edgar allan poe essay

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Poe, edgar allan.

• Thomas Wright
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.612
• Published online: 26 September 2017

At the beginning of the twenty-first century , Edgar Allan Poe was more popular than ever. The Raven and a number of his Gothic and detective tales were among the most famous writings in the English language, and they were often some of the first works of literature that young adults read. They had also entered the popular imagination—football teams and beers were named after them, and they had inspired episodes of the animated television show The Simpsons and a number of rock songs. Poe also continued to exercise a profound influence over writers and artists. Two of the most popular authors of the second half of the twentieth century , Stephen King and Isaac Asimov , acknowledged Poe as an important precursor. Countless novels published at the end of the twentieth century , such as Peter Ackroyd 's The Plato Papers: A Prophesy ( 1999 ) and Mark Z. Danielewski 's House of Leaves ( 2000 ), also bear definite traces of his influence. The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges , whose own works are greatly indebted to Poe, once called him the unacknowledged father of twentieth-century literature, and Poe's influence shows no signs of diminishing. Despite his enormous popularity and influence, Poe's canonical status is still challenged by certain commentators. Harold Bloom , for instance, regards Poe's writings as vulgar and stylistically flawed. Bloom follows in a long line of Poe detractors, many of whom have been amazed by the fact that what T. S. Eliot called his “puerile” and “haphazard” productions could have influenced “great” writers such as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé .

Poe criticism was, however, far more favorable (and far more plentiful) over the last half of the twentieth century than previously. Poe is indeed something of a boom industry in academia. New Critics, New Historicists, psychoanalysts, and poststructuralists all find his works suggestive. Few of these critics are interested in making aesthetic judgements, however, and those who concern themselves with such things continue to express doubts about Poe's achievement.

As a result, Poe remains something of an enigma. To many he is a formative influence, a genius, and an inspiration; to others he is a shoddy stylist and a charlatan. It would be more reasonable, perhaps, to regard Poe as all of these things and to accept James Russell Lowell 's famous judgment that he was “Three fifths…genius, and two fifths sheer fudge.” Few of Poe's readers are reasonable, however, as he is one of those writers who is either loved or hated.

Poe's Persona

One of the reasons Poe has been far more popular and influential than writers who, according to some, have produced works of greater literary value is that he created, with a little help from others, a fascinating literary persona. That persona was of an author at once bohemian and extremely intellectual. The bohemian aspect was largely the creation of his “friend” Rufus Wilmot Griswold , who in his obituary of Poe described him as a depraved and demonic writer. Poe himself was responsible for the intellectual element: he presented himself to the public in his writings as an erudite and bookish scholar.

Poe's persona captured the imagination of the world; like Byron before him, he became a kind of mythical or archetypal figure. Nineteenth-century poets such as Ernest Dowson and Baudelaire (who prayed to Poe and dressed up as him) regarded Poe as the original bohemian poète maudit (a tradition in which the poet explores extremes of experience and emotional depth) and as the first self-conscious literary artist. As such, he seemed to be a prefiguring type of themselves. This legendary persona may be at odds with Poe's real personality and the actual facts of his biography, but that is beside the point. What matters is that it fascinated and continues to fascinate people.

Poe's legendary personality and life have also provided people with a context in which his writings can be read (and it is worth noting here that an account of Poe's life has traditionally appeared as a preface to anthologies of his works). As is the case with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde , we tend to read Poe's works as expressions of his (real or mythical) character and as dramatizations of his personality. This confers a degree of homogeneity on his writings; although he experimented in a variety of forms and wrote on numberless topics, we think of all of his productions as “Poe performances.”

Early Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 , the son of the itinerant actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold , both of whom died when he was still an infant. He was brought up by the Richmond tobacco merchant John Allan , with whom he had a difficult relationship. Educated in London and then, for a brief period, at the University of Virginia, Poe entered the U.S. Army in 1827 . It was always Poe's ambition to be recognized as a great poet, and in 1827 he published his first volume of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems , under the name “a Bostonian.”

The title poem of the slim collection is a monologue by Tamerlane, the Renaissance Turkish warrior. The other poems are conventional romantic meditations on death, solitude, nature, dreams, and vanished youth in which Poe comes before us, as it were, in the theatrical garb of the romantic poet. The poems display Poe's considerable gift for imitation (which he later used to great effect in his prose parodies) and his habit of half quoting from his favorite authors. They contain countless echoes from romantic poets (especially Lord Byron). It is not, however, so much a question of plagiarism as it is of Poe serving a literary apprenticeship and placing himself within a poetic tradition.

In 1829 Poe published, under his own name, his second verse collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems . It contained revised versions of some of the poems that had been published in Tamerlane (Poe was a zealous reviser) and seven new poems. Sonnet—To Science , Poe's famous poem on the antagonistic relationship between science and poetry, opens the book. It is followed by the title poem, Al Aaraaf , which has been variously interpreted as a lament for the demise of the creative imagination in a materialistic world and as an allegorical representation of Poe's aesthetic theories. The poem is characterized by its variety of meter, its heavy baroque effects, and its extreme obscurity. The volume has its lighter moments, however. Fairyland , with its “Dim vales,” “Huge moons,” and yellow albatrosses is one of Poe's first exercises in burlesque and self-parody. It was typical of Poe to include, within the same volume, serious poems and comic pieces that seem to parody those compositions.

In 1831 , wishing to leave the army, Poe got himself expelled from the West Point military academy. In that year he also brought out a third volume of poetry, Poems by Edgar A. Poe . This collection represents a considerable advance on his earlier efforts and contains famous poems such as To Helen and The Doomed City (later called The City in the Sea ). The former, which is perhaps the most beautiful of all Poe's lyrics, is a stately hymn to Helen of Troy, which in its later, revised form, contained the celebrated lines:

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the Glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.

The Doomed City is a wonderful evocation of a silent city beneath the sea.

Both poems create a haunting atmosphere through the use of alliteration, assonance, measured rhythms, and gentle rhymes; they also contain words with long open vowel sounds such as “loom,” “gloom,” “yore,” and “bore” that were to become a Poe trademark. Because of Poe's fondness for such techniques, it is hardly surprising that his poems have been compared to music. Poe believed that music was the art that most effectively excited, elevated, and intoxicated the soul and thus gave human beings access to the ethereal realm of supernal beauty, a realm in which Poe passionately believed and for which he seems to have pined throughout his life. As Poe aimed to create similar effects with his verse, he attempted to marry poetry and music. This is why the rhythm of his verse is perfectly measured and often incantatory; it is also why he frequently chose words for their sounds rather than for their sense. In To Helen , for example, he writes of “those Nicéan barks of yore,” a rather confused classical allusion but a word that produces wonderfully musical vibrations.

Poe offers us what he called “a suggestive indefiniteness of meaning with a view of bringing about vague and therefore spiritual effects .” Decadent and symbolist poets of the nineteenth century , including Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine , were heavily influenced by Poe's method, and they consciously imitated his “word-music.” They also regarded Poe as their most important precursor because of his theoretical statements about poetry. Indeed, Poe was (and perhaps remains) as famous a critic and theoretician of verse as he was a poet. He is particularly remembered for his powerful denunciation of didactic poetry and for his emphasis on the self-consciousness and deliberateness of the poet's art.

Most of Poe's important theoretical pronouncements were made in the essays and lectures he wrote toward the end of his life. In Poems he wrote a prefatory “Letter to Mr —,” which represents his first theoretical statement about verse. Here he defined poetry as a pleasurable idea set to music. He also argued, with more than a slight nod to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge , that poetry “is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.” At its best, Poe's poetry embodies such ideas by creating vague yet powerful atmospheric effects and by giving the reader intense aesthetic pleasure.

Poe's early poetry received mixed reviews and failed to establish him as either a popular or a critically acclaimed author. Later commentators, such as T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman , criticized its limited range and extent; they also bemoaned its lack of intellectual and moral content. Others dismissed Poe as a mere verse technician; Emerson famously referred to him as “the jingle man.” Poe's verse was, however, revered by later nineteenth-century poets such as Mallarmé and Dowson, and considering his influence on such Decadent and symbolist writers, he can perhaps be regarded as the most influential American poet of that century after Whitman.

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

Numerous connections exist between Poe's early verse and the short stories he started to write for magazines and newspapers around 1830 . (Poe's decision to turn his hand to prose was partly because of the lack of commercial and critical success achieved by his poetry.) In some of his stories Poe included poems; he also returned to forms, such as the dramatic monologue and the dialogue between disembodied spirits, that he had used in poems such as Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf . And yet Poe's tales are clearly distinguished from his early verse, most obviously by their variety of mood, content, and theme. Poe seems to have been liberated as a writer when he turned from romantic verse to the more flexible, capacious, and traditionally heterogeneous genre of the short story. He now had at his disposal a multitude of tones and devices, and in the twenty-five stories that he wrote in the 1830s and that were collected in the anthology Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 1840 ), he exploited these to great effect.

