and French letters. At the German criticism, however, I cannot refrain from laughing all the more heartily, all the more seriously I hear it praised. Not that, in detail, it affects me as an absurdity—but in the adaptation of its details. It abounds in brilliant bubbles of suggestion, but these rise and sink and jostle each other, until the whole vortex of thought in which they originate is one indistinguishable chaos of froth. The German criticism is unsettled, and can only be settled by time. At present it suggests without demonstrating, or convincing, or effecting any definite purpose under the sun. We read it, rub our foreheads, and ask "What then?" I am not ashamed to say that I prefer even Voltaire to Goethe, and hold Macaulay to possess more of the true critical spirit than Augustus William and Frederick Schlegel combined.
the technique of the raven
[Poe's Philosophy of Composition, first published in Graham's Magazine, April, 1846, and here reproduced entire, has been called a hoax by most foreign critics. Even Baudelaire thinks that "un peu de charlatanerie" is to be detected in it. On the contrary, it is nothing more than a summarized application of Poe's most characteristic principles of criticism. It does not deal with creation but with formal adaptation. Every point made may be found, explicit or implicit, in what Poe had already said about poetry in general or poems in particular. The reason that it gives offense to many Poe admirers is because its import is misunderstood. The article does not attempt to define genius,
