Poe was first a writer of poems, then of prose tales, and then of analytical criticisms, and one may take a cue from his famous discussion of the "Raven" by considering them in reverse order. His theory of art can be derived from the seventy-odd articles on his contemporaries which he printed and reprinted, from the days of the _Southern Literary Messenger_ to those of _Godey's_, and from the summarized essays which he formulated in the three latest years. "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle" are equally well illustrated by his own poems and his comments on the poems of others. He accepts the division of the world of mind into Intellect, which concerns itself with Truth; Taste, which informs us of the Beautiful; and the Moral Sense, which is regardful of Duty. He defines poetry of words as "The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth." In the moods aroused by the contemplation of beauty man's soul is elevated most nearly to the level of God; and the privilege of Poetry--one refrains from using such a word as "function"--is to achieve an elevation of soul which springs from thought, feeling, and will, but which is above them all. For the composition of poetry, thus limited in its province, he developed a fairly rigid formula, a Procrustes bed on which he laid out his several contemporaries. Poems, he said, should be brief; they should start with the adoption of a novel and vivid effect; they should be pitched in a tone of sadness; they should avail themselves of fitting refrains; they should be presented, in point of setting, within a circumscribed space; and always they should be scrupulously regardful of conventional poetic rhythms. These artistic canons are largely observed in his poems and severely insisted on in his criticisms. He was immensely interested in detail effects, and hardly less so in the isolated details themselves. All the fallacious and inconsistent metaphors of Drake's "Culprit Fay," for example, by which the reader is distracted, he assembled into a final indictment of that hasty poem; and in the works of Elizabeth Barrett, of whom he was one of the earliest champions, he discussed diction, syntax, prosody, and lines of distinguished merit in the minutest detail. Seldom in these critiques does he rise to the task of expounding principles, and more seldom still does he discuss any principles of life. Always it is the cameo, the gold filigree, the miniature on ivory under the microscope. It is not unfair to apply his own method to him, with reference, for instance, to poetic passages he most admired, by quoting a few of his quotations. From Anna Cora Mowatt: Thine orbs are lustrous with a light Which ne'er illumes the eye Till heaven is bursting on the sight And earth is fleeting by.