“A snare in every human path”

The most remarkable thing about Poe’s “Tamerlane” (1827) is not necessarily its ambition—for what gifted young poet is not ambitious? Nor is it the poem’s relative obscurity among Poe’s poetic works—because for young, gifted poets, and particularly for Poe, ambition often proves inversely proportional to popular success. Rather, what is most remarkable about the poem is its consistency with Poe’s more mature writings, particularly in its distinctive rhetorical strategies, which include (apparent) self-revelation, deception, emotional evasion, and subversion of its audience’s expectations or conventional assumptions. Specifically, Poe makes use of a nominally “confessional” narrative—one that invokes his favorite themes of ambition, love, visionary idealism, violence, loss, and betrayal—only to reject the traditional premises and benefits of the confessional form, namely, contrition, sympathy, forgiveness, and reintegration of the “lost” self back into the social or spiritual body from which it has been alienated. Instead, Poe uses Tamerlane’s unusual confession to challenge the very authority of his confessor—that “holy friar” who, in later versions of the poem, is renamed “holy father”—and to reject the notion of any sort of paternalistic sympathy or identification. He does so, interestingly, through a subtle invocation of one of the foundational myths—that of the “scapegoat”—common to all three patriarchal “religions of the book”: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In doing so, Poe lays the groundwork for a lifelong poetic project, and a poetic theory, that reimagines the figure of the artist-as-scapegoat, not as an ultimate sacrifice or surrender of artistic integrity, but rather as a viable alternative for preserving that integrity in the face of paternal (and literary) authority.

The critical history of Poe’s “Tamerlane” is sparse. The original printed version, as it appears in Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), received no critical notices at all, and its subsequent publications, in revised form, were generally received as merely a sample of Poe’s “juvenilia” (a perception that Poe himself encouraged). In the century and a half since Poe’s death, only a handful of critics have given the poem any sustained critical treatment outside of an introduction or footnote to Poe’s collections of poetry. These rarely go beyond noting its general themes of ambition, loss, and dissolution as typical of Poe’s early writing, tracing its literary sources and references as examples of Poe’s reading, exploring its relationship to Poe’s early romantic disappointments (particularly with Sarah Elmira Royster), or examining its awkward experiments with versification.^[1]

Perhaps the reason for this critical neglect is that, as Daniel Hoffman puts it, the poem is an “elephantine failure” and “a poem that nobody would read unless he had to.”^[2] And yet, when we consider those handful of critical readings that have addressed the poem in depth—notably Edward Davidson (1957), David Halliburton (1973), Robert Jacobs (1977), and G. R. Thompson (1984)—a case can be made that anyone who wishes to understand Poe’s driving motivations as a poet, his distinctive rhetorical strategies, and the development of his poetic theory and practice will, like the “unfortunate” students in Professor Hoffman’s now famous seminars, have to read “Tamerlane.”^[3] Each of these critics makes a compelling argument for the poem’s centrality to Poe’s thinking about the role and function of the poetic imagination, and each notes the significance of the power dynamics at work within the poem’s nominally confessional narrative, although they disagree on precisely what those dynamics are. None of them, however, argue that the poem “works” on any but the most rudimentary conceptual and poetic level. The poem continues to be seen as only a formative stage in Poe’s artistic development—a notion that I don’t seek to change but rather to complicate and perhaps refocus.

But in order to understand both the “confessional” nature of the poem and its ambivalence toward paternal authority, we must first reflect on some of the biographical and material circumstances of the poem’s composition. In the formative years of 1826–1831 (during which time “Tamerlane” was written and revised three times), Poe experienced increasing tensions in his relationship with his foster father, John Allan. Already, the young Poe had a cultivated sense of his own isolation and betrayal by those closest to him, including the birth father who abandoned him; the mother who died early, leaving him a “charity case”; and, of course, the foster father who bullied and belittled him at every opportunity. Even his beloved foster mother, Frances Allan, would die before Poe had the opportunity to pursue his emerging literary ambitions. Thus, it was only with John Allan that Poe was able to carry on, for a time, an increasingly bitter and abject correspondence—one that set a pattern for many of his later relationships, particularly with paternalistic mentors, publishers, editors, and literary friends. These relationships were all intricately tied to Poe’s efforts to establish himself in the literary marketplace as a serious man-of-letters and an independent artist—an ambition that, from the beginning, set Poe at odds with the demands of his foster father, as well as those of the marketplace itself.

