Poe's Concept of Supernal Beauty as Applied to Selected Poems

OF THESIS This thesis is primarily concerned with Edgar Allan Poe's application of his aesthetic philosophies to his poetic writings. In particular, the extent to which the selected poems are successful in attaining or simulating the attainment of supernal beauty is examined. The ideas herein dealt with are those having to do with Poe's reaching for the ethereal world of the imagination through his art. While specific poems are analyzed with respect to his critical writings, this thesis never assumes that his poetry was nothing save a practical exercise of those theories. The selected poems are explored with regard to their validity as art of the highest order where Poe's idea of the supernal is the aesthetic measuring device. The poems dealt with are 11 The Bells," "The Sleeper" and "Israfel"--each being indicative of larger groupings of Poe's poems. An analysis of . what Poe meant by "supernal beauty" is undertaken in order to establish something of a foundation on which to construct a case for the several poems as vehicles to an appreciation of the ethereal imaginative world. By comparing the poems, and analyzing each in terms of the critical writings, an evaluation of Poe's use of artistic methods is undertaken. These methods are enumerated in Chapter II. Dealing with Poe as a completely rounded artist rather than only as a poet was rewarding in that it led to the formulation of the theory that an appropriate sensory focus is necessary to an understanding of the supernal state. This focus theory, based on one of the t ale s ("The Sphinx") , became applicable in an infinite number of places. The major contribution of this thesis lies in the surf acing of this theory of i nterior focus and its relevance in the study of Poe' s aesthetic philosophies as they relate to his own poetry. It is my contention that an understanding of Poe's sensory focus must first be mastered before one may expect to understand his spiritual release into the r ealm of the supernally beautiful. The three major poems herein dealt with require conscienti ous purging of the soul before they can reasonably be expected to succeed as vehicles in the s earch after ethereal loveliness. The examination of the poems is based on this sort of aesthetic open-mindedness and is centered in Poe 1 s own critical work. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I . INTRODUCTION •••••••••••••••••••••••••• • •••••••••••• 1 Critical Acrimony •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 2 Attention to the Ethereal •••••••••••••••••••••••• 8 Poe as Artist ••••••••••••••.••••••••••••••••••••• 10 The Concept of Sensory Focus ••••••••••••••••••••• 13 Importance of the Poetry ••••••••••••••••••••••••• 15 II. SUPERNAL BEAUTY•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 17 Methods of Achieving Supernal State •••••••••••••• 18 Poe's Approach to the Supernal ••••••••••••••••••• 23 Major Characteristics •••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 29 I II . THE HYPNOTIC STATE AS A ROUTE TO THE SUPERNAL IN 11 THE BELLS"•••••••••••••••••••••••• 31 Effect of the Bells •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 32 Points of Departure •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 37 Musical Elements in t he Poem ••••••••••••••••••••• 39 IV. 11THE SLEEPER II. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • . • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 44 Sleep and Death •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 44 Dre a:rning • ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• • • • • • • • 4 5 Mesmerism and Immortality of t he Mind •••••••••••• 50 Use of Sleep in Aesthetic Quest •••••••••••••••••• 52 V. ARTISTI C TRANSCENDENCE TO THE SUPERNAL WORLD I N "ISRAFEL11 ••••••••••••••• • •••• • • • • • • • • • • • • •.. 55 Poe and t h e Angel•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 58 Point of Dep arture ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 60 ii CHAPTER PAGE Artistic Touch ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 62 Music as an Emotional Outlet ••••••••••••••••••••• 64 VI. CONCLUSION ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 66 Results or Investigation•••••••••••••••• • • • • • • • • • 66 VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................... 70


INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this thesis is to examine that portion of Edgar Allan Poe's aesthetic philosophy in which he is involved with the quest for supernal beauty. This area of Poe's writing has been generally overlooked by scholars who tend to deal with the tales and poems with no eye open to aesthetic gain. Often ignored as being vague, the aesthetic concept of supernal beauty aids the reader in attaining a fuller understanding of the poetry. showing the sup ernal world through the poems. This concept of supernal beauty is inherent in the poems. Chapter II will explore the concept of beauty in detail while sub sequent chapters will deal with certain poems in terms of this t h eory. Contrary to Bate 1 s assertion that Poe did not clarify his choice of words, it is obvious that Poe carefully chose those terms which came as close as possible to indic a ting concretely what was for him an intuitive experience. Being as much a scholar of the language as a technician employed in the rhytbraical use of it, Poe was certainly aware of the connotations imp lied by his word choices. It can hardly be denied that the poet who so painstakingly created poetic pyramids such as "The Raven," "Ulalume, 11 "Israf'el, 11 and 11 To Helen" made certain decisions with respect to lexicon and idiomatic use of words and phrases before he emp loyed them. The master nit picker who derided his contemporaries over the use and mis-u se of gr ammar was most certainly careful to avoid exp osing himself to literary broadsides by committing the egregious errors for which he took others to task . The mathematical precision with which Edgar Poe proceeded in t he rhythmical creation of hi s verse and prose writings is s o obvious as to make Bate's disinterested derision laughable. Basing his study evidently on 11 The Poetic Principle," Bate stoops to call Poe's "general critical outlook ••• mainly significant as one of the more extreme examples of a romantic tendency of thought.rr Citing Poe's theory which posits the imagination as the 11 1 soul 1 of poetry, 11 Bate attemp ts to make the reader believe that Poe's use of the word "imagination" is vague when viewed in contrast to the definition employed by Hazlitt or Coleridge.3 It is interesting to note that no textual evidence is given to shore up this feeble observation.
