The Slender Poe Anthology (2 page)

I like to think of Poe as our folklorist; his tales are Grimm to us. He shaped his wild and unruly reveries into tales cunningly contrived to keep himself cool. Truly there was “method in his madness”—and we are made his confederates by the uncanny craft of his story-making.

A very good thing to remember about Poe
is
his industry; this man wrote a
great
deal in the roughly twenty years of his professional career. Not only those tales and poems that are irreplaceable, but much that would fill copy for an approaching deadline. In his review work, he essentially initiated serious criticism in our country. Doing so, he became known as “the tomahawk man,” and caused resentment in quarters where later he could have used allies. Perhaps these words from Edmund Wilson's “Poe as a Literary Critic” might provide some perspective: “The truth was that literary America has always resented in Poe the very superiority which made him so quickly an international figure.”

There will always be those who consider Poe a deathmonger. But in the early decades of 19th century America, death was a more intimate affair than it is today. It more often than not took place at home, and it was more common at an early age. There is no question that Death, The Mighty X, is central to his work; one could almost go so far as to rephrase the medieval maxim as a governing principle of his
oeuvre
: Death's center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. But then let us briefly consider how death filters into the work of the two greatest American poets of the 19th century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

In the New England of Dickinson's day, the Angel of Death could be seen grinning from gravestones that greeted a town's visitors as they toured the local cemetery, much as we nowadays tour a museum. Always an eager, perceptive reader, Emily was given a volume of Poe in 1854 by a possible suitor who was leaving Amherst. She was not yet 24, and had composed only five of the poems that thirty-two years later, after Emily's burial, her sister would discover in a locked box in the poet's bedroom. Out of the 1,775 poems she left behind, we know now that a hefty portion deal in some way with death. A trio of her most anthologized pieces open like this: “Because I could not stop for Death—/ He kindly stopped for me—”; “I felt a funeral in my brain,”; “I died for Beauty—but was scarce/ Adjusted in the Tomb…”

While Whitman walked the hospitals in Washington during the Civil War, nursing the wounded, he saw plenty of death, plenty of young men from both armies about to die. Poe had published a couple of his articles during 1845, when he was editor of the
Broadway Journal
. Their paths crossed; later Whitman wrote, “I have a distinct and pleasing remembrance of his looks, voice, manner, and matter; very kindly and human, but subdued…” Two decades after their meeting in the offices of the
Broadway Journal
in 1865, Whitman composed his elegy for Lincoln,
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
, wherein the poet flees “down to the shores of the water” to hear the gray-brown thrush sing:

Come lovely and soothing death,

Undulate round the world, serenely, arriving, arriving,

In the day, in the night, to all, to each,

Sooner or later delicate death.

Sleep is the image of death, and in sleep, we dream. In one of Poe's earliest poems, he exclaims at the outset, “Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!” And around the same time, his 18th year or so, he began a poem that in its final form would pose this question: “Is all that we see or seem/ But a dream within a dream?” Poe's work is tinctured with dream.

In one of the most interesting of his
Marginalia
, from the March 1846 issue of
Graham's Magazine
, Poe speaks of “shadows of shadows”—
fancies
he calls them for want of a better name—which arise “where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams” and which are so novel, they are beyond “the power of words” to describe, though he does say of these “psychal impressions”: “It is as if the five senses were supplanted by five myriad others alien to mortality.” They come only at moments of intense tranquility and sound health, therefore are inherently rare, but when circumstances are favorable, Poe feels “the capacity of inducing or compelling” this “instantaneous intuition” of “the spirit's outer world.” Many of his poems and tales enact this movement to the “the very brink of sleep”; the apotheosis is a kind of visionary swoon suggested by lines composed around a year later:

This standing motionless upon the golden

Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams

Gazing, entranced. . .

Not long ago I dreamt of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Poe riding together in the car of a speeding train, perhaps on route to where each was lecturing. At first they were merely cordial to one another, but soon warmed while discussing the loss of their beloved young wives to consumption. They drew closer; the conversation became lively as they spoke of the supernal solace of nature, how poetry has never been defined to the satisfaction of all parties, and the transcendent power of Shakespeare. Poe said something to the effect that beauty is how the divine speaks to us, and Emerson replied, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” Unaccountably, I was compelled to get off at the next stop; I watched with melancholy wonder as the pair in their train car sped far beyond the horizon.

