Repercussions of “The Bells”
Poe, Emerson, and the Bifurcation of American Poetics (with a Postscript on Tuckerman)
The ode as practised by American poets in the nineteenth century followed a very different path from that of its English cousin. In the previous century, both in England and the New World, poets had exercised the genre in all its varieties, and even the strict Pindaric found prominence in the work of Thomas Gray, who was preceded by Congreve, Collins, Akenside, and others. The Cowleyan pseudopindaric, however, was far more prevalent, practised by a long list of poets after Dryden’s “Ode in Memory of Mrs Killigrew” and his two Cecilia odes. Odes on political topics abounded. But the pseudopindaric was the loosest recognized form available to poets before the advent of free verse itself – the easiest to write, the hardest to write well – so that Dr Johnson dismissed it with contempt.1 The genre was further degraded by the countless productions of poets laureate for royal birthdays and other routine occasions.
The ode was reinvigorated by the English romantics, when Coleridge and Wordsworth assimilated their meditations on nature to the “greater ode” (as opposed to the “lesser” Horatian ode) and invented the “greater romantic lyric.” Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” is doubtless the supreme achievement in our language in pseudopindarics, though the greater romantic lyric assumed a variety of verse forms. Yet despite considerable slippage of nomenclature, poetic form, and poetic occasion, it remains clear that the greater romantic lyric, identified in M.H. Abrams’s classic essay, was slow to reach America. Although Abrams cites Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” as an example, the ode in America typically does not resemble the greater romantic lyric. Instead, the American ode remained political and topical. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman’s “The Cricket” is so atypical that it seems the exception made to prove the rule.
To test these statements, I begin with the two seminal poets of nineteenth-century America, Emerson and Poe. Largely through Harold Bloom’s writings over several decades, Emerson has returned to his rightful place in the American pantheon after having been neglected in the New Critical era. In 1988, Bloom proclaimed that, from Emerson’s moment to ours, “American authors are either in his tradition, or in a counter-tradition originating in opposition to him” (“Mr America”). This counter-tradition, in poetry at least, doubtless stems from Poe, left unnamed – pointedly perhaps – because Bloom’s project also seemed intent on writing Poe out of the American tradition. But Bloom was not the first to discern these currents. As long ago as 1900, Edmund Clarence Stedman, having compiled his vast anthology of nineteenth-century verse, declared, “it is now pretty clear, notwithstanding the popularity of Longfellow in his day, that Emerson, Poe, and Whitman [are] those of our poets from whom the old world had most to learn … Years from now, it will be a matter of fact that their influences were as lasting as those of any poets of this century” (American Anthology, xxiv).
American poetry has long been subject to critical binaries, but all of them boil down to an opposition between the Emerson-Whitman line and that of Poe. According to Roy Harvey Pearce in The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), American poets are either “Adamic” (that is, Whitmanic) or “mythic” (that is, academic or formalist). Philip Rahv’s once celebrated essay “Paleface and Redskin” (1939) falls likewise into place. Similar polarization is mirrored in the War of the Anthologies during the 1950s, when the “Adamic” advocates of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry squared off against the academic New Poets of England and America. More recently, Charles Altieri observed that poets during the 1960s grouped into the “symbolist” (sc. “mythic” or “metaphoric”) and the “immanentist” (“Adamic” or “metonymic”) (Enlarging the Temple, 29–52). At times, hostilities have erupted: Bloom’s advocacy for the Emerson faction has been vociferous and dogmatic, while antagonists during the War of the Anthologies took no prisoners. Clearly, Poe’s aesthetics are the ancestor of the New Criticism, while Whitman stands behind the counter-poetics of the New York, San Francisco, and Black Mountain groups.
Like most widely held generalizations, these possess enough truth to make them attractive. Although the appeal of binary thinking in general has faded in recent decades, the habit persists, and always with some falsification. My purpose here is to re-examine the poetics of Emerson and Poe exemplified in their odes, both to affirm and to complicate this opposition.
In broad terms, we know how this works: to Emerson, the poet is a visionary who has achieved “an original relation to the universe” (Essays, 7). He is “poet” in the widest sense, one who may realize his high thoughts in various ways, but insofar as he chooses verse, he remains foremost a prophet, even a “liberating god”: “The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune.” To Poe, the poet is an author of verses pure and simple – a craftsman. “For Emerson, inspiration and expression are one process; Poe divorces the two.”2 Both, however, reserve poetry for exceptional purposes, never for “something to read in normal circumstances” (to use Ezra Pound’s expression3). Poetry and ordinary experience, the material of prose fiction, seems mutually exclusive.
Hostilities between Emerson and Poe were personal and political as well as aesthetic. Poe’s visceral dislike of “the transcendentalists” erupts in “The Philosophy of Composition,” and, as a Southerner, he resented the abolitionism centred in Boston. As for Emerson, he famously rejected Poe as “the jingle man” and is reported to have commented on “The Raven”: “I see nothing in it.”4 His barbs against the “umpires of taste” whose “knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form” (447) were probably not directed against Poe, but they may as well have been.5 The poetics of Emerson and Poe seem so antithetical as to be mutually exclusive – “diametrically opposite,” as undergraduates love to say. But there is significant overlap.
First, both Poe and Emerson present poetry as a means of spiritual elevation and set it apart from ordinary life. Both “were idealists who saw an eternal spiritual verity underlying the material universe.”6 Poe takes pains to distinguish this spiritual effect from both intellect and emotion: “Now the object Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable to a certain extent in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me), which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement or pleasurable elevation of the soul” (Essays and Reviews, 16). Thus Poe, despite the elusiveness of his actual religious convictions, reserves poetry exclusively to the spiritual sphere.7 The purpose of poetic contemplation is just that “intense and pure elevation of soul – not of intellect, or of heart” (16). Like Emerson’s Uriel, Poe’s figure for the poet is the angel Israfel. Elsewhere, in his early Drake-Halleck review, Poe describes the “intangible and purely spiritual nature of poetry” as a “radiant Paradise” which is “palpably marked out from amid the jarring and tumultuous chaos of human intelligence” (509). Emerson, whose vision of the poet is more comprehensive, argues that the poet is one “in whom these powers are in balance,” one who “traverses the whole scale of experience” (Emerson, Essays, 448). Emerson may look at a farm and read a “mute gospel” (29), and his visionary power may elevate even the ugly or the obscene; but the goal is invariably a higher spiritual Truth. “All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology” (451). The poet, he says, sees through material reality, “turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form. For poetry was all written before time was” (456). If Emerson’s version of “the whole of experience” is more capacious than Poe’s, it is just as radically skewed towards the realm of the spirit.
Second, both Emerson and Poe place supreme value on “originality.” In both, concepts of imitation, tradition, or genre are stigmatized, even at the risk of what appeared to be bad taste. As Stephen Donadio remarked, “one compelling characteristic that Emerson shares with Poe is a kind of studied tastelessness – tastelessness sometimes carried to the point of preciosity” (“Emerson,” 86). If good taste is a badge of superior class, bad taste is the attribute of the democrat, as it is so often in American literature and popular culture. Emerson’s grandiose call for an “American Scholar” is only one among many for a new literature in a new world: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” and “poetry will revive and lead in a new age” (Essays, 53). Poe scoffed at this literary nationalism, but he was no less insistent on the need for “keeping originality always in view” (Essays and Reviews, 13) in his comments on plot construction in fiction and versification in poetry. In devising the form of “The Raven,” for example, he says, “My first object (as usual) was originality,” and he goes on to scold his fellow poets: it is clear, he says, “that the possible varieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite, and yet, for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing” (20–1). Yet beyond the trochaic octameter stanzas of this poem, Poe, for all his meticulous craftsmanship, habitually takes more licences than any poet of his period other than Emerson, shifting freely from one stanza form to another within the same poem. Poe is silent on this subject, however, while Emerson vaunts his liberties with metre: “The kingly bard / Must smite the chords rudely and hard, / As with hammer or with mace” (“Merlin”). Since Emerson was capable of writing unobjectionable metres elsewhere, his metrical insouciance may be seen as deliberate; but whether deliberate or not, the licences taken by this generation of American poets mark a significant loosening of versification before Whitman.
If we focus on prosody, we find another significant parallel. Early critics of Emerson’s poetry were nearly unanimous in their dismay over his unorthodox versification. Hyatt Waggoner’s survey of criticism yields a collective view not only that the prose vastly overshadows the poetry but that the poetic technique is “lame,” “unscannable,” “careless,” “defective,” “inartistic,” and “slovenly” (Emerson, 26–31). It is reassuring, therefore, to discover that George Saintsbury (who had perhaps the acutest ear of any critic) thought that Emerson has “a distinct prosodic quality”; “the peculiar octosyllabic couplets of which he was so fond, though rough in appearance, are very characteristic,” and “his mixture of iambs and trochees (as in ‘Rhea’) is sometimes quite effective, as is that of varied metres in ‘Monadnoc.’” He concludes by noting anticipations of Whitman (English Prosody, 3:483). Poe however, unlike Emerson, staked his reputation on prosodic expertise. Yet his detailed account of classical metres in “The Rationale of English Verse” is riddled with errors visible to anyone who had suffered a whipping for false quantities in an English schoolroom.8 And like Emerson’s metrical vagaries, Poe’s licences with stanza have raised questions about his basic competence. W.L. Werner in 1930 argued that the irregularities of Poe’s stanzas “are not the inspired deviations of a master” but, rather, “lapses typical of a person who is trying to achieve good technique”; he noticed furthermore that, although Poe is harshly critical of false rhymes in other poets, his own verses are full of them, and he allowed them to stand through many revisions (“Poe’s Theories,” 164). Defenders predictably rushed to Poe’s rescue. My interest is not to revive these debates but to show how they shed light on American cultural attitudes towards poetry itself. Such licences in Emerson and Poe proclaim their originality. In Emerson they signify freedom from the restrictions of older prosodies. Poe, for his part (writing in a country whose education system was far removed from the class-stratified English schools), treats prosody as a kind of magic kit full of gizmos for mystification and enchantment. As James Russell Lowell wrote in “A Fable for Critics,” he “talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, / In a way to make people of common sense damn metres.” Either way, the result is that American poets, as Stephen Cushman argues in Fictions of Form in American Poetry, are paradoxically too much, not too little, concerned with questions of form and metre.
