The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings

Chronology

Readers interested in the publication dates of individual stories, poems and essays are advised to consult the Notes.

1809 19 January Born in Boston to Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins and David Poe, Jr., both actors.

1811 Father disappears. 8 December Mother dies in Richmond, Virginia. Edgar accepted into the household of John and Frances Valentine Allan, but not legally adopted. His sister, Rosalie, also enters a foster family but his brother, William Henry, is in care of his grandparents.

1815 Moves to London with his foster parents. Allan establishes a branch office of the Allan and Ellis trade firm.

1816 Admitted to a boarding school kept by the Misses Dubourg.

1818 Sent to the Manor House School, Stoke Newington, directed by the Reverend John Bransby.

1820 July Arrives back in New York City with foster family, following the failure of Allan’s business plans in London; the family returns to Richmond. Begins his studies with Joseph H. Clarke; receives instruction in Latin and Greek at Clarke’s school.

1823 Enters the school of William Burke.

1824 Mourns death of Mrs Jane Stith Craig Stanard who is the inspiration of ‘To Helen’.

1825 Meets and becomes romantically involved with Sarah Elmira Royster. When Allan’s uncle, William Galt, dies, Allan inherits much of his property, and purchases Galt’s mansion.

1826 February Enters University of Virginia; excels in the study of Latin and French. Incurs gambling debts, which Allan refuses to acknowledge. December Poe leaves the university and returns to Richmond.

1827 March Leaves Richmond for Boston. Enlists in the army as a private soldier under the name of Edgar A. Perry. Poetry collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, published by the printer Calvin F. S. Thomas. Poe’s battery ordered to Fort Moultrie, Sullivan’s Island, Charleston Harbor.

1828 Solicits John Allan’s consent to withdraw from the service; request remains unanswered. December Reassigned to Fortress Monroe.

1829 Promoted to the rank of Sergeant Major. Asks Allan to help him obtain an appointment as a cadet to West Point. 28 February Frances Allan dies; reconciled with John Allan. Moves to Baltimore, where second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, is published by Hatch & Dunning.

1830 June Takes examination for entrance to the Military Academy at West Point and is appointed. October Allan marries Louisa Gabriella Patterson. Poe communicates to Allan his intention to leave the academy.

1831 Court-martialled and dismissed from West Point. April Publishes his third poetry collection, Poems, with Elam Bliss, New York. Moves back to Baltimore and lives in the home of his aunt, Mrs Maria Clemm, and his cousin, Virginia, together with his grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, and William Henry. 1 August William Henry Poe dies.

1832 Excluded from Allan’s revised will. Gets closer to Virginia and responds to her affection for him.

1833 May Writes letter to the editors of the New England Magazine offering for publication his ‘Tales of the Arabesque’, later titled Tales of the Folio Club; it is declined. Wins Baltimore Saturday Visiter literary prize of $50 with the short story ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’. The contest introduces him to the novelist John Pendleton Kennedy.

1834 27 March John Allan dies. Poe suffers poverty.

1835 7 July Elizabeth Cairnes Poe dies. August Poe moves to Richmond. Pleads with Mrs Clemm not to postpone his marriage to Virginia. In a letter to Kennedy confesses his suicidal feelings. Employed by the publisher of Southern Literary Messenger, Thomas W. White, on Kennedy’s recommendation, and contributes tales and reviews. October Mrs Clemm and Virginia join him in Richmond.

1836 Gains fame as the unacknowledged editor of the Messenger: attracts attention with his uncompromising reviews. 16 May Marries Virginia Clemm. Begins writing his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. 27 December White admits in a letter he will have to dismiss Poe.

1837 January Resigns from the Messenger, which subsequently publishes two instalments of his novel. Moves to New York with Virginia and Mrs Clemm. Unsuccessfully attempts to seek employment.

1838 Moves his family to Philadelphia. Just before his arrival, pro-slavery mobs burn down the offices of the Pennsylvania Freeman. July Harper and Brothers in New York publish The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Agrees to rewrite Thomas Wyatt’s The Conchologist’s First Book and issue it under his own name.

