant center which is the Godhead.” There is very little here of the scenic and pretty, no reference whatever to the engraving accompanying the piece, yet the reader does find the most effective demonstration possible of the heights to which an inspired solitary observer might rise. The true center of the essay seems to be the thrill of extravagant speculation.
     The remainder of the piece is devoted to natural description, albeit heavily colored with subjectivity, of a ramble among “melancholy tarns” of the area. There he says he felt like falling into a “doze” beneath an almost narcotic “unknown odorous shrub,” thinking that only by dreaming might he actually look upon the scene before him, “such was the character if the phantasm which it wore.” This comment, of course, leads the reader to question even the concrete details of passages like “The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed.”
     Whether the writer is awake or asleep, as night falls he glimpses the apparition of a fairy in a boat. Poe had notoriously maintained in “The Philosophy of Composition” that “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Thus the poor “fays” must not only be seen in the process of dying, but dying repeatedly: “rendering unto God their existence little by little” until the apparition is gone, or night has fallen or the dreamer has awakened.
     The castigation of science, then, with which the essay opens becomes profoundly ambiguous since, in an aestheticized analogue of Christ’s crucifixion, the decease of the divine is the moment of its greatest beauty. Just as with the beloved woman, it is the lover’s longing that is loveliest, not the object of his affection at all, and to bring that pathos to the greatest height, the fay must die.
     “The Island of the Fay” is an island in the mind. Far from the mundane appreciation of the natural beauty of trees, mountains, and lakes, Poe is looking for a meditation that will accommodate him to life on earth by fancifully transmuting what he sees. The first third of the article consists of ambitious mental exercises specifically designed to free the consciousness from mere observed reality and the remainder provides a vision of the divine at the moment of its vanishing, simultaneously indulging and denying the writer’s desire.
     In his third plate article “Morning on the Wisshiccon” Poe constructs a light burlesque of a similar theme of ambivalence and the veil of illusion. Beginning quite soberly, Poe suggests that foreign visitors to America miss the most beautiful sights because “the real Edens of the land lie far away from the track of our own most deliberate tourists,” in the wild back-country. He relates a journey of his own to such a remote region during which he “sank into a half slumber” dreaming of “ancient days.” In this condition he sees the noble elk featured in the plate posing atop a cliff. Yet the animal alone is not as beautiful as the animal with a sense of inevitable loss. “I fancied the elk repined . . .at the manifest alteration for the worse, wrought upon the brook and its vicinage, even within the last few years, by then stern hand of the utilitarian.” Imminent extinction lends the elk a patina of loveliness similar to the grace that descends on the dying woman.
     From this meditation, not so very different from the vision of the fay, he is suddenly roused by the appearance of a servant who feeds the animal which, it seems, though suggestive of an emblem of the aboriginal untouched wilderness, was a pet, a domestic animal. After the opening which declared that English tourists never see the real wild America, it seems this vestige of aboriginal fauna is kept by “an English family.” Thus the knot of contradiction is tightly tied. The joke is on the writer until the reader reflects that Poe had been in on it all along and the reader is the one he successfully strung along.
     For the last of his plate articles Poe was presented with an illustration of “Byron and Miss Chaworth.” The relationship of these two makes for him a model of noble true love. He opens with a quotation from George Sand (the name he uses is Mme. Dudevant) who, rather like Marmontel, he finds to mix “many an admirable sentiment” with “a chaos of the most shameless and altogether objectionable fiction.” She speaks of the purity of young love, and, according to Poe, Byron, who was, of course, notoriously promiscuous with men and women of all sorts, maintained the beauty of this relationship specifically because he and Miss Chatworth were never intimate after their youngest days. “It is better,” he says, “for the mere romance of the love-passages between the two [emphasis added], that their intercourse was broken up in early life.”
     Poe’s notion of love from afar as the highest love differs from its form in Jaufre Rudel, since for Poe the experience is deeply solipsistic. “It was born of the hour, and of the youthful necessity to love . . .It had no particular regard to the person, or the character, or the reciprocating affection of Mary Chatworth.” In fact, Poe enjoys thinking that to her Byron was “a somewhat portionless, somewhat eccentric and rather lame young man,” while to him she was “the Egeria of his dreams – the Venus Aphrodite that sprang, in full and supernal loveliness, from the bright foam upon the storm-tormented ocean of his thoughts.” Their love derives its power from the fact that it cannot be realized.
     While the piece on Stonehenge illustrates how, even for a writer as idiosyncratic as Poe, a restrictive journalistic assignment might produce routine hackwork, the other three articles prove that professional restrictions might also allow the writer the opportunity for rich rhetoric and soaring concepts. These essays elaborate in pathetic and comic strains Poe’s central themes: the superiority of imagination over reality, and in particular the supreme value of a sublime love as a wholly mental phenomenon for which an unreal object serves better than a real, and for which the impossibility of satisfaction is a paradoxically essential factor. In the end, as in his stories in general, his true focus is the nervous subjectivity of the restless creative mind, enjoying itself in the cosmic flights of the “island of the Fay,” deceiving itself in the cause of the Romantic in “Morning on the Wisshiccon,” and glorifying ethereal unrealized love in “Byron and Miss Chaworth.”

