"Criticism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

And now it appears evident, that since Poetry, in this new sense, is
the practical result, expressed in language, of this Poetic
Sentiment in certain individuals, the only proper method of testing
the merits of a poem is by measuring its capabilities of exciting
the Poetic Sentiments in others. And to this end we have many aids- in
observation, in experience, in ethical analysis, and in the dictates
of common sense. Hence the Poeta nascitur, which is indisputably
true if we consider the Poetic Sentiment, becomes the merest of
absurdities when we regard it in reference to the practical result. We
do not hesitate to say that a man highly endowed with the powers of
Causality- that is to say, a man of metaphysical acumen- will, even
with a very deficient share of Ideality, compose a finer poem (if we
test it, as we should, by its measure of exciting the Poetic
Sentiment) than one who, without such metaphysical acumen, shall be
gifted, in the most extraordinary degree, with the faculty of
Ideality. For a poem is not the Poetic faculty, but the means of
exciting it in mankind. Now these means the metaphysician may discover
by analysis of their effects in other cases than his own, without even
conceiving the nature of these effects- thus arriving at a result
which the unaided Ideality of his competitor would be utterly
unable, except by accident, to attain. It is more than possible that
the man who, of all writers, living or dead, has been most
successful in writing the purest of all poems- that is to say, poems
which excite more purely, most exclusively, and most powerfully the
imaginative faculties in men- owed his extraordinary and almost
magical preeminence rather to metaphysical than poetical powers. We
allude to the author of Christabel, of the Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, and of Love- to Coleridge- whose head, if we mistake not
its character, gave no great phrenological tokens of Ideality, while
the organs of Causality and Comparison were most singularly developed.
Perhaps at this particular moment there are no American poems held
in so high estimation by our countrymen, as the poems of Drake, and of
Halleck. The exertions of Mr. George Dearborn have no doubt a far
greater share in creating this feeling than the lovers of literature
for its own sake and spiritual uses would be willing to admit. We have
indeed seldom seen more beautiful volumes than the volumes now
before us. But an adventitious interest of a loftier nature- the
interest of the living in the memory of the beloved dead- attaches
itself to the few literary remains of Drake. The poems which are now
given to us with his name are nineteen in number; and whether all,
or whether even the best of his writings, it is our present purpose to
speak of these alone, since upon this edition his poetical
reputation to all time will most probably depend.
It is only lately that we have read The Culprit Fay. This is a
poem of six hundred and forty irregular lines, generally iambic, and
divided into thirty-six stanzas, of unequal length. The scene of the
narrative, as we ascertain from the single line,

The moon looks down on old Cronest,