“‘As urged by Schelling’: Schelling's Philosophy of Art and Poe's Critical and Fictional...

"As Urged by Schelling": Coleridge, Poe and the Schellingian RefrainAuthor(s): Sean Moreland and Devin Zane ShawSource: The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 50-80Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41717105Accessed: 25-04-2017 23:20 UTC

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so "As Urged by Schelling"

"As Urged by Schelling": Coleridge, Poe and the Schellingian Refrain

Sean Moreland and Devin Zane Shaw

'Tis mine and it is likewise yours; But an if this will not do;

Let it be mine, good friend! for I Am the poorer of the two.

- Coleridge

What may not an ingenious man make out against another, if he will put his own definitions on the other's words?

- Coleridge

"As urged by Schelling..."

Judging by citations alone, it would appear that Poe had relatively little

interest in the work of German idealist philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. In The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe ( 1 995), Thomas Hansen and Burton

Pollin dispense with Schelling's importance to Poe cursorily, writing that

Poe mentions Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) five times in all. Two passages are significant. The reference

in "Morella" to "the doctrines of Identity as urged by Schelling" is a good example of Poe's use of German ideas to lend a tone of high intellectual seriousness to his tales. His true attitude toward Schelling, however, can be inferred from an allusion to the same idea in

Poe's note to material subsequently excised from "Loss of Breath" (1835). There he stresses his mistrust of German philosophic rhetoric.1

Hansen explains that, despite his praise of Schelling as critic elsewhere, Poe's invocations of Schelling are ultimately mocking and dismissive (80). Further, it has been pointed out by critics that despite Poe's pretensions

to a broad familiarity with German literature and philosophy, his actual

knowledge of such was almost entirely second-hand and extremely limited.

Probably the first of these was George Woodberry, who over a century ago wrote that Poe "knew no more of Tieck than he might have derived

from Carlyle, or of Schelling than was told in Coleridge, and Schlegel


he had read in an early American translation."2 Hansen's book largely reinforces this point, effectively delineating the limits of Poe's knowledge

of the German language and its writers, concluding that aside from a "superficial working knowledge," Poe was "ignorant of the language," and that his awareness of German literature and philosophy therefore was

almost entirely second-hand and piecemeal (3).

We will not contradict these critical assessments here. There is no

reason to doubt Woodberry's assertion that Poe relied extensively on Coleridge for his knowledge of Schelling, as well as on references to and translated passages from Schelling in periodicals including The Dial and Blackwood 's Magazine ; nor, following Hansen, is there reason to think that Poe read any of Schelling's work in the original German. Nevertheless, we will argue that Poe's reception, or misprision, of Schelling's ideas had a much more vital influence on his thought and writing than Woodberry's or Hansen's assessments of Poe's limited and mediated knowledge would suggest. It is our contention that Poe's indirect reception of Schelling's thought contributed to a transformation

of his critical practice, while at the same time injecting change and novelty into some of Schelling's concepts. Let us return to Poe's references to Schelling and specifically Hansen's summary of these citations: "These references [are] to Schelling's Naturphilosophie, a work frequently cited in English language journals, and they reflect [the] mood of a scoffer, not an ironist" (80).3 While Hansen is correct

that Schelling's name sometimes serves as a métonymie invocation of the kind of opacity and obscurity stereotypically associated with post-Kantian German thought, this certainly does not preclude Poe's adaptation of some of Schelling's key concepts. After all, Poe notoriously evinces the greatest scorn for those writers from whom he has borrowed the most. However, this scorn is not directed at the Naturphilosphie (which itself is not identical to the "doctrines of Identity" mentioned by Poe), for insofar as both Schelling and Poe reject a mechanistic account of nature they have much in common. Instead, Poe rejects what he considers to be the metaphysicianism of Schelling and, later, Coleridge, while appropriating important aspects of his predecessors' respective philosophies of art.

More specifically, we will argue that Poe appropriates, via Coleridge, Schelling's critique of allegory. Poe is indebted to Coleridge, as


52 "As Urged by Schelling"

Coleridge is to Schelling, for his view of allegory as a literary device and interpretive strategy which is restrictive and undesirable because of its reliance on external points of reference. Each of these otherwise very different theoreticians of art had in common the desire to articulate

an alternative category through which it is possible to grasp the unity of form and content in the work - whether it be the work of art or the

"work" of mythology. This category, for Schelling, is the symbol, which

Coleridge recasts as the "tautegory," and for Poe it is - shorn of many theological and metaphysical implications - the refrain.

Before we articulate this vital critical commonality, however, it must be

pointed out that discerning the extent of Schelling's influence on Poe is complicated by two major factors. The first is Poe's inconsistency in acknowledging his sources, an inconsistency that mirrored Coleridge's own treatment of Schelling from whom he derived some of his most important concepts. As Paul Hamilton observes, in the Biographia Literaria (1817) and elsewhere, Coleridge "displaces his worries about his own originality onto speculations about Schelling's unacknowledged indebtedness to Jakob Boehme."4 This strategy is paralleled by Poe's major criticisms of Coleridge in texts including the "Letter to B - " (1836) and "The Literati of New York City" (1846), in which Poe, while praising Coleridge's powers as a poet, explicitly rejects key elements of Coleridge's thought including his theory of the productive imagination versus the reproductive fancy. What Poe does not admit is his outright adoption of many other elements of Coleridge's thought. This obfuscation can best be understood in the broader intellectual and

cultural context of the American Renaissance, in which - in the wake of

agitations by American intellectuals for American literary and cultural autonomy - to confess the direct influence of British writers was to open oneself to critical censure.

This was not a wholesale denial of British influence, for Richard Gravil

argues persuasively that "for Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne and Poe, one route towards cultural independence was their election of Romantic rather than Victorian [British] contemporaries,"5 and this is certainly evident in both Emerson's and Poe's admissions of Coleridge's influence. While both continued to read and derive inspiration from the post -Biographia Literaria work, both would also downplay the importance of the later work, especially Aids


Moreland and Shaw 53

to Reflection, in their writings. This is despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that, thanks to James Marsh's influential 1 829 American edition,

Aids to Reflection was Coleridge's most popular prose work among American readers, and that, as Gravil demonstrates, it influenced these

writers in important ways.

While in an 1 835 review of Coleridge's Table Talk, Poe would describe Aids to Reflection as a "great written prose work,"6 in the 1846 essay on "The Literati of New York City" he would refer to it disparagingly, writing:

"Fancy," says the author of "Aids to Reflection" (who aided Reflection to much better purpose in his "Genevieve") - "Fancy combines - Imagination creates." This was intended, and has been received, as a distinction; but it is a distinction without a difference -

without even a difference of degree. The Fancy as nearly creates as the imagination, and neither at all. Novel conceptions are merely unusual combinations. The mind of man can imagine nothing which does not exist. 7

Here, Poe adapts a distinction Coleridge makes in Aids to Reflection 8 and uses it to shore up his rejection of a distinction Coleridge had earlier

made in Biographia Literaria, while simultaneously suggesting that Coleridge's metaphysical effusions m Aids are of far less philosophical significance than his poems themselves. This is one of the best examples

of Poe's cagey rhetorical staging where Coleridge's influence is concerned, as he specifically differentiates his ideas from those of not just Coleridge, but the metaphysical Coleridge of Aids to Reflection. This reinforces Gravil's observation and suggests Poe's awareness of Aids to Reflection's importance to the Boston Transcendentalists, against whom Poe was typically at great pains to define himself, and with whom Poe would also associate Schelling, especially in "How to Write a Blackwood's Article" (1842), which further complicates the discernment of details in Poe's reception of Schelling.