Planetary Motions

This post is a draft of the introductory essay to Planetary Motions, a collection of new poems whose publication (from Giant Steps) is scheduled for June.



The planets were so-called because the name signified in Greek “wanderers,” and Mars and Venus, unlike the fixed stars, seemed to ramble about aimless in the heavens. From a later heliocentric perspective, however, the movements of these heavenly bodies appear elegant and predictable. I can conceive a day that scientists might announce that Venus and the rest were vagabonding after all and the regularities the astronomers had reported were simply mirror images reflecting their own minds in their more rational, if operatically grand, moments.

My own course pretends to little design. The chaos theorists have shown, however, that systems lurk even in what is apparently arbitrary, and, of course, all patterns break up when viewed from a different angle or a slightly altered consciousness. How do I happen to dwell in this town? I simply find myself here. Why do I believe as I do? Because of everything that has come before. Course of study, course of life make little difference in the great tidal movements of mind which are likely in the end to resemble the slow unfolding of a tree’s shape over decades, the distribution of stars in the sky, or the histories of slugs and snails told in silvery mucus.

The boldest claim I would make for the driftings of the consciousness I know best is similar to that made by Marcus Aurelius for what he saw before him on the table: “some splits appear in the crust of baking bread, and these have nothing to do with the baker’s plan, yet these have always a certain rightness.” A rightness like that of the shore-marks of the sea’s waves, or the undulations wrought in the Sahara’s sands by wind, or the swirls and stripes on my tabby’s back.

These things, though, are untouched by intention, so a work of art represents always its object, not only transformed by the conventions of human senses and brains, but then further shaped by desire, fear, and vision. Poetic events, like those observed on the quantum level, come into existence only when observed.

Everything is a matter of aesthetics in the end. Ethics requires defining what sort of a person one would find it becoming to be. Viciousness is quite simply ugly. My ideologies resemble my home’s interior decoration though the former are more easily portable. Each person constructs a nest of what seems right and judges others for their taste rather than their ratiocination, and this procedure is quite in order for we know what we like and must settle for that as a human sort of Truth. Poems and other forms of art are naked about this. As Sidney said, the “Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” A few hundred years later, Keats called a similar willingness to suspend “any irritable reaching after fact and reason” Negative Capability. A millennium and a half earlier another writer with medical training, Sextus Empiricus, had recommended ἐποχή, withholding judgement on all issues, as the likeliest path to serenity.

Lacking a destination might seem to some to entail lacking a purpose, yet, though miles behind, I would like to think that I follow the footsteps of Fa Yen who, when he declared that he was on a pilgrimage without a destination, wandering without goal, was assured by master Kuei Ch'in that such undirected movement was exactly right whereupon Fa Yen attained enlightenment. I can promise no such reward, only a few snapshots of consciousness reflecting glints of shattered truth which I wave in the dark like a blessedly naïve child with a sparkler the bright lights of which provide a sort of promise in spite of their evanescence. Looking then down, a crystal ball is surely available in the reflections and refractions of every puddle in the gutter!