Coleridge, as we know, separated the imagination from fancy. Hi s concept of imagination was then divided into primary and s econdary considerations. The primary imagination was defined as "the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception" and the secondary as "an echo of the f ormer. 11 4 By contrast, Poe's concept of imagination, which endeared him to the French symbolists, hinged on a percep tual distortion of reality in order to get to a h igher reality.
In essence, Poe's concep t of the imagination is the broader of the two since Coleridge has, as Poe say s, "imprisoned his own conceptions by the barrier he has erected against those of others. 11 5 Coleridge was able to integrate beauty 3wal ter Jackson Bate, "Edgar Allan Poe," in 9riticism: The Ma jor Texts, ed. by W. J. Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970), pp. 351-52. 4samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Imagina tion, 11 ibid., p. 387. 5 11 Letter to Mr.
., " in ~_b.e Comple te Poetry and Selected Criticism of Ed ar Allan Poe, ed . by Allen Tate (New York: The New Ameri can Library, 1968 ), p. 152 . with truth whereas for Poe the two ideals were at odds.
Perhaps the most outrageous attack from Bate•s quarter comes in his assertion that Poe sought to "narrow the word •poetry• until it suggested merely short, lyric verse, or even isolated lines of verse." He goes on to use that statement as a staging from which to deny Poe his claim to any measure of contemporaneity whatsoever.6 Certainly no solecist, Poe is more likely to tell us what poetry is not and what is not poetry thus leaving an entire world consisting of poetry rather than to narrow down the word "poetry." His tendency to expand the art form to its widest dimensions is the very opposite of Bate's contention that his writings tend to narrow the definition of poetry. Poe's well known contention that the universe was the poetic composition of the Supreme Being is indicative of his expansive definition of poetry.
If Poe applied a limitation to poetry it most surely was his sel f-imposed dedication to the American tradition of lyric poetry. But Poe evidently saw poetry as more than just poems--for him poetry was also a cosmology.
There are, certainly, those among us who would violently disagree with Dr. Bate. If the poet ever lived who sought to expand not only the word or the concept but the being of poetry to its nth degree, then '~rwithout doubt, that poet was Edgar Allan Poe.
6Bate, "Edgar Allan Poe," ibid., pp. 351-52. posits the personal philosophy that final and complete attainment of the supernal is not possible in the realm. of consciousness we, of needs, deal with on this side of the grave. By placing the forbidden fruit just out of reach, the tantalizing insufficiency of man is justly portrayed.
That Poe, who wrote the rule book, was equally unable to attain the unattainable--to reach the unreachable--is the self-contained definition of his artistic torment. His human failure to hold on to the pleasures of the next world is shown in an expression of grief "at our inability to grasp ~ wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which tb:!'ougg the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. 0 9 Poe was certainly able to pull himself and his readers to the brink of the next world; to catch a glimpse of the beauty there reigning and to aid us in achieving the same, bu~, of course, being mortal (though-. psychically sentient) he was unable to capture the supernal experience for more than a fleeting instant. The ephemeral, transitory nature of these journeys to the world of aesthetic perfection was sufficient cause within itself to produce the melancholy mood which is necessary to even its fleeting success. Seeing then, the briefest moment of exposure to 9 11 The Poetic Principle," in Complete Poetry, p. 160. the supernally beautiful as an aesthetic success of the first order, the poet might well concentrate his efforts on perfecting that path to success which worked for him.
Poe's numerous reworkings of the poems is proof of his personal application to the task.
Recognizing that one's imagination might at any time be surpassed by any other individual, Poe through constant revision of his works never stagnated nor allowed himself to be satisfied with his attempt through literary art to reach the supernal state. W riting in nMarginalia," he humors himself and the reader with the figure of a youngster bettering the imagination of the author of "Jack and the Beanstalk" by imagining with no more apparent effort than any other youthful endeavor to triple the is the equal of his prose fiction. Poe was singular in this respect. Appreciated in the European manner, which was applied to the fullness of one's artistic worth and not to one particular forte, he was dealt with on the Continent not as a critic, or a poet, or a writer of tales, but as an artist whose ability was great in all these areas as well as the area of cryptography for which the Europeans held a great admiration. If we might adopt the European standard and deal with Poe as an artist in the round--a sculptured artist, not a painted one--we have the sort of foundation upon which we can quite readily construct the superstructure of our own .American genius in much the same manner as that used by Valery and Baudelaire {though admittedly the latter's fascination with Poe was based on far more than aesthetic considerations).
Knowing as we do that the writing of verse was Poe's primary passion and the writing of mechanical critiques of his contemporaries was born of commercial necessity, we might suspect that he would abandon the poetic form in his prose and hurriedly scramble back to his own ground and apply himself to the writing of some very valuable verses (if the slap at Henry James might be allowed).
Quite the contrary was the case, however. Poe seemed content to turn out some of the most poetic of American prose.
"Ligeia" (the short story) might easily be considered as much a poem as "Ligeia" (the poem from "Al Aaraaf"). All of Poe's known necessities are present in the tale. There is, for instance, an opiate heightening within the person of the narrator. W e have of course, the death of a beautiful woman, the establishment oi' melancholy as the prevalent mood and a third variable--the unreliable narrator. Making use then of the subject matter best suited to his poetry and the 11 most legitimate of all poetical tones," Poe had for all practical purposes written a ~en.! • The catch, obviously, is that he had perfectly disguised this poem beh ind t he diaphanous facade of the short prose tale.
