by still more graceful and more modest varieties. (Tales, 2:1332)
In this passage, the narrator’s vision shifts from the dramatic precipices or “Salvatorish” imagery to a more pastoral, cultivated, and designed landscape that evidences man’s influence. This human influence moves the landscape away from the dreadful, sublime terror that Burns associates with both Cole and Poe and toward a beauty resulting from the artistic transformation of landscape gardening and peaceful domesticity. In an effort to link Poe to the “dark side” of American experience, Burns ignores this more domestic aspect of his sensibility—a sensibility also expressed in “The Domain of Arnheim” (a pendant to “Landor’s Cottage”) and seen in the landscape paintings composed by Asher Durand and Frederic Church during the mid-1840s. This sensibility and its importance to Poe are revealed in a most personal way in his letter to Helen Whitman dated October 18, 1848:
I suffered my imagination to stray with you, and with the few who love us both, to the banks of some quiet river, in some lovely valley of our land. Here, not too far secluded from the world, we exercised a taste controlled by no conventionalities, but the sworn slave of a Natural Art, in the building for ourselves a cottage which no human being could ever pass without an ejaculation of wonder at its strange, weird, and incomprehensible yet most simple beauty. Oh, the sweet and gorgeous, but not often rare flowers in which we half buried it!—the grandeur of the little-distant magnolias and tulip-trees which stood guarding it—the luxurious velvet of its lawn—the lustre of the rivulet that ran by the very door—the tasteful yet quiet comfort of the interior—the music—the books—the unostentatious pictures—and, above all, the love—the love that threw an unfading glory over the whole! (Letters, 2:712)
Such is the sentiment that Poe longed for not only in his life but also in his work. The paintings he saw by Cole, Church, and Durand are portrayals of natural beauty or idealized portraits of human intercourse with nature. The latter description is especially true of Asher Durand’s An Old Man’s Reminiscences. Nothing in the painting is threatening or remiss, bringing to mind Poe’s sketch of Ellison’s life in “The Domain of Arnheim” and Landor’s life in “Landor’s Cottage.”
Poe’s fascination with landscape and landscape gardening is evident in his mature sketch “The Domain of Arnheim,” written in 1846. This sketch not only reflects a desire for peace but also articulates Poe’s visual aesthetics. Here the narrator asserts that “the art of landscape gardening exhibits those qualities of the poet” that Poe held in high esteem:37
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 flower and the trees, [Ellison] 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 a poet, but of the august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic sentiment in man. . . . Mr. Ellison did much toward solving what has always seemed to me an enigma:—I mean the fact (which none but the ignorant dispute) that no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such Paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvass of Claude. (Tales, 2:1272)
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