1839 Charged with plagiarism when Haswell, Barrington and Haswell publish The Conchologist’s First Book: plates, preface, introduction and notes on shells had been drawn from Captain Thomas Brown’s The Conchologist’s Text Book (Glasgow, 1833). Becomes co-editor of William E. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. Publishes first volume of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque with Lea & Blanchard, Philadelphia. December Begins cryptography series for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger.

1840 Ceases his collaboration with Burton’s Magazine. Prepares prospectus for his own literary project, Penn Magazine. Delays plans due to insufficient support and ill health. November George Rex Graham buys Burton’s Magazine and merges it with Casket to form Graham’s Magazine.

1841 Joins editorial staff of Graham’s Magazine. Fails to obtain government position. Meets Rufus Wilmot Griswold, his future literary executor and maligner of his reputation. Embarks on the publication of ‘Autography’ series.

1842 Virginia suffers from lung haemorrhage. Poe resorts to drink. May Gives up his editorship. Resumes effort to obtain government post, in the Custom House in Philadelphia.

1843 Agrees with Thomas C. Clarke and Felix O. C. Darley on the publication of his own literary magazine, renamed The Stylus, but his plans fail. An extensive biography of Poe appears in Clarke’s Saturday Museum. March Travels to Washington DC for an appointment in President John Tyler’s administration: drinks excessively and loses job opportunity. June Wins $100 prize for the story ‘The Gold-Bug’. July Publishes The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe with William H. Graham. November Lectures on American poetry.

1844 April With Virginia leaves Philadelphia for New York. 13 April Deceives New Yorkers with ‘The Balloon Hoax’, in the New York Sun. October Joins the editorial staff of the New York Evening Mirror.

1845 January Publishes ‘The Raven’ in the New York Evening Mirror. Develops flirtatious relationship with Frances Sargent Osgood. Becomes associate editor of Broadway Journal and later its proprietor. July Publishes new edition of Tales and in November The Raven and Other Poems, both with Wiley & Putnam. Gets acquainted with the literary society of his time. Reads ‘Al Aaraaf’ and ‘The Raven’ at the Boston Lyceum. Gains recognition in France. Virginia’s health deteriorates.

1846 January Suspends publication of the Broadway Journal. Moves with his family to Fordham Cottage. Falls ill when Virginia’s health declines.

1847 30 January Virginia dies. Poe falls ill. Wins libel lawsuit with $225 damages from the Evening Mirror for the publication of Thomas Dunn English’s accusations of forgery, concerning Mrs Osgood’s letters which Mrs E. F. Ellet had demanded from him. Goes to Philadelphia to re-establish his magazine contacts.

1848 Edits new prospectus for Stylus project. February Reads Eureka (An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe) to an audience at the Society Library in New York. June Eureka published by Putnam. Lectures on ‘The Poetic Principle’ in Providence, Rhode Island. Proposes to Mrs Sarah Helen Whitman: she consents to an engagement but declines his marriage proposal. Returns to New York.

1849 Suffers hallucinations from excessive alcohol consumption. Talks to E. H. N. Patterson from Oquawka, Illinois, about possible revival of the Stylus. Proposes to widow Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton. Lectures at the Academy in Norfolk and the Exchange Concert Rooms in Richmond. 3 October Falls into coma and taken to hospital. 7 October Dies. Buried in Baltimore beside Virginia.

Tatiani Rapatzikou

Introduction

1

On 16 May 1836 Edgar A. Poe and his friend Thomas Cleland filed a marriage bond with the Clerk of the Hustings Court in Richmond, Virginia, in preparation for Poe’s marriage to his cousin Virginia Clemm. Mr Cleland added an affidavit that Virginia was ‘of the full age of twenty-one years’, though she was, in fact, only thirteen. Poe’s marriage to a ‘child bride’ has taken its disproportionate place in the complex legend that has made of Poe’s life a more baroque fiction than the author himself ever created, but the truth of his relationship with Virginia, so far as it can now be ascertained, is best seen later and in its proper context – that of Poe’s life, and the work which Virginia directly inspired. At this point it is sufficient to note that in the spring of 1836 Poe seemed to have within reach two of his most persistent desires: the professional opportunity to put himself ‘before the eye of the world’, and the stable comforts of a well-ordered domestic life, provided not only by Virginia, but by her capable, devoted mother, Mrs Clemm.

