The opponents of utilitarianism in art have been the calumniators of poets with ideas unacceptable to the majority. They have hindered the popularity of pessimistic poets like Leopardi and Thomson. They are shocked by the morbidities of Dostoievsky and Strindberg. But every author has the right to describe emotions without being compelled to draw a moral from them. In such case the writer becomes a great psychologist, and his work is by no means devoid of intellectual content. Thus the stories of Poe which have no moral outlook are really stories with a purpose for they are profound documents in psychology. To them psychologists like Mosso have gone for studies of the emotion of fear. One finds ideas in them that throw light on the nature of our emotions. Hence Brownell in his well written essay on Poe which attacked him because of his indifference to moral problems (a view in which Howells and James concur) is wrong in denying to Poe a high place in art. Poe did what all artists do: he drew on his emotions and if he could portray fear and grief for death, it was because he had known them. Graham describes the timid nature of Poe, who was afraid to be himself alone. That feeling accounts for the _Fall of the House of Usher_. Poe's stories are rich in ideas, in valuable psychological data. None of them, except _William Wilson_, has an ethical aim, but they all have an intellectual, utilitarian purport, in giving us profound knowledge of man's hidden emotions. They are the result of Poe's keen intellect as well as of his emotions. They have anticipated many researches by psychologists; they have set circulating profound views of the psychic constitution of man. They thus became art with a purpose, not however to spread ethical truisms, but broad liberating ideas.
Those art for art's sake critics who take their inspiration from Poe's essay on the _Poetic Principle_, sadly misunderstand their critic. Except in two poems written as metrical and musical experiments, _The Bells_ and _Ulalume_, Poe's intellect adorned all the poetry he wrote in verse as well as prose. Read his prose poems, _Shadow_, _Silence_, _The Colloquy of Monos and Una_, _The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion_, _The Power of Words_, and _Eureka_. He was justified in his pleading that poetry should not become the mere vehicle of moral commonplaces, for these are not beautiful, and the vogue of the New England school was beginning to make the moral aims of poetry too paramount.