EdgarAllan Poe:

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion," wrote Edgar Allan Poe in the preface to his volume The Raven and Other Poems (1845). Yet, apart from juvenilia and fugitive verses, his poetic legacy consists of only some seventy poems. Poe's extensive oeuvre is comprised of his tales of detection, exploration, and horror; two novellas; political satires; philosophical colloquies; a cosmological prose poem over one hundred pages long; critical essays on poetics; over three hundred reviews of contemporary books of all kinds, from the fiction of Irving, Hawthorne, and Dickens and the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Longfellow to such ephemera as the verses of Elizabeth Oakes Smith and S. Anna Lewis; the introduction to a book on shellfish; a series of character sketches of the literati based on analysis of their handwriting; "Marginalia," his notes on a miscellany of literary topics; and other journalism. In this life of busy hackwork for magazines, Poe managed to perfect two forms of fiction--the mystery, the horror tale--that have made him have a greater influence on the popular culture of our century than has any other writer of the nineteenth. Purposefully writing "not above the popular, nor below the critical taste," his essays on poetics defined the art and the work of the poet, influencing the French symbolists and, through them, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and other modernist poets.

Compared to the voluminous work of Walt Whitman, or the 1,775 lyrics left us by Emily Dickinson, Poe's own poems make a meagre offering. His verse has been attacked for its mechanical meters, inflated diction, and other infelicities, yet few poets of his century beside those just named have been as widely read in our time as Poe, or have contributed to our national culture such unforgettable poems as "To Helen," "Israfel," "The City in the Sea," "The Raven," "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "Annabel Lee." To these, among Poe's essential poems, let us add "Romance," "Alone," "To Science," and "Lenore." A careful reading will show that while consistency of theme striates all of these, in mode, in form, in diction they are by no means alike, though Poe's unmistakable handprint marks every line.

The author of these works was born in Boston on 19 January, 1809 to Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British-born actress of great beauty, charm, and popularity, and David Poe, son of a Revolutionary Quartermaster general from Baltimore. David Poe also trod the boards, but with so little talent as to be derided in the press. Edgar had a brother, William Henry, and a sister, Rosalie; when Edgar was a year old his father, drinking too heavily,deserted the family. Elizabeth Poe went on tour with little Eddie in her care; his siblings were raised by relatives in Baltimore. When Edgar was two his mother, at liberty in Richmond, fell ill with consumption and died a lingering death in a boarding house, attended by sympathetic local matrons. One of these, Frances Allan, herself childless, took in the orphaned boy.

Her husband, John Allan>, was an ambitious, self-righteous tobacco merchant who took his family along when he went on business to London, 1815-20; while there Edgar attended a school in Stoke Newington (described in his tale "William Wilson"). By 1825, Allan, inheriting a legacy, was a wealthy man, and, though never adopted, Edgar grew up in expectation of becoming his heir. Allan, however, required that Edgar take part in his business, and had a utilitarian contempt for the boy's literary ambitions and strivings. Their relationship was filled with tension, exacerbated after Mrs. Allan's death (also from consumption) and John Allan's remarriage. Allan sent Edgar to the newly-established University of Virginia on a meagre allowance; there, surrounded by the profligate sons of wealthy planters, Poe ran up gambling debts and tailors' bills which Allan refused to pay. Returning to Richmond, Poe quarrelled with Allan and left home in 1827. Henceforth he lived a precarious life. He made his way to Boston, he published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian. This volume, containing the title poem, a narrative of 400 lines, and nine lyrics, created no stir whatever. Its penniless author enlisted in the U.S. Army, signing on as "Edgar A. Perry" since a gentleman would not serve as an enlisted man. In 1830, with the intercession of John Allan, Poe qualified for West Point under his own name, but after serving a year he appealed to Allan to secure his release; Allanrefusing, Poe got himself dismissed for neglect of duty. Nonetheless he dedicated his volume Poems (1831) by Edgar A. Poe "To the U.S. Corps of Cadets,"' and a decade later he canvassed his one-time classmates in the Corps for contributions to support a magazine of his own--a project in which he was never successful.