In dealing with his aesthetic philosophy, we have little choice but to draw on all available writings. W hile this sort of approach would be hardly appropriate for many other authors, it is a . good deal less incongruous in a study of Poe's work. Applying as h e did his poetic principle to all of his writings--poetry and prose, Poe left a carefully trimmed but incredibly rich collection of written works.
Unwilling to leave his theories in the form p resented in "The Poetic Principle," Poe showed the reader the Path to supernal beauty and ini'ormed him of the danger of being overly n earsighted in deal ing with literat ure in one of his lesser known tales.
The degree of control which we can exercise over the focusing of the inner eye is, I contend, the key to Poe's aesthetic theory isasmuch as that theory addresses itself to the problems with regard to the worlds of imagination and reality. Poe, who truly loved to indulge in cryptography and hidden meanings, showed us the way to an understanding of his world in an oft-neglected tale (a tale incidentally, which is as much a poem in its own right as any verse produced by the same author), namely "The Sphinx. 11 The narrator of this tale like our bookish critics has been seated before a window reading. He lifts his eyes at length from the volume to the window before him but fails to adjust his focal length and due to this error is unable to see through the window. His inner mind set on seeing no further than the printed page, he struggles with the words there presented rather than with the twin worlds they represent in the volume. Mistaking a tiny insect on the window for a huge monster on the landscape beyond, the narrator is a sickeningly accurate symbol for t h e critic.
The literalistic reader referred to above is holistical ly metaphorical for the human failure to adjust one's inner eye or consciousness to the focus neces s ary to see beyond common sense reality to that worl d of t h e imagination in which a greater reality of fancy is present. In summary, it can be noted that the two sides of Poe's artistic character--the mathematically precise and the artistically free--have combined to form some of the finest poetry ever produced. The extent to which conscious focus influenced the work can only be speculated upon.
In attempting to honor Poe's own critical guidelines the biographical approach must be avoided.
This thesis deals with Edgar Allan Poe's most important artistic work, his poetry. Poe's passion was for the creation of poetry, and it is in this area that he e~ceeds the best efforts of his contemporaries. It is unfortunate but, nevertheless, true that the vast majority of critics have ignored the poems in order to concentrate on the excitement of the tales. His short stories in no way compromise the aesthetic ideals elucidated in the poems •.
The poems, on the other hand, give a great deal (in terms of awareness of aesthetic stimuli) to the tales.
W allace Stevens has said poetry helps us to live our lives. Poe goes beyond this and creates poems which deal with spiritual life. A strong believer in the immortality of the mind, Poe had a unique view of death.
Viewing death as merely the passing of our physical beings, he could not help feeling that the mind (the soul) would be in a better situation liberated from worldly realities.
He found his rest in poesy. Our undertaking here is the nearly classical search for Atman, Brahm.an, Kairos--terms which admittedly Poe did not use but terms with which he could hardly be unfamiliar given his obvious (though possibly cursory) knowledge of Eastern scripture.
Edgar Allan Poe's major contribution was his poetry. Through his poetic work, Poe will lead us to the sunnnit of superhuman existence. The following chapters deal with the theory and selected poems in terms of that theory.

SUPERNAL BEAUTY
The spiritual, intuitive world of dream-like softness--more nebulous, more ethereal than we can readily imagine--is the very definition of the realm of the supernal. This imprescriptible realm which offe rs an alternative to the world of caus e and effect reality furnishes the sensitive soul with a supra-reality in which one's own inner light is the basis of one's perceptions.
The realm of the supernal, as we shall see in our examination of tr•fue Sleeper," is one in which beauty may reign eternally without fear of being tainted by the appetites of the anti-poetic world. And since Poe, perhaps more than the majority of artists, was concerned with this sort of beauty, it is not at all surprising that he leans towards the intuitive world beyond and away from the world of cause and effect reality--his own sort of reality coming alive only in that aesthetic realm which resists the pressures and falsities of the real world. Poe establishes t hen, the world of supra-reality as the only reality. In writing of the elevation to that world through poetry, Poe states: That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most eleva ting, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect--they refer, in short, just to that int ense and pure elevation of soul--not of intellect, or of heart--upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating "the beautiful." Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes--that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment--no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to is most readily attained in the poem.l The world of the supernal is available to us only insofar as the artist constructs for us a s piritual springboard by means of which we are able to execute the necessary transcendental leap and aspire to that level where exists the supernally beautiful. The poem being uniquely suited to act as elevating agent, it is little wonder that Poe constantly sought to refine and rework his art into the most nearly perfect verse imaginable.

8
Poe's idea of achieving supernal beauty through the poem is evident in certain characteristic methods. These include · ' the use of surprise, artistic transcendence through the metaphor of sleep or death, and music ; (the rhythmical creation of beauty). These three methods will be dealt with at leng th as subsequent chapters investigate the poems.
The method o:f surprise (as used in "The Bells") indicates that Poe was aware of the e:ffectiveness of the unusual. According to Poe's philosophy, surprise is useful in shocking the reader out of the common rationality, thus fre eing the soul to be more perceptive toward t h e supernal.
Perfectionist though he was with respect to absolute correctness in poetic form, Edgar Poe realized the benefit to be gained through inclusion of the totally unexpected.

19
As shall become evident in the examination of the specific poems, the element of surprise--the shock of sudden elevation--is inevitable in Poe's work. The extent to which the surprise is augmented or diminished in intensity is left entirely to the poet. Never one to ignore the extraordinary, The eye, catching the end of a verse, whether long or short, expected, for the ear, a rhyme. The great element of unexpectedness was not dreamed of--that is to say, of novelty--of originality. "But," says Lord Bacon, (how justly!) "there is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportions." Take away this element of strangeness--of unexpectedness-of novelty--of originality--call it what we will-and all that is ethereal in loveliness is lost at once. W e lose--we miss the unknown--the vague--the uncomprehended, because offered before we have time to examine and comprehend. We lose, in short, all that assimilates the beauty of 2earth with what we dream of the beauty of Heaven.