So, while Hansen is surely right in stating that it "was potentially dangerous for an American writer to acquire a reputation in the literary



marketplace as an imitator of the German school" (10), as Poe's vexed framing of his relationship with Coleridge suggests, it was perhaps even more dangerous for an American writer of Poe's generation to be perceived as an imitator of British writing. Despite Poe's self- defense against accusations of Germanism in his preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839), it may be that the admission of German influences was, in his milieu and to his mind and despite his frequent parodying of German scholarship and Sturm und Drang writing, more acceptable than what might be perceived as a regression to British cultural paternalism. If so, this would help account for Poe's evident desire to eschew the appearance of drawing heavily on Coleridge

by running the risk of appearing to draw on Schelling himself.

The second, and closely related, difficulty is one which is widely endemic to Poe studies, that of Poe's notorious tonal instability and penchant for ambiguous parody. Most of the references to Schelling that pepper Poe's tales, as Hansen points out, are obviously parodie, and linked to his satirical attacks on the high-minded obscurantism that characterized Coleridge's investment in Schelling's metaphysical thought (which Poe suspected) and the similar appropriation of Schelling by Emerson and the Boston Transcendentalists (whom Poe abhorred). Nevertheless, while the references to Schelling in various tales of the mid-to-late 1830s are marked by misrepresentation or parody, this should not deter us from recognizing the importance that some of Schelling's key concepts had for Poe. We will briefly review a few of these parodie allusions here, beginning with "Loss of Breath" ( 1 835), whose breathlessly prolix narrator repeatedly invokes Schelling.

The narrator of this tale has been variously interpreted as a parody of Coleridge, of Emerson, or of Boston Transcendentalism generally. In any case, he embodies the metaphysical pretensions that Poe held in contempt in many of his contemporaries, an embodiment reinforced by material excised from the final version of "Loss of Breath," a note which advises readers to recognize in the narration of Mr. Lacko'breath "much of the absurd metaphysicianism of the redoubted Schelling."9

In the same year, Poe's early drafts of the tale "Morella" ( 1 835) similarly

employ Schelling as a metonym for all that is abstrusely metaphysical. Here, however, the atmospheric effect to which this invocation contributes is rather one of ominous irreality and intellectual obsession



than of scathing satire. However, whereas Poe's reference to Schelling's identity-philosophy in the overtly parodie "Loss of Breath" is perhaps loosely accurate in its casual adumbration of Schelling's thought, in that it depicts Lacko'Breath as facing the loss of his individual identity through absorption in the universal, the reference in the overtly more serious "Morella" is deliberately misleading.10 Describing Morella's studies, the narrator writes that "above all the doctrines of Identity as urged by Schelling were the points of discussion presenting the most of beauty to the imaginative Morella. That kind of identity which is not improperly called 'personal' Mr. Lock determines, truly I think, to consist in the sameness of a rational being" {Tales, 1: 226). Whereas the reference in "Loss of Breath" suggests Poe's awareness that Schelling's identity-philosophy is in stark opposition to Locke's concept of identity,

he suggestively substitutes one for the other in this passage, eliding the

blatant difference between Locke's discussion of personal identity and Schelling's attempt to demonstrate the absolute identity of subjectivity (and thus personality) and objectivity." While its chief purpose is to set up the horrific transmigration that the narrator believes to have occurred by the tale's conclusion, it also serves as an apt epistemological parody, since Poe would have known that Locke was the major figure in British empirical philosophy that Coleridge was reacting against in his turn to Kant and the post-Kantians. By putting Locke's definition in his pastiche, Poe again airs his contempt for " metaphysicianism " by suggesting that this is yet another "distinction without a difference," as

he wrote of Coleridge's "desynonymization" of fancy from imagination.

Part of the intellectual context for this parody is undoubtedly established

by James Marsh's American edition of Aids to Reflection. His introduction reinforces that the importance of Coleridge's book, to Americans specifically, is its critical intervention against the "prevailing"

metaphysical system which is fundamentally at odds with Christian theology and philosophy. Marsh writes, "by the prevailing system of metaphysics, I mean the system, of which in modern times Locke is the reputed author, and the leading principles of which, with various modifications, more or less important, but not altering its essential character, have been almost universally received in this country."12 Marsh goes on to claim that the prevalence of this system of thought in

American theology and philosophy is disastrous, since "so long as we hold the doctrines of Locke and the Scotch metaphysicians respecting



power, cause and effect, motives, and the freedom of the will, we not only can make and defend no essential distinction between that which is natural, and that which is spiritual, but we cannot even find rational grounds for the feeling of moral obligation ."'3 Marsh advocates Coleridge's Aids as crucial to overcoming these influential doctrines, which Coleridge elsewhere referred to as "the general contagion of . . . mechanic philosophy."14

While Poe shared in common with Schelling, Coleridge, and the Transcendentalists the rejection of mechanistic materialism, Poe was equally skeptical of the idealist systems they would variously propose or pursue.15 Poe continues his parodie invocations of Schelling with his early drafts of the satiric tale, "The Psyche Zenobia" (1838). This tale, featuring an inane protagonist perhaps based loosely on Margaret Fuller,

who would shortly become editor of the "Frogpondian" periodical The Dial, would later become "How to Write A Blackwood's Article."

Again, it is not so much Schelling who comes in for Poe's mockery, as his adoption by writers who speciously attempt to capture "the tone metaphysical." The 1838 version reads:

If you know any big words this is your chance for them.

Talk of the academy and the lyceum, and say something about the Ionic and Italic schools, or about Bossarion,

and Kant, and Schelling, and Fitche [sic], and be sure you abuse a man called Locke, and bring in the words a priori and a posteriori. (Tales, I: 342, note x)

The tale satirizes the obscurantist density of those writers whom Poe thought to be lost in what Coleridge, in his essay "On the Prometheus of Aeschylus" (1834), called the "holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics."16 While the satiric tone would intensify in later versions of the tale ( 1 840, 1 842), Schelling's name would notably be struck from

the final version, which would instead single out Kant alone:

The tone metaphysical is also a good one. If you know any big words this is your chance for them .... Say something about objectivity and subjectivity. Be sure to abuse a man called Locke. Turn up your nose at things in general, and when you slip anything a little


too absurd, you need not be at the trouble of scratching

it out, but just add a foot-note, and say that you are indebted for the above profound observation to the ' Kritik der reinen Vernunft ,' or to the ' Metaphysische

Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft.'' It will look erudite and - and - and frank. (Tales, I: 341-342)

In brief, it appears that after 1838, Poe's pillorying employment of Schelling subsides - and he excises most of the references to Schelling in his revisions of these tales - with the notable exception of the reference in "Morella," from which we take our title. Schelling's name now appears, instead, in a different context in a few of Poe's reviews and

critical writings, where it is invoked with express admiration. This is made even more interesting in light of Hansen's observation that "Poe's public repudiation of Germanic influence in the preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque makes 1839 a pivotal year in his stylistic relationship to German letters" (106). This "public repudiation" of "German letters" does not seem to apply to Schelling, who stops being the butt of Poe's parodies and instead becomes praised as a critic.

