naby Rudge_ was publishing in parts, Poe showed his skill as a plot
hunter by publishing a paper in _Graham's Magazine_ in which the very
{530} tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the
_finale_ predicted in advance.

In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe resembled Coleridge,
who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse
often reminds one of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_, still
oftener of _Kubla Khan_. Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in
the opium habit. But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing
else. He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with
melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse. It is
curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of
poetry. At first these are metrical experiments and vague images,
original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little
meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from
nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his
poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance,
without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real
world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed--formed
upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a
great display of _a priori_ reasoning in his essay on the _Poetic
Principle_ and elsewhere--that pleasure and not instruction or moral
exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or
goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it
gave should be _indefinite_. About his own poetry there was always
this {531} indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country
of dream--a "ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of
time"--filled with unsubstantial landscapes, and peopled by spectral
shapes. And yet there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this
uncanny scenery. The reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is
in itself a kind of language, and that it in some way expresses a
brooding thought or passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul.
Sometimes there is an obvious allegory, as in the _Haunted Palace_,
which is the parable of a ruined mind, or in the _Raven_, the most
popular of all Poe's poems, originally published in the _American Whig
Review_ for February, 1845. Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as
in _Ulalume_, which, to most peo