It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets, Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these men. Poe himself was unable to accept, with any degree of complacence, the materialistic philosophy which seemed to him the most plausible explanation of life. One of his best-known sonnets is a threnody for poetry which, he feels, is passing away from earth as materialistic views become generally accepted. [Footnote: See the sonnet, _To Science._] Sensuous as was his conception of poetry, he yet felt that one kills it in taking the spirit of ideality out of the physical world. "I really perceive," he wrote in this connection, "that vanity about which most men merely prate,--the vanity of the human or temporal life." [Footnote: Letter to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844.] It is obvious that atheism, being pure negation, is not congenial to the poetical temper. The general rule holds that atheism can exist only where the reason holds the imagination in bondage. It was not merely the horrified recoil of orthodox opinion that prevented Constance Naden, the most voluminous writer of atheistic verse in the last century, from obtaining lasting recognition as a poet. Verse like hers, which expresses mere denial, is not essentially more poetical than blank paper. One cannot make so sweeping a statement without at once recalling the notable exception, James Thompson, B.V., the blackness of whose atheistic creed makes up the whole substance of _The City of Dreadful Night_. The preacher brings comfort to the tortured men in that poem, with the words, And now at last authentic word I bring Witnessed by every dead and living thing; Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: There is no God; no fiend with name divine Made us and tortures us; if we must pine It is to satiate no Being's gall. But this poem is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It would be nearer the truth to say that his unbelief broke his heart. Thomson himself would be the first to admit that his vision of the City of Dreadful Night is inferior, as poetry, to the visions of William Blake in the same city, of whom Thomson writes with a certain wistful envy, He came to the desert of London town, Mirk miles broad; He wandered up and he wandered down, Ever alone with God. [Footnote: _William Blake._]