Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

As a student of Edgar Allan Poe’s classical learning has stated, “If Poe had a ‘ruling passion,’ it was to acquire and to sustain the pose of a classical scholar and Virginia gentleman.”
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This yearning for fame and fortune, transmuted onto the literary plane, repeatedly caused him anguish and earned him meager profits; yet it inspired some of the most fascinating poetry and fiction in the English language. Poe’s wish to appear erudite has sometimes created difficulties with his language and allusions for modern readers. His literary motives have often been baffling, especially those underlying his fiction. His fiction often made fun of what he wrought best: terror tales. In his writing about his own writing, controversies and ironies continue to swirl, often blurring where Poe the person stops and Poe’s creative writings begin. Contrary to long-lasting mythologies, Poe—exceptionally conscious artist that he was—is not the protagonist in his tales and poems. Though autobiographical portraiture often colored literary productions in his era (and in a few cases entered his own work, but in minor ways), as it continues to do in many instances today, it is not the dominant mode of Poe’s writings.

Born in 1809 in Boston to a British emigrant mother, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, and a Baltimore father, David Poe, Jr., he has repeatedly been associated with the antebellum South, where he spent much of the first half of his life as the foster son (never adopted) of John and Frances Allan, in Richmond, Virginia. Sometime during 1811, David Poe, Jr., deserted his family; Mrs. Poe became ill and died in Richmond in December of that same year. Edgar consequently was taken in by the Allans, whence derives his middle name, often misspelled even today. Though he expected to inherit John Allan’s large fortune, Poe was disinherited and subsequently lived in poverty for much of his life. It is a wonder that he was able to create the artistic writings he did in light of the continual combat he waged against the wolf at his door during much of his brief life.

When Poe emerged as a writer during the 1820s, the American literary world was still very tentative about its achievements and prospects. Several major inspirations from abroad contributed to the literary milieu during that span, however, and creative writing in America seemed to increase between the immediate post-Revolutionary years and Poe’s era. While major literary influences came from Great Britain and Germany, American nationalism was developing in all areas of life, and responses to such foreign influences were mixed. Many American authors and critics hoped for the creation of a distinctively American literature, which, they felt, should break from what they saw as negative traditions of the Old World. From the eighteenth into the nineteenth century American literary circles inveighed against terror or horror literature—so-called Gothic literature—because it supposedly displayed too much class structuring or too many sacrilegious themes, all expressed in extravagant language and implausible characterization. Many British and American readers also shared a hostility toward writing branded as “German” or “Germanism,” supposedly because late-eighteenth-century German literature was seen both as vulgar and as manifesting many of the implausibilities of Gothic literature.

Despite the American and British criticism of Gothic literature (the term is most commonly applied to fiction, although many Gothic plays and poems exist) as too German, however, literary Gothicism is actually British in origin. Descending from a melding of historical, architectural, and literary forces and a growing curiosity about nonrational states of mind, the Gothic revival in the arts commenced in the British Isles during the mid-eighteenth century. It was only later that German authors, who devoured British Gothic works, emulated those models and adopted Gothicism as their own. When interest in and criticism of German literature in turn sprang up in the Anglo-American literary world in the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, many forgot about the precise origins for contemporary terror literature. If critics and general readers who had been nurtured on neoclassic principles—which emphasized order, reason, and balance—directed negative criticism toward what they dismissed as vulgar “Germanism,” many creative writers derived much from the Gothic mode. Irony and hostilities notwithstanding, works inspired by the Gothic tradition were published in Great Britain and America, starting with a great flourishing in the 1790s, and the legacy remains fruitful. For example, many current romance novels and horror tales, among others, continue to refashion techniques and themes that originated long ago.