This story I paraphrase is case 20 of the Cóngróng lù, or Book of Equanimity by Wansong Xingxiu, in Japanese called the Shōyōroku.

The Primacy of Poetry in Sidney’s Defence

     The crisis in the prestige of poetry that occasioned Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie [1] is far more evident in contemporary society, Timely though his theme may be, his concept of poetry is an obstacle for modern readers’ sympathetic reception of his essay. To him a part of the grandeur of poetry is that the word may be stretched to embrace all work of imagination. His emphasis on art’s role in fostering morality, quite out-of-place for many modern readers, further raises the barrier. Though the author adopted the pose, fashionable in his day, of pitying “the evill luck” that might bring a reader “to read this inck-wasting toy of mine,” his essay contains an original and persuasive theory of verbal art featuring a sophisticated understanding of mimesis that goes beyond the ideas inherited from Plato and Aristotle to anticipate elements of semiotic theory.
     Sidney’s essay opens with a lament for the decline in poetry’s position. “Poetrie,” he complains “from almost the highest estimation of learning, is falne to be the laughing stocke of children.” Today poetry is generally ignored. Sidney’s own practice indicates that in his day, poetry retained sufficient cachet to be a required skill for courtiers, whereas today poetry has fallen further yet to the extent that competence in the art, even as a consumer and even among the educated, is rare today. [2] A poet-politician would in modern American society be a freak.
     Sidney describes accurately the paramount position of poetry in traditional societies. For him the ancient Greeks provide the most convincing evidence. He says that they considered poetry “above all names of learning.” In part this prestige is associated with the idea of poetic inspiration and poets’ “prophetic” role, but it also assumes an obsolete broad definition of poetry. To Sidney and to the ancients, poetry could mean all imaginative intellectual work, including not only prose works and philosophy but science as well. From poetry, he says, “other learnings have taken their beginnings.” Thus for him, not only is Homer a poet, so are Heliodorus the author of a prose romance, Herodotus the historian, and Manilius the astronomer.
     Sidney, however, distinguishes poetry from other forms of knowledge which have external objects, claiming that poetry is “directed to the highest end of the mistress-knowledge, by the Greeks called archetektonikē.” For Aristotle the coordinating “master art” is politics, because it orders the affairs of humans with artful design setting out social organization and ethical imperatives with the aim of the good of all. [3] Sidney, however, names the poet as “moderator” of “the school of learning.”
     Thus poetry holds the executive function overseeing all sorts of learning of which “the finall end is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate soules made worse by their clay-lodgings, can be capable of.” To Sidney both producing and consuming intellectual and artistic work make a person at once more human and more divine, more excellent in general, and certainly more moral.
     An authoritative reference work quotes Northrup Frye’s devastating judgement on literature’s ethical value. “Any attempt to align [art] with morality, otherwise called bowdlerizing, is intolerably vulgar” [4] though the same source calls the relevance of ethics to literary criticism the issue “with the most sustained written tradition” in all of literary history. [5] Sidney would have thought he was expressing a simple and generally accepted commonplace when he defined poetry by moral parameters, saying “that faining notable images of vertues, vices, or what els, with that delightfull teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a Poet by.”
     Indeed, the encouragement of morality can sound like the principal role of art.


“For these indeed do meerly make to imitate, and imitate both to delight & teach, and delight to move men to take that goodnesse in hand, which without delight they would flie as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodnesse whereunto they are moved: which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them.”