Neither Emerson nor Poe sees the poet as a mere “man speaking to men” (in Wordsworth’s gendered phrase). He is more like an angel speaking to angels. Poetic experience is elevated to a realm of Platonic purity, stripped of its messy accretions of tradition. The “cultural work” of poetry, if that phrase is even appropriate, is exclusively spiritual. Perhaps the most significant point of agreement between them is that the common world of human society, history, politics, friends, and families are all but excluded from consideration. Emerson thought that a landscape was spoiled for poetry “if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of the sight of men” (Essays, 42). Neither Emerson nor Poe would think of composing a historical progress poem, or a Wordsworthian idyll, or a Coleridgean conversation poem. Both composed pseudopindaric odes, in a sense, but with very interesting qualifications. Politics is manifestly unbeautiful: it’s hard to think of any poetry less socio-political than Poe’s, and when he turned to the free pseudopindaric form, the result was “The Bells.” Emerson’s Merlin, on the other hand, “modulates the king’s affairs”; but while Emerson does address political or historical topics at times, he nearly always seems to be stooping from the clouds.
Were it possible to imagine an American poetry of which Emerson and Poe were the sole progenitors, much would remain unchanged. It would still have high metaphysical flights into the sublime. It would still have Whitman and the line of free verse and open forms that flow out of him, with endless debates about alternative prosodies and “breath.” It would still have the unrestrained individualism and wild formal innovation, a poetry in which each poet has his or her idiosyncratic prosody or else an apologia for the lack of one. As W.H. Auden observed, where there is no traditional status given the poet, “it is up to each individual poet to justify his existence by offering a unique product”: “It is harder for an American than it is for a European to become a good writer, but if he succeeds, he contributes something unique; he sees something and says it in a way that no one before him has said it. Think of the important American writers,” he challenges. “Could any European country … produce writers who in subject matter, temperament, language, are so utterly unlike one another or anybody else?”9
But the paradox remains: in the great experiment of elective democracy, notes Dana Gioia, where a person is defined to a significant extent by his or her politics, American poetry is normally seen either as an alternative to public, political, commercial, or communal life – or as irrelevant. “Everything, critics have insisted for decades, is the proper subject for modern poetry; unlike the art of the past, contemporary poetry excludes nothing.” And yet there is “a surprising paucity of serious verse on political and social themes”: American poetry “has been unable to create a meaningful public idiom. It has little in common with the world outside of literature – no reciprocal sense of mission, no mutual set of ideas and concerns … At its best, our poetry has been private rather than public, intimate rather than social, ideological rather than political … Most of our poets have tried to develop conspicuously personal and often private languages of their own” (Poetry, 115, 126–7). Fortunately, Gioia’s sweeping generalization is not strictly true. He overlooks Whitman, for one. But Emerson and Poe were the crucial pre-Whitmanic figures who defined for American poetry not so much its overt subject matter as the purposes that poetry should serve. Emerson’s “Merlin,” declares Bloom, “is dangerous in that it tempts our poets to a shamanism they neither altogether want nor properly can sustain” (Ringers, 305). Poe’s aestheticism, on the other hand, has tended to limit American poetry to an ornamental function.
Emerson and Poe may exalt poetry to a high position through claims of transcendence, metaphysical or aesthetic, but they sideline it in the process. Major odes by Emerson and Poe sum up this binary all too neatly. If Poe’s “The Bells” is the consummate product of the jingle man, Emerson’s odes are for the most part placed in the mouths of higher beings – Uriel, Bacchus, Hamatreya, Saadi, Merlin. American poetics, like its politics, tends to polarize. There was in fact an available via media, suggested by the romantic Tuckerman, or the transatlantic Longfellow or James Russell Lowell later in the century – an Arnoldian compromise between classical standards and romantic subjectivity, an internationalist view that reproportions nativist Americanism and recognizes the continuities of American poetry with British and European traditions. Lowell, for one, is called a romantic, but he was capable of adopting the viewpoint of the citizen as well as of the individual. American poets and students of American Studies alike have shunned this middle path, and one result is that poetry has become either an alternative to public life or irrelevant.
Although Emerson and Poe both invested heavily in their vocations as poets, they are mainly valued today as writers of prose. They themselves participated, then, in that transfer of prestige in the hierarchies of literary genre from poetry to prose that took place during the nineteenth century. Emerson – who had no time for prose fiction and scolded Hawthorne for wasting his genius writing stories – chose the higher road in his philosophical essays, but Poe not only wrote prose fiction, he wrote it in its more grossly crowd-pleasing forms. This shift of prestige extends far beyond American literature, of course. It is axiomatic to the Marxist György Lukacs: the novel, he argued, “is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become the problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”10 Poetry, even in its epic form, thus deals with life as “unproblematic.” Bakhtin’s characterization of lyric poetry as “monoglossia,” preferring the “heteroglossia” of the novel, is a parallel development. Closer to home, John P. McWilliams traces this process in The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860, arguing that the epic genre in American literature too was taken over by the novel after Sir Walter Scott’s conflation of epic with romance. Verse romance maintained a lively presence for a time, notably in Longfellow, but the novel won the day. Herbert F. Tucker’s Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 painstakingly documents this rivalry as it developed in England.
The consequences of this shift appear already in the poetry of both Emerson and Poe. When Emerson was a transparent eyeball observing “the frolic architecture of the snow” (“The Snow Storm”) he was taking delight in the creative play of the Oversoul, reading the minutest particle through metonymic abstraction as the signature of the One in a way that might have pleased Jonathan Edwards. But when he was not writing neo-Wordsworthian observations of Nature, Emerson reserved poetry primarily for liberating gods with suprahuman magical powers such as might populate epic or romance – deities like Hamatreya, Brahma, or Bacchus, angels like Uriel, purveyors of shamanistic wisdom like Merlin. These speakers adopt the accentual metres of folk tradition and the posture of the “man of truth” (“Saadi”), the speaker of wise sayings variously described as “gnomic,” “orphic,” “prophetic,” or “aphoristic.” One common feature of these folk traditions is that they are dateless: “The archaic character of proverbs,” noted A.J. Greimas, constitutes “a placement outside of time of their meanings.”11 Another common feature recalls Lukacs’s claim that, in epic, the totality of life is “directly given”: in folk wisdom, according to James G. Williams, “there is an overwhelming preference to affirm and undergird society and tradition rather than the individual and novelty … The individual internalizes the voice of the fathers and obeys it by guarding himself against disorder (folly)” (Those Who Ponder, 42). Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard clearly falls in line here, and just as clearly Emerson does not. Instead, he participates in the romantic tendency towards what Williams calls the “wisdom of counter-order,” a paradoxical overturning of common-sense folk wisdom clearly visible in William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” and extending to figures like Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde.12 As Williams points out, this stance of counter-order also has some precedent in Hebrew scripture, in Koheleth and Job, and in the paradoxical sayings of Jesus himself; but the writers we describe as romantic practised it habitually.
With these notions in mind, I turn to Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” a poem about history:
Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,
Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood.
“Hamatreya” begins with a litany of proper names, the point being that these half-remembered lives are meaningless. Emerson consigns them to the hellish spondees of Milton’s “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death” (PL 2.621): “Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: / And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.” There is grim truth in this, of course, a truth that Emerson himself confesses renders him “no longer brave.” “Hamatreya” is an essential corrective to the pervasive human-centred view of Emerson that emphasizes secular “Self-Reliance” at the expense of “Fate” or “The Oversoul.” As Hyatt Waggoner remarks, the poem insists on “the necessary humbling, the religious sense of man’s utter dependence, that must, Emerson thought, precede any valid affirmation” (Emerson, 147). Harold Bloom, on the other hand – never a fan of humility – typically diffuses the issue, conceding that, while “Necessity speaks as the Earth-Song in ‘Hamatreya,’” it is then “defied by the Dionysiac spirit of the poet in ‘Bacchus,’” and the opposition then subsumed in “Merlin.” “The three poems together evidence Emerson’s major venture into his own cosmos in the Poems of 1846” (Ringers, 296).
Yet it is easy to forget that “Hamatreya” was an occasional ode, written for the “Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town, September 12, 1835.”13 Emerson’s presentation that day began with a recitation of his poem, but it continued with a lengthy discourse detailing the history of Concord. This speech is unlike almost anything else in Emerson, packed with historical incident, anecdotes of war and bravery (such as might ornament a heroic poem), defiance of British authority, and construction of the civic government of the New England town. We learn what Bulkeley did and why he was an important person. All along, Emerson exhibits admirable sentiments: “The virtues of patriotism and of prodigious courage and address were exhibited on both sides” of every conflict, he notes, “and, in many instances, by women.” And (mindful of President Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830) he laments the fate of the Native American: “It is the misfortune of Concord to have permitted a disgraceful outrage upon the friendly Indians settled within its limits, in February, 1676, which ended in their forcible expulsion from the town. This painful incident is but too just an example of the measure which the Indians have generally received from the whites.”14 Yet, he adds with a white man’s stoic resignation: “We know beforehand who must conquer in that unequal struggle. The red man may destroy here and there a straggler, as a wild beast may; he may fire a farm-house, or a village; but the association of the white men and their arts of war give them an overwhelming advantage, and in the first blast of their trumpet we already hear the flourish of victory.”
Minute circumstances like those catalogued in the “Historical Discourse,” however, are the purpose of lowly utilitarian prose: “Hamatreya” itself is firmly situated in the ahistorical realm of proverb. It is, Hyatt Waggoner remarks, “perversely ahistorical”: “as far as we can tell from the poem, the Puritans had no religion at all” since the Old and New Testaments “repeatedly rebuke the idea of man’s ownership of God’s creation.” Such is the case, he observes, “even if the religion of the forefathers was as superstitious and untenable as Emerson thought it to be.”15
If we turn to Emerson’s essay on “History,” we encounter a more idiosyncratic prose: “There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. Of the works of this mind history is the record.” History (as I know it at least) is almost unrecognizable in these words. In the very first sentence it is reduced to “mind,” wholly subjectivized. The circumstantial detail of the “Historical Discourse” gets set aside, and (to use Gustaaf Von Cromphout’s word) history becomes “psychocentric.” Emerson, he says, “scorned the past as fact and exalted the past as meaning, knowing that only in the mind of the present could the past achieve existential reality. Since thought is reality, he regarded the past as a creation of the present, as a product of the retrospectively creative force of the mind of the present” (“Dialectics of History,” 54). Emerson’s prose advances a metahistory, to use Hayden White’s term, from which it is a short step to Van Wyck Brooks’s “usable past” or William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (Conrad, Refiguring America, 19–22).
