Introduction

As a student of Edgar Allan Poe’s classical learning has stated, “If Poe had a ‘ruling passion,’ it was to acquire and to sustain the pose of a classical scholar and Virginia gentleman.”¹ This yearning for fame and fortune, transmuted onto the literary plane, repeatedly caused him anguish and earned him meager profits; yet it inspired some of the most fascinating poetry and fiction in the English language. Poe’s wish to appear erudite has sometimes created difficulties with his language and allusions for modern readers. His literary motives have often been baffling, especially those underlying his fiction. His fiction often made fun of what he wrought best: terror tales. In his writing about his own writing, controversies and ironies continue to swirl, often blurring where Poe the person stops and Poe’s creative writings begin. Contrary to long-lasting mythologies, Poe—exceptionally conscious artist that he was—is not the protagonist in his tales and poems. Though autobiographical portraiture often colored literary productions in his era (and in a few cases entered his own work, but in minor ways), as it continues to do in many instances today, it is not the dominant mode of Poe’s writings.

Born in 1809 in Boston to a British emigrant mother, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, and a Baltimore father, David Poe, Jr., he has repeatedly been associated with the antebellum South, where he spent much of the first half of his life as the foster son (never adopted) of John and Frances Allan, in Richmond, Virginia. Sometime during 1811, David Poe, Jr., deserted his family; Mrs. Poe became ill and died in Richmond in December of that same year. Edgar consequently was taken in by the Allans, whence derives his middle name, often misspelled even today. Though he expected to inherit John Allan’s large fortune, Poe was disinherited and subsequently lived in poverty for much of his life. It is a wonder that he was able to create the artistic writings he did in light of the continual combat he waged against the wolf at his door during much of his brief life.

I

When Poe emerged as a writer during the 1820s, the American literary world was still very tentative about its achievements and prospects. Several major inspirations from abroad contributed to the literary milieu during that span, however, and creative writing in America seemed to increase between the immediate post-Revolutionary years and Poe’s era. While major literary influences came from Great Britain and Germany, American nationalism was developing in all areas of life, and responses to such foreign influences were mixed. Many American authors and critics hoped for the creation of a distinctively American literature, which, they felt, should break from what they saw as negative traditions of the Old World. From the eighteenth into the nineteenth century American literary circles inveighed against terror or horror literature—so-called Gothic literature—because it supposedly displayed too much class structuring or too many sacrilegious themes, all expressed in extravagant language and implausible characterization. Many British and American readers also shared a hostility toward writing branded as “German” or “Germanism,” supposedly because late-eighteenth-century German literature was seen both as vulgar and as manifesting many of the implausibilities of Gothic literature.

Despite the American and British criticism of Gothic literature (the term is most commonly applied to fiction, although many Gothic plays and poems exist) as too German, however, literary Gothicism is actually British in origin. Descending from a melding of historical, architectural, and literary forces and a growing curiosity about nonrational states of mind, the Gothic revival in the arts commenced in the British Isles during the mid-eighteenth century. It was only later that German authors, who devoured British Gothic works, emulated those models and adopted Gothicism as their own. When interest in and criticism of German literature in turn sprang up in the Anglo-American literary world in the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, many forgot about the precise origins for contemporary terror literature. If critics and general readers who had been nurtured on neoclassic principles—which emphasized order, reason, and balance—directed negative criticism toward what they dismissed as vulgar “Germanism,” many creative writers derived much from the Gothic mode. Irony and hostilities notwithstanding, works inspired by the Gothic tradition were published in Great Britain and America, starting with a great flourishing in the 1790s, and the legacy remains fruitful. For example, many current romance novels and horror tales, among others, continue to refashion techniques and themes that originated long ago.

In the first Gothic novel—Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, subtitled “A Gothic Story” and published anonymously in 1764, then with Walpole’s name revealed the next year—we encounter vicious pursuit of innocence (and innocents) for purposes of power, lust, or money. These motives drive Prince Manfred, grandson of the usurper of the throne of Otranto in medieval Italy, who is eager to wed his son Conrad to lovely young Princess Isabella, to secure family succession to the throne. Conrad dies mysteriously, however, crushed by a gigantic black helmet that appears in the palace courtyard. Manfred rapidly proposes to have his own marriage annulled and marry Isabella himself, hoping that a younger wife will produce a son to secure succession. Revolted by Manfred’s obvious lust, Isabella flees through dark corridors and subterranean passages in the eerie old castle, aided by a mysterious young man, Theodore, who assists her escape to sanctuary in the neighboring monastery. Manfred’s rages against the young pair or anyone else who seems to thwart his will, his ill treatment of his docile wife, Hermione, his murdering his own daughter by mistake—all precede the clearing away of mysteries in family and political identities. Supernatural touches increase the characters’ anxieties: The giant helmet portends tragedy; a portrait of Manfred’s ancestor becomes animated and seems to disapprove of his descendant’s behavior; disaster and gloom hover over all. Lust, near-incest, violence, brutality—all linked with family mysteries and identities over which the strange old decaying castle seems to preside—create overwhelming terror and fear. The comic speeches and actions of menials provide comic relief to the more grim sections in the story.

Walpole’s use of the castle and the nearby monastery as backdrops is a natural outgrowth of the contribution of the British cultural heritage to literary Gothicism. In the 1530s, King Henry VIII broke from Roman Catholicism because of circumstances akin to Manfred’s: Henry wanted a son to solidify his line’s succession within the British monarchy. His attempts came to naught, with tragedy resulting for most of his six wives. Henry also dissolved many British religious centers, an action that led to widespread sackings: Abbeys, churches, convents, monasteries, and cathedrals were ruined. By the mid-eighteenth century, such ruins came to symbolize transience in human aspirations. The inhabitants of such places, whose robed, hooded figures readily suggested ghosts or demons, provided origins for additional supernaturalism in literary Gothicism. Since the clerics had at one time held political as well as religious status, here were perfect targets for British anti-Catholics of a later day to cast as villains, especially since clerical celibacy also suggested unnatural sexuality. Appropriately, many British Gothic works were set in southern continental Europe, the seat of continuing Roman Catholic power, where villainous foreign policies and secretive character types would contrast markedly with the British sense of open political, social, and religious life.

By the time of The Castle of Otranto, much British poetry had become imbued with what we now call “graveyard” topics—short lives, the grave (and its physical manifestations: gravestones, mausoleums, etc.) as symbolic of instability in the human condition, and the eeri ness of churchyard environs. We need not wonder that Walpole’s imagination should have turned to similar themes and settings. The Castle of Otranto also owes a debt to the ranting, lustful, power-mad villains in Renaissance revenge tragedies. Walpole’s novel continues to puzzle readers, however, because we are never certain whether he wrote with absolute seriousness or if there is a smile just beneath the sensationalism. Thus, the origins of literary Gothicism yield both terrifying and humorous substance.