After West Point, Poe moved in with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and her eight-year-old. daughter, Virginia, in Baltimore. When Cousin Virginia turned fourteen, Poe married her. She and Mrs. Clemm (whom he called "Ma") comprised Poe's only stable family, whom he tried to support on the meagre salary of a magazine editor, augmented by small payments for poems, stories, and essays. Poe was an editor, successively, of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, 1835-36; Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Philadelphia, 1839-40; Graham's Magazine, 1841-42; The New York Evening Mirror, 1844-45; and, on borrowed money, briefly became editor and proprietor of The Broadway Journal, 1845-46. These brief tenures reflect Poe's tetchy disposition, quarreling with employers over salary and editorial decisions, and his drinking. Poe alternated periods of sobriety with disabling binges, a common pattern among alcoholics. Despite these spells of insensibility and their consequences he produced a prodigious amount of work and was a very successful editor, increasing the subscription list of his employers' journals with his exacting literary reviews and by offering readers a prize for the solution of cryptograms. (The author of "The Gold Bug" was fascinated with secret writings and codes.)

Virginia Poe, trained as a singer, spat blood one day--the first sign of the consumption from which, after a lingering illness, she died at twenty-three, in 1847. Poe, ill himself, depressed, half-mad with grief and loneliness, courted several literary women simultaneously; including a childhood sweetheart in Richmond whom he visited in hopes of arranging marriage. Unsuccessful, on his way back to New York he stopped in Baltimore and was found delirious in a gutter under conditions still unexplained. Taken to a hospital, he died four days later, on 7 October, 1849.

According to Poe biographers from Marie Bonaparte to Kenneth Silverman, the key events in this sad life were the successive wasting illnesses and deaths of Poe's mother, stepmother, and wife. The agonizing deaths of the women from whom he sought security and comfort surely marked his imagination in ways reflected in his tales and poems--particularly his poems; his fiction has a wider range of theme and feeling, including satires, hoaxes offered as aggression against his readers, and, in his tales of detection, ratiocinative plots for which there is little room in his verses.

In Poe's first volume of poems, Tamerlane, published when he was eighteen, the concluding poem, "The Lake," demonstrates not only his precocious facility but a strangeness, an original conception of theme. The genre to which "The Lake" belongs is the nature poem, much practised by such American followers of Wordsworth as William Cullen Bryant (as in "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"), Emerson ("Musketaquid," "The Rhodora," "Woodnotes," "Monadnoc"), and Longfellow ("Autumn," "Snow-Flakes"). In such poems the poet feels identified with the spirit of Nature, a source of benignity and beauty. But the young Poe chooses to memorialize "a wild lake, with black rock bound":

My infant spirit would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.
Yet that terror was not fright--
But a tremulous delight.
And a feeling undefined
Springing from a darken 'd mind.
Death was in that poison 'd wave
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining--
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

Poe's originality is still more striking in his sonnet, "To Science," the introductory poem to his verse epic "Al Aaraaf" from which his second volume in 1829 took its title.

Science/True daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart;
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

Readers are prone to assume that Poe is attacking science, the Cartesian tradition, intellectual analysis, since the "dull realities" which hold Science aloft are the enemies of imagination, preventing the poet from "his wandering/To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies." This antipathetic force has "driven the Hamadryad from the wood/To seek a shelter in some happier star." All this is so, but overlooks a major symbol contributing to the sonnet's meaning. The image of a vulture or condor, as Richard Wilbur pointed out in his introduction to the Laurel edition of Poe's Poems (1959), recurs often in Poe's writings, always' representing the destructiveness of Time, the ultimate enemy of our happiness. The vulture or condor feeds on carrion, which is to imply that it destroys mortality, and mortality is inexorably subject to change, death, and decay because imprisoned in the realm of Time. But the poetic imagination would soar free of this subjection to contemplate and express unchanging perfection, Beauty, found on "some happier star." As the next poem makes clear, that star is Al Aaraaf. In this one the formal execution is impressive, as Poe> combines with the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet the development of theme characteristic of the Petrarchan form.