This is not quite the same as negation – it is not Henry Ford’s “History is bunk” or Carl Sandburg’s “The past is a bucket of ashes.”16 Although Emerson famously disowns the past in “The American Scholar” and the introduction to Nature, he gave “History” pride of place in Essays, First Series (1841), and in this essay, absolute truth is both subjective and historicized. As Van Cromphout puts it, “truth never is, but is always in the process of becoming, and this perception induced him to identify the absolute with history” (“Dialectics of History,” 55). The ever-evolving nature of truth in the mind of the poet-hero is incompatible with society’s conception of truth as something long established. “This one fact the world hates,” Emerson declares in “Self-Reliance,” “that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past” (Essays, 271). The hero’s historic function was to make truth prevail in a world clinging to traditional beliefs that, on account of their very “pastness,” were false. History is thus a record of the evolving metaphysics of human imagination.
But where is all this in “Hamatreya”? The poem itself concludes in an unobjectionable and conventional moral: since death comes to rich and poor alike, avarice is pointless. One might dignify the point by calling it a Riffaterrean hypogram, and Emerson endows this conventional piety with drama of sorts in the “Earth’s Song” and defamiliarizes it with an invented Hindu name. But conventional it remains. “Hamatreya” the poem disavows interest in the circumstantial particulars of human activity described in the “Historical Discourse,” and it makes no attempt to explore the metaphysical complexity of the essay on “History.”
Emerson’s other odes are equally didactic, and they do go beyond the conventional moralizing of “Hamatreya” in the direction of the paradoxical counter-order proverb; but both “Uriel” and “Bacchus” are removed from specific historical context. Uriel in Emerson’s comic parable – “the sharpest sighted Spirit of all in Heav’n” (Paradise Lost 3.691), the angel who interprets God’s will to the other angels – offends common sense when he declares “Line in nature is not found” and preaches paradoxically, “Evil will bless, and ice will burn.” He is banished from Heaven – that is, from Harvard – but, withdrawing into his cloud, continues “truth speaking.” Like Uriel, Emerson was banished from Harvard Divinity School for some thirty years after his shocking address. “Bacchus,” on a less theological plane, reads like an affront to the Temperance Society. Emerson was surrounded by reformers of all kinds, of course, but though he followed the activities of the Temperance Society, he apparently did not take serious interest in them. In “The Poet” he had declared that “bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other procures of animal exhilaration” (Essays, 460), thus contributing to the decadent myth of the poet’s affinities with artificial paradise. Although he was no advocate of prohibition – “Make love a crime, and we shall have lust,” he wrote17 – he nonetheless cautioned that such quasi-mechanical means were “a spurious mode of attaining freedom.” Thus “Bacchus” too immediately turns his praise of inebriation into an inoffensive metaphor, explaining that his wine “never grew / In the belly of the grape,” and so Bacchus appears as sheepish as Snug the Joiner confessing that he is not a real lion.
Emerson’s Channing Ode is far more complex and difficult than either of these, not only in its topicality but in its uncertain attitude. Its general circumstances are well known: President Polk’s Mexican War and the annexation of Texas threatened to add another large and powerful slave state and upset the balance of Congress in favour of the slave-holders. Emerson’s friend William Henry Channing, an arch abolitionist, asked Emerson to address the issue in a poem. The “Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing,” the manuscript dated June 1846, is his response (Allen, Waldo Emerson, 483–4), and Emerson’s most wildly irregular pseudopindaric ode has long been central to his work. Yet the critical history is spotty, and many details remain clouded.
The poem is almost unique in Emerson’s poetry in addressing a specific socio-political problem. Recent criticism has focused on Emerson’s attitudes towards slavery and abolitionism, but the poem ranges far beyond that to consider issues of public avarice, political expediency, cultural appropriation, and international power – and the relation of all to the functions of poetry. Len Gougeon, writing against earlier critical emphasis on Emerson’s suspicion of all social reformers, has rightly called attention to his increasing sympathy for abolition in the mid-1840s. Yet even Gougeon concedes that earlier scholars missed this development because Emerson regarded his own “occasional discourses on specific social issues as largely ephemeral”: he left them unpublished, many were lost, and the majority of his important lectures on slavery were not delivered until after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.18 At the time of the Channing Ode, Emerson was more focused on a higher “national mission” than any specific political disputes.19 Here, Emerson explicitly refuses to write poetry from the viewpoint of the citizen. Poetry is reserved for the elevation of self.
The specific occasion of the poem was long obscure, but Gougeon identifies it convincingly as the Boston funeral of one Charles Turner Torrey, a militant abolitionist who had died in a Maryland jail serving time for aiding slaves to escape (“Anti-Slavery Background,” 63–77). Torrey was a controversial figure: the foremost Unitarian church in Boston refused to hold his funeral service, and two years earlier Emerson himself had refused a request from Whittier to write a letter on his behalf. Emerson’s attendance at the funeral on 19 May 1846 was a matter of public notice. But Emerson’s journals, as Gougeon reveals, show a still divided attitude: Torrey is a “martyr,” his eulogist a “benefactor”; Emerson is disgusted by the “skeptics” of Park Street Church who would not let Torrey’s crowded funeral “spoil their carpets” and contemptuous of the general public with its “appetite for pineapple and ice cream.” On the other hand, he regarded abolitionist accusations over Torrey’s death to be false rage and “make believe” (Virtue’s Hero, 110–11). No wonder then that the “angry Muse / Puts confusion in [his] brain”: she will not allow him to adopt the role of monologic bard.
Emerson’s solution to this dilemma is elegant: deploying the trope of apophasis, Emerson refuses to discuss the most pressing issue, even as he places it squarely before the reader. What follows then is a rant, a chaotic diatribe against the evils of the time – but all of it, as it were, under erasure. A politician, for example, might employ apophasis to declare that she will not stoop to itemize her opponent’s well-known corruptions, his indecencies, his public intoxication. Even Emerson’s object of address in the poem is oblique: yes, it is a public declaration of Emerson’s views, yet it is directed towards the single individual Channing. Apophasis is a powerful tool of irony: it elevates the character of the speaker to a higher moral plane, while more subtly it also flatters the listener into tacit agreement. There is a further dimension to the figure observed by Reginald Gibbons: apophasis, he says, “acts as if there were hidden realms or realities within or beside or behind what is familiar to us,” just as in conversation, “we say more than we mean, but we are not able to discern all that extra meaning in what others say” (“Apophatic Poetics,” 39). The figure has a mysterious resonance, an intonational quality that makes Emerson’s poem highly performative.
Though loath to grieve
The evil time’s sole patriot,
I cannot leave
My honied thought
For the priest’s cant,
Or statesman’s rant.
If I refuse
My study for their politique,
Which at the best is trick,
The angry Muse
Puts confusion in my brain.
Emerson’s tone is both conversational and elliptical, both knowing and indirect, and he repeatedly leaves allusions open to the listener.Critics, for example, have uniformly assumed the “evil time’s sole patriot” to be Channing; but given Gougeon’s gloss, the reference must be to Torrey, who gave his life for his moral convictions. If Emerson did decline an invitation to speak at Torrey’s funeral, as Gougeon says, the phrase “loath to grieve” makes even better sense (Virtue’s Hero, 110–11). Emerson proceeds to spill his vitriol:
But who is he that prates
Of the culture of mankind,
Of better arts and life?
Go, blindworm, go,
Behold the famous States
Harrying Mexico
With rifle and with knife!
Or who, with accent bolder,
Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer?
I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook!
And in thy valleys, Agiochook!
The jackals of the negro-holder.
The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men.
In a few short strokes, Emerson attacks political hawkishness, glib patriotism, sectional animosity, Northern racial hypocrisy, public mendacity, and (without naming him) the prating orator Daniel Webster. Critics have disagreed, however, about the exact thrust of these lines. David Bromwich decides that they are spoken by Channing accusing Emerson himself as the “one who prates,” while Gougeon reads them as Emerson’s self-accusation, his mea culpa. I am more inclined to agree with Carl Strauch and see allusion to Daniel Webster’s second speech at Bunker Hill, in which he flattered his New Hampshire constituents and expatiated on the leyenda negra of Spanish cruelty in order to justify his support for the Mexican War (“Background and Meaning,” 8–9).
The solution to this moral failure, however, is not as simple as Emerson’s esteemed friend Channing would have it.
O glowing friend,
That would indignant rend
The northland from the south?
Wherefore? to what good end?
William Henry Channing was ready not only to withhold his taxes like Thoreau, but to renounce his nation altogether and secede. At the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in May 1846, he had presented a resolution “that the People of Massachusetts do here and now deliberately assert, that there is no longer a Union of these States, a National Constitution, a National Executive, that no citizen of these States is under any kind of obligation of patriotism, or of honor, to aid this act of unparalleled outrage upon a sister Republic” (Strauch, “Background and Meaning,” 7–8). Emerson saw clearly enough that, while such a move might distance Massachusetts from the sin of slaveholding, other sins would remain – the venality of Northern commerce, industry, and banking, plus the dependence of each of these upon the Southern slave economy.
For the “wrinkled shopman,” then, Emerson concludes that
There are two laws discrete,
Not reconciled, –
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking …
Let man serve law for man;
Live for friendship, live for love,
For truth’s and harmony’s behoof;
The state may follow how it can,
As Olympus follows Jove.