The element of surprise functions in a different manner from other methods Poe uses to approach the supernal world. Operating somewhat like a literary sauna, the unexpected allows the reader to drift through the steamy womb-like warmth of the poem's form until suddenly he is plunged into the icy pool of novelty. Vi/hen given the opportunity to carefully analyze certain effects used in poetry, the most analytical minds will become lost in method and tend to lose sight of the intended end of the art. By being surprised with the "unexpectedness" of a certain effect, the reader cannot fail to rely on immediate responses rather than on well though out reactions. The response to the beauty demonstrated by the poet would thus be emotional rather than intellectual.
Another method which he used to a great extent is the idea of sleep and death as a metaphor for transcendence. Since sleep and death both perform a symbolic destruction of the real world, Poe ·finds the freedom to work within this context concentrating on the mind and soul divorced from the physical world. The dream, quite obviously one of his very favorite metaphors, was used to fine advantage in "A Dream," "Dream-Land, 11 "Dreams," 11 A Dre am within a Dre am 11 and, of course, 11 The Sleeper. 11 Closely related to the sleep/death method is the notion of the hypnot ic or mesmeric effect on the consciousness.
That to deal with the especial powers of the oft-neglected soul of man, one must, of necessity, wipe the mind blank of considerations which affect the physical body is, naturally, obvious. Poe's interest in hypnotism (or mesmerism as it was then called) provided him with better psychic equipment than the majority of his contemporaries. Predating by more than a century the psychedelic art movement, Poe was sufficiently aware of the electrical power of man's psyche to use his knowledge and conjecture in this area to help in the formulation of what anyone 21 with a taste for such things must surely recognize as the definitive poetic statement concerned with this part of the human experience. In "Mesmeric Revelation," Poe states: W hatever doubt may still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are now almost universally admitted. or these latter, those who doubt, are your mere doubters by profession--an unprofitable and disreputable tribe. There can be no more absolute waste of time than the attempt to prove, at the present day, that man, by mere exercise of will, can so impress his fellow, as to cast him into an abnormal condition, in which the phenomena resemble very closely those of death, or at least resemble them more nearly than they do the phenomena of any other normal condition within our cognizance; that, while in this state, the person so impressed employs only with effort, and then feebly, the external organs of sense, yet perceives, with keenly refined perception, and through channels supposed unknown, matters beyond the scope of the physical organs; that, moreover, his intellectual faculties are wonderfully exalted and invigorated; that his sympathies with the person so impressing him are profound; and, finally, that his susceptibility t o the inipression increases with its frequency, while, in the same proportion, the peculiar phenomena elicited are more extended and m.or. e pronounce.d. 3 3Edgar Allan Poe, "Mesmeric Revelation," in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. by Hervey Allen (New York: The Modern Library, 19'b5T, p. 88.
Awareness, then, we might safely say, of the largely unexplored powers of the psyche was a major forte in Poe's literary bag of tricks. His consciousness of the beauty projected by the pure soul without interference 22 or tainting by the vulgarities of physical necessities, led him to the brink of man's fullest measure of existence.
At this point, it follows, man must either strike up some sort of deal with his own faculties in relationship to the universe or take upon himself the extensive psychic responsibilities of becoming his own god.
A third method is the use of the power of music. "The Bells" and "Israfel" are excellent examples of Poe 1 s musicality. Poe states, "music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry." Thus, since pleasure is the proper end of the poem, and since the concept of supernal beauty is intimately connected to the pleasure of ethereal experience, the use of music completes the work and fulfills the requirements of poetry. Chapters III and V will discuss in some detail this area of music and musicality in the poems.
Obviously, these three are not the only techniques Poe uses to attain to the supernal realm. Certainly, the brevity of the lyric poem, exotic sense imagery, and t h e internal focus required of t he r e ader are i mportant as methods of reaching through poetry to the supernal. It is also i mportant t hat the reader reco. gnize that Edgar Poe 1 s poetic philosophy is not easily segmented. Most often we will find that Poe uses the various methods enumerated in combinations. For example, "The Bells" combines the hypnotic trance-like effect with the power of music and rhythm.. It is through this layering of techniques that 23 Poe creates in the reader the desired effect. Needless to say, the notion of mysticism which he exposed himself to in the reading of the Koran and other Eastern scriptures and philosophical writings, pervaded a goodly number of his poems in greater or lesser degree s of obviousness. The delicate softness which so often accompanies his verse is rarely directly attribut able to one poetic convention or another. More often than not, Poe offers us a glimpse of the symmetrical whole he has created through the fitting together of the appropriate effects in their proper measure. While mysticism, narcosis, mesmerism, music, and vertigo play their respective parts in selected poems, the poet's success in achieving his nearly flawless verse is attributable to none of these individually.
When faced with the universal challenge--when we come, at length, to the sort of awareness Poe has been attempting to show us--are we still articulate as human beings or are we reduced to bodiless spirits? Poe's answer is quick. The only way in which we can achieve everlasting rapture is, obviously, through leaving this mortal life.