In fact, such is the diversity of the style and mood of Poe's early stories that the division of the contents of Tales into the two categories of grotesque and arabesque seems simplistic and inadequate. Poe's grotesques are comic and burlesque stories that usually involve exaggeration and caricature. In this group we can include the tales Lionizing and The Scythe of Time (earlier called A Predicament ), which are satires of the contemporary literary scene. Another characteristic of Poe's grotesque stories is the introduction of elements of the ludicrous and the absurd. In the tale Loss of Breath , the protagonist literally loses his breath and goes out in search of it. It is a shame that Poe's early grotesques are generally neglected, because not only do they testify to his range and resourcefulness as a writer, but some of them are compelling and funny. The neglect results partly from the fact that, in order to be appreciated, they require extensive knowledge of the literary and political state of antebellum America and partly because they have been overshadowed by his arabesque tales.

Poe's arabesque tales are intricately and elaborately constructed prose poems. The word “arabesque” can also be applied to those stories in which Poe employed Gothic techniques. Gothic literature, which typically aimed to produce effects of mystery and horror, was established in the latter half of the eighteenth century by writers such as the English novelist Anne Radcliffe and the German story writer E. T. A. Hoffmann . By the beginning of the nineteenth century , the Gothic short story had become one of the most popular forms of magazine literature in England and America.

It is generally agreed that Poe's particular contribution to Gothic literature was his use of the genre to explore and describe the psychology of humans under extreme and abnormal conditions. Typically, his characters are at the mercy of powers over which they have no control and which their reason cannot fully comprehend. These powers may take the form of sudden, irrational impulses (“the imp of the perverse” that inspires the protagonist of Berenice to extract the teeth of his buried wife, for example), or as is the case with the eponymous hero of William Wilson , a hereditary disease. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque contains some of Poe's most famous Gothic productions, including Morella , Ligeia , and Berenice (the stories of the so-called “marriage group,” which concern the deaths of beautiful young women), along with perhaps the most popular of all his tales, The Fall of the House of Usher .

“Usher” is a characteristic arabesque production. It exhibits many of the trappings of Gothic fiction: a decaying mansion located in a gloomy setting, a protagonist (Roderick Usher) who suffers from madness and a peculiar sensitivity of temperament inherited from his ancient family, and a woman (his sister) who is prematurely buried and who rises from her tomb. Yet from Gothic clichés such as these, Poe produced a tale of extraordinary power. Indeed, perhaps only Stephen King in The Shining ( 1977 ) has succeeded in investing a building with such horror and in conveying the impression that it is alive.

Apart from the grotesque and arabesque stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque includes other varieties of writing. Hans Phaall has been classed as science fiction, and King Pest is a surreal historical adventure. Several stories contain elements of all of these genres; Metzengerstein , for example, is at once a work of historical fiction, a powerful Gothic tale, and a witty and grotesque parody of the latter genre. The diversity of the contents of the tales, and the variety of theme and style within individual stories, must be seen in the context of the original form in which they appeared. All of the tales were first published in popular newspapers and magazines from 1832 to 1839 . The audience for such publications was extremely heterogeneous, and Poe was clearly trying to appeal to as large a cross-section as possible. We should also remember that, unlike subscribers to weightier publications, the magazine- and newspaper-reading public had a very limited attention span. Readers craved novelty, sensation, and diversity.

Poe was profoundly influenced by the tastes of this public. In a letter to Thomas Willis White , a newspaper editor, he remarked that the public loves “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful colored into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” In Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque this is precisely what he gave them. The most obvious characteristic of his stories is their sensationalism: they include accounts of balloon journeys to the moon, premature burials, encounters with the devil, and a number of gruesome deaths.

From the early 1830s Poe planned to gather together his short stories and publish them in book form. In the mid-1830s he unsuccessfully offered for publication a collection of stories under the title Tales of the Folio Club . Poe devised an elaborate plan for the “Folio Club” volume. The tales were to be read out, over the course of a single evening, by various members of a literary club, and each story was to be followed by the critical remarks of the rest of the company. The book was evidently intended as a satire of popular contemporary modes of fiction and criticism; as such it can be compared to the work of Poe's English contemporary, Thomas Love Peacock . The satirical intent is clearly indicated by the names and descriptions of the various club members, which include “Mr Snap, the President, who is a very lank man with a hawk nose.” Many of the figures were based on real people.

When considering Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , it is important to remember the dramatic nature of its forerunner. Our knowledge of the Folio Club gathering encourages us to read Poe's stories as the compositions of various personae and to regard Poe as author of the authors of the tales. W. H. Auden described Poe's writing as operatic, and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque does indeed resemble an opera in which Poe's narrators walk on and off the stage. Thus, the narrator of Morella mutters, melodramatically, “Years—years, may pass away, but the memory of that epoch—never!” as he leaves the stage to make way for the narrator of Lionizing . “I am,” the latter remarks to the reader-audience by way of introduction, “that is to say, I was —a great man.”

Poe's gift for impersonating his narrators is remarkable, and like a great dramatist, he seemed to contain multitudes of characters. The comparison with the playwright is appropriate because the world of Poe's writing is a thoroughly theatrical one. In it the laws of “real life” (of psychological accuracy and consistency, for instance) do not apply, and in this context we can recall Poe's famous distinction between “Hamlet the dramatis persona” and “Hamlet the man.” In the Poe universe, bizarre and absurd incidents occur on a regular basis, the dialogue and the settings are distinctly stagy, and everything is hyperbolic. As the above quotations from Morella and Lionizing suggest, it is also a world in which tragedy can be quickly followed by comedy.

And here we might recall that Poe was the son of two itinerant actors. It is particularly interesting to note that Poe's beloved mother, Eliza, was renowned for her ability to play an enormous range of tragic and comic roles, often in the same theatrical season. Her son seems to have inherited this gift as, in his writings, he effortlessly swaps a suit of sables for motley attire. At times, as in The Visionary (later called The Assignation ), which contains elements of tragedy, parody, and self-parody, Poe wore both costumes at the same time. And this in turn may help us understand the appeal of Gothic literature for Poe, because it is a form of writing in which comedy intensifies the horror by setting it in relief. Those who have adapted Poe's tales for the cinema have appreciated the humorous elements of the Gothic, as their films are at once terrifying and hilarious.

Drama and theatricality are in fact everywhere in Poe's writing. As a young poet, he effortlessly mimicked the styles of writers such as Byron; as a reviewer he convincingly adopted the tone of the authoritative critic. Throughout his works he seems to entertain and juggle ideas rather than to offer them as articles of faith, and the idea of literary performance is central to his authorship. Poe is a writer-performer whose productions can be compared to virtuoso literary displays. As readers we are like members of a theater audience who are by turns enthralled, horrified, and dazzled, and when the performance is over we applaud Poe's artistry.

An appreciation of the theatrical nature of Poe's work has important consequences for criticism. If we view Poe's writing as fundamentally dramatic, it becomes impossible to discover Poe's individual voice in the universe of voices that is his work or to analyze it from the point of view of his authorial intentions. It also becomes essential to judge the work's style and content in terms of its dramatic appropriateness: when Poe's writing is weak and verbose, for example, this may be the appropriate style for a particular narrator.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The only full-length novel that Poe would write, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ( 1838 ), was begun on the suggestion of a publisher to whom he had unsuccessfully offered Tales of the Folio Club . Its first two installments appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger , and it came out in book form in 1838 . In choosing to write a sensational sea adventure—the plot includes, among other things, a mutiny, a shipwreck, a famine, and a massacre—Poe once again selected an extremely popular subject and form.

As a realistic chronicle of an utterly fantastic journey, the novel is similar to some of the stories Poe had written in the 1830s, such as MS. Found in a Bottle . Cast in the form of a first-person account of a real sea voyage and including journal entries, “factual” information, and scholarly footnotes, Pym is written with a sharp attention to significant detail that recalls the novels of the eighteenth-century author Daniel Defoe . This attention to detail, which can be found throughout Poe's fiction, confers a degree of verisimilitude on narrations that lack psychological realism. Poe's fictional works are not, in other words, realistic, but they have a reality of their own. Pym is also similar to a Defoe novel in that it is digressive and loosely structured. In contrast to Poe's short stories, it lacks a definite architecture and fails to create a unified impression or effect. Curiously enough, this is precisely what makes it such a hypnotic book. Pym's journey, like that of Karl Rossman in Franz Kafka 's Amerika ( 1927 ), is imbued with a vague sense of horror.