In the first Gothic novel—Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto,
subtitled “A Gothic Story” and published anonymously in 1764, then with Walpole’s name revealed the next year—we encounter vicious pursuit of innocence (and innocents) for purposes of power, lust, or money. These motives drive Prince Manfred, grandson of the usurper of the throne of Otranto in medieval Italy, who is eager to wed his son Conrad to lovely young Princess Isabella, to secure family succession to the throne. Conrad dies mysteriously, however, crushed by a gigantic black helmet that appears in the palace courtyard. Manfred rapidly proposes to have his own marriage annulled and marry Isabella himself, hoping that a younger wife will produce a son to secure succession. Revolted by Manfred’s obvious lust, Isabella flees through dark corridors and subterranean passages in the eerie old castle, aided by a mysterious young man, Theodore, who assists her escape to sanctuary in the neighboring monastery. Manfred’s rages against the young pair or anyone else who seems to thwart his will, his ill treatment of his docile wife, Hermione, his murdering his own daughter by mistake—all precede the clearing away of mysteries in family and political identities. Supernatural touches increase the characters’ anxieties: The giant helmet portends tragedy; a portrait of Manfred’s ancestor becomes animated and seems to disapprove of his descendant’s behavior; disaster and gloom hover over all. Lust, near-incest, violence, brutality—all linked with family mysteries and identities over which the strange old decaying castle seems to preside—create overwhelming terror and fear. The comic speeches and actions of menials provide comic relief to the more grim sections in the story.

Walpole’s use of the castle and the nearby monastery as backdrops is a natural outgrowth of the contribution of the British cultural heritage to literary Gothicism. In the 1530s, King Henry VIII broke from Roman Catholicism because of circumstances akin to Manfred’s: Henry wanted a son to solidify his line’s succession within the British monarchy. His attempts came to naught, with tragedy resulting for most of his six wives. Henry also dissolved many British religious centers, an action that led to widespread sackings: Abbeys, churches, convents, monasteries, and cathedrals were ruined. By the mid-eighteenth century, such ruins came to symbolize transience in human aspirations. The inhabitants of such places, whose robed, hooded figures readily suggested ghosts or demons, provided origins for additional supernaturalism in literary Gothicism. Since the clerics had at one time held political as well as religious status, here were perfect targets for British anti-Catholics of a later day to cast as villains, especially since clerical celibacy also suggested unnatural sexuality. Appropriately, many British Gothic works were set in southern continental Europe, the seat of continuing Roman Catholic power, where villainous foreign policies and secretive character types would contrast markedly with the British sense of open political, social, and religious life.

By the time of
The Castle of Otranto,
much British poetry had become imbued with what we now call “graveyard” topics—short lives, the grave (and its physical manifestations: gravestones, mausoleums, etc.) as symbolic of instability in the human condition, and the eeri ness of churchyard environs. We need not wonder that Walpole’s imagination should have turned to similar themes and settings.
The Castle of Otranto
also owes a debt to the ranting, lustful, power-mad villains in Renaissance revenge tragedies. Walpole’s novel continues to puzzle readers, however, because we are never certain whether he wrote with absolute seriousness or if there is a smile just beneath the sensationalism. Thus, the origins of literary Gothicism yield both terrifying and humorous substance.

Although not every Gothic work includes a haunted castle, or lust, or money madness, most call up anxieties and power plays leading to tragedy—sometimes with supernatural interventions, sometimes with warped characters who move within eerie architectural or natural settings, which contribute to emotional unsettledness and an overall gloomy atmosphere. The recurrent situation in Gothic literary tradition is that of an alienated protagonist in an alien world. Some later writers present gory details of physical sufferings in repellant surroundings (horror); some others eschew the descriptions of physical tortures, preferring to delineate psychological effects of mysterious threats and oppressions (terror).

American authors experimenting with Gothicism had to either employ European settings and characters or adapt the Gothic to American subject matter. The person mainly responsible for this transformation was William Dunlap, the so-called father of American drama, who composed several Gothic plays during the 1790s. Three were European in substance, but
André
(1798), set during the American Revolution, adapted the overwrought psychology of a renowned wartime British spy captured by Americans, condemned to death, and awaiting execution. As in many other Gothics, war constituted a perfect foil to uncertainties in physical and emotional life. Dunlap’s friend Charles Brockden Brown turned to Gothicism in American locales for four of his six novels published in the late 1790s and early 1800s, and he is often credited with founding American literary Gothicism. American writers generally tended to emphasize psychological issues and to offer rational explanations for what might have seemed supernatural. Poe was to carry Gothicism to greater psychological heights than the majority of his predecessors.
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Poe wished above all else for recognition as a poet, an understandable desire in one whose literary tastes were shaped by the Romanticism bonding Anglo-American cultural worlds in his era. What is still remembered as the mainstream form of Romantic imaginative writing is the lyric poem, and in creating lyric poetry Poe excelled. Taking Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Thomas Moore as his obvious literary models (though he was also inspired by others both in the Romantic movement proper and on the periphery of that movement), Poe wrote verse featuring intense passions, sometimes concerning fame, more often concerned with blighted love, which affected the speaker-protagonists, who desired successes in both areas. Gothic fiction also had a great impact on his imaginative writings.

