[William Gilmore Simms],review in the Southern Patriot

It is a great error of the multitude to confound poetry with those things and arts upon which a judgement is easily made up. If the standards of poetry be fixed, as must be the case with all human arts before we can possibly or wisely sit in judgement upon them, it is equally certain that its varieties are endless, and each calls for standards of its own. The vulgar disregard of this necessity, is at the bottom of all the thousand blunders which presumption commits, whenever it places its beefy bulk in the fauteuils of literary criticism. There it sits, dispensing judgment with the most vulgar air of authority, without the slightest consciousness of the true nature of the case before it. Without dreaming of the true principles involved, and making the arbitrary dicta of its narrow experience or comprehension, the code by which to judge of principles and performance wholly foreign to all which it has ever known or understood. Thus, to the person who pins his faith to the style of composition peculiar to Pope and Dryden, this volume of Mr Poe will seem the most arrant nonsense. Such a person will be utterly at a loss to conceive the possibility of a human and sane reason having been present with the writer of the verses before us at any one moment during the performance of his whole task. The wild, fanciful and abstract character of these poems, will prove incomprehensible to him who requires that poetry shall embody an axiom in morals, or a maxim in philosophy or society, and the seemingly purposeless character — wholly purposeless in an economical and practical sense — of these phantasies, will seem to him worthy only of the inmates of a cell in Bedlam. Without going so far as to approve wholly of the scheme and tenor of Mr Poe's performances in verse, we must beg to caution those who, habituated to certain dissimilar kinds of composition, would utterly reject, or refuse any faith in their merits, that in making up their judgments, regard must be had to the not always understood varieties of poetry — to its wonderful flexibility — the numerous classes of style conception and utterance which it enjoys, — and the still more infinite forms in which it may hereafter, and in the hands of future artists be found to embody itself. We are apt, however wise, experienced and indulgent, to insist, after a certain age upon a certain routine in the course of our studies and reading; and to object to the novel and the unusual for no better reason than its singularity. Now, it is in poetry and the indefinite arts alone, that originality can be found or fancied, and a refusal to make the exception in respect to these has been the cause of all those unfortunate cases of judgement, which have had their decisions reversed by posterity. Mr Poe is a fantastic and a mystic — a man of dreamy mood and wandering fancies. His scheme of poem requires that his reader shall surrender himself to influences of pure imagination. He demands as a preliminary that you should recognize totally unreal premises — that you should yield yourself wholly to the witch element, as implicitly as Mephistopheles requires it of Faust, ascending the wizard eminences of the Brocken. Unless you can make him this concession you had better have nothing to do with his volume. At all events, for your mutual sakes, do not venture to pass any opinion upon it. He has not written for you, and you are not the critic for him.