SOURCE: Hoffman, Daniel. “‘O! Nothing Earthly …’/ The Poems.” In Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, pp. 18-80. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.

[In the following essay, Hoffman discusses Poe's reputation as a poet, both in France and in America, claiming that many of Poe's rhymes, apparently drawn from his own experiences, are banal and are possibly deliberate hoaxes on his reading public.]

November 1956. I am brooding on the poems of Edgar Poe in Dijon, living with my wife and two babies in the only maison bourgeoise in a farm village three kilometres beyond the end of the bus line. All the other houses in Saint Apollinaire are attached to barns and have cows in the front yard, but our yard is given to a garden, the beds crowded between pebbled walks. It's getting chill. There's hoarfrost on the beet fields and morning mists hang from Madame Pagès' pear tree. Ever since my compatriot John Foster Dulles halted the Franco-Israeli conquest of Suez last month, oil, coal, rice, and soap have been in short supply. I spend every other day scouring the coal yards of Dijon along the rail line—have become an expert scrounger, putting to unwonted practice the vocabulary lists memorized while reading Lettres de Mon Moulin. Also other words, newly heard, and remembered. I can distinguish by their shapes and brand-marks the pressed coal briquets from Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland. I buy wherever I can, hauling fifty-kilo sacks on the floor of my Anglia. I've built a coalbin in Mme Pagès' garage. It's cold. Today is the Fête des Fulbrights, the presentation of new American books to the Faculté des Lettres, the visit by the American Consul and the Fulbright Commissioner from Paris, the speeches of welcome and acceptance. Then my lecture, on the poet whose work is set for examination this year for the agrégé: Edgarpoe.

So, in Saint Apollinaire, surrounded by the sounds of lowing cattle in the barns and crowing cocks on the dunghills beside the lavage, with the medieval church down one road, the Renaissance château down the other, I spend the morning re-reading the poems of Edgarpoe. Now it is time. The lecture hall in the old Faculté is filled to the ceiling—all my students, and scores of teachers of la littérature Américaine in lycées from as far out in the hinterland as Besançon. Here, in Dijon, they have walked through narrow alleys and crooked streets bordered by Roman walls and overhung by swollen Renaissance balconies, walked beneath roofs upheld by flamboyant caryatids, and entered the gloomy gateway of the Faculté. They have climbed the treadworn stairs into the dim lecture chamber to hear le Professeur Visitant Chargé avec l'Enseignement des Etudes Américaines, himself said to be a poet, speak of Edgarpoe.

They are poised in a tiered semicircle around me, straining to hear my English words, ready for my American accent to fall flatly on their ears. I commence. ‘I cannot read the poems of Edgarpoe without feeling a sensation—of pain.’ A gasp clutches the breath of my auditors. ‘No poet in the English tongue who is still read with reverence has committed such gaffes against the genius of our language, nor has written lines of comparable banality.’ An indignant murmuration surges around the amphitheatre. ‘It cannot even be said of Poe that when he is at his worst he is awful in a manner peculiarly his own—need he have been Edgar Poe to write, in “Al Aaraaf,”

O! nothing earthly save the thrill
Of melody in woodland rill—

or, in “The City in the Sea,”

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest …

or, from “The Sleeper,” a line as tasteless as ‘Soft may the worms about her creep!’; or so vulgar a rhythm as that in “Lenore,” ‘A dirge for her that doubly died in that she died so young.’ Did it require a poet of Poe's sublimity or a critic as fastidious in the matter of the prosody of his contemporaries, to contrive such a rhyme (in “Ulalume”) as mated ‘kissed her’ with ‘vista,’ or such sustained banality as in this stanza from “Israfel”—

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.

or such evanescent balderdash as in the lines,

And softly through the forest bars
          Light lovely shapes, on glossy plumes,
Float ever in, like wingèd stars,
          Amid the purpling glooms—

None of these passages would be out of place in the ‘Poet's Corner’ of a weekly rural newspaper in my native country. In fact that's probably where the last quatrian I've quoted first appeared, for it is not by Poe at all, but by a justly forgotten poetess named Mrs. Amelia Welby. I mention her, and quote her lines, because Poe himself applauded her poem as ‘one that would do honor to any one living or dead,’ citing the passage about glossy plumes and purpling glooms as ‘unquestionably, the finest in the poem.’ A poet of such faulty taste would well be capable of writing, in his own poem, such bathos as

Save only thee and me. (Oh, Heaven!—oh, God!
How my heart beats in coupling those two words!)

or committing to print a description so gross and literal as

          seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

What claims, I asked, have such thumping doggerel, such sentimental clichés, on our serious attention?

Ah well, you can't take away from the French, already on short rations of rice and soap and enduring a pénurie d'essence, their reverence for Baudelaire's spiritual brother. Halfway through my lecture I recognized it as a piece of Poesque arrogance, a catastrophe inspired by some perverse imp of my own. For despite his blatant faults, Poe's poems do have a gaudy grandeur. Although marred by all the vulgarities and overwearied rhymes I have quoted and then some, when one has read “The City in the Sea” or “Ulalume” or “Annabel Lee,” one has had an experience he does not forget.

All this—the power of Edgarpoe—came back to me when I avidly read the mad adventures of Humbert Humbert, who seduced and was ravished by his twelve-year-old beloved in plain view of several hundred thousand voyeurs like myself:

Did she have a precursor? [Humbert asks on the very first page.] She did, indeed she did. In point of fact there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea.

Humbert, whose mother had died when he was three (Poe's mother died when he was two), lived, a petted darling, on the grounds of his father's Riviera Hotel. It was there that he fell wildly, unrelievedly, in love with that ‘initial girl-child.’ Her name? A maiden there lived whom you may know by the name of Annabel. Name of Annabel Leigh.

Annabel Leigh, the archetypal lost love of the pubescent motherless boy in a princedom by the sea. They snatched a moment, a moment beyond her family's vigilant protection, a moment in a cave beside the sea, where they awkwardly groped for one another's pleasure-parts, tormented to a delicious frenzy by each ‘incomplete contact,’ until, at last,

I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

And Humbert Humbert spent the rest of his life looking for her—‘that mimosa grove—the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since—until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.’

By incarnating her in another! Ah, Humbert, Humbert, had you re-read the works of Edgarpoe you might have found some other, some less dangerous means to break her spell! For you might have remembered not only the mellifluous rhythms and melodious periods of “Annabel Lee” but also the terrors, the horrors, the eerie and immitigable sufferings recorded by the narrator of “Ligeia,” the tale of one who, like yourself, assuaged his aching longing for a lost love by reincarnating her in another—or did she reincarnate herself in the dying body of his second wife, thus exercising her awful claim upon his devotion? Whoever did what, “Ligeia” should be a cautionary tale to any like Humbert Humbert, who tries to assuage the pain of a lost childhood love (in a kingdom by the sea) by incarnating her into another. It won't work. That other won't, simply won't, be just as was the initial child-love. She will exercise her own claims, live in the satiation of her own lusts, wrap you, Humbert, whoever you are, wrap you around her little finger, ride you, the lovely little witch that she is, to your doom.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
                    Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
                    Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:—
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
                    In the sepulchre there by the sea—
                    In her tomb by the sounding sea.

To be the lover, or the would-be lover, of Annabel Lee, or Annabel Leigh, is a fate not easily avoided. On the one hand you end up yearning to lie down by her side in a sepulchre: necrophilia! On the other, you can't get her, can't get at her, can't consummate all those exacerbated urgings which you and she began to feel and which you haven't ever since ceased feeling, so you incarnate her in another. That way, Lolita. But Poe had been there, too.

Edgar Allan Poe wears all the medals of the sufferings his poems record and celebrate and revel in. The intensity of his sufferings is the badge of his honor. The garish light by which his verses flicker, the weird, wild, and wonderstruck helplessness of the personages in his tales, these are the expressions of a possessed and demonic writer, hatched from the one egg he has put in his haunted basket.

And what were these sufferings? Who doesn't know them, who can't infer them from the first perusal of his verses! The details are peculiar, the specific instances of a special type of woe accumulate upon the defenseless head of a little orphaned boy with a repetitious savagery which makes inescapable the conclusion that Fate itself had an obsessional interest in inflicting upon poor Edgar Poe one particular species of human woe. As though by intensifying that one suffering, he could be made to write of it in paradigms of all the lesser losses which the rest of mankind must endure. But what a capricious choice Fate made as the vessel through which its mordant yet exalted dithyrambs would be poured.

Fate waited, to enact this particular purpose, until a troupe of itinerant thespians was cast up on the shores of penury, ‘at liberty,’ in Boston, Massachusetts, in the dead of winter, 1809. On January nineteenth of that year a son was delivered of Elizabeth Arnold Poe. The father, David Poe, Jr., was, like his wife a treader of the boards. An indifferent actor, it would appear, thought to be of Irish descent, and, by all evidence, addicted to the bottle. Not a very stable or responsible fellow, David Poe, Jr., although his father had been an honorary Quartermaster General in the Continental Army during the Revolution. Elizabeth Arnold Poe was very much more popular, more versatile, more successful on the stage than her nearly ne'er-do-well husband. She'd been bred to the theatre by her mother, an actress of some repute in England before her emigration, with her little daughter, to these States. So Eddie was born into that most precarious profession, the art of feigning. And within a year his bibulous father had disappeared. Simply vanished, leaving the young and beautiful Elizabeth, with her great moody eyes brimming, to look after little Eddie and his elder brother William Henry and his younger sister Rosalie. Alas, Rosalie proved, when grown, to be mentally retarded; she plays no part in Edgar's development. Nor does his brother, who was raised by grandparents in Baltimore after the mother's death.

The mother's death! Mother, with her infants in her care, still had to provide for her family, still had to follow her profession, trudging from one provincial town to another for one-week or one-night stands, developing a cough, a paroxysmic seizure, at last, in 1811, in Richmond, Virginia, spitting blood. In Mrs. Osborne's boarding house. There, in her single room, with her infant son beside her, Mrs. Poe lay dying, attended in her misery by the charitable solicitation of several good ladies of that gracious city. Edgar was two years old, watching his beautiful mother die of consumption, or, as they called it in those days, phthisis. Spitting blood.

