Beauty's one of those great words with no specific meaning, yet generates a positive response when it's used. What is beauty? Ask 100 people what is beauty and you'll get a fair distribution of answers. Truth is beauty. Nature is beauty. Youth is beauty. There's beauty in honesty. Ms/Mr Universe? Mmm...possibly. There's beauty in grace, in sacrifice, in charity and altruism. There's beauty in struggle, resilience, defiance. There's terrible beauty being born. There's beauty in the mushroom cloud after nuclear detonation. There's beauty in triumph and beauty in defeat. A word that means something different to different people and different circumstances has no specific meaning at all. Take away the meaning and you're left with the positive response.
Reviving a dead thread, I know. Oh well, I'm shameless. I've always disagreed on Poe with this thoroughly. It's a callback to the Aesthetic Movement during the Victorian Age of English literature. In that period, the aim of poetry was exactly that: to be beautiful and flow seamlessly. Of course, that often came to the sacrifice of anything concrete and substantial in the works. And also, an endless stream of travelogues where we get to hear about forests and lakes and mountains for the hundred thousandth time. It's awful. Never made sense to me that he would say this either. I suppose it more falls on his definition of beauty. For a man so interested in the horror side of Gothic literature, beauty must lie somewhere interesting. In any case, I think the aim of poetry should be to leave an impression on the reader. Have something that makes it stick with reader for years to come.
