Star In the West TNR.pdf - The Hermetic Library

Poe, in that little masterpiece of his, “The Poetic Principle,” lays down that
the value of a poem lies in the ratio of its elevating excitement, the
excitement being the power it has in elevating the soul. And here we think,
were Poe still living, he would have found no small part of his ideal realized.
By soul we naturally do not mean a haloed fowl strumming dithyrambs on a
harp, or the mere döppelganger of the living; but that inner power of good
and evil which lies latent in self, controlled by that intuitive consciousness
within us, and manifested in our appetites and desires; this intangible soul
aspiring upwards is called Virtue, sinking downwards Vice; finding infinity
in the conceptions of nether and upper, heaven and hell, paradise and
gehenna; and finality on earth – its sporting ground. Further Poe states: that
an epic was of itself a nullity, and that a poem of great length, commencing
as it might in exaltation, ended in nine cases out of ten in somnolence.
Poetry must stimulate, it must irritate the soul in some definite manner, or
else it ceases to be poetry. For when once poetry exerts a soporific power its
whole object is lost, and, as a flash of lightning, it must he vivid, bright,
flaming for a moment, awful, eloquent, rushing from the darkness of night
through the flashing elements of day into the silence of eternity.
And this is exactly the poetry we here find. No poems are of any great
length, no poems here contain a labour on the part of the reader to attain the
end,* though in some places the labours of Hercules seem insignificant
compared with the labours of mental unknotting, but even in such places
(where the sense becomes tangled in the reader’s mind)’ he loses none of the
beauty of rime and rhythm, he never becomes bored, never weary. Set in the
pure gold of verse and line, lie lyrics of surpassing beauty: Tannhäuser (the
longest of the poems) would be a magnificent contemplation even if we cut
from it its sparkling songs, but with them it becomes superb, neither are
there too many; the queen of our poet’s ideals is no gilded prostitute, no
Theodora hung with a myriad flashing jewels, but rather some chaste
priestess carrying on her breast the mystic symbol of Isis, whose belt is a
jewelled Zodiac, and in whose hand is the eternal Ankh.
*Except perhaps in Orpheus.
This interspersing of lyrics has been carried to a charming intensity of
expression and their effect on the mind is one full of joy, no cloying, no
surfeit, no repletion; the variety of the dishes is extraordinary in delicacy and
piquancy as well as in number.