The grave offers us a whole new world of pleasure as may be seen in our forthcoming examination of "The Sleeper." In the meantime we can, through fine art, approach the supernal world and catch momentary glimpses thereof. The hedonist in each of us is invited to indulge itself in pleasure feasts of short duration. In the event that the soul becomes addicted to supernal beauty to the extent that living in the real world becomes impossible, the only welcomed escape is death. The conqueror worm which deals only with the flesh and bone of the deceased excites no concern in the mind. Of course, it requires little in the way of effort to reach beyond the grave after one has actually died. The trick is to have the best of both worlds--to hold on to the mortal life while exposing one's soul to the world beyond. The desperate struggle for Nirvana--the striving to lightly touch the misty unreality of the imaginative world--is Poe's self-contained contest.
That boundless place where his spirit met and mingled with Baudelaire's, that altar of beauty beyond the gateway of death, is the very region where all living minds escape from the deceased physical bodies and mer ge with the universal consciousness. When all souls become one with God, as Poe suggests in "Eureka," they all become (at least in Part) the Supreme Being. As each becomes a part of the whole, so does the whole diffuse itself among the several Parts. Man, reaching for immortality, finds escape from the temporal nature of his existence through the fusion of his consciousness with that of the Creator. "Each soul is, in part, its own God--its own Creator." Speaking o:f the diffusion of the self amongst the Universe, Poe holds that man finds his identity in that of the Supreme Being. He states that man 11 • • • ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. 11 4 Poe's philosophy of man's place in the universe then, obviously, held that man, being as much or as little as a pore in the palm o:f God's hand, could find his identity only in the mergence of all souls into the very being of the Creator. In essence, man becomes his own god by virtue of being a part of that whole which he knows as God. This integration of mortal and immortal energies, ot necessity, combines the most and least desirable aspects of each--and integrates these in a new perceptive force capable of that which the individual members are not. It is in this state--seeing through the eyes of God as well as through our own--that we are most capable of heightened perception. Our utilization of these newly acquired perceptive tools is, p erhaps, i~perfect yet the glimpse of eternity we are capable of perceiving while in this state makes the effort worthwhile. By rising above t he boundaries ------·------ With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; And the passions should be held in reverence; they must not--they cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry comp~nsations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.:> Poe holds that by applying the passions rath er than the rational thought processes, man· can ultimately achieve that end--supernal beauty. One must abandon every thought of charting his progress or of dealing in any fashion with what in any case is an ethereal abstraction.
Perceiving of the supernal quest as an inherent thirsting i n the soul of man, Poe saw the desire for knowl edge of the next world as an out ward symbol of man 1 s Yearning for the spiritual. In "The Poetic Principle," 5 11 Preface to the Poems," ib.i 9:_., P • 887. he states: We have still a thirst unquenchable ••• This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us--but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whosg very elements, perhaps, app ertain to eternity alone. Straining after a supernal beauty which might restore the unity of the diffused universe--and of his own shattered soul--the poet begins with earthly things, ••• subverts their identities and accomplishes their imaginative destruction. The supposition is t h at a melodious and rhy~hmic destruction of the earthly must be heavenly.
The conscious reader of Poe· 1 s work cannot be ignorant of his oft-expressed views concerning the end of poetry.
The fami liarity of the concept that ple asure is t h e end of the poem and that the corpse of a beautiful woman is the most suitable topic thereof migh t very generally induce a feeling of contempt. Yet, if an unders t anding of his concept of be auty is desired, it becomes necessary to survey the 8 wilbur, "Introduction," in Poe, P• 33.  When through repetitive use of the mantra, the reader is able to induce a trance-like state in which he is recep tive to the sensual experience of the supernal world, the poet has succeeded inasfar as he is able.
The tension wi~hin the poem itself is carefully measured in each stanza. The de gree to which it is possibl e for t he tinkling silver bells of stanza one to induce a p sychic leap is limited indeed. As the bells become h eavier and more terrifying (golden bells in stanza two, bra zen bells in three, and iron bells in four) the attention of the persona moves from the 11 merriment" and "happiness" of the smaller bells to the "terror" and "solemn thought 11 of the heavier bells. Finally, t h e p ersona asks himself what sort of sadistic fiend must pull the ropes to cause the incredible racket. The point is, of course, that the more involved the person becomes with the sound of the bells, the less likely he is to concentrate solely on the metallic monsters. Lifting his sensory focus to other objects, the bells recede into the background of his mind until they provide but a musical framework for the new activities of the imagination.
The taste for repeating whole lines and groups of lines, which grew pro gressively more conspicuous in Poe's verse, may be accounted for in the same ways. To repeat words or lines without (as in the modern sestina or villanelle) continually modifying their meaning is to shift the reader's attention from sense toward sound. If the sound is regular and sonorous, it may prove mildly hypnotic--as Coleridge found by endlessly repeating his own name--and so further the poet's effort to cast a spell.2 Beautiful as the moment of aesthetic breakthrough to the world of anti-reality is, we must in all fairness to the poet investigate further that moment which inevitably precedes the leap--the point of departure. While this point of departure is different in each poem it is invariably a violent, sudden s hock. The cons ciousness is never fully able to absorb the impact of an innnediate ascent into an unknown spiritual sphere. The reader's initiation into the world of intuitive idealism is never subtle in Poe's art.
The poet, who is prescient to some degree with respect to the world beyond, is able to guide the reader and set him 2wilbur, ibid., P• 38. aright during the course of the journey but is unable (or perhaps unwilling) to soften the blow of the experience-beyond-experience upon the entranced s·oul of 37 the reader. In "The Bells," the point at which the narrator loses sight of the giant bells as his instrument of torture and enters a trance-like state of music and sensuous beauty is the highest moment of the poem. While only the briefest of glimpses into the world of the supernal is permitted, the moment of spiritual exhilaration experienced by the narrator (and hopefully the reader) is the guide by which the sensitive soul will continue to lead his life.
