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By C. Alphonso Smith, from his book Edgar Allan Poe: How to Know Him, 1921.
In this excerpt from a larger study of Poe's writing, Smith explains in clear terms how Poe's criticism differed from that of his contemporaries. Smith was head of the department of English at the U.S. Naval Academy and Edgar Allan Poe Professor at the University of Virginia.
Poe's criticisms are more than introductions to his own works. They have a value as historical material in the evolution of American literature. They serve as contemporary witnesses to the supremacy of Cooper, Bryant and Irving, and as heralds of the greater group represented by Longfellow, Lowell, 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 easilyhave 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.
To compare Poe as a critic with Coleridge or Matthew Arnold or Sainte-Beuve or Taine or Lowell is to compare him with men who wore, it is true, the same livery, but who served under other banners. His criticism was different from theirs because his purpose was different. When I read them, I feel more than I feel in Poe the impact of philosophical suggestions, of wide historical relationships, of literature interpreted as life, and life seen anew through literature. Whether you call their method judicial in the Aristotelian sense, or purely impressionistic, or learnedly historical, the man whose work they are criticizing seems in certain vital ways to live again. I seem to know him as a man and as a thinker, but not as a craftsman. How he succeeded in bodying forth his conceptions, how the man became for the time being the literary artist, how he made an ally of that tested body of truth known as technique, how he differs from me who now think as he thought but am as powerless as before to write as he wrote,--this remains in its original obscurity. But it is this niche in criticism that Poe has come nearer filling than any one else. It is this quality in his critical work that makes him a living force wherever men are "stung by the splendor of a sudden thought" but impotent to impart it. It is this radiation from his criticisms that makes them permanently serviceable not merely to the creative artist in letters but to all those who wish to write or to speak more convergently and thus more effectively.
