“The Raven” makes onomatopoeic use of the mournful long o sound in the name of the speaker’s lost love, Lenore, the repeated phrase “nothing more,” and, of course, in the raven’s lone word. When the speaker first realizes that the bird will only say “nevermore,” he is amused—but when melancholy overtakes him again, he torments himself by asking the raven questions that confirm his worst fears: nevermore will he be reunited with Lenore or find relief from his memories of her; nevermore will the bird stop reminding him of his grief.
“The Bells” is an even more radical experiment in sound poetry, particularly with its hypnotic repetition of the word “bells,” at first a “tintinnabulation,” but by the end building to a cacophony of sorrow. In describing four phases of life, each section of the poem is longer than the last; the final section, devoted to iron funeral bells, repeats “rolls,” “time,” “bells,” “knells,” overwhelming the rest of the poem as, to Poe’s mind, the sorrows of death overwhelm life.
“The Bells,” “Ulalume,” and “Annabel Lee,” all written after the death of Poe’s wife, Virginia, are particularly poignant in light of that last great loss of the poet’s life. Ulalume, like Lenore, is another name that suggests sorrow—Ulalume through its similarity to the word “ululate,” meaning to keen with grief, and its rhyme with “tomb.” Also similar to “The Raven” is the speaker’s apparent desire to torture himself: Lost in thought, he wanders to the crypt of Ulalume, wondering, “what demon hath tempted me here?” But in the ballad “Annabel Lee,” written in the last year of Poe’s life at a time when he knew that his physical and psychological health was failing, he seems to look forward to a time when he would be free from sorrow. Unlike “The Raven,” where the speaker is assured that he will not be reunited with Lenore in heaven, the speaker here proclaims that “neither the angels in Heaven above, / Nor the demons down under the sea, / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / of the beautiful Annabel Lee.” As the speakre lies down next to Annabel Lee in her “sepulchre there by the sea,” we may imagine, after all, some end to Poe’s lifelong torment.
CRITICAL EXCERPTS
Reminiscences and Critical Biographies
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. New York Tribune, October 9, 1849. In The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.
Fellow New York journalist Griswold was Poe’s literary executor and someone he considered a friend. Poe’s literary reputation has never completely recovered from Griswold’s obituary of Poe, published in the New York Daily Tribune the day of Poe’s funeral and reprinted widely, and his 1850 memoir of the dead writer, both of which were extremely uncharitable in their assessment of Poe and in some cases helped to spread untrue smears against his character.
Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. The poet was well known personally or by reputation, in all this country; he had readers in England, and in several of the states of Continental Europe; but he had few or no friends; and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art lost one of its most brilliant, but erratic, stars.
Moran, John J. A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe: Life, Character, and Dying Declarations of the Poet. Washington, D.C.: William F. Boogher, 1885.
As a resident physician at Washington Medical College in Baltimore, Moran was the doctor who attended Poe when he was brought in after being found unconscious in the street. He was present at Poe’s death. Nearly forty years later, he took it upon himself to attempt to rectify some of the misinformation surrounding Poe’s life and death—the widely held belief, for example, that he died from alcohol poisoning.
It was my sad duty as his physician to sit by his deathbed; to administer the cup of consolation; to moisten his parched lips; to wipe the cold death-dew from his brow; and to catch the last whispered articulations that fell from the lips of a being, the most remarkable, perhaps, this country has ever known. Let me entreat your thoughtful attention, therefore, to a plain, unvarnished story of a checkered life, and the strange and melancholy events that darkened the last hours of a dying genius. . . . I am persuaded that I should lend my feeble aid as a witness to the truth, and refute the foul accusations cast upon the memory of Poe, and repel the vile slanders respecting his death.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1941. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Quinn’s biography of Poe is still considered the best biography of the poet. Quinn relied on research in the Poe family archives and tried scrupulously to avoid the untruths about Poe that had been perpetuated by both his enemies and his admirers.
Reams of print have dealt with the question of whether the sorrow of the poet was described objectively by Poe or whether he was dramatizing a real love. This controversy is really unnecessary. Poe’s dread of the loss of Virginia, born of her recurring danger and nurtured by his devotion, had become a spiritual offspring, as concrete to him as the child he was denied could ever have been. In one sense, therefore, the poet was describing an emotional creation which had become objective to him, and the vivid reality of the poem is a consequence. But the primary inspiration was the abstract love of a beautiful woman—whether she was Helen, Eleonora, Lenore, or any other variant of the same name. Whether she was actually dead, or whether he feared her inevitable doom, is a detail.
Walsh, John Evangelist. Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Walsh, who had previously won an Edgar Award in 1969 for his 1967 book Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind the Mystery of Marie Roget, investigates the greatest mystery of Poe’s life: What happened to him in the week prior to his death on October 7, 1849. He provides a detailed account of the known record, debunks some of the persistent theories about Poe’s death, and speculates plausibly about what he thinks actually happened.