One of those good, kind ladies whose heart was touched by the sufferings of the unfortunate Mrs. Poe was the childless wife of an ambitious tobacco merchant. On Mrs. Poe's death, Frances Allan took little Edgar into her own household and raised him as her son. Her husband, John Allan, was not quite so precipitate—his part in the chronicle of Edgar's woes is complicated, and I'll defer its recital till a more appropriate page of this, my chronicle of Poe's life and work and reputation and influence and how Edgarpoe wormed his way into my guts and gizzard and haunted my brain and laid a spell upon my soul which this long harangue is an attempt to exorcise.

Of John Allan I will now say but this: he did not adopt Edgar Poe, the infant son of wandering actors so fortuitously thrust beneath his eaves. If there is a villain in Poe's destiny, a malign person insinuated into his fortune by the machinations of that evil fairy who always spoils the christening party, it may have been his nonadoptive guardian. For John Allan reared the boy in full expectations of becoming his heir and gave him half a claim on the rights and privileges accorded in the antebellum South to a would-be gentleman. (Actually, Allan, a merchant, was himself a pretender, in that cotton kingdom ruled by baronial planters, to those airs and graces.) But at the crucial moment, he cast Edgar adrift without a cent, without a foster-father's blessing, to make his own way in a profession still more precarious than the ill-starred career of his true parents: the profession of a Poet.

By that time, the kindhearted and beautiful Mrs. Allan, too, had died. Had died, like Elizabeth Arnold Poe before her, of consumption.

I skip a few chapters in the Life of Poe, skip over to his twenty-seventh year. He has been in and out of the army—yes, the United States Army—he has been in and out of the U.S. Military Academy, for Poe is our only great writer to have tried for a commission at West Point. He has been a magazine writer, has published two volumes of verse at his own expense, has won a fifty dollar prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visitor for his story “MS. Found in a Bottle,” has become editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, and has married Miss Virginia Clemm of Baltimore.

Arthur Hobson Quinn, whose magisterial biography is still the authoritative source for all facts and figures about Edgar Allan Poe, finds it not unusual that a man of twenty-seven marries a girl of fourteen, his first cousin. Or that all throughout their married life he called her ‘Sis,’ or that her mother, his aunt Mrs. Clemm, lived with the couple, kept house for them, and was addressed by the husband, Edgar, as ‘Mother.’ Dr. Quinn exercised great ingenuity in recapitulating, inter alia, the complete dramatic career of Poe's grandmother, and in ascertaining precisely in which room at 2230[frac12] East Main Street, Richmond, Elizabeth Poe died. But to questions like the propriety of Edgar Poe's marriage to a scarcely nubile girl half his age, and his close blood relation at that, Quinn's powers of detection were not attracted.

On the other hand perhaps too much has been made of these rather odd circumstances by Joseph Wood Krutch and Marie Bonaparte.

What should I make of them? Right now I'll make little, merely mention the facts as facts, and complete this factual recital (carefully edited to emphasize certain effects—for as Poe advises, all must be bent toward unity of effect).

The effect toward which I'm trying to unify these sometimes intractable events is, well, it's the effect which is suggested by the next relevant fact: nine years later, in 1847, Virginia Poe—I forgot to say that Virginia had a beautiful voice, was trained as a singer—Virginia burst a blood vessel in her throat, and in a matter of months she sank into consumptive pallor, feebleness, much spitting of blood, and, at last, the surcease of an early death.

Virginia was twenty-three, the age when many young women are about to be married. She had been nine years a bride, yet, if Poe's posthumous psychoanalysts, Drs. Krutch and Bonaparte, are to be given credence, she died a virgin and a maid:

… a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
.....And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
          In the sepulchre there by the sea—
          In her tomb by the sounding sea

They so conclude, not, I must say in defense of their ratiocinative analysis of Poe's life, on the evidence of his poems. They examine his life, his circumstances, his whole personality, and conclude that he was psychically impotent.

That seems an impertinence, doesn't it? I mean, there's something rather tasteless in hypothesizing about the sexual relations of a man who died over a century ago. None of our business, that.

What is our business, though, is not what Poe did or couldn't do in the dark womb of his conjugal bed, but what he wrote. And that, of course, brings us around once again to what he lived, what he suffered. Whether he could get it up or not (the evidence of the tales is pretty one-sided), you don't have to have a certificate from Dr. Freud to recognize Poe's sad and crippling obsession, he put into his writing an intense energy as great as that which a libidinous seducer would have expended upon the breaching of a thousand virgins. Poe was born to suffer, to thrill to the exquisite torment of those sufferings, to transmute them by his symbolistic imagination into paradigms of man's divided nature, of man's heroic efforts to escape his fate.

But you might not guess all this from a poem like “Annabel Lee.”

I mean, would you be likely to hail, as an expression of imaginative power, Poe's sad, musical ballad of a lost love?

Poe, who had lost his three great loves—his mother, his foster-mother, his bride—all in the same way, all wasting on their sick-beds, all spitting blood, choking, all pathetically grasping and gasping for breath, while he, the infant son, the boy, the bridegroom, can but sit beside his beloveds in helpless anguish, watching them sink, sink, sink, and slip away until their pain-wracked seizures at last are stilled by their last, wakeless sleep.

How could such a boy, such a man, but ask, What are we born for? ‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings then?’ cries Tamberlaine in Marlowe's play (Part 1, v ii 97). One poète maudit, killed in a tavern brawl, speaks across the centuries to his semblable. Edgar Allan Poe, aged eighteen, chooses as his theme, for the title poem of his first book (‘by a Bostonian’), Tamerlane!

Tamerlane, 243 lines of Tamerlane (as finally revised, in 1845), ‘by a Bostonian,’ aged nineteen, recently rusticated from the University of Virginia for debts to his landlord, tailor, gambling companions, etc., etc.

In exile.

But, in this free country, exiled from what?

From childhood. From mother and from foster-mother. From all his dreams of temporal power and social supremacy, his dreams of an inheritance and his hopes of a college education and a secure place in society. At nineteen.

All that is left to this headstrong and penurious youth are his dreams, his vain imaginings, which he spells out in chiming, rhyming lines. Edgar has no recourse but to become the hero of his own imagination.

In 1827 that seemed a likely course. Not so much the hero of The Prelude, but—Byron. There's a hero for the age! Byron, with his romantic black locks, his brow streaked by the howling blasts of the tempest—how very like Byron is Poe, in Walt Whitman's dream, half a century later; the dream of Whitman, the only American poet who attended the dedication, in Baltimore, of that monument at Poe's grave for which Mallarmé had written his sonnet ‘Au tombeau d'Edgar Poe.’ Whitman had dreamed of Poe rushing toward the grave—

In a dream I once had, I saw a vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm. It was no great full-rigg'd ship, nor majestic steamer, steering firmly through the gale, but seemed one of those superb little schooner yachts I had often seen lying anchor'd, rocking so jauntily, in the waters around New York, or up Long Island Sound—now flying uncontroll'd with torn sails and broken spars through the wild sleet and winds and waves of the night. On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems—themselves all lurid dreams.

Walt, perspicuous, magnanimous old man—how wisely he chose as an image of the poems a tableau which could have been drawn only from the tales! There is no poem of Poe's in which a figure, a dim Edgar, is hurtling toward destruction aboard a schooner-yacht; but wait until we come to “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym! Wise old Walt, who conceived, as his tribute to Poe, his only real rival as the nineteenth-century's Literatus, a perfect put-down: The poetry is in Poe's prose.

Neither Walt Whitman nor anyone else would have dreamed such a dream about Poe were he only, or chiefly, the author of “Tamerlane.” That's a poem nobody today would be likely to read for pleasure. The students in my Poe seminar read it—they had to—and were convinced that, during that week in the fall semester, they were the only ten souls in the entire nation so occupied. Plodding through the 243 lines of Tamerlane's lament, they read the confessional monologue of the Tartar peasant who left his native cottage to conquer the world, then returned intending to marry his beloved, but—guess what—found that she had died. As Richard Wilbur points out in his notes to the Laurel edition of Poe's poems, ‘It is not that Tamerlane has made an erroneous choice between Love and Ambition: it is that Time has inevitably estranged him from his boyhood and from the visionary capacity to possess, through Psyche, “the world, and all it did contain.” The fundamental contrast is between two kinds of power: the despotic imaginative power of the child, and the adult's struggle for actual worldly power. The first is judged ideal or “holy,” the second earthly or evil.’

Like all of Wilbur's comments on Poe's poems, this is both sensitive and accurate. But Wilbur forbears to judge the poems; he is content to describe them and to relate their images to one another. I'll be more temerarious and assert that “Tamerlane” is a poem nobody would read unless he had to, one which is valuable chiefly for what it suggests about the young Poe's reading and for demonstrating his limitations. He'd been reading Byron and Milton and was already mapping out the very special and peculiar territory in which his poetic faculty could function. But in “Tamerlane” he drew a huge overdraught on his poetic account. Who would read “Tamerlane” today, but a graduate student in Professor Hoffman's Poe seminar? Or Professor Hoffman? Yet, when I checked the early (1827) version (Complete Works, VII, 127-39) I found who else had been reading “Tamerlane”: in strophe xiii, ‘I pass'd from out the matted bower / Where in a deep, still slumber lay / My Ada …’ whose name does not appear in the later version. But this is the Ada whose name does appear (it was Byron's daughter's middle name), indeed is the title of, a novel, a prodigious creation of an anti-world, by Vladimir Nabokov, author of the pseudonymous Humbert Humbert's confessions and a confirmed, nay, an obsessional, reader—or should I say devotee, or enchantee—of Edgar Poe.

Why this modern creator of an anti-world should be—would have to be—in thrall to Poe isn't very clear from “Tamerlane,” but in Poe's next major (that is to say, large) poem it all comes clear. I mean in “Al Aaraaf.”