This praise occurs in Poe's "Exordium" to Graham 's Magazine ( 1 842), and again in its revised form in his essay on "American Poetry" ( 1 845). Poe writes:

And what need we say of the Germans? - what of Winkelmann, of Novalis, of Schelling, of Goethe, of Augustus William, and of Frederick Schlegel? - that their magnificent critiques raisonnées differ from those of Kaimes [Kames], of Johnson, and of Blair, in principle not at all, (for the principles of these artists will

not fail until Nature herself expires,) but solely in their

more careful elaboration, their greater thoroughness, their more profound analysis and application of the principles themselves. ( Essays , 1030)17

Hansen dismisses this oddly praiseful preface, writing that Poe "essentially repeats familiar characterizations that were commonly applied to German scholars," and that "this sort of adulation [...] pertains

badly to the authors that Poe names," since "he had not read these



writers in depth - if at all" (77). Nevertheless, Poe would not have had to read Schelling "in depth" to have internalized some of his "principles themselves," since they has been distilled, if in a modified form, by a number of Coleridge's works. Most prominent among these are the Biographia Literaria, Aids to Reflection, and various essays, such as "On Prometheus," delivered as a lecture in 1825, and published as an essay in the Transactions of The Royal Society in 1 834, a text with which Poe

may well have been familiar, and which may have influenced his own praise of Aeschylus's Prometheus as one of the few "entire poems of a pure ideality" in his 1836 review of The Culprit Fay ( Essays , 523n). The likelihood that Poe had Coleridge's essay in mind while writing this review is reinforced by Poe's praise of Coleridge later in the same review, praise which is also subtly critical, in a manner reminiscent of the "Literati" piece quoted above, in its strategy of simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal:

It is more than possible that the man who, of all writers,

living or dead, has been most successful in writing the purest of all poems - that is to say, poems which excite

more purely, most exclusively, and most powerfully the

imaginative faculties in men - owed his extraordinary and almost magical preeminence rather to metaphysical

than poetical powers. We allude to the author of Christabel, of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and

of Love - to Coleridge - whose head, if we mistake not its character, gave no great phrenological tokens of

Ideality, while the organs of Causality and Comparison were most singularly developed. ( Essays , 512)

Here, Poe again displaces the reader's attention from the degree to which he is indebted precisely to Coleridge's philosophical writings for his own insights, both building on and subverting his source. In suggesting that Coleridge's own powers as a poet "to excite [...] the imaginative faculties" are dependent upon his metaphysical, rather than

poetical, powers, he suggests that Coleridge succeeds as a poet despite his own poetic theory, which unifies the ends of poetry and philosophy.

Instead, Poe resituates the role of Coleridge's metaphysics as an aid not to Truth, as Coleridge might have hoped, but rather to the excitement his

poems evoke, to the affective intensity which is Poe's sine non qua of



"Ideality." In short, he suggests that Coleridge's metaphysics serve his poetry much the way Poe's references to Schelling serve his tales; they tonally modulate the work, contributing to its unity of effect. This highly

insightful displacement is exemplary of the combination of ingenuity and duplicity that marks Poe's critical writings. We will return to those

critical writings below, but first we must attempt to explain the context

of those concepts within the philosophical frameworks developed by Schelling and Coleridge respectively, in order to appreciate the radicality

of Poe's revision of these concepts.

The Symbol and Mythology in Schelling

Within the play of ingenuity and duplicity of Poe's criticisms, it is nevertheless possible to locate, despite a number of displacements, a persistent critique of allegory as a literary device and interpretive key. For Schelling, Coleridge, and Poe, allegory is a subordinate device or category because it requires that the work of art (or, in the case of Schelling or Coleridge, religion and mythology) be understood according

to external categories. As Coleridge argues in The Statesman 's Manual (1816), allegory "is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture- language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principle being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot."18 In opposition to allegory, Schelling, Coleridge, and Poe each propose a category that presents the unity of form and content in the artwork,

or even the unity of meaning and being in religion or mythology. For Schelling, this category is called the symbol; for Coleridge, the tautegory; and for Poe, the work is unified by the refrain.

We must first turn to the influence of Schelling on Coleridge. An immediate philological difficulty is that it is Schelling's lectures on The Philosophy of Art (1 802- 1 804) that most fully articulate the distinction

between symbol and allegory, and these were not widely available until they were collected in the posthumous Sämmtliche Werke compiled by his son (1856-1861). While the distinctions Schelling makes between schematism, allegory, and symbol are present in the notes of Henry Crabb Robinson, who attended these lectures on "Schellings Aesthetick" in 1 802- 1 803, making it possible that Coleridge was familiar with these

distinctions at this early point, there is no certain evidence that Robinson



shared this material with Coleridge.19 The distinction between the symbolism of Greek mythology and Christian allegory is also present in

Schelling's On University Studies (1803), although Coleridge does not seem to be familiar with this text either.20 Fortunately, this difficulty is

ameliorated because the concept of the "symbol" is treated in other texts

that Coleridge had read. In Philosophy and Religion (1804), Schelling emphasizes that "true mythology is a symbolism [ Symbolik ] of the ideas,"21 while the treatment of Greek mythology enabled by Schelling's

concept of the symbolic provides the basis for his later text, The Deities

ofSamothrace (1815), which influenced Coleridge's discussion of the tautegory of myth in "On Prometheus."

Schelling's lectures on The Philosophy of Art were given while he was attempting to develop a complete system of what he called identity-philosophy or absolute idealism (this is the 'doctrine of identity' mentioned by Poe's tales, above) from 1801-1806. There, Schelling seeks to demonstrate the original identity of subjectivity and objectivity, freedom and necessity, as well as the self and the world. For the purposes of this essay, we can only describe this system in the most general terms.22 Identity-philosophy signals Schelling's break with the transcendental idealism of Kant and Fichte, which means

that he argues that self-consciousness can neither explain objectivity nor knowledge of the objective world (nature or natura naturans ), but itself needs to be explained. Schelling proposes that subjectivity and objectivity must be explained through their common genesis from the original identity of the absolute. It is the task of philosophy to think this

identity, through the construction of philosophical ideas, which present

the unity of the universal and particular. But Schelling also accords an important place for artistic production, which through the imagination

( Einbildungskraft ) produces or presents ( darstellen ) the universal in the

particular artwork - a conception of artistic production which lays the ground for Coleridge's formulation of the symbolic function of tautegory and anticipates Poe's cosmopoetic vision in Eureka P

In §39 of The Philosophy of Art, Schelling proposes that the symbolic is the "absolute form" of the presentation of the universal and particular

within the particular and concrete form of the artwork; it is the synthesis

of two partial forms, schematism and allegory.24 Unlike schematism and allegory, in the symbol, meaning and being are the same (PA, 49 /V:



411). The symbolic provides, on his account, the interpretive key to understanding mythology, which he claims is the "necessary condition and first content of all art." ( PA, 45 /V: 405) The opposition between the

symbolic and allegory not only explains the difference between Greek mythology and Christian mythology, it also provides the conceptual tools necessary to determine the task for a modern, "new mythology" emerging in fragmentary form in the works of Goethe or Cervantes (PA, 232-34/V: 676-79). Far from a merely historical analysis of the difference between symbol and allegory, Schelling is also arguing that the coming "new mythology" must symbolically present the absolute unity of freedom and necessity, self and nature, the individual and society, rather than just present this unity in only allegorical terms.

