[In the following essay, Lerner examines psychoanalytical criticism of Poe's poetry, suggesting that the scope of such criticism should be broadened to cover not just the tragic elements of the poet's life but also to include his personal philosophy of poetry.]

ATTEMPTS TO STUDY POE PSYCHOANALYTICALLY

Edgar Allan Poe's life (1809-1849) was so psychologically complicated that psychoanalytically oriented writers can easily find in it gold mines of information for their theories. Poe's writing includes, among other topics, such themes as love, horror, anxiety, fantasy, and strange conditions of the mind. His material, therefore, is also a “natural” for psychological theories that are concerned with personality aberrations.¹ His life is extremely enticing in this direction and has led critic Vincent Buranelli to make the following comment:

Edgar Allan Poe is the most complex personality in the entire gallery of American authors. No one else fuses, as he does, such discordant psychological attributes, or offers to the world an appearance so various. No one else stands at the center of a mystery so profound. Hawthorne, Melville and Faulkner are, by comparison with Poe, easy enough to classify, while Edwards, Cooper and Hemingway emerge with crystal clarity. Poe resists easy interpretation and broad generalization. Any plausible analysis of his work, like any authentic story of his life, must begin with this primary and essential truth.²

Even the simplest of personalities contain complexity that is often misunderstood. And Poe's was no simple personality. With excellent understanding of the personality makeup of an artist like Poe, Buranelli also reminds us:

It is false to call him little more than an artist of nightmares, hallucinations, insane crimes and weird beauties, little more than an intuitive poetic genius dabbling in pretentious logic when he is not lost in the black forest of pathological psychology. Nor is he a frigid allegorist living in an ivory tower safely away from the contamination of the world. Poe is a dreamer (in the widest sense of the term), and that is where an analytical study may properly begin; but it must not end until it has accounted for Poe the rationalist, the scientist, the hoaxer, the humorist, and the literary and social critic.

(p. 19)

The fact that Poe's poetic genius was tied to a distorted personal life was bound to affect his feeling and thinking. These ideas and emotions in turn were naturally reflected in his work. But Philip Lindsay exhibits the real dangers of psychoanalytically oriented criticism when he shifts the focus from the work of art to the case history in a passage like the following:

Son of shiftless parents and at an early age fatherless and motherless, Edgar Poe was born to live in nightmare. His life, almost from birth, might well have been his own creation, following a pattern similar to one of his tales, macabre and frenzied and ending on a note of pointless tragedy. The story, “William Wilson,” was largely autobiographical, not only in external details, but in its emotional content. Here, Poe opened his heart and confessed that his own pitiless destroyer was himself. Most men, were they honest, might make a similar confession. Yet with Poe this was not entirely true. He might have destroyed himself but the seeds of that destruction were germinated in childhood. Always haunting him was the thought of death in love, of the death of his mother, then of the death of a woman he loved, then of the death of his foster-mother, and finally of his wife. These four he loved died as though his kiss were lethal. In the grave, surrendered to the conqueror worm, their once quick flesh rotted, and his desires turned naturally from life towards death. Death, the enemy, became the loved one, and he relished more the thought of dissolution than the living body he clasped, feeling always the skull beneath the hair he touched, the small bones moving in the hand he clasped, and the teeth felt under a kiss.³

Poe's strange life has been considered in several ways. One of the attempts as early as 1920 to study Poe as an aberrant personality was that made by Lorine Pruette.⁴ In addition to relating, along psychoanalytic lines, some of Poe's poetry to some of the early determinants of Poe's life, Pruette is also concerned with the “individual psychology” of Alfred Adler. “The organic inferiority of both lungs and mind, if we follow the theories of Adler, demanded compensation, which the youth found in drawing and in writing stories and poems” (Pruette, p. 375).⁵ Poe's “will to power,” Pruette believes, “would brook no superior, nor even equal, in either physical or mental pursuits, and it was this intolerance of the claims of mediocrity which brought upon him in later life the enmity of much of the literary world” (p. 375). Pruette also points out that Poe was of the belief “that his absolutely unswerving devotion to truth was responsible for his scathing criticisms” (p. 375). But Poe's own “devotion to truth” was still tied to a personality that was in a constant state of anxiety and unrest.⁶ And in her monumental psychoanalytical study of Poe, Marie Bonaparte⁷ emphasizes that Poe's achievement could primarily be understood in terms of the pathological trends in Poe's life. Freud made a special point of this when in the Foreword to Bonaparte's work, he wrote: “Thanks to her interpretative effort, we now realize how many of the characteristics of Poe's works were conditioned by his personality, and can see how that personality derived from intense emotional fixations and painful infantile experiences.”⁸

PSYCHOANALYTICALLY ORIENTED CRITICISM OF SELECTED POE POETRY

To enlarge our scope of understanding of the psychoanalytically oriented criticism of selected Poe poetry, an important point must be kept in mind. Poe's poetic endeavors were based on a definite belief that he had of poetry. He states his rationale as follows:

A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.⁹

So strongly was the above view a guiding belief in all of Poe's work that Norman Foerster remarked: “This was Poe's artistic creed, exemplified in nearly all that he wrote: in his poetry, his tales, his essays on literary theory, and his criticism of literature—on nearly every page of his sixteen volumes.”¹⁰

Poe's definition of poetry has been viewed by Pruette in a broader psychoanalytic sense as follows:

The poems of Poe are songs of sorrow: beauty is in them, most often dead beauty, love is there, most often the love of those who are dead to him, and madness is there, as if the expression of the prophetic powers of his unconscious. Often enough, in moments of extreme depression, under the influence of drugs or in the temporary insanity induced by the use of stimulants, must he himself have felt those “evil things, in robes of sorrow,” which “assailed the monarch's high estate.”

(“A Psycho-Analytical Study of Edgar Allan Poe,” p. 384)

Beauty and pleasure often appear together in dreams.¹¹

Frequently these are intertwined with a desire for love fulfillment, and in real life give an impression of happiness, which is often referred to as a dream. That Poe has captured this feeling is indicated in the last eight lines of his poem entitled “Dreams”:¹²

I have been happy, tho' but in a dream.
I have been happy—and I love the theme:
Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality which brings
To the delirious eye, more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love—and all our own!
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.(13)

These lines were published when Poe was still a relatively young man. It appears that he felt deeply apart from humanity at this time. Joseph Wood Krutch has stated:

It was natural that a young man who felt, as Poe did, desperately isolated from the rest of mankind should find his model in the most popular poet of melodramatic isolation and so, though traces of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge have been found in him, the dominant influence is obviously Byronic.¹⁴

Based on another poem, entitled “A Dream.” the critics give us further insights into Poe's past hopes and his present situation as well as a contrast between the world of reality and the world of fancy, all closely related to dreams, fantasies, day-dreams, and wish-fulfillments.¹⁵

“A DREAM”

In visions of the dark night
          I have dreamed of joy departed—
But a waking dream of life and light
          Hath left me broken-hearted.
Ah! what is not a dream by day
          To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
          Turned back upon the past?
That holy dream—that holy dream,
          While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
          A lonely spirit guiding.
What though that light, thro' storm and night,
          So trembled from afar—
What could there be more purely bright
          In Truth's day-star?

(Stovall, p. 21)

In commenting on the above poem, Pruette points out that in “A Dream” one can see Poe in the midst of the experience of “the contrast between what he has and what he has wanted, between the real and the ideal world of fancy” (p. 382). Also, the poem uses such images as “the dark night,” “the past,” “holy dream,” “lonely spirit,” and concludes with a resounding statement. The last stanza, while taking into account the reality of the dark side of life, ends in the form of a question expressing a wish. The word “Truth's” in the last line points up something special here. Truth and science are closely related. Both have a way of shaking men out of their dreams. Both have a way of making dreams a reality if the dreams are based on verifiable assumptions.¹⁶ Hence, it is an easy step to go from this “A Dream” to Poe's “Sonnet—To Science.” Writing as though he were thoroughly acquainted with psychoanalytical theory, Poe's “Sonnet—To Science” offers some keen insights into reality and dreams.

“SONNET—TO SCIENCE”

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
          Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
          Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
          Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
          Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
          And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
          Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
          The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

(Stovall, p. 24)

In asking many questions of science, Poe is actually revealing its power, especially in the use of the word “vulture” in the fourth line of the above poem. Poe is reminding science that she has forced the seer, the poet, to come back to reality, and that the Elysian fields of childhood are only dreams. Here we have Freud's concepts of the reality and pleasure principles further emphasized.¹⁷ Dreams may be forms of wish fulfillments, but science with its emphasis on reality and truth forces one to look at himself, into himself, and at the world around him with great honesty. He is saying all this while voicing the objection of the romanticist “that the scientific attitude reduces everything to the most prosaic reality.”¹⁸

Bonaparte argues that Poe looks upon science as a hated father. She also makes it a point to stress the idea that “true daughter of Old Time” in the first line is

the appanage of Time, thus being identified, in accordance with the process of the unconscious—which in this case troubles itself little about sex—with Time and so the “father.” This was another reason why Poe hated science and would hate it, as bitterly, all his life.

(The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, p. 56)

In light of Bonaparte's comments, one might be tempted to forget that beauty and truth were of vital concern to Poe. He writes about this while discussing “The Raven,” and touches upon beauty and truth in poetry:

When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect—they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—not of intellect, or of heart—upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating the “beautiful.” Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes—that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment—no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to is most readily attained in the poem. Now the object Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable to a certain extent in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me), which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation of the soul.¹⁹

Poe goes on to emphasize, in the same text, that passion and truth may be profitably introduced into poetry. For these two phenomena, passion and truth, may be employed when properly used as means of making the poem itself a more effective work of art and beauty.

Beauty, truth, and science also demand a disciplined appreciation. The reality of life, the remembrance of the beautiful, the realization that nature is oblivious to our desires require a high level degree of understanding. In the poem “A Dream Within a Dream” the last stanza reads as follows:

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

(Stovall, p. 18)

The idea that truth, reality, and a moment of beauty are all ephemeral forms is put in the form of a question about a dream within a dream.²⁰ And according to Pruette, “In ‘A Dream Within a Dream’ we find rebellion against the disappointments of life” (“A Psycho-Analytical Study of Edgar Allan Poe,” p. 382). Always then we are confronted in Poe's poetry with questions of truth, beauty, pleasure, reality, and dream, the very essentials of one's involvement with living and the core of modern depth psychology.

Modern depth psychologists believe that part of a creative person's contribution in his work is often a child-like quality of appreciation and awe; one can easily find these qualities in the poems of Poe, particularly in those that are intended to evoke a sadness or a yearning for the past or faraway places. The opening stanza of Part I of the poem “Al Aaraaf” certainly exemplifies this:

O! nothing earthly save the ray
(Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty's eye,
As in those gardens where the day
Springs from the gems of Circassy—
O! nothing earthly save the thrill
Of melody in woodland rill—
Or (music of the passion-hearted)
Joy's voice so peacefully departed
That like the murmur in the shell,
Its echo dwelleth and will dwell—
Oh, nothing of the dross of ours—
Yet all the beauty—all the flowers
That list our Love, and deck our bowers—
Adorn yon world afar, afar—
The wandering star.

(Stovall, p. 25)

This poem alternates between poetic passages of great beauty and obscure and rough lines. Bonaparte believes that “Al Aaraaf” was based on Poe's “ancient passion for astronomy”: “This passion for astronomy seizes many a child and adolescent when education demands the repression of instinctual urges, for the sky is the bourne of those who seek escape from earthly realities; realities to which, in certain ways, Poe was never to return” (p. 41).

Astronomy is a branch of science that provides youngsters, particularly, with many imaginative possibilities for flights of fancy. What better place to resolve one's conflicts than in a great beyond of infinite hopes and dreams? If one is to carry this idea to a finer point in Freudian theory, Marie Bonaparte's statement is most significant: “The passion for astronomy in the young and in adolescents indicates an attempt, under educative pressure, to escape from the tormenting violence of ‘guilt’ laden sex, and bathe in the calmness of infinite space” (p. 594).²¹ And like an astronomer Poe was careful with his work and precise in his poems. For Poe's claims to poetic genius rest primarily on a small volume of verse; he was constantly working over and refining his poetry.²²

As in the work of the astronomer who deals with precision, order, and speculation, there was another dimension to Poe's work, as previously suggested. He was concerned with beauty: “He sought, not the varied pleasures of the world, but the interpretation of Beauty alone, the highest form of which he felt to be linked always with melancholy” (Pruette, p. 381).

One of the themes of Poe's poems is a desire to escape from the inequities and imperfections of this mortal world into a land of surcease, hope, joy, and complete childhood imagination. He speaks to the singing angel, Israfel, in the poem by the same name, as follows:

Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
          Is a world of sweets and sours;
          Our flowers are merely—flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
          Is the sunshine of ours.
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
          Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
          A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
          From my lyre within the sky.(23)

(Stovall, p. 49)

The escape into Elysian fields and the entire process of day-dreaming is, according to psychoanalytic theory, closely linked with a desire for a return to an omnipotent state of life where the pleasure principle fully operates and where the individual is in a constant state of wish-fulfillment.²⁴ “The poet would change places with the angel if only he could, for he feels hampered only by his human condition, not by his genius.”²⁵

It should be remembered that psychoanalytically oriented criticism lays major emphasis on unconscious determinants to explain underlying factors about human behavior and activities. Dreams often hide from the individual much of the meaning of his motives and wishes. Marie Bonaparte explained this in terms of the creative artist as follows:

Of all the devices employed by the dreamwork, that of the displacement of psychic intensities—apart from one exception—is the most freely used in the elaboration of works of art, doubtless because such displacement is generally dictated by the moral censor, which is more active in our waking thoughts than in sleep. The conceiving and writing of literary works are conscious activities, and the less the author guesses of the hidden themes in his works, the likelier are they to be truly creative.²⁶

Poe's endeavors to escape from the feeling of being doomed did not prevent him from writing excellent prose and beautiful verse. His poetry abounds with images of beauty and probably forms part of his own wish ideal as regards the beautiful. But the beautiful is often surrounded with the desolate, death, loneliness, and other realistic aspects of life. And with it all Poe was an excellent craftsman.²⁷

The first stanza of “The City in the Sea” is a fine example of Poe's perceptive powers combined with technical skill to bring out some poignant lines about death.

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.(28)

(Stovall, p. 50)

Pruette is of the opinion that “City in the Sea” is “a picture of beauty desolated, of death reigning in the courts of life and love” (“A Psycho-Analytical Study of Edgar Allan Poe,” p. 383). One thing seems certain about Poe's treatment of death in his poetry. His employment of the imagery of death along with that of sleep and dreamlike states has led Roy Harvey Pearce to remark: “Poe is quite obviously the poet of dream-work.”²⁹ Incidentally, death and death-wishes frequently appear in dreams.

In “The Sleeper” a lady is asleep, presumably dead, as we read the following lines:

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

(Stovall, p. 53)

In referring to “The Sleeper” Pruette is of the opinion that Poe “is occupied with his dominant theme, the linking of sex and death” (p. 385). The theme of love and death comes out again and again in such poems as “To One in Paradise,” the “Sonnet to Zante,” “Leonore,” “Ulalume,” “Annabel Lee,” and the universal favorite, “The Raven.” There are many psychoanalytic, especially Freudian, overtones in all of these poems as indeed there are in most of Poe's works.

Probably no psychoanalytically oriented critic could offer a more telling explanation of death and beauty than does Poe himself. In his exposition of the composition and conception of “The Raven,” Poe writes:

I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven, the bird of ill-omen, monotonously repeating the one word “Nevermore” at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object—supremeness or perfection at all points, I asked myself—“Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death, was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”³⁰

Naturally, such an explanation is bound to arouse all kinds of Freudian psychoanalytic speculations. One of the experiences that would naturally be sought out in this regard would be Poe's early years. Poe's early life with women and even his later relations with women were filled with a good deal of tragedy and unhappiness of all kinds. Beauty to Poe was evidently tied to something in his psyche, which was to be lost, was not to be enjoyed, and above all was to bring a good deal of suffering. Beauty really meant dead beauty, as is clearly shown in his poems.

Poe's parents died early and under very unpleasant circumstances. His mother was reputed to be most gifted and beautiful. At a most impressionable age came another blow—the death of Mrs. Helen Stanard—his first Helen. Later, came the death of his foster mother, followed by the loss of three sweethearts, and the six years of fear for the life of his wife Virginia, who finally died at the age of twenty-five in 1847.³¹ Beautiful women to Poe were meant to be written about but never to feel secure with. “Little wonder, then, that he wrote of the death of beautiful women” (Pruette, p. 386).

Notes

1. One of the most balanced and best-written biographies of Poe is Arthur Hobson Quinn's Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., 1941). Another work of interest here is Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1934). For comprehensive bibliographical information on Poe, see Jay B. Hubbell, “Poe,” in Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1963), pp. 1-46.

2. Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1961), p. 17. A further consideration of the psyche of Poe can be found in Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933).

3. The Haunted Man: A Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1953), p. 11.

4. “A Psycho-Analytical Study of Edgar Allan Poe,” The American Journal of Psychology 31 (October 1920): 370-402.

5. For information on Adler's views see Alfred Adler, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, trans. P. Radin (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1946); Alfred Adler, What Life Should Mean to You, ed. Alan Porter (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1931); Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher, eds., The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1956); and Kurt A. Adler and Danica Deutsch, eds., Essays in Individual Psychology: Contemporary Application of Alfred Adler's Theories (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1959).

6. It is also interesting to note the following remarks of Pruette: “With woman poets, Poe was seldom, almost never, critical. His desire for superiority seemed with women to take an entirely different form. He had the characteristic over-valuation of the opposite sex which, according to Adler, is invariably connected with the neurotic constitution.” (p. 375)

7. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (London: Imago Publishing Co. Ltd., 1949).

8. Freud also went on to state in the Foreword that while investigations such as Bonaparte's may not explain genius, underlying factors are revealed about phenomena that awaken the creative aspects of genius and the subject-matter that people of this calibre are destined to choose (p. xi). Interestingly enough, it should be quite evident by now that statements about Poe and/or his work from a depth psychology point of view are often quite inconclusive. In addition to the above comments, Poe's life has been studied in the present century by the neurologist Dr. John W. Robertson, who spoke of Poe in terms of a “bad heredity,” and by Joseph Wood Krutch, who thought of Poe as suffering from a “mother” fixation and hence created an abnormal world in order to compensate for sexual impotency. See John W. Robertson, Edgar A. Poe (San Francisco: B. Brough, 1921), and Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1965). Also, for an interesting and comprehensive article providing historical information about attempts to understand Poe's life psychologically, see the following: Philip Young, “The Earlier Psychologists and Poe,” American Literature 22 (January 1951): 442-54.

9. “Letter to B———,” Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Edward H. Davidson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956), pp. 414-15. Pleasure and a high sense of beauty: these were two important aspects of Poe's criticism regarding all genres. But in Freudian psychoanalytic terms, pleasure and beauty have special meanings. Basic to an understanding of Freud's psychology is the concept of pleasure and unpleasure. In brief, Freud believes that when there is a feeling on the part of the individual's ego that tensions are being raised, one is encountering unpleasure, while the lowering or relaxation of tensions or absence of pressures is felt as pleasure. Beauty is thought of as closely related to the very experience of civilization; that is, Freud believes that the lack of beauty is something civilization will not tolerate. After speaking of happiness and love, Freud says: “We may go on from here to consider the interesting case in which happiness in life is predominantly sought in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever beauty presents itself to our senses and our judgement—the beauty of human forms and gestures, of natural objects and landscapes and of artistic and even scientific creations. This aesthetic attitude to the goal of life offers little protection against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.” See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1961), pp. 29-30.

10. American Criticism: A Study in Literary Theory from Poe to the Present (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1962), p. 7. Foerster has a keen perception about Poe's view of pleasure and beauty. He develops these other themes with much wisdom in the section of the work entitled “Poe,” pp. 1-51. It is also important here to point out that one American critic in particular has disputed Poe's ability as a writer and has also questioned Poe's concepts, especially as regards “beauty” and “pleasure.” See Yvor Winters, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism,” Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938), pp. 93-122.

11. For those interested in the Freudian theory of dreams, see “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, Inc., 1938), pp. 181-549. Also refer to the following: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1), vol. 4 (1900) of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, rev. and ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953); and Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (11) and On Dreams, vol. 5 (1900-1901) of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, rev. and ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953). For a discussion of the Jungian theory of dream interpretation, refer to comments in the following works: C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, in Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series 20, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler. Gerhard Adler, vol. 9, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), part 1; The Development of Personality, in Collected Works, vol. 17, trans. by R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954); Symbols of Transformation, in Collected Works, vol. 5, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956); and The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, in Collected Works, vol. 3, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960). For those interested in an Adlerian point of view on dream interpretation, see: Alfred Adler, “Dreams,” What Life Should Mean to You, ed. Alan Porter (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1931), pp. 93-119; also, see references to dreams in the following: Alfred Adler, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, trans. P. Radin (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1946); Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher, eds., The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1956).

12. Floyd Stovall, ed., The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1965), pp. 13-14. Unless otherwise noted, all of the poems discussed herein are from this work.

13. This poem, “Dreams,” was originally part of the volume Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). Marie Bonaparte believes that this work contained poems that were “all melancholy in cast.” She believes this may be partially owing to the romantic spirit of the age. (The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, p. 37)

14. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius, p. 65. This same critic also develops the concept of Poe's wishes and dreams as being caused to a large extent by “ferocious and reckless egotism.” See Joseph Wood Krutch, “The Strange Case of Poe,” The American Mercury 6 (November 1925): 349-56. Also see Joseph Wood Krutch, “Genius and Neuroticism” in And Even If You Do (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1967), pp. 145-52. And since dreams are to Freud disguised wish-fulfillments, and since they are often related to childhood's state of omnipotence and a feeling of happiness, there is a coming together in these lines of the past and present. In Freudian psychoanalytic theory the time factor of past and present are inextricably bound up with the future insofar as the day-dream wish is concerned. This idea is given fuller treatment in the following work: Sigmund Freud, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming,” Collected Papers, ed. Ernest Jones (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1949), 4: 173-83.

    Incidentally, the concept of happiness as expressed in the above poem “Dreams” does not blind Poe to stark reality. For at the base of this poem is a wish-fulfillment. And in light of modern psychoanalytic theory, I suggest that Poe reveals a profound awareness of dreams without being a trained practitioner.

15. Of interest here too is the fact that Walt Whitman relates a dream and concludes that the lurid figure appearing in the dream might be Edgar Allan Poe. Whitman was of the belief that all of Poe's poems were “lurid dreams.” See F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1941), p. 541. Matthiessen makes a point of reminding readers that Whitman's comment about Poe “defines by implication his own aims.” (p. 540)

16. In writing of science and truth as contrasted with religious claims, Freud wrote: “Scientific thought is, in its essence, no different from the normal process of thinking, which we all, believers and unbelievers, alike, make use of when we are going about our business in everyday life. It has merely taken a special form in certain respects: it extends its interest to things which have no immediate obvious utility, it endeavours to eliminate personal factors and emotional influences, it carefully examines the trustworthiness of the sense perceptions on which it bases its conclusions, it provides itself with new perceptions which are not obtainable by everyday means, and isolates the determinants of these new experiences by purposely varied experimentation. Its aim is to arrive at correspondence with reality, that is to say with what exists outside us and independently of us, and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or frustration of our desires. This correspondence with the real external world we call truth. It is the aim of scientific work, even when the practical value of that work does not interest us.” See Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. W. J. H. Sprott (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1933), pp. 232-33.

17. In essence, the reality principle as propounded by Freud holds that the mature ego can postpone the need for immediate gratification, can learn to endure a degree of frustration, and pain, and can renounce certain sources of satisfaction for a greater gain at a later time. The pleasure-principle is the opposite, where the psychical activity of the individual is bent on immediate gratification. See Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. by Joan Riviere (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1943), pp. 311-12.

18. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1958), p. 137.

19. “The Philosophy of Composition,” in The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, With Selections from His Critical Writings, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn and Edward H. O'Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1951), 2: 980-81.

20. This idea of “dream within a dream” has special meaning in Freudian theory and psychoanalytic criticism, as is indicated in the following: “As for the judgment which is often expressed during a dream: ‘Of course, it is only a dream,’ and the psychic force to which it may be ascribed, I shall discuss these questions later on. For the present I will merely say that they are intended to depreciate the importance of what is being dreamed. The interesting problem allied to this, as to what is meant if a certain content in the dream is characterized in the dream itself as having been ‘dreamed’—the riddle of a ‘dream within a dream’—has been solved in a similar sense by W. Stekel, by the analysis of some convincing examples. Here again the part of the dream ‘dreamed’ is to be depreciated in value and robbed of its reality; that which the dreamer continues to dream after waking from the ‘dream within a dream’ is what the dream-wish desires to put in place of the obliterated reality. It may therefore be assumed that the part ‘dreamed’ contains the representation of the reality, the real memory, while, on the other hand, the continued dream contains the representation of what the dreamer merely wishes. The inclusion of a certain content in ‘a dream within a dream’ is therefore equivalent to the wish that what has been characterized as a dream had never occurred. In other words: when a particular incident is represented by the dream-work in a ‘dream,’ it signifies the strongest confirmation of the reality of this incident, the most emphatic affirmation of it. The dream-work utilizes the dream itself as a form of repudiation, and thereby confirms the theory that a dream is a wish-fulfilment.” See Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Basic Writings, p. 360.

21. This discussion leads directly into fantasy and the life of the artist. See Freud's discussion of this point in A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, pp. 327-28. For those interested in the psychoanalytic interpretation of the artist, the following will be helpful: Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, Inc., 1955); and Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Psycho-Sexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, Inc., 1947).

22. Stovall in the Poems has interesting comments on the text of Poe's poetry in this regard and is most complete as to variant readings and textual notes.

23. Harry Levin has also linked “Israfel” with Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “through the quoted metaphor comparing the heart to a lute. Roderick's heartstrings vibrate to the decline, the catalepsy, and the interment of Madeline. Heralded by a reading from a romance, she emerges from the vault in her bloody shroud, and brother and sister share their death-agonies.” (pp. 159-60)

24. Joseph Wood Krutch in “The Strange Case of Poe” has captured some of the dynamics associated with this personality phenomenon and connected it with Poe's stories. “First reasoning in order to escape feeling and then seizing upon the idea of reason as an explanation of the mystery of his own character, Poe invented the detective story in order that he might not go mad.” (p. 356)

25. Buranelli, p. 98. D. H. Lawrence has also made a keen observation of this phenomenon from the standpoint of man's survival, though he specifically refers to Poe in the following passages: “Poe had a pretty bitter doom. Doomed to seethe down his soul in a great continuous convulsion of disintegration, and doomed to register the process. And then doomed to be abused for it, when he had performed some of the bitterest tasks of human experience, that can be asked of a man. Necessary tasks, too. For the human soul must suffer its own disintegration, consciously, if ever it is to survive.” Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Thomas Seltzer Inc., 1923), p. 65.

26. “Poe and the Function of Literature,” in Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. William Phillips (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1963), p. 61. Also see Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, p. 645.

27. No less an authority than Baudelaire, who was responsible for introducing Poe to the French, recognized Poe's skill, versatility, and craftsmanship as a writer. See Baudelaire on Poe, trans. and ed. Lois and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. (State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle Press, 1952).

28. All through this poem death reigns supreme in love and life. One can never forget, as Faust did, that he must not tarry for a moment. In “The Interpretation of Dreams” Freud explains that the child's concept of death is alien to that of the adult. To the child, being dead means being gone. The child has generally been spared the sight of much suffering which precedes death. To the child's way of looking at things, according to Freud, the departed one ceases to trouble the survivors. Nevertheless, one of Freud's main underlying themes in one of his works is that the fear of death is closely related to the fear of being forsaken or deserted. The individual feels there will be an end to protection against every danger. Furthermore, the fear of death is closely related to the fear of being castrated. See Sigmund Freud, The Problem of Anxiety, trans. H. A. Bunker (New York: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly Press and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1936).

29. The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 141.

30. “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Quinn and O'Neill, eds., 2:982.

31. All of these items are treated in the various biographies already mentioned. Three of the biographies tend to be more psychological than the others—those by Bonaparte, Krutch, and Robertson.