In December 1835 Poe had become editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, and his fiction, essays and reviews rapidly won the magazine a national audience. Life in a Richmond boarding house, with Poe’s meagre salary supplemented by Mrs Clemm’s industry as a seamstress, may seem a humdrum existence for an aesthetician who so persistently reiterated the principles of Beauty and Ideality, but for Poe as an artist it was a fruitful time, and in comparison with the desperate circumstances in which he had found himself in the years following his discharge from West Point and his appointment as editor of the Messenger, these months in Richmond could hardly have been an unpleasant interlude. Nonetheless, Poe resigned from the Messenger in January 1837, following a disagreement with the owner, T. W. White. White was uneasy about Poe’s ‘intemperance’, and perhaps jealous of his success as an editor; but White was not an unreasonable man, and he seems to have been genuinely fond of Poe. To attribute Poe’s resignation to professional disagreement alone is not sufficient: he was also tempted by the prospect of challenging more directly the literary hegemony of the North. While Richmond was the ‘home’ to which he repeatedly returned, it no doubt evoked baffling and painful memories; and he seems, further, to have been caught by that spirit of restlessness which marked so many periods of his life – one is tempted to use Poe’s own term, ‘perverseness’.

Following his resignation the Southern Literary Messenger began to serialize Poe’s first attempt at a novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, but when Poe submitted a story entitled ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, White promptly rejected it, for he doubted ‘whether the readers of the Messenger have much relish for tales of the German school’. Poe eventually sold the story to Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine for a fee of $10. When ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ appeared in the collected Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Poe’s sole remuneration consisted of a few complimentary copies of the volume; for a later and expanded edition he received payment in the form of twenty copies of the book; but when he subsequently offered the copyright of a two-volume collection of his stories on the same terms, the proposal was immediately rejected. Poe’s brief letter to the Philadelphia publishers, Lea & Blanchard, in which he suggests that ‘you receive all profits, and allow me twenty copies for distribution to friends’, is a pathetic document in the life of a man who, even when greeted with wide popular acclaim, could do little more than maintain a genteel poverty – and often not even that. By one of those ironies which have by now become almost idiomatic to Poe’s life, his six-sentence letter to Lea & Blanchard was auctioned less than a century after his death for $3,000.

Not only is ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ one of Poe’s finest tales, but one whose richness and totality of effect entitle it to unquestioned place among the short-fiction masterpieces of all time. Perhaps no other single story has exerted such profound influence on other artists as Poe’s ‘Germanic’ tale. As a young man Debussy attempted to set the story in the form of a ‘symphony on psychologically developed themes’, and though the project was never realized in these terms, Poe’s work continued to intrigue the composer, providing inspiration for his opera of Pelléas, as it had for Maeterlinck’s drama with its over-refined hero ‘so pale and feeble and overcome by destiny’. Later Debussy cherished the idea of composing an opera based on Poe’s story, and although he died before the project was completed, during the last years of his life it haunted and inspired him; in letters he speaks of the ‘obsession’, the ‘almost agonizing tyranny’ which Poe exerts over him; his own phraseology begins to echo Poe’s, and in a mood of depression he could write to André Caplet:

I have recently been living in the House of Usher which is not exactly the place where one can look after one’s nerves – just the opposite. One develops the curious habit of listening to the stones as if they were in conversation with each other and of expecting houses to crumble to pieces as if this were not only natural but inevitable. Moreover, if you were to presume I should confess that I like these people more than many others… I have no confidence in the normal, well-balanced type of persons.

Film-makers, of course, have made wholesale use of Poe’s fiction, and the House of Usher has had more than one cinematic fall; the most notable was the first, Jean Epstein’s version of 1928. Despite improbable alterations in the plot, Epstein was able to use experimental camera techniques to capture the elusive mystery of the story, the unreal, dreamlike, baroque grandeur of the house itself, and the tormented soul of Roderick Usher. What is especially interesting is the degree to which the mood of Poe’s story encouraged both Epstein and Debussy to seek new creative techniques in their respective arts. Yet this story – one of the most frequently anthologized pieces by Poe, and justifiably one of his most famous – was dismissed in the author’s lifetime not only as too ‘Germanic’ for a popular audience, but, most damnably, as ‘a juvenile production’.