The problem with allegory, for Schelling, is that the work of art takes its rule (its form and content) from elsewhere: the content "portrayed signifies or means something other than itself." (PA, 148/V: 200) This, he claims, is a primary element in Christian mythology, which makes finitude as moral agency an allegory of the infinite. While schematism, allegory, and the symbolic are modes of artistic presentation, Schelling also considers them as universal categories, which leads to this "something other" of allegory's rule: "thinking is simple schematization; all action, by contrast, is allegorical (since as a particular it signifies a universal); art is symbolic" (PA, 48/V: 411, translation modified). Philosophically speaking, when Schelling states that action is allegorical, he has in mind Kant's and Fichte's accounts of practical reason: each practical act aims toward the categorical imperative, each finite action aims toward an infinite task.25 But this claim also has a specifically Christian resonance: that the finite is an allegory of the infinite means that each person's moral action takes on a significance in the next life (PA, 61/V: 430). As such, allegory is appropriate to Christian mythology and Christian art, but it does not capture the singularity of Greek mythology.26

To interpret Greek mythology as a set of allegories is, on Schelling's account, one-sided. While allegorical meaning is always a possibility of Greek mythology due to its "infinity of significance," the separation

of the allegorical elements is only possible once this mythology is no longer a living social form, "after all poetic spirit was extinguished" (PA,

47-48/V: 410). In its living form, Greek mythology is symbolic: the



universal and the particular "are absolutely one," not only in the work of art, but also in the way that a mythology expresses the public life of

a people.27 Artistic production is neither a derivative form of human activity (that is, an illusory representation of social life), nor a mimetic

play of fear and pity as in Aristotle, nor an object of disinterested satisfaction as it is for Kant. Schelling writes: "whatever is to be the object of absolute artistic presentation should be as concrete and self-identical as the image, and yet as universal and significant as the concept."28 In the plastic arts, sculpture is a symbol of the indifference

of content and form, universal and particular, while in the literary arts,

tragedy - insofar as it reconciles freedom and the necessity of fate, and

the individual and community - is the highest presentation of art and mythology. Tragedy, in its performance, literally enacts the identity of

freedom and necessity (PA, 252ff/V: 694ff).

As mentioned, neither Coleridge nor Poe knew of the details of these posthumously published lectures. Nevertheless, Schelling's claim - that mythology in the most concrete detail has conceptual, historical, and philosophical content - plays an important role in the reconfiguration of his thought after 1 809.29 This system, which is announced in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, is characterized by a theological turn toward a philosophy of freedom that

later develops into a philosophy of revelation. Despite the differences between his later philosophy and his system of absolute idealism, Schelling maintains that mythology must be understood according to its symbolism which is both concrete and particular as image but also universal in concept. The meaning and form of mythology have a common genesis and can only subsequently be separated. This much is consistent from the treatment of the symbol in the Philosophy

of Art through the later philosophy of mythology of the 1840s. In the Philosophy of Art, he argues that in the symbol, "Meaning ... is simultaneously being itself' (PA, 49/V: 411). In The Deities of Samothrace, he claims that the examination of the series of the deities

of the Cabiri provides the opportunity "for the investigation of the underlying concept [zu Grunde liegenden Begriffs ] of each deity."30 And,

following Coleridge, in his lectures on the philosophy of mythology in the 1840s, Schelling will specify that mythology "is not allegorical, it is tautegorical. To mythology the gods are actually existing essences, gods that are not something else, do not mean something else, but


rather mean only what they are."3 ' During this period of his philosophy,

after 1809, Schelling seeks to reconfigure philosophy according to the grounds of the concrete conceptual content of mythology or revelation, the reiterations of the relation between nature and freedom from the

"actual primordial system of humanity" (as he states in the "Postscript" to The Deities of Samothrace) to the fullness of Christian revelation (. DS , 30/ VIII: 423).

In other words, Schelling attempts to show not only the concrete instances of the history of human consciousness of producing nature (natura naturans), but also the history of how human consciousness emerges within nature through a series of revelations. Natural history, for Schelling, is not separated from human history and revelation, but is informed (in the sense of Ineinsbildung) by it; hence the importance of mythology. While what follows does not relate to the way that Poe distinguishes between the refrain and allegory, Schelling's account of the emergence of form and redemption in nature and consciousness clearly influences Coleridge's discussion of the distinction between law and idea in "On Prometheus."

In The Deities of Samothrace , Schelling investigates, through philosophical and philological analyses, the ways in which the Cabiri deities present the potencies of producing nature. He argues that there is a necessary relationship between the three gods, Axieros, Axiokersa, and Axiokersos, which is grounded in the potencies of producing nature.

Axieros (and later the Greek Demeter) expresses the first potency of nature as pure production. Schelling characterizes this pure production as a "hunger," "poverty," and "lack, need, and longing," a pure and formless production of nature that yearns for form and objectivity, "a nature which is not insofar as it merely strives to be" (DS, 18-19/VIII: 351-353).32 The first potency of nature is the "dark ground," which is a productivity that precedes the revelation of form, and thus precedes the epoch of nature as humans know it.33

The next step, the second potency, is an ontological leap. During the period of absolute idealism, Schelling struggles with demonstrating the transition from the infinite or the absolute to the finite. In Philosophy

of Religion, he proposes that such a transition must be thought of as a "leap" whose content can be sought in mythology and revelation.34 His



subsequent work seeks to elaborate the structure of this ontological leap

from pure production or becoming to being. Thus the second deity and potency, Axiokersa (later the Greek Persephone), is the presentation of the ontological leap, bringing the "primal indeterminateness to actuality or formation" ( DS , 20/ VIII: 355). With this ontological leap, what was once the formless dynamic of pure production becomes the finite world of forms and (to use Schelling's earlier terms) the self and nature. Schelling closes the discussion by suggesting that Axiokersos (later Dionysos), the third deity and potency, is "the one who overcomes

the magic of Persephone, tempers her harshness, subdues and exorcises that primordial fire" (DS, 21 /VIII: 356).35 This third potency tempers what Schelling considers to be the harshness of primal form, which makes possible both the repose of contemplation that will be actualized in Dionysus, the "lord of the spirit world," and, as it is in Christian revelation, the moment of Christ or redemption (DS, 24/VIII: 361).36

As in his earlier work, rather than interpreting mythology allegorically,

as a lesson whose truth can be sought elsewhere, Schelling interprets the Cabiri as a concrete moment of consciousness within a broader

history of mythology and revelation. However it is important to note the continuity of the development of mythology and revelation, for Schelling no longer opposes pagan mythology to Christian allegory, as he does in The Philosophy of Art. To rephrase the problem in different terms, Schelling seeks in the Cabiri myths an early iteration of the system of philosophy that he claims is historically developed in ever fuller and richer content from the earliest of Greek mythology to

the fuller symbolism of Christian revelation. In this sense, The Deities ofSamothrace forms only a small part of the whole announced in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.