The stepping-off places in the individual poems are nearly as intangible as the realm of the supernal, but it is possible to make some observations with regard to the probable points of departure. Quite obviously, the precise moment of revelation will vary from individual to individual.
The point at which the word· 11 bells" is repeated until it no longer bears any sort of relevance to the iron instruments but is an entity unto itself, being no symbol for an object of reality, but rather becoming a combination of consonant and vowel sounds possessing a claim to its own reality, is one of the more important p laces where the spirit might hop e to be lifted from the rat i onal world to the next.
To t h e rolling of the bells--0 f the bells, bells, bells--To t he tolling of the b ells--Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells--To the moaning and the groaning of the bells. Integrating the emotional loveliness of music with the mathematical precision of unerring poetic format and tempering the resulting product with a great deal of spiritual calm, the poet created a dynamic art which escapes the iron-clad dungeon of drab uniformity in a manner not unlike that utilized by our consciousness in spiralling upward toward aesthetic enrichment.
A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its imraediate object, pleasure, not truth; to roman~e, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained: romance presenting p ercep tible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without an idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.3 In searching after the "fearful symmetry" of the eternal loveliness, Poe was unwilling to r educ e the full 3 11 Letter to Mr. _ ___ _ __ .,"in Complete Poet~z, p. 153. effect of music on the soul. The joys beyond the grave being the goal of immortal man, the most natural transportation was on the soaring lines of vibrating music--the vibrations of the instrument or voice being perfectly in tune with the soul of the poet.
Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in 41 its various modes of metre, rhytbrn, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected-is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality. It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles--the creation of supernal Beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken nofes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels.~ According to Poe's theory, the sym,pathetic droning of the sirens of the supernal complements and supplements our feeling of drifting and swirling in the thick delicious air of that state which is our goal. Utilizing the beauty of music as a catalyst in· our transcending these mortal boundaries, we cannot but attune ourselves, for an indescribable moment, to the ethereal level of semi-consciousness we desire to attain. By synchronizing the rhythms of the poetry with those of the mind, Poe sought to simplify the fli ght to the supernal world. Offering little in the way of intellectual perceptions, the poet does make clear, in the poem and more particularly in "Eureka," certain 4"The Poetic Princip le," ibid., p. 161. intuitive harmonies between man and the universe, thus closing the existing gap for a moment. Poe's use of music was to add a more spiritual note to the poem through the orchestration of existing harmonies. The intuitive perceptions experienced by the conscious reader are as carefully constructed as they are spiritually frail.
Since the rhythms of poetry derive in great part from the characteristic rhythms of the emotions, the supraemotional nature of Poe's poetry would be sufficient explanation for its frequent metronomic regularity. One could also confidently attribute the regular rhy thms (as well as the heavy assonance, alliteration, and rhyme) to Poe's desire to approximate music (the vaguest, hence most spiritual of the arts), ~d to secure the magical advantages of incantation.~ 42 W hen the horror of the bells' monstrous noise gives way to t h e rapture which accompanies the sensing of supreme beauty, it is not at all unlikely that our freed consciousness, soaring throughout the universe, will perceive of the bell's tones as more dulcet t h an even the quivering lute strings of the angel Israfel.
Th e importance . of "The Bells 11 to a full comprehension of Poe' s concept of supernal beauty can b arely be overstated . I t is altogether possible that, like the sweet musical strains from the world beyond, the tinkling of the bells beckons us to a higher level of understanding. I t is probable t hat certain other p oems will l ift us hi gher still but without that first step, no endless journey is possible.
Through affording us the opp ortuni ty to gain some .5wilbur, ibid., p. 38. sort of sensory perspective, the poem exorcises a number of spiritual stumbling blocks. It is as a literary blueprint that the poem achieves its great worth. W ith each stanza of the work, we shift aesthetic gear s, as it were, until we find ourselves in a sort of spiritual overdrive wherein the tinkling, chiming "clangor of the bells 11 metarnorphizes into a melancholy ecstasy. In no poem does Poe more firmly take the adventurous reader by the hand and lead him step by step, stanza by stanza, to a revelation of the glories and ecstasies beyond the mortal existence. The "sleeper" is a dead woman laid out in her grave-clothes. She is in that condition of somnolence which Poe describes elsewhere--in "Spirits of the Dead" or "The Colloquy of Monos and Una"--as the initial state of consciousness after "death. 11 The landscap e of the poem sympathizes with her intermediate condition: the moon sheds its opiate influence on drowsy flowers (which are symbols of remembrance and purity); a ruin settles but does not yet "plungen; a lake forgets the world in hypnagogic trance.l The narrator of the poem, however, is unable, in the f inal analysis, to waken the dead. The poet is very familiar with the world of dre ams, having devoted a few very fine poems and certain tales to t h at strange state.
Making use of the world of dreams as a figure for the world of t he superna1, Poe is able to struggl e with t h e poetic and real variables and come to grips with certain less than evident truths with re gard to the divisions (real and imagined) between the worlds of reality and fancy.
I have been happy, though in a dream. I have been happy--and I love t he theme--Dre ams J in their vivid coloring of life, As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife Of semblance with reality, wh ich brings To the delirious eye more lovely things Of Paradise and Love--and all our own--Than y oung Hope in his sunniest hour hath lmown.

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When we attempt to reconcile dreaminess and the concept of focus as advanced in Chapter I , we are more or less obliged to encompass the wh ole s cope of unsureness.