Time, of course, has vindicated not just ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, but Poe’s reputation as well, and yet almost a century passed after his death before American critics began to treat his work with appropriate seriousness. European critics were far more astute in recognizing his significance, and the fact is hardly surprising. Poe’s relationship to the European romantic tradition – to Coleridge and De Quincey, to Byron, Keats and Shelley, to the Gothic traditions of Germany and the critical theories of Schlegel – is more immediately recognizable than any American tradition, and his work marks him not simply as a precursor of the Symbolist school in France, but as a direct and major influence on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud. T. S. Eliot’s suggestion that Poe’s profound influence on the French resulted from improvements in the translation is of little worth. Baudelaire’s translations of the tales, which comprise five of the twelve volumes of his collected works, are remarkable for their strict authenticity and adherence, wherever idiom permits, to Poe’s phraseology.¹ Poe’s poetry – which Baudelaire despaired of rendering accurately in French – received its most influential translation in Mallarmé’s edition, where the form, that of the prose poem, made a direct and major contribution to the vers libre movement;² and yet Poe’s theories of poetry – of beauty, inspiration, originality and imagination – almost certainly created a greater impact than his verse itself, and his criticism, like his fiction, was translated with literal exactitude.

While Poe’s impact on the arts in France can hardly be overstressed, and while the French are entitled to full credit for critical recognition of his genius, Poe’s influence outside France has also been considerable. Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle both acknowledged their debts to Poe’s work, Conrad praised the authenticity of his descriptions of the sea, and Mann found in ‘William Wilson’ the classic example of the Doppelgänger theme. From Poe’s tales we not only trace the growth of the detective story, but also the science-fiction genre (where one must again return to the French and to Jules Verne’s acknowledgement in Le Sphinx des Glaces). Poe’s influence on Hawthorne is verifiable, and the argument for influence on Melville has logic if not primary documentary evidence on its side. We can see in Poe an early elaboration of the grotesque tradition which underlies the work of William Faulkner, and in such neglected stories as ‘The Man that was Used Up’ a significant foreshadowing of the Black Humourists. It is hardly necessary (or even reasonable) to claim that in each of these instances – and the score of others which might easily be cited – Poe acted as a direct influence, or, even when he did, as a strictly determining one. Without in any way distorting his work, we can see in it not only the origins of symbolism, but a crude statement of New Criticism, the stream-of-consciousness technique, ontological crises which defy any other description but ‘existential’, and methods which seem to foreshadow surrealism and abstract painting – even, indeed, in Eureka, theories of matter remarkably close to those of Einstein. To the sympathetic reader such variety and imaginative resourcefulness are intriguing, but it is tempting to overstress Poe’s influence, and the critic must be particularly wary of committing lèse-majesté: like most men of genius, Poe was in many respects in advance of his time, and through the force of a profound creative intellect he could crystallize moods, techniques, ideas which seem to us peculiarly modern; but he was also of and for his time.

Just as Poe was once vilified by those who saw in him a prime example of diseased intellect, so too has his life been distorted by devotees who have pictured him as an exotic, trapped and finally destroyed by what Baudelaire described as ‘a great barbarous realm equipped with gas fixtures’. It was a particularly gratifying image to the Decadents, and it persists as a popular misconception based on the fact that Poe made at best a precarious living as a writer and that he was, according to legend, driven to alcohol and drugs not only by the peculiar torments of his private life, but by a hostile and intolerant world which could not appreciate the rare light of his genius. Amid such elaborate romances there lurks, of course, some truth. There is a sense in which Poe was an exotic, an improbable product of his age, if we consider his work from the conventional viewpoints of intellectual history: in his lushness and sensuousness, his confirmed aestheticism and his obsession with the grotesque and arabesque, he may well remind one more of exotics like Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire or Rimbaud than he does of any American writer or artist. But as Poe’s letters, essays and reviews suggest, he maintained a real and varied interest in the world around him, not merely in literature, but in the theatre, in architecture, music, painting, commerce, education, theories of government, and particularly in science. His sonnet ‘To Science’ has been read as a conventional romantic cry of distress against a materialistic age, which in some measure it is; but such a reading denies the ambiguous tone of the poem and falsifies, somewhat, its intention, which is to establish, as a preface to ‘Al Aaraaf’, the distinction between man’s power and responsibility as a rational creature and those of the intuitive, imaginative being. The contrast recurs throughout Poe’s work – whether in the form of reason and imagination, or natural and supernatural, or matter and Ideality. Poe’s ideal was a perfect synthesis of the two modes of intelligence. In his fiction the closest he came to this ideal was in the creation of the master detective Dupin, a poet who brings to commonplace reality the discriminating eye of the artist, but who weighs his evidence as a logician and is able to extrapolate from the raw materials of the real world the ideal solution. Art was, for Poe, the only method by which one could penetrate the shapeless empirical world in the search for order, and Eureka was his most elaborate attempt to reconcile the apparent split between imagination and fact. It is this ambitious intention which shapes all of Poe’s best work, determining his use of image and symbol and underlying his insistence on the principle of unity in poetry and fiction. Science has its place in man’s search for understanding, but science and the imagination have tended to bifurcate in the modern world; only the true poetic intellect can end this long-established dualism.

