The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe

T.S. Eliot on Poe

• In 1948, T.S. Eliot suggested that Poe's work should be viewed as a whole to be judged fairly and not seem inferior as the sum of its parts.
• The critic faces a strain when having to view his work as a whole.

Separating Poe's Poems from Prose

• European critical practice would not permit separating the poems from the prose.
• They would see the poems as one expression of a complex personality responding to the undeveloped society of the New World.
• This was the method of critic-historians like Taine and Georg Brandes.
• Modern American criticism tends to focus on single poems.
• The results have been rewarding because many people have learned how to read it and enjoy it.
• We have not done so well with the larger works like the novel, or even the nouvelle.

Introduction to Poe

• The author aims to introduce readers to Poe's poetry as he was introduced to it in boyhood.
• Poe was in the house and I read him as I read the Rover Boys.
• The author retained Poe, whereas the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, and G. A. Henty soon became a blank.
• At the age of fourteen, the author found three small volumes by Edgar Allan Poe.
• One volume contained some of the more famous tales, as well as the stories of ratiocination, like "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rog?t".
• These stories gave the adolescent mind the illusion of analytical thought.
• Some of the others, such as "The Premature Burial" and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", raised questions about the relation of body and soul.

Eureka

• One of the three volumes contained Eureka.
• It was the first essay in cosmology that the author read.
• It led to Ernst Haeckel's The Riddle of the Universe and then to Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy.
• Eureka is the only piece of adolescent reading in popular astronomy to which the author has returned in age; and I still take it seriously.
• The author wonders why the modern proponents of the Big Bang hypothesis of the creation have not condescended to acknowledge Poe as a forerunner.
• Big Bang presupposes an agent to set off the explosion of the primordial atom; and that is what Poe presupposed in his fundamental thesis for Eureka.
• "In the original unity of the first thing lies the secondary cause of all things, with the germ of their inevitable annihilation."
• The cosmos will shrink back into spatial nothingness, taking man along with it; and hence man, having returned to the original nothing, which is God, will be God.

Theme of Annihilation

• The theme of annihilation is attractive to young persons.
• Annihilation or romantic death at the end of sentimental love is an adolescent posture of disorder set against the imposed order of the family or of adult society into which the child resists entrance.
• This posture of disorder is never quite rejected in maturity, and it is the psychological and moral basis of what today is called Existentialism.
• One reason why Americans may be a little bored with French Existentialism is that we have always been Existentialists, or have been since the time of Poe, who discovered it in us.
• Existentialism assumes that man has no relation to a metaphysical reality, a kind of reality that he cannot know even if it existed; he is therefore trapped in a consciousness which cannot be conscious of anything outside itself.
• He must sink into the non-self. Poe sinks into the vortex, the maelstrom, suffocation of premature burial or of being walled up alive; or he sinks into the sea.
• Coleridge's influence on Poe is noted.
• The death of a beautiful woman was, for Poe, the most "poetical" subject for poetry.

"Alone"

• Among the poems attributed to Poe, the authenticity of which cannot be proved, is a piece entitled "Alone".
• Internal evidence suggests it can be used as a key to some of his complex themes: vortex, grave, pit.
• The poem's origins are in childhood.
• The poem was first published in 1875, was found in an album belonging to a lady in Baltimore; it was the theory of the late Killis Campbell that the poem was written about 1829 or 1830, when Poe was not older than twenty-one.
• Four-fifths of Poe's poems were written by the time he was thirty.

Poe's Fictional Projection

• Poe's poetry consists of some sixty-odd authenticated poems.
• They were all written by Poe as his own fictional projection; by Poe as the demon he tells us he saw take shape in a cloud.
• There is nothing very shocking about this.
• A non-theological view of demonology would tell us that a demon is simply a person who cannot develop.
• A fierce determinism has arrested the rounded growth of his faculties; so that the evil he does other persons is not a positive malice but an insistence that they remain as emotionally and intellectually deprived as he himself must remain.
• Poe's poems, from first to last, from "Tamerlane" to "Ulalume", show almost no change.
• All of his poems might have been written in any one year of his life, at age fifteen or age forty (his age when he died).
• That most of them were written before 1831 was probably due to the later financial necessity of making a living out of literary journalism.
• He was the first committed and perhaps still the greatest American literary journalist on the high French model: a critical tradition represented today by Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley.