Á Distinction with a Difference: Tautegory and Allegory

In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge readily admits to borrowing various aspects of Schelling's philosophy.37 While the amount of his heavy-handed borrowing has remained controversial, Schelling was not, at least publicly, bothered by it. In fact, he seems to have appreciated that his (even to this day) often neglected Deities ofSamothrace "has been understood in its meaning by the talented Brit," and adds that for coining the "apposite expression" tautegorical, "I happily let him have


the borrowings from my writings."38 As Schelling recognized, these borrowings extend beyond those of the Biographia Literaria. To see how Coleridge takes up the distinction between symbol and allegory within his own work, we will now turn to "On Prometheus," and enter the

"holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics" to search out how Coleridge understands Aeschylus's tragedy based on the myth of Prometheus (Prometheus, II: 1277). In a manner similar to Schelling's discussion of the emergence of form out of nature's productivity, Coleridge examines

how the Prometheus myth presents the common genesis of law (nomos) and idea. This myth, he argues, shares "the very same . . . subject-matter

with the earliest record of the Hebrews" (Coleridge is referring to the myth of the Fall of Man) which is an account of the genesis of nous (mind or reason) in humanity (Prometheus, II: 1267). The Hebraic and Greek accounts present the moment in which humans are distinguished from the rest of nature in two different ways. The Hebrew narrative of

the tree of good and evil, on Coleridge's account, is an allegory which serves as an instrument of moral instruction, while the Greek form is a

tautegory or philosopheme (Prometheus, II: 1267-1268).

Compared with Schelling's later definition, in "On Prometheus," Coleridge's use of the term "tautegory" and its cognates is not well defined; he wavers between two meanings. On the one hand (as Schelling will later point out), "tautegory" is treated as a synonym for "philosopheme," designating a philosophical doctrine in poetic form. For instance, at one point in the essay, Coleridge notes that as a philosophical doctrine, the Greek philosopheme contains some "profound truth in it," while he regards the Mosaic doctrine "as the truth" (Prometheus, II: 1278). On the other hand, he also treats the myth as "symbol or tautegory," which possesses its meaning in its being; or, as Schelling later writes, "mythology must likewise properly be taken just as one usually takes a philosopheme."39 In this case, the Prometheus myth must be treated symbolically according to the content and contextual relations within the myth itself. As we will indicate below, this wavering can be attributed to the historical-critical focus of "On Prometheus," confined as it is to Greek mythology and the myth of the fall. When, in Aids to Reflection and The Statesman's Manual, Coleridge differentiates between a symbolic or tautegorical reading of scripture (which he endorses) and an allegorical reading, he does so to demonstrate that Christianity is "a Life and a living Process."4"



Coleridge's interest in Greek mythology bears numerous similarities with Schelling's. Like Schelling's The Deities ofSamothrace, Coleridge analyzes how mythology provides an account of the transition from the infinite to the finite, and how the sensible world emerges from the absolute or the "Indistinguishable." But in opposing law to idea, Coleridge also evokes the problematic that drives Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), which seeks to demonstrate how self-consciousness strives to overcome its opposition to nature, and how nature strives to produce consciousness.41 Thus for Coleridge the opposition between law and idea, personified in Jove and Prometheus, will reach its fullest expression as an opposition between producing nature ( natura naturans) and human will ( Nous : "the rational will, the

practical reason") (Prometheus, II: 1277, 1294).

On Coleridge's reading, law and idea are originally or essentially identical, and their separation is expressed by the Prometheus myth: "there arose a war, schism, or division" between law (thesis) and idea (antithesis), which separates the prothesis or original identity of the absolute (Prometheus, II: 1 273). Despite this opposition, neither law nor idea have priority over the other; because they share a common origin, after the schism, each side of the opposition strives toward its opposite (Prometheus, II: 1291). Thus law strives to attain the idea, while idea strives to become law. This striving, as Coleridge interprets it, gives content to the philosophical doctrine expressed within the myth, much in the way Schelling had once argued that subjectivity strives for objective expression as much as the objectivity of nature strives for subjectivity. While neither thesis nor antithesis attains its opposite, the dynamic of striving produces the complex set of relations between law and idea. Following Schelling, he calls this movement potenziation, the production of relations of subjectivity and objectivity of increasing power or complexity.

Let us now turn to the basic expression of this opposition between law and idea as it is expressed in "On Prometheus":

The nomos is essentially idea, but existentially it is (idea)

substans, i.e. id quod stat subím.v, understanding sensu generalissimo. The idea, which now is no longer idea, has substantiated itself, become real, as opposed to idea,


and is henceforward, therefore, substans in substantiate.

The first product of its energy is the thing itself: ipsa se

posuit et jam facta est ens positum. Still, however, its productive energy is not exhausted in this product, but

overflows, or is effluent as the specific forces, properties,

faculties of the product. (II: 1273-4)

As prothesis or original identity, nomos and idea are one. With the "schism" in the absolute, their essential unity is sundered, and nomos comes to exist as substance or the real expression of the idea; nomos becomes real as natura naturans, producing nature. Coleridge then argues that this producing nomos creates a series of products of increasing complexity, from the "thing itself' to properties, faculties, functions and understanding (the substance that stands under) (Prometheus, II: 1275). However, his account is not clear on how producing nomos becomes a product. He argues that the producing agent posits products, but he does not define this term. In this regard, Schelling's discussion of limitation might be of some use. In the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling argues that subjectivity, in

striving toward objectivity, continuously encounters limits that produce

the epistemological categories necessary for understanding nature.42 Similarly, he argues that producing nature always exceeds, as producing power, any particular product; if it did not, production would cease in an

object and nature would become inert.41 This conception of products as the result of limitations on producing is suggested by Coleridge when he

argues that producing nomos (which he characterizes as the "antecedent unity" or "productive and self-realising idea") must, in striving toward the idea, "re-emancipate itself from its product" (Prometheus, II: 1275). This process of production and, as it were, 're-emancipation' underlies the production of objects of increasing complexity or potenziation, from the "thing itself' to the understanding.

A similar set of conceptual relationships organizes Coleridge's discussion of the idea striving toward nomos. Just as the striving of nomos produces products, the striving of the idea toward nomos produces self-consciousness. Though self-consciousness cannot appear as a phenomenon, it can take itself reflexively as an object. Unlike nomos, however, idea does not produce a product, but strives toward self-reflexive

subjectivity, which is to be a "nomos autonomos" - the rational will or



practical reason (Prometheus, II: 1276-1277). Though Coleridge has appropriated various concepts from Schelling's System of Transcendental

Idealism and Deities ofSamothrace, there remains an important difference

between the two. Schelling remains, despite many revisions to his system,

committed to demonstrating how an intelligence must arise out of nature,

in order to avoid falling into the modern mind-body dualism. Coleridge,

for his part, defends a form of dualism, suggesting that the "hetero-, or

rather [the] allo-genity" of nous marks the difference between humans and animals. If there is any doubt on this point, Coleridge claims that Nous is "stolen from heaven, to marks its superiority in kind, as well as

its essential diversity " (Prometheus, II: 1268).