In his mingled fascination with and suspicion of scientific ‘truth’ Poe was clearly the child of the nineteenth century: what he feared was the dogmatism of science and the corrupting influence of materialism; but in an article entitled ‘A Chapter on Science and Art’ he could deal sympathetically with a variety of modern inventions and urge the establishment of a scientific foundation in Washington. He harshly ridiculed technological progress and obsessive materialism in ‘The Man that was Used Up’, and yet his writing is studded with references to scientific treatises which clearly demonstrate a greater interest than the simple creation of mood or credibility. Poe’s apparent ambiguity in this respect is not unique: Mark Twain could satirize the methods of geology in Life on the Mississippi and yet lose an enormous fortune through his investment in the Paige typesetting machine; at the Columbian Exhibition Henry Adams thrilled at the sight of the huge dynamos which were to transform American life, but feared that as a result of such technological progress men might become ‘mere creatures of force round central power-houses’. Poe frequently paraded erudition which had come to him at second-hand, and as a journalist he was occasionally compelled to write on subjects which could have held little real interest for him, but experience, reading, and a mind eagerly responsive to new ideas gave him a wide acquaintance with the world in which he lived.

Nonetheless, to many of his contemporaries and to succeeding generations of critics – even those who freely expressed their fascination with his fiction – Poe seemed peculiarly out of touch with his age. Vernon Parrington summarized the conventional critical response to Poe when he noted that:

An aesthete and a craftsman, the first American writer to be concerned with beauty alone, his ideals ran counter to every interest of the New England renaissance: the mystical, optimistic element in transcendentalism; the social conscience that would make the world over in accordance with French idealism, and that meddled with its neighbor’s affairs in applying its equalitarianism to the Negro; the pervasive moralism that would accept no other criteria by which to judge life and letters – these things could not fail to irritate a nature too easily ruffled… Aside from his art he had no philosophy and no programs and no causes.³

Though we can now recognize, in the mystical exaltation which often colours his work, some affinities with the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, it is nonetheless true that Poe stood apart from many of the social and political traditions of the nineteenth century. But with what a sardonic smile Poe would have read Parrington’s lines, not simply because of his almost irrational dislike of ‘New England’, but because of the fervour with which he argued against provincialism (not nationalism) and urged that American writing must be seen in a world context. Furthermore, Poe, too, sought a transcendental experience, but one motivated and circumscribed by taste. In the search for a new vision of man, Poe took the route of aesthetics, while the major figures of the New England renaissance – Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne – took that of ethics. In his definition of the ‘Poetic Principle’, Poe divided the world of mind into ‘Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense’. Taste was the most vital of these divisions because it could hold communion with both intellect and morality:

Just as the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms: – waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity – her disproportion – her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious – in a word, to Beauty.

The aim of poetry for Poe was to put the reader in as direct a sensuous contact with this beauty as language would permit (and in describing the process by which such contact can be made in its highest and most enriched form, Poe is moving toward the concept of the ‘objective correlative’): thus man could reach that elevated state of perception which he himself apothesized as ‘the intoxication of the Heart’. Poe’s debt to Coleridge is obvious; and yet whenever one speaks of influences and sources in Poe, it is well to remember the evolution which such suggestions underwent in his best work, leading him, in his late theories of poetry, to a conception of the creative process which seems distinctly modern – one which attempts to blend the Coleridgean aesthetic with a concept of mind as the formalistic and controlling force in composition.

