Poe on the tale or short story

Excerpted and abridged from his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Graham’s Magazine, May 1842

The book professes to be collection of tales, yet is misnamed. They are by no means all tales. Many of them are pure essays.

Of the Essays, a painter would at once note their leading or predominant feature, and style it repose. There is no attempt at effect. All is quiet, thoughtful, subdued. Yet this repose may exist simultaneously with high originality of thought. A strong current of suggestion runs continuously beneath the upper stream of the tranquil thesis.

But it is of his tales that we desire principally to speak. In almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. Without unity of impression, the deepest effects cannot be brought about.

Were we called upon to designate that class of composition which [excepting certain poems] should best fulfil the demands of high genius, we should unhesitatingly speak of the prose tale, as Mr Hawthorne has here exemplifies it. We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. In the brief tale, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control.

If wise, [the skilful literary artist] has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having

conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents – he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his fIrst step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leave in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel.

[While poems have to aim at Beauty,] Truth is often, and in very great degree, the aim of the tale. Thus the field of this species of composition [the tale, or short story], if not in so elevated a region on the mountain of Mind, is a table-land of far vaster extent than the domain of the mere poem. The writer of the prose tale, in short, may bring to his theme a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought and expression – (the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic or the humorous) which are not only antagonistical to the nature of the poem, but absolutely forbidden.

We have very few American tales of real merit.

Mr Hawthorne’s Tales belong to the highest region of Art – an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order.

[Italics are Poe's; bold font is mine. AG]