From Poe's perspective, perhaps this too is a distinction without a difference. For both Schelling and Coleridge, the use of the distinction between symbol and allegory reinforces an interpretive approach that uses Christian revelation to orient historical criticism, rather than

using historical criticism to interpret scripture (this places them in direct opposition to Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus). While Schelling originally considers the symbol a crucial concept of the philosophy of art in order to discover those categories which could make a new, modern mythology possible, he eventually abandons the philosophy of art for a philosophy of revelation or positive philosophy, which is "necessarily a Christian philosophy."44 As Paul Hamilton explains, in "a theological context, Coleridge, like Schelling, wishes to refute any higher criticism that historicizes or relativizes the truth of Christian doctrine. To the idea that scriptural expression might be allegorical of anything, he opposes the claim that it is consubstantial with its subject."45 While Coleridge wavers on the significance of the term tautegory in "On Prometheus," and even seems willing to consider scripture allegorically (though he considers Mosaic doctrine as "as the truth"), in Aids to Reflection and The Stateman 's Manual, he distinguishes between symbol-tautegory and allegory in order to reinforce what he considers to be the living truth of Christian doctrine.

While modern histories and political economies "partake in the general contagion of . . . mechanic philosophy," which is abstract as allegorical understanding, in scripture, writes Coleridge, these histories

are the living educts of Imagination; of that reconciling

and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason


in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the Senses by permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors .46

The Refrain and the Philosophy of Composition

Unlike Schelling and Coleridge, both of whom became increasingly orthodox (that is, less Spinozist or pantheist) in their mature writings, Poe

was not one to tarry with philosophical trinitarianism; if metaphysics is,

in Coleridge's phrase, a "holy jungle," it is one which Poe quite happily de-sacralized and deforested for his own critical use. One could even

take Poe's wry remark in "The Rationale of Verse" as a comment on his rejection of the "depths" of Schelling's or Coleridge's thought, in favor of its application to practical criticism. Poe writes, "the proper 'profundity' is rarely profound - it is the nature of Truth in general, as

of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial" ( Essays ,

26-27), a remark which is particularly germane given Poe's earlier characterization of Coleridge as one who "goes wrong by reason of his very profundity" ( Essays , 8). While Coleridge's belief in the divine origins of the Imagination and its mystical apprehension of nature as a harmonious system became the field on which Emerson and the Transcendentalists would tread (or frolic?), Poe derived something very different from Coleridge's meditations.

His increased distance from Coleridge's religious and metaphysical disposition informed Poe's oft-reiterated rejection of Coleridge's distinction between fancy and imagination. He first expressed this rejection in his review of Moore's "Alciphron" (1 840) and subsequently in "American Prose Writers" (1 845; see above) and "The Literati of New

York City" (1846). In this last instance, Poe justified his repetition in a note to the text by stating that, since "by metaphysicians and in ordinary

discourse, the word fancy is used with very little determinateness of meaning, I may be pardoned for repeating here what I have elsewhere said

on this topic" ( Essays , 1 126n; cf. 334). Poe follows this with a reiteration

of his claim that Coleridge's distinction is sans difference, a claim informed by his rejection of Coleridge's Imagination as a "reconciling and

mediatory power" which incorporates reason in the images of sense, and



organizes the senses through the "self-circling energies of the Reason" (a phrase which Emerson, by contrast, will privilege in his essays). In contrast to this, Poe presents an account of imagination as capable only of organizing and recombining impressions from the senses. This is most explicit in the "Alciphron" review, where he writes that "the fancy

as nearly creates as the imagination; and neither creates in any respect. All novel conceptions are merely unusual combinations. The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed." Poe goes on to emphasize that "all which seems to be new - which appears to be a creation of intellect [...] is re-soluble into the old" ( Essays , 334).

Once again Poe's duplicitous ingenuity prevails, as while he rejects Coleridge's theory of the Imagination, he will also adapt one of its sources to his own ends. As Hamilton observes, the explanation of imagination and fancy "central to Biographia Literaria lose their main philosophical force unless they are referred back to Schelling's ontological explanation of the world as the doubling and repetition in differentiated forms of an original identity."47 While Poe's refusal to accept Coleridge's elevation of the imagination as "stolen from Heaven" and an echo of "the infinite I AM" signals his departure from both Schelling's and Coleridge's theological underpinnings, he nonetheless goes on to present his own explanation of the world as the differentiated

repetition of an original identity, and to link this explanation to his own

aesthetic philosophy, in Eureka (1848). This can, perhaps, be regarded as proof of Poe's thesis that "all which seems to be new" is ultimately "re-soluble into the old."

Poe's description of the imagination in "The Literati of New York" further clarifies his differences from Coleridge. Here, Poe states that

Imagination, fancy, fantasy and humor, have in common

the elements combination and novelty. The imagination

is the artist of the four. From novel arrangements of old forms which present themselves to it, it selects such only as are harmonious; the result, of course, is beauty

itself - using the word in its most extended sense and as inclusive of the sublime. The pure imagination chooses, from either beauty or deformity, only the most

combinable things hitherto uncombined; the compound,


as a general rule, partaking in character of sublimity or

beauty in the ratio of the respective sublimity or beauty

of the things combined, which are themselves still to be considered as atomic - that is to say, as previous combinations. ( Essays , 1126n)

This makes it clear that Poe's conception of the imagination allows no room for the kind of fiat lux that characterizes the Coleridgean imagination's imitatio Dei. Alexander Schlutz explains that "Imagination, as central for Coleridge as it is for Schelling, provides the possibility of an actual connection of the self and God and thus the unity of philosophy

and religion in the medium of artistic activity,"48 and aptly argues that,

the philosophical and religious convictions that underpin Coleridge's thought ceased to have any purchase on Poe's thought and prose. If Emerson's Unitarianism no longer seemed a tenable religious position for the ex-Unitarian Coleridge, deeply immersed in Trinitarian belief in the last years of his life, the differences in religious, philosophical, and aesthetic sensibility between Coleridge and Poe ultimately run far deeper than such doctrinal conflicts.49

Instead of Trinitarian theology, Poe's aesthetic theories become increasingly grounded in the immanence of sensation, as he defines and evaluates poems and to some degree also tales, chiefly by the sensations they are capable of eliciting from their readers or auditors. So, in his 1 842 review of Twice-Told Tales, Poe claims that all "high excitements are necessarily transient," and that "without unity of impression, the deepest effects cannot be brought about" ( Essays , 571). Despite his previous praise of Hawthorne's inventiveness, in his 1 847 review of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse, Poe uses his anti- Coleridgean concept of recombinant imagination to bolster his claim that while Hawthorne is both "inventive" and "peculiar," he is not, finally "original," despite the views of many critics (formerly including

Poe himself) to the contrary. More importantly, Poe also adapts the subordination of allegory he derives from Schelling and Coleridge in condemning "the strain of allegory which completely overwhelms the greater number of [Hawthorne's] subjects" ( Essays , 582). Poe supports



this criticism by claiming allegory necessarily interferes "with that unity

of effect which, to the artist, is worth all the allegory in the world," pointing not to a sidereal eternality, but rather to the affective economy

which links the work and its reader to justify his view ( Essays , 583).