     The proposition that literature fosters good behavior is not only uncongenial to modern critical thinking in theory; it is hardly supported by the irregular reputations of not a few poets or the simmering gossip in certain university English departments. [6]
     Sidney’s lofty principles were in part partisan, of course. He was writing in reply to Stephen Gosson's The Schoole of Abuse. Yet he seems to undercut his own claims about poetry’s ennobling effects with the opening in which he cites Pugliano‘s verbal praise of horsemanship as his model. [7] This inspiration may seem to trivialize poetry, reducing it to the status of a long list of other courtly accomplishments, but such a judgement is anachronistically anti-feudal. While the association seems to moderns to put poetry on a par with ruffled collars and the like, to Sidney (under the tutelage of Castiglione) the aristocrat sought to exemplify genuine excellence in every way. Just as a Victorian author implies a socio-aesthetic standard in calling ethical behavior “gentlemanly,” or, more simply, “manly,” to an Elizabethan high birth was associated with high-mindedness.
     Poetry is not, however, for Sidney purely didactic, a “medicine of cherries” in his phrase. Ironically, in part due to his being borne aloft by his Renaissance neo-Platonism, Sidney overcame the reductive identification of art with imitation that led Plato to belittle poetry as “an imitation of an imitation.” Declaring “Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” Sidney discards any simple notion of mimesis, suggesting a more sophisticated semiosis, a refracted reality centered in the poet’s imagination which is, in fact, distinct from the world itself though always linked to it.
     In this way he finds Xenophon’s literary picture of Cyrus, a historical figure, while not “wholly imaginative” to be “another nature,” an original creation resembling divine creation. Deviations from perceived reality are no deficiency but rather poetry’s particular glory. Because of such non-imitative elements, the artist’s work is enabled to be “either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature.” Escaping “the narrow warrant of her [Nature’s] gifts,” the poet is capable of “freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit.”
     For Sidney, though, this increase in verbal power comes not from the generalizing of all Cyruses into a Platonic form of Cyrus, but in particularity of the artist’s design. “Let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing and whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger, than finding in the schoolmen his genus and difference.”
     While not contradicting the mimetic principle he inherited, Sidney is careful to expand it for his own analysis. “Poesie therefore, is an Art of Imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speake Metaphorically.” Immediately after affirming his authority, he introduces new terms that suggest his view of poetry conceived in the poet’s imagination. A “re-presentation” goes beyond a “presentation,” a “counterfeit” is etymologically, something made “in opposition” to a model, and, most significantly, “to speake Metaphorically” is quite different from speaking literally. This non-imitative shift moves the poet’s image from realism to something greater. For Sidney, poetry is man’s distinctive capacity, the activity in which he displays his divinity more than in any other.
     The value of metaphor is that it can offer rich and precise objective correlatives for experiences, conveying them with far more information than other forms of discourse. One way in which poetry is distinguished from other forms of discourse is by its affective component. Poets are “Fathers in learning” generally, but they are alone in possessing “hart-ravishing knowledge.” While non-aesthetic texts usually allow scant expression of emotion, poetry often foregrounds feelings, and to Sidney, “moving is of a higher degree than teaching.”
     Sidney rejoins Aristotle in asserting poetry’s privilege over history, imagination over facts, metaphorical meaning over literal. The potential of poetry arises in the first place from the ability of the author to construct a work that reflects, not the appearance of things, but their meaning, their significance, including the associated emotions. This total picture untethered to observed facts corresponds to the true greater reality of human experience which includes not only subtle shades of insight that might escape the gross terms of literalism, but also allows the inclusion of self-reflection, ambivalence, contradiction, tension, and mystery as well as that unique variety of pleasure called beauty.




1. So-called in Posonby’s authorized first edition (1595). It had been titled An Apologie for Poetrie in Olney’s earlier printing. While I shall use the title Sidney apparently preferred, I recognize the advantage of Olney’s title because of its distinction from Shelley’s equally celebrated A Defence of Poetry.

2. Even in academic departments the study of relatively recent fiction has, to a unprecedented extent, displaced poetry.

3. Nicomachean Ethics I.2.

4. Frye was, of course, a devout Christian. Note how even his denunciation of morality’s claims on art is cast in aesthetic terms. The comment occurs in Fearful Symmetry, p. 121 in the Collected Works edition.

5. “Ethics and Criticism” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

6. It is likely true that literary critics and scholars are more righteous in that they are inclined to the left politically, but this is not likely due to their specific training, but rather is characteristic of all educated people.

7. Sidney’s Defence is itself cast in the most classical form of an oration. A detailed description of his debt to Quintilian and Cicero appeared in Kenneth O. Myrick’s Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. A more recent study is John Webster’s “Oration and Method in Sidney's ‘Apology’: A Contemporary's Account,” Modern Philology 79.1 (Aug., 1981), 1-15.