Poe's non-adoptive foster father John Allan had no clue to the scope or relevance of his contrary young charge's ambition.Allan was not the man to infer from young Edgar's seven-mile swim in the James River, in emulation of, or rivalry with, Byron's swimming the Hellespont, how grandiose were his literary aims. At twenty Poe had conceived, and in "Al Aaraaf" attempted to embody, a cosmology, a philosophical aesthetic which enshrined imagination and gave it dominion over a realm untouched by the baseness of human passions or experience of the Time-bound world. The 422 lines of this poem (just a dozen shorter than The Waste Land) show Poe's borrowings from Milton and from Thomas Moore's then popular Lalla Rookh--strange juxtaposition!--in a plot of his own devising. Poe, an omnivorous reader, seized on an encyclopedia account of the observations of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who in 1572-74 recorded the sudden appearance and subsequent fading away of a bright star--what we now know to have been a supernova--in the constellation Cassiopeia. Poe also read, in George Sale's translation of the Koran (1734) a passage describing "A1 Aaraaf" as a sort of limbo between Heaven and Hell where reside those "whose good and evil works are so equal that they . . . deserve neither reward nor punishment and will, on the last day be admitted to paradise, after they perform an act of adoration." Poe boldly transformed this description, locating A1 Aaraaf on Tycho Brahe's star now invisible to human sight, and making it the realm of Nesace, the spirit of Beauty. Here, on this happier star foretold in his sonnet, passion, such as that between the demispirits Ianthe and Angelo (Michaelangelo Buonarroti) has no place. "They fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts/ Who hear not for the beating of their hearts." What they "hear not" is the harmony of the spheres whose avatar is described thus:

Ligeia! wherever
Thy image may be,
No magic shall sever
Thy music from thee.

Later, in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), Poe decided that a true poem must be readable at a single sitting and should not exceed the length of one hundred lines, tacitly admitting that "Al Aaraaf" failed by his own measure. What it succeeds in doing, however, is in making specific the aim that Poe's poems will attempt to fulfill. This is to enact the autonomy of the imagination in its own self-generated and self-contained universe of dreams, where Beauty is its subject and the baseness of the world, subject to the decay of Time, is left behind by the poet with his vision of a happier star.

At this point it is useful to consider "The Philosophy of Composition," the essay that purports to explain how Poe wrote "The Raven" (1845), since it so clearly states the principles enacted by his other poems. The reason for limiting the poem to one hundred lines is that its aim is the excitation of the reader's soul, an effect which a longer poem can only intermittently achieve. Everything in the poem must contribute to this effect--rhythm, sound, rhyme, and especially subject. The optimum subject for producing this effect is the most melancholy, the emotion educed by the contemplation of the death of a beautiful woman. Poe reasons back from the text of "The Raven" to the putative choices by which he claims it was written. Although the poem is driven by an unassuageable emotion, Poe claims its composition resulted from a series of inter-locked conscious choices. Over these details we need not pause, but the importance of this essay is its portrayal of the poetic act of creation not as a spontaneous overflowing of inspiration but as the conscious embodiment in verse by a craftsman of his predetermined ideas. Poe's presentation of the poet as Maker, rather than, as with other Romantics, as Finder, greatly influenced French and American poetry and criticism.

Poe's reasoning, or, as he called that faculty, his ratiocinative mind, represents one aspect of his sensibility--the opposite, as it were, of his Romanticism with its emphasis on both the exploration of extreme psychological states of terror and guilt, and the transcendence of such emotions in ideality. Poe takes certain aspects of the Romantic movement to their limits--his tales of terror and poems. of being haunted by lost loves probe and dramatise these states of feeling with a specificity and depth beyond their appearances in the poems of Coleridge or such Gothic novels as The Castle of Otranto. At the same time, Poe inherits the Enlightenment's rage for order, for systematization. His psyche is deeply divided; he adopts the eighteenth century's facultative psychology, separating intellect, emotion, and moral sense. In his critical writings he proclaims that poetry must deal only with Beauty, not with Truth or Virtue, the subjects fit for prose. Thus he fixes, as With an exclusionary lens, upon only one side of Coleridge's aesthetic, and debars from poetry almost all the materia poetica as the rest of the world apprehends it.

