Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/94

74 Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Holmes. Poe lived in a transition age, when New York was yielding its literary hegemony to New England, and when the South and the West were sounding the first notes in a great regional chorus which, after 1870, was to mark the advent at last of a regionally representative American literature. These movements were noted and recorded by Poe as by no other contemporary critic.

But Poe's critiques have an independent value apart from the time and place that called them forth. They are the comments of one whose genius was preeminently structural. The architecture of prose and verse, especially of the short story and the short poem, appealed to Poe far more than they appealed to any other English or American critic. He did not neglect content, but he was distinctively the builder. His most characteristic reviews are not mere appraisals; they are answers to the question, How might this have been better done? This kind of criticism might easily have degenerated into the analysis of the purely external and comparatively irrelevant. In fact, Griswold said of Poe: "As a critic, he was more remarkable as a dissector of sentences than as a commenter on ideas." But Poe was primarily neither a dissector of sentences nor a commenter on ideas. He dissects sentences and he comments on ideas but only as these make or mar the structural unity, the wholeness of effect, of the piece that he is criticizing. "Totality of effect" became Poe's touchstone at the beginning of his critical career; and words, sounds, rhythms, sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, plot, and background are held to a strict stewardship not on their own account but as joint agents in carrying out the predetermined design.