Brevity in Poe’s creative writings overall is analogous to brevity in a dream: The dreamer moves from recognizable reality further into nonrational realms, the climax arrives, and the dream, or nightmare, ceases. Poe’s nightmare vision, to define his principal literary vision more precisely, anticipates those in the works of numerous later writers, and for such outreach he should be remembered as having contributed significantly to as many major currents as to eddies in literary waters.11 What has sometimes been mischaracterized as mere hack-work, created out of an inadequacy and inability to rise to greater heights, may today reveal more about some readers’ limitations than about any liabilities in Poe’s artistic vision and achievement.
Benjamin F. Fisher, Professor of English at the University of Missis sippi, has published extensively on Poe and many other subjects in American, Victorian, and Gothic studies. He is currently at work on two books and a monograph about Poe. Fisher is on the editorial boards of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe Review, Victorian Poetry, Frank Norris Studies, Gothic Studies, Simms Review, and English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, and he is past president of the Poe Studies Association and chairman of the Speakers Series of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. He was awarded a Governor’s Citation in the state of Maryland for outstanding contributions to Poe studies and has won several awards for outstanding teaching.
Notes
1 Palmer C. Holt, “Poe and H. N. Coleridge’s Greek Classic Poets: ‘Pinakidia,’ ‘Politian,’ and ‘Morella’ Sources,” American Literature 34 (1962), pp. 8-30. I add here my grateful acknowledgment of the scholarship in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969-1978. Although I have not used the text, I have also often found helpful the annotations by Burton R. Pollin, ed., in Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Boston: Twayne, 1981; vol. 1: Imaginary Voyages.
2 A fine overview of Gothicism is Devendra Prasad Varma’s The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences, London: Arthur Barker, 1957. I assess Dunlap’s imitating of American literary Gothicism in my “William Dunlap, American Gothic Dramatist,” in Transactions of the Samuel Johnson Society of the Northwest 17 (1988), pp. 167-190. See also Clark Griffith’s “Poe and the Gothic,” in Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 127-133; and my “Poe and the Gothic Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 72-91. Especially good on many points concerning Poe is editor Richard P. Benton’s The Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: A Symposium in Two Parts, a special double number of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 18:1 & 2 (1972). Benton’s introductory overview, “The Problems of Literary Gothicism,” sets forth excellent perceptions on American Gothicism from its early manifestations to the later twentieth century.
3 Dennis W. Eddings, “Theme and Parody in ‘The Raven’,” in Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990, pp. 209-217.
4 The best overview of this project is Alexander Hammond’s “A Reconstruction of Poe’s 1833 Tales of the Folio Club,” in Poe Studies 5 (December 1972), pp. 25-32; and his “Further Notes on Poe’s Folio Club Tales,” Poe Studies 8 (December 1975), pp. 38-42. See also my The Very Spirit of Cordiality: The Literary Uses of Alcohol and Alcoholism in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978.
5 Strangely, Mabbott—in Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 238—is reluctant to credit this tale with any value, citing in support Robert Louis Stevenson’s denigration dating from 1875. A more convincing critique is Louis A. Renza’s “Poe’s King: Playing it Close to the Pest,” in Edgar Allan Poe Review 2:2 (2001), pp. 3-18.
6 Such is the argument of Clark Griffith in “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” in University of Toronto Quarterly 24 (1954), pp. 8-25.
7 I assess this technique in “Blackwood Articles à la Poe: How to Make a False Start Pay,” in Perspectives on Poe, edited by D. Ramakrishna, New Delhi: APC Publications, 1996, pp. 63-82.
8 Interestingly—in regard to playing off supernatural and natural—Poe revised what in “The Assignation” had first read as “the Demon of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal” to “the Genius of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal.” This change eliminates any hint of supernaturalism and substitutes, fittingly, a word that has as its root meanings “creator” and “begetter,” thus deftly preparing for the lack of creativity, artistic or sexual, in old Mentoni as contrasted with both in the Marchesa’s lover, who probably fathered her child.