Poe is all about what he calls Taste—it's the poetic intellect. He places its operation between the faculty of mind that deals with Truth and the one that serves Duty—Taste desires Beauty. It's an aesthetic consciousness—and beauty affords us something of a spiritual experience. But by its own nature, beauty is ephemeral—the gorgeous sunset blending raspberry and tangerine in the molten clouds above a cobalt blue sea
will not stay
—it will pass. As Stevens unforgettably puts it, “Death is the mother of beauty.” And yet, part of us feels e. e. cummings is right too, when he says: “beauty is more now than dying's when.”

Charles Baudelaire, thought to be by many the greatest French poet of the 19th century, recognized in Poe a mind already at home in Paris, though Poe had never left the precincts of America. I think it might be wise to enlarge the circle of contemporaries with which Poe is usually associated. During his lifetime there was a remarkable vibe resonant across Europe. We may imagine Poe, even on the other side of the Atlantic, picked it up on the ether.

It was most potently expressed in the music being composed for the still-evolving instrument of the piano. The poets of the keyboard I have in mind are Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt. All three were born during the months of 1810-1811, a year or two after Poe. Their piano music is altogether like listening to a solitary heart thinking. “The great variety of melodious expression which is given out from the keys of the piano,” writes Poe, “might be made, in the proper hands, the basis of an excellent fairy-tale.” And in the hands of these men, the basis for “true and intelligible histories” of all the passions that baffle, bewitch and bless the human heart.

The poet at the writing desk, stylus in hand; the poet sitting at the piano, hands on the keys. “The piano is the vessel to which a multitude of sounds are entrusted,” writes Alfred Brendel, “the more so since one single player is authorized to control the whole piece.” A single player shaping sounds to effect an “elevating of the soul.” It is the art of sonic alchemy. And while both the arts of the poet and the composer are narrative in nature, since both unfold in time, it's their suggestiveness, their “indefiniteness,” that allows for the spirit to whirl—or be still—where it will.

Considering Poe's work in the light of Chopin's
Noctu
r
nes
, Schumann's
Carnival
, or Liszt's
Mephisto
Waltz
strikes me as a sound idea. Seek out the piano music of these poets and see for yourself. “Let the poet press his finger steadily upon each key,” writes Poe, “and imagine each prolonged series of undulations the history, of joy or of sorrow…”

I like to think of Poe as nearly always the brightest one in the room, and capable of doing anything well to which he set his mind. But there was one thing he was not capable of doing well, and that was drinking. Alcohol had a savage and deleterious effect on Poe; it damaged his career and undermined his health, though truly he's far from the only American poet, actor, artist or writer who has battled the bottle. Poe didn't drink all the time, but when he did, he was his own worst enemy.

Nevertheless, I like to think Fanny Osgood had it right. A popular poet of the day with whom Poe carried on a brief literary romance during his period of celebrity in the salons of New York, she writes in her memoir, “To a sensitive and delicately nurtured woman, there was a peculiar and irresistible charm in the chivalric, graceful and almost tender reverence with which he invariably approached all women who won his respect.”

I like to think of Poe as a pioneer at the penumbra of consciousness, scouting nebulous frontiers. Using the ancient form of the dialogue, Poe scripts voices from the other side of death. One of the shaman's traditional functions was to fly into the invisible world and listen to the ancestors. Poe carries us elsewhere, beyond The Mighty X.

In the preface to the last volume of his poetry published in his lifetime,
The Raven and Other Poems
(1845), Poe writes, “With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence…” Today it is likely that we have a more flexible and fluid sense of what poetry is than in Poe's time; but passion remains a key to all artistic endeavor. I like what Poe says in an early and crucial review:

If, indeed, there be any one circle of thought distinctly and palpably marked out from the jarring and tumultuous chaos of human intelligence, it is that evergreen and radiant Paradise which the true poet knows, and

knows alone, as the limited realm of his authority—as the circumscribed Eden of his dreams.

“Mozart declared on his death-bed,” writes Poe in a
Marginalia
from July 1849, “that he ‘began to see what
may
be done in music…'” With three months to live, I imagine Poe was also beginning to glimpse what
may
be done in poetry. Certainly, the totality of his work continues to call us into the future.

This collection intends to put Poe in a fresh slant of light; I've mixed the poems and tales to create a novel arrangement that has its own distinctive narrative. It begins with a love that absolves and ends with a transfigured “new man.” I've chosen the poems that are to me the strongest, while selecting some of the lesser-known tales that deserve more attention. From his longing and loss, from his detections and dreams, Poe fashioned “a palace of imagination.” With luck, you hold a key to it in your hands.

Ideally it would be best to have a pair of these
Slender Poe
anthologies, so you can read aloud Poe's words with someone else, perhaps alternating paragraphs or stanzas, marveling at his language and vision. If that were to be the case, no doubt, his spirit surely would join the both of you.