Much of the recent debate about Emerson concerns his ability to reconcile these two laws. Len Gougeon, leading the effort to de-transcendentalize Emerson, argues that there is no inherent conflict between his impulse towards self-reliance and his commitment to abolitionism in particular or democracy in general (“Politics of Democracy,” 185–220). But his arguments rely heavily on later work, and they take little account of the poetry. In his 1846 “Ode,” the two laws are clearly antithetical and unresolved. Emerson, in fact, makes enormous concessions to the law of Commodity, and (with only slight ironic qualification) applauds the march of progress:
’Tis fit the forest fall,
The steep be graded,
The mountain tunnelled,
The sand shaded,
The orchard planted,
The glebe tilled,
The prairie granted,
The steamer built.
But higher moral idealism is simply not possible in the realms of politics, society, or “things”; it can only be cultivated internally: “Let man serve law for man; / Live for friendship, live for love.” For present solace, there is only the assurance of Compensation (surely the feeblest element of Emersonian teaching): “Wise and sure the issues are. / Round they roll till dark is light, / Sex to sex, and even to odd.” And for the future there is hope that the Oversoul will someday extract honeycomb from carnivore, like Samson in the Hebrew parable.
The over-god
Who marries Right to Might,
Who peoples, unpeoples, –
He who exterminates
Races by stronger races,
Black by white faces, –
Knows to bring honey
Out of the lion;
Grafts gentlest scion
On pirate and Turk.
The de-transcendentalizing school may desire to secularize Emerson entirely; but in this poem, hope for social justice is left to the Oversoul – a vaguely millennialist solution. Thus Emerson’s erasure of politics in this, his most political poem, is absolute.
If Emerson’s long-term millennialist view of history allows him to accommodate enormous systemic evils, the reason lies in his complex – or one might say mixed, indecisive, or muddled – attitudes towards current events in present time. Emerson’s refusal to tie himself to the “one mania” of the abolitionists is well understood. But he was also conscious that absolute right is rarely found exclusively on one or the other side. Slavery is evil to be sure, but we are all involved in it, North and South – even the abolitionists wore cotton and drank rum. Daniel Webster is forced into political cant, but Emerson continued in his personal admiration for the man to the end, even after the great betrayal of 1850.20 Commodity may be the lowest manifestation of Nature, philosophically considered, but Emerson was a Platonic pragmatist who possessed, as James Russell Lowell wrote in “A Fable for Critics,” “A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range / Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange.” Or as David Bromwich puts it, he had a “lover’s quarrel with Commodity, and liked to speak of its advancement in the language of manifest destiny.”21
How then do we understand the extermination of “black by white faces”? The passage is unquestionably an affront to Channing and a distancing from the abolitionist cause. In Emerson’s defence, Gougeon cites Emerson’s journals: “I hate the narrowness of the Native American Party … Man is the most composite of all creatures … [and as] by the melting and intermixture of silver & gold & other metals, a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian Brass, was formed so in this Continent – asylum of all nations, the energy of the Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles & Cossacks, & of all the European tribes, – of the Africans, & of the Polynesians, will construct a new race, a new religion, a new State, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages” (Virtue’s Hero, 116–17). Emerson’s “smelting pot” sentiment is reassuring. But even here, one remembers his certainty in the “Historical Discourse” of the “overwhelming advantage” of white man over red man – “in the first blast of their trumpet we already hear the flourish of victory” – and his certainty here in the “Ode” that the white race is “stronger” than the black. Emerson’s private views on the hierarchy of races are now well known (Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 200). His vision of the future is not racial harmony but assimilation, marginalization, and extinction.
The Over-God “marries Right to Might,” and if He has joined them together, who is Waldo to put them asunder? If the Cossack eats Poland, why complain that America harries Mexico with knife and rifle?22 As Jenine Abboushi Dallal has demonstrated, Emerson’s attitudes towards the breakneck westward expansionism of the 1840s and the Mexican War itself were also divided. He rarely addressed the concept of “manifest destiny” directly, and when he did, it was usually in the context of the war with Mexico and the threat of increased power to the slave states; but, “like Thoreau and the abolitionists of his day, Emerson did not object to expansionism itself” (55).23 As he wrote in his journal for 1844, “the question of the annexation of Texas is one of those which look very differently to the centuries and to the years. It is very certain that the strong British race which have now overrun that tract, & Mexico & Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions & methods it was done.”24 Emerson consistently argues, observes Dallal, “that the sordid facts of history – wars, slavery, the conquest and subjugation of one race by another – disappear when perceived on a grand scale” (56). His habit of seeing from the double perspective of both centuries and years explains many of his apparent contradictions; if he shrank from President Polk’s methods, he seems to have condoned the results.
Scholarship in the past few decades has illuminated the depths of Emerson’s political thinking; but Emerson’s poetry remains untouched. After 1850, Emerson’s commitment to the abolitionist cause became far less ambiguous than it was in 1846. Len Gougeon and his followers protest that too little attention gets paid to his later statements, and they lay considerable blame at the door of Stephen Whicher’s biography, which ends at 1860 with the essay on “Fate” (Virtue’s Hero, 17–18). Yet, as the critics de-transcendentalize and retranscendentalize, this period remains not only the one most commonly read but also the one during which Emerson wrote his best poetry and impressed his figure of the Poet on American consciousness. Consistently, Emerson pushed his poetry in the direction of the timeless, the universal and proverbial. In the contentious words of John Carlos Rowe, Emerson’s transcendentalism “reveals itself to be at fundamental odds with the social reforms regarding slavery and women’s rights.”25 “Poetry was all written before time was” (449). The Poet remains, like its creator, aloof from the messy day-to-day moral uncertainties of politics.
“The Bells” is an outrageous poem by any standard. It is utterly resistant to close reading, and its critical history has been not only slight but helpless to say anything beyond the obvious. An approach through “content” yields little more than four rites of passage in the human lifecycle, while an approach through “art” quickly degenerates into itemization of consonants and vowels. Suggestions for Poe’s “sources” of the poem are interesting mainly because none is wholly convincing, and the effort simply underscores the unprecedented nature of Poe’s project.26 It is the closest the nineteenth century came to pure “sound poetry.” “Much fun has been made at Poe’s expense,” writes one critic, who proceeds to describe “The Bells” poem as “cacophonous” and “annoying” (Wardrop, Word, 16–17). But the truth is, critics have not found a way to talk about it, and a recent volume of eighteen essays devoted to Poe’s poetry contains only passing references. Just recently, Jerome McGann in his brilliantly paradoxical The Poet Edgar Allan Poe has devised a means to approach it.27 Yet it remains one of the best known poems in the American canon. Poe’s editor, Thomas Olliver Mabbot, describes “The Bells” as “a great popular favorite [and] one of the finest specimens of onomatopoeic verse in English.” He dutifully recounts a colourful story about the circumstances of its composition, involving one Mary Louise Shew, who suggested the topic to Poe when he complained he could not write because of the noise of bells outside.28 This sounds like part of Poe mythography, but there’s no good reason to question it, and Professor Mabbot supports it with copious information about particular bells in the vicinity and reasons that they might be sounding, whether it was a Sunday or whether there may have been a nearby fire. Whether this snippet of biographical information bears on the significance of “The Bells” is just one of the questions it poses.
“The Bells” perhaps achieved its greatest celebrity as a fixture in courses of elocution widely taught in American schools from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.29 Schoolroom elocution is probably best understood less as a means of improving communication than as a social tool for setting class boundaries; and the results included turning the natural production of human speech into an aesthetic artefact. “The Bells” was a favourite performance piece, so it became an easy target for ridicule as the study of elocution faded. Whether taken seriously or in jest, “The Bells” with all its flagrant onomatopoeia is a performance piece, a histrionic experience for the audience, an oral experience rich in the “mouth feel” of poetry for the reciter,30 a virtuoso display for Poe himself. Turning speech into artefact is its purpose. Poe’s legacy to poetry rests as much on the tendentious “Philosophy of Composition” as on his poems themselves, and readers often question its seriousness. Did he really compose “The Raven” in the rational, analytical way he tells us, choosing consonants and vowels for their “effect”? Or is his narrative just another Poe hoax? Poe’s account is open to suspicion not only because it comes after the fact but because it challenges every romantic notion of writing “from the heart.” But when Poe sat down to break his writer’s block and compose “The Bells” at the behest of Mary Louise Shew, might he not have turned to the calculating method he had already laid out and delivered to audiences on a number of occasions? “The Bells” in any case serves even better than “The Raven” as demonstration of the principles in the essay.
To read “The Bells” as a demonstration text for Poe’s essay means to contemplate it as a whole, reflexively. “The Bells” represents what poetry should strive to become and the purpose poetry should serve. It is experiential and paradigmatic, an object of contemplation neither referential nor cognitive. It focuses on the universals of human experience, the archetypal rites of passage, to the exclusion of anything topical or political. It is wholly unified and short enough to make its “effect” in a single performance. This effect is a composite of poetic beauty on all levels – physical, emotional, and spiritual. It is composed on constructivist principles, not in a “fine frenzy.” Yet, as a “rhythmical creation of beauty,” it is a product of such a romantic imagination as is typified by Keats’s famous outburst, “O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts” (Letters, 68), wholly sensory, virtually drained of intellectual content, and thus innocent of the heresy of didacticism. It is not discursive. It shows rather than tells. Such a description would make it seem a model New Critic’s poem.
Jerome McGann, taking his bearings from Yvor Winters, that formidable rationalist of a previous generation, notes that he “censures Poe’s poetry for its lack of content,” and he agrees, “in that the language of the poems is not precisely defining but precisely suggestive.” Poe’s style “works to unhinge both words and syntax from semantic certainty. That is the glory and the nothing of it.” Therefore we rightly say that they are “performative rather than expressive” (Poe, 114–15). Emerson, on the other hand, “regards poetry as a vehicle for expressing significant ideas” (120). McGann forgets, however, that Emerson’s ideas are always destabilized, continually turning into something else. Both Poe and Emerson thus compose their poetry in a rarefied ideational atmosphere – too rarefied for the common reader – so that it took Whitman to restore ordinary ideas to poetic speech. In that regard, Whitman is as conservative and populist as his fellow fireside poets. Poe consequently, as McGann among others observes, “rarely comments on the social and political events of his time” (146), being sealed up safely within his aesthetic theories. A similar silence – one might say a Southern silence – extends forward through later Southern poets, who cherished unpopular, vanquished, or (in Allen Tate’s word) “reactionary” political ideas but kept them, more or less, out of their poetry. Although most readers shrink from Poe’s tacit contempt for American democracy, McGann adds portentously, “we should take it just as seriously as we take Whitman’s sanguine views” (156).