Despite, or because of, these divisions in his mind and psyche, Poe at the same time is driven by a need to unify all that his philosophy proclaims is divided. In his tales of detection and the best of his critical essays and reviews his mind quite brilliantly analyzes and constructs an intellectually comprehensible order. His criticism was the first in America rigorously devoted to enforcing literary standards.

Two brief lyrics define the poet's fate and his role. "Alone," inscribed in the album of a woman friend but not collected by Poe or published until 1875, twenty-six years after his death, described the poet's sense of his separation from mankind. "From childhood's hour I have not been/As others were," nor has he "seen/as others saw."

I could not bring
My passion from a common spring--

And all I lov'd--I lov 'd alone--
Then--in my childhood--in the dawn
Of a most stormy life--was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still--
From the torrent, or the fountain--
From the red cliff of the mountain--

From the thunder and the storm
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view--

This demon is the spirit compelling the poet to write down his vision. It will be seen that the particulars of nature enumerated here are listed only to be disregarded; his demon will compel him to obliterate the tactile world.

Like Poe's sonnet "To Science," his poem "Romance" was prefaced to "Al Aaraaf." This lyric also dwells on his fated childhood, in which "Romance, who loves to nod and sing/With drowsy head and folded wing" taught the poet his alphabet and earliest word. Romance appears to him "a painted paroquet"--this spirit of poetry is itself an image, not a real speaking bird. As in "To Science," the poet is menaced by a rival bird, "eternal Condor years" that "So shake the very Heaven on high/ With tumult" that he has "no time for idle cares." Yet, although when a calmer hour invites him "with lyre and rhyme/To while away" his time in "forbidden things," his heart would feel it "to be a crime/Unless it trembled with the strings." Here the poet's heart is transfigured as an Aeolian harp, an image Poe will use again in "Israfel."

That poem is prefaced by a motto Poe attributed to the Koran (it is actually from the commentary of its translator, Sale): "And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures."

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
"Whose heart-strings are a lute;"
None sings 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.

Poe boldly elaborates a passage from the end of Moore's Lalla Rookh describing "Israfel, the Angel" of whose song

none knew whether
The voice or lute was most divine,
So wondrously they went together.

Poe mythologizes Moore's subject, who sings "ecstasies above" since Heaven is his, while we mortals must make our songs in this world where "the shadow of thy perfect bliss/Is the sunshine of ours." The earthbound celebrant of the angel's heavenly song concludes,

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.

Poe's aesthetic inevitably burdened many of his lines with abstract diction, but several of his lyrics are distinguished, as we have seen, by their combinations of clarity, concision, and verbal music. The cameo masterpiece among Poe's poems is "To Helen." Two cruces in the text may require explanation: in line 2, "Those Nicean barks of yore" alludes to the Grecian vessels sailing home after the Trojan war--"Nicean" is Poe's spelling of Nikean, dedicated to Nike, goddess of victory; and "Thy hyacinth hair" (line 7) describes not a color but a hair-do--set in tight curls, like the petals of a hyacinth. With these puzzles clarified, we can see that the poem offers a four-stage description of Helen. First, she is the beautiful woman for whose sake the war was fought and for whom "The weary, way-worn wanderer" returns "To his native shore." In the course of his journey ("On desperate seas long wont to roam"), her features and her "Naiad airs" have brought him "home/To the glory that was Greece/ And the grandeur that was Rome"--which is to say, Helen, now a Naiad or spirit, has returned her worshipper to his native shore, the world of classical perfection. In the final stanza, however, she is, transformed yet again; now "in yon brilliant window-niche/How statue-like" she stands, as though an image of the Virgin in a cathedral. There, in her final transformation, she holds aloft "The agate lamp" which reveals her as "Psyche, from the regions which/Are Holy Land!" Thus Poe has his reader ascend with him a Platonic ladder of love, moving from love of the beauty of a woman to its culmination in which she personified Psyche, his soul, and the "native shore" to which he; following her, has returned, is not Achaia, not Greece nor Rome, but "Holy Land." Here the philosophical idealism so copiously expounded in "AI Aaraaf" is condensed into fifteen lines t,hat move with surety, swiftness, and grace unparalleled elsewhere in Poe's canon, as though these strophes were indeed struck upon the lyre of Israfel.

