Evermore: Edgar Allan Poe and the Mystery of the Universe

3. The Problem of Beauty

59 THE PROBLEM OF BEAUTY 3 The problem of Beauty does not strike the average person as a problem. For an artist who deals with Beauty day in and day out, however, this problem may raise its ugly head. Poe came to deeper and deeper convictions about Beauty over the course of his career. As a boy he assumed Beauty, as his poem “To Helen” suggests . Inspired by the mother of his best friend, emblematic of the schoolboy crush, Poe pays tribute to Jane Stith Stanard, his ideal of female beauty, a rival to Helen of Troy. Tragically, Jane Stanard descended into insanity and died shortly afterward, and Poe witnessed the contrasting ugliness of life. Beauty and ugliness have a complicated relationship that goes beyond a mental construct to the very nature of things. Thus, death plays a profound part in understanding Beauty.1 As he established himself as a literary critic, Poe needed a basis for evaluating prose and poetry. He had to resolve in his own mind some objective criteria, some just basis for evaluating literature. More importantly, he had to set a standard for his own writing. In his essays and criticisms about writing, Poe reveals his developing understanding about the nature of Beauty and what it tells us about the world. Despite the emphasis that he lays on Beauty throughout Evermore 60 his work, he is not known for his descriptions of beautiful subjects. He suggests and he evokes, but he relies upon the reader to participate by using their own imaginations to picture the scene. In this way, readers rely upon the cosmic source of Beauty rather than the poet’s restrictive impressions. Thus, the common experience of Beauty provides a basis for unity between that which evokes Beauty and those who experience it. The Philosophy of Furniture Poe presented some of his thoughts on taste in “The Philosophy of Furniture,” published in May 1840.Without an aristocracy of blood, as in European countries, Americans defaulted to an aristocracy of money, displaying wealth the way Europeans display their heraldic arms. Because of the role of money in society in America, the general population tends to confuse “magnificence and beauty.”3 Poe lamented that in such an environment, the cost of something determines its artistic merit. Given this cultural situation, Poe offered a number of opinions regarding good taste in the decoration of a room with an important qualification that relates to his understanding of literature in general and the universe. Decoration and the combination of furnishing elements depend “upon the character of the general effect.”4 Good taste in furniture and the arrangement of a room involves the general effect, or as he would come to describe this situation in writing, “the unity of effect.” Poe did not hesitate to make extravagant statements about the variety of carpets he did not appreciate. Because he does not write about his fellow poets and tale writers, but about the people reading the magazine in rooms adorned with the kind of furnishings Poe ridicules, his comments speak directly to his public audience. He wrote, As for those antique floor-cloths still occasionally seen in the dwellings of the rabble—cloths of huge, sprawling, and radiating devices, stripe-interspersed, and glorious with all hues, among which no ground is intelligible,—these are but the wicked invention of a race of time-servers and money-lovers—children of Baal and worshippers of Mammon—Benthams, who to spare thought, 61 The Problem of Beauty and economize fancy, first cruelly invented the Kaleidoscope, and then established joint-stock companies to twirl it by steam.5 Besides flashy carpets, overpowering curtains, and glaring lamps, Poe also took issue with the overuse of mirrors. He decried all the glitter that Scarlet O’Hara adored and speculated that a bumpkin would realize something was wrong in a room so crammed with such “discordant and displeasing effects,” but that the same person in a room tastefully furnished “would be startled into an exclamation of pleasure and surprise.”6 Poe does not provide a developed standard for taste other than indicating that Beauty involves a general effect that brings pleasure and surprise. He also regards Beauty as the antithesis of discord and displeasure. After his general criticism of the prevailing vulgarity of American taste driven by the accumulation of expensive furniture , Poe gives a description of a tastefully furnished room. The description has a startling...