In his early essays on poetry, Poe floundered about with the time-honoured bugbear of quantitative verse and rendered meaningless verdicts on ‘bastard trochees’; if in theory he never comprehended the accentual basis of English poetry, in practice he could achieve remarkable effects. Happily, Poe abandoned these arguments in the later ‘Poetic Principle’, along with his carping attacks on individual poets. Style and idea have undergone extensive refinement, and his war on didacticism has been qualified, though hardly abandoned. Poe’s own poetry has often been seen as poor evidence of the success of his theories of composition: Emerson dismissed him as ‘the jingle man’, and only in the middle of the twentieth century did English or American critics begin to take serious issue with such a charge. Poe could describe poetry as the ‘passion’ of his life, and yet in fairness to his reputation the reader should be aware that most of his poetry was written before the age of twenty-two, and that personal anxiety and financial need prevented him from devoting his talents to verse with the consistency he desired. Nonetheless, one could cite few American poems written after the death of Edward Taylor in 1729 and before the early verse of Emily Dickinson to compare in richness or accomplishment with Poe’s ‘Helen’, ‘The Raven’, ‘Lenore’ or ‘Ulalume’. Furthermore, poetry was a far more comprehensive term for Poe than it was for his contemporaries, and when seeking the poetic in his work we must also look to critical statements like the following, in which Poe describes Man’s aspiration toward Beauty:

It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us – but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.

or to the opening sentence of ‘Usher’:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

It is unfortunate that in the small body of verse which he produced, Poe so often took as his models sentimentalists like Willis, Puckney, Moore and Hood; but even at its worst, Poe’s poetry suggests to us that quality of intensity and heightened consciousness which is the aim of all his work. He dismissed the representational style as commonplace and uninspiring, and cited music as the supreme art form, the one most suitable to ‘the creation of supernal Beauty’. Poe would certainly have applauded Walter Pater’s assertion that ‘all art continuously aspires to the condition of music’ – to that ideally abstract medium whose components are not distorted by material connotation, and are thus freed to create their own unique, transcendent relationships. It is not surprising, then, that music itself plays such a major role not only in the images and sounds of Poe’s own poetry, but in his prose work as well. Thus Poe characterizes the temperament to be described in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as a lute suspended in mid-air, and the ‘wild fantasies’ of Usher’s own singing form a central image in the story. Poe’s conviction of the musical properties of language as a necessary adjunct to the search for Beauty may threaten to overwhelm sense in ‘The Bells’ and justify his reputation as ‘the jingle man’; it could also produce the memorable lines in ‘To Helen’, with their subtle overlaying of internal rhymes and assonance and richly evocative language:

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
     Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

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

2

Poe’s staunch opposition to didacticism, combined with the grotesque terror of his most memorable tales, did indeed seem to set him apart from what Parrington cited as the ‘pervasive moralism’ of his time; but without denying Poe’s uniqueness, one can see numerous points of convergence between his work and that of other major American writers of the nineteenth century. Poe began his career as a writer of fiction with a series of satires on literary fashions: what we know of the early Tales of the Folio Club would be ample evidence of his familiarity with the popular fiction of his time, even if we did not have his reviews and articles as final substantiation. In parodying his contemporaries, Poe discovered his own particular gifts as a writer of fiction; that he did more than merely surpass many of them in the dramaturgy of death and decay is a point which can be dealt with later.

As a critic of literature Poe was fearless and often astute, the avowed enemy of the puffery which characterized so much of American literary life in the nineteenth century; but his criticisms often descended to the level of personalities, and not even the most sympathetic student of Poe can follow the history of his war with Longfellow or his own puffery of second-rate poetesses without acute embarrassment. James Russell Lowell described him as ‘at once the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works… in America’, yet one who ‘sometimes seems to mistake his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand’. But Poe’s criticism was not simply directed against the literary foibles (and imagined plagiarisms) of his time. He was a harsh critic of democracy, sharing James Fenimore Cooper’s distrust of a democratic audience as a great leveller of taste and literary standards. In ‘Mallonta Tauta’, a utopian projection into the year AD 2048, Poe derided the ruler of the ‘ideal’ Republic, King Mob:

This ‘mob’ (a foreigner, by the by) is said to have been the most odious of all men who ever encumbered the earth. He was a giant in stature – insolent, rapacious, filthy; had the gall of a bullock with the heart of a hyena and the brains of a peacock. He died, at length, by dint of his own energies, which exhausted him… As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it on the face of the earth – unless we except the case of the ‘prairie dogs’, an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government – for dogs.