In "Fairy Land," "The Valley of Unrest," "The City in the Sea," and "Dream-Land" Poe attempts to have his soul approach the Eden or Holy Land envisaged in other poems by obliterating the base life he would escape. In" The City in the Sea" there are" shrines and palaces and towers" that "Resemble nothing that is ours"; in this city of the dead, "On the long night-time of that town" light comes not from heaven but "from out the lurid sea," streaming up domes, spires, fanes, walls,

Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

--that is, the realms of music, natural beauty, and intoxication in which we seek in art similitudes of the beauty of nature, are all subsumed by the weird supernal light from below.

So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seems pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

These lines, with their reverberating grandiloquence, create an effect at once compelling, disturbing, and mysterious. As the city sinks beneath the sea,

Down, down that town shall settle hence.
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

Although this must be a city of ghosts, none is to be seen; the exact significance of the apocalyptic tableau is masked in the indefinable terror it evokes. Elsewhere, I have attempted to define this terror:

Poe is describing, with his customary energy and invention, the most dramatic moment in all human perception: the End of Everything. For some poets the most dramatic moment is the union of the soul with nature, for others the juncture of soul with soul in the physical union of love. For Poe it is the death of the universe.

In "Dream Land" Poe sets out to annihilate the real world, describing "Bottomless vales and boundless floods," formless chasms and caves, "Mountains toppling evermore/Into seas without a shore"--a lengthy catalogue of self-destructing natural features, the passage through which leads "the spirit that walks in shadow" to "an Eldorado" which can be beheld only "through darkened glasses."

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule--
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE--out of TIME.

Cognate with this theme are two poems inserted in Poe's most famous short stories as epitomes of their meaning: "The Haunted Palace" from "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Conqueror Worm" from "Ligeia." In the latter tale the nameless narrator' has married the lady Ligeia, who, like her namesake in "Al Aaraaf," represents the harmony of the universe: all wisdom issues from her eyes. He worships her, but Ligeia sickens and dies, and the narrator, wild with grief, after a time remarries. His second wife is Rowena, whom he installs in a bedchamber of psychedelic terrors, for he hates her. While he is in an opium trance she too sickens and dies--and in her death-throes is transformed into Ligeia. The poem "The Conqueror Worm" is spoken by Ligeia. She envisages our life as a play watched in a theatre by angels--a play with "Much of Madness, and more of Sin,/And Horror the soul of the plot" in a spectacle in which mimes, puppets and phantoms "Flapping from out their Condor Wings/ Invisible Wo" act out a "motley drama" that appals even the visiting angels, who,

all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

The poem is vivid, but not nearly as effective as the tale of "Ligeia."

Death triumphs in "The Conqueror Worm," but in "The Haunted Palace" we find an allegory of a mind going mad. The palace is the "head/In the monarch Thought's dominion," where wanderers "Through two luminous windows" (the eyes) "saw/Spirits moving musically/To a lute's well-tuned law." This is a scene such as Israfel might sing--the harmony is celebrated by

A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed that monarch's high estate

And "Vast forms that move fantastically/To a discordant melody" displace the Echoes while "A hideous throng rush out forever."

