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preface to Poe’s volume, Poems of 1831. In the second passage, the 22-year-old introduces the crucial importance of music in the poet’s art, as well as distinguishing poetry’s objective—pleasure—from the “truth” of science. As William Carlos Williams would later confirm, “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.”
    Poe, already aware of the inhibiting provincialism of the American letters of his time, is prescient in the other passage, supposing that some books improve with travel, for two decades later, Charles Baudelaire, his Parisian twin, would begin to translate Poe in earnest—ultimately playing a key role in establishing the name of Poe in world literature.

LETTER TO MR. B————— 1831
    You are aware of the great barrier in the path of an American writer. He is read, if at all, in preference to the combined and established wit of the world. I say established; for it is with literature as with law or empire—an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession. Besides, one might suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel-their having crossed the sea is, with us, so great a distinction. Our antiquaries abandon time for distance; our very fops glance from the binding to the bottom of the title-page, where the mystic characters which spell London, Paris, or Genoa, are precisely so many letters of recommendation.
    * * *
    A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained: romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry in definite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.
    What was meant by the invective against him who had no music in his soul?

    This solid, unusually straightforward poem first appeared in Poe’s second volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems , published in Baltimore, December 1829. At the time, Charles Darwin, born less than a month after Poe, was at Christ’s College in Cambridge, indifferently studying toward possibly becoming a parson. A decade after Poe’s death, Darwin would publish his theory of natural selection in On The Origin of Species , a book by which much of America is still troubled.
    The pure objectivity to which science often aspires is qualified nicely by Poe’s direct address: “Science! ...Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes!”
    Myths nourish the imagination as well as being timeless. Richard Wilbur says of Poe’s sonnet, “…the poem may seem a hyperbolic warning that if the age does not grant poetry its own kind of truth, it will deprive itself of the highest and fullest means of ordering and enhancing human experience.”

SONNET — TO SCIENCE
    Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
    Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
    Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
    Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
    How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
    Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
    To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
    Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
    Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
    And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
    To seek a shelter in some happier star?
    Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
    The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
    The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

    Always short of cash, Poe gave a number of his fictional characters great wealth, and none more than Ellison, the hero of this visionary tale, first published in the March 1847 issue of Columbian Lady’s and