Pym also contains a preface, reminiscent of Defoe, in which the narrator claims that the book is a real account of a voyage although its first installments in the Southern Literary Messenger had appeared under the name of the short-story writer, “Mr Poe.” Few reviewers were taken in by this typical Poe hoax, and the novel was generally reviewed with varying degrees of enthusiasm, as a work of fiction. Until around the 1960s, critics tended to agree with Poe's own dismissive estimation of his “very silly” novel. Since then, however, it has received much better press and has inspired a variety of readings that range from the autobiographical to the allegorical. Like many of Poe's works, it is Pym 's ambiguity and indefiniteness that make it so suggestive. These qualities are perfectly embodied in the novel's famous last line. As the eponymous hero's boat heads toward a cataract, a shrouded human figure suddenly appears, “And the hue of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” At about the same time Poe also wrote two other works, both unfinished, that can be briefly mentioned here. The Journal of Julius Rodman , a Pym -like account of an expedition across the Rocky Mountains, appeared in Gentleman's Magazine in 1840 . Five years previously the Southern Literary Messenger had published scenes from Politian , a blank verse tragedy set in Renaissance Italy that would later be included in The Raven and Other Poems ( 1845 ).

Poe's Criticism

Throughout his life Poe wrote a great deal of literary journalism and worked in an editorial capacity for a variety of newspapers. It was also one of his great ambitions to edit his own magazine. As a critic he was outspoken, vitriolic, and fearless. He highlighted the technical limitations of the books he reviewed, accused several authors (most famously Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ) of plagiarism, and took great delight in attacking the New England literary establishment.

Poe was not simply motivated by a disinterested concern for the health of letters; he was also desperately trying to carve his way to literary fame. That is why his criticism tended to be as sensational as his short-story writing: controversy was the equivalent of the Gothic and grotesque effects of his fiction. Without money or regular employment, Poe had to achieve celebrity status in order to survive in the literary marketplace, and if he could not be famous then he would be notorious. He did everything he could to keep his name before the public, even going to the extent of anonymously reviewing his own works.

Poe also used the pages of the popular press to fashion and present an image of himself as a man of immense erudition. In his articles, as in his short stories, he included countless quotations and phrases from various languages; he also made a great exhibition of his learning. Poe's “Marginalia,” published in newspapers during the 1840s, consists of comments and meditations that he claimed to have scribbled in the margins of the books in his library. “I sought relief,” he commented, like a latter-day Renaissance connoisseur of fine literature, “from ennui in dipping here and there at random among the volumes of my library.” The reality was quite different, however. Poe wrote the pieces as fillers for newspapers when they were short of copy, and the sad fact of the matter was that he could never afford to assemble an extensive library of his own.

Poe's most important contributions to literary criticism were his theories concerning the short story and poetry. It has been suggested that his comments on the short story, which were scattered throughout reviews of books such as Nathaniel Hawthorne 's Twice-Told Tales ( 1837 ), helped establish the genre in its modern form. Poe's theory can be briefly summarized. He was concerned above all with the effect of his tale on the reader. This effect should, he thought, be single and unified. When readers finished the story they ought be left with a totality of impression, and every element of the story—character, style, tone, plot, and so on—should contribute to that impression. Stories too long to be read at a single sitting could not, in Poe's view, achieve such powerful and unified effects—hence the brevity of his own productions. Poe also advocated the Aristotelian unities of place, time, and action and put special emphasis on the opening and conclusion of his tales. In addition, he encouraged authors to concentrate exclusively on powerful emotional and aesthetic effects—the aim of fiction, he suggested, was not a didactic one. Finally, instead of providing the reader with a transparent upper current of meaning, he thought that the meaning of a tale should be indefinite and ambiguous.

Obviously, such ideas help us understand Poe's own short stories. The Tell-Tale Heart and The Masque of the Red Death , for example, exhibit most of the above-mentioned characteristics. The theories of poetry that Poe adumbrated in book reviews and in lectures such as The Poetic Principle ( 1849 ) also help us understand his verse. In Poe's criticism there is a sense in which he was justifying his own practice as a creative writer and also attempting to create the kind of critical atmosphere in which his work would be favorably judged. Other writers, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound , have also found this to be an effective strategy for achieving literary success. More broadly, it can be suggested that writing such as Poe's that lacks a definite content and an unambiguous message requires a theory in order to, as it were, support it and make it intelligible to the reader.

Poe's statements about poetry are similar to his pronouncements on the short story. Thus, in a review of Longfellow's Hyperion, A Romance ( 1839 ), he criticized its lack of a definite design and unified effect. Later, when commenting on the same author's Ballads and Other Poems ( 1841 ), he complained of Longfellow's didacticism and his failure to appreciate that the aim of poetry was not to instruct readers but to give them access to the world of supernal beauty. These ideas were expressed in a more theoretical form in The Poetic Principle , in which Poe criticized what he referred to as “the heresy of the didactic” and famously defined poetry as “the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” These ideas proved to be extremely influential and were later adapted by “art-for-art's-sake” aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and by symbolists such as Paul Valéry . It has also been suggested that Poe's emphasis on the words on the page, rather than on external considerations such as the writer's biography, make him an important precursor of the New Critics.

The Raven and Other Poems

Poe's most influential theoretical essay was probably “The Philosophy of Composition,” published in Graham's Magazine in 1846 . Before we turn to it, however, it is necessary to consider The Raven , the inception and writing of which the essay describes. The Raven , first published in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845 , was an instant hit with the reading public. This allusion to pop music is apt because the immediate and enormous success of the poem has been accurately compared to that of a present-day song. On its publication, Poe became an overnight sensation, and thereafter he would always be associated with the poem. In a sense this association is unfortunate, because it obscures the fact that the poem, like many of Poe's short stories, is a dramatic production. The narrator, a young man mourning the death of his love Lenore, sits in his study musing “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”—a character and a setting typical of Poe. As well as being a dramatic poem, it is also an intensely theatrical one: the gloomy weather, the speaking bird, and props such as the purple curtain and the bust of Pallas could have been filched from the set of a Gothic drama. The young man's language, too, is distinctly stagy; at one point he remarks to the Raven: “ ‘Sir…or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore.’ ” The effect of such distinctly camp lines is complicated; you are not sure whether to laugh or scream. In the theater, and in the theatrical world of the poem, it is of course possible to do both.

Given the theatricality of the poem, it is fitting that Poe performed it, just as Dickens performed his novels, in public and private readings. During his recitations Poe once again proved that the theater was in his blood: he would dress in black, turn the lamps down low, and chant the poem in a melodious voice. The content of the poem is of course unrealistic; like a great drama, however, it creates its own vivid and convincing reality through its solemn rhymes and its stately rhythm.

Poe's raven has become as famous as those other birds of romanticism, Keats 's nightingale, Shelley 's skylark, and Coleridge's albatross. This is ironic because, in The Philosophy of Composition , he insisted that the poem was not a romantic one. The essay was written to demonstrate that, far from being a work of inspiration, the composition of The Raven proceeded with what he called “the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” Along with metaphors drawn from mathematics, Poe typically (and revealingly) used images of acting to convey his detachment and self-consciousness during the writing of the poem.

Desiring to create a powerful effect of melancholy beauty that would appeal to both “the popular and the critical taste,” Poe tells us that he hit upon the saddest of all subjects: the death of a beautiful woman. This had, of course, been the subject of several of his earlier writings, such as the “marriage group” of stories in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . In order to make the effect of the poem intense and unified, he decided that it should be limited to around one hundred lines and that it would include a refrain composed of the single, sonorous word, Nevermore . In the remainder of the essay Poe, who might be compared here to a magician who enjoys explaining away his tricks, goes on to make numerous comments of a similar nature.

It has been suggested that The Philosophy of Composition was a typical Poe hoax, and it is highly unlikely that it is a veracious account of the actual writing of The Raven . This, however, is largely irrelevant since the essay's importance lies in the fact that it offered a novel theory of composition and a new conception of the poet. Poe was attempting to replace the idea of the inspired poet that had been established by the ancients and by contemporaries such as Coleridge with his notion of the cold and calculating author. Once again, Poe's idea proved to be extremely influential in the history of literature. It informs Valéry's conception of the poet as an extremely self-conscious artist and T. S. Eliot's idea of the impersonal author.

It is doubtful that Poe's theories would have exercised such a powerful influence had he not also embodied and dramatized them in his writings. Perhaps even more important, he also offered himself as an archetype of the kind of author he was describing. Poe presented himself, in other words, as the exemplar of the self-conscious poet, an original that poets such as Baudelaire copied.

