Reconsidering Poe’s “Rationale of Verse”

Reconsidering Poe’s “Rationale of Verse” CHRISTOPHER ARUFFO E dgar Allan Poe’s essay “The Rationale of Verse” has been ill-treated. A rationale is a “an explanation or exposition of controlling principles (as of an opinion, belief, practice, or phenomenon),”1 and Poe’s essay attempts to explain the controlling principles of poetry—including all traditions, across all languages, throughout all history. In writing his “Rationale,” however , Poe disputed scholarly wisdom that had been established for centuries, and the science of his time offered no support. Lacking empirical evidence, Poe made claims from his own intuition and argued from examples and anecdotes. “The Rationale of Verse” was repeatedly rejected before its publication and has since been alternately ignored, scorned, and reviled for its “bluffing and shoddy scholarship.”2 However, recent research in both linguistics and psychology holds the promise of legitimizing Poe’s theories. Additionally, Stuart Levine and Susan Levine’s recent edition Critical Theory: The Major Documents offers a new and exhaustive analysis of “Rationale,” providing us with the occasion to look again at this text. Given what we now know, Poe’s thesis may be extracted and reexamined, allowing us to see “The Rationale of Verse” as an important component of his critical theory. “The Rationale of Verse” is intended as a technical manual for prosodic practice, as Poe makes clear in its fourth paragraph: We are without a treatise on our own verse. In our ordinary grammars and in our works on rhetoric or prosody in general, may be found occasional chapters, it is true, which have the heading, “Versification,” but these are, in all instances, exceedingly meagre. They pretend to no analysis; they propose nothing like system; they make no attempts at even rule; every thing depends upon “authority.” They are confined, in fact, to mere exemplification of the supposed varieties of English feet and English lines.3 This declaration explains why Poe’s manuscript “has generally been read as a technical study of prosody . . . although it announces itself as theory.”4 Poe intends to present a technical study derived from a theory of natural law. He claims that manuals of prosody do not explain the principles underlying their own instructions, such that problems of verse are “solved . . . by a rule, stating C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 69 C H R I S T O P H E R A R U F F O the fact, (or what it, the rule, supposes to be the fact), but without the slightest attempt at the rationale” (96/231–32). Poe explains the intrinsic fault of such a manual: when a problem does not conform to its inventory of rules, the problem is “incomprehensible” (100/236) and cannot be solved. Discussion of anomalous problems can bloat into “forty or fifty vague pages, solely because of [the] inability to show how and why . . . by which showing the question would have been settled in an instant” (98/234). There is “no end” to such problems, Poe claims, but they could easily be resolved “by the true laws (not the supposititious rules) of verse” (100/236). With “The Rationale of Verse,” Poe wishes to encapsulate a unifying law that will simultaneously obviate and justify all systems of prosody. He wants to pinpoint the fundamental motive for the creation of verse—from which impulse any rule might be derived, to which origin every rule could be traced, and from which rationale each rule would be evidently true. Poe stumbles badly in presenting his argument. Overtly, “The Rationale of Verse” is a vicious, petulant, egotistical tirade. Its thesis is overshadowed by a relentless harangue against the ignorance of scholastic authority. A strawman definition of verse is given and vigorously eviscerated (82–86/218–21), but no alternative comes forward in its stead. Having no empirical support for his assertions, Poe repeatedly appeals to “common sense” (81/215, 86/221, 99/235, 100/236, 108/244, 118/254), despite his own admission elsewhere that “profound ignorance on any particular topic is always sure to manifest itself by some allusion to ‘common sense’ as an all-sufficient instructor.”5 Every page...