My approach is to read Poe’s poem not through verbal analysis but through a series of contextual frames. By the end, “The Bells” will, I hope, become comprehensible as a considered attitude towards life and art expressed through immediate symbolism. Each of these frames is intricate in itself, so I summarize beforehand: “The Bells” stands as Poe’s idiosyncratic extension of the tradition of odes to music, best known through the St Cecilia odes of Dryden (“A Song for St Cecilia’s Day,” “Alexander’s Feast”) and Pope (“Ode on St Cecilia’s Day”), all rich in virtuoso displays of onomatopoeia. But by Poe’s time, this tradition had already morphed through a number of instances to include poems about music and the passions, and even about pure sound. Such poems express human experience as purely auditory, ultimately stripped of rational activity. Meanwhile, by the time of Poe, the concept of music itself had undergone radical revision. Poe’s choice of the bell as his poetic emblem raises further issues of sound and signification (underscored by the obsessive onomatopoeia), the meaning of bells in the sensory world of Poe’s day, the aesthetic experience of bells as objects of contemplation, and the spiritual relationship of bells to the Divine.
This approach follows in the path of John Hollander, whose Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 traces the conceptual transitions that underlie the St Cecilia tradition. In its earlier phase, music was understood through the Medieval-Renaissance concept of musica speculativa, an ideal Pythagorean music of the spheres – angelic music inaudible to the human ear, a macrocosmic harmony. The experience of human music – that is, Latin chant and sacred polyphony – could bring the listener both morally and physiologically in tune with this divine order. These earlier ideas never wholly died away, but gradually music began to be understood in less grandiose but more immediate terms through its operations on the emotions. This process coincides with the increased importance being gained by wordless instrumental music; and even before 1620, “Descartes could turn off the singing of the spheres as if with a switch when he began his Compendium Musices by saying: ‘The object of this art is sound. The end, to delight and move various affections in us.’”31 This reconceptualization of music as emotion led to the systematized musical Affektenlehre of the later baroque period. The terminus of Hollander’s book is 1700; but, in a later essay, “Wordsworth and the Music of Sound,” Hollander sketches subsequent developments into the early nineteenth century, culminating in Wordsworth’s extraordinary late ode “On the Power of Sound” (1828).
Unfortunately, Hollander’s essay is only a sketch, and the larger intellectual history of Wordsworth’s woefully understudied “On the Power of Sound” still waits to be written. Hollander focuses on the poetic metaphors in eighteenth-century poetry that link music to the conventional locus amœnus and to the natural landscape – music figured as the audible voice of the romantic landscape. William Collins’s “The Passions: An Ode for Music” becomes an important stage in this transition, whose ultimate destination is the landscape of the romantic sublime, where the affects themselves become foregrounded ahead of musical sounds. Wordsworth’s unprecedented late ode articulates this feeling poetically and conceptually.32
Wordsworth’s poem – a sizable pseudopindaric in fourteen stanzas – is significant for its identification of sound in the abstract, as opposed to music, as an entity, an invisible nexus of power to be addressed. Outwardly it does not resemble “The Bells,” except to identify sound as an invisible power that gives providential direction to human life, though Poe, as we shall see, gives Wordsworth’s Christian mythos a characteristically perverse twist. Poe was a steady reader and admirer of Wordsworth. Poe indeed objected to Wordsworth’s didacticism – “He seems to think that the end of poetry is, or should be, instruction” (Essays, 6–7) – but this point is mixed with words of praise, and they appear in Poe’s earliest criticism, the preface to his 1831 Poems. Less well known is Poe’s later remark, that (unlike Donne and Cowley) Wordsworth and Coleridge used metaphysical knowledge properly because their aim was to stimulate poetic feeling “through channels suggested by mental analysis.”33 There is every likelihood, then, that Poe had read Wordsworth’s “On the Power of Sound” – a work that represents a major romantic development of the conventional ode to music.
In Wordsworth, sound, the “Spirit aetherial,” is no longer the mythic music of the spheres beyond the reach of the ear. Yet it is invisible and numinous, so it remains a divine presence detectable by mortals through “the cell of Hearing.” The poem surveys sounds of many kinds, from the natural locus amœnus imagery surveyed by Hollander, predictable in a Wordsworth poem (“The headlong streams and fountains / Serve Thee, invisible Spirit”) to a range of human sounds, from the ditties of “happy milkmaids” to the “sailor’s prayer breathed from a darkening sea.” Wordsworth tropes all sound, natural and human, as “music” and as an instrument of divine mercy with the power to elevate human misery.34 Misery, on the abstract level, figures as “thought” in the first stanza, and later (in keeping with William Collins) as one of the “dangerous Passions.” Hearing is an
Intricate labyrinth, more dread for thought
To enter than oracular cave;
Strict passage, through which sighs are brought,
And whispers for the heart, their slave;
And shrieks, that revel in abuse
Of shivering flesh.
Even votaries of God are subject to “a voluptuous influence / That taints the purer, better, mind,” while “the uplifted arm of Suicide” images ultimate desperation. Nor does Wordsworth focus exclusively on individual misery: in stanza 5, the young revolutionary poet he once was reappears to remind the reader of times “when civic renovation / Dawns on a kingdom,” and the sluggard must be roused to meet “the voice of Freedom.”
The power of sound to transfigure human woes points to a cosmic music like the conventional music of the spheres, “Lodged above the starry pole … flowing from the heart / Of divine Love, where Wisdom, Beauty, Truth / And Order dwell, in endless youth.” The final stanzas of Wordsworth’s profoundly Christian poem first render a psalm – “Break forth into thanksgiving, / Ye banded instruments of winds and chords” – and at last resolve into the voice of the unnamed God whose voice spake Fiat lux at the beginning of time, and will preside forever as the Word, the messianic Logos, beyond the end of time.
Wordsworth’s analysis of sound raises two additional points. First, the concept of “music” itself was undergoing radical changes during this period. Second, there was an emerging awareness in philosophy of the phenomenology of acoustics to balance the overwhelming Enlightenment emphasis on optics.
Walter Pater wrote his famous dictum “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” in 1873,35 too late for Poe to have read it; but Pater’s thought itself arose from a complex of developments emanating from German Romanticism – to which Poe made his own contribution in “The Philosophy of Composition.” German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus traces these developments in his magisterial summary The Idea of Absolute Music. This complex of ideas appeared in connection specifically with the rise of classical instrumental music in the eighteenth century. Until then, any music separated from sacred words was considered little more than low entertainment, and Emmanuel Kant famously, in his Critique of Judgement, considered wordless music, however delightful, as the lowest of the arts, lacking intellectual substance or moral purpose. It is unlikely that Poe was aware of Arthur Schopenhauer’s influential rebuttal, in Book 3 of The World as Will and Representation (1819), which inverts Kant’s hierarchy and places music as the highest art because it is uniquely capable of representing the metaphysical organization of reality. Schopenhauer was not widely read until after Poe’s death (when he was available to Pater). But as Dahlhaus demonstrates, this revaluation was simmering in many thinkers in the generations following Kant.
Poe’s knowledge of his German precursors has always been a divisive subject among critics; but while we may agree that Poe’s acquaintance with the German language was slight, his interest was great.36 Two writers known to have interested Poe, Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann, figure prominently in Dahlhaus’s narrative. Hoffmann, who was not only a writer but a composer of substance, is a crucial figure who insisted that wordless instrumental music was the “true music” (Dahlhaus, Idea, 7) and the goal of all music history (27). He was the first, according to Dahlhaus, “to speak emphatically of music as pure ‘structure.’” In his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Hoffmann declared that “Beethoven’s music presses the levers of terror, of fear, of dread, of pain, and awakens the endless longing that is the nature of romanticism” (59). Hoffmann thus elevates the power of music through the rhetoric of the sublime. Absolute music is no longer entertainment, nor is it merely a medium for the expression of feelings – a view that Hoffmann, like Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel before him, dismissed as “bourgeois” (71–2); instead, music is able to speak the unspeakable, manifest the invisible. And Hoffmann the composer, trained in the arduous rules of harmony and counterpoint, understood that the sublime could only be reached through the fabrication of an artistic structure. As for Poe, music is where “the soul most nearly attains that end upon which we have commented – the creation of supernal beauty” (Essays and Reviews, 688). As Dahlhaus sums up, “From the same ideohistorical root as the desire for a ‘pure matter’ in language and music comes the conception that a poet, by being nothing but a ‘literary engineer,’ evokes the ‘wondrous.’ Yet the quid pro quo of mechanism and magic, from craft and metaphysical meaning, which was just as characteristic of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe as it was later on for Mallarmé and Valéry, seems to derive from the romantic music esthetic of the late eighteenth century, whence it was transferred to poetics in Hoffmann” (Idea, 150).
In order to respond to this inarticulate sublime, as the German thinkers quickly realized, the listener needed to adopt an attitude of aesthetic receptivity. Johann Herder, for example, argued that wordless music – “‘conceptless beauty’ existing ‘purposely without purpose’” (Dahlhaus, Idea, 79) – induced a state of devotion in which the listener withdraws from both self and world, and the music appears as an “isolated world for itself” (79). This discovery, Dahlhaus remarks, is “fundamental to the musical culture of the nineteenth century”: it led to the German invention of the symphony concert, to which the audience listens in silent reverence. “Great instrumental music, in order to be comprehended as ‘musical logic’ and ‘language above language,’ require[s] a certain attitude of aesthetic contemplation (most urgently described by Schopenhauer), an attitude through which it constituted itself in one’s awareness in the first place” (80). This attitude of aesthetic contemplation is quasi-religious – “for music is certainly the ultimate mystery of faith” (said Tieck), “the mystique, the completely revealed religion” (89). Poe’s access to these ideas, it is true, seems impossible to trace in detail. Yet they inform virtually every reference to music in Poe. They were pervasive in Germany well before Poe’s time, and American musicologists record the massive influx of German musicians into America from the eighteenth century onward, and their hold over the performance and critical attitudes of highbrow music in America throughout the period.