The Raven was republished in Poe's most substantial and famous collection of verse, The Raven and Other Poems , in 1845 . The book, which was prefaced by a statement that typically succeeded in being at once self-effacing and arrogant, contained revised versions of earlier compositions such as Israfel and poems that had never previously appeared in book form. Also included in the collection were several poems that had appeared, or would later appear, in Poe's short stories. (This is a striking demonstration of the homogeneous nature of Poe's oeuvre.) The most famous of these poems are The Haunted Palace , a powerful atmospheric poem improvised by Roderick Usher, and The Conqueror Worm , written by the eponymous hero of Ligeia . In the latter, angels are in a theater watching humankind play out its meaningless “motley drama” in which there is “much of Madness and more of Sin / And horror the soul of the plot.” Suddenly, “a blood-red thing” comes onto the stage. The lights go out, the curtain comes down, and death (for it is he) holds illimitable dominion over all. In its Gothic style, its dark vision of the world, and its theatricality, the poem is characteristic of its author and indeed reads like a microcosm of his oeuvre. One obvious point that can be made in connection with the poems that appeared in Poe's short stories is that they are dramatic works (a comparison here might be made with Robert Browning's monologues). Yet again, Poe displays his great gifts as a mimic or actor, and once more we are alerted to the difficulties of reading his work in an autobiographical light.

Many of Poe's finest poems were written after the publication of The Raven and were collected in volume form posthumously. These include the onomatopoeic The Bells , the beautiful ballad Annabel Lee , and the musical masterpiece Ulalume . This last poem is perhaps the most perfect example of Poe's ability to create a mysterious and unearthly atmosphere through repetition, assonance, and the use of languorous, usually trisyllabic, words. While discussing the poem, Poe is reported to have remarked that he deliberately wrote verse that would be unintelligible to the many. Ulalume is certainly hard to understand, but like the rest of Poe's verse, its ambiguity heightens rather than diminishes its power.

Poe, the Detective Story, and Science Fiction

Between the publication of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 and his death in 1849 , Poe wrote numerous short stories. Among them are some of the most famous of all his writings, such as The Black Cat , The Tell-Tale Heart , The Cask of Amontillado , The Pit and the Pendulum , Hop-Frog , and The Masque of the Red Death . These stories have achieved the status of myths in the Western world; even those who have not read them know their plots. Because of the exigencies of space, and also because some of Poe's arabesque and grotesque productions have already been discussed, the focus here is on the stories that appeared in Tales ( 1845 ) and, in particular, on Poe's detective tales and science fiction. Although reviewers of Tales were, as usual, divided between those who described Poe as a great original and those who dismissed him as a showy and stylistically incompetent writer, the volume sold better than any of Poe's other publications.

Four detective stories (or “Tales of ratiocination,” as Poe called them) appeared in Tales : the prize-winning The Gold-Bug and three tales that featured the detective C. Auguste Dupin: The Purloined Letter , The Mystery of Marie Roget , and The Murders in the Rue Morgue . Although writers such as Voltaire, William Godwin , and Tobias Smollet had produced examples of what might be loosely termed crime fiction in the eighteenth century , it was these tales that established the modern short detective story as a definite and distinct form.

In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the most famous and entertaining of Poe's detective stories, we immediately recognize the structure of the modern detective tale. A hideous and inexplicable crime is committed (the brutal murder of two women in a locked room in Paris), and all the evidence is placed before us. The police, who rely on cunning and instinct rather than rational method and imagination, are utterly baffled. Fortunately for them, an amateur genius, Dupin, is on hand to unravel the mystery. The tale (which in terms of its action is written backward) thus includes two stories: that of the crime and that of its solution and explanation by Dupin.

In creating Dupin, Poe invented the archetype of the modern detective. Among Dupin's descendents are Agatha Christie 's Hercule Poirot, G. K. Chesterton 's Father Brown, and of course Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes, who in one of Conan Doyle's stories actually discusses Dupin's merits. An eccentric and reclusive genius, Dupin is both a poetic visionary and a detached man of reason; he combines the attributes of the poet with those of the mathematician. In The Purloined Letter , where he unravels a mystery by identifying with the criminal, Dupin also displays an actor's power of empathy. He is, in other words, a glorified and aristocratic version of Poe. Poe also created the original of the detective's companion: a friend of average intelligence who narrates the tale and who acts, as it were, as the reader's representative within it. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the character is nameless; in later works by other authors he will be called Doctor Watson and Captain Hastings.

Poe is thus in large part responsible for one of the most popular and dominant forms of modern literature. After reading Poe, the French writers the Goncourt brothers believed that they had discovered “the literature of the twentieth century —love giving place to deductions…the interest of the story moved from the heart to the head…from the drama to the solution.” This prediction proved correct. Twentieth-century writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (who believed that Poe's ghost dictated detective stories to him) consciously imitated Poe, and the popularity and influence of the detective story has been, and still is, enormous. The broader point made by the Goncourt brothers concerning a literature of “the head” is also interesting. The detective story is essentially an intellectual exercise or game, and much of Poe's writing can be described in these terms. Perhaps it is this quality in his work that made it so popular and influential in the twentieth century .

The invention, or at the very least the foundation, of the modern detective story is surely Poe's greatest contribution to world literature. He has also been hailed as the father of modern science fiction. The extent to which Poe established the genre is, however, a matter of controversy. Those who have argued for his formative influence point to the futuristic, technological, and rationalistic elements of his work. It is perhaps better to approach the question through a consideration of Poe's influence, which was enormous. Poe's science fiction stories profoundly influenced later masters of the genre such as Jules Verne , H. G. Wells , and Isaac Asimov (who conflated the science fiction tale and the detective story). Among the Poe stories that have been classed as science fiction are Hans Phaall , the eponymous hero's account of his nineteen-day balloon journey to the moon, and the futuristic Mellonta Tauta . Two stories in Tales , The Colloquy of Monos and Una and The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion , have also been classified as science fiction tales.

Both are dialogues between disembodied spirits set sometime in the distant future. The dialogue form, which derives from ancients such as Lucian and Plato , was very popular in Poe's time among satirical writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, Giacomo Leopardi , and William Blake . Poe also used it for satirical purposes; in these dialogues he criticizes his age for, among other things, its exclusive belief in science. Poe's argument with science was in some respects a typically romantic one. Science and industrialization, it is suggested in The Colloquy , have given humans the false idea that they have dominion over nature and have devalued the poetic intellect.

Yet Poe went further than this conventional romantic position and challenged science's claims to objectivity and its emphasis on empiricism. So far as objectivity is concerned, reading hoax stories such as Hans Phaall leaves the impression that scientific explanations of the world are not unlike stories and that science itself may be a kind of fiction. Regarding the limitations of empiricism, Poe believed that the discovery of facts was not enough and that it is what is done with them that is important. It requires, Poe suggests, a visionary rather than a scientist to sort, connect, and shape them into theories. This visionary figure, who is both poet and mathematician, appears throughout Poe's writings. Sometimes he is Dupin, the great detective; at other times he is Poe, the theorist of poetic composition and the author of the scientific prose poem Eureka .

Poe evidently believed that Eureka , published in 1848 , was his greatest achievement: “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka,’ ” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “I could accomplish nothing more.” Indeed, he appears to have regarded it as nothing less than the solution to the secret of the universe. It is most unfortunate for humanity, therefore, that Eureka makes extremely dull reading and is very difficult to understand. One of the best attempts at a summary is contained in Kenneth Silverman 's ( 1991 ) excellent biography of Poe. Suffice it to say here that Eureka , subtitled as “Essay on the material and the spiritual universe” predicted, among other things, the annihilation and the rebirth of the universe.

Although Eureka has traditionally been regarded as a distinct work within the Poe canon, there are many connections between it and the rest of his oeuvre. Passages in short stories such as Mellonta Tauta prefigure some of its contents. In his preface to the book Poe described it as a poem rather than a “scientific” work. “I offer this Book of Truths,” he wrote, adapting Keats's famous line, “not in the character of a Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it True.”

The rather confused critical reception that Eureka received also made it a typical Poe production. Some reviewers read it as an elaborate hoax in the manner of Hans Phaall ; others considered it to be a prolix and labored satire of scientific discourse. Certain critics regarded it as a brilliant and sincere work of genius, yet it was also dismissed as arrant fudge. Such diverse and extreme reactions to Poe's work have already been noted; they testify to the fact that, whatever else his writing is, it is impossible to ignore.

Poe's Influence

When Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849 from causes that are still the subject of debate, some commentators predicted that his works would be forgotten. They could not have been more wrong, as his books are currently read throughout the world and his influence on world literature has been extraordinary. With their consummate artistry, their self-consciousness, and their heavy atmosphere of decay, Poe's poems and tales (along with his literary persona and his theories) inspired Decadent and symbolist writers of the nineteenth century . Baudelaire, among whose earliest works were translations of Poe's stories, famously died with a copy of Poe's tales beside his bed. Mallarmé, Verlaine, Dowson, and Wilde also worshipped at the Poe shrine.