That Poe's re-consideration of allegory is central to his own aesthetic philosophy (however fragmentarily articulated and ironically inflected that philosophy may be) is certain. One need look no further than Poe's major aesthetic manifestos, "The Philosophy of Composition," "The Rationale of Verse," "The Poetic Principle," and even Eureka to find evidence of this. However, since it is with "The Philosophy of Composition" that Poe opposes allegory to the refrain, it is to that essay

that we will now turn. Here, Poe is explicit about his changing of the scale of artistic scope according to material concerns. After emphasizing

that a work of extensive length interrupts the "unity of impression" or

intensity of affect ( Essays , 571), since the external world impinges on reading,50 Poe again recommends lyric poetry and prose tales for their more immediate affective potential.51 Instead of allegory, which undermines the unity of effect, Poe advocates the use of the refrain, which functions, much like Schelling's symbol or Coleridge's tautegory, to unify the whole of the work of art, giving it greater affective potential. Consider Poe's definition of the refrain:

As commonly used, the refrain, or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon the force of monotone - both in sound and thought. The pleasure is deduced solely from the sense of identity - of repetition. I resolved to diversify, and so vastly heighten, the effect, by adhering, in general,

to the monotone of sound, while I continually varied that of thought: that is to say, I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain - the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried. ( Essays , 17)

Poe's explanation echoes Coleridge's conception of the tautegory as predicated upon a repetition of the identical, but with difference, in that Poe's modification of the refrain, which derives from "the sense of identity - of repetition," involves his introduction of variation, but a


variation that does not disrupt the identity of each iteration. However, unlike Coleridge's tautegory, which depends upon a consubstantiation of divine truth with linguistic expression, Poe's refrain is presented in terms of the relationship between physiological response and linguistic expression.

The function of the refrain within "The Raven" serves as a metonymy for Poe's general theory of the refrain; "nevermore" both elicits a strong

affective response from the narrator and, with each iteration, shifts the

narrator's sense of its meaning, advancing the poem's argument and unifying its effect through a slight modulation of its tone. In short, the

refrain of "The Raven" enables the poem to be both monologue and dialogue, while the meaning of the refrain of "nevermore," the variation

in thought it elicits in the narrator, and by extension, in the reader, remains an undercurrent only, and is never allowed to overpower the being of the word, its morphological monotone. In this respect, the refrain of "The Raven," markedly different from Coleridge's tautegory,

is nevertheless also the poetical heir to Schelling's argument, in the Philosophy of Art, that in the symbol, meaning must be "simultaneously

being itself' (PA, 49/V: 41 1).

Recall that, in the "Prometheus" essay, Coleridge's conception of tautegory vacillates between two meanings. One concerns his treatment of the myth as "symbol or tautegory," which derives from this Schellingian conception of the being of the symbol as possessing its meaning. The other concerns Coleridge's use of tautegory as a synonym for "philosopheme," designating a philosophical doctrine in poetic form. Given Poe's opposition of the ends of poetry (beauty, pleasure) with the ends of philosophy (truth), it is perhaps surprising, and certainly perverse, that "The Raven" serves as such a philosopheme, or poetic expression of Poe's philosophical doctrine. It is nevertheless true that it does so, as "The Philosophy of Composition," ironically or otherwise, indicates. While Poe's criticism of Hawthorne's allegorical tales is based on his sense that the imposed "meaning" of the tales overwhelms their "being," breaking the unity of their effect upon the reader, his project with "The Philosophy of Composition" is to reveal the degree to which "The Raven" fulfills the aesthetic criteria that Poe adapts, via Coleridge, from Schelling.



While Poe notes that the refrain "as commonly used" is "limited to lyric verse," he also implicitly recognizes its potential for other literary forms. After all, phrasal repetition with slight variation is a technique as pervasive, and arguably as effective, throughout Poe's fiction and criticism as throughout his poetry. Despite the fact that it is in his theory

of poetry that Poe explicitly articulates the technique of refrain, its use in "The Raven" is arguably a modification of a technique that Poe had much earlier perfected in his tales. One could as readily apply many of Poe's comments on the refrain to the use of modulated phrasal repetitions

in, for example, "The Fall of the House of Usher," where each instance of "house" and closely related words (including the "Haunted Palace" of the framed poem) is in effect a refrain, each iteration of which serves

as a métonymie recapitulation of the tale's total structure, and builds, cumulatively, toward its total effect.

While much remains to be said about Poe's use of the refrain in his own

poetic and fictional writings, as well as his pursuit of a Schellingian trajectory within Eureka (a work which, like the Philosophy of Art, attempts to demonstrate the original identity of subjectivity and objectivity, self and the world), a detailed analysis of these connections must be left to future endeavors, as they are beyond the scope of this article. For the time being, we must conclude by noting that it is Poe's purposeful redirection of the philosophical trajectory inaugurated by Schelling, combined with his use of this trajectory to open new fields for criticism, poetry and prose fiction alike, that made his relatively few

references to and appropriations from Schelling so important. It is also this redirection that differentiates the Schelling who urged Poe from the

Schelling who urged Coleridge, despite the former's purloining from the

latter. Of course, given Poe's radical revision of Schelling, it is likely that the German philosopher, were he to have read Poe's works, would have found himself in the position of the narrator of "William Wilson,"

unable to recognize his reflection, but unable to shake its haunting, and strangely familiar, aspect.


More'and and Shaw 75

Notes

1 . Thomas S. Hansen with Burton R. Pollin, The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of Literary References in His Works. (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), 80. Subsequent references will be cited in text.

2. George E. Woodberry, "Notes." The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. Web.

3. Hansen does not indicate which work he has in mind; Schelling published numerous works with either " Naturphilosophie " or " Philosophie der Natur " in the title.

4. Paul Hamilton, Coleridge and German Philosophy. (London, Continuum, 2007), 15-16. See also S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literana , 2 vols. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), I: 161; and Marginalia. Ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), IV: 427.

5. Richard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities , 1762- 1862. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), xvi.

6. Edgar Poe (?), "Notice of Coleridge's Table Talk ." In The Baltimore American (July 22, 1835): 2. Web.

7. Edgar Poe, "The Literati of New York City." In Essays and Reviews. Ed. G.R.Thompson. (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1 126n. Subsequent references to works collected in Essays and Reviews will be cited prenthetically

as Essays.

8. See S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection: In the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence , Morality and Religion. Introduction and Notes, James Marsh. (Burlington: Chauncey Goodrich, 1829), where Coleridge writes that "difference in degree does indeed suppose sameness in kind: and difference in kind precludes distinction from differences of degree" (141).

9. Edgar A. Poe, Tales and Sketches , 2 vols. Ed. Thomas Olive Mabbott. (Urbana: University of Illinois Pres, 2000), I: 78. Subsequent references will be cited in text as Tales.