But first, what went wrong in “Tamerlane”? Poe was trying to do too many things at once: tell a narrative, project an epic, dramatize the conflict between earthly and spiritual power. His diction is more appropriate to lyric verse, his story remains static, his hero speaks to no respondent. Poe hadn't yet discovered exactly which form was required by his theme.

How could it be otherwise? He was only eighteen. Every week I have a bull session called a class with half a dozen student poets and would-be poets of just that age. The very best of them are likely to change their styles, meters, dictions, forms, stance, subjects, personae, three or four times a semester. A young poet must discover who he is, he must create himself as a poet. Even a genius must do this. It's a painful process, splitting your own skin and squeezing your soul and body out of it, even, sometimes, before you know the shape or color of the new self you are going to become. Poe, like any young man teaching himself to be a poet, made a couple of false starts.

But even in false starts there's a gain, an increment, an increase in technical skill and the uncovering of a part of one's own donnée. That's one gain. Another is the recognition of what won't be carried over into the next self-image of the poetic persona. So even losses are gains.

The poet discovers his self by creating it. However much tempted was Edgar Poe to imagine himself as puissant as Tamerlane, and to imagine Tamerlane as powerless in the coils of time as himself, he came much closer to defining the essential Moi who speaks in his best poems in a confessional meditation, first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1875, a quarter century after his death, but signed and dated ‘E. A. Poe. Baltimore, March 17, 1829.’ Nobody knows why Poe never included it in his books of verse—or rather, in his book; for, like Whitman, though on a very minuscule scale indeed, Poe's poetical productions comprised a single œuvre which was added to in each of the successive volumes he issued between 1827 and 1845. Perhaps the copy which came to Scribner's was unique, and not having that copy in his possession, Poe had lost the poem. But no. He'd have written it down again, with his prodigious powers of memory and concentration. Maybe “Alone” cut a little too near the bone for Poe, whose poems and tales are an elaborate repertoire of masks: Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe … We'll meet him as Hoaxiepoe, as Inimitable Edgar the Variety Artist, as Horror-Haunted Edgar, as … but I'm getting ahead of myself here. “Alone”:

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov'd—I lov'd alone—
Then—in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by—
From the thunder and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
When the rest of Heaven was blue
Of a demon in my view—

Although there are echoes here of Byron's Manfred (ii ii 50-56), this is Edgarpoe's own work, his own destiny, his own woe: The Alienated Poet come-to-life. Not alienated by the neglect of a materialist bourgeois society—that is the case of course, though here he doesn't complain of it—but alienated because of the fated specialness of his own nature. Edgarpoe is a marked man, one of the Chosen. Chosen to enjoy what others cannot even sense, chosen to suffer what others know not, to love whom he loves in an isolation as complete as that in which he feels suffering and joy. All this, because of ‘The mystery which binds me still.’

The poem is nearly a success, for though it begins with the tone and the commonplace diction of a song of Thomas Hood's or Tom Moore's, it modulates, by the end, to the intensity of early William Blake. The openness of diction is not as unusual for Poe as one would think, if one were accustomed only to the rhodomontade of “The Raven,” “Ulalume,” and “Lenore.” Poe was quite able to write with clarity, indeed the language here is so ordinary it dips into the banal. But the last six lines redeem the poem from that. ‘A demon in my view.’ Poe really was a haunted man, and as a poet, in verse or prose, he had the power to haunt his readers.

I think of Edgar Allan Poe at nineteen, author of these poems and others I've still to re-read, making his bid for Fame and Immortality and Recognition and who knows what else by publishing his slender store of verses at his own cost—at his own cost who could scarcely afford the next night's lodging. Those humiliating letters he had to write to John Allan, the nonsire who had already cast him off, pleading for money, as gift, as loan, on any terms, money to publish, money with which to buy a suit, a shirt, pay the landlord, the grocer, the printer. How much self-abasement can a boy stand, how much abuse of the ego can he bear?

Richmond Monday [19 March, 1827]

Sir,

After my treatment on yesterday and what passed between us this morning, I can hardly think you will be surprised at the contents of this letter. My determination is at length taken—to leave your house and indeavor to find some place in this wide world, where I will be treated—not as you have treated me … my resolution is unalterable. …

… Send my trunk &c to the Court-house Tavern, send me I entreat you some money immediately—as I am in the greatest necessity—If you fail to comply with my request—I tremble for the consequence

Yours &c Edgar A Poe

It depends upon yourself if hereafter you see or hear from m.

So distraught he left off the second letter in the word me. The next day Poe writes to Allan again:

Dear Sir,

Be so good as to send me my trunk with my clothes—I wrote to you on yesterday explaining my reasons for leaving … I am in the greatest necessity, not having tasted food since Yesterday morning. I have no where to sleep at night but roam about the Streets … I beseech you as you wish not your prediction concerning me to be fulfilled—to send me without delay my trunk containing my clothes, and to lend if you will not give me as much money as will defray the expence of my passage to Boston (＄12) and a little to support me. …

The following December, now in the army at Fort Moultrie, Poe writes:

I only beg you to remember that you yourself cherished the cause of my leaving your family—Ambition. If it has not taken the channel you wished it, it is not the less certain of its object. Richmond & the U. States were too narrow a sphere & the world shall be my theatre—

One can only imagine with what apoplexy Allan read this page, in which the ungrateful young whippersnapper he had fed and clothed like a member of his own family has the impudence to flaunt his insane ambition—and to revel in that allusion to the theatre, as though his proper parentage were something to brag up and down the market square!—

… There never was any period of my life when my bosom swelled with a deeper satisfaction, of myself & (except in the injury which I may have done to your feelings)—of my conduct—My father do not throw me aside as degraded I will be an honor to your name.

This letter pled with Allan to obtain Edgar's discharge from the army. Like his other pleas, before and after, it was ignored.

Such are a few of the sufferings which Edgar bore alone.

We have not done with his relationship to John Allan, who seems gratuitously to have dealt his helpless charge one blow after another. Yet Allan had a case, too, for Edgar was surely the least sympathetic boy in Richmond for him to have in his own household—headstrong, insubordinate, self-willed, forever making outrageous demands. Poor Edgar.

Where did we leave him? Down from the university, out from his enlistment, then a cadet and again pleading with ‘Pa’ to secure his release; that aid not forthcoming, Edgar is dismissed from the U.S.M.A. for being on sick call instead of on duty. And now he has published his second volume of verse—it's 1829, in Baltimore—Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Edgar is twenty years old.

What can we expect in the way of poems from a twenty-year-old genius? He will write poems conceived within the conventions of his age, and some of those poems will outlast the conventions within which they were conceived, while others will fade with the changing of taste and fashion. A poet has to start somewhere, he must plunge into the swim at the moment when he becomes aware of his own ambition. For Poe, that moment came during the notoriety of Byron and Shelley, during the popularity of such third-team minnesingers as Tom Moore and Thomas Hood, and during the influence on the best poets of the critical ideas of Coleridge. What would you expect but that the verse of a twenty-year old, even a genius, would be a hodgepodge of these and other influences?

Poe's genius announces itself in startling ways. More by his renunciations than by his achievements. His special genius was the kind that rules out, on principle, most of the subjects and themes that other poets spend lifetimes trying to deal with. For Poe, such materia poetica as physical love, the influence of the natural world upon human sensibility, and human history simply aren't on the page. Not in poetry.

What's left, then? A narrowing concentric circle of concern. Poe ends by asserting that poetry itself must be devoted to the presentation of a single subject. Yet even while foretelling these extreme exclusions, “Al Aaraaf” is very ambitious—too ambitious. It is Poe's most ambitious failure.

Before I sink in its ethereal vapors, let me quickly say which were those poems of Poe's that do transcend the conventions of his time. “Alone” is one of these. So are “Romance,” and “The City in the Sea,” and “Dream-Land.” These are all lyric soliloquys. His other successful genres are the brief lyric (“To Helen,” “To One in Paradise,” “Israfel”), the sonnet (“Sonnet—To Science,” “To My Mother”), and the literary ballad (“Lenore,” “Ulalume,” “For Annie,” and “The Raven”). Some of these poems transcend their time without being good poems; they may be terrible poems, but they are, undeniably, unforgettable. Some of them are very good indeed. Still, that's not much of an output for a genius who confessed ‘With me poetry is not a purpose but a passion.’ One hidden thread in this inquiry, a thread I will seize and draw taut at the right instant, will sew up the answer to the query, What went wrong with Poe's passion for poetry? Why did he dry up, and leave one of the teeniest bodies of verse of any poet the world has applauded for over a century?

But now, the ethereal vapors of “Al Aaraaf.” What a piece of machinery is this! “Al Aaraaf” exhibits extreme symptoms of what Poe was later to attack—after he had convinced himself that he could not write this way—as ‘the Epic mania.’ This piece reads like the first two of a dozen, or a score, of cantos in a Great Poem of Cosmological Revelation. But Eddie ran out of gas.

“Al Aaraaf” is the best he ever did in the line of Jumbo Productions. Fractured though it is, we have here a far more convincing imaginative experience and a much more adept show of versification than in either of his other two elephantine failures, “Tamerlane” and “Scenes from Politian.” (A word about “Politian”: this is a sketch for a Jacobean tragedy, using the same plot—fixated love, madness—as that in Simm's Beauchampe, Chivers's Conrad and Eudora, Charles Fenno Hoffman's novel Greyslaer, and Robert Penn Warren's poem Brother to Dragons. Poe's “Politian,” however, is no better than the least of these: an inflated, ill-managed costume drama set in Rome.)

In “Al Aaraaf” Poe finds a different way to evade dealing with the actual world from such efforts at archaic history as “Tamerlane” and “Politian.” He escapes into an imaginary future—well, it's not specified as future, so let's call it an imaginary time out of time—in which an apocalyptic vision may be vouchsafed to his supernatural protagonists.

So Edgar takes over the very machinery of epic which Toqueville six years later would deny the American poet because the American people no longer believed, or wished to believe, in the past, in gods, or in the intermediary creatures between Heaven and earth—be they angels, spirits, or merely (as in The Rape of the Lock) parodic sylphs. What the American public believed or wished to believe never cut any ice for Edgar. This lad not yet old enough to vote against President Jackson has his own vision of truth, of cosmological truth. He had been reading Milton and Shelley and Tom Moore, and let the reader who dares, follow, and be compelled to believe as Poe believes. For “Al Aaraaf” is a wild mishmash of things strayed, stolen, or transformed from Paradise Lost, from Queen Mab, and from Moore's The Loves of the Angels. Poe undertakes to believe, to write, and to live as a poet-prophet, delivering the Word—not from Ararat or Sinai or Calvary, but from that remote star which he alone has seen. Al Aaraaf, Poe's note informs us, is ‘A star … discovered by Tico Brahe which appeared suddenly in the heavens—attained, in a few days, a brilliancy approaching that of Jupiter—then as suddenly disappeared, and has never been seen since.’ This distant realm of beauty fading from our sight Poe describes, in another note; ‘With the Arabians there is a medium between Heaven and Hell, where men suffer no punishment, but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they suppose to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment.’ Thus Poe circumvents both mundane reality and Christian cosmology. ‘Kubla Khan,’ ‘Lalla Rookh,’ and the Brighton Pavilion attest to the lure of Arabian Nights felt by the Romantics. Poe is making the Arabic scene too, but he is making that scene his own.

As he makes his own his borrowings from Milton, Shelley, and Moore. For “Al Aaraaf” is puzzlingly original. It is a fable about the wholly aesthetic conception of ideality and of an afterlife in which participation in that ideality is possible. The cosmological scope of this production as well as the grand effect of some of its lines bears the mark of Milton (however little like Milton is the theology). Another of Poe's models seems to me to be Shelley's Queen Mab. As with Paradise Lost, the differences are just as revealing as the similarities.

Both “Al Aaraaf” and Queen Mab take place in an imaginary landscape, in both there is a Spirit named Ianthe, and truths unknown on earth are revealed. But where Shelley's poem is one of rebellion—of specific rebellion against the tyrannies of an oppressive class system; against war-mongering kings; against God, Christ, and the Church—Poe in “Al Aaraaf” doesn't deign to attack any such abuses. Instead he writes as though the real world were completely irrelevant. His poem is devoted to the evanescent terrain of the ideal, and the only resemblance to human life on Al Aaraaf is the presence, among certain of its inhabitants, of that impure passion, love. Poe's poem is a cosmological legend, a breathing-into-being of a realm of the ideal, to which he consigns the existence of the idea of the lost sculptures of our Classical antiquity. From such snippets of Christianity, Neoplatonism, and his own imperious designs, Poe constructs his non-Christian, nonplatonic star.

Much too ambitious. Yet the young Poe was already able to handle complex conceptions in his verse, and to vary the texture of that verse. In Part I the normative line is first, octosyllabic couplets, then pentameter couplets, with the interposition at lines 82-117 of a lyrical interlude in alternately rhymed trimeter-dimeters. Part II consists of pentameter couplets with the interposition at lines 68-155 of another lyric, this time in anapestic dimeters:

Ligeia! Ligeia!
          My beautiful one!
Whose harshest idea
          Will to melody run …

The whole opus runs to 422 melodious lines, more than four times the length Poe later decided was admissible in a true poem. Part I introduces Al Aaraaf, where there is ‘nothing earthly save the ray / (Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty's eye.’ This world, ruled over by Nesace, contains both the originals and the departed spirits of all earthly beauties. By a trick of synaesthesia, we attend

Fair flowers, and fairy! to whose care is given
To bear the Goddess' song, in odors, up to Heaven.

She sings her song (the first lyrical interlude), and then

She stirr'd not—breath'd not—for a voice was there
How solemnly pervading the calm air!
A sound of silence on the startled ear
Which dreamy poets name “the music of the sphere.”

From this eloquent silence speaks ‘the eternal voice of God,’ commanding Nesace, in couplets of Miltonic grandeur,

What tho' in worlds which own a single sun
The sands of Time grow dimmer as they run,
Yet thine is my resplendency, so given
To bear my secrets thro' the upper Heaven.
Leave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly
With all thy train, athwart the moony sky—
Apart—like fire-flies in Sicilian night
And wing to other worlds another light!
Divulge the secrets of thy embassy
To the proud orbs that twinkle—and so be
To ev'ry heart a barrier and a ban
Lest the stars totter in the guilt of man!

Nesace has already defined her embassy, in her hymn to Heaven:

And here, in thought, to thee—
          In thought that can alone
Ascend thy empire and so be
          A partner of thy throne—
By winged Fantasy,
          My embassy is given,
Till secrecy shall knowledge be
          In the environs of Heaven.

Thus the divine mission of Nesace, the agent of Beauty, is the revelation of her secret knowledge ‘in thought that can alone … By winged Fantasy’ ascend the throne of God. This thought can only be the creative imagination of the artist or the poet, earthly creators of beauty.

The message of “Al Aaraaf” is so evanescent, its language so opaque, that the argument is difficult to follow. If this be an epic, it is an epic without an epic hero; if it be legend, it is the legend of no people. Indeed there is not a living person in the poem—so far its only characters are a fairy, Nesace, and the voice of God. Poe is his own myth-maker. What relation there may be between his conception of “Al Aaraaf” and the beliefs of Christians, Arabs, or any other sect is completely accidental. Poe's ‘myth’ in “Al Aaraaf” is about as cloudy and as self-determined as that of Shelley in Queen Mab and of Keats in Endymion. Indeed, Poe is writing his screed across the heavens in the manner of these greater English poets a decade before him. There is not one word in “Al Aaraaf” by which a reader, unfamiliar with its authorship, could infer it to have been written in Baltimore, by an American.

The second canto gives no better clue to the author's nationality than did the first:

High on a mountain of enamell'd head—
Such as the drowsy shepherd on his bed
Of giant pasturage …

This is the world of Romance, of pastoral, actually a world as yet unknown, for we are on Al Aaraaf, where

A dome, by linked light from Heaven let down,
Sat gently on these columns as a crown …

—an image reminiscent of Shelley's ‘dome of many colored glass.’ On these columns are sculpted the lost ‘Achaian statues,’ and

Friezes from Tadmor and Persepolis—
From Balbec, and the stilly, clear abyss
Of beautiful Gomorrah! O, the wave
Is now upon thee—but too late to save!

This demonic suggestion of the flooded city prefigures Poe's later poem, “The City in the Sea.” So far, in Part II, we have been given a spiritual tableau vivant. This sets the scene for the return of Nesace, who sings her second hymn. This time she invokes the divine spirit of harmonious correspondence of idea with ideal:

Ligeia! wherever
          Thy image may be,
No magic shall sever
          Thy music from thee.

Nesace urges, in anticipation of the last hundred lines of the poem,

And true love caresses—
          O! leave them apart!
They are light on the tresses,
          But lead on the heart.

For the divine throne to which Ligeia, the spirit of ideal beauty, may ascend, does not tolerate earthly passion. This is Poe's hymn to intellectual beauty, the attainment of which requires the abnegation of the dross of our flesh, our world, our life, our loves.

Not until line 174 of Canto II do we find anyone like a person in the poem, and what pass for persons prove to be the risen ghost of Michelangelo and the fallen spirit of one of Nesace's minions, Ianthe. There they are, on that distant star, doomed not to know true Heaven because they love one another. The last hundred lines of the poem speak of their unavailing love; the passage concludes as it began ‘They fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts / Who hear not for the beating of their hearts.’ This couplet holds the germ of half of Poe's other poems and of his best-known tales.

The Angelo-Ianthe episode has very much the look of an original cadenza upon an ancient theme, one much favored by other Romantic poets before and after Poe. The motif is the love between a supernatural being and a mortal; always a bad show, since either the goddess loses her gleam and sinks into mere mortality (Undine); or the lover must be made an immortal too (Endymion) and so is translated out of this life altogether; or the punishment of the gods is visited upon the lover—as an evil transformation or a curse—for his hubris in desiring to ravish a lady so far out of his class (Actaeon; Tithonus, Yeats's At the Hawk's Well).

But Poe works it out still another way. In “Al Aaraaf” both lovers lose. Angelo isn't actually a man, he is a ghost or spirit of a man—in fact the spirit of the man who was the world's greatest lover and creator of beauty, the incarnate Artist's ghost. As such, in Poe's cosmology he is only demi-divine and semimortal, for such a spirit is not conducted directly into Heaven.

Ianthe, too, although a nymph, is not fully spiritualized. Enough of Earth's grossness and the mortality of flesh pertains to her that she may undo her equivocal status among the higher beings by succumbing to passion. In Poe's aesthetic universe, any creature who feels the stirrings of his heart is thereby damned.

Any such representation of a romance between an earthling and a spiritling is bound to run certain procedural risks, not the least of which is sheer incredibility. It must have galled Poe, who followed the state of his own reputation with the care of a speculator reading the daily tickertape, that a decade after “Al Aaraaf” had appeared—and nearly disappeared, so little was it noticed—the most touted poem written by an American was Joseph Rodman Drake's ‘The Culprit Fay.’ This piece of paltry frivolity Jacksonian America could safely extol, since it made no serious challenge to the premises of a go-ahead, materialistic society but offered merely the safe diversion of a pretty and fanciful story. Not to wonder that Poe slashed ‘The Culprit Fay’ in his review in April, 1836, of a posthumous edition of Drake's poems. What may be surprising to some, however, is the tone of light irony and easy humor with which he outlines the defects of ‘The Culprit Fay,’ defects which we may be sure his own amibitous poem had successfully avoided:

We are bidden, in the first place, and in a tone of sentiment and language adapted to the loftiest breathings of the Muse, to imagine a race of Fairies in the vicinity of West Point. We are told, with a grave air, of their camp, of their king, and especially of their sentry, who is a wood-tick. We are informed that an Ouphe of about an inch in height has committed a deadly sin in falling in love with a mortal maiden, who may, very possibly, be six feet in her stockings. The consequence to the Ouphe is—what? Why, that he has ‘dyed his wings,’ ‘broken his elfin chain,’ and ‘quenched his flame-wood lamp.’ And he is therefore sentenced to what? To catch a spark from the tail of a falling star, and a drop of water from the belly of a sturgeon. What are his equipment for the first adventure? An acorn-helmet, a thistle-down plume, a butterfly cloak, a ladybug shield, cockle-seed spurs, and a fire-fly horse. How does he ride to the second? On the back of a bull-frog.

And so forth. Poe continues for half a page his catalogues of these twee fancies, then adds,

Such are the puerilities we daily find ourselves called upon to admire, as among the loftiest efforts of the human mind, and which not to assign a rank with the proud trophies of the matured and vigorous genius of England, is to prove ourselves at once a fool, a maligner, and no patriot.

To dispraise an American poet took courage; to raise above the Muse's temple the Union Jack on a higher staff than that of Old Glory took even more. To sink forever the specious repute of the ridiculous ‘Culprit Fay’ Poe cites, not his own superior practice in “Al Aaraaf,” but Shelley's invocation of Queen Mab:

It will be seen that the Fairy of Shelley is not a mere compound of incongruous natural objects, inartistically put together, and unaccompanied by any moral sentiment—but a being, in the illustration of whose nature some physical elements are used collaterally as adjuncts, while the main conception springs immediately, or thus apparently springs, from the brain of the poet, enveloped in the moral sentiments of grace, of color, of motion—of the beautiful, of the mystical, of the august, in short of the ideal.

Poe is of course making clear the distinction between Fancy, such as Drake's, and Imagination, such as Shelley's—and, by implication, his own. He has brought into the criticism of American poetry the division of these lower and higher imaginative faculties first proposed by Coleridge, distinctions which will become very important in his own criticism, though to be sure he wields them in ways and toward ends which would have surprised Coleridge himself perhaps more than they would have pleased him.

Coleridge, proposing Imagination as the esemplastic power, had further distinguished between the primary and the secondary imagination. ‘The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.’ The secondary imagination he defined as ‘an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will,’ like the primary in kind but differing in degree and in the manner of its operation. The secondary imagination, says Coleridge, ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create. … It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.’ The lower order of thought is Fancy, which ‘has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites,’ and is thus ‘a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space.’

May I be forgiven for summarizing this familiar doctrine from Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII. The point I want to make about “Al Aaraaf” and about Poe's poetry in general is, Poe tries to operate only in the realm of the primary imagination, arrogating to his own creative powers the ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.’ Even the secondary imagination is too impure for Poe, since it accepts the world of dead objects in order to vitualize, idealize and unify. In “Al Aaraaf” Poe had to depend upon his own imaginative distortions, through synaesthesia, of common objects (like flowers, stars, and meteors) in order to make tangible his wholly imaginary world. So his flowers sing hymns, his silences speak, the twilight murmurs as it falls (II, 40-41). Even so, the irreality of Al Aaraaf is conceived in terms of the objects and sensations of the earth to which it is designed as a preferable alternative. In certain of his later poems, Poe creates a landscape which is further supposed to be an evidence of the primary imagination, because so little like any sensible objects, because apprehended by no sensations already known to the reader. This is a course at once heroic and hazardous for a poet, since it debars from his art practically all of the experiences of mankind and makes his poetry completely self-defining, self-limiting, solipsistic.

As though the primary imagination were a self-begotten, self-renewing power, independent of human relationships, carrying out its imperious directives with the same independence and autonomy as does the infinite I Am.

Poe, poor Edgarpoe, the penniless orphan, the abandoned and lovelorn boy, cognizant of his impotence in the affairs of men and the love of women, conceives himself as a self-begotten deity, the infinite I Am made finite, given a habitation and a name. Name of Edgar Allan Poe.

This reads indeed like psychotic behavior. And it is not surprising that Poe's psychiatric critics, like Krutch and Mme Bonaparte, have declared him psychotic and insane. As for me, I too am a psychiatric critic of sorts, and I hereby expound another doctrine. Edgar Poe was both insane and sane, but sane mostly, especially sane when writing his poems, his criticism, and his tales. For these are composed not, as he would have dearly hoped, out of the disinterested stirrings of the primary imagination alone; they are composed out of the sufferings and wounds of his bruised and beaten yet resilient ego, his ego that had the extraordinary power of dipping, slipping, ripping down into his unconscious and, while not surrendering its willed control of the shape and form of what he wrote, yet depending for its content—always for its latent content, sometimes even for its manifest content—upon the id. The work of Idgar I Am Poet.

For such a youth the power of fancy is beneath contempt, the power of secondary imagination is but secondary. He must aim beyond the known stars, for Al Aaraaf. Out of the extremity of his own miserable life he imagined a life as little like our life as can be the life of spirit like our raw sufferings. His principles are aesthetic—that is to say, he pursues the pleasure principle until, like Freud, indeed, anticipating Freud (as we shall see in Eureka), he goes beyond the pleasure principle. One side of his art is the effort to create the ineffable, the bower of unutterable delight. But the road thither is terrifying, frightening, for, like the lover of a spirit, Edgarpoe must put in direst jeopardy the only life he knows—this one, miserable as it is—in his quest for a realm of being more sublime. Therefore delight and terror are everywhere mingled in a weird harmony in Poe's writings.

This heroic abandon of the poet to live by imagination alone, this insistent effort to create a contra-world, has made Poe the hero of symbolist writers and readers from Baudelaire until our own time. The absolute autonomy of imagination is not a tenable doctrine, but it sounds like a siren's song in the mind of Nabokov, as it tempted Wallace Stevens, and, through Baudelaire, a line of great French poets running from Mallarmé and Verlaine to Yves Bonnefoy.

But what, in fact, did Poe accomplish? I've placed a heavy load of historical influence upon poor Eddie's shoulders, all because of “Al Aaraaf.” The brief poems with which he prefaced and followed “Al Aaraaf” help to clarify the urgency in “Al Aaraaf” to escape from this world. The prefatory poem is “Sonnet—To Science”; the coda, “Romance.”

What else would a young poet in 1827 try his hand at besides an Epic Poem of Cosmic Revelation? What else but a sonnet! To write a good sonnet you usually have to have climbed over the bones of your fourteen apprentice sonnets, each good line putting paid to the ghost of a failed poem. It's a devilish difficult form, the sonnet, though it always seems, in a good one, to be so simple, so logical. Edgar must have burned his apprentice sonnets, for the earliest one we have from him is “Sonnet—To Science,” a poem worthy to appear beside the great sonnets of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats—to say nothing of Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, et al.—as in fact it does appear, in The Penguin Book of Sonnets, where I first read it. In 1945. Surrounded, as it then was, by more familiar Romantic masterpieces—‘To Ozymandias,’ ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’—how could one help but take Poe's lone sonnet as an outcry against the antipoetic materialism of the modern scientific age, the utilitarian logic which drives imagination ‘To seek a shelter in some happier star?’

Of course we read into the poems we read the needs we need those poems to serve. And when I first read Poe's sonnet, that was my need. It's true, I could have read “Sonnet—To Science” in that first volume—The Poems [The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe]—of Poe's work in which I had scribbled an inscription, having endured a troubled sleep after reading “A Predicament.” But I had bought that book to own other poems in it—“To Helen” (I knew a girl named Helen then) and “The Raven” and—I confess it—“The Bells.” At fifteen one is ready, one needs, to be swept away by the sheer tintinnabulation of a poetry of sound, of incantatory spells, a poetry of hypnagogic trance which will possess one's whole consciousness with a tomtom and a chime. Sonnets march to a different drummer, one I wasn't ready then to heed. But when on a weekend pass, in Cincinnati, in a bookshop, stealing forty-eight hours from my quasi-scientific military assignment, I was ready for the disciplined argument of a sonnet and especially for the seeming rejection, in Poe's sonnet, of Science which preyed upon the world and drove Imagination into exile. In those days I was writing abstracts of aeronautical literature—articles, captured documents, tech reports on aerofoil design, strength of materials, power plants, superchargers, injection pumps. Sometimes a single word, or the design on the edge of a page would snag my attention, and I'd start up half an hour later from a trance in which I had been hypnotized by the meaningless repetition of injection-pump, injection-pump, injection-pump. Start up guiltily, for it was my duty that had been neglected, and I had no poem to show for my dereliction. Being thus entrapped by science, stifled by technology, manacled by duty, you can imagine how I longed for the guiltless indulgence of my wayward and indolent imaginative faculties. Such was my need, when I first read Poe's “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?

Ah well, I'd never actually seen a tamarind tree (had Edgar seen one?), but I'd had summer dreams, and now, thanks to duty, to science, to the Cartesian spirit which had disenchanted the magic casements of imagination by congealing the world of appearances into a realm of fixities, exact measurements, concrete objects, facts, causalities—my summer dreams had vanished as the Milky Way before the light of a wintry sun. Neither Edgar Poe nor I had, at this time, any of Whitman's hospitality and amplitude regarding science. We couldn't and wouldn't say, with Walt,

Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of old cartouches. …
This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.
Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling.
I but enter them to an area of my dwelling.

‘An area of my dwelling.’ Walt Whitman is still dwelling on this earth, and so the discoveries of geologists and chemists are useful to him. But where was the area of Edgarpoe's dwelling?

Al Aaraaf. A somewhere other. Since Imagination has been driven from the glades and groves of this earth, it must seek its proper home ‘in some happier star,’ not on earth at all, not at all in this life. There, on Al Aaraaf, among the spirits of the vanished beauties of both the Parthenon and Gomorrah, alongside still greater beauties never yet experienced here. So Poe's poem is really not concerned primarily, as I was when I first read it, with merely fretting against the dominance of the Cartesian mind. Its first concern is to insist upon the necessity of Imagination creating its own world.

And the real enemy in “Sonnet—To Science” isn't even science. It's ‘Old Time,’ whose ‘true daughter’ Science is. For Time is the father who has hatched the vulture-like Science, therefore Time, too, plucks at the carrion of things, feeding upon the dead body of this world. Science is thus imagined as the monstrous offspring of a monstrous parent, the second generation of the original sin against Beauty and Imagination. That original sin is personified as Time.

And Edgarpoe longs, longs, desperately longs to return to that paradisal time before Time began or was begotten, before that original sin. Longs to return there, even if it kills him.

The image of vulture Time appears again in “Romance,” this time in opposition to another bird image, that of Romance itself—

Romance, who loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and folded wing,
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been—a most familiar bird—
Taught me my alphabet to say—
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild wood I did lie,
A child—with a most knowing eye.

In this first stanza Poe has summoned an image at once autonomous and archetypal, a reflection of a shadowy, painted bird—thus already at two or three removes from reality. That bird is one which, when tamed, can speak. And from it he learned ‘my alphabet to say.’ This is a tellingly compact symbol of the source, within the ‘most knowing eye’ of his own infantine being, of the very art by which he depicts it.

This power he had ‘While in the wild wood I did lie, / A child,’ but, as the second stanza makes clear, ‘Romance is a poem lamenting the loss of that power, and invoking the recurrence of imaginative vision:

Of late, eternal Condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky.

The tumult of the Condor years breaks up the calm tranquillity in which the paroquet taught the dreaming child its ABCs.

And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings—
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away—forbidden things!
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.

The consistency of the poem is flawed in the end, as the governing metaphor undergoes an illogical transformation, from bird to lyre. The threatening, tumultuous Condor years may be fitfully evaded under the ‘calmer wings’ of ‘an hour,’—a species of bird not specified, but one which flings its down upon the poet's spirit. In the Cartesian world, described in “Sonnet—To Science,” from which Imagination has been banished, ‘with lyre and rhyme’ to while away that brief hour are now ‘forbidden things.’ Yet the poet's heart speaks the truth of its own nature and would transgress another, higher law ‘Unless it trembled with the strings.’ If we bridge the mixed metaphor, what the poem tells us is that the true language of the heart is the alphabet taught it in childhood by the dream-image of ‘Romance, who loves to nod and sing, / With drowsy head and folded wing.’ Dreams, then, are more ideal and beautiful than the tumultuous realities beneath the condor wings of the passing years.

The imaginative authority of dreams will be explored in such poems as “Dream-Land” and “The City in the Sea”; but first let's follow another image from “Romance,” the trembling of the strings which the poet feels vibrating with a music like his own heart's beat.

This is the music of ‘the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures,’ an epigraph which Poe, incorrectly, attributed to the Koran. As Killis Campbell pointed out many years ago, the quotation itself is incorrect too: it seems adapted from a phrase in George Sale's Preliminary Discourse to an edition of the Koran (1764) which read, ‘the angel Israfil, who has the most melodious voice of all God's creatures.’ Of course what's lacking is the most telling part of the epigraph—whose heart-strings are a lute. But another epigraph of Poe's supplies the missing phrase. His most terrifying tale of horror, the one in which Roderick Usher buries his twin sister alive, is prefaced with a couplet from Béranger (who actually wrote ‘Mon coeur …’):

Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne.

This suspended lute is of course an Aeolian harp, that favorite image of the Romantics for the songs made by the breath—that is, the spirit—of Nature herself. But Poe's songs are not those of Nature, they are songs of the spirit which has successfully escaped its bondage to Nature, realm of mortality, suffering, and corruption. How it is that the wind-harp hung above the House of Usher corresponds to the lute-like heart of the Arabian angel Israfel is one of the mysteries in Poe's work it would take a detective like Monsieur Dupin to solve. Perhaps I'll yet untangle it.

Israfel's lyre! Poe would, if he could, have always smitten those angelic strings. Poetry, to him, is song; and this one option bends his verses on its stave, making inaccessible to Edgarpoe all those other marvellous effects attained by Romantic poets from Wordsworth to Williams, the poets for whom poetry is speech. No, it's song, song, song, as in Shelley's lyrics, in Byron's ‘Hebrew Melodies,’ in the Songs and Anacreontics of Moore. It was the ear, the taste, the craving of the age, this conscious confusion between the music of rhyme, the music of melody, the music of music, the music of the spheres. Ideality, that perfect beauty on which Poe gazed with such longing, that perfect beauty he attempted to imitate and enshrine in his verses, is for him attainable, if at all, through the effects of musicality of sound and indefiniteness of meaning. The nearest Edgarpoe gets to that heavenly music in “Israfel” is in the first and the last stanzas:

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
          ‘Whose heart-strings are a lute;’
None sings, so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell)
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
          Of his voice, all mute.
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.

When Edgarpoe has really set his lyre within the sky he is capable of a lovely music, a lyrical movement, a fortuitous lilt of chiming sounds. The lyrical interludes in “Al Aaraaf” are quite delicately managed, the brevity of their trimeter/dimeter lines hastening the reappearance of the rhyme sounds, and those sounds invariably mating soft and mellifluous syllables with one another. Occasionally Edgarpoe strikes on the lute-strings of his heart a few chords which sound as sweetly as do any struck by Shelley or Byron. Who cannot but be charmed by the melodiousness of rhyme and alliteration, the lulling lilt, and the indefiniteness of meaning imposed by a syntax purposely inconclusive, of the last stanza in “To One in Paradise”:

And all my days are trances,
          And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
          And where thy footstep gleams—
In what ethereal dances,
          By what ethereal streams.

You wouldn't think the author of such a lovely lyric could be the perpetrator of those walloping bloomers, those resounding clichés, those lines of tawdry vulgarity, with which I tried to shock my audience of Poe-worshippers at Dijon into a realization that their angelic semblable was, at times, incapable of sublimity. The wild vagaries in tone and execution between a poem like “To One in Paradise” and a set of verses like “Eulalie—A Song”; or even the divagations in finesse among the stanzas in “Israfel” I've just quoted and those which Poe insisted upon interposing between them, suggest that Poe had, at best, a very uneven ear. It may suggest, too, that his poems weren't as totally committed to the strains of the wind-harp in his heart as he would like us to think. What else then, besides singing the angelic tones of the soul, is his poetry trying to do?

Or, to put it differently, what, in fact, is his soul trying to sing on that harp, which is his heart within the sky? In “Al Aaraaf” his soul is revealing a tableau of the Great Good Place and, in Part II, a fable of the exile from Heaven of the artist who allows passion to divert him from the quest for ideality. In “Israfel” and “To One in Paradise” Poe actually sings a lyric, a song. But even in these melodious lines he is also telling a story—a truncated story, true, but there is the seed of a narrative: How I, Edgar Allan Poe, would exchange my mortal melodies, if I but could, for the immortal strains of Israfel, and in “To One in Paradise,” the song in fact conveys the rudiments of a story: ‘Thou wast that all to me, love, / For which my soul did pine. …’ It's the same old story. The lament for the departed beloved. As indeed the title might have tipped us off.

All of Poe's poems are at the same time committed to the conception of poetry-as-song and of poetry-as-narrative. Each of his poems is the metrical account of an action. The common denominator of this action in the poems, the archetype of their plot, is this: Someone goes somewhere. The Imagination goes to a happier star; the ‘thou’ who ‘wast all to me’ goes to Paradise; I the Poet go to Heaven as Israfel perhaps comes down to earth. The highest common denominator among these poems is they are all poems of journeys, and the journeys are all quests. The Journey and the Quest! Those Great Archetypes!

Whither journey we, and for what are we questing?

Two poems announce our destinations: “The City in the Sea” and “Dream-Land.” Maybe the one is the other? Both are tales dreamed and sung: the strains Romance has plucked upon the poet's lyre. In these dream-poems the function of rhythmic regularity is primarily to induce in the reader that trance-like helplessness which Richard Wilbur has called the hypnagogic state. It is exactly the same use of meter that Yeats, half a century later, described in his essay, ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ (1900). The meter favored for this purpose is the octosyllabic couplet, perhaps because so employed by Coleridge in ‘The Pains of Sleep.’ It's a meter that will dull the mind with its metronomic insistence and its lack of either the quickened music of trimeter rhymes or the sinewy movement of caesura-filled pentameters. Once the dream mood is established, once the reader has been mesmerized and has suspended his workaday rational faculties, the imagery of the poem takes command of both the dreamer's and the reader's minds, and the meter can also be commanded by the imagery—commanded to indulge itself in the freer movement, the more lively displacement of stresses, by which we distinguish a flexible rhythm from a mechanistic meter.

Poe has a really dreadful poem on the same dream-subject as his two good ones. If we compare “The Sleeper” to “Dream-Land” or “The City in the Sea,” the difference between his meter and his rhythm, between his originality and his balderdash, becomes clear. How long are we going to stay with a poem that begins,

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim …

If we stick around for a few more lines, we have to rhyme musicálly with valley. This language is as dead as the meter. Yet the vision the poem is trying to evoke was, I don't doubt, as genuine for Poe as that in “The City in the Sea”:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West. …

What a beginning! That first ‘Lo!’ makes a spondee when followed by Death, and in the next line metrical distortion places the heaviest accents right where they belong, on the adjacent syllables stránge cíty. This distortion of iambs into spondees recurs twice in the next line—Fár dówn … dím Wést. The only words to receive vocal stress are the operative words which determine the meaning.

But the next couplet nearly blows it:

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.

What a string of banal clichés—the worst line in the poem. But I forgive it, for the rest of the poem really does create the weird wild sunken scene promised in the title.

If we went aloft in “Al Aaraaf,” “Sonnet—to Science,” and “Israfel,” this time the trip we take heads the other way: beneath the sea. Yet both noplaces are the home of the shades of the dead. Here we are, among ‘Time-eaten towers that tremble not,’ where ‘melancholy waters lie,’ where ‘No rays from holy heaven come down,’ but the light—ah, the light!—comes

                    from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathéd friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

This is a venue outside of Nature, where, we would expect, light would ‘from holy heaven come down.’ Instead, a weird light clambers up, up, up, encompassing the entire city which, with its domes and fanes, its freizes and bowers, is as opulent as Xanadu. The unearthly light reveals the images—the sculptured artifices—of music (the viol), of natural beauty (the violet), and of that intoxication (the vine) in which we recognize music as a simulacrum of the ideal beauty of nature. I'm divided between admiration for this stanza's astonishing creation of an unreal reality and regret that the path of the light wasn't more consistently from the bottom to the top of the scene.

So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seems pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There, above all the fanes and domes and bowers, Death reigns. What an effect! Pendulous … gigantically … The diction is perfectly controlled here, these magniloquent words effectively pointed against lines of clear and simple Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Death, imperious and all-presiding—but what he presides over is yet another surprise: it's the dissolution of his own city. The City in the Sea now slips and shudders …

The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

This conclusion is more impressive than communicative. We sense a terror that we cannot explain. If the City in the Sea was the home of the shades of ‘the good and the bad and the worst and the best,’ who, then, is in Hell to do it reverence? It's worth remarking that for all we know the city is actually unpopulated, for we never see any of these best or worst shades. Possibly I've been wrong in calling it a city of the dead spirits; it may be the Earthly City at some apocalyptic moment when all who were alive ‘Have gone to their eternal rest’ leaving behind them the ‘Time-eaten towers’ that at first ‘tremble not’ but then, after Death has looked ‘gigantically down,’ sink into the sea.

Whatever the cryptic and aborted epic tale whose foreshortened terrors are evoked by the poem, we cannot miss being gripped by the weirdly frozen aspect of “The City in the Sea.” At first the city is absolutely immobile in an environment which inverts our expectations of a natural world; then, in the only action of the poem, the eerie light climbs up from the sea to the highest tower, Death looks down and the city slides beneath the waters. An apocalypse—but what is the significance of its inexplicable terror?

Poe is describing, with his customary energy and invention, the most dramatic moment of all human perception: the End of Everything. For some poets the most dramatic moment is the union of the soul with nature, for others the juncture of soul with soul in the physical union of love. For others it is the image of their own death. For Poe it is the death of the universe.

Why is the death of the universe Poe's most powerful image? How can such a conception be a powerful image for a poet, unless he be St. John revealing the Book of Revelation?

The answer leaps ahead like a vast electric charge splitting from this world to the next, as we will be told in Eureka and in various preliminary sketches Poe has still to write between “The City in the Sea” and his great apocalyptic treatise in 1845. But how to make the end of everything a poetic theme—that was Poe's problem. He kept on trying, tried again (in 1845) in his poem “Dream-Land”:

                    By a route obscure and lonely,
                    Haunted by ill angels only,
                    Where an Eidolon, named Night,
                    On a black throne reigns upright,
                    I have reached these lands but newly
                    From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
                                        Out of Space—out of Time.

This is the trip Poe's poetic persona is forever trying to take, ‘Out of Space—out of Time,’ denying the actual world—‘Bottomless vales and boundless floods … Mountains toppling evermore / Into seas without a shore,’ as though we could even imagine a sea without a shore or a mountain that abused its own mountainhood by forever toppling. When we arrive by this impossible route at that inconceivable destination,

There the traveller meets aghast
Sheeted Memories of the Past—
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by—
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth—and Heaven.
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eye unclosed;
So wills its King, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringed lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

Although I have omitted such infelicities as Poe's rhyming ‘still and chilly’ ‘With the snows of the lolling lily,’ the poem still seems a Hallowe'en scare, or a Gothic parody. Until we think about it. For Poe isn't always in as full control of his language as he is of his vision. This of course is no excuse, a poet must be a poet clear through; but Poe sometimes (like Melville, like Hardy) seems trapped by a set of conventions inadequate to express the radical clarity of his vision. His diction is that of the Gothic spook story or ghost poem, his vision that of a man struggling to say what he has seen in a world so unlike ours that he has difficulty using the language of ours to describe it. What he is trying to say in “Dream-Land” is that only in dreams can we follow that ‘route obscure and lonely,’ which, though it leads us through terrors (however banal), reunites us with the dead—who are in Heaven. The phrase lifted from St. Paul who told us that we now see through a glass darkly, does not allude to his faith at all but rather to Poe's own conviction that after death the soul will join the spirits in “Eldorado” (not a happy phrase, that). Poe does not propose their salvation, their redemption, only their contentment in a realm we cannot view or know until we join them. Once again the poem seems more portentous than communicative, and what communication it achieves is more a matter of the mood than of the matter. I spoke a moment ago of Poe's vision being clearer than his language, but the fact is, what he so clearly saw was a vision of something inexpressible. In poems. In his tales, this poet to whom ‘poetry is not a purpose but a passion’ succeeded in creating what his poetry failed to create.

This is not to say that his poetry is all failure. He cannot bring himself, while using the conventions of poetry—principally the convention of Being A Poet—to speak of certain truths at the very dead center of his own psychic life. He can say things in tales like “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Purloined Letter,” “Ligeia,” “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” which none of his poems found words, images, syntax to express. Yet none of his tales speaks with the memorable haunting tone of his cameo masterpiece, “To Helen.”

No one who knows any poem of Poe's does not know this one. I can't remember when I didn't know it. I recall being made to memorize it in the eighth or ninth grade—in those days poetry was properly taught by being learned by rote—but I seem to remember that that was no problem, for I already knew the poem. Long before buying The Poems, volume I of the Works [Complete Works], before reading “A Predicament” and starting to twitch at night in response to Poe's spell. Long before I went steady in high school (beginning with the Senior Class trip to Washington) with a lovely girl named Helen. I always knew “To Helen” by heart.

Helen, thy beauty is to me
          Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
          The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
          To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
          Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
          To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
          How statue-like I see thee stand,
          The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
          Are Holy-Land!

See, I can't forbear from reciting it yet again. It seems inconceivable that in the first version of this poem, in 1831, Poe hadn't yet thought of the two lines everybody remembers, and had written instead,

To the beauty of fair Greece,
To the grandeur of old Rome.

Even Israfel nods at the lyre. He didn't change it ‘To the glory that was Greece’ until 1841, or ‘And the grandeur that was Rome,’ until 1845.

I've said that all of Poe's poems are narratives as well as songs. What about the tale told as the poet sings “To Helen”? Someone goes somewhere, the Journey, the Quest: where are they?

Right in the poem. It's Helen who goes on the journey, it's the poet who is then left with the quest still to make—but the poem doubles back on itself since his recognition, in “To Helen,” of the quest he had still to make is actually a form of his making it.

Helen in the first stanza is a living woman, a lovely woman, whose beauty is to me like … (I'll get back to what it's like; let's stay with her, with Helen, for the moment). In the second stanza, though, Helen is no longer an imaginable woman in the room. Nor are we in present time. Indeed, the very first simile has moved us with the swiftness of thought from 1831, or 1845, or right now, back into a world of Nicéan barks of yore. Which yore? The yore of Classical antiquity so idealized by Keats's ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ the antiquity which Schliemann's excavations at Troy were making known and accessible to imagination, known as a Golden Age of repose, balance, beauty. A woman in Poe's poem is being idealized as an image of Ideal Beauty, and so her hair is ‘hyacinth,’ her face ‘classic,’ her airs ‘Naiad’; these qualities ‘have brought me home’

          To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Home, because the ‘me’ in the poem is in exile, dreaming wistfully of the Nicéan barks which ‘gently, o'er a perfumed sea, / The weary, way-worn wanderer bore / To his own native shore.’ Nicéan must be Poe's spelling of Nikean, pertaining to Nike, goddess of Victory—his wanderer may be Ulysses, returning from his victorious campaign against Troy, weary, wayworn, approaching Ithaca at last … Or is it Agamemnon, son of Atreus, returning to Peloponnesus and disaster from the same victory—in the war fought because of Helen's beauty? For Edgarpoe's Helen is also Homer's Helen, the Helen of the ages, Perfect Beauty. With ‘Naiad airs.’

Helen is getting away from us, she has been turned, or has turned herself in our imagination, from a human girl to a Grecian Naiad with hyacinth hair. (It was years before I figured out what that means. Not dyed purple, but coiffed in tight curls, like a hyacinth bloom.)

Helen's apotheosis is completed in stanza three, where she stands like a statue in a ‘brilliant window-niche’—like the statue of a saint or, better still, of the B.V.M., in a church, a church which is interchangeably a temple to Helen-as-Aphrodite, a temple like the Parthenon from which Lord Elgin took the marbles celebrated by Keats. Whether in a Temple to Aphrodite or a Cathédrale de Notre-Dame, Helen is suddenly transformed yet again—with ‘The agate lamp within thy hand’ she is now the goddess of Wisdom—not Athene merely, but the Spirit of Intellectual Beauty—

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
          Are Holy-Land!

Psyche! Whose soul would her statue-like image represent? Whose but the poet's, who alone has perceived her, perceived her dimly limned in the actual woman who is the occasion for the poem—the occasion for the vision which is the poem's subject—the woman so swiftly subsumed by Imagination into first the image of classical beauty, then the still more remote images of which classical beauty is only a nearer approximation than the living woman. From girl to Naiad to statue—to Psyche! The further we get from life, the closer to ideality: from life to antiquity, from antiquity to myth, from myth to art, from art to Intellectual Beauty, the ethereal spirit revealed at last. And with his vision of Psyche, the poet knows whence she has come: ‘from the regions which / are Holy-Land.’ Lucky the days, in 1831, 1843, and 1845, when that vision was vouchsafed to him, for then, then, he had briefly dwelt on Al Aaraaf.

W. H. Auden has said that ‘Poe's best poems are not his most typical or original. “To Helen,” which could have been written by Landor, and “The City in the Sea,” which could have been written by Hood, are more successfully realized than a poem like “Ulalume,” which could have been written by none but Poe.’

On the contrary, I would say that it's Poe's failures which could have been written by other (and lesser) poets. His successes, however much they seem to use the meters, forms, or themes of his contemporaries, are the poems indefinably stamped by the handmark of none but Edgarpoe. Hood's ‘The Sea of Death’ (I find it in Mr. Auden's and Norman Holmes Pearson's Poets of the English Language, vol. 4, Blake to Poe) is superficially like “The City in the Sea”; but on inspection Hood's fragment proves a standard piece of graveyard poetry, notable only for its nautical venue. His sea filled with the dead, ‘garmented in torpid light,’ is a mood-piece, sad and faintly mysterious, but quite lacking in Poe's special light, which is lurid and rippling with energy, not torpor.

What made Auden think of Landor when he read “To Helen”? Was it these lines from ‘Ianthe’?—

Past ruin'd Ilium Helen lives,
          Alcestis rises from the shades;
Verse calls them forth; 'tis verse that gives
          Immortal youth to mortal maids …

Or perhaps the more familiar ‘Rose Aylmer.’ In “To Helen,” and only in “To Helen,” Poe seems to emulate Landor's characteristic qualities without using his themes. In “To Helen” we find a Landor-like economy of means, the reliance upon classical imagery, the cameo whittling of the action down to the barest essentials and those essentials presented with a maximum of lyrical energy. Such Augustan Romanticism is not Poe's usual métier. Nothing could be further from the style he adopts for “Ulalume,” or “Lenore,” or “The Raven.” I like to think that “To Helen” is a poem that Landor might have wished to have written. None of his—much as I admire them—can equal its stunning compression and swift imaginative movement.

Curiously, however different in tone, diction, rhythm, and form are “Ulalume” and the others I've just named from “To Helen,” these longer poems of Poe's equally bear his hand-print, for all share the one theme whose variations we've already found everywhere in Edgarpoe. Someone goes somewhere: a maiden dies, and her lover journeys in search of her spirit toward Dream-Land, or Paradise, or The City in the Sea, or ‘To regions which / Are Holy-Land.’ That's the master-plot in The Poems of Edgarpoe. It makes no matter whether the poem be a lyric, like “To Helen,” or lyrical ballads, like “Ulalume” and the rest. It's even the plot half-hidden in Part II of “Al Aaraaf,” where Ianthe and Angelo fell, Poe told us,

          for Heaven to them no hope imparts
Who hear not for the beating of their hearts.

But what kind of love is this, which Poe can express only when the beloved is dying or dead, a love to which passion is inimical?

Edgarpoe abhors passion. The love he seeks is incompatible with life. He imagines that it is the pure exercise in pure freedom of the pure imagination. He imagines—because it was true of his own life—that life itself, with its unassuageable physical passions, is a disease to be endured:

The moaning and groaning,
          The sighing and sobbing,
Are quieted now,
          With that horrible throbbing
At heart:—ah, that horrible,
          Horrible throbbing!
The sickness—the nausea—
          The pitiless pain—
Have ceased, with the fever
          That maddened my brain—
With the fever called “Living”
          That burned in my brain.

(“For Annie,” lines 19-30)

The throbbing at heart is simply the remorseless muffled beating of our built-in pacemaker, our Time Machine. A heart-beat is the pitiless refrain of our exile from Ideality. Poe's poems are all wild and yet wilder efforts to escape from the fever of living either backwards or forwards in time, and to attain either by dream-vision or by the intensity of a lover's devotion to his departed Ideal, a momentary residence in that never-yet-experienced realm of Ideality which he calls Al Aaraaf, Paradise, Aidenn or whatever else.

His longest and most familiar poems either chart the fever or recount the escape of the beloved to a happier star, or tell of the bereaved lover's attempt—often baffled and incomplete—to rejoin her there. A poet with a tale to tell, alive and suffering in the first half of the nineteenth century, would, expectably, find at hand a very fitting form for his narrative. That form is the literary ballad.

A ballad, as everybody knows, is a narrative poem in regular stanzas, often with a refrain: a tale told in song, the song residually suggesting dance. How wise of Wordsworth and Coleridge, when they plotted the downfall of Augustan literary decorum, to imitate folk ballads, the archaic form of poetry most compatible with democratic sympathies. Wordsworth even thought he was imitating the speech of actual men. But Edgarpoe has no such demotic sentiments. If, like his contemporaries Longfellow and Whittier in this country, like Mangan and Davis and Ferguson in Ireland, or Coleridge and Wordsworth and Scott and Barnes in Britain, Poe writes literary ballads, he nonetheless remakes the ballad form into the servant of his own peculiar needs.

I propose that Edgar adapted the ballad convention in two ways. One set of his lyrical ballads—“El Dorado,” “Annabel Lee,” and “For Annie”—tell their tales in straightforward fashion, without refrains, the style approximating that of “Israfel,” “To One in Paradise,” and the songs in “Al Aaraaf.” The narrative content in these poems deals with the putatively successful escape of the speaker from the ‘horrible throbbing / At heart,’ from ‘the fever called living.’ The other set of Edgarpoe's ballads includes “Lenore,” “Ulalume,” and “The Raven”: ballads wildly declaimed to a madder music, an insanely inescapable meter and the demented recurrences of far-fetched rhyme and interior rhyme. In these the speaker is desperately trying to burst out of the prison of his passions, but he cannot do so; he is trapped, and can only endure the thumping repetitions of a refrain like ‘Nevermore.’

There's one poem which doesn't lend itself very well to my clear schematization. This is “Bridal Ballad,” which has one of the most unfortunate rhymes in American poetry this side of Thomas Holley Chivers. The rhyme I mean comes toward the end of the third of five stanzas. The ballad-speaker is a lady who has just been re-married after being widowed; but alas, her new husband's ‘voice seemed his who fell / In the battle down the dell, / And who is happy now.’ Already we are supposed to feel a shudder that the bride is not as happy as her dead first husband is. But her new husband—

… spoke to re-assure me,
                    And he kissed my pallid brow,
While a reverie came o'er me,
And I sighed to him before me
(Thinking him dead D'Elormie),
                    ‘Oh, I am happy now!’

Edgar, how could you bruit a name so preposterous as ‘D'Elormie,’ so patently a forced rhyme for ‘o'er me’ and ‘before me’? I can see Edgar chewing his pencil, thinking of a name that would rhyme: Boremie, Coremie, Doremie, Foremie, Goremie … How could he invent so absurd a name?

But that rhyme isn't all that's wrong with “Bridal Ballad,” it's only a symptom of its graver flaw. Poe is trying to sing the sweet music of “Israfel” in a situation requiring the hysterical ballad-cadenzas of “The Raven” or “Lenore.” The short lines, the insistent feminine rhymes, strain for a lilt at odds with the matter of the tale, a tale he tells more successfully in the prose of “Ligeia.”

If I'm right about “Bridal Ballad” then maybe there's something in my theory that Poe's ballads differ from each other because they attempt two separate variations on his master-plot. In the sweet ballads the speaker escapes his mortality. In “Eldorado,” the knight sets out on his quest for that place, grows old without finding it, at last meets a ‘pilgrim shadow’ who directs him to press onward, ‘Over the Mountains / Of the Moon, / Down the valley of the Shadow.’ That's all; nothing is specified, not even the knight's name. It's nothing but the archetype, sung to a tune that suggests the quest may yet be accomplished. If we read “For Annie” with only its plot in mind, we learn—as we have already learned—that the speaker has been delivered into the quietude of his death-sleep, freed at last from the torments of passion. He is now in good case because reunited in death with ‘A dream of the truth / And the beauty of Annie.’ In “Annabel Lee,” the quest is likewise successful although the speaker is still alive. The intensity of his love for his bride ‘in her sepulchre there by the sea’ is so great that he can sing triumphantly of their ‘love that was more than a love,’ a love coveted by the angels who sent a cold wind ‘killing and chilling my Annabel Lee.’ Now that she's been chilled and killed, he can go on worshipping her. This must be so because their love was never a gross passion but a Pure Ideality even when she was alive. After all, she was only a child and he was a child in that kingdom by the sea.

“Lenore,” on the other hand, is a ballad of a love thwarted and a lover tormented. The first and third stanzas lament her death—Richard Wilbur suggests that these lines are spoken by ‘either the family priest or one of the false friends of the dead Lenore.’ Whoever the speaker, he calls for conventional exequies—‘Let the bell toll! … Come, let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!’ and he upbraids her dissenting lover: ‘And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more!’ The second and fourth stanzas are Guy de Vere's impassioned and contemptuous reply, in which he attacks her wicked family (‘Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth, and ye hated her for her pride; / And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her—that she died’). He refuses to join in their hypocritical rituals which would but mock her soul ‘from the damnéd Earth’; instead,

And I—tonight my heart is light—no dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days.

Poe worked this poem over and over, publishing it first in 1831 as “A Paean,” written in simple quatrains, with only one speaker, the bereaved husband. This poem is so different from “Lenore” (it does not even contain her name) that it may be read as yet another of Poe's ballads; the dramatic contrast achieved by dividing the tale between two speakers first appears in the 1843 version, in short lines and sixteen-line stanzas. The final version of 1844 made numerous changes of diction and improved the poem further by regularizing the meter into fourteeners. The diction is full of operatic gesticulation—‘Ah, broken is the golden bowl. … See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore. … Peccavimus; yet rave not thus. … Avaunt! avaunt!’ The mise en scène, evidently contemporary in “A Paean” has been made vaguely medieval in “Lenore,” and the conflicting views argued and ranted by Guy de Vere and the friend or priest—I think he is a priest who advises ‘let a Sabbath Song / Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!’—this dialogue casts the priest as the villain in the piece, a convention familiar to readers of Gothic romances about wicked prelates and evil monks. So “Lenore” is a Gothic ballad in the operatic mode, in which Guy de Vere upholds the ideality of his pure devotion, while the priest is the spokesman of a corrupt conventional Christian piety.

For years and years I thought “Lenore” ridiculous; now, having figured it out, have I proved too clever by half at the expense of my own taste? I won't go so far as to say I like the poem, but I find myself more tolerant of its excesses than I ever thought possible. Now when I read “Lenore” I no longer think, Who can suspend disbelief in