Poe was also influenced by Romantic landscape poetry and travel books, which were popular among contemporary readers. He repeatedly created natural and architectural backdrops that were diffuse and misty, perfect surroundings for characters’ emotional uncertainties and fears. In the wake of contemporary discoveries of the ruins of ancient civilizations and the fascination exerted by such artifacts, tangible evidence of once flourishing but long decayed cultures provided fitting literary symbols for his characters’ disintegrating minds. Biblical and classical themes are evident in such early Poe poems as “The Lake,” “The Coliseum,” “The Sleeper,” “To Helen” (published in 1831, the first of two poems with this title), “The City in the Sea,” and “Dream-Land.” Poe reworked such materials, usually with greater psychological sophistication, in later poems like “The Raven,” “Ulalume: A Ballad,” “Eldorado,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee.” All of Poe’s poems might aptly be called “visionary,” because the setting or the protagonist’s emotions and consequent outlook are expressed in a rhetoric using primarily visual symbolism or vivid imagery. Such vi sionariness often contributes to dream or (in most of Poe’s creative works) nightmare effects.

Poe’s theoretical pronouncements on poetry make this visionary intent explicit. For him, poetry was “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” a definition that balances theme and form. He also thought that poetry should elevate or excite the soul, which, in his estimation, much American poetry did not do, tending instead toward the “heresy of the didactic” (that is, it was too preachy and moralizing). If poetry is beauty expressed as “music,” then the pronounced rhythms and rhymes in Poe’s poems exist to excite emotional responses in readers. In keeping with the time-honored concept of the poet as a wonderfully free (and, as a creature of nature, amoral) songbird, Poe’s poems are calculated to “sing” readers into the world of the poem at hand. In other words, poetry should enchant (the word means “to sing into”) a reader into the world or the magic interior of a poem by means of hypnotic outreach. Poe expected his poems and tales to appeal to readers’ ears as well as their eyes. To Poe the idea of music involved inherent brevity, and his championing of brief poems is wholly consistent with such thinking.

Jane Austen’s likening her literary practices to polishing a tiny bit of ivory for refinement might be related to Poe’s composing verse in small quantity. Within such limits Poe created some remarkable poems. For poetic art in which sound and sense coalesce, we may turn to the earliest poem included here, “The Lake—To—,” the concluding piece in Poe’s first book of verse,
Tamerlane and Other Poems
(1827). The poem’s eerie setting deftly stimulates the protagonist’s feelings of isolation, lost love, and a death wish. The opening unfolds ordinary youthful tendencies: first desiring solitude, at the lake, then attaching emotional significance to the terrain, which becomes increasingly grim and terrifying.

The situation in Poe’s poem resembles Henry Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond; Thoreau’s imagination was stirred by the presence of water—the ultimate origin of all life—to celebrate uplifting excitement. Thoreau’s favorite images, the rising sun and moving water, are inverted in Poe’s landscape, which might be thought of as similar to what Thoreau himself (jocularly) called Walden Pond—a “walled-in” pond. Poe’s eerie lake casts a literal and figurative “pall” (the cloth covering a coffin and within this poem an obstacle to psychological ease) over the protagonist. Thus “The Lake—To—” stands as the most symbolic of Poe’s earliest poems. Confinement in the natural scene promotes fears in the speaker, who fixates on the lake and its “poisonous wave,” closed in with unyielding rock and overshadowing pines redolent of death. The “you” addressed remains vague. Is there a literal dead love, or is the one addressed “dead” to the protagonist solely from unalterable separation? Or does the “other” exist as part of the speaker’s own psyche, and is “you” some repressed but signal emotion that, locked in as it may be, can not be quelled but continues to torment?