Such a viewpoint was far removed from the democratic idealism which Emerson and Thoreau asserted and which reached its supreme lyrical expression in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Yet Emerson himself was apprehensive of the excesses and abuses to which democracy might yield; and indeed there is a long conservative political tradition in American literature to which ‘Mallonta Tauta’ and several of Poe’s other satirical pieces belong, the tradition which produced Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, Cooper’s The American Democrat, The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, and Henry Adams’s Esther. Poe’s image of the democratic mob – ‘insolent, rapacious, filthy’ – might easily be interpolated into Twain’s description of the residents of Bricksville in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nonetheless, in suggesting Poe’s links with this sceptical political tradition, one must add the important qualification that when Poe did turn his talent toward an evaluation of the political times in which he lived, he produced his crudest and least interesting work. On such contemporary subjects as architecture, landscape gardening, the theatre and songwriting, the aesthetician was much more at home.

Placing Poe in the context of the American literary tradition, one does him greater justice in emphasizing his quest for transcendental experience, his repeated invocation of the voyage of the mind which conveys man out of the known world and into the ideal vision which rests beyond, even though the quest may often end in madness and death. In his symbolic presentation of this voyage, Poe has numerous affinities with Hawthorne and Melville, sharing with them what Melville identified as ‘the power of Blackness’, and what Poe himself described as ‘the blackness of darkness’. Yet even on this common ground we are arrested as much by Poe’s divergence from the methods of his contemporaries as by the similarities. Two lines from the poem which Poe inserts into ‘Ligeia’ could almost serve as an epigram for his most characteristic work:

And much of Madness and more of Sin

And Horror the soul of the plot.

Madness, to be sure, appears in the work of Hawthorne – in, for example, the distracted figure of Ethan Brand or the sinister intellect of Dr Rappaccini – but this madness is distanced from the reader; Hawthorne’s primary concern is not with madness but with sin, in particular with the Unpardonable Sin which he identifies as ‘the violation of a human heart’. While the pursuit of this self-destructive course and the realization of its consequences may drive his characters to something like madness, his primary concern is less with the madness itself than with madness as a reflection of alienation from the human community, as a symbol of the warping effect of sin on unrepentant consciousness. Poe’s maddened heroes are closer to that arch monomaniac, Captain Ahab, than to any of Hawthorne’s characters, and numerous parallels can be traced between Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Moby Dick – not merely in their use of the voyage of consciousness motif, or the symbolism of black and white, but in the total movements of the two works – from the known to the unknown, from the natural to the supernatural.

Poe shares predominantly with Melville and Hawthorne the concept of the hero as a lonely and estranged figure, and in this respect Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ bears close reading alongside Hawthorne’s ‘Wakefield’ (as studies of the way in which creation often invokes parallel destruction, further and more subtle analogies are seen in Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ and Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’). Like Hawthorne and Melville, Poe returned repeatedly to the theme of the outsider, and he shared with them a vision of the torment which threatened to engulf the character who stepped out of society. In Poe’s most characteristic writing this withdrawal is, of course, more absolute than in the work of his contemporaries, so absolute that in the most memorable of his tales there is no attempt to invoke, except by the most minimal implication, the society which has moulded (and often warped) his characters. Poe’s settings are mysterious, exotic, remote, and when he set his master detective, M. Dupin, the task of solving a real murder, that of Mary Cecilia Rogers, he transferred the crime to Paris. Poe’s ultimate concern is less with society than with the individual mind driven to the brink of madness, and it is success in portraying this ultimate agonized crisis of consciousness which marks him as an original. But this does not deny him a place in American letters. This is a point worth emphasizing when as noted a critic as Joseph Wood Krutch has maintained in one of the most authoritative and frequently reprinted studies of Poe that his works ‘have no place in the American literary tradition’. Perhaps we are better prepared today to recognize as ‘real’ the crisis of consciousness to which Poe’s heroes are so often subjected, but even without this psychological (and existential) subtlety, a careful reading of Poe’s complete work refutes such an assertion. Nor is it necessary to force the ‘domestication’ of Poe as one scholar has done by citing his allusions to ‘cabbages, cucumbers, turnips, onions, celery, cauliflower, Irish potatoes, corn, parsley, pumpkins, water-melons, milkweed and purslain’.⁴