10. While in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism , Schelling associates such a loss of individuality with what he variously calls dogmatism,



Spinozism, and enthusiasm, in the first presentation of his system of philosophy

(identity-philosophy or absolute idealism), he argues that subjective idealism is an insufficient ground for philosophy; instead, to attain the standpoint of reason itself, "one must abstract from what does the thinking." See Friedrich Schelling,

"Presentation of My System of Philosophy." Trans. Michael Vater. In The Philosophical Forum 32.4 (2001): 349/IV: 114. Each citation of Schelling gives the pagination of the English translation (where available), followed by the pagination of K. F. A Schelling's edition of Schellings sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart, Cotta: 1856-1861) by volume (in Roman numerals) and page.

1 1 . In a nutshell, Schelling argues that the truly philosophical standpoint (from

the "standpoint of reason") must start from the absolute, in which there is no substantial difference between human subjectivity and nature, or what knows and what is known; such a strict distinction only appears to those who begin from the standpoint of reflection and who would ask, 'how does an individual consciousness know something about the external world' (see Schelling's "Presentation of My System of Philosophy," 349-350/IV: 114-116). Contrast this with Locke's account of personal identity: "Self is that conscious thinking thing (whatever substance made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness and misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends." John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , abridged, edited and annotated by Kenneth P. Winkler (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 143.

12. James Marsh, introduction to S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection : In the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality and Religion , xxiix-ix.

13. Marsh, xxx.

14. Samuel T.Coleridge, The Statesman' s Manual. In Lay Sermons. Ed. R. J. White (Princeton University Press, 1972), 28-29.

15. Poe's metamorphosing of Schelling into Locke with "Morella" anticipates the continued importance that Locke's thought, like that of the Scottish skeptics, will have for Poe, an importance that is part of the epistemological context of his estrangement from both post-Kantian Idealist and Boston Transcendentalist thought. For more on Locke's importance for Poe, see Joan Dayan, "Poe, Locke and Kant." In Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu. Ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV. (Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990), 30-44.


16. Samuel Coleridge, "On the Prometheus of Aeschylus." In Shorter Works and Fragments , 2 vols. Ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. D. J. Jackson. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), II: 1277. Hereafter cited as "Prometheus."

17. See also "American Poetry," Aristidean (November 1845): 1:375-76. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. Web.

18. Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual , 28.

19. See the editor's introduction to "Schellings Aesthetick," in Henry Crabb Robinson, Essays on Kant , Schelling , and German Aesthetics. Ed. James Vigus. (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2010), 65. Paragraph 51 (pp. 80-81) is a condensed statement of §39 in Schelling's Philosophy of Art. Trans. Douglas W. Stott. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 45-50/V: 406-13. Hereafter cited as PA.

20. See On University Studies. Ed. Norbert Guterman. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966), 84/V: 287-88.

2 1 . Schelling, Philosophy and Religion. Trans. Klaus Ottman. (Putnam, Conn: Spring Publications, 2010), 52/VI: 67.

22. For more detail, see Devin Zane Shaw, Freedom and Nature in Schelling 's Philosophy of Art. (London: Continuum, 2010), 88-1 12.

23. The presentation of the identity and unity takes place through the imagination's power to form-into-one (the Ineinsbildung or esemplasy) of the universal and particular as the particular in art. See Friedrich Schelling, PA , 32/V: 386; and Samuel Coleridge, Biographia Literaria , I: 168-70; The Statesman * s Manual , 79: "by a symbol I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of

that, the whole of which it represents."

24. PA , 46/V: 407. Schematism, according to Schelling, is a basic mode of thinking and artistic production insofar as it intuits the particular through the universal. Nevertheless, it is not a complete presentation of the absolute because in this mode the universal cannot explain the particular, such as the particularity of Greek mythology or Christian mythology (46-47 /V: 407-08).

25. On Schelling's subversion of the Kantian and Fichtean emphases on practical reason, see Shaw, 63-87.



26. This does not mean that there are no symbolic aspects of Christianity. He claims 1) that Christ is a symbol of the infinite in the finite: "It is as if Christ . . . constituted the conclusion of the time of antiquity. He is there merely to

draw the boundary - the last god" (PA, 64/V , 432); 2) that baptism and the eucharist are symbolic acts (PA, 65/V: 434) and that 3) that the "symbol of God is the church as a living work of art" (On University Studies , 90/V : 3 1 5). Note,

however, that he speaks of the Catholic church as symbol or as mythology in the past tense ( PA , 72/V: 443).

27. VI, 572-573; cf. PA , 280/V: 736. For the political implications of Schelling's philosophy of art see Shaw, 135-41.

28. PA , 49/V: 412, translation modified. Note the pointed contrast with Kant's definition of the beautiful: "that which, without concepts, is represented as

the object of a universal satisfaction." See Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96.

29. While art was once the highest potency of human practice, the counterpart

of philosophy even, by 1810 Schelling claims that artistic production is an expression of longing and individual will. See the "Stuttgart Seminars." In Idealism and the Endgame of Theory. Ed. Thomas Pfau. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 234/VII: 471.

30. Schelling 's Treatise on " The Deities ofSamothraceT Ed. Robert F. Brown. (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1977), 17/VTII: 349. Hereafter cited in text as DS.

31. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. Trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 136/ XI: 195-96.

32. Cf. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 28-29/VII: 358-60.

33. Thus "Axieros must be regarding as first being [Wesen]" but not the highest (DS, 18/VIII: 352).

34. Philosophy and Religion , 26/VI: 38.

35. The description of this series bears a remarkable similarity to that found in one of the first presentations of these potencies in Schelling's "Concerning



the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature" ( 1 807). Trans. Michael Bullock. In Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling. (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 323-64.

36. DS, 24/VIII: 36 1 . While we cannot discuss it here, Schelling also analyzes the role of the "harbinger" or "messenger," the god who announces a more complex iteration of revelation. This is the Samothracian god Kadmilos, or the Greek Hermes.

37. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria , I: 163-64.

38. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 187 note e/XI: 196, translation modified. Schelling continues: Coleridge "gives unhesitatingly to his fellow countrymen unfamiliar with it - if with some irony - expressions to be enjoyed, like subject-object and others similar."

39. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 187 note e/XI: 196n.

40. Aids to Reflection. Ed. John Beer. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 202.

41. Schelling writes: "Precisely as the intelligence, by means of succession, constantly tries to depict the absolute synthesis, so likewise will organic nature

constantly appear as struggling towards universal organism and at war against an inorganic nature." System of Transcendental Idealism. Trans. Peter Heath. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 125/111:494.

42. System of Transcendental Idealism , 57-58/III: 408.

43. First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature. Trans. Keith R. Peterson. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 224/III: 315.

44. Friedrich Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy. Trans. Bruce Matthews. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 184/XIII, 135.

45. Hamilton. 108.

46. The Statesman 's Manual , 28-29.

47. Hamilton, 7.


so "As Urged by Schelling"

48. Alexander Schlutz, "Purloined Voices: Edgar Allan Poe Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge." Studies in Romanticism 41.2 (Summer 2008): 195-224.

49. Schlutz, 195: 195-224.

50. A process Poe horrifico-comically illustrates in many of his tales, including with the reading of "The Mad Tryst" near the end of "The Fall of the House of Usher."

51. See also: Essays, 15, 586: "As the novel cannot be read at one sitting, it cannot avail itself of the immense benefit of totality." He also states that the epic is the result of a "primitive sense of art" (585).


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