The power of sound as divine metaphor ultimately derives from the properties of sound itself and the empirical physiology of human hearing. This takes us to a phenomenology of sound. There is a small but vibrant literature in this area, and my principal guide will be philosopher Don Ihde, whose Listening and Voice systematically unpacks what poets and musicians have known intuitively about sound all along. Ihde’s book ranges widely, from Husserl to audio technology. Like every writer in this rarefied field, he laments the hegemony of vision over hearing in the hierarchy of senses. Most philosophers, he notes, follow Aristotle, who declared: “Above all we value sight … because sight is the principal source of knowledge” (Ihde, Listening and Voice, 7). The result has been a “history of philosophy with … pages and pages devoted to the discussion of ‘material objects’ with their various qualities and on the ‘world’ of tables, desks, and chairs that inhabit so many philosophers’ attentions: the realm of mute objects. Are these then the implicit standard of a visualist metaphysics?” (50). We might suspect, Ihde says, that some of the questions most difficult for this visualist tradition might yield to the attention of listening: “Symbolically, it is the invisible that poses a series of almost insurmountable problems for much contemporary philosophy. ‘Other minds’ or persons who fail to disclose themselves in their ‘inner’ invisibility; the ‘Gods’ who remain hidden; my own ‘self,’ which constantly eludes a simple visual appearance … It is to the invisible that listening may attend” (14). Ihde does not write as a theist, but his argument confirms the relationship between auditory experience and faith in the supernatural assumed by both Wordsworth and Poe in their meditations on sound.
Other attributes of hearing enter into the mix. Vision separates: things are objectified “out there,” apart from self. Sound enters into us, fills us and sometimes overwhelms self, diminishing the outer world. As overwhelming music “fills space and penetrates my awareness,” says Ihde, “not only am I momentarily taken out of myself in what is often described as a loss of self-awareness that is akin to ecstatic states, but there is a distance from things” (Listening and Voice, 78). Emily Dickinson captures the terror of this experience in one of her best known poems: “Then Space – began to toll, / As all the Heavens were a Bell, / And Being, but an Ear.” Yet if touch is “the most intimate of the senses,” suggests composer R. Murray Schafer, hearing and touch meet in the experience of vibration, particularly in the lower frequencies of sound: hearing is “touching at a distance” (Tuning, 11). Vision is located in space. Sound surrounds us everywhere, it has neither back nor front. Vision establishes extension and solidity. Sound is shapeless. Vision is stable in time, and the duration of seeing is determined by the self. Sound is transient, heard and gone forever (especially before electronic recording); its duration is a given, beyond control of the self, vision is deliberate; we look, focus, or else close our eyes. Sound is inescapable: we have no earlids. As Ihde notes, it is “a penetrating, invading presence … As noise, this penetrability may be shattering, even painful. The sudden scream at the moment of highest tension in the Hitchcock movie … is rightfully described as piercing” (Listening and Voice, 81). This inexorability of sound is reflected etymologically in many languages: “Thus hearing and obeying are often united in root terms” (81).
Jean-Luc Nancy drives his speculations even further than Ihde into the domain of cognition. Playing on the ambiguity that, in French, “entendre” means both “to hear” and “to understand,” he declares:
Meaning and sound share the space of a referral, in which at the same time they refer to each other, and that, in a very general way, this space can be defined as the space of a self, a subject. A self is nothing other than a form or function of referral: a self is made of a relationship to self, or of a presence to self, which is nothing other than the musical referral between a perceptible individuation and an intelligible entity (not just the individual in the current sense of the word, but in him the singular occurrences of a state, a tension, or, precisely, a “sense”) … A subject feels: that is his characteristic and his definition. This means that he hears (himself), sees (himself), touches (himself), tastes (himself), and thus always feels himself feeling a “self” that escapes [s’échappe] or hides [se retranche] as long as it resounds elsewhere as it does in itself, in a world, and in the other. (Listening, 8–9)
Listening, then, pre-eminently among all the senses, constitutes the individual who “feels himself feeling a ‘self.’” Here are no transparent eyeballs: all is acoustic. To Nancy, listening is crucial in constructing not only the individual’s relationship to the outer world but also his own internal awareness of identity. “To be listening will always, then, be straining toward or in an approach to the self” (9).
What of bells themselves? While much of the symbolism is apparent from even a superficial reading of the poem, some underlining may be useful. Most important is the centrality of the church bell to the soundscape of preindustrial Christian communities on both sides of the Atlantic. In the words of Murray Schafer, the church bell “defines the community, for the parish is an acoustic space circumscribed by the range of the church bell” (Tuning, 54); it is a centripetal sound, so “it attracts and unifies the community in a social sense, just as it draws man and God together” (11). This was true of the nineteenth-century American town to a degree that is obscured today: “while the contemporary church bell may remain important as a community signal or even a soundmark, its precise association with Christian symbolism has diminished or ceased” (175). To the preindustrial ear, the church bell articulated the numinous “sound of time”; it was “an acoustic calendar, announcing festivals, births, deaths, marriages, fires and revolts” (55), and its centrality indicated the centrality of church and God to the daily lives of all within earshot. Even among secular contemporaries, claims Schafer, “the sound continues to evoke some deep and mysterious response in the psyche” like a Jungian mandala that signifies “wholeness, completeness or perfection” (176). “Perhaps no artifact has been so widespread or has such longstanding associations for man as the bell” (173)
And the bell as “artefact” makes it an ideal symbol for Poe. The bell is a human-made artefact, so its pealing is not the unmediated voice of Divinity. Nor is it the pure voice of Nature that Wordsworth or Thoreau might emphasize, nor even the whistling wind made manifest by the Aeolian harp, found in Coleridge or even the tone-deaf Emerson.37 The sound of the bell is created by a particular object, the work of a human artisan if you will, cast with expert care in a metal foundry. Its relationship to the spiritual reality that it represents is thus human-made symbolic mediation.
“The Bells,” Poe’s penultimate poem, was written shortly after that curious cosmologico-theological treatise Eureka (1848). This text is often read for its quasi-scientific interest, but I see it as an almost desperate search for a benign theology within a materialist cosmos. The three big questions that Poe investigates are couched in scientific language – the creation of the universe, the nature of matter, and the ultimate destiny of the universe. But the driving motive is Poe’s obsession with the same existential questions that stand behind much of his fiction – the relation of soul to the material body, the fear of death, and the possibility of an afterlife whether blessed or demonic. If matter is made of atoms, light made of photons, electricity of electrons, why cannot spirit be made of some as yet undiscovered particle? References to Deity are swamped in pseudo-scientific speculation, and Poe tries to confine himself to generic language, preferring to write “Creator,” “First Cause,” “spirit,” “Original Unity,” “Divine Volition,” rather than “God.” Through a tortuous maze of reasoning that even speculates about multiple universes, Poe arrives at a happy ending. Eureka has even been claimed (absurdly) as evidence that Poe had rediscovered “the ideal sense of Beauty and Love” through which “man” can hope “to recover his lost Eden” (Carlson, “Poe’s Vision,” 9). Even though the forces of attraction and repulsion struggle in their opposition, Poe claims, “The Body and The Soul walk hand in hand” (Science Fiction, 256); and even though this struggle should lead the universe to collapse in final catastrophe, nonetheless, “the Universe is the plot of God” (292): “The absolutely consolidated globe of globes would be objectless – therefore not for a moment could it continue to exist. Matter, created for an end, would unquestionably, on fulfillment of that end, be Matter no longer. Let us endeavor to understand that it would disappear, and that God would remain all in all” (305). The rhapsodic tone of these final pages suggests that Poe, for the moment at least, had found his own justification of transcendence and the consolation of an apocalyptic God.
This observation brings me back to onomatopoeia. Was it really annoyance at local church bells that triggered Poe’s unprecedented outburst? There had been nothing like it in the history of poetry, and sadly, a theoretical understanding of poetic (as opposed to linguistic) onomatopoeia remains little explored. Hugh Bredin’s “Onomatopoeia as a Figure and a Linguistic Principle” comments that it “would be a substantial scholarly task to trace the origin and vicissitudes of the theory of onomatopoeia” (556) – a task that no one has so far undertaken. “Rhetoricians are more impressed by figures that affect syntax and meaning than by figures affecting sound. Logicians and philosophers care mainly about propositions … Saussure’s principle, that the relation of sound to meaning is arbitrary, holds virtually universal sway” (565). Nonetheless, Bredin makes a case for the significance of the figure, affirming finally that “onomatopoeia is, in some sense or other, a linguistic universal” (569). But the tentativeness of his speculations signals the current rudimentary understanding of literary onomatopoeia.
Poe’s fascination with onomatopoeia raises fundamental issues about his relation to language. To linguists, onomatopoeia arises in two related debates – about the origins of language and about the nature of sound symbolism in language. To my knowledge, Poe makes no claims about the origins of language in onomatopoeia, the so-called “bow-wow theory” dismissed by contemporary linguists. But such a belief is implicit in his method, and it is worth comparing Emerson’s speculations in the famous passages in the fourth chapter of Nature, where he locates the origins of language in metaphor: “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow” (Essays, 20). Emerson thus appears to claim a direct correspondence between signifier and signified, buried in the half-conscious etymology, and he spins fantasies about the infancy of language, “when it is all poetry” (22). To Emerson, language arises from visual likeness, and its nature is essentially cognitive. However, as Gustaaf Van Cromphout has demonstrated, Emerson was enough of a Kantian to realize that “real facts” are beyond human apprehension, “that all so-called facts are humanly conceived or perceived phenomena” (“Language as Action,” 316–17). Thus to Emerson the relation between signifier and signified is a subjective action. If Poe (following Herder and Rousseau) conceived of language as arising from onomatopoeic imitation of natural sounds, then (in opposition to Saussure) he conceived a direct correspondence between signifier and signified. But in Poe’s perfect language this correspondence is auditory, emotive, and connotative. And it opens a gap between the material signified and the apparently immaterial (because auditory and invisible) signifier, parallel to the gap between body and soul that so troubled him throughout his life.