Elizabeth Barrett was far closer to an appreciation of the ‘reality’ of Poe’s work than were either of these simplistic views when she remarked, with regard to ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, that ‘The certain thing in the tale in question is the power of the writer, and the faculty he has of making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar.’ In the light not only of Poe’s search for transcendental experience and his fascination with the estranged hero, but also of the frequently grotesque violence of frontier humour and the Negro folk tale, it would be possible to claim for Miss Barrett’s concept a ‘near’ and ‘familiar’ place within that American tradition to which Krutch denies Poe access. But Miss Barrett had in mind the larger and more compelling ‘reality’ which is at the heart of Poe’s most horrific tales and which accounts for the fact that while Poe can clearly be seen as a ‘national’ figure, his fiction has drawn a larger international audience than that of any other American writer. When we look to the work of Poe most frequently reprinted and translated, terror is the most distinctive quality. At times terror is produced by conventional means, and with conventional results, as in the description of the ruined English abbey, ‘with its verdant decay’, to which the narrator in ‘Ligeia’ takes his fair-haired bride, Lady Rowena. Poe was a master of atmosphere, and here terror relies heavily on the unrelenting intensity of the picture he is able to construct from essentially ‘Gothic’ materials. But Poe attempted to go beyond the popular Gothic tradition, and deplored the meretricious use of terror and grotesquerie. In his preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he objected to being taxed by critics for

what they have pleased to term ‘Germanism’ and gloom. The charge is in bad taste, and the grounds of it have not been sufficiently considered. Let us admit, for the moment, that the ‘phantasy pieces’ now given are Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism is ‘in the vein’ for the time being. Tomorrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else. These many pieces are yet one book. My friends would be quite as wise in taxing an astronomer with too much astronomy, or an ethical writer with treating too largely of morals. But the truth is that, with a single exception, there is no one of these stories in which the scholar would recognize the distinctive features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are taught to call Germanic… If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul – that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results.

All too often Poe’s use of Gothic convention has served to obscure the real import of his work; it is not sufficient even to give him credit for the vividness with which he created such effects, unless we can also see the effects as evidence of the larger and more significant ontological struggle which underlies them.

Poe has been variously pictured as a sadomasochist, dypsomaniac, drug addict, manic depressive, sex pervert and egomaniac. There can be little doubt that he was a disturbed, tormented man, like so many of his own characters, often driven to the perilous brink of madness. If his fiction were merely the product of disinterested fancy, his tales of horror could hardly produce their brooding, sinister intensity; and yet Poe’s own mental state – while it may account for the tone and the themes to which he repeatedly returned – does not explain the work itself. The temptations to interpret Poe from a biographical point of view are numerous: he gives Usher his own features and William Wilson his birthdate; he celebrates his life with Virginia Clemm in ‘Eleanora’, and would appear to be taking revenge on his critics in the allegorical ‘Hop-Frog’. The fiction demands that we look at the life that produced it, but the critic must approach such analysis with more than the usual caution; the temptation is to see Poe’s work simply as the outpouring of a profoundly disturbed mind, denying, therefore, the conscious artistry in its composition. Poe meticulously revised what he regarded as his best work, and any study of those revisions is proof of his thorough control of his creative faculties. In Le Génie d’Edgar Poe, Camille Mauclair has pointedly asserted that Poe’s work is ‘constructed objectively by a will absolutely in control of itself’, and that genius of the sort we see there is ‘always sane’. Nonetheless, Poe remains the perennial victim of the idée fixe, and of amateur psychoanalysis of the most blatant variety. Because it is the work not only of an expert in psychoanalysis but of a fine critic of literature, Marie Bonaparte’s Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poenecessitysuccess