The only choice, finally, is to be either sucked into the maelstrom of the sensual sterility or to ascend into the boundless infinity of the supernal. But as surely as proper focus is a prerequisite for clear sigh t and insight so must the effort precede the ultimate victory. Needed is the energy from within the soul which supplie s the fuel burned by the sensitive enquiring mind. W e are forced then either to accept t h e dream world as real or to reduce the real world to dream-like proportions in order to develop the appropriate intellectual environment from which to pursue Be auty of the supernal order.
Granted the above mentioned premise , it fol l ows t hat sleep, dreams, and death are among the most nearly perfect sub j ec t s for Poe's purposes. Poe 's constant use of these vari ab l es and his wel l-known i nsi s tence tha t the deat h of a be auti ful woman wa s t he mo s t p oetic al sub ject matter indicate that we are at least following the proper approach to an understanding of t his area of concern.
Poe's ability to shift the balance of values 47 is vi sibly displayed in this p oem. The assigning of values usually associated with sleep to the restf ul grave is a case in p oint. The poet's insistence that death is perhaps a more desirable state than sleep is exposing his philosophy with regard to this world and that beyond.
Obviously, the tortured soul of the artist who won but litt le in the way of literary honor in his own time must surely h ave felt that the great sleep from which we never wake would be comforting indeed.
Sleep, the natural habitat of dreams, is not an unusual topic for the poet who lived for the sp iritual dream--the realm beyond this mundane existence. The author of 11 A Dream within a Dream," "Dreams, 11 "A Dream, 11 and "Dream-Land 11 --the same gentleman who likewise was not unfamiliar with the dream-like states induced by laudanum and alcohol--did little to disguise his interest in this area of semi-consciousness. The lady sleepsl Oh, may her sleep, Which is enduring, so be deepl Heaven have her in its sacred keepJ ' rhis chamber changed for one more holy, This bed for one more melancholy, I pray to God that she may lie Forever with unopened eye, While the pale sheeted ghosts go byl Assuming that satori can only be achieved after 3 11 A Dream within a Dream," in W ork s_, p. 1 31. the cares of the physical world have been forgotten, we a.re obliged to seek our aesthetic break through either after death or while in the imitation de ath state--sleep.
As dreams take over our entire consciousness when asleep, so does the mind apply itself to other pursuits in like manner. If we are denied the comforts of the grave we must seek our solace either in the s tate of sleep or through some sort of artificially produced psychomimetic state. It is not in the least surprising then that these two counterfeit deaths are greatly favored by Poe in the poems.
In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed,

But a waking dream of life and 4 light
Hath left me broken-hearted.
Since the conqueror worm holds terror only for the mind which is still associated with a functioning physi cal body, the worms in "The Sleeper" are not at all 49 horrible monsters but some kind of p assive jeweled entity which shares the earth with the dead (or, more correctly, which shares its earth with the trespassing corp se).
Helminthiasis, then, being deprived of its terror, t he poet is fre e to exploit the figure of the worm a s a poetic convention divorced from its u sual connotation as under- YesJ though that long dream were of hopeless sorrow, 1 Twere better than the cold reality Of waking life, to him whose heart must be, .And hath been still, upon the lovely earth~ A chaos of deep passion, from his birth.~ It is extremely easy to be misled by this sort of short-si ghted examination of the poems and aesthetic philosophy and to come to view Poe's ultima te world of purification as being inherent in the gr ave. But, of course, it lay far beyond this easily attainable goalJ W hen the poet enquires "Why and what art t hou dre aming here?" he expresses more t han innocent curiosity .
his aesthetic and spiritual goals if he could have an advisor in the grave pointing out the sweet dreams of the world beyond. The situation he was in was that of the educated artist estimating as closely as possible the joys beyond the grave but never really knowing how fully he had succeeded.
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape t hose who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of e vil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable," and a gain, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "~ressi sunt mare tenebrarum, Poe found a revelation in his dreaming which allowed for a release of the psychic energies he had unleashed through his unorthodox approach to art. His aesthetic hedonism, as pure as it was extreme, led him to t h e discovery of a suprareality in the darkest corners of the dream world.
Richard W ilbur states: I f esse est percipi, as Bishop Berkeley said--if to be is to be p erceived--then when we withdraw our attention from the world in somnolence or sleep, the world ceases to be. As our minds move toward sleep, by way of drowsiness and reverie and the hypnagogic state, we escape from consciousness of the world, we escap e from awareness of our bodies, and we enter a r e alm in which reason no longer hampers the play of the imagination: we enter t he realm of dream.7 The only way in which he could literally mak e time stand still and ach ieve the supernal experience for an infinite length of time was to sleep forever or to die.
Where the dead sleep--11 All Beauty sleepsJ" The eternal sleep to which he ascended in 1849 was an experience Poe was singularly prepared to appreciate. One cannot help but feel assured that in a Baltimore grave "lies Edgar,  Israfel. The irony of the situation is that that is exactly what he must do. Poe holds that the worldly life must be shuffled off before existence in the face of the almighty consciousness is possible for any measurable duration of time. A symbolic physical death is necessary to even the brief glimpses since our spiritual desire to attain to that supernal plane negates the physical possession of our earthly being. The infinite goodness of the situation would, obviously, more than compensate for any loss the man could conceivably feel. The singular moment of ascension produced by the poen1 is that very moment in whi ch the reader is better than dead, better than alive; he is aware.
Humility, rarely an artist's outstanding virtue, is nearly lacking altogether in the poet who announces that given t he opportunity to tra de his existence for that of the angel, he would play with greater boldness.
