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How Well Did Poe Know Milton?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
“All literary history,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe, “demonstrates that for the most frequent and palpable plagiarisms, we must search the works of the most eminent poets.” The term “plagiarism” may be variously defined in connection with a work of literary art, the crime ranging in degree from servile reproduction to such creative use of sources as one finds in Shakespeare and Milton. Indeed, the term is all too often used without any apparent recognition of the fact that an idea—or a phrase—may occur independently to two different minds. To Edgar Poe, harried, beset, frustrated, the thing became an obsession and for him the term gained the widest applicability—particularly as he saw, or fancied he saw, others poaching on his own preserves. Yet ironically the question arises as to whether the author of “Al Aaraaf” might not, by his own definition, be indicted for plagiarizing John Milton; whether, indeed, his reply to Outis —“Can any man doubt that between the Iliad and the Paradise Lost there might be established even a thousand idiosyncratic identities?—And yet is any man fool enough to maintain that the Iliad is the only original of Paradise Lost?”—represents to some degree a defensive attitude? In view of Poe's several footnotes indicating Milton as his source, additional annotation by his editors, and a considerable number of references to the blind bard in his essays and critical pieces, it would seem of considerable importance to determine just how familiar the poet was with his great predecessor.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 “Reply to Outis, V,” in Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (N. Y., 1902), xii, 106—hereafter “Harrison.” This edition has been used for material not available in The Complete Poems and Stories, ed. A. H. Quinn and E. H. O'Neill (N. Y., 1946), 2 vols.
2 Broadway Journal, 22 Mar. 1845, Harrison, xii, 79.
3 Particularly Killis Campbell, in his fine edition of The Poems (N. Y., 1917).
4 “Longfellow's Ballads,” Quinn and O'Neill, ii, 941, 946.
5 “PoeticPrinciple,” Quinn and O'Neill, ii, 1021 et passim.
6 Ida Langdon, Milton's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (New Haven, 1924), p. 40.
7 An Apology for Smectymnuus, in The Student's Milton, ed. F. A. Patterson (N, Y., 1930), p. 571.
8 “Poetic Principle,” ii, 1027.
9 Paradise Lost, “The Verse,” Patterson, p. 159.
10 “Poetic Principle,” ii, 1026.
11 Apology, Patterson, p. 548.
12 “Longfellow's Ballads,” ii, 938-939.
13 “Poetic Principle,” ii, 1027.
14 A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, 1944), p. v.
15 Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (N. Y., 1934), i, 129.
16 Titled “Letter to B—–,” Quinn and O'Neill, ii, 857.
17 “The Quacks of Helicon,” ii, 926.
18 Harrison, xiv; the first and fourth are to be found on p. 47, the second on p. 53, the third on p. 54.
19 Edited by S. C. Hall; review in Broadway Journal (17 May 1845), Harrison, xii, 139.
20 Quinn and O'Neill, ii, 579-580 (reference is to the invocation to PL, Book iii).
21 Graham's (Mar. 1845), Harrison, vii, 271.
22 Harrison, xii, 7-8.
23 “George P. Morris,” Harrison, x, 44.
24 The Influence of Milton upon English Poetry (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 80-85 passim.
25 “The Rationale of Verse,” Quinn and O'Neill, ii, 987-988.
26 Prose Works, Harrison, xii, 244.
27 “Zinzendorff and Other Poems,” Southern Literary Messenger (Jan. 1836), Harrison, vii, 131.
28 Harrison, xii, 57.
29 Quinn and O'Neill, ii, 911 (the reference is to “Thanatopsis,” l. 41 and ll. 50-53).
30 “Longfellow's Ballads,” Harrison, ii, 941 (cf. Milton on divine inspiration, invocation to PL, vii).
31 Broadway Journal (26 July 1845), Harrison, xii, 195.
32 Harrison, xvi, 26 and 27.
33 “Marginalia,” Harrison, xvi, 153; see also xvi, 58 (“Inversions should be dismissed”).
34 But cf. Harrison, xvi, 58, “All contractions are awkward. It is no paradox that the more prosaic the construction of verse, the better.”
35 “Bryant's Poems,” Quinn and O'Neill, ii, 904.
36 “Prose Works,” Harrison, xii, 244.
37 Professor Mabbott is convinced that this name, nowhere else recorded, is a misprint for NESAEE, a sea nymph mentioned by Homer.
38 Poe's “To [Marie Louise Shew],” March 1848, Quinn and O'Neill, i, 80.
39 “Bryant's Poems,” Quinn and O'Neill, ii, 895, 892.
40 “Some Notes on Poe's Al Aaraaf,” MP, xiii, i, 41-42.
41 See also lines 14-15 in the 1831 edition, cited by Killis Campbell, reminiscent of “Il Penseroso”: “Thou! thy framing is so holy / Sorrow is not melancholy.”
42 Although Campbell (p. 176) calls attention to lines from Lalla Rookh, he agrees that one might compare with this tradition of the Asphodel, amaranth in PL iii.353-357.
43 “The Humanitarians held that God was to be held as having really a human form—vide Clarke's Sermon, Vol. i, page 26, fol. edition.
“The drift of Milton's argument leads him to employ language which would appear, at first sight, to verge upon their doctrine; but it will be seen immediately that he guards himself against the charge of having adopted one of the most ignorant errors of the dark ages of the church.
Dr. Sumner's Notes on Milton's Christian Doctrine
“Among Milton's minor poems are these lines:
Dicite sacrorum praesides nemorum Deae &c Quis ille primus cujus ex imagine
Natura solers finxit humanum genus?
Eternus, incorruptus, aequaevus polo,
Unusque et universus exemplar Dei.
“And afterwards:
Non cui profundus Caecitas lumen dedit
Dircaeus augur vidit hunc alto sinu, &c.“
the Latin lines, as Killis Campbell points out, from his De Idea Platonica quemadmodum Aristoteles Intellexit, I. 7-10, 25-26. The whole was later used as the first three paragraphs of “A Few Words about Brainard” Graham's, Feb. 1842.
44 See also PL v.395: “Spring and Autumn here / Danc'd hand in hand”; vii.374: “Dawn and the Pleiades before him danc'd”; and ix.103.
45 PL i.714-715. Interestingly enough, in “Our Amateur Poets, no. 1, Flaccus,” Poe cites lines as “perhaps not altogether original with Mr. Ward,” but taken from his own Al Aaraaf!
46 Campbell sees as a basis for 1. 20 of this passage, PL ii.1004 f.; for “the window of one circular diamond, etc.,” the stairway which Milton describes in PL iii.503 ff. He finds “Al Aaraaf” n.60 “vaguely suggestive of the immortal scene in the fourth book of Paradise Lost (598 ff.) describing the coming of evening in Paradise.”
47 ii.181. The lines cited are 56-57 of the “Epitaph for the Marchioness of Winchester.”
48 He refers to PL iii.418 ff. and 543 ff.
49 ii.231 ff., bearing the tell-tale note: “pennon—for pinion.—Milton.”
50 Campbell, p. 154 (“Lycidas,” l. 69).
51 Ibid., pp. 198,201.
52 “Mr. Poe's Reply to the Letter of Outis,” iv (29 Mar. 1845), Harrison, xii, 98.
53 Ibid., v (5 Apr. 1845), Harrison, xii, 105-106.