by Matt Cardin
Xavier Aldana Reyes
See also: The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Eighteenth Century; Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Carter, Angela; The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Melmoth the Wanderer; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Numinous; Penny Dreadful; Poe, Edgar Allan; Radcliffe, Ann; Rice, Anne; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood; Walpole, Horace.
Further Reading
Bloom, Clive, ed. 2007. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Botting, Fred. 2013. Gothic. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Chaplin, Sue. 2011. Gothic Literature: Texts, Contexts, Connections. York: Longman.
Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Punter, David. 1996. The Literature of Terror, Volume 1: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Edwardian Age and The Literature of Terror, Volume 2: The Modern Gothic. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Punter, David, ed. 2015. A New Companion to the Gothic. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Spooner, Catherine. 2007. “Gothic in the Twentieth Century.” In The Routledge Companion to Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 38–47. London and New York: Routledge.
Townshend, Dale. 2016. “Gothic and the Cultural Sources of Horror, 1740–1820.” In Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, 19–51. London: British Library.
Walpole, Horace. 2014. The Castle of Otranto. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
GOTHIC POETRY
Gothic poetry began in the eighteenth century and accompanied the rise of Gothic architecture. The poetry was partly the product of the rediscovery of medieval history, exemplified in the building of Strawberry Hill House by Horace Walpole, and partly an interest in what Walpole called “gloomth,” that mysterious half-understood world of shadows and bizarrerie that could be experienced from visits to ruins, and that was attached to the personal universe that the eighteenth century called sentiment. Sentiment was an irrational and highly subjective emotional response to the sublime, which itself inspired both terror and horror and could only be felt in extreme situations.
Gothic poetry emphasized this interior world and especially dealt with the feelings accompanying the attractions of fear and disorientation when faced with a universe devoid of the rationality preached by Enlightenment thinkers. The best way to experience such feelings was to revisit the ruined world of the past in one’s mind, or to inhabit a supernatural world where God was no longer present.
Gothic literature was originally inspired by the world of Shakespeare, but Gothic poetry had a slightly different trajectory. Memorial poetry of the time produced by England’s metaphysical poets in the seventeenth century, stripped of its word play and religious intention, soon became the memorial elegy as produced by Thomas Gray. This in turn led others to take a more sanguinary view of decay, and the new vogue for tourism sent crowds to ruins such as Netley Abbey, where they mused and wrote sonnets on the picturesque charms of death and decay.
Poets as different as Lord Byron and Susan Evance produced poetry on decay and ruination, while novelists such as Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794) incorporated poetry of meditations on the picturesque. Her own blandly soothing poems on nature (“The Glow-Worm”) and scenery were accompanied by poems of dead brides (“The Mariner”), murdered pilgrims (“The Pilgrim;” originally “The Traveller”), and the mountain abyss (“Storied Sonnet”), in which there is a decided hint of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan.”
Nevertheless, Byron was the most famous poet of Gothic thrills for his generation, supplying vampires in “The Giaor” (1813) and metamorphosing into the first vampire character in “The Vampyre” (1819) by his doctor John Polidori. Yet it was Coleridge whose influence was eventually the strongest. The French Revolution deeply influenced both William Wordsworth and Coleridge, and through its prism they discovered the sublimity of nature and nature’s resonance with human emotion in a world in which nature is supreme. Coleridge’s interest in the border ballad form, then current, led to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), in which the death of an albatross has to be atoned for by the sailor who has murdered the bird. The moment the mariner fixes his unknowing listener with his tale of woe, and thereby curses him to repeat the story to the reader, became the spine of Mary Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein (1818).
Nevertheless, it was the German writer August Bürger’s poem of doomed love that was to become the most influential of all Gothic poems. Bürger was the son of strict Lutheran parents, and he was set to join the church. But he rebelled, and his interest in law gained him a magistrate’s position while his interest in British border ballads led him to become a poet. His most famous poem, “Lenore,” was translated into English by William Taylor for the March 1796 edition of The Monthly Magazine as “Lenora.”
The story follows Lenore as she waits for her William to return from the Crusades. Her despair leads her to renounce God despite her mother’s entreaties. Suddenly, in the night, William, although clearly a specter, appears on a steed and carries off Lenore in her night shirt to be his bride. At cock crow they plunge to earth, William returning to his tomb and Lenore left dying amid the graves.