If I could dwell Where Israf el Hath dwelt, and h e 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 gives himself over completely to the spirit of the p oem and, for once, is less the exegete and more the sentimental character than we are often allowed to see.
The perfect agreement of heart-felt passion and perfect song is re ached by Israfel--an agreement which greatly excite s Poe who sees this integration as a greater reality than even he imagined in h is critical works wherein he posited the notion that this sort of combination of feeling with art was necessary to an achievement of the supernal realm. Like another American poet of a l a ter century, Wallace Stevens, Poe had a "necessary angellf to deal with who was the person and the idea of Israfel.
The heavenly references, the poem's basis in mythology, and the ecstatic mood served to overcome what one might initially observe as technical mediocrity.
As perhaps the most perfect example of poetic passion overtaking poetic reason, this poem is exceeded nowhere in Poe 1 s collected verse. His ability to entertain artistic pleasure at the expense of the usual mathematical precision is encouraging in that it is proof that, at least, his aesthe tic ideals have worked for himself. This is not to say that the work is technically poor. On the contrary, "Israfel" has its moments of stunning control. Yet, its grace and beauty seem to extend more from the exalted world of imagination than from the realm of reality.
Very neatly supplying himself with a subject wh ich followed directly a notion he had dealt with in "The Poetic Principle," Poe carefully avoided the nearly inevitable downfall in this poem. Israfel is never allowed to merely recite in song the happenings of the real world. Poe's angel holds no mirror up to nature; to Poe's way of thinking none was necessary. Serving as Poe's ideal poet, Israfel combines the sweetness of heavenly music with original stor ies of happenings in the misty borderland of the cons cious mind. It is because of his success in his presentation that the angel arrives at the poetic extremes.
Es chewing, as far as possible, t he trivialities of the rational world, the angelic b ard frees his passions to concentrate fully on feelings having to do with the hugeness of t he universe.
He who shall s imply sing , with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a .truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and sen timents, which greet h im in connnon with all mank ind-h e , I say, h as yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a somet~ing in t he distance which he has been unable to a ttain.
Israfel, whose voice casts a s pell over the stars, me smerizes his audi ence with the beauty of his music. Even t he ear l y morn ing light h alts in its development to l i sten t o t h e outrageously beaut iful tones of the vo i ce and lute. 111 The Poetic Principle, " in Comple t e Tales, P• 893.
The point of departure from this real world occurs, f or the poet, before the work begins and for the reader at such t ime as he realizes that the summa tion of all supernal ecstasies is to exist within the soundbox of Israfeli's lute. The swirling music and the incredible reverberation of sound merge and become one with the soul of the seeker. But the skies that angel trod, Where deep thoughts are a duty--Where Love's a grown-up God--Where the Houri glances are Imbued with all the beauty Which we worship in a star.
The "deep thoughts 11 which he mentions in the verse reproduced above are, of course, not intellectual thoughts but passionate expressions of inner feelings. The passions which are released through the resonating lute strings achieve something approaching absolute purity since the strings respond directly to the mood and feelings of the artist whose fingers pluck its strings.  Edgar Allan Poe aimed his art beyond the s tars.
He was remarkably successful in that his work , more t han a c entury after his death, has yet to be appreci ated fully.
Poe gave us the best possible hint s at how to ach ieve cer tain aesthetic ends. It is for the reader to take t h ose clues and strive for success in his own direction. Having dealt with this poem and those in the preceding chapters i n the manner in which they have been presented, we s t and on the bri nk of the timele ss secret. W e, like Poe, are "Out of SPACE--out of • rrME . 112 2 11 nream-Land," in Complete Tales, p. 9 68 . The results of this investigation are basically these: (1) Poe, having formulated an idea about supernal beauty, injected his art with a controlled amount of aesthetic heightening through which he attempted to show the reader the supernal world.
(2) Through the methods elucidated in Chapter II, Poe sought to create the appropriate effect on the reader thus ushering him to the brink of · the supernal realm.

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While the very sub j ect matter limits severely t h e amount of concrete gain one mi ght reasonably exp ect from an investigation of this kind, cer tain conclu s i ons might be readily drawn. Obviously, t he concept of supernal beauty was much more than a philosophical thought to Poe.
The attainment of that ethereal loveliness bec ame his obse ssion (perhap s even "monomania" would not be too harsh a term). As the concept was of such supreme i mportance to the poet, he was driven to an insp ired quest after that end in his own artistic work. Through the use of t h ose effects calculated to aid the r e ader in achi eving something on the order of a glimp se of eth ereal b e aut y , Poe used his p oetr y not only a s an exp os i t i on in vers e f orm of t h e aesthe tic philosophy he so painstakingly revealed in "The Poetic Princip le," but also as a worldly tool which was useful in helping him (and his readers) to a ttain to that realm of exquisiteness for a brief moment.
To reiterate, Poe ' s s triving for the beauty be yond was a maj or characteri s t ic of h is p oetic writings. Of course, Poe's poetry suffers little if appreciated on a level altogether divorced of aesthetic considerations.
The unfortunate majority of critics and readers read the poem with no eye opened to aesthetic enlargement. But, while the art is strong enough to stand and be considered valid even while denied what is probably its foremost purpose, he who reads the poems and applies them a gainst the critical t heories will experience a heightened enjoyment of the art which has been thus injected with a measured amount of hyperaesthesia. Edgar Allan Poe's aesthetic quest through poetry for the ethereal experience of the next world was singularly s ucce ssful. He becomes the reader's oneirocritic, showing and interpreting through p oetry the world of the free imagination. If the reader assumes the appropriate sensory focus and a prop erly intuitive state of mind, the poems cannot fail.