This song is prophetically sung by Roderick Usher, as one of his art-works (he composes a guitar rhapsody and a symbolic painting too), while his sister languishes in the tomb in which he has buried her alive. From the tomb she will emerge, to fall upon him as the house falls, and all disappear in the dark tarn that bore the reflection of the affrighted House of Usher. The whole tale is a fable of dissolution, of a mind, of a soul, of a family, of a world: The End of Everything.

It will be inferred from these bald plot summaries that both tales involve, as Poe said a poem must, the deaths of beautiful women. This, the most melancholy of themes, is the burden of Poe's literary ballads, "Lenore," "The Raven," "Ulalume," and "For Annie." These are the poems most responsible for Poe's unending popularity. Among them are those that have attracted the most denigration, even derision, of his poetry for their inflated and pretentious diction, their mind-deadening repetitions, their commitment to draconian rhyme-schemes and mechanical meters. While these characteristics are indeed true, a defense of Poe's practice is in order.

By definition a ballad is a narrative in verse, intended to be sung, characterized by rhyme, strong metrical stresses, and, often, refrains. The literary ballad imitates folk balladry but inevitably differs from such originals in its often more complex structure and diction not worn smooth by generations of oral transmission. In the case of Poe's ballads it must be emphasized that they are designed to illustrate the sort of verbal music he invokes in several of the poems discussed above, though the taste of his time was more tolerant than ours of the incessant rhyming and unvaried meters he uses. Further, Poe's ballads are intended to be recited aloud, rather than read silently to oneself, and each is spoken by an invented character--Guy De Vere, the bereaved lover in "Lenore" and, it is probable, also in "The Raven," while the mourner is not named in "Ulalume," or "For Annie." Therefore these ballads should be interpreted as dramatic monologues. The seeming excresances of style in fact dramatize the mental state of the speakers. Thus the rhodomontade of "Ulalume," with its manic repetitions, its inchwise progression and wildly inflated diction represents the grief-maddened quest of its speaker. He unwittingly seeks, on All Soul's Night, the tomb of his lost love Ulalume. He wanders past "this dank tarn of Auber" (this line invokes the composer of a then-familiar orchestral suite,"Le Lac des Fees") and "This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir" (a painter of the Hudson River school). So the tomb of his lost love is a ghoul-haunted fairyland depicted only in the imaginings of artists. In this poem, as in "Lenore" and "The Raven"--to say nothing of "The Bells"--Poe is virtuosic in creating compulsive structures of rhythm, rhyme, interior rhyme, which conspire to compel the reader's attention. Poe means to lull the reader's cognitive mind, to make it unresisting in the presence of meanings suggested in the poems by images and symbols. Thus, in "The Raven"the bereaved scholar in his study contrives a series of queries which can be answered only by the ominous bird's single-word vocabulary, "Nevermore." It is sounds like "The silken, sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" that draw a spell across our conscious minds, making us accept as true the unlikely scenario, accept as inevitable its development and denouement:

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is
sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the
floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

In "For Annie" and "Annabel Lee" the hysterical magniloquence of the forgoing ballads gives way to a lyrical style invoking surcease-- in "For Annie," from "the fever called living," and, in "Annabel Lee," an incurable nostalgia, an unassuageable longing for his lost love.

With a score of poems and half a dozen essays, Poe has left his mark upon the poetry of the succeeding century and a half, for he provided the theoretical grounding and justification for the symbolist and modernist movements. Isolating the aesthetic impulse from the pursuit of morality or truth, Poe enshrined imagination and made of poetry (and by implication all other arts) a self-creating, self-sufficing empery; he empowers the poet, who by his fealty to the laws by which his art produces its desired effects, elevates the soul of his readers while expressing the inescapable depths of his own. Poe's aesthetic requires the imagined annihilation of the physical world and the suppression or evasion of human passion; otherwise the poet remains a prisoner of the destructive element, Time. Thus Poe strove to strike upon his lyre the hymns of angels. As Richard Wilbur concludes, "There has never been a grander conception of poetry, nor a more impoverished one."