Walter Scott translated Bürger’s “Der Wilde Jager” as “The Wild Huntsman” and published it to great acclaim in Matthew Lewis’s Tales of Wonder in 1796, while Lewis himself produced his own version of the ballad in his scandalous Gothic novel The Monk (1796). “Lenore” introduced the “corpse bride,” the girl who dies when she is about to marry, a character trait reproduced in the characters of Victor Frankenstein’s bride Elizabeth in Frankenstein and Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860) and reproduced in such films as Tim Burton’ s The Corpse Bride (2005). The poem’s most famous line, “stil Denn die Todten reiten schnell” (“for the dead travel fast”; Bürger 1900, 27), was used by Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897) when Jonathan Harker first encounters the count.
Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) was the last great Gothic novel of the Romantic period (ca. 1760–1830, with romanticism as such surviving several decades longer). It also set the tone for a different sort of Gothic sensation. Instead of the horrors attendant on the supernatural world, there was a greater attention to material fears made manifest by the cruelty of authority and the perversity of human nature. It was to human nature that the writers of the late Romantic Gothic would turn their attention. Theirs would be a world where horror was not a consequence of violating nature, but instead would be a consequence of mental disturbance. Such mental disturbance was first analyzed by James Prichard in A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (1835). He called the condition “moral insanity,” a term for those whose outward signs are perfectly normal, but who are insane within.
Coleridge had led the way in the exploration of the imagination in Biographia Literaria (1817), in which he proposed a new way of understanding the world. This was through pure imagination, which to Coleridge had the power to transform base reality and transcend material being. This “new” world was opposed to the merely combinational aspects of our perception, which he called “fancy.” To get to the imagination one might use drugs or other hallucinogens, the point being to reconnect with the spiritual aspect of human existence. This was Coleridge’s poetic solution to the loss of God, which had taken place with the secularization of French life amid the upheavals of the French Revolution (1789–1799). Nevertheless, if a person were to reconnect with the supernatural and what amounted to a natural religiosity, there was nothing to stop him or her from simply imagining a reality that was at odds with experience. In simple te
rms, this might lead a person to impose his or her will through perverse and hallucinatory desire brought on by mania or drug addiction or both.
The first English writer to understand this contradiction and to become fascinated by it was Thomas De Quincey, who published a satiric article in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1827 titled “On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts.” In it he proposed a “Society of Connoisseurs in Murder” whose aim was to analyze the “design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade” (De Quincey 2006, 10) and “poetry” essential to study the “great artists” (4) of murder whose lives were eaten up by the secret passions of “jealousy, ambition, vengeance and hatred” (4).
De Quincey’s proposal, absurd though it seemed, suggested a new heightened interest in criminal psychology, the murders themselves creating a world only a fraction apart from normality, determined by secret passions harbored by all people. It was simply too “vulgar” and unimaginative to knock someone on the head for his money bag. From now on there had to be “sympathy” for the murderer rather than the victim.
De Quincey had been drawn to the subject by his fascination with the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders, which occurred in 1812 between December 7 and 19. An unknown assailant had butchered two families, including their young children, beating them senseless and cutting their throats. John Williams was apprehended and charged, but hanged himself in prison before any proof could be brought. His body was buried with a stake in its heart at a crossroads near the scene of the crime. This interest in the psychological aspects of Gothic mentality greatly influenced two of the most important Gothic poets of the years 1830 to 1850, Robert Browning and Edgar Allan Poe.
Browning’s great gift was for psychological monologues, a term applied later to the series of poetic narratives he created between the middle 1830s to 1842, when he published the collection Dramatic Lyrics (1842). Such monologues are interior conversations with the reader, who is drawn into the mad world of the speaker to the point where it is impossible to escape the knowledge that is imparted, a technique invented years earlier by Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Porphyria’s Lover, which Browning wrote in 1836 and published in the January edition of the Monthly Depository (but without its present title), was an early attempt to understand the mind of a killer who yet believes he is a lover. It was reprinted in Dramatic Lyrics under the title “Madhouse Cells.” The tale is told as Porphyria returns to her lover at night through a rainstorm. Although wet, she sits next to the narrator and puts her arm around his waist as she gently lays his cheek on her bare shoulder. The eroticism is heightened by the disheveled nature of her clothes and by her “yellow hair” and “white shoulder bare” (Browning 1836, 43). The narrator meditates on her absolute love for him and that at the moment of their silent clinch “she was mine” (44). The reader might expect a kiss or vow of love from the narrator, yet what he does next is both shocking and inexplicable:
. . . I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. (44)
The infantilized tone, “I found a thing to do,” and the use of diminutives such as “little” suggest an innocence about the narrator’s actions that speak directly of moral insanity. Indeed, he even rationalizes the assumption that
No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain. (44)
However, murder now has no moral consequence as the poem pointedly finishes with the cynical “God has not said a word!” (44). It is no coincidence that Porphyria is a disease of the blood and skin that may lead to manic depression in sufferers. This hint at medical complications nevertheless leaves a world where perverse desire (in this case, possibly fetishistic sexual desire: Porphyria’s hair) and the personal will of the narrator override spiritual elements and confuse moral certainties, replacing material reality with the inner disorientation consequent upon absolute loss of faith.
