Poe's Mysticism 2

has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth" (Great
Short Works 549).
The Poetic Principle, then, is "the Human Aspiration for Supernal
Beauty" and "the manifestation of the Principle is always found in
an elevating excitement of the Soul - quite independent of that
passion which is the intoxication of the Heart - or of that Truth
which is the satisfaction of the Reason" (Great Short Works 550). In
this context, "Love … is unquestionably the purest and truest of all
poetical themes."
A distinction you will notice here is that the Supernal Beauty is not
merely Passion, in other words, not merely an emotion of the Heart.
It is "higher," in the sense that the experience of it takes place at
what amounts to another order of reality. Really, this is a
characterization of Plato's Beauty, or Good. As in all mystical
traditions, Poe's Beauty cannot be understood rationally as a
"Truth": For example, the great figure in Western mystical
literature of this perennial sensibility occurs in Dante's Purgatorio,
where Virgil, symbol of the guiding rational intellect, vanishes just
before the entry into Eden because rational understanding is no
longer effective. Beatrice, figure of that divine understanding which
transcends the rational and is essentially a figure of Love, takes
over.
Poe is describing just such a transcendent sense of reality. The
earthly vehicles of transcendent experience are music and poetry,
not rational science. This is the first whole articulation of the
modern aesthetic idea that art may replace religion.
A quirk of this essentially Platonic view of Beauty as the pinnacle
of experience is that "the tone of the highest manifestation of Beauty
is sadness." On the face of it this idea sounds perverse because the
common wisdom is that to be sad is to be unhappy, and beauty is a
happy experience. But in point of fact, mystical traditions
worldwide continually point to the fact that the difficulties of
earthly experience - particularly difficult emotional experiences -
are polishing stones of the soul. The great Persian mystic Rumi, for
example, repeatedly observes that grief is a friend to be embraced
because it will result in the purifying and beautifying of the soul.
Similarly, Plotinus' Ennead on "Our Tutelary Spirit" (III.4)
describes a force which enables a living person, not to live a
comfortable, safe life, but to encounter the work - meaning
difficulties - required to make its way back toward the divine.
"Workers need ground to scrape and hoe," says Rumi (in Coleman
Barks' translation), "not the blue sky of unspecified desire."
Similarly in Poe, the sadness that finds its way into all human
existence is a passage to, a grounds for experience of Beauty.
If Passion, or the emotional faculties of the Heart, are not what Poe
means by Beauty, his word Duty, referring to the Moral Sense, has a
similar limitation. This too can be understood in Platonic terms. In
the Socratic dialogues, the main topics of conversation are the
virtues, which is to say, our moral senses. There is an insinuation
throughout Plato that what is being talked about is actually the least
of all cosmic concerns, but that it is the only topic recognizable
enough to the uninitiated to be generally exposed to analysis. In
other words, the true concerns of the cosmos cannot be talked about.
They are, in a way, ineffable - ineffability being one of William
James' and others' earmarks of mystical experience. Something that
approaches the ineffable world but that can be talked about, is our
moral sensibility. Socrates demonstrates that the task is nigh-on
impossible because definitions of justice, courage, temperance,
wisdom and so on are all inadequate. But what the conversants do
agree on is that moral realities exist, however much they may be
disagreed over.
When Poe speaks of Duty - a word distinctly from mid-19th
century America - or the Moral Sense, this Socratic range of the
idea of the "moral" underlies his idea. Stories, or any prose, can
express Truths or ideas about Truth directly to the intellect; that is
to say, they can be talked about in rational terms, just as in the
Socratic dialogues.

Aphrodite. Human moral sense links us to the divine world at
Love. In Poe, once again, the great poetic theme is Love because it
is our opening beyond the merely Moral, or Truth, into Supernal
Beauty, known also in Plato as the Good.
What must be understood in Poe, as in Plato and Plotinus, is that
he takes the experiences of the inner psyche - he calls them
"elevations of the Soul" - as real, that is to say, more real than the
material world. Once again, this is a sensibility persistently
expressed in all mystical literature: The reality encountered during
a mystical experience is virtually always characterized as being
more real than reality.* The evidence for Poe's adherence to this is
less obvious than the evidence of his Platonic links, but probably
we need point only to the poem "Sonnet - To Science" and observe
that in the poem, the "dreams" of the poet are more or less
eradicated by the rationality of science, which examines only "dull
realities" and is in fact depicted in the poem as a vulture. The
world science recognizes is dull compared to the dream-world of
poets. Even though this poem was written when Poe was just 21, it
shapes not a romantic reverie or idealization of the poetic life, but
in fact a mystical intuition of the possible ways of experiencing the
universe - through the rational mind, which dulls it down, or
through the imagination and the inner faculties of the psyche, that
is to say, the Beautiful, or mystical, which opens and expands it.
As far as I can tell, Poe never had a hard-core mystical experience,
at least not in the strict sense described by W.T. Stace in which the
mystic reports having literally unified with God or the cosmos.
But he did have a profound intuition of the unity of the cosmos,
and that intuition is laid out in Eureka. Significantly for this
discussion, Poe insists on the idea that this long essay is not
merely an essay, but is a "prose poem," implying it is to be read as
an evocation, at some level, of Supernal Beauty. In the context I am
trying to unfold here, this means it is a work of mystical literature,
as all poems should be.
And in fact, despite T.S. Eliot's regret that Eureka does not supply
much in the way of emotional excitement (a debatable assertion),
Eureka is a full-blown effort to show that science, despite its
dullness, in fact depicts the reality of a perpetually unifying
cosmos, and in that activity is essentially in and of itself, unified.
After many pages examining the mathematics and astronomy of
the time - including the observation that the universe appears to be
made of "orbs within orbs" - and explaining his intuitive sense that
gravity can be shown mathematically to be holding everything
together, Poe indeed observes that "there are volumes of stars
stretching out apparently as if they were rushing towards a great
central mass in consequence of the action of some great power"
(172-73). The universe appears to be pulling itself into itself.
Then, employing metaphors of dazzling layers, he discloses that:
"It is the poetical essence of the Universe - of the Universe which,
in the supremeness of its symmetry, is but the most sublime of
poems. Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms: -
thus Poetry and Truth are one" (178). The main point here is the
identity, or unity of the metaphor's vehicle and tenor, but also for
our purposes the identification of Truth and Beauty. Like Plato,
Plotinus and the perennial writers of all cultures, Poe is moving
here toward the ultimate oneness of all.