In his correspondence with Allan, Poe employs a full range of rhetorical strategies and emotional appeals designed to alternately appease, entreat, apologize, accuse, and even threaten John Allan with various forms of embarrassment or guilty complicity. In one early letter, Poe expresses his determination “to leave your house and endeavor to find some place in this wide world, where I will be treated—not as you have treated me.”^[4] How he was actually treated remains a matter of speculation, but for Poe, the salient features were a general lack of “affection,” overheard disparagements and insults, and worst of all, the humiliation of economic dependence. Poe dismisses the former abuses as irrelevant to his newfound sense of artistic purpose, but he cannot help but acknowledge the hard reality of his poverty, though he does so with what would become a characteristic hostility and melodrama, not to mention an obscure threat: “Send me, I entreat you, some money immediately—as I am in the greatest necessity—If you fail to comply with my request—I tremble for the consequence.”^[5]

The consequence, of course, was his enrollment in the army—an ironic embrace of just the kind of authoritarian discipline against which Poe would always rebel (indeed, Poe is later discharged for deliberately disobeying orders). But in this instance, Poe’s threat promises something more ominous, not for only for Allan, but for Poe himself—some ultimate degradation or embarrassment, even a tragic death, that might reflect poorly on his image-conscious father. Allan’s silence in response to this and later appeals for sympathy, and his repeated refusal to offer anything in the way of financial support, eventually drives Poe to the depths of despairing supplication: “I sometimes am afraid that you are angry & perhaps you have reason to be—but if you will but put a little more confidence in me—I will endeavor to deserve it—”; “I am anxious to abide by your directions, if I knew what they were.”^[6]

Poe’s professed confusion over his father’s wishes reveals a deeper desire for his father’s “confidence” and “direction”—two things consistently lacking in Poe’s personal and literary lives—the denial of which contributes to his growing anxiety that he might not deserve the success for which he longs. So debilitating are his fears and his lack of direction that Poe apparently becomes petrified by his father’s continued silence: “You must be aware how important it is that I should hear from you soon—I do not know how to act.”^[7]

Such paralysis in the face of paternal authority is the presumed situation of most “confessional” models—at least those of Freud, Foucault, and others who have examined such narratives from the standpoint of power relations. Lacking a direct communication with the authoritative other, the typical confessional speaker must ultimately answer his own questions by assimilating his earliest intuitions of paternal authority, confused though they may be, in the form of an overweening “conscience.”^[8] But interestingly, when confronted with the lack of responsiveness or direction from his foster father, Poe doesn’t choose to answer silence with silence; nor does he go about “acting” in any way differently from before. Instead, he repeatedly provokes and cajoles Allan to voice his particular complaints, to reveal his resentments and suspicions. He demands to hear his own sins spoken aloud by the father.

When Allan at last complies in July of 1829—citing his foster-son’s repeated financial failures as well as his harsh words toward Allan himself—Poe takes the opportunity to go on the offensive: “Before I proceed to tell the event of my application, I think it my duty to say something concerning the accusations & suspicions which are contained in your letter. . . . I am conscious of having offended you formerly—greatly—but I thought that had been forgiven, at least you told me so” [Poe’s emphasis].^[9] Here Poe acknowledges a “consciousness” of his own sins against Allan (a fact that belies his earlier “confusion”) but at the same time, he takes it as his “duty” to remind Allan that he has already offered “forgiveness”—an act that, Poe implies, cannot be revoked. If Allan’s demands are to carry any weight, Poe suggests, they must at least be consistent with his previous words and actions. It is a staggering instance of the sinner demanding his rights as a penitent, while simultaneously laying a retaliatory accusation at the feet of the supposed authority: you forgot your own words.

This rhetorical strike does little to move the obstinate Allan, but apparently it is one that emboldens Poe to continue his requests and complaints for another six months. In January of 1831, Poe lets fly another angry rant that is part confession, part supplication, and part accusation and rejection:

Here Poe takes his “duty” one step further, not only reminding his father of the forgiveness that he has verbally given, but also of the “free will” with which he has given that and all of his previous personal and financial support—a claim that undermines any assumption of obligation on Allan’s part (he chose it freely) but also puts him in the tricky position of having to explain his current disavowal of Poe’s claims. In asserting his infantile helplessness and his lack of free will, Poe denies his own obligation to “reply” to Allan’s accusations, and lays responsibility for any mistakes firmly on Allan’s shoulders (you are the parent, I am the child). Finally, while expressing his own expectation of forgiveness, Poe makes clear in this letter that he has neither forgotten nor forgiven any of Allan’s slights against him. Here we see Poe making full use of the rhetorical power at his disposal as a “confessant” and “child” in need of its father’s promised protection and blessing.

Nevertheless, Allan never fully accedes to Poe’s demands (but for a few grudging dollars sent intermittently throughout their correspondence), which finally leads Poe to disavow not only his father’s authority, but even his need for further assistance or support. Understanding that the material battle is lost, Poe nevertheless proclaims his own “moral victory” in one final epistolary lunge that draws upon all the weepy melodrama of the sentimental tradition: “When I think of the long twenty one years that I have called you father, and you have called me son, I could cry like a child to think that it should all end in this. . . . I can write to you with the consciousness of making no application for assistance, that I dare to open my heart, or speak one word of old affection.”^[11]

The passive-aggressive abjection of this moment recalls Samuel Maio’s description of the confessional poet’s evocation of pathos as “weeping with one eye on the camera.”^[12] Poe is fully aware of the manipulative and, he hopes, guilt-inducing effect of his words, and yet he delivers them with a pained sincerity that makes us wonder for a moment if, in fact, he really intends to cause his father pain. But looking over the course of their exchanges, we can see the pattern by which Poe attempts to turn the emotional and moral current in his favor—to take his father’s presumed authority and power over him and claim it as his own, at least to the degree that he can, in good conscience, cease to care what his father thinks of him. It is in that eventual “freedom” of his own conscience that Poe claims at least a partial victory.

Poe’s rejection of Allan, while it does little to improve his material situation, creates an important template for understanding Poe’s later attitude toward authorities of all kinds and his strategies for dealing with their moral and psychological claims over him. If he cannot ultimately free himself from the hard economic and social realities that press upon him, he can at least, through his mastery of the language, perform a kind of rhetorical reversal of their authoritative claims over his conscience and perhaps assert some semblance of “free will.” It is a strategy that Poe would apply early and often in his later dealings with the literary marketplace and its symbolic representatives.

More immediately, though, Poe would bring the lessons learned through his correspondence with Allan to bear on his first major poetic undertaking, “Tamerlane”—a poem that evolved over the course of that ongoing struggle with paternal authority, and which reflects, on several levels, the same desires to pacify, evade, and ultimately challenge “the father” on the poet’s own terms. As in the letters, Poe would utilize both the dynamics of confessional discourse and the subversive potency of poetic language to shift the terms of Tamerlane’s deathbed confession from those of contrition and submission to those of moral defiance and, to a more limited degree, emotional and intellectual liberation.

I am not the first to have noted the poem’s biographical associations or its use of a confessional framework. Edward Davidson, in 1957, called the poem “a confused autobiography” that involves “simultaneous concealment and revelation.”^[13] But he also suggests that the contrived deathbed “confession” is, in fact, “only a device to get the reminiscence under way.”^[14] As evidence he notes that the speaker, Tamerlane himself, immediately disavows the confession and expresses no desire at all for forgiveness or penance. Instead, the poem as a whole displays what Davidson calls a “self-directional will-to-power”—one that flatly contradicts the confessional impulse, at least as that impulse is traditionally understood. For Davidson, such a contradiction invalidates the meaning or coherence of Poe’s clumsy framing of the poem.

I argue, however, that it is precisely through the subverted confessional discourse that Tamerlane, like Poe, seeks to express both his genuine remorse and his lack of “faith” in the power or authority of the father-confessor to offer him any sort of salvation.

The rejection of the father’s “gift” of solace and hope, and indeed his very connection to anything that the speaker considers “divine,” is challenged before it is even properly offered. Instead, Tamerlane looks for hope in some “holier fount,” some deeper source, that exists outside of his “earthly” father’s purview, and perhaps beyond his heavenly father’s as well.

David Halliburton, in his classic study Poe: A Phenomenological View, sees this rejection of the confessional sacrament as evidence that “Tamerlane” is, on the whole, “the history of a being that negates itself.”^[16] He argues that far from embracing a will-to-power, Tamerlane’s confession represents an ironic realization that “to have power is to be in the power of another, and to know it.”^[17] In this case, Tamerlane’s rejection of the father belies the inheritance that he receives from that father: an “innate nature” that is filled with both a love of beauty and the Ambition that drives him to conquer all that he sees. This “inheritance,” however, is perceived by Tamerlane as an external force, perhaps a demonic one, that takes possession of his soul from childhood—“imbibed” through the air and the chilling mists of his native Tagalay. Halliburton’s reading suggests that Tamerlane is the victim as much as the perpetrator of his crimes. He emphasizes Tamerlane’s lack of a “functional will” and instead suggests that the poem expresses Paul Ricoeur’s notion of the “servile will”—the will to self-enslavement or demonic possession that frees the self from moral responsibility for sin, and perhaps, allows for divine intercession or exorcism of that sin.”^[18] Unfortunately for Tamerlane, as for Poe, there is no intercession by the father, precisely because he has already renounced such a possibility at the opening of the poem. Thus, Tamerlane’s confession ultimately serves only to “negate himself.”

Robert D. Jacobs, in “The Self and the World: Poe’s Early Poems,” argues with Halliburton’s assertion that Tamerlane displays a “servile will” and instead describes him as “an egotist, like Melville’s Ahab, who imposes himself on what he sees.”^[19] Nevertheless, he agrees on the central fact that Tamerlane’s rejection of both Sublime Nature and idealized human Love (both symbolized by the figure of his abandoned lover, Ada), as well as the intercession of the holy father, leads “logically to ontological disaster—a failure in relation to others, and a consequent failure of self.”^[20] He sees the poem as an early example of that perverse “tendency towards self destruction, and a seemingly uncontrollable impulse towards ego-gratification” that later manifests itself in the tales. In the end, Jacobs says, “Tamerlane has chosen the world, the flesh, and of course, the Devil.”^[21]

While I agree with all three critics’ assessments of Tamerlane’s psychological situation and his surrender to those demonic forces that are either the result of his paternal “inheritance” or his overt rejection of the potentially reconciling sacrament of confession, I disagree with the consensus belief that this rejection represents an “ontological disaster” or “negation of self.” In fact, I believe that the poem offers an alternative ontological possibility: a self that can exist beyond the influence of paternalistic judgment; a demonic, exiled self that takes on the sacrificial role of the “scapegoat,” not as a perverse act of self-destruction, but as a liberating opportunity.

After the poem’s initial rejection of the father-confessor’s power to console, Tamerlane recounts his early abandonment of his childhood companion, Ada, and the idealized human love that she represents, as well as his embrace of earthly Ambition in its place. Elsewhere, I have argued that this childhood romance is, in fact, representative of a sublimated maternal longing and identification, which creates an early sympathetic bond that allows for the kind of open confession and consolation that Tamerlane cannot receive from the father; it is that “holier fount” that he mentions in the first stanza as an alternative to the father’s confessional ritual. ^[22] But Tamerlane’s abandonment of that love, Ada’s eventual death, and his later attempt to create a simulacrum in his “queenly city,” Samarkand, results in a gothic return of the repressed that threatens to annihilate him. The failure of this maternal/erotic identification opens up that possibility of “a being that negates itself,” which David Halliburton suggests. Here, however, I am more concerned with the failure of the paternal identification that, I believe, sets up the closing “demonic” embrace that ultimately offers the dying subject an alternative fate.

Near the end of the poem, after achieving all that earthly Ambition can offer him, Tamerlane finds himself overcome by a “sullenness of heart,” haunted by “the sound of coming darkness,” and oppressed by a vague sense of “danger nigh.” Most disturbing, though, is his vision of a cold, observing presence in the skies above Samarcand:

Here, the moon’s deathly gaze brings his vision of triumph and glory to a trembling halt. It recalls the dead (maternal) presence of a former time and casts a pall over his present life. In contrast to his lost love’s “quiet eye,” this gaze speaks menacingly to Tamerlane’s conscience and urges him back to the place that he has abandoned, back to his childhood “home.” He guiltily, and with what Peter Brooks would call an “overborne will,”^[23] accedes to the demand and seeks out his abandoned birthplace—only to find that it, conversely, has abandoned him:

The “undying voice” of remembrance confronts the speaker with his own betrayal and absence. That it speaks from the “threshold stone” of his first home suggests a dark parallel to the “stepping-stone” of Samarcand, upon which his new throne is erected—making them uncanny doubles of one another.^[24] As in the later tale “Ligeia” (1838), the voice and gaze of the dead lover take possession here, not only of the new love’s form, but of the speaker’s mind and will, dispossessing him of all that he has achieved in her absence. Tamerlane seemingly ends the confession with a recognition that “Death, who comes for me” offers the only final truth that he has access to: the truth of his own guilt and the abandonment of both his spiritualized Love and his earthly Ambition. It is a perfectly tragic ending. Indeed, the original 1827 version of the poem ends after this stanza, with these lines: “What was there left me now? Despair— / A kingdom for a broken-heart.”^[25]

However, the later 1829 and final 1845 versions of the poem do not end here—an additional long stanza takes up the original address to the “Father” (and note, he is no longer a “holy” father or a friar, just an abstracted paternal presence) to whom Tamerlane now teasingly says, “I firmly do believe—/ I know,” as if he might finally be ready to accept the father’s offer of atonement. But instead, what Tamerlane claims to “know” is that,

The claim that his impending death has allowed Tamerlane a view into the “regions of the blest” nullifies the father’s implied demand for “faith,” or the necessity of relying on a priest’s special insight or authority. What’s more, the implication that this vision contains “nothing to deceive” suggests that the father’s promises (or Tamerlane’s own earlier fantasies) might, in fact, have been deceptions. Finally, in response to any claims of authority that the “father” might assert here, Tamerlane instead bears witness to “rays of truth you cannot see.” This marks his final rejection of that father-confessor’s guidance or redemptive power. The father is never mentioned again in the closing scene of the poem, and Tamerlane’s thoughts seem to turn back to his own speculations on the cause of his downfall.

To reject the sacrament of confession upon one’s deathbed is, of course, the ultimate renunciation of paternal authority and of the emotional and spiritual salvation that “He” offers. It might, as earlier critics have suggested, be seen as an act of inexplicable self-destruction and an acknowledgment of his own “negation.”^[26] But as we see in Poe’s letters to John Allan, neither he nor his poetic speakers are ever content to not have the last word, however desperate and uncertain it may be. For Tamerlane, the choice between a foolish, unfeeling “father” and the annihilating remembrance of the mother/lover, leads him to conclude, ambiguously, that “I firmly do believe . . . that Eblis hath / a snare in every human path.”

The word “Eblis” or “Iblis,” in Arabic, means “despair” or “deprived” and is often used in the Koran as simply another name for Satan. But in both Judeo-Christian and Muslim demonology, it is also a frequent alias of an earlier demon, Azazel, a subversive spirit and the chief of the Djiin—desert spirits whose name means, among other things, “to conceal or overshadow.”^[27] Azazel is cast from heaven for refusing to bow down before Adam and for lusting after mortal women, as well as for teaching humans certain forbidden practices, particularly the use of weapons and ornamentation.^[28] Notably, these are the same “gifts” (or sins) that Tamerlane demonstrates: the art of war and conquest, the building of a beautiful city, and most importantly, his defiance of all worldly or spiritual authority in favor of his own all-pervading will-to-power.^[29] What’s different about Tamerlane is that he, like Poe the Romantic poet, still longs for a kind of visionary idealism, a supernal beauty that might transcend the limits of the physical world and its fleeting comforts. He has experienced not only the lust, but the love of a mortal woman, and he longs to return to both the childish innocence and the romantic/maternal sympathetic union that he once knew. He is not “evil,” in the ultimate sense of that word, and though he is sinful, he is cognizant and ashamed of that sinful nature. Reconciliation remains a possibility, if he can only locate the appropriate “divinity” with whom to reconcile.

Significantly for my reading here, Azazel is also associated with one of the central ritual myths of Western religion: that of the scapegoat. In the book of Leviticus 16:8, we hear of Aaron casting lots to determine which sacrificial goat goes to God, and which goes to Azazel. The one that goes to God is sacrificed on the altar, but that which falls to Azazel is, first, blessed (or cursed) with a confession of the priest’s and the people’s sins, and then sent off into the desert. One who is “snared” by Eblis or Azazel, then, is “the scapegoat” who carries the sins of others into the desert, but notably, is not sacrificed to “the Father.” Instead, the scapegoat represents the eternal exile—his fate is not to die, but to be consumed by “despair,” or by those demons whose purpose is to “conceal or overshadow” the truth that the scapegoat represents; that is, the truth imparted to the scapegoat by the confession of the priest and people from whom he has been exiled.

The inescapable “snare” that makes Tamerlane into a “scapegoat,” while it dooms him to exile, also allows him the freedom to continue speaking, albeit in a “concealed” fashion—his only audience, perhaps, being fellow exiles or the demonic forces that rule his spiritual desert. But this freedom and lack of concern for the consequences of his words prompts Tamerlane to end his confession, not with a final plea, but with a question:

If this closing question is, in fact, aimed at either the father-confessor, or more interestingly, the divine “Father,” then what we see, once again, is an inversion of the confessional dynamic—the confessant interrogating his confessor. What’s more, he is posing a question that implicates that Father in the speaker’s Fall—for how is it that, under the watchful gaze of a supposedly loving parent, an impurity creeps into the Edenic scene of his childhood? Who is ultimately responsible for that oversight? Tamerlane, we see, will not take the full blame for his unsought dreams and visions, or for the impulses that drive him to abandon his lover. Though he has, in the rest of the poem, acknowledged his own guilt and condemned himself for it, Tamerlane here evinces a defiant stance and an accusatory gaze that is almost a direct echo of Poe’s correspondence with John Allan. Poe, too, asserts that he is not to blame for those failures that took place under the gaze of his father and argues that, if anything, it is Allan who instilled the sense of “ambition” and success that Poe tries to live up to. It might not be absurd to say that Poe partially blames Allan for the fact that he has been alienated from those maternal presences that once offered him comfort. The point here is not that any of these accusations are true or just, but that Tamerlane (or Poe), once freed from the coercive authority of the paternal “conscience,” is allowed to assert the possibility—to turn the confessional ritual into an act of defiance and questioning.

Though, ultimately, “Tamerlane” offers no viable, or at least attractive, alternative to the Father’s ritual of atonement, it does suggest that there are legitimate reasons to question the authority of that ritual. Whether figured as “God,” a “holy friar,” or a “father,” paternalistic authority loses its moral imperative for the exiled scapegoat. Unfortunately for Tamerlane, as for many of Poe’s protagonists, any recourse to the maternal, sympathetic other comes too late and in too horrific a guise to do him any good. He is, ultimately, left to “wander the desert” without any authoritative other with whom to reconcile.

“Tamerlane,” then, sits at the opening of Poe’s poetic career, much like one of his own ghastly marble busts or creaking hinges—a foreboding of things to come. In its defiant rejection of paternal authority, its longing for a primal intimacy and idealized “beauty,” its horrific “return of the repressed,” and in its subversion of the symbolic order—all via confessional performance—the poem lays out the landscape of Poe’s later poetry and poetic theory. It also suggests, for Poe himself, a driving ambition (or compulsion) to overturn those aesthetic assumptions that typically structure the lyric quest for “self-expression”—the demand for “presence” over “absence,” the need for sympathetic understanding, and the belief in the efficacy of language itself as a reliable medium. Though his poems would continue to search longingly for an ideal form and a balance between the demands of “innate nature” and external “tyranny,” the “undying voices” of the past (or of the repressed) continue to haunt and disrupt such productions.

In order to convey this consciousness of the instability and uncertainty of intimate relationships, including that between poet and audience, Poe would first have to develop a more comprehensive theory of the poetic encounter and the capacity of language to mimic and perform “intimacy.” This he does over time through his own frequently reworked theories and “poetic principles”; through a series of later poems that revisit the haunted landscape of love, betrayal, and dissolution that “Tamerlane” first explored; and finally in his experiments with popular narrative forms, particularly the criminal confessional narrative.

Notes

Elizabeth Phillips, “The Poems: 1824–1835,” in A Companion to Poe Studies, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 70–71.

Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 30.

See Edward Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1957), 5; David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); Robert D. Jacobs, “The Self and the World: Poe’s Early Poems,” Georgia Review 31 (Fall 1977); G. R. Thompson, Circumscribed Eden of Dreams: Vision and Nightmare in Poe’s Early Poetry (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1984).

The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, rev. by Burton R. Pollin and Jeffrey A. Savoye, vol. 1 (New York: Gordian Press, 2008), 10.

Ibid., 11.

Ibid., 35.

Ibid., 38.

See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion (New York: Harper, 1958), and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). In “The Uncanny,” Freud suggests that the uncanny “double” is a result of the ego’s emerging capacity for self-observation (in the form of a “conscience” or superego), which is the result of overcoming our primary narcissism through an identification, usually, with the father. But the double also incorporates certain “possible futures that we still cling to in phantasy” and that “nourish in us the illusion of Free Will” (142). “Conscience,” then, contains the seeds of both paternal identification and paternal rejection—something we see developing in both Poe and his poetic “double,” Tamerlane.

Ostrom et al., The Collected Letters, 36–38. Though we don’t have all of Allan’s letters to Poe, it is clear from Poe’s correspondence that among the “offenses” Poe has committed, besides his irresponsible behavior, were accusations of drunkenness and adultery against Allan. In fact, Poe was deeply incensed at Allan’s apparent ill-treatment of his adopted mother, Frances Allan, who died in February of 1829. Her death prompted a brief reconciliation, but Allan’s later remarriage and disinheritance of Poe marked the end of their civil relationship and was no doubt seen as a further sign of “betrayal” by Poe.

10.

Ibid., 59.

11.

Ibid., 67–68.

12.

Samuel Maio, Creating Another Self: Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1995), 26.

13.

Davidson, Poe, 5.

14.

Ibid., 6.

15.

This and all other quotations from the poem are from Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn, Library of America Edition (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 24.

16.

David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 51.

17.

Ibid., 53.

18.

Ibid., 61.

19.

Robert D. Jacobs, “The Self and the World: Poe’s Early Poems,” Georgia Review 31 (Fall 1977): 648.

20.

Ibid., 652.

21.

Ibid., 652.

22.

John Edward Martin, Disquieting Intimacies: Confession and the Gothic Poetic in Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2006), 84–107.

23.

Peter Brooks, Troubling Confession: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Brooks defines the “overborne will” as “the nodal moment at which free will, free determination, passed over into compulsion—the narrative, one might say, of the mind twisted to that moment where it breaks” (77). It is also the moment at which the confessant becomes “the unwilling collaborator in establishing his guilt” (68).

24.

In the original 1827 version, the voice that Tamerlane hears is that of “a hunter I had known,” indicating an old family dependent who informs him of Ada’s death. But in later versions, Poe offers this more ambiguous voice emanating from the threshold stone to indicate a more ghostly presence, which I am reading as the “undying voice” of his lost love.

25.

Edgar A. Poe, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1., ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 39.

26.

Poe would later offer his own pseudoscientific explanation for such a tendency—“a mobile without motive”—when the narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” posits “a radical, primitive impulse,” called “perverseness,” in which “the desire to be well is not only not aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists” (Quinn, Poetry and Tales, 841).This perverse sentiment, while seemingly suicidal, is not wholly self-directed, but rather, exists in an “antagonistical stance,” suggesting, perhaps, a position of resistance—a position here evinced by Tamerlane’s temporary assimilation of, or by, a lost feminine consciousness that offers annihilation rather than “salvation.”

27.

Leo Jung, Fallen Angels in Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan Literature (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1974), 60–62.

28.

Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 191.

29.

Although I cannot say definitively how extensive Poe’s knowledge was of Hebrew or Arab demonologies, he does demonstrate some familiarity with both the biblical and Koranic myths, not only in “Tamerlane” but also in subsequent poems like “Al Aaraaf” and “Israfel,” as well as in his “arabesque” tales, including “Ligeia.” Here, it is only necessary to trace the connection between the Arabic Eblis and the Hebrew Azazel—two desert demons with similar origins and characteristics—as possible parallels in this poem.