Poe’s investment in onomatopoeia as sound symbolism is beyond question. His method appears to be intuitive – at least, I know of no previous guidebook averring that “the long o [is] the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant” (Essays and Reviews, 18). Nowadays, such certainties are nixed by the hegemony of post-Saussurean linguistics. Both Gérard Genette and Umberto Eco have written extensive accounts of this question, which goes back as far as Plato’s Cratylus, with overwhelming agreement that words have a merely conventional relationship with their referents. But there remains a niche of linguistics known as phonosemantics that studies onomatopoeic vocabularies, and the data are tantalizing.38 The question remains knotted: Is onomatopoeia a wholly subjective construction of the mind? Or is it an objective correspondence constituted by a perceiving ear? Poe never doubts the reality of onomatopoeia, but to a visually oriented disbeliever like Emerson he was merely a poet playing elaborate games with the accidents of sound in wholly decorative and insignificant ways – in other words, a jingle man. But if, in onomatopoeia, Poe was exploring meta-realities in language pushed to the side by other writers, wresting genuine affects from auditory poetic language, then he was a true discoverer. His quest for the transcendent ideal led through the material properties of language, its consonants and vowels, sound, and rhythm. By calling attention to the material properties of language, he clouds its common-sense transparency. His purpose as poet was to elevate his reader, through the “rhythmical creation of beauty,” to the transcendental reality of spirit. This is certainly what Baudelaire and Mallarmé and the French exponents of symbolisme and poésie pure all claimed for him.
Poe’s “The Bells,” then, marks in its sensory but invisible pathway the process of cosmic time that generates human lifecycles. This power emanates from the celestial powers: it is sublime and requires a particular attitude of receptive, even reverential contemplation. But it is despotic, the voice of necessity, and if its tinkling is pleasurable at first, it gradually becomes obsessive and oppressive clangour. The noise, in Kenneth Silverman’s term, is “faith-destroying” (Poe, 403). The merely human ear cannot tolerate such apprehension of cosmic Truth, even if it were, against all appearances, as benign as Poe in Eureka convinced himself it is. Like Roderick Usher, who suffered from “that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable,” the speaker of “The Bells” is eventually overwhelmed by the inescapable pealing. Sound is invisible but all-enveloping, invasive, autocratic – having in Poe’s version not the comfort of Wordsworth’s divine mercy, but ultimately terrifying.
Framing a performance of “The Bells,” then, is akin to framing a sublime symphony within the acoustic space of a concert hall.39 It is, however, a dark and tragic symphony. Poe’s text is infused with the characteristic Gothic inevitability of his best tales: if “The Bells” is frivolous, it is the frivolity of a Totentanz. Here is its poetic irony. The milieu is ordinary, the human figures, such as they are, seem puppets on strings – virtually invisible, generic, depersonalized. Human volition has all but vanished. The progression from silver, to golden, to brazen, to iron bells is inexorable, and the sequence would make no sense if reversed. Existence, as Silverman writes, is “the plaything of a lying, sadistic Overlord of Life, the banquet of a Ghoul-God” (404). The bells seem to convey a message of sorts, but the message is “runic” – that is, a written language in an unreadable but assuredly mystical or sacred script – the secret of the cosmos set out plain as day, but undecipherable.
Unless one reads the poem ironically. This is the strategy of Jerome McGann, who draws a distinction: “The sound of bells is not the sound of music. It is the sound of the quotidian world … whereas music is the unheard sound of poetry.” Bells are human-made, belonging to earth, not heaven; they are keeping “the time of two different temporalities,” one sublunary, the other supernal (Poe, 181). McGann reinforces his assertion, which goes back to Professor Mabbot’s anecdote about Mrs Shew and the origins of the poem, by tracing Poe’s gaudy word “tintinnabulation” to a source in De Quincey’s Opium-Eater, which protests against the “persecution” of the chapel bells at Oxford (182). This reading is framed in McGann’s analysis of Eureka as a poem in prose that “raids the archives of science and cosmology for a language and a syntax that could replace the language and syntax of religion” (Poe, 98). For McGann, this raid is successful. But he goes on to say, everything in Eureka is to be understood “as a saying or a speaking,” “as a supposing or a fancying or an imagining” (McGann’s emphasis), and thus he obliges the reader willing to follow his sophisticated ironic turn – even if not based on a private knowledge of Poe’s biography and reading – into a state of perpetual uncertainty (99). I read Eureka as a genuinely personal spiritual quest.
A second argument goes back to McGann’s proper emphasis on “The Bells” as a performative text. “The poem is a challenge to meaning because it is a challenge to recitation,” he claims, and draws extravagant issues with the uncertainties of emphasis and intonation that it poses (Poe, 180–3). The enemy here, as it is Poe’s enemy in “The Rationale of Verse,” is the tyranny of scansion. This argument overlooks two textbook facts. First, scansion never wields a tyranny. It is simply an abstract guide, a merely virtual gridwork, for the performer. Ask any Shakespearian actor. Emphasis and intonation are free variables that play against the metre of any poem. Second, “The Bells” is a pseudopindaric ode, its precise metre unpredictable from line to line – a fact McGann leaves unmentioned – so that any performance is naturally confronted with more options than usual.
I must add one highly speculative postscript to this analysis: there is possible further provenance in common between Poe and Emerson – the doctrines of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Emerson’s admiration for Swedenborg is well known from his lengthy essay in Representative Men and elsewhere, though it seems to be considered an embarrassment and thus has been poorly studied.40 Poe, as usual, is harder to pin down, and few Poe critics mention it. I have already suggested the relevance of Swedenborg’s correspondences to the mirror effects in “House of Usher.” Edward H. Davidson ventures farther, citing from Roderick Usher’s library not only Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell but titles by Tommaso Campanella and Robert Flud – all of which “consider the material world as manifestation of the spiritual” – as books that Poe “had read” (Poe, 196). Davidson cites no evidence for this assertion. More recently, however, Lynn R. Wilkinson uses Swedenborg to explain Baudelaire’s first attraction to Poe. According to Wilkinson, Baudelaire’s earliest translation from Poe – his “Mesmeric Revelation” – seems “a strange choice for a first translation into French”; but “from the point of view of Baudelaire’s evolving interest in visionary systems and aesthetics, it makes perfect sense … In translating ‘Mesmeric’ as magnétique, Baudelaire made explicit a distinction Poe’s narrative only implies, a distinction between two traditions among the followers of Mesmer: those who emphasized the therapeutic aspects of his theories and those who saw them in more cosmological terms, often marrying them with aspects of Swedenborgianism” (Dream, 237). The gaps in this chain of evidence are glaring. Yet if Poe had investigated the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg (as I suspect he did), he would have been impressed with the sage’s central doctrine of correspondences, which seems to be foregrounded in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (see above, note 10). Swedenborg would also have given Poe a vividly imagined account of angelic afterlife.
Poe may have seen in Swedenborg’s correspondences (as the symbolistes certainly did) a metaphysical rationale for the linkage between poetic image and subjective realities, both spiritual and emotional, and, on the auditory level, between metre, onomatopoeic sound symbolism, and the same ineffable effects. If he had read farther in Heaven and Hell, he might have noted Swedenborg’s extended account of the language of the angels, a perfect language beyond the grasp of mortals in which a single spoken word conveys the substance of an entire printed volume – a kind of celestial Pakzip. In this language “they express affections through the vowels; with the consonants, they express the particular concepts that derive from the affections, and with the words they express the meaning of the matter” (261/210).41 Poe’s Israfel perhaps spoke this language:
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
“Whose heart-strings are a lute”;
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
One does not need Swedenborg to understand the point of Poe’s verses about the ideal angelic poetry; but such a context gives it added richness:
Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely – flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.
In “The Bells,” Poe achieved a nearly pure poem as a work of music: it is virtually non-cognitive, even non-referential, at least as nearly as an artefact made of words can be. Its repercussions sound through American poetics to the present time. The musical ideal emerges grossly in the eccentricities of Sidney Lanier’s “The Symphony” (and poetic “symphonies” by other poets – primarily from the South), as well as in Wallace Stevens’s equivalent in pure optical phenomenology, “A Sea Surface Full of Clouds.” More important, the concept of a poem judged as an artefact apart from its cognitive subject matter resonates through the decades of the New Criticism. The tradition that stems from Emerson, too, has its value of theoretical purity, its demand for new thought and traditional barriers of every kind smashed and tossed away. In a subtler way, it too does away not only with aesthetic traditions but also with the ballast of mundane realities, turning poetry into a medium for vatic prophecy and spiritual self-cultivation.
The demand for originality and theoretical purity has left American poets of subsequent generations with a heritage that is at once a source of strength and a limitation. The American poet does not just write poems but must invent a new kind of poem to write. This is as true of major figures like Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, or Pound as it is of lesser phenomena like Stephen Crane, Marianne Moore, Vachel Lindsay, or e.e. cummings. The result is a sustained transport of poetic inventiveness and variety that no lover of American poetry would wish otherwise. But it has helped to confine poetry as a whole to a specialized niche.
Admirers of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman must thank Yvor Winters for drawing this unknown poet to our attention and must forgive his gross hyperbole. I do not have to believe that “The Cricket” is “the greatest single American poem of the nineteenth century” in order to find it profound and deeply moving.42 But though it has been picked up in some recent anthologies, it remains on the periphery of the American canon.43
Tuckerman, born to a well-established Boston family, lived a reclusive life in Greenfield, Massachusetts, contemporary with his distant relative Emily Dickinson. There is no evidence that either poet was aware of the other. Tuckerman was well educated, earning a law degree from Harvard, where he ventured at the risk of tainting his Episcopalian upbringing. His tutor in Greek was the transcendentalist poet Jones Very. Tuckerman never practised law and lived on a comfortable inheritance from his father. In 1847, he married Hannah Lucinda Jones, and they had three children together. But Hannah died after giving birth to the last in 1857, and Tuckerman fell into a state of mournful and never-ending remembrance. Three years later, he published his Poems privately and sent the volume to a number of literati: Alfred Tennyson replied with a complimentary note, Tuckerman visited him in January, 1855, and the two masters of poetic bereavement formed a lasting friendship. In the States, Longfellow and Hawthorne wrote admiring responses, and Hawthorne was particularly appreciative. The poems, mainly sonnets, went into commercial editions in England and the United States before Tuckerman’s premature death at the age of fifty-two. His book was well enough known to generate a couple of newspaper parodies, but Tuckerman’s name quickly disappeared.44 His work even escaped the eagle eye of Edmund Clarence Stedman, whose 1900 anthology of American poetry included figures as obscure as Emily Dickinson and Melville.