At the end of the nineteenth century , science fiction writers such as Verne and Wells and authors of detective stories such as Conan Doyle acknowledged their profound debt to Poe. It was Conan Doyle who remarked that Poe's tales “have been so pregnant with suggestion…that each is a root from which a whole literature has developed.” In the twentieth century Poe's influence was no less profound. His short stories were of immense importance to authors as diverse as Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft (who referred to his tales of horror as “Poe stories”), Vladimir Nabokov , and Stephen King. He has also had a powerful effect on every other branch of the arts. Painters such as René Magritte and Edmund Dulac were fascinated by him, and film directors such as Roger Corman and Alfred Hitchcock also took inspiration from his writings.

Poe continues to inspire and enchant people today. In the future he will no doubt attract as much hostile criticism as he has in the past, but he will survive because he will continue to be read. And despite all of the faults and all of the fudge in his writings, it is hard, in conclusion, to think of another American writer who has so drastically altered the landscape of the popular imagination or who has had such a powerful effect on his fellow artists.

Selected Works

• Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
• Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
• Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831)
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
• Tales (1845)
• Eureka (1848)
• Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1969–1978)
• The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976)
• The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (1986)
• Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (1996)

Further Reading

• Carlson, Eric W. , ed. The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829 . Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966. Collection of all of the famous essays on Poe, including those by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Walt Whitman.
• Carlson, Eric W. , ed. A Companion to Poe Studies . Westport, Conn., 1996. A comprehensive collection of modern appraisals of every aspect of Poe's life and work.
• Hayes, Kevin J. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . Cambridge, 2002. Excellent and wide-ranging collection of late-twentieth-century Poe scholarship.
• Hyneman, Esther F. Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English, 1827–1973 . Boston, 1974.
• Silverman, Kenneth . Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . New York, 1991. Its psychoanalytic explanations are sometimes unconvincing, but it is easily the best biography available.
• Walker, I. M. , ed. Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage . New York, 1986. Anthology of contemporary reviews of Poe's work.

Related Articles

• American Detective Fiction
• Popular Fiction
• The Short Story in America

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer and critic famous for his dark, mysterious poems and stories, including “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Who Was Edgar Allan Poe?

Quick facts, army and west point, writing career as a critic and poet, poems: “the raven” and “annabel lee”, short stories, legacy and museum.

FULL NAME: Edgar Allan Poe BORN: January 19, 1809 DIED: October 7, 1849 BIRTHPLACE: Boston, Massachusetts SPOUSE: Virginia Clemm Poe (1836-1847) ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Edgar Allan Poe was born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston. Edgar never really knew his biological parents: Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British actor, and David Poe Jr., an actor who was born in Baltimore. His father left the family early in Edgar’s life, and his mother died from tuberculosis when he was only 2.

Separated from his brother, William, and sister, Rosalie, Poe went to live with his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, in Richmond, Virginia. John was a successful tobacco merchant there. Edgar and Frances seemed to form a bond, but he had a more difficult relationship with John.

By age 13, Poe was a prolific poet, but his literary talents were discouraged by his headmaster and by John, who preferred that young Edgar follow him in the family business. Preferring poetry over profits, Poe reportedly wrote poems on the back of some of Allan’s business papers.

Money was also an issue between Poe and John. Poe went to the University of Virginia in 1826, where he excelled in his classes. However, he didn’t receive enough money from John to cover all of his costs. Poe turned to gambling to cover the difference but ended up in debt.

He returned home only to face another personal setback—his neighbor and fiancée Sarah Elmira Royster had become engaged to someone else. Heartbroken and frustrated, Poe moved to Boston.

In 1827, around the time he published his first book, Poe joined the U.S. Army. Two years later, he learned that his mother, Frances, was dying of tuberculosis, but by the time he returned to Richmond, she had already died.

While in Virginia, Poe and his father briefly made peace with each other, and John helped Poe get an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Poe excelled at his studies at West Point, but he was kicked out after a year for his poor handling of his duties.

During his time at West Point, Poe had fought with John, who had remarried without telling him. Some have speculated that Poe intentionally sought to be expelled to spite his father, who eventually cut ties with Poe.

After leaving West Point, Poe published his third book and focused on writing full-time. He traveled around in search of opportunity, living in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond. In 1834, John Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, but providing for an illegitimate child Allan had never met.

Poe, who continued to struggle living in poverty, got a break when one of his short stories won a contest in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter . He began to publish more short stories and, in 1835, landed an editorial position with the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe developed a reputation as a cut-throat critic, writing vicious reviews of his contemporaries. His scathing critiques earned him the nickname the “Tomahawk Man.”

His tenure at the magazine proved short, however. Poe’s aggressive reviewing style and sometimes combative personality strained his relationship with the publication, and he left the magazine in 1837. His problems with alcohol also played a role in his departure, according to some reports.

Poe went on to brief stints at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine , Graham’s Magazine , as well as The Broadway Journal , and he also sold his work to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger , among other journals.

In 1844, Poe moved to New York City. There, he published a news story in The New York Sun about a balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean that he later revealed to be a hoax. His stunt grabbed attention, but it was his publication of “The Raven,” in 1845, that made Poe a literary sensation.

That same year, Poe found himself under attack for his stinging criticisms of fellow poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Poe claimed that Longfellow, a widely popular literary figure, was a plagiarist, which resulted in a backlash against Poe.

Despite his success and popularity as a writer, Poe continued to struggle financially, and he advocated for higher wages for writers and an international copyright law.

Poe self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems , in 1827. His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems , was published in 1829.

As a critic at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond from 1835 to 1837, Poe published some of his own works in the magazine, including two parts of his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym . Later on came poems such as “Ulalume” and “The Bells.”

“The Raven”

Poe’s poem “The Raven,” published in 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror , is considered among the best-known poems in American literature and one of the best of Poe’s career. An unknown narrator laments the demise of his great love Lenore and is visited by a raven, who insistently repeats one word: “Nevermore.” In the work, which consists of 18 six-line stanzas, Poe explored some of his common themes: death and loss.

“Annabel Lee”

This lyric poem again explores Poe’s themes of death and loss and might have been written in memory of his beloved wife, Virginia, who died two years prior its publication. The poem was published on October 9, 1849, two days after Poe’s death, in the New York Tribune .

In late 1830s, Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , a collection of short stories. It contained several of his most spine-tingling tales, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “William Wilson.”

In 1841, Poe launched the new genre of detective fiction with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His literary innovations earned him the nickname “Father of the Detective Story.” A writer on the rise, he won a literary prize in 1843 for “The Gold Bug,” a suspenseful tale of secret codes and hunting treasure.

“The Black Cat”

Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” was published in 1843 in The Saturday Evening Post . In it, the narrator, a one-time animal lover, becomes an alcoholic who begins abusing his wife and black cat. By the macabre story’s end, the narrator observes his own descent into madness as he kills his wife, a crime his black cat reports to the police. The story was later included in the 1845 short story collection, Tales by Edgar Allan Poe .

Later in his career, Poe continued to work in different forms, examining his own methodology and writing in general in several essays, including “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Poetic Principle,” and “The Rationale of Verse.” He also produced the thrilling tale, “The Cask of Amontillado.”

From 1831 to 1835, Poe lived in Baltimore, where his father was born, with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. He began to devote his attention to Virginia; his cousin became his literary inspiration as well as his love interest. The couple married in 1836 when she was only 13 years old and he was 27.

In 1847, at the age of 24—the same age when Poe’s mother and brother also died—Virginia passed away from tuberculosis. Poe was overcome by grief following her death, and although he continued to work, he suffered from poor health and struggled financially until his death in 1849.

Poe died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore at age 40.

His final days remain somewhat of a mystery. Poe left Richmond on ten days earlier, on September 27, and was supposedly on his way to Philadelphia. On October 3, he was found in Baltimore in great distress. Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later. His last words were “Lord, help my poor soul.”

At the time, it was said that Poe died of “congestion of the brain.” But his actual cause of death has been the subject of endless speculation. Some experts believe that alcoholism led to his demise while others offer up alternative theories. Rabies, epilepsy, and carbon monoxide poisoning are just some of the conditions thought to have led to the great writer’s death.

Shortly after his passing, Poe’s reputation was badly damaged by his literary adversary Rufus Griswold. Griswold, who had been sharply criticized by Poe, took his revenge in his obituary of Poe, portraying the gifted yet troubled writer as a mentally deranged drunkard and womanizer. He also penned the first biography of Poe, which helped cement some of these misconceptions in the public’s minds.

Although Poe never had financial success in his lifetime, he has become one of America’s most enduring writers. His works are as compelling today as they were more than a century ago. An innovative and imaginative thinker, Poe crafted stories and poems that still shock, surprise, and move modern readers. His dark work influenced writers including Charles Baudelaire , Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Stephane Mallarme.