Earlier that morning, after a journey of some thirty hours by train and steamboat, he had reached Richmond from Philadelphia, where he stopped over on his way south from his home in New York. The latter part of the journey had not been pleasant, for he was still feeling the effects of another of his prolonged drinking bouts, this one in the Quaker City, and in fact the worst yet. So extreme had been his intoxication in Philadelphia, where he lingered for two weeks, that he’d experienced his first full-blown fit of delirium tremens, complete with visions.
Early Reviews and Responses
Baudelaire, Charles. Preface to Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires par Edgar Poe. 1857. In The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.
Baudelaire, one of the greatest of French poets, saw Poe as a soul mate based on their similar life experiences and artistic vision. Baudelaire’s translations of Poe’s poems and stories introduced him to French readers, who have generally held him in higher esteem than do his fellow Americans.
. . . we shall see that this author, product of a century fascinated with itself, child of a nation more infatuated with itself than any other, has clearly seen, has imperturbably affirmed the natural wickedness of man. There is in man, he says, a mysterious force which modern philosophy does not wish to take into consideration; nevertheless, without this nameless force, without this primordial bent, a host of human actions will remain unexplained, inexplicable. These actions are attractive only because they are bad or dangerous; they possess the fascination of the abyss. This primitive, irresistible force is natural Perversity, which makes man constantly and simultaneously a murderer and a suicide, an assassin and a hangman. . . .
Lawrence, D. H. “Edgar Allan Poe.” In Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: T. Seltzer, 1923.
British novelist Lawrence argues that Poe wrote more as a scientist than an artist and that his only real literary sub
ject was his own psychological torment.
Poe had a pretty bitter doom. Doomed to seethe down his soul in a great continuous convulsion of disintegration, and doomed to register the process. And then doomed to be abused for it, when he had performed some of the bitterest tasks of human experience, that can be asked of a man. Necessary tasks, too. For the human soul must suffer its own disintegration, consciously, if ever it is to survive.
But Poe is rather a scientist than an artist. He is reducing his own self as a scientist reduces a salt in a crucible. It is an almost chemical analysis of the soul and consciousness.
Huxley, Aldous. “Vulgarity in Literature.” In Music at Night and Other Essays. London: Chatto & Windus, 1931; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1931.
Huxley’s criticism of the vulgarity that “spoils” Poe is specifically directed at his admirers who are not native speakers of English, especially the French.
Was Edgar Allan Poe a major poet? It would surely never occur to any English-speaking critic to say so. And yet, in France, from 1850 till the present time, the best poets of each generation—yes, and the best critics, too; for, like most excellent poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry are also admirable critics—have gone out of their way to praise him. Only a year or two ago M. Valéry repeated the now traditional French encomium of Poe, and added at the same time a protest against the faintness of our English praise. We who are speakers of English and not English scholars, who were born into the language and from childhood have been pickled in its literature—we can only say, with all due respect, that Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry are wrong and that Poe is not one of our major poets. A taint of vulgarity spoils, for the English reader, all but two or three of his poems—the marvelous “City in the Sea” and “To Helen,” for example, whose beauty and crystalline perfection make us realize, as we read them, what a very great artist perished on most of the occasions when Poe wrote verse.
Eliot, T. S. “From Poe to Valéry.” In The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.
Like Huxley, Eliot, in this 1948 lecture at the Library of Congress, had little positive to say about Poe’s writing; but by considering from the viewpoint of his French admirers, he was better able to appreciate Poe’s significance.
Poe is indeed a stumbling block for the judicial critic. If we examine his work in detail, we seem to find in it nothing but slipshod writing, puerile thinking unsupported by wide reading or profound scholarship, haphazard experiments in various types of writing, chiefly under pressure of financial need, without perfection in any detail. This would not be just. But if, instead of regarding his work analytically, we take a distant view of it as a whole, we see a mass of unique shape and impressive size to which the eye constantly returns. . . . I can name positively certain poets whose work has influenced me, I can name others whose work, I am sure, has not; there may be still others of whose influence I am unaware, but whose influence I might be brought to acknowledge; but about Poe I shall never be sure.
Critical Response in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Auden, W. H. Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose and Poetry, edited by W. H. Auden. New York: Rinehart, 1950.
British poet Auden’s introduction to this collection of Poe’s work was an important early indication of a change in the estimation of Poe within the English-speaking literary establishment.
Both these types of Poe story have had an extraordinary influence. His portraits of abnormal or self-destructive states contributed much to Dostoevski, his ratiocinating hero is the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and his many successors, his tales of the future lead to H. G. Wells, his adventure stories to Jules Verne and Stevenson. It is not without interest that the development of such fiction in which the historical individual is missing should have coincided with the development of history as a science, with its own laws, and the appearance of the great nineteenth-century historians; further, that both these developments should accompany the industrialization and urbanization of social life in which the individual seems more and more the creation of historical forces while he himself feels less and less capable of affecting his life by any historical choice of his own.
Wilbur, Richard. “House of Poe.” In The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.