Although not every Gothic work includes a haunted castle, or lust, or money madness, most call up anxieties and power plays leading to tragedy—sometimes with supernatural interventions, sometimes with warped characters who move within eerie architectural or natural settings, which contribute to emotional unsettledness and an overall gloomy atmosphere. The recurrent situation in Gothic literary tradition is that of an alienated protagonist in an alien world. Some later writers present gory details of physical sufferings in repellant surroundings (horror); some others eschew the descriptions of physical tortures, preferring to delineate psychological effects of mysterious threats and oppressions (terror).

American authors experimenting with Gothicism had to either employ European settings and characters or adapt the Gothic to American subject matter. The person mainly responsible for this transformation was William Dunlap, the so-called father of American drama, who composed several Gothic plays during the 1790s. Three were European in substance, but André (1798), set during the American Revolution, adapted the overwrought psychology of a renowned wartime British spy captured by Americans, condemned to death, and awaiting execution. As in many other Gothics, war constituted a perfect foil to uncertainties in physical and emotional life. Dunlap’s friend Charles Brockden Brown turned to Gothicism in American locales for four of his six novels published in the late 1790s and early 1800s, and he is often credited with founding American literary Gothicism. American writers generally tended to emphasize psychological issues and to offer rational explanations for what might have seemed supernatural. Poe was to carry Gothicism to greater psychological heights than the majority of his predecessors.²

II

Poe wished above all else for recognition as a poet, an understandable desire in one whose literary tastes were shaped by the Romanticism bonding Anglo-American cultural worlds in his era. What is still remembered as the mainstream form of Romantic imaginative writing is the lyric poem, and in creating lyric poetry Poe excelled. Taking Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Thomas Moore as his obvious literary models (though he was also inspired by others both in the Romantic movement proper and on the periphery of that movement), Poe wrote verse featuring intense passions, sometimes concerning fame, more often concerned with blighted love, which affected the speaker-protagonists, who desired successes in both areas. Gothic fiction also had a great impact on his imaginative writings.

Poe was also influenced by Romantic landscape poetry and travel books, which were popular among contemporary readers. He repeatedly created natural and architectural backdrops that were diffuse and misty, perfect surroundings for characters’ emotional uncertainties and fears. In the wake of contemporary discoveries of the ruins of ancient civilizations and the fascination exerted by such artifacts, tangible evidence of once flourishing but long decayed cultures provided fitting literary symbols for his characters’ disintegrating minds. Biblical and classical themes are evident in such early Poe poems as “The Lake,” “The Coliseum,” “The Sleeper,” “To Helen” (published in 1831, the first of two poems with this title), “The City in the Sea,” and “Dream-Land.” Poe reworked such materials, usually with greater psychological sophistication, in later poems like “The Raven,” “Ulalume: A Ballad,” “Eldorado,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee.” All of Poe’s poems might aptly be called “visionary,” because the setting or the protagonist’s emotions and consequent outlook are expressed in a rhetoric using primarily visual symbolism or vivid imagery. Such vi sionariness often contributes to dream or (in most of Poe’s creative works) nightmare effects.

Poe’s theoretical pronouncements on poetry make this visionary intent explicit. For him, poetry was “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” a definition that balances theme and form. He also thought that poetry should elevate or excite the soul, which, in his estimation, much American poetry did not do, tending instead toward the “heresy of the didactic” (that is, it was too preachy and moralizing). If poetry is beauty expressed as “music,” then the pronounced rhythms and rhymes in Poe’s poems exist to excite emotional responses in readers. In keeping with the time-honored concept of the poet as a wonderfully free (and, as a creature of nature, amoral) songbird, Poe’s poems are calculated to “sing” readers into the world of the poem at hand. In other words, poetry should enchant (the word means “to sing into”) a reader into the world or the magic interior of a poem by means of hypnotic outreach. Poe expected his poems and tales to appeal to readers’ ears as well as their eyes. To Poe the idea of music involved inherent brevity, and his championing of brief poems is wholly consistent with such thinking.

Jane Austen’s likening her literary practices to polishing a tiny bit of ivory for refinement might be related to Poe’s composing verse in small quantity. Within such limits Poe created some remarkable poems. For poetic art in which sound and sense coalesce, we may turn to the earliest poem included here, “The Lake—To—,” the concluding piece in Poe’s first book of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). The poem’s eerie setting deftly stimulates the protagonist’s feelings of isolation, lost love, and a death wish. The opening unfolds ordinary youthful tendencies: first desiring solitude, at the lake, then attaching emotional significance to the terrain, which becomes increasingly grim and terrifying.

The situation in Poe’s poem resembles Henry Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond; Thoreau’s imagination was stirred by the presence of water—the ultimate origin of all life—to celebrate uplifting excitement. Thoreau’s favorite images, the rising sun and moving water, are inverted in Poe’s landscape, which might be thought of as similar to what Thoreau himself (jocularly) called Walden Pond—a “walled-in” pond. Poe’s eerie lake casts a literal and figurative “pall” (the cloth covering a coffin and within this poem an obstacle to psychological ease) over the protagonist. Thus “The Lake—To—” stands as the most symbolic of Poe’s earliest poems. Confinement in the natural scene promotes fears in the speaker, who fixates on the lake and its “poisonous wave,” closed in with unyielding rock and overshadowing pines redolent of death. The “you” addressed remains vague. Is there a literal dead love, or is the one addressed “dead” to the protagonist solely from unalterable separation? Or does the “other” exist as part of the speaker’s own psyche, and is “you” some repressed but signal emotion that, locked in as it may be, can not be quelled but continues to torment?

We might take as a paradigm for considering Poe’s verse (and, for that matter, much of his fiction) the title of a poem by twentieth-century poet Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Poe’s creative works—and not only that about his own blackbird, “The Raven”—yield multiple, equally valid interpretations. “The Lake—To—” constitutes sophisticated literary art, particularly from one as young as Poe. Some other selections in the Tamerlane volume are not so artistic, and it may be worth noting that Poe, likely deeming it inferior poetry, never again included in volume form the Tamerlane poem “The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour.”

Many misunderstandings concerning Poe’s poems need correcting. Among them is the notion that “The Sleeper” (titled “Irene” when it originally appeared in the 1831 Poems) is grotesque, and that it may betray a necrophiliac strain in Poe himself. The poem has continued as a popular standard selection in anthologies, and it is neither insignificant nor revolting. Rather than betraying any personal emotions or proclivities of its author, “The Sleeper” treats a situation more commonplace in Poe’s era than in our own and is accompanied by the subtle unfolding of a bereaved lover’s psychology. The opening centers on a mourner’s extreme confusion. His being outdoors on a June midnight, his thoughts wandering from the moon down to a grave and water lilies, succeeded by his hallucinatory state becoming less troubled about the “sleeping” lady—this is psychological realism subtly rendered. As mourners typically with solemn dignity, and often by an indirect route, approach a corpse prepared for burial, so this survivor leads us to realize gradually that the lady’s sleep is one of death, and that from the bed, where she has been laid out for burial (ordinary practice in Poe’s time), she will be borne to her grave.