9 Since racial issues have been connected with Pym so often in recent years, one might profitably consult Randall Kennedy’s Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. See especially Kennedy’s “Introduction” and chapters 3, 6, and 7. Noteworthy, too, is Kennedy’s observation: “Distinctly underdeveloped is the literary tradition that portrays interracial relationships that are at least potentially rewarding” (pp. 137-138). Naturally, as a person of his time, Poe would have had conflicts concerning racial issues, and in expressing any thoughts regarding these matters he no doubt would be ambiguous. That Dirk Peters survives when Pym and their Tsalalian hostage do not may register such uncertainties. See also Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 579-580, 590-591. Joseph V. Ridgely’s assessment of Poe and racism (in which he reminds us that the author of an extremely pro-slavery article in the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger was not Poe) should confute more speculative ideas concerning Poe and race. See Ridgely’s “The Authorship of the ‘Paulding-Drayton Review’,” in Poe Studies Association Newsletter 20:2 (Fall 1992), pp. 1-3, 6. See also Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson’s The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 200, 205; and Terence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, chapters 5 and 6. For earlier worthwhile opinions about Poe’s novel, see G. R. Thompson’s “Romantic Arabesque, Contemporary Theory, and Postmodernism: The Example of Poe’s Narrative,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 35:3, 4 (1989), pp. 163-272; and Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992. Poe’s debts in Pym to another influential tradition in his day are illuminated by Kent Ljungquist’s The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques, Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984, chapter 2.
10 A gloss on these masculine-feminine mergings may be found in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, pp. 579-580; 590-591. Also too significant to ignore in light of such a reading is Pym as imp. According to Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, the word “imp” may derive from the Latin for “to prune,” which led to definitions like “graft,” “repair,” or, in noun form, “bud,” “shoot,” “offspring,” “scion,” and “graft”—all suggestive of growth and development, and thus of Pym’s maturing.
11 For Poe’s sophistications and modifications of literary Gothicism, see my “Poe and the Gothic Tradition,” pp. 72-91. For later impacts, see three publications of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Maryland: Richard Fusco’s Fin de Millénaire: Poe’s Legacy for the Detective Story (1993); Craig Werner’s “Gold Bugs and the Powers of Blackness: Re-Reading Poe” (1995); and my volume of edited essays Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986). On Poe’s international high standing, see Poe Abroad: Influences, Reputation, Affinities, edited by Lois Vines, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.
POEMS
The Lake—To
In spring
of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less—
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.
But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody—
Then—ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.
Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight—
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define—
Nor Love—although the Love were thine.
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.
Sonnet—To Science
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?1
Fairy-land
Dim vales—and shadowy floods—
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can’t discover
For the tears that drip all over.
Huge moons there wax and wane—
Again—again—again—
Every moment of the night—
Forever changing places—
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces.
About twelve by the moon-dial
One more filmy than the rest
(A kind which, upon trial,
They have found to be the best)
Comes down—still down—and down
With its centre on the crown
Of a mountain’s eminence,
While its wide circumference
In easy drapery falls
Over hamlets, over halls,
Wherever they may be—
O‘er the strange woods—o’er the sea—
Over spirits on the wing—
Over every drowsy thing—
And buries them up quite
In a labyrinth of light—
And then, how deep!—O, deep!
Is soaring in the skies,
With the tempests as they toss,
Like—almost any thing—
Or a yellow Albatross.a
They use that moon no more
For the same end as before—
Videlicett a tent—
Which I think extravagant:
Its atomies, however,
Into a shower dissever,
Of which those butterflies,
Of Earth, who seek the skies,
And so come down again
(Never-contented things!)
Have brought a specimen
Upon their quivering wings.
Israfel b
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
“Whose heart-strings are a lute;”
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,2
And the giddy stars (so legends tell)
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamoured moon
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven,)
Pauses in Heaven.
And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli’s fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings—
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.
But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty—
Where Love’s a grown up God—
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.
Therefore, thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest!
Merrily live, and long!
The ecstasies above
With thy burning measures suit—
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervour of thy lute—
Well may the stars be mute!
Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely—flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.
To Helen
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o‘er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
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.
Lo! In yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!3
The Sleeper
At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethe,c see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies
(Her casement open to the skies)
Irene, with her Destinies!
Oh, lady bright! can it be right—
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop—
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully—so fearfully—
Above the closed and fringed lid
‘Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,
That, o‘er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear,
hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!
The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye,
While the dim sheeted ghosts go by!
My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold—
Some vault that oft hath flung its black
And winged panels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o‘er the crested palls,
Of her grand family funerals—
Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone—
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.
The Valley of Unrest
Once it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto the wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers,
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 6