The Baltimore home where Poe stayed from 1831 to 1835 with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Poe’s cousin and future wife Virginia, is now a museum. The Edgar Allan Poe House offers a self-guided tour featuring exhibits on Poe’s foster parents, his life and death in Baltimore, and the poems and short stories he wrote while living there, as well as memorabilia including his chair and desk.

• The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
• Lord, help my poor soul.
• Sound loves to revel near a summer night.
• But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
• They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
• The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
• With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not—they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.
• And now—have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart.
• All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
• I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
• [I]f you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
• Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

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Edgar Allan Poe: Brief Biography Essay

Life overview, work and the four genres, introspective narrator in “the tell-tale heart”, poe’s legacy to literature.

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most influential writers in the history of Western literature, whose work has largely defined the genre of American Gothic. His compelling, often disturbing writing incorporates several Romantic attitudes, as well as the idea of the sublime. The concept of the sublime, that being a term for whatever excites the ideas of pain and danger, is widely present in his fiction. Sublime’s exploration of the darkest sides of the human soul and psyche has contributed greatly to the development of the horror genre. Poe’s depiction of some of the major ideas of Romanticism is another noticeable feature of his writing. Subjectivity and emphasis on individualism, romanticized solitude put in the spotlight, and the belief that imagination is superior to reason are some of the Romantic ideas represented in Poe’s characters.

Edgar Allan Poe is an American poet, prosaist, and literary critic. Born into a Boston family of actors at the beginning of the 19 th century, he became an orphan at a young age and was taken in by a successful merchant household. Throughout his life, Poe went through the conflict with his adoptive father, military service, his brother’s death, and a long period of financial struggle. Despite ending up becoming one of the genre-defining writers for horror and gothic literature, Poe was forced to beg for monetary assistance throughout his life. His writing career coincided with a difficult period in the American publishing industry that, at the time, was regularly undercompensating its authors (Safner 15). The writer’s life and work alike were impacted by his depression and other mental illnesses that aided him in the detailed depiction of disruptive, maladaptive thoughts (Dean and Boyd 490). Poe’s death was mysterious and rather painful: on October 7 th , 1849, he passed away after a prolonged delirium fit, fearing whatever awaited him in the afterlife.

The four genres Poe has worked in are science fiction, horror fiction, adventure fiction, and detective fiction: a form of literature he is frequently credited with inventing. His horror fiction works are characterized by the wide usage of the sublime, as mentioned above. They frequently incorporate such themes as mental disorders, body horror, and unexpected, uncontrolled violence or fear (Dean and Boyd, 483). His works in science fiction and adventure fiction generally tended to appease the mass market, as much of the writer’s career was dedicated to commercial writing. The detective genre, however, presents an interesting case, as Poe’s short story The Murders in The Rue Morgue is believed to be the first of its kind. Its narrative focuses on the investigation of the brutal murder of the two women, whose case presents a seemingly unsolvable mystery. The story’s protagonist, an amateur detective, finds a murderer – a giant ape – while the police forces are helpless: a plot device that later becomes emblematic for the genre.

The Tell-Tale Heart is the story of a man who decides to confess his crimes after committing a murder due to being tormented by his own internal guilt. It is a clear example of the illustrative narrator in fiction, who is defined by the story’s exploration of the protagonist’s feelings and thoughts. The narrator fits the definition perfectly, being so in touch with his consciousness that it does not allow him to forget about what he has done for even a minute. The protagonist is intentionally left nameless to highlight his insanity and distance him from the common patterns of thinking (Amir 596). Even the reasoning behind the murder is deeply troubling and odd, having nothing to do with more understandable motives like greed or revenge. Instead, the narrator cannot distract himself from the “evil eye” of his victim, with whom he has no other quarrels. The feelings of paranoia and fear of the “eye” consume the narrator, compelling him to murder a helpless old man. The exploration of the protagonist’s unhealthy internal world is then conducted in the rest of the short story. Feeling guilty and scared, he further descends into the nightmare of insanity, hearing deranged sounds that the others are unaware of.

Poe’s legacy to literature in America and worldwide is undeniable: one of the most recognizable Gothic writers, a clear example of a romanticist and an inventor of the entire genre. His fascination with death, torture, and the dark side of the human soul, in general, grant his writing a truly unique place in the literary canon. Edgar Poe is the most known, arguably, for being willing to revel in the dark and the horrifying, and thus many of his works were considered shocking at the time. His rich gothic imagery captures attention and keeps the reader on the edge of their seat, compelling them to keep reading no matter how disturbing the story gets. Furthermore, his constant financial struggle and the internal conflict between preferred themes and the need to write for money might resonate significantly with the writers of today.

Amir, Shamaila, “Analysis of the Short Story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe”. The Creative Launcher , vol. 2, no. 3, 2020. Web.

Dean, Hannah J., and Ryan L. Boyd. “Deep Into That Darkness Peering: A Computational Analysis Of The Role Of Depression In Edgar Allan Poe’s Life And Death”. Journal Of Affective Disorders , vol. 266, 2020, pp. 482-491. Elsevier BV. Web .

Safner, Ryan, “Honor Among Thieves: How 19th Century American Pirate Publishers Simulated Copyright Protection”, 2021. Web.

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Bibliography

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Text: Edgar Allan Poe, “ The Philosophy of Composition ” (Text-02), Graham's Magazine , vol. XXVIII, no. 4, April 1846, 28:163-167

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

[page 163, full page:]

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION.

———

BY EDGAR A. POE.

C HARLES DICKENS , in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of “Barnaby Rudge,” says — “By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his ‘Caleb Williams’ backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done.”

I cannot think this the precise mode of procedure on the part of Godwin — and indeed what he himself acknowledges, is not altogether in accordance with Mr. Dickens’ idea — but the author of “Caleb Williams” was too good an artist not to perceive the advantage derivable from at least a somewhat similar process. Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.

There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. Either history affords a thesis — or one is suggested by an incident of the day — or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative — designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue, or autorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves apparent.

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect . Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest — I say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone — whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone — afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would — that is to say, who could — detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such [column 2:] a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say — but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers — poets in especial — prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition — and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought — at the true purposes seized only at the last moment — at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view — at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable — at the cautious selections and rejections — at the painful erasures and interpolations — in a word, at the wheels and pinions — the tackle for scene-shifting — the step-ladders and demon-traps — the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio .

I am aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no means common, in which an author is at all in condition to retrace the steps by which his conclusions have been attained. In general, suggestions, having arisen pell-mell, are pursued and forgotten in a similar manner.

For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance alluded to, nor, at any time, the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions; and, since the interest of an analysis, or reconstruction, such as I have considered a desideratum , is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analyzed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by which some one of my own works was put together. I select “The Raven,” as the most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.

Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se , the circumstance — or say the necessity — which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.

We commence, then, with this intention.

The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression — [page 164:] for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed. But since, ceteris paribus , no poet can afford to dispense with any thing that may advance his design, it but remains to be seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity which attends it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones — that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief. For this reason, at least one half of the “Paradise Lost” is essentially prose — a succession of poetical excitements interspersed, inevitably , with corresponding depressions — the whole being deprived, through the extremeness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect.

It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art — the limit of a single sitting — and that, although in certain classes of prose composition, such as “Robinson Crusoe,” (demanding no unity,) this limit may be advantageously overpassed, it can never properly be overpassed in a poem. Within this limit, the extent of a poem may be made to bear mathematical relation to its merit — in other words, to the excitement or elevation — again in other words, to the degree of the true poetical effect which it is capable of inducing; for it is clear that the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect: — this, with one proviso — that a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all.

Holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree of excitement which I deemed not above the popular, while not below the critical, taste, I reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poem — a length of about one hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and eight.

My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally appreciable. I should be carried too far out of my immediate topic were I to demonstrate a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and which, with the poetical, stands not in the slightest need of demonstration — the point, I mean, that Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. A few words, however, in elucidation of my real meaning, which some of my friends have evinced a disposition to misrepresent. That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect — they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul — not of intellect, or of heart — upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating “the beautiful.” Now I designate [column 2:] Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes — that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment — no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to, is most readily attained in the poem. Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul. It by no means follows from any thing here said, that passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem — for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music, by contrast — but the true artist will always contrive, first, to tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and, secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem.

Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation — and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness . Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

The length, the province, and the tone, being thus determined, I betook myself to ordinary induction, with the view of obtaining some artistic piquancy which might serve me as a key-note in the construction of the poem — some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn. In carefully thinking over all the usual artistic effects — or more properly points , in the theatrical sense — I did not fail to perceive immediately that no one had been so universally employed as that of the refrain . The universality of its employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and spared me the necessity of submitting it to analysis. I considered it, however, with regard to its susceptibility of improvement, and soon saw it to be in a primitive condition. As commonly used, the refrain , or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon the force of monotone — both in sound and thought. The pleasure is deduced solely from the sense of identity — of repetition. I resolved to diversify, and so vastly heighten, the effect, by adhering, in general, to the monotone of sound, while I continually varied that of thought: that is to say, I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain — the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried.

These points being settled, I next bethought me of the nature of my refrain . Since its application was to be repeatedly varied, it was clear that the refrain itself must be brief, for there would have been an insurmountable difficulty in frequent variations of [page 165:] application in any sentence of length. In proportion to the brevity of the sentence, would, of course, be the facility of the variation. This led me at once to a single word as the best refrain .

The question now arose as to the character of the word. Having made up my mind to a refrain , the division of the poem into stanzas was, of course, a corollary: the refrain forming the close to each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt: and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant.

The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became necessary to select a word embodying this sound, and at the same time in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which I had predetermined as the tone of the poem. In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word “Nevermore.” In fact, it was the very first which presented itself.

The next desideratum was a pretext for the continuous use of the one word “nevermore.” In observing the difficulty which I at once found in inventing a sufficiently plausible reason for its continuous repetition, I did not fail to perceive that this difficulty arose solely from the pre-assumption that the word was to be so continuously or monotonously spoken by a human being — I did not fail to perceive, in short, that the difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating the word. Here, then, immediately arose the idea of a non -reasoning creature capable of speech; and, very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone .

I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven — the bird of ill omen — monotonously repeating the one word, “Nevermore,” at the conclusion of each stanza, in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object supremeness , or perfection, at all points, I asked myself — “Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death — was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious — “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

I had now to combine the two ideas, of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a Raven continuously repeating the word “Nevermore” — I had to combine these, bearing in mind my design of varying, at every turn, the application of the word repeated; but the only intelligible mode of such combination is that of imagining the Raven employing the word in [column 2:] answer to the queries of the lover. And here it was that I saw at once the opportunity afforded for the effect on which I had been depending — that is to say, the effect of the variation of application . I saw that I could make the first query propounded by the lover — the first query to which the Raven should reply “Nevermore” — that I could make this first query a commonplace one — the second less so — the third still less, and so on — until at length the lover, startled from his original nonchalance by the melancholy character of the word itself — by its frequent repetition — and by a consideration of the ominous reputation of the fowl that uttered it — is at length excited to superstition, and wildly propounds queries of a far different character — queries whose solution he has passionately at heart — propounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture — propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of the bird (which, reason assures him, is merely repeating a lesson learned by rote) but because he experiences a phrenzied pleasure in so modeling his questions as to receive from the expected “Nevermore” the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow. Perceiving the opportunity thus afforded me — or, more strictly, thus forced upon me in the progress of the construction — I first established in mind the climax, or concluding query — that to which “Nevermore” should be in the last place an answer — that in reply to which this word “Nevermore” should involve the utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and despair.

Here then the poem may be said to have its beginning — at the end, where all works of art should begin — for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, that I first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza:

“ Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil!

By that heaven that bends above us — by that God we both adore,

Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore —

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

Quoth the raven “Nevermore.”

I composed this stanza, at this point, first that, by establishing the climax, I might the better vary and graduate, as regards seriousness and importance, the preceding queries of the lover — and, secondly, that I might definitely settle the rhythm, the metre, and the length and general arrangement of the stanza — as well as graduate the stanzas which were to precede, so that none of them might surpass this in rhythmical effect. Had I been able, in the subsequent composition, to construct more vigorous stanzas, I should, without scruple, have purposely enfeebled them, so as not to interfere with the climacteric effect.

And here I may as well say a few words of the versification. My first object (as usual) was originality. The extent to which this has been neglected, in versification, is one of the most unaccountable things in the world. Admitting that there is little [page 166:] possibility of variety in mere rhythm , it is still clear that the possible varieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite — and yet, for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing . The fact is, originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.

Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre of the “Raven.” The former is trochaic — the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic. Less pedantically — the feet employed throughout (trochees) consist of a long syllable followed by a short: the first line of the stanza consists of eight of these feet — the second of seven and a half (in effect two-thirds) — the third of eight — the fourth of seven and a half — the fifth the same — the sixth three and a half. Now, each of these lines, taken individually, has been employed before, and what originality the “Raven” has, is in their combination into stanza; nothing even remotely approaching this combination has ever been attempted. The effect of this originality of combination is aided by other unusual, and some altogether novel effects, arising from an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration.

The next point to be considered was the mode of bringing together the lover and the Raven — and the first branch of this consideration was the locale . For this the most natural suggestion might seem to be a forest, or the fields — but it has always appeared to me that a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident: — it has the force of a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral power in keeping concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with mere unity of place.

I determined, then, to place the lover in his chamber — in a chamber rendered sacred to him by memories of her who had frequented it. The room is represented as richly furnished — this in mere pursuance of the ideas I have already explained on the subject of Beauty, as the sole true poetical thesis.

The locale being thus determined, I had now to introduce the bird — and the thought of introducing him through the window, was inevitable. The idea of making the lover suppose, in the first instance, that the flapping of the wings of the bird against the shutter, is a “tapping” at the door, originated in a wish to increase, by prolonging, the reader's curiosity, and in a desire to admit the incidental effect arising from the lover's throwing open the door, finding all dark, and thence adopting the half-fancy that it was the spirit of his mistress that knocked.

I made the night tempestuous, first, to account for the Raven's seeking admission, and secondly, for the effect of contrast with the (physical) serenity within the chamber.

I made the bird alight on the bust of Pallas, also for [column 2:] the effect of contrast between the marble and the plumage — it being understood that the bust was absolutely suggested by the bird — the bust of Pallas being chosen, first, as most in keeping with the scholarship of the lover, and, secondly, for the sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself.

About the middle of the poem, also, I have availed myself of the force of contrast, with a view of deepening the ultimate impression. For example, an air of the fantastic — approaching as nearly to the ludicrous as was admissible — is given to the Raven's entrance. He comes in “with many a flirt and flutter.”

Not the least obeisance made he — not a moment stopped or stayed he,

But with mien of lord or lady , perched above my chamber door.

In the two stanzas which follow, the design is more obviously carried out: —

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore ,

“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,

Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the nightly shore —

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

——

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

Though its answer little meaning — little relevancy bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door —

Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door ,

With such name as “Nevermore.”

The effect of the dénouement being thus provided for, I immediately drop the fantastic for a tone of the most profound seriousness: — this tone commencing in the stanza directly following the one last quoted, with the line,

But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only, etc.

From this epoch the lover no longer jests — no longer sees any thing even of the fantastic in the Raven's demeanor. He speaks of him as a “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore,” and feels the “fiery eyes” burning into his “bosom's core.” This revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover's part, is intended to induce a similar one on the part of the reader — to bring the mind into a proper frame for the dénouement — which is now brought about as rapidly and as directly as possible.

With the dénouement proper — with the Raven's reply, “Nevermore,” to the lover's final demand if he shall meet his mistress in another world — the poem, in its obvious phase, that of a simple narrative, may be said to have its completion. So far, every thing is within the limits of the accountable — of the real. A raven, having learned by rote the single word “Nevermore,” and having escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven, at midnight, through the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light still gleams — the chamber-window of a student, occupied half in poring over a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased. [page 167:] The casement being thrown open at the fluttering of the bird's wings, the bird itself perches on the most convenient seat out of the immediate reach of the student, who, amused by the incident and the oddity of the visiter's demeanor, demands of it, in jest and without looking for a reply, its name. The raven addressed, answers with its customary word, “Nevermore” — a word which finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving utterance aloud to certain thoughts suggested by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl's repetition of “Nevermore.” The student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as I have before explained, by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer “Nevermore.” With the indulgence, to the utmost extreme, of this self-torture, the narration, in what I have termed its first or obvious phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no overstepping of the limits of the real.

But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. Two things are invariably required — first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness — some under[[-]]current, however indefinite of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness (to [column 2:] borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal . It is the excess of the suggested meaning — it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under[[-]]current of the theme — which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists.

Holding these opinions, I added the two concluding stanzas of the poem — their suggestiveness being thus made to pervade all the narrative which has preceded them. The under-current of meaning is rendered first apparent in the lines —

“Take thy beak from out my heart , and take thy form from off my door!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore!”

It will be observed that the words, “from out my heart,” involve the first metaphorical expression in the poem. They, with the answer, “Nevermore,” dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated. The reader begins now to regard the Raven as emblematical — but it is not until the very last line of the very last stanza, that the intention of making him emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance is permitted distinctly to be seen:

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,

And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted — nevermore.