Neither edition of Tuckerman’s poems in his lifetime included “The Cricket,” his most impressive achievement. Nor did Witter Bynner’s effort to recover Tuckerman’s sonnets in 1931. “The Cricket” did not emerge from the poet’s private notebooks until 1950, when it was printed (in an imperfect text) as a small-run pamphlet, and finally, in 1965, it became generally available in an Oxford edition of the complete poems, edited by Yvor Winters’s pupil N. Scott Momaday. Since then, there has been a biography, a Twayne monograph, a few doctoral dissertations, and a Selected Poems from Harvard’s Belknap Press (2010), plus a number of appreciative commentaries from critics like Edmund Wilson and Denis Donoghue, with Harold Bloom the one dissenting voice (Ringers, 219).
I pause over “The Cricket” for several reasons. First, its poetic quality earns it a place in any broad survey of American poetry, particularly a survey of American odes. It is a rare example of the greater romantic lyric in nineteenth-century America. It is also a curious effort to mediate the ghostly voices of Poe and Emerson. Tuckerman was deeply read in English poetry, and the lushness of Keatsian imagery and Keatsian meditative structures, argument wedded to concrete image, clearly informs his poem. He was no American nationalist who rejected transatlantic English traditions for the sake of originality. “The Cricket” is also, like “The Bells” and like Wordsworth’s late ode, a poem about the power of sound. Tuckerman’s diction shares with Poe a penchant for obscure proper names with Hellenic resonances (Patriotic Gore, 492). Tuckerman’s chirping crickets, however, are not the human artefacts of Poe’s bells but voices of Nature, bringing them closer to the romantic traditions of Wordsworth and Emerson. Yet the black six-legged creature of the poem is primarily a maker of sound.
Tuckerman was inevitably touched by Emerson’s proximity and influence in mid-century Massachusetts; the two men were personally acquainted, and Tuckerman had studied with the mystical Jones Very. But Tuckerman viewed Nature through the eyes of a scientist. In the words of Momaday, “he was at home in the sciences of botany and astronomy, and he knew more than most men about geology … He was not a pantheist, nor did he incline to pantheism. He was not a mystic, nor did he recommend the mystical experience. Tuckerman and Emerson were at odds on the most fundamental points.”45 As Stephen Burt puts it, Tuckerman is “our first dedicated American poet of the disenchanted biosphere.” He seems “closer to Nature, the scientific journal, than to Wordsworth’s Nature.”46 Virtually every one of Tuckerman’s critics – Bynner, Winters, Momaday, Golden, England, Burt – sees him as a tacit dissenting voice to Emersonianism. To this, Eugene England adds the background of New England Episcopalianism, which is rarely overt in the poetry but never denied Nature as the work of the creator (Beyond Romanticism, 36–45). All this accounts, perhaps, for Harold Bloom’s sniffiness.
“The Cricket” may be read as Tuckerman’s challenge to Emerson’s assumption in his introduction to “Nature” that “all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.” Emerson’s self-evident equation of the disembodied ME to the whole of the cosmos is shown as absurd egotism figured in the chirping of a solitary cricket. If, as Patricia Yeager has argued, ambitions for the sublime are nothing more than “political fictions meant to aggrandize the male ego” (“Maternal Sublime,” 21), Tuckerman’s sublime is its humble antithesis.
The poem begins by situating the speaker vaguely in time and place as he contemplates the presence of a lone cricket:
The humming bee purrs softly o’er his flower,
From lawn and thicket
The dog day locust singeth in the sun
From hour to hour:
Each has his bard, and thou, ere day be done
Shalt have no wrong.
So bright that murmur mid the insect crowd
Muffled and lost in bottom grass, or loud
By pale and picket,
Shall I not take to help me in my song
A little cooing cricket?
Every creature needs its bard: it is the conceit of a poetical taxonomist, or a Whitman constructing his all-embracing catalogues. But the imagery is already auditory and semi-disembodied – humming, murmuring, cooing.
Soon the single chirping cricket becomes innumerable as the speaker drifts into dreamy, subjective reverie:
No few faint pipings from the glades behind
Or alder-thicks;
But louder as the day declines,
From tingling tassel, blade and sheath,
Rising from nets of river vines,
Winrows and ricks;
Above, beneath,
At every breath;
At hand, around, illimitably
Rising and falling like the sea,
Acres of cricks!47
The world of outer nature expands in space to the far horizon; the great clouds of witness of the chirping crickets grow, and the natural sounds multiply and enter into the speaker as he sinks into poppyladen semi-consciousness.
The dream extends in time as well, to memories of the dreamer’s childhood:
Dear to the child, who hears thy rustling voice
Cease at his footstep, though he hears thee still,
Cease and resume, with vibrance crisp and shrill,
Thou sittest in the sunshine to rejoice!
Night lover too, bringer of all things dark,
And rest and silence, – yet thou bringest to me
Always that burthen of the unresting sea,
The moaning cliffs, the low rocks blackly stark.
These upland inland fields no more I view,
But the long flat seaside beach, the wild seamew
And the overturning wave!
The dreamer’s subjective cosmos extends backward to childhood, and to erotic memories of courtship, and forward to death, the grave of his beloved, and the “crowning vacancy” – all surrounded by the seascape of infinite space and time.
But space and time exceed the grasp even of the dreamer’s subconscious thought, which plunges into mythic fantasy. If I were to analyze “The Cricket” as a poetic symphony, this would be the scherzo:
So wert thou loved, in that old graceful time
When Greece was fair,
While god and hero hearken’d to thy chime
Softly astir
Where the long grasses fringed Caÿster’s lip;48
Long-drawn, with shimmering sails of swan and ship
And ship and swan,
Or where
Reedy Eurotas ran.49
Did that low warble teach thy tender flute,
Xenaphyle50
Its breathings mild? say! did the grasshopper
Sit golden in thy purple hair
O Psammathe?51
Or wert thou mute,
Grieving for Pan amid the alders there?
And by the water and along the hill
That thirsty tinkle in the herbage still,
Though the lost forest wailed to horns of Arcady?
The proper names are mysterious female objects of the generic male Eros, lost in a time out of time. But the scherzo too turns dark, as the god Pan is dead and the nymph Psammathe grieves – the grasshopper in her hair perhaps recalling Tithonus, grown too old for love and altered out of divine pity. Psammathe in myth is a figure for the grief of a bereft mother, an inconsolable loss.52 Tuckerman’s fantasy returns to the dark mourning of so much of his poetry.
The Enchanter in the final stanza is unidentified,53 but he appears as a Gothic figure – like Hawthorne’s Rappaccini, or perhaps Emerson’s Merlin – his power activated by poisonous or hallucinogenic flora (“mandrake or dorcynium”). He seems to have gained an ability to understand the sounds of Nature as articulate messages. Nature has become a fount of mystic symbols that announce themselves spontaneously, or an auditory hieroglyph decipherable by the Enchanter alone. The speaker longs for such power, but it frustrates and eludes him:
Like the Enchanter old –
Who sought mid the dead water’s weeds and scum
For evil growths beneath the moonbeam cold,
Or mandrake or dorcynium,54
And touch’d the leaf that open’d both his ears:
So that articulate voices now he hears
In cry of beast, or bird, or insect’s hum,
Might I but find thy knowledge in thy song!
. . . . .
So might I stir
The world to hark
To thee my lord and lawgiver,
And cease my quest;
Content to bring thy wisdom to the world;
Content to gain at last some low applause,
Now low, now lost
Like thine, from mossy stone amid the stems and straws,
Or garden grave mound, trick’d and drest –
Powder’d and pearl’d
By stealing frost,
In dusky rainbow-beauty of euphorbias.55
The “rainbow-beauty of euphorbias” is associated with deepest winter, a touch of colour in the dark turn of the year. The rainbow binds the classical imagery to the traditional biblical emblem of hope, and possibly – if the euphorbia is understood as the poinsettia – with the promise of Christmas.
The speaker’s wish for suprahuman knowledge is not granted, but the imagery leads him to an ambiguous and imperfect consolation at the end of the poem.
Then Cricket! sing thy song! or answer mine!
Thine whispers blame, but mine has naught but praises!
It matters not. Behold! the Autumn goes
The Shadow grows,
The moments take hold of eternity;
Even while we stop to wrangle or repine,
Like thinnest mist –
Like yon escaping colour in the tree,
Rejoice! rejoice! whilst yet the hours exist,
Rejoice or mourn, and let the world swing on
Unmoved by cricket song of thee, or me.
The seasons come and go, human lives evaporate “like thinnest mist,” and the whole of nature becomes “naught in innumerable numerousness.” Though committed “to the hieroglyphs of nature” (Donoghue, “Tuckerman,” 369), he must confess that he cannot decipher them. The speaker hears the singing of the anonymous and innumerable crickets “ignorantly,” without comprehension or meaning, and he is left only to rejoice – “whilst yet the hours exist / Rejoice or mourn.”
Samuel Golden describes “The Cricket” as “a happy poem.” It is not an adjective that I would use. It is, however, a poem in which grief is partially resolved, a sort of consolation achieved. As in Poe, the speaker of Tuckerman’s “Cricket” allows himself to be absorbed into an auditory world and becomes and individual who “feels himself feeling a ‘self’” (Nancy, Listening, 9). This self is not a transcendent ego, nor is it an empty negation. It is aware of its rightful, if infinitesimal, place in the cosmos. Death is inevitable, but life is a gift. There are signs of Christian hope, perhaps, but they are very faint if they exist at all. Whether there is cause to rejoice or cause to mourn, human feelings are indifferent. The poem comes to rest, acquiescent in its final realization of the limitations of human understanding and the insufficiency of the human imagination.