Edgar Allan Poe on landscape gardeners as poets

    If the ties between art and wild nature interest you, so may Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Domain of Arnheim.” Its main character, Mr. Ellison, with his enormous wealth and aesthetic sensibilities, chooses landscape gardening as his medium of poetic expression. We enter on this excerpt:

In the widest and noblest sense he was a poet. He comprehended, moreover, the true character, the august aims, the supreme majesty and dignity of the poetic sentiment. The fullest, if not the sole proper satisfaction of this sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of beauty. Some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism all his ethical speculations; and it was with this bias, perhaps, which led him to believe that the most advantageous at least, if not the sole legitimate field for the poetic exercise, lies in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness. . . .
    No definition had spoken of the landscape-gardener as of the poet; yet it seemed to my friend [Mr. Ellison] that the creation of the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here, indeed, was the fairest field for the display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty; the elements to enter into combination being, by a vast superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In the multiform and multicolor of the flowers and the trees, he recognised the most direct and energetic efforts of Nature at physical loveliness. And in the direction or concentration of this effort -- or, more properly, in its adaptation to the eyes which were to behold it on earth -- he perceived that he should be employing the best means -- laboring to the greatest advantage -- in the fulfillment, not only of his own destiny as poet, but of the august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic sentiment in man.
 
    For a brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe, click here. For images of or relating to Edgar Allan Poe, click here.
    For the complete text of Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim,” click here.