The same effect is to be found in Browning’s more famous “My Last Duchess,” which was anthologized in 1842. It takes place in the corridors of the Duke of Ferrara’s palace during 1564. The duke is showing an ambassador around his picture collection while discussing his next potential bride. Everything is told in an urbane and disinterested tone created by the technique of enjambment (the continuation of a sentence or clause across a poetic line break, without a pause), which gives the poem a conversational tone, the better to disarm its reader before the denouement.
The duke begins the conversation by stopping at a portrait behind a curtain that he has drawn back and pointing out his “last duchess.” Sinisterly, he notices that she is presented “looking as if she were alive” (Browning 1842, 25), and that, even more disturbingly, the ambassador is privileged to see what is shown. The duke points out the way the painter has caught the “half flush that dies along her throat,” but this aesthetic detail sends the duke off into a reminiscence regarding the duchess’s perceived overfamiliarity with those around her and her apparent disregard of his gift to her of “a nine-hundred-years-old name” (26). The duke turns to his interlocutor and admits that something in the duchess “disgusts him.” It appears he has had her murdered, something of so little consequence to him that he continues his tour oblivious of his revelation. The implication, however, is clear: the next duchess will meet the same fate, and the duke will continue with the same casual disregard.
Browning was the master of insidious intent. His exploration of perverse states of mind rationalized beyond sense was a symptom of mid-century concerns regarding the nature of human consciousness in a world beset with existential doubts, social upheaval, rapid industrialization, and class conflict. These concerns found their greatest expression in Alfred Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (1842).
All of these conflicting problems seemed unwittingly to focus on women. Edgar Allan Poe, although an American, was influenced by the currents of British thought regarding mental hygiene and psychological well-being. In a series of short tales—“Berenice” (1835), “Eleonora” (1842), and “Ligeia” (1838)—Poe explored the nature of that male monomania that he named “the imp of the perverse.” It was Poe who first integrated previously written poems into his tales to give greater psychological insight into the characters and the way they experienced the world. It was also Poe who integrated assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds) and sibilance (the repetition of s, sh, z, and related sounds) into his prose to give it a dreamlike feeling, which Poe remarked had the effect of language and imagery recalled from reverie or the moment between waking and sleeping.
Ligeia occupies this dreamlike and hallucinatory world, in which an unnamed narrator sits with his dying wife (a wife who may be a hallucination brought about by opium consumption), who intones the poem “The Conqueror Worm.” The poem concerns a “theatre” of human woes where “puppets” act out “mimes” “at [the] bidding of vast formless things” (Poe 2008, 88). The action of the poem is that of humanity (or, at least, sentient beings) manipulated by the mindless entities of a meaningless universe in an endless cycle of anarchy and chaos. Into this terrifying world crawls “the Conqueror Worm,” a fanged and gory entity to whom all must submit. Against this disaster Ligeia poses the overriding importance of the human will, all that is left of the spiritual possibilities of Coleridge’s imagination. When Ligeia returns at the end of the tale, it is not merely the triumph of her will, but that of the narrator’s, who literally wills her into life out of the corpse of his second wife. As with Browning, it is the fetish of her raven hair that is the symbol of her resurrection.
Poe again made use of the incorporated poem in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where “The Haunted Palace” is a metaphoric description of Roderick Usher’s mental decline, the Gothic imagery of the castle serving as a perfect foil for the disintegration of Roderick’s mind, where red eyes and a humorless laugh betray mental disorder.
The poem
most associated with Gothic goings-on is Poe’s “The Raven” (1845), whose central character, the raven itself, may have been suggested by Grip, the talking raven in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841). The poem’s complicated rhyme scheme may have been further suggested after Poe reviewed the trochaic octameter poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” by Elizabeth Barrett, published in 1845. Regardless of its sources, the poem follows the incident of a raven landing on a bust of Pallas inside the door of a young scholar who is reading books of occult knowledge while mourning his lost love, who is called Lenore (a clear reference to Bürger’s poem). It begins,
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm”: Horror the Soul of the Plot
While Poe’s “The Raven” may be the first thing that comes to mind for most people when they try to think of a Gothic poem, his “The Conqueror Worm,” which allegorically portrays conscious life as a hideous play presided over by incomprehensible powers and performed for an angelic audience, delivers a dose of Gothic gloom that at least equals that of its dark-feathered cousin.
Lo! ‘t is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years—
A mystic throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast shadowy things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!
That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forevermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