The quotations from “The Raven” are centered here for the convenience of the reader. As the columns are rather narrow, these quotations are not centered, or even indented, in the original, but presumably would have been had space allowed.

[S:2 - GM,  1846] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Essays - The Philosophy of Composition (Text-02)

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe

Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 30, 2017 • ( 1 )

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was the first major American writer explicitly to advocate the autonomy of poetry, the freeing of poetry from moral or educational or intellectual imperatives. His fundamental strategy for perceiving such autonomy was to view poetry not as an object but as a series of effects. Hence, while his views are broadly Romantic like Emerson ’s, they differ deeply from Emerson ’s in that they present an affective and expressionist view of poetry. While he is usually considered a Romantic, Poe’s concern with technique and construction exhibit a formalist disposition and anticipate some of the more modern formalistic theories.

Poe’s genius has often been seen as pathological: he lost both his parents at an early age, was informally adopted and later broke with his adoptive parents; he abandoned his studies at the University of Virginia , which he had entered in 1826; he was expelled from West Point Military Academy in 1831; he led a controversial life as a contributor to, and editor of, journals; he indulged in bouts of drinking, suffered from depression and paranoia. Yet his image as an outcast, his emphasis on beauty rather than morality or truth, his view of poetry as affording us a glimpse of an ideal world, as well as his insistence on the close union of poetry and music, exerted a considerable fascination and impact on writers such as Baudelaire , who translated a number of his tales, and Mallarmé , who translated his poems, as well as Lacan , who published in 1966 his seminar on Poe’s story The Purloined Letter .

Poe’s most famous tales include The Black Cat , The Fall of the House of Usher  (1839), and The Cask of Amontillado   (1846), and among his notable poems are To Helen , Israfel, The City in the Sea ,  and The Haunted Palace . His poem The Raven  (1842) was widely popular. Some of Poe’s radical insights into poetry and criticism are expressed in his essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846), which purports to explain the origins of his own poem The Raven.  Other critical essays include The Poetic Principle  and The Rationale of Verse . In The Philosophy of Composition , Poe urges that a poet should begin with the “consideration of an effect,” i.e., the response that will be produced in the reader or listener.13 He also urges that the poet should keep “originality always in view” ( PC ,  178). This effect, he insists, must be produced as a “unity of impression.” Poe does not believe that such a unified impression can be achieved by a long poem; since poetry “intensely excites, by elevating, the soul,” and since intense excitement must by nature be brief, a long poem “is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones – that is to say, of brief poetical effects” ( PC, 180). A poem such as Paradise Lost , Poe argues, is at least one half composed of prose, with which the poetic passages are interspersed. Hence the first poetic requirement, unity of impression, cannot be satisfied in a long poem.

Poe’s second major claim for the nature of poetry is that it must be “universally appreciable,” and it is beauty that has the power universally to please. Hence, “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem . . . That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful” ( PC, 181). Poe points out that beauty is not, as is commonly supposed, “a quality, . . . but an effect,” an “intense and pure elevation of soul – not of intellect, or of heart.” Truth, which is the aim of the intellect, or passion, which represents an excitement of the heart, says Poe, are both more easily attainable in prose than poetry. In fact, both of these are antagonistic to beauty, “which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem” ( PC, 182). Hence beauty – not truth, or emotion, or goodness – is the peculiar province of poetry. Moreover, beauty is reconceived by Poe not as a quality belonging to an object but as an effect in the subject; his views, perhaps influenced by Kant via Coleridge , stop short of Kant’s sophistication. Whereas, for Kant, beauty was a mode of apprehension on the part of the subject, for Poe it is a response caused in the reader or listener by the literary object or poem. These are the general points made in Poe’s essay, the remainder of which attempts to explain the stages of the composition of “The Raven.”

Poe’s subsequent essay, The Poetic Principle   (1850), offers a fuller account of his aesthetics. Here also, he urges that a long poem is a contradiction in terms since it cannot sustain the unity, the “totality of effect or impression,” that is the “vital requisite” in all works of art. Poe warns also that a poem may be “improperly brief ” such that it degenerates into epigrammatism. A poem that is very short cannot produce “a profound or enduring effect” ( PP,  890).

One of Poe’s chief endeavors in this essay is to identify and undermine what he calls “the heresy of The Didactic ,” which refers to the view that “the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth” and that every poem “should inculcate a moral.” As against this, Poe insists that the most dignified and noble work is the “poem per se – this poem which is a poem and nothing more – this poem written solely for the poem’s sake” ( PP, 892– 893). This is perhaps the first insistence on artistic or poetic autonomy by an American writer; it may be significant, as emerges later in his text, that Poe somewhat aligned himself with Southern values and resented the domination of American letters by Northern liberalism, as instanced by the influence of the North American Review ( PP , 899). Poe himself wrote for the Southern Literary Messenger , eventually rising to the editorship of this journal. In this context, Poe’s insistence on artistic autonomy may have been a call to consider the beauty of a poem regardless of its political, as well as its moral, content; given that his notion of beauty was somewhat Platonic , it may also have been an attempt to lift art out of and above the sphere of everyday life and its entanglement in bitter political and social struggles.

At any rate, Poe makes a sharp distinction between “the truthful and the poetical modes” of apprehension and inculcation. Truth, he says, demands a severity of language: “We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned.” Such a mood, says Poe, “is the exact converse of the poetical” (“PP,” 893). Such a seemingly Platonic distinction between the language and mode of philosophy as against those of poetry has of course been challenged by many modern writers. Poe locates his views in a broader model of the mind which somewhat recalls Kant’s location of aesthetic judgment as situated between the realm of understanding (which addresses the realm of phenomena) and the realm of practical reason (comprehending the realm of morality). Poe likewise divides the mind into three aspects: “Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense.” He places taste in the middle, acknowledging that it has “intimate relations” with the other two aspects; but he observes a distinction between these three offices: the intellect is concerned with truth; taste apprehends the beautiful; and moral sense disposes us toward duty (“PP,” 893). By situating his view of poetic autonomy within such a scheme, Poe is following a Kantian procedure of both identifying a subjective faculty specifically as aesthetic, and establishing boundaries between distinct human endeavors or attributes, boundaries which cannot be violated. Poe admits that the precepts of duty or even the lessons of truth can be introduced into a poem; but they must subserve the ultimate purpose of art, and must be placed “in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the poem” (“PP,” 895).

Hence poetry should not be realistic, merely copying or imitating the beauties that lie before us. Rather, poetry is “a wild effort to reach the Beauty above . . . to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone”; it is a “struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness” (“PP,” 894). Platonic passages such as these, urging the poet to rise above the transient world and to focus his gaze upon the eternal form of Beauty, must have attracted Baudelaire and some of the French Symbolists such as Mallarmé. Poe uses the term poetry in a broad sense, to cover all of the arts; but he sees a very close connection between poetry and music; in fact he defines poetry as “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste . . . In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement, of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the Heart” (“PP,” 895). What is not Platonic, however, is the isolated exaltation of Beauty over truth and goodness; the harmony that was possible, even in theory, in Plato’s system, between these forms or essences, between these multifold dimensions of human endeavor, has disintegrated into a desperate craving for a beauty that is not found in the actual world, and a retreat from the increasingly troubled realms of truth and morality.

Poe defines the “poetic principle” as “the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” a quest for an excitement of the soul that is distinct from the intoxication of the heart or the satisfaction of reason. Truth may be instrumental in this quest inasmuch as it leads us to “perceive a harmony where none was apparent before.” The experience of such a harmony is “the true poetical effect” (“PP,” 906). Once again, we glimpse here reflections of Kantian ideas, refracted perhaps through Coleridge. The poet, according to Poe, recognizes in many phenomena the ambrosia that nourishes his soul, especially in “all unworldly motives – in all holy impulses – in all chivalrous, generous, and selfsacrificing deeds” (“PP,” 906). What is interesting here is that all of these phenomena appear to pertain to morality: the very morality that is expelled from the poet’s quest for beauty returns as the very ground of this quest, resurrected in aesthetic form on the ground of its own beauty. In other words, morality becomes an integral part of the aesthetic endeavor, and becomes justified on aesthetic grounds. Once again, art is seen as salvific, displacing the function of religion in serving as our guide to the world beyond.

Source: A History of  Literary Criticism : From Plato to the Present Editor(s): M. A. R. Habib

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Categories: Literature

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe , Israfel , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Poetry , Romanticism , The Black Cat , The Cask of Amontillado , The City in the Sea , The Fall of the House of Usher , The Haunted Palace , the heresy of The Didactic , The Philosophy of Composition , The Purloined Letter , The Rationale of Verse , To Helen

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