Funeral services in the deceased’s own home are today no longer customary, but well into the twentieth century home funerals were still common: Witness Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial” (1914), and William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930). Poe’s poem suggests the solemnity and stately ceremonies customary in funeral proceedings. The couplets (two-line rhyming units) that constitute the major verse form in the poem convey restraint and order; they are checks on impulses that might otherwise grow frenzied. The occasional triplets (three-line rhyming units) signal rises in the speaker’s emotions, albeit he never lets his imagination riot as it did when the poem began. Overall, the tone and rhythm are of restraint and slow motion, in a movement little by little toward the lady herself; only then do we discover that she is dead. Perhaps the bereaved lover requires such gradual approach to accommodate the finality of his beloved’s death, and so the indirection or obliqueness in his thinking is actually psychologically accurate.

If he had been “moon-mad,” or lunatic, when the poem began (and he could have been subject to nonrational forces that typically hold sway on Midsummer Eve, to which the June time frame may point), just so the lines about the lady’s lying near an open window incorporate folklore fears about the night air’s bad effects upon sleepers. Kept even more distanced, as if when it is faced directly it conveys starkness and bleakness that are too appalling, is the tomb itself, introduced appropriately in the final stanza as if to signify that it is the ultimate resting place for the “sleeper.” Although some are revolted by the line “Soft may the worms about her creep!” we should keep in mind that, consistent with the mourner’s previous ideas, once he contemplates the future, he adjures the worms to move about outside, not into, the lady’s body, so her rest will remain undisturbed. The exclamation punctuation in this line attests that although the bereaved lover may have strong feelings, the worms themselves should remain quiet, thereby imputing to “soft” its sound, not its tactile context.

Given that “The Sleeper” mirrors the shorter life expectancies of nearly two centuries ago, the poem not surprisingly won early acclaim, not for any melodramatic or novel substance but for poetic form and tone that may be likened to a dignified eulogy delivered at a funeral or even published in a newspaper account of visitation and funeral practices. Poe achieved far sturdier realism in this poem than has generally been admitted, and contrary to what some readers infer, he did not plan to cause revulsion in his public. “The Sleeper” may anticipate the aura of mourning in later poems like “The Raven” and “Ulalume,” or in the fiction we find in “Shadow—A Parable.” Many readers only reluctantly accept that Poe may not have imagined these pieces as cheap thrills and lurid horrifics.

In light of his aesthetic writings on poetry, it is reasonable that Poe should write some poems that in part address poetics, as he does in “Sonnet—To Science,” Israfel,” and ”To Helen” (1831). Many anthologists view ”Sonnet—To Science” as if it were Poe’s personal outcry against scientific rationalism. More likely is that Poe felt that a firmly realistic foundation is essential in genuine poetry. To bolster this premise, Poe depicts a speaker, a mere poetaster, who marshals as his inspirations tropes that were hackneyed well before Poe’s time, and that patently add decided irony to the speaker’s presumable inveigh ing against triteness. Poe’s ”poet” not only uses clichés but confines them within a sonnet. Though the sonnet has occasioned interesting. modifications in structure and allows for liberties in content, it may also rank among the more restrictive forms in English verse. In form and theme, therefore, Poe’s would-be-poet argues a sad case. More to the point is Poe’s emphasis on a realistic, plausible foundation for poetry, one that counters the speaker’s frail defense of outmoded substance.

The poem “Israfel” also argues for a poetry grounded in realism. The speaker-singer indicates that whereas the angel-poet Israfel’s dwelling in heavenly realms may help produce idealism in lyrical form, the earthly poet, living in the real world as he does, must cope with less pleasant realities. “Israfel” is, however, inescapably a “singing” poem and thus melds the beautiful with the useful, implicitly hinting at the magic or “enchantment” that often eludes earthbound poets. Like Tennyson, Poe produced poems that were artistic but that did not ignore the utilitarian.

“To Helen” (1831) likewise focuses on an ideal inspiration (her beauty is more ideal than physical in context; Helen of Troy was reputedly the most beautiful woman in the world) that calms a speaker shaken by war and sea travel. The name “Helen” derives from Greek roots meaning lightning, and the very invoking of her name dazzles the speaker with radiant beauty, so that Helen’s actual physique is obscured, but the ideal of her beauty is a restorative that brings about a settled state for the speaker. When in the final stanza the speaker has reached his home and Helen becomes Psyche (a legendary female with a lamp), the leitmotif is maintained. Nurturing Psyche’s “light” symbolically inspires the speaker, who then assumes the role of poet (a word that derives from the Greek for “creator”) within the poem as he “creates” images and rhythm. More to the point, this poet offers us an exquisite joining of theme (beauty as harmonizer) with form (exquisite lyric tone and movement). “To Helen” numbers among Poe’s few nonhorrific poems, although the speaker’s awe resembles that in many other, less pleasantly situated Poe characters.

Other poems—for example, “The Valley of Unrest,” “The City in the Sea,” and “The Coliseum”—depict weird dreamscapes that elicit wonder, as they evoke vanished glories and leave tantalizing mysteries for those who respond to their effects. The first poem pictorializes a takeover of a once populated and appealing locale by desolation as foreboding restlessness arises in all natural phenomena there. “The City in the Sea” partly derives from the biblical account of the destruction of the sinful cities Sodom and Gomorrah and partly from the legend of Atlantis, the fabled sunken city that periodically resurfaces and sinks again into the ocean. “The Coliseum” closes on a more positive note than the others because the stones that once teemed with the activities of sports and spectators retain an ability to captivate a contemporary beholder. Mood is everything in these poems, and Poe’s melodic sound effects suggest the meandering visionary experiences of the onlookers, who call up visions via song (enchantment) for readers. A similar principle informs “Dream-Land,” with its speaker who has gone imaginatively free-floating and who returns recalling lasting effects of the surreal world, “Out of SPACE—out of TIME.” where his emotions have transported him. While “Dream-Land” leaves the protagonist shaken by what he saw and heard, “Sonnet—Silence” is a tour de force of contrasting sound effects with a theme of the terrifying soundlessness of the “shadow” silence, evil double of the “corporate Silence” (a silence that results from geographic desolation). The fateful silence is that which desiccates the will.

Kindred silence descends upon the speaker and his antagonist at the end of “The Raven,” Poe’s most famous poem. Silence becomes even more terrifying here because the inexorably repeated “still” in the closing lines means absolute cessation of speaking, hearing, motion—physical representations of the will’s powerlessness. The setting resembles those in other works in its gradual constriction of the protagonist. The raven may not actually be terrifying, but he certainly paralyzes the narrator emotionally and physically. Folklore often has ravens in league with the devil; Poe’s raven may, however, be no more than a very ordinary creature seeking shelter and warmth on a cold winter night. That this bird has been taught to articulate the single word “nevermore” may be unusual but not necessarily supernatural. The bird’s speech is turned ghastly by the overwrought narrator, whose “Lenore” may in fact be as imaginary as the raven’s diabolic power.

Ambiguities abound in “The Raven.”³ That a bird admitted to the indoors on a cold December night would immediately seek the highest spot for his safety may be wholly plausible; that that perch is the head of a white marble bust of Pallas (Athena), goddess of wisdom and intellectuality, is also plausible. The protagonist may have been poring over books of magic spells as he nodded (and the incantatory sounds in the poem strengthen this possibility); somehow, his interaction with these books may have conjured the bird, consequently unleashing forces that bode ill for the conjurer. After all, the hour is midnight during the season of the death of the year, and the narrator does mention a “ghost” as emanating from his hearth, all of which might hint at supernaturalism. Learning that “ghost” was nineteenth-century slang for the shadow formed by dying embers, however, we may suspect that Poe’s narrator is not really beset by otherworldly torments, but that his mind is gradually disintegrating. Is Lenore an actual dead woman or a significant emotional part in the protagonist’s self that he has managed to “kill” or repress? She never appears as a physical being. She is “nameless,” and yet the narrator keeps invoking her; her name derives from the same root as “Helen,” and we have already seen that that name conveys brilliant light and great beauty. Could this “rare and radiant” Lenore be an ideal, without which the narrator goes mad? His “chamber” may symbolize the interior of a mind, and a closing mind at that. The protagonist doesn’t venture outside his opened door, and seeing “darkness” beyond may momentarily placate him, but creating such an entryway, along with opening the window, could in magical lore suffice to admit the bird and the nonrationality it represents. Once this power is implicitly invited inside, there’s no telling how it may operate. Using the means of Gothic themes (anxiety, fear, loss) and setting (a haunted chamber), “The Raven” gives us the interior of a human head/mind as its “world.”

A companion piece in suspense and terror, “Ulalume” moves us through foreboding outdoor scenery as the nameless speaker and his companion, Psyche, journey during what may be Halloween night. Psyche, the nurturer and illuminator (of the soul more so than the body), attempts to dissuade the speaker from proceeding, though he feels compelled to do so. Although they are outdoors, where they can easily observe planetary signs in the skies, there is an unmistakable sense of constriction and limitation connected with initially oblique hints about love (toward which planetary manifestations are unfavorable). The pair appropriately come to a decided stop when they arrive at Ulalume’s tomb, a destination the speaker hadn’t seemed to notice they were approaching. Confronted by the actual abode of death, as well as being melancholy over the loss of Ulalume, the speaker represents death-in-life as the poem ends. He rapidly becomes as emotionally “withering and sere” as the leaves. His stasis occurs because Psyche’s counsel went unheeded. Therefore we may detect in the speaker an inability to yield to any female presence in his makeup. The consequences of such egotism are disastrous. The name “Ulalume” has variously been construed as implying both light and wailing, and this speaker’s inability to reconcile with the female creative and intuitive element in the self has caused his “light” to dim and die. Consequently he is left to “wail,” and the nature of the spoken word, in a poem that constitutes a lament, serves in its monotony as an apt means of rendering the speaker’s muttered sorrow.

Poe’s dictum, that the “most poetic of all themes is the death of a beautiful woman,” is surely represented in many of his poems, but one may well ponder the exact meaning of the phrase. It does not mean that Poe himself was hostile toward women or that symbolic murders and burials in his writings reflected personal hostility. His thinking on this topic might have had strong origins in everyday life around him, when the average life span was short, and that for women often less than that for men. The phrase might also spring from a more jocular impulse (that is, he divined his own abilities in creating such situations). “Poetic” and “poet” might be read or heard as “Poe-tic” and “Poe-t,” and Poe indeed punned on his name on several occasions. Then, too, the phrase may indicate that his female characters, who symbolize a vital constituent in the self, are not dead and gone forever, but temporarily repressed. Rightly, therefore, most of them return to haunt those who were responsible, directly or indirectly, for their “deaths.” A reader may come away from the late poem “Annabel Lee” even more mystified because the survivor-speaker’s lilting tone and attitude verge toward happiness, although this lightness may be a foil for his hysterical reaction to Annabel’s death. The closing lines, too, may seem gruesome because of possible necrophilia (the speaker‘s, not Poe’s) latent in them. We are equally undecided when reading “Eldorado,” perhaps one of Poe’s happier poems, but one in which delight takes what may be a sobering turn in the final stanza (although the Shade’s words to the inquiring knight might also have a rallying intent). “The Bells,” too, leads us adroitly from pleasantness as life begins on to the funereal conclusion of life.

III

Poe’s tales continue to be the most admired part of his literary legacy, however much he wished to be a poet. One may legitimately ask what were his reasons for resorting to prose fiction as a mainstay, most notably to the short story or, as he preferred, the “tale”? The answer is simple: money. Poe received no profits from his early poems, so he turned to a form that was likely to sell better, the short story, and specifically to short fiction in the Gothic vein. Tales featuring a single character (or at least one who stood out from any others), beset by oppressive and mysterious forces, often amid fantastic settings, existed long before Poe found in this paradigm a suitable creative medium. Terror tales had become staples in periodicals, chiefly in a renowned literary magazine in the Anglo-American literary world during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the house organ for the well-established Scottish publishing firm of Blackwood: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, colloquially called Blackwood’s or Blackwood. It is evident from his writings that Poe’s knowledge of this periodical was extensive. His satiric tale “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and its sequel, “A Predicament,” lampoon not just recurrent themes, motifs, and stylistic techniques of stories from Blackwood‘s, but indeed ridicule Poe’s own hallmark methods and themes in fiction. Compelling satire and parody require expert comprehension of what one wishes to treat comically, and so we might examine Poe’s own fiction to discover what he understood of the production of intriguing Gothic tales.

Apparently, from the time he left West Point in 1831 for his grand-mother Poe’s home in Baltimore, until his name appeared in connection with a literary contest in that city late in 1833, he thoughtfully considered what should constitute effective tales of terror. He gave himself an independent study course in content and methodology in popular Gothic fiction as groundwork for his own. He submitted five tales to a prize contest sponsored by a Philadelphia newspaper, the Saturday Courier, near the end of 1831. Although none won the prize, they all circulated in the paper, perhaps without Poe’s consent or knowledge, during 1832. The first to appear, “Metzengerstein,” seems all too customarily horrific in its “German” setting and its feuding families, connected by supernatural occurrences, who suffer stupendous catastrophes. Horror is evident in young Frederick Metzengerstein’s lips, lacerated in fright during his sensational final journey mounted on a giant supernatural horse, an ominous, repulsive creature. This tale may devolve from the folk motif of the devil riding a giant black horse to claim his victims. Poe alters the traditional black coloring of the horse to fiery shades. The other Courier tales were spoofs on what were then best-selling fictions and their authors, and one was not even Gothic.

In 1833 the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, a weekly newspaper, sponsored a competition with cash prizes for the best poem and tale. Poe’s tale “MS. Found in a Bottle” and his poem “The Coliseum” were ranked the winners until the evaluators discovered that both were written by the same person. They decided that the poetry prize would go elsewhere, although Poe asked that they give the other writer the money for the poem but announce that both of his own works had originally been named first’s. Poe’s wish was ignored, the poetry prize going to “Song of the Winds,” by John Hill Hewitt, editor of the Visiter, leaving Poe outraged. The prize selections appeared on October 19, 1833, and Poe’s poem on October 26. Those publications, which were reprinted elsewhere in the United States, brought the young writer his first literary recognition.

Looming, too, was another experimental venture of Poe‘s, generally known as “Tales of the Folio Club,” a book of interlocking frame narratives. ⁴ In this scheme, never actualized, a group of writers, the Folio Club, meet monthly for literary reading and critiques. Preceding the readings are substantial suppers accompanied by plenty of alcohol. After each member reads his original “brief prose tale” (a hit at some best-selling author’s typical theme and form), critiques follow. Poe once wrote that these critical interchanges were meant to enliven comedy in the project: Voiced by pretentious would-be authors, each tale is delivered by a first-person narrator, a caricature of an actual popular author represented. Because the author-reader of the worst tale hosts the next meeting, and because one of the group has his works successively targeted, someone in the group eventually becomes enraged, flees to a publisher with the manuscripts, and hurries them into print as an expose, for revenge.

What doubtless enlivened the overall scheme was that the club members, from the effects of either eating or/and drinking too much, would have articulated corresponding bizarre situations and repetitious language patterns within their tales, imparting zesty humor to those fictions, such mirth given point by the critiques. Had “Tales of the Folio Club” been published, a far different conception of Poe might have emerged early in his career—with what future we may only conjecture. Publishers rejected his manuscript, however, on grounds that the content was far too sophisticated for average readers and sales would not warrant the financial risk. Poe eventually dismantled the collection, brought out individual stories in periodicals, and thereby paved the way for readers’ disagreements that continue to be dynamic even today.

From the few manuscript leaves that survive, some ideas about the “Folio Club” are plausible. A portion forming a prologue—to an eleven-story version—lists and tersely characterizes the club members. For example, if in its original Saturday Courier form “Metzengerstein,” read by Mr. Horrible Dictu, existed as a “straight” tale of Gothic or “German” sensationalism that, revised for the Folio Club, was improved but remained chiefly serious in import (or indeed if it were read as a Gothic extravaganza), and with its likely position as sixth among Folio Club tales, it might have drawn varied responses from overfed, drunken listeners. First, if it was serious but well done, it might have gained merely a nod from the majority as familiar if unexceptional “German” fiction. Of course, any art in the tale would have eluded inebriated, drowsy listeners. Even if it were intended as a parody of “Germanism,” many could no longer have discerned that possibility. The repetitive phrases and words, the overall incoherence of young Frederick Metzengerstein, the treacherous protagonist, the demonic horse, the suspense and melodrama that surround impending tragedy—all these features might dovetail with an intoxicated reader reading to an intoxicated audience. Nonetheless, in this early tale we find Poe mingling human and animal traits, a mingling that recurs in his fiction: Witness “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat,” “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” and “Hop-Frog.” In all, however, the surface grotesquerie thinly masks psychological underpinnings.

Several other tales—for example, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Visionary” (later entitled “The Assignation”), and “Bon-Bon”—contain innuendos of gluttony or drunkenness, although the first two do not have the comic surfaces found in the last. In light of the improbabilities or discrepancies in “MS. Found,” which invite wariness as to accuracy, we may ask of the bottle containing the manuscript: Was it a bottle actually tossed into the sea when the protagonist-writer of the manuscript had arrived at his most sensational and improbable adventure, remaining rational enough to pen meticulous diary jottings and attempt to dispatch them? Or was the bottle one on the Folio Club table or one to which the author of the tale had previously liberally resorted as he composed his story? Subtle wordplay alluding to imbibing and low-grade gin may assist us to realize some of Poe’s intent here.

“The Assignation,” too, may reveal alcoholic inspirations. From the torrent of words and kaleidoscopic visual effects in the opening paragraph, on through the narrator’s misapprehensions of the planned “assignation” to an early-morning visit to his mysterious friend’s dwelling, where they drink wine, the narrator grows bewildered by his host’s outré art collection (and, perhaps, the effects of the wine) and the host’s speech, which smacks of wordplay on alcohol (“the very spirit of cordiality”), until he realizes that the other has committed suicide by drinking poisoned wine; he soon learns that the Marchesa, the man’s paramour, has imbibed poison, too. If the entire story in one version was Folio Club material, then the high-pitched language and events may have enhanced a drunkard’s rendering of intense love, wholly misapprehended by him. “The Assignation” derives in large measure from Thomas Moore’s 1830 biography of Lord Byron, The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life, although the sensational deaths of the lovers are Poe’s own creation.

“Shadow—A Parable” and “Silence—A Fable” may strike us as deliberately planned for companion reading. The former depicts seven mourners assembled to watch the corpse of Zoilus, fortifying themselves with “red Chian wine.” The formal, repetitive language, the mourners’ solemnity, the aura of impending catastrophe, their terror when Shadow appears and speaks in accents uncannily familiar but indefinable—all these features suggest alcoholic perception and rhetoric. Add a narrator named “Oinos,” Greek for “one” but also for “wine,” and the verdict that it is a wine-bibber’s tale gains strength. This story may also epitomize the general drift of “Tales of the Folio Club”: A group steadily drinks on amid an aura of death and terror (typical themes in Folio Club tales), and the gathering culminates in a rout, one that may signify the insulted club member’s absconding with the manuscripts and publishing them. The oddly familiar language heard by those in “Shadow—A Parable” may in context be redolent of language in Folio Club tales and debates. So, too, with “Silence—A Fable,” probably the tale read by the “very little man in black” whose tale of volatile emotions amid desolate scenery mimes Poe’s own early poems. The original title was “Slope—A Fable,” in which the initial word, a transliteration into English of the Greek word for “Silence,” may too be an anagram for “is Poe,” cream of a bizarre jest. The language—with its many repetitions and sentences starting with conjunctions, the unpleasant backdrop suggestive of decay, alternating calm with storm, the abject narrator and the hapless man on the rock, plus a demon storyteller—could be a drunkard’s verbal expression and his equivalent of “seeing pink elephants.”

Yet another aspect resides in these tales: Both would have appealed to Poe’s contemporaries because the language recalls that in the King James Bible. In “Silence—A Fable” the language notably resembles excited, fulsome “preacher rhetoric” that would have touched sympathetic chords among the more evangelical among them and that might be compared with similar rhetorical strategies in popular nineteenth-century comic takeoffs on sermons—for example, “The Harp of a Thousand Strings” and “Where the Lion Roareth and the Wang doodle Mourneth,” both attributed to William Penn Brannan, and both more overtly good-humored than “Silence—A Fable.” The account of Satan’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness may also have influenced the demon’s profane catechizing of the narrator in the tale. “Shadow—A Parable” recalls Psalm 23, with its valley of the shadow (death), thus adumbrating “Eldorado,” wherein a shadow (perhaps the protagonist’s ambiguous “other”) tells the questing knight that he must descend into the valley of death before his ambitions are fulfilled.

Poe’s oft neglected “King Pest” was during his lifetime never mentioned as a Folio Club tale, but its blended horror and mirth suggest potential kinship with the project. A bizarre group attempts to evade a plague terrorizing their city by sequestering themselves in an undertaker’s parlors, raiding his liquors, and attempting to retain health amidst the squalor of the contagion. Although the group pretends to royal status, such pretense fails to cow the two sailors who stumble into their midst, possibly because the sailors, already intoxicated, recognize like symptoms in those they meet. Collectively, the revolting physical features and stilted, pompous verbalizings of King Pest and his retinue keep readers alert to ambiguities coupling horror (from plague as actual disease and from equally revolting settings) with humor (comic names, “plague” as merely nuisance, wordplay) until the sailors seize Queen Pest and the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest, then bolt, evidently anticipating sexual conquest. As in the Folio Club, in “King Pest” emotions explode into grotesque speeches and actions, and conclude in the high jinks of the abduction of the females, one with decided alcoholism, the other with a give-away literary name. Add the implicit exposure of farce in the “pest-iferous” traits of the characters and the links with literary elements, and we can surmise that this tale might have concluded Poe’s contemplated book, where public revelation of bombast and bogus “quality” would have ensued. The subtitle for “King Pest,” “A Tale Containing an Allegory,” may have indeed glossed potential for the Folio Club, whatever other readings may ob tai⁵

Here, then, we see Poe creating fiction that might be “popular” in several senses. That these early tales employ situation and language structures involving drunken narrators is no great wonder. Drunken narrators often framed stories that quickly plummeted the protagonist into events of dreadful import, only to close with disclosures that exposed the lurid events as originating in imbibing. Many such yarns came from authors usually designated as “frontier” or “Southwest” humorists. In his blendings of humor and horror emanating from alcohol or other intoxicant origins, Poe resembles many other American authors in his era and many in our own. For example, novels by the British writer Thomas Love Peacock often centered upon dinner-table scenes in which generous amounts of food and drink contributed to entertaining arguments concerning philosophical and literary topics. In Blackwood’s serialized “Noctes Ambrosianae,” characters loosely based on the editors and several prominent contributors offer gossip-column commentary ranging from politics and social issues to literary concerns; intermittently, the voices in the “Noctes” seemed to be inspired by alcohol.

Poe eventually tended to remove, or certainly to diminish the effects of, these and other specifics, the better to locate disturbing and frightening circumstances nearer their real source, the human mind. In tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” particularities of place or intoxication are not as central as irregularities or irrationalities in the characters’ emotional makeup. Similar psychological focus informs “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Purloined Letter,” “‘Thou Art the Man’,” “The Sphinx,” and “Hop-Frog.” In all, geography of the imagination—internal geography—rather than physical, external geography is emphasized. Several Poe narrators also tend to liken their bewilderment to that of opium users instead of claiming opium use as the cause of their own unsettled mind-set-for example, the protagonists in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia.”

Poe realized, first, that he could bend Gothic conventions toward a greater psychological plausibility; and, second, that the erratic perspectives of drunkards could be used in the pursuit of what we might deem more “sober,” subtle ends. He stated in the preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (see “For Further Reading”), written not long after he had abandoned the Folio Club venture, that the basis for his tales was psychological realism and not the “Germanism” with which critics had charged him: If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul,—that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results (vol. 1, p. 5). Those “legitimate sources” were, of course, for the most part located in disturbed human minds, with allowances made for physical torments that intensified emotional tortures in tales like “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Causes for the turmoil in the minds of Poe’s characters are easy to fathom. Poe’s cultural world was coming to grips with the human mind and the hidden self—it was an exciting topic for both clinical and lay observers, especially in the context of the developing cultural nationalism of a self-consciously American civilization.

To another American writer in Poe’s era, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose ideas won widespread acceptance, the human mind harbored much good. Emerson expounded on a notion of self-reliance that teamed the individuality suggested by “self” with ways to excite and to connect (the root meanings of “reliance”). This outlook was optimistic about the possibilities of exploring the human mind, an optimism that seemed to mirror advancing pioneering and settlement in the nation.

In Poe’s writings, conversely, the human mind was fascinating, but a source of more danger than pleasure. Poe’s self was certainly not a metaphor for pleasing light and flowing waters, symbolizing ongoing life, as in Emerson’s imaginative vision. Poe’s waters were usually troubled and dangerous (witness those in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Silence—A Fable,” “A Descent into the Maelström,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym); and his lighting typically creates obscuring or frightening effects. Poe’s lighting inverts the pleasing effects of lighting that may be found in other authors’ writings and is instead glaring or obscuring, even blinding—as, for example, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Hop-Frog,” and Pym, or in “The Lake—To—,”“The Raven,” “Ulalume,” “Dream-Land,” and “The City in the Sea.” Even in a more cheerful poem like “To Helen,” dazzling light obscures the onlooker’s visual abilities. Such tropes in Poe’s works form perfect metaphors for rapidly shifting sensations in unstable minds, or strange actions and speeches that often represent those emotional traumas. The convoluted prose that typifies Poe’s tales, and that some readers have found objectionable, may be a subtly realized expression of mental distortions and the attempts of Poe’s characters to express such feelings. Often Poe’s writings unfold intricate issues in gender, of masculinity and femininity, and the reiterated interiority in his creative works fittingly symbolizes the human mind and self.

“William Wilson” exemplifies such psychological foregrounding. The tale at first seems to be just one among many similar nineteenth-century literary works in which twins struggle to the death, whether that be actual organic death or emotional death-in-life. Poe manages to have both types of death come into play. Narrator William Wilson stabs the “other” William Wilson (his twin, double, conscience), only to learn that he has “murdered” the good part of what should be his integrated self, thereby furthering the triumph of the evil within. The repetition of the word “will,” the resemblances between the two Wilsons, the claustrophobic settings of the main episodes—all are foundations for successful psychological fiction. The other William Wilson’s voice is symbolically husky and muted because the narrator William Wilson doesn’t want to hear its actual sounds or its counsel.

That horrors in Poe’s works often occur without supernatural help makes them all the more significant, and more frightening. Most of the tales in which women are prominent revolve around this theme. The early “Berenice” and “Morella” struck some of Poe’s contemporaries as mere exercises in horror, but they overlooked artistic modifications of Gothic conventions that we see today as foreshadowing sophisticated psychological developments in literary creations throughout the world. The narrator in “Berenice,” Egaeus, has nearly the same name as the father in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Egeus, who fails to comprehend the truly irrational nature of love. That Poe’s character was born in a library—thus he’s unreal—may carry more psychological substance than what informs many other mere thrillers. On two counts—a literary name and an inability to cope with physical realities, except in odd, even sadistic responses—Egaeus likely causes debility in Berenice. By showing her scant love he thereby manages to drive her toward an early grave; his fixation on her teeth squelches any mutuality in their relationship. The story is open-ended: Possibly Egaeus pulled the teeth of a corpse, an activity already gruesome enough, or maybe Berenice was not actually dead, but only in a cataleptic state approximating death, so his violation of her grave might involve even worse emotional warpings in his character. Inability to love makes him static, with only an occasional pendulum swing toward sadism.

The narrator-husband in “Morella” appears to be more passive than his wife (the title character), although such passivity may mask emotional savagery, which ultimately kills. Like Egaeus, this man manifests no healthy passion or love. Morella’s spirit returns, however, and takes over the body of their daughter, also named Morella, but named only at the moment when she is baptized—an event that represents irrepressibility of will. Perhaps the narrator’s refrain-like or near-rhyming repetition of “Morella” forms an incantation or spell that conjures the elder Morella’s spirit.

A variation on this theme of the will’s supremacy makes “Ligeia” one of Poe’s most compelling tales. If, as has been hypothesized, Poe originally intended to satirize German and British Romanticism—respectively symbolized in the dark, super-intellectual, German Ligeia, and the dumb blonde English maiden, Rowena (perhaps a hit at Scott’s Ivanhoe)—an equally valid seriousness informs the tale.⁶ The nameless narrator, like other Poe characters in intimate relationships who suffer because of an inability to love, brings about the death of his first wife, Ligeia, a symbol of colossal strength in human will. In contrast, his second wife, Rowena, symbolizes real, flesh-and-blood femininity. However, her family’s real desire is not Rowena’s happiness but the narrator’s financial generosity. Indifferent to Rowena’s future, her family does not see that life with her husband is horrifying. Their bridal chamber resembles a coffin, and his reactions to her are sadistic, possibly because they arise from repugnance toward the physical in love. In true horror-story fashion, he apparently poisons Rowena while fortifying his resolve with opium, then fantasizes that Ligeia takes over Rowena’s body. Given the hallucinatory texture of the tale, what the narrator would have us accept as truth in no way resembles factuality. As in Poe’s other fiction about dying and returning women, disaster emanates from a male whose attitudes and conduct toward females—in what is presumably the most intense human relationship, marriage—devastates all involved. If these women symbolize nurturing and intuitive elements in the human self, then the husband’s “killing” them is equivalent to psychological repression, and in Poe’s imaginative universe, nobody can repress a strong emotion without experiencing a tremendous, negative rebound.

Two other tales revolve around the deaths of beautiful women with more positive implications. In “The Assignation,” Poe’s first prose tale to feature the theme, the lovely Marchesa does not return to haunt her lover—who is not her husband, but instead a far younger, more virile, artistic, altogether creative man. Rather, they agree to double suicide. Although the horrifics in these deaths are undeniable, the horror is mitigated by the lovers’ hope to unite on the far side of the grave, where worldly society’s rules of conduct do not apply. Bliss after death may also signify a more spiritual love than society would tolerate. A reversal of these events occurs in Poe’s last published tale about women. “Eleonora” incorporates moments of sadness, when the narrator’s wife, the lovely, delicate Eleonora, dies. The narrator and Eleonora were blissful in the Edenic Valley of Many-Colored Grass; but paradise is temporal, and so, after their sexual experience, she dies because Edenic innocence has passed. The narrator’s memories of what followed became clouded for some time, an understandable rendering of his grief, comparable with that of the bereaved lover in “The Sleeper.” Ultimately he comes out of his dream state, which has not been wholly pleasant, finds himself (a telling phrase as regards his psychological state, and one recurrent in Poe’s fiction) in a city, a direct counter to the idyllic rural environs he had shared with Eleonora when they were youthful innocents, ignorant of many aspects of life. In his new surroundings, which suggest greater reality than the valley had offered, he is tempered by sadness. He meets Ermengarde; their marriage will be one of mutuality and more maturity than his union with Eleonora. Eleonora’s spirit blesses the new marriage and perhaps reincarnates in Ermengarde, although such revivification remains ambiguous. Eleonora’s name has the same root as “Helen” and “Lenore,” and so her effect upon the narrator is dazzling. But dazzle ment does not suffice to make an entire life, and so he progresses into greater maturity.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” commands special status among tales of a beautiful woman whose death brings woe to the survivor-male. For many readers, “Usher” epitomizes all that Poe did best in Gothic horror. The precise nature of the tale’s success, however, has been debated. While terrors in the tale derive from legitimate sources, those in the soul, the tale may in another reading stand as a fine parody of literary Gothicism. Just as in “The Assignation,” Poe goes beyond the trappings of popular horror fiction in “Usher.” As in the earlier tale, too, the narrator in this tale interprets the Usher twins’ relationship through a distorted lens, “seeing” it through imperfect vision. Consequently, discrepancies between appearance and reality abound; they enrich the psychological undercurrents of meaning that are seminal in this and other Poe tales. The “Usher” narrator’s sojourn in the “house” of Usher may symbolize a journey into depths of his own self, where he confronts psycho-sexual-artistic elements that horrify him by the far greater negative than positive possibilities they raise. As in some of the poems and in Pym, this tale notably renders a symbolic entering into the human head to find masculinity and femininity in dreadful imbalance—a Poe trademark, as we have seen, of terror “of the soul.”

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” often distinguished as a separate species of fiction from Poe’s horror tales, is often held up as the invention of the detective story. It may indeed be his invention—it is at least far more his invention than the Gothic horror story, which he merely adapted to his own purposes. “Rue Morgue,” indeed, is not swathed in the same extravagant prose as some of the earlier tales, but its expression does not disguise its Gothic heritage. Baffling, atrocious murders without a clear-cut motive, committed in a seemingly locked room; confusion over the killer’s language; signs pointing to some supernatural agency at work—all are eventually clarified by the awe-some mind of the amateur sleuth Dupin. His disdain of professional police methods, the wordplay in his name (“Dupin” sounds like “dupe-ing”) and in the name of the prime police suspect, Le Bon (“the good”), the name of the locale (no “Rue Morgue,” or “Mortuary Street,” ever existed in Paris); an ape imitating human behavior—all attest to Poe’s having his own type of joke in this tale. So does the entire “false start” method employed—leading readers to expect supernaturalism at work, but then disclosing realistic, if unusual, conditions related to the deaths.⁷ Just so, in “The Purloined Letter” we find that Dupin and the Minister D may be twins, a relationship that makes it possible for Dupin to outwit the criminal and surpass the police. Furthermore, and perhaps humorously, Dupin comments on the value of balancing within the self mathematical and poetical elements—that is, reason and imagination. Because D considers his own, strictly mathematical, mind to be far more astute than that of a poet, and because Dupin is a poet (as is Poe), the poet (or intuitive part of the self, perhaps) is accorded superiority. Poe seemingly could not resist parodying what he himself did well, and so in “ ‘Thou Art the Man”’ he spoofs the tale of detection, again using as part of the plot what is seen by some as supernaturalism at work, although clearer wits disbelieve (using ballistics to identify a criminal is a first of its kind in a detective story). Similar confusion of supernaturalism and madness informs “The Gold-Bug.” And Poe’s subtle balancing of natural and supernatural—chiefly by use of demon tropes in “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—may plausibly, as in many of his other tales, allow shallower readers to be fooled into reading these as simple stories of the otherworldly. ⁸

IV

Much in the foregoing pages also applies with equal validity to Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which continues to defy readers’ efforts at interpretation. When Poe enlisted acclaimed American author James Kirke Paulding in a failed effort to get “Tales of the Folio Club” published by the prominent firm of Harpers’, Paulding praised the project but noted that it was too rarified for average readers. He counseled Poe instead to use his talents for a novel featuring realistic, if intermittently comic, treatment of aspects of American life that might benefit from humorous lights being thrown upon them. Although Poe heeded Paulding’s advice by using the timely theme of polar exploration (here to the Antarctic) in Pym and by using comedy, the subtleties and coded nature of that comedy have confounded many readers. The extended title of the book and its preface alert us that truth-versus-fiction or appearance-versus-reality themes are significant. The vessels in which Pym sails, many characters’ names, including Pym’s own (which may be an anagram for “imp”), the disquisition on penguins, plus many inconsistencies, betray comic underpinnings. Far more easily apprehended, though, are the horrifics: Details of revolting illness, the physical consequences of mutiny aboard ship, shipwrecks, savage barbarism, and live burial course through the novel. Indeed, if “horror” is distinguished from “terror” because the former involves sensory experience (contact with repulsive smells or loathsome tangible objects, bodily pain) and the latter defines anguish, fear, hysteria, attraction-repulsion (emotional upheavals only), then Pym is replete with both. Perhaps Poe’s ironic tendency underlies many passages of disgusting details as deliberate bait that would separate careful from superficial readers. Not long before, writing as a critic, he had censured what he termed the “mere physique of the horrible” in William Gilmore Simms’s novel The Partisan: A Tale of the Revolution (1835), which, however, contains far less physical discomfort, excruciating pain, torture, and death than we find in Pym.

If Poe shifted his imaginative direction during the composition of Pym, it’s no wonder that its heterogeneous features confuse but entice readers. To some extent Poe builds on the mode of the boy’s adventure story enjoyed by many nineteenth-century readers. The adventures of young Pym and his great friend, Augustus Barnard, anticipate those of Tom and Huck in Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. The adventures of Poe’s youths fall very much into the category of the naughty but not malicious or destructive boy in such fiction. Intoxication, the boys’ frolicking in a boat, the Ariel (perhaps an allusion to the boat that upset and caused the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s early death), the preposterousness in Pym’s first accident and his rapid recovery may reasonably suggest that Pym shares affinities with the Folio Club tales, as do the motifs of food and drink, along with incredible plunderings from and mimickings of travel books and repeated situational and stylistic extravagances that characterize this novel. One might surmise that much in Pym came out of a bottle from the same shelf as “MS. Found in a Bottle.”

Regarding another topic, should we, for instance, impute racism to the seemingly evident imputations of a widening divergence between North and South in the 1830s? Does the Tsalal natives’ conduct represent fears of African-American slave uprisings against white oppressors in the South? Since more than enough evidence has been marshaled to indicate that Poe was not the paranoid racist some critics have discerned—many who call him racist use as sure “proof” material not written by or unshakably endorsed by him—we cannot brand him with that label.⁹ Moreover, is the racism of the story Poe’s own, or is he playing upon widespread attitudes of others, to produce a book that would sell? He certainly kept his finger on the pulse of popular attitudes.

Pym is a novel about a protagonist’s spiritual-sexual growth; not only is the chief theme in Pym not racist, but Poe may have been actually ahead of his time, in positing that Pym had developed into a post-adolescent stage in which he was prepared, if warily, to merge with the female presence represented by the giant, white-shrouded human figure.¹⁰ Pym draws the other voyagers with him, although moving in this way toward an inescapable unknown may have troubled him and his Tsalalian hostage, if not Dirk Peters (whose names merge sexuality and spirituality). Poe may indeed have had racial fantasies, but in Pym such fantasies seem to exist in the context of melding rather than in separation. Within this scheme, Nu-Nu, a member of a decidedly anti-feminine culture—emphasized in the destruction of the Jane Guy, a ship contextualized with notable femininity—is not equal to a merger with the feminine toward which Pym and Peters are drawn; Nu-Nu’s death may symbolize his position. If Pym is a work in which we see probings of irrationality in the human self (and “self,” singly or in compound words, resonates throughout the novel much like a refrain in a poem or piece of music), then the final scene, where masculine and feminine are inevitably going to merge, may symbolize an awe-inspiring plunge into depths hitherto only glimpsed. If Pym is continuing to mature, then that continuation plausibly incorporates mystery as a concomitant to true identity.

Such a reading, of course, offers but one approach to Poe’s novel. Others suggest that Pym may be incomplete because Poe had no idea where to go with his creation, or that incompletion may signal his consciously essaying the Romantic fragment that became a respectable form in the early nineteenth century, as exemplified in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” several Wordsworth poems, Keats’s “Hyperion,” Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life,” and Byron’s Don Juan. This structure of incompletion or tentativeness paves the way for what has subsequently become known as Modernism in literature. Not too long after it was published and reviewers remarked its heterogeneity, Poe called Pym a “silly book,” but when he sought to plume himself as an author, he always cited it as one of his accomplishments. If, according to Webster‘s, “silly” may mean “contrary to reason,” Poe, being Poe, may have knowingly chosen this designation to confute his detractors.

V

What can one say in conclusion regarding Poe’s ongoing appeal? First, his creative works have survived considerable deprecation to emerge as deservedly ranking with those of other authors whose achievements are often considered far more artistic than his own. Part of the low esteem for Poe’s poems and fiction has come about because readers today are often unwilling to approach literature with their ears as well as their eyes. Thus Poe’s intent to enlist hearing as well as seeing from his audiences may have been blunted by shifts in readers’ responses. Second, since connections of his creative work with literary Gothicism have been apparent since he began to publish, and since Gothic tradition overall had to wait until the later twentieth century before it gained recognition, Poe’s work was likewise bypassed by many until comparatively recently.

A consensus has emerged, however, that Poe’s horror writings merit considered attention. Poe realized that stock character types and their worlds, long familiar in antecedent Gothicism, could be manipulated into representations of the human mind (symbolized in weird castles, mansions, dark pits, or cellars) under stress (represented by the overwrought characters themselves, who repeatedly seem to be living creatures moving with and through dizzying experiences inside and “haunting” those minds just described). He discerned that he could create a sustained “effect” or impression of such upheavals in short poems and, for the most part, in brief fictions, Pym being a notable exception. Poe’s horrors thus continue to fascinate readers because they indeed touch on timeless, existential anxieties common to people everywhere. His works therefore are seldom set in a specific historical time. Poe’s renown for literary succinctness of course validates his intent; he wrote best with brevity. That “best” emanated, however, from his awareness that intensity cannot be long sustained in much related to human nature, and that human emotions are kaleidoscopic. Therefore he repeatedly used lyric poetry and short stories as his most comfortable media for unfolding the interior of the human mind, whether employing weird landscapes (“Ulalume”) or drawing on the haunted-castle theme from earlier Gothics to enhance the emotional turmoil in his characters. To press this point home, Poe often shaped his material to suggest the reader’s entry into the human head, which frames the mind. Thus the dark windings of interiors, with movements spiraling up or down, create rich textures and dizzying effects, encompassing issues of gender, sexuality, marriage—all of which concern human identity. Whatever form he uses, Poe aims for a vivid, intense impression, and such intensity cannot be lengthened into extended form without diminishing the effect. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is also a short novel, for its time, albeit the prose expression within that book displays an unmistakable repetitiveness, perhaps to reinforce the pervasive aura of a hypnotic dream-world into which Pym journeys.

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.