The following appreciation of Poe by poet Wilbur, presented as the Library of Congress Anniversary Lecture in 1959, focuses on “Poe’s fundamental subject”: “the poetic soul . . . at war with the mundane physical world.”
It is not really surprising that some critics should think Poe meaningless, or that others should suppose his meaning intelligible only to monsters. Poe was not a wide-open and perspicuous writer; indeed, he was a secretive writer both by temperament and conviction. He sprinkled his stories with sly references to himself and to his personal history. He gave his own birthday of January 19 to his character William Wilson; he bestowed his own height and color of eye on the captain of the phantom ship in Ms. Found in a Bottle; and the name of one of his heroes, Arthur Gordon Pym, is patently a version of his own. He was a maker and solver of puzzles, fascinated by codes, ciphers, anagrams, acrostics, hieroglyphics, and the Kabbala. He invented the detective story. He was fond of aliases; he delighted in accounts of swindles; he perpetrated the famous Balloon Hoax of 1844; and one of his most characteristic stories is entitled Mystification. A man so devoted to concealment and deception and unraveling and detection might be expected to have in his work what Poe himself called “undercurrents of meaning.”
Moss, Sidney P. Poe’s Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963.
Moss’s book focuses on Poe the critic, arguing that his opinions were formed in the crucible of the rivalries of wars of words among literary journalists of his day, conflicts to which Poe himself was a frequent contributor.
And having in general sound literary values, he condemned the prevailing notion that popularity and sales were measures of a book’s worth by insisting there were standards of judgment other than those of the market place.
The efforts that Poe made to safeguard a tradition whose value it is impossible to exaggerate were absolutely necessary, but a less militant man would not have devoted a career to the task. Whatever his motives, for he was by no means entirely altruistic, his militancy is attested by the fact that for almost his entire career he single-handedly fought the two most powerful cliques in America—those in Boston and New York—which were determining that tradition. Whatever his motives, his devotedness to that tradition is attested by the fact that he persisted in his assaults (the lapses that occurred during his breakdown notwithstanding) despite the very real danger of ruin—a ruin to which he was finally reduced.
Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.
Former U.S. poet laureate Hoffman’s analysis emphasizes his personal response to Poe as a writer and a persona. His idiosyncratic writing and intuitive judgments lead him to unusual insights about Poe.
Typical of Edgarpoe. His art conceals while it reveals, reveals while it conceals. Nothing is further from his intention than to sing a simple song, or use the language of clear and common speech. These meters, rhymes, and redundancies, the portentous tone, the inflated diction, all, like the early references to musician and painter, put the actual experience at a poetic distance, impose upon it a new form, an expression completely different from that given to gross affairs like passions and hungers of the flesh, a language other than that in which this workaday world haggles over prices and orders breakfast. To explore his inward soulscape Edgarpoe had to take the vocables of the workday dialect and from such unpromising stuff create moods and meanings ne’er attempted yet in prose or rhyme.
Critical Response in the 1980s and Beyond
Deas, Michael J. The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe. Charlott
esville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.
Deas’s unique take on Poe is to consider the writer’s career in the context of the photographic portraits taken of him in his adult life.
The physical similarities between Poe and a character such as Usher have led at times to an unfortunate blurring of the distinction between life and art, with some readers attributing to Poe the same compulsions and maladies suffered by his fictional creations. The misapprehension is little dispelled by the author’s most frequently reproduced portraits, the six daguerreotypes taken during the last eighteen months of his life—each of which depicts a worn and evidently troubled individual. The “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype typifies the matter: with its nocturnal tonality and saturnine gaze, the portrait suggests one of Poe’s Gothic tales as readily as it does the sunlit daguerreotype studio in Providence where it was taken in the autumn of 1848. Moreover, later likenesses such as the “Ultima Thule” plate have provided a kind of visual credence to Rufus Griswold’s defamatory description of Poe, and have been instrumental in shaping a popular image of the poet which, while perhaps satisfying the public demand for stereotypes of genius, appears to have little basis in fact.
Peeples, Scott. Edgar Allan Poe Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998.
Peeples, in updating the Twayne’s United States Authors series book on Poe, provides a readable critical overview that merges traditional scholarship with new approaches such as feminist criticism and New Historicism.
In considering Poe’s posthumous reputation, we encounter yet another dichotomy: between the alcoholic madman and writer of immoral tales on the one hand and the devoted husband and son-in-law, the seeker of supernal beauty on the other. We might take another step back and posit a split between the shadowy pop culture icon alluded to in movies, songs, novels, and television shows and the body of work that inspires meticulous scholarly research—and endless debate, as we have seen. There are, of course, many Poes, not only because he was a kind of literary ventriloquist but because readers bring such a variety of expectations to his poems and tales. Still, Poe encourages us to think in terms not of multiplicity but of dichotomy: the self we know versus the self we don’t know; everyday experience versus the reality of dreams and art; the mathematician versus the poet; the desire to reach a mass audience versus disdain for that same audience; the impulse for survival versus the impulse for self-destruction; faith in the transmigration of the soul versus fear of the “conqueror worm.”
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