Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/214

194 public attention; and thus, as so many feathers of fancy, have been blown aloft only to be whistled down the wind.

[From The Poetic Principle. See the preceding extract. It must be understood that Poe uses "truth" in its moral or prudential or purely factual sense. No poem deserves the name that is not founded and arched in truth. But what kind of truth? Poe answers in Eureka: "The sense of the symmetrical is an instinct which may be depended upon with an almost blindfold reliance. It is the poetical essence of the Universe—of the Universe which, in the supremeness of its symmetry, is but the most sublime of poems. Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms:—thus Poetry and Truth are one." See also the first paragraph of the third extract from The Poetic Principle, page 200.]

While the epic mania—while the idea that, to merit in poetry, prolixity is indispensable—has, for some years past, been gradually dying out of the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity—we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined. I allude to the heresy of The Didactic. It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit