Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the texts, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the works’ history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

Comments

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The first of these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledge of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him to conceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw a correct outline, while the second groups, fills up, and colors. Both of these Mr. Poe has displayed with singular distinctness in his prose works, the last predominating in his earlier tales, and the first in his later ones. In judging of the merit of an author, and assigning him his niche among our household gods, we have a right to regard him from our own point of view, and to measure him by our own standard. But, in estimating the amount of power displayed in his works, we must be governed by his own design, and, placing them by the side of his own ideal, find how much is wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinions of the objects of art. He esteems that object to be the creation of Beauty, and perhaps it is only in the definition of that word that we disagree with him. But in what we shall say of his writings, we shall take his own standard as our guide. The temple of the god of song is equally accessible from every side, and there is room enough in it for all who bring offerings, or seek an oracle.

—from Graham’s Magazine (February 1845)

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

When all is said, it is not in the power of man to make Poe altogether sympathetic. I cannot find it in my heart to like either his portrait or his character; and though it is possible that we see him more or less refracted through the strange medium of his works, yet I do fancy that we can detect, alike in these, in his portrait, and in the facts of his life as now most favourably told, a certain jarring note, a taint of something that we do not care to dwell upon or find a name for.

—from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1874)

 

WALT WHITMAN

Almost without the first sign of moral principle, or of the concrete or its heroisms, or the simpler affections of the heart, Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.

—from Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883)

 

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN

Poe was not a single-poem poet, but the poet of a single mood. His materials were seemingly a small stock in trade, chiefly of Angels and Demons, with an attendance of Dreams, Echoes, Ghouls, Gnomes and Mimes, ready at hand. He selected or coined, for use and re-use, a number of what have been called “beautiful words,”—“albatross,” “halcyon,” “scintillant,” “Ligeia,” “Weir,” “Yaanek,” “Auber,” “D‘Elormie,” and the like. Everything was subordinate to sound. But his poetry, as it places us under the spell of the senses, enables us to enter, through their reaction upon the spirit, his indefinable mood; nor should we forget that Coleridge owes his specific rank as a poet, not to his philosophic verse, but to melodious fragments, and greatly to the rhythm of “The Ancient Mariner” and of “Christabel.” Poe’s melodies lure us to the point where we seem to hear angelic lutes and citherns, or elfin instruments that make music in “the land east of the sun and west of the moon.” The enchantment may not be that of Israfel, nor of the harper who exorcised the evil genius of Saul, but it is at least that of some plumed being of the middle air, of a charmer charming so sweetly that his numbers are the burden of mystic dreams.

 

—from Poets of America (1885)

FRANCIS THOMPSON

In nearly all [Poe‘s] tales of idealistic terror or beauty, of which the “House of Usher” is an example, the hero is Poe himself; while they constantly revolve round situations suggested by his own history. To consider Poe is to consider these tales, and to consider these tales is to consider Poe....

The tales are vital with a wrongful vitality. They are told by heroes whose sensitive nerves have the preternatural acuteness of initial insanity; colour, sound, scent—every detail of description in their rendering becomes morbidly distinct to us, like the ticking of a clock in the dark. In the “House of Usher” this feature becomes conscious of itself; the hero hears the beating of a woman’s heart while she stands without the closed door. Beauty and terror are alike portentous, “larger than human,” like figures in the mist. The landscapes are preterhuman, painted as with fire, and blinded with a light such as only streams from the fountains of the dreaming brain. The heroes live by choice in chambers out of nightmare, where curtains like molten silver fall in cataracts on carpets of burning gold, lighted by coloured flames which writhe from antique lamps, and perfumed from carven censers; on golden tapestries phantasmal figures waver in the rushing of a continuous wind. Amid such surroundings women of unearthly beauty, or the shadow of Poe’s own child-wife, pass and die, and dying, give rise to tragedies of impermissible terror; the Red Death incarnates itself among the fated revellers; or a man flies through life pursued by the visible presence of himself. Beauty which cannot separate itself from terror, terror haunted by beauty, are the powers which rule this world of an opium-dream.

It is the deliberate turning away of a man from the normal; it is the obsession by the desire for better bread than is made from wheat. When Poe theorises on landscape-gardening, he avows his preference for the artificial style, but must have a “spiritualised” artificiality, an artifice which suggests the more than mortal. Yet this world at which the human heart aches becomes real while we read—there is the genius. The art is admirable in its sureness and delicacy. The imagination has seized these things of beauty and terror with more than the closeness of a poet—with the closeness of a dream; and there is no closeness, either to terror or beauty, so appalling as that of a dream. The scope is strange and narrow, but the mastership is absolute.

—from Academy (September 28, 1901)

D. H. LAWRENCE

Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe’s “morbid” tales need have been written. They need to be written because old things need to die and disintegrate, because the old white psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass.

Man must be stripped even of himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly process.

—from Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

 

W. H. AUDEN

I myself cannot remember hearing any poetry before hearing “The Raven” and “The Bells”; and “The Pit and the Pendulum” was one of the first short stories I ever read.

—from his introduction to Edgar Allan Poe:

Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka (1950)

Questions

1. Do the sound effects in “The Raven” enhance or impede or perhaps even constitute the meaning of the poem?

2. Detective stories often have a providential aspect: One feels some outside force working to separate the sheep from the goats. But in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” there is no such force operating. We need Dupin to save Mr. Le Bon (“the Good”) and to banish the monster. Has God taken a break?

3. Why do you think Poe made his detective such an odd-ball? Why do you think his orangutan is so unrealistic? It commits its crimes while trying to imitate human behavior. Dupin brags that “most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms.” Could it be argued that the orangutan is what Dupin sees—a primitive part of us—when he looks through the window to our bosoms?

4. Poe wrote that the “most poetic of all themes is the death of a beautiful woman.” Is this statement true? Does it prove that Poe is disturbed? Mean-spirited? Does other literature support Poe’s claim?

5. One way of understanding supernatural horror fiction is to see the various horrors as metaphors for psychological traits or events: The orangutan, for example, can be interpreted as something in humanity that is murderous and monstrous and primitive. Using this method, how would you read “Ligeia” or “William Wilson”?

6. A fellow poet, James Russell Lowell, once said that Poe was “three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” What do you think?