Poe's Sincerity

• In the short introduction to Eureka he said that poetry with him had been a "passion", leaving the implication that he had had no time to write much of it.
• One may reasonably doubt the validity of this explanation, though one may not doubt Poe's sincerity in thinking it valid.
• He had enough time from 1831 to his death in 1849 to rewrite most of the poems, some of them many times.
• He had very little, or rather one thing, to say in poetry; in the revisions he was trying to say it better or was trying, by means of deletions and additions, to make old poems look like new poems.

Romantic Poet

• More than any other romantic poet, here or in England, either of the preceding generation of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Bryant, or of his own, he became the type, not the greatest but the most representative: that is to say, he became the type of the alienated poet, the outcast, the po?te maudit?the poet accursed.
• The demon-cloud had early uttered its malediction.
• The self-conscious dramatization of doom, fully developed towards the end of his life in "The Raven" and "Ulalume", was not consciously assumed, as a pose; it came from the inside, out of his early life.

Poe's Entitlement to Doom

• Poe had the "education of a gentleman", five years as a boy in England and a few months at the University of Virginia, financed by a foster-father who never legally adopted the boy and who rejected him when his protector died.
• The protector was the first Mrs. John Allan. The second Mrs. Allan did not like Poe, whose gambling debts at the University gave Allan an excuse for cutting him off.
• Poe was not prepared for any of the three respectable vocations of the Old South: the law, the army, and the Church.
• At twenty Poe was a gentleman without family, property, or vocation; so he enlisted in the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry; and from then on, though he soon reclaimed his name, he lived what was virtually an anonymous life, a professional writer in a country that did not recognize letters as a profession.
• If history had consciously set about creating the character and circumstances favorable to the appearance of the archetype of the romantic poet, it could not have done better than to select Poe for the r?le and Richmond as the place for his appearance.
• The pure romantic poet, either through choice (Shelley) or through circumstance (Poe), or partly one, partly the other (Keats), must isolate himself, or be isolated, or simply find himself isolated for the deeply felt but not consciously known purposes of his genius.
• A poet may have many subjects, but few poets since the time of Blake have had more than one theme.
• Such poets must try again and again to give the theme, in successive poems, new and if possible fuller expression.
• One might see the relation of theme to subject as a relation of potency to actualization.
• The romantic poet is trying to write one poem all his life, out of an interior compulsion; each poem is an approximation of the Perfect Romantic Poem.
• A poet like Ben Jonson has many themes but only one style; Poe has one theme and many styles, or many approximations of one style, none of them perfect, and some very bad.

Four Poems by Poe

• There are four poems by Poe that everybody can join in admiring: "The City in the Sea", "The Sleeper", "To Helen" (the shorter and earlier poem of that title), and "The Raven"; one might include "Ulalume", but less as distinguished poetry than as Poe's last and most ambitious attempt to actualize in language his aloneness.

"To Helen"

• "To Helen" is somewhat more complex than the critics have found it to be.
• The similarity to Landor has been frequently remarked.
• The direct address is to "Helen", inevitably Helen of Troy whether or not Poe had her in mind; and the tact with which she is described is Homeric.
• She is not described at all; she is presented in a long simile of action, in which her beauty is conveyed to the reader through its effect on the speaker of the poem.
• The complexity of feeling, unusual in Poe, comes in the last stanza with the image of Helen as a statue in a niche, perhaps at the end of a hall, or on a landing of a stairway.
• She has all along been both the disturbing Helen and, as a marble, a Vestal Virgin holding her lamp: she is inaccessible. The restrained exclamation "Ah, Psyche" is one of the most brilliant effects in romantic poetry.
• "Ah" has the force of "alas": alas, that Helen is now in a lost, if holy land, as inaccessible and pure as she herself is.
• Psyche could be an archetype of suprasensual love by means of which the classical, sensual Helen is sublimated.
• Poe wrote the poem when he was not more than twenty-one.
• The theme of the poem is isolation of the poet after great loss.

Poe's Aesthetic Theory

• Poe's aesthetic theory has not been overrated, but it has been complicated by certain scholars who have tried to show that the theory implies systematic thought.
• He was, on the contrary, not a systematic critical thinker but a practical critic who on the whole was limited by the demands of book-reviewing, by which he made a great part of his living.
• The essay most popular in his time was "The Poetic Principle", actually a lecture, what we know today as a "poetry reading with commentary".
• Poe was the first itinerant American poet who thus became known to hundreds of people who never read a line of his writing.
• His theory of prosody, which he developed in "The Rationale of Verse", founders on a misconception of the caesura. In the long run his theory of poetry is quite simple: "the rhythmical creation of Beauty" is the end of poetry, which is most completely realized in that most poetical of subjects, the death of a beautiful woman, or more often, in his own verse, the beautiful woman's corpse.
• He derived his psychology from his intellectual climate:
  • Intellect
  • Feeling
  • Will
• Since the aim of poetry is pleasure, not instruction, both intellect and will are eliminated, and emotion is the limited province of poetry.
• Poe was the first romantic expressionist in this country: the poet must not think in his poetry; he could be allowed to think only of the means by which the emotionally unthinking subject-matter reaches the reader as an effect. The intellect thus operates in technique but not in the poem itself.
• Although Poe attacked the genteel preaching of Longfellow and Lowell as the "heresy of the didactic", he was himself paradoxically a didactic poet.
• He is constantly telling us that we are all alone, that beauty is evanescent, that the only immortality may be a vampirish return from the grave, into which we must sink again through eternity.
• In "The Haunted Palace" we are taught that the intellect cannot know either nature or other persons.
• In "The Conqueror Worm" we are taught that life is a "drama" in which we think we are the protagonists; but the actual hero is death in the guise of a gigantic Worm.
• If, as Poe says in Eureka, "the universe is a plot of God," and man participates in the plot as a conscious actor, then the purposeless activity of man has as its goal the horror of death and bodily corruption.
• The "rhythmical creation of Beauty" means very little, if anything, as a general aesthetic principle; it means in Poe's poetry the expression of a Pure Emotion which creates in the reader a pure emotional effect, about which we must not think, and about which we must do nothing.

"The Sleeper"

• Of the poems which I have mentioned as being among his best, there is no need to discuss at length "The Sleeper", which many critics consider a masterpiece.
• There is bad writing in it?"The lily lolls upon the wave"; "And this all solemn silentness"?yet it remains Poe's best treatment of the beautiful female corpse.
• The "lady" will be taken to a vault where her ancestors lie, against which she had "thrown, In childhood, many an idle stone".
• This is the only poem in which the dead lady has any life before her appearance on the bier or in the tomb.

"The City in the Sea"

• If Poe wrote any "great" poems they are surely "The City in the Sea" and "The Raven".
• "The City in the Sea" was first published in 1831 as "The Doomed City"; revised and republished in 1836 as "The City of Sin"; "The City in the Sea" is the title in the 1845 edition of the poems.
• The recurrent symbolism of the vortex that one finds everywhere in the prose tales appears infrequently and incompletely in the poems; but here it receives its most powerful expression in verse.
• In the first five lines there is a doggerel movement?"Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best/Have gone to their eternal rest."
• Everything in Poe is dead; in this poem everything is dead; for the poem might be entitled "The City of Death".
• When this dead city slides into the sea we, presumably, go down with it into the vortex: into oblivion.
• In Dante the sea to which we return is the will of God; in Poe it is a dire apocalyptic vision in which we suffer "inevitable annihilation".
• Except for "To Helen" the poem contains the best lines Poe ever wrote:
  • But light from out the lurid sea
  • Streams up the turrets silently?
  • Up many and many a marvellous shrine
  • Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
  • The viol, the violet, and the vine.

"The Raven"

• In conclusion I can add very little to the criticism of "The Raven", a poem so badly, even vulgarly written in many passages that one wonders how it can be a great poem, which I believe it to be.
• We have here the two necessary elements?the beautiful, dead, "lost Lenore" and the po?te maudit who with perfect literary tact is confronted with, I dare to say, the demon of the youthful poem "Alone".
• It is the same demon, this time come down from the clouds and taking the form of a bird that imitates human speech without knowing what the speech means:
• And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming. . .
• This poem?a late poem, written in 1844?is the one poem by Poe which is not direct lyrical, or romantic, expressionism.
• It has dramatic form and progression,: the poet conducts a dialogue with his demon; it is the only poem by Poe which leads the reader through an action.
• In classical terms, the plot is simple, not complex; it is a simple plot of Recognition in which the poet, examining all the implications of the bird's "Nevermore", recognizes his doom.

Henry James on Poe

• Henry James said that admiration of Poe represented a "primitive stage of reflection".
• One agrees; but one must add that without primitive reflection, however one defines it, one cannot move on.