theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and Psychology 83
readily be exaggerated: the critical theories of classicism and
romanticism differ more violently than the creative practice of
their best writers.
The authors most given to discussing their art wish naturally
to discuss their conscious and technical procedures, for which
they may claim credit, rather than their "given," the unelected
experience which is their matter or their mirror or their prism.
There are obvious reasons why self-conscious artists speak as
though their art were impersonal, as though they chose their
themes either by editorial compulsion or as a gratuitous aesthetic
problem. The most famous document on the topic, Poe's "Philosophy
of Composition," professes to explain by what methodo-
logical strategies, proceeding from what initial aesthetic axioms,
his "Raven" was constructed. To defend his vanity against the
charge that his horror tales were literary imitations, Poe wrote
that their horrors were not of Germany but of the soul; yet that
they were of his own soul he could not admit: he professed to
be a literary engineer, skilled at manipulating the souls of
others. In Poe, the division is terrifyingly complete between the
unconscious, which provides the obsessive themes of delirium,
torture, and death, and the conscious, which literarily develops
them. 15
Were we to set up tests for the discovery of literary talent,
they would doubtless be of two sorts: one, that for poets in the
modern sense, would concern itself with words and their combination,
with image and metaphor, with linkages semantic and
phonetic (i.e., rhyme, assonance, alliteration) ; the latter, for
narrative writers (novelists and dramatists) would concern itself
with characterization and plot-structure.
The literary man is a specialist in association ("wit"), disso-
ciation ("judgment"), recombination (making a new whole out
of elements separately experienced). He uses words as his me-
dium. As a child, he may collect words as other children col-
lect dolls, stamps, or pets. For the poet, the word is not pri-
marily a "sign," a transparent counter, but a "symbol," valuable
for itself as well as in its capacity of representative ; it may even
be an "object" or "thing," dear for its sound or look. Some novelists
may use words as signs (Scott, Cooper, Dreiser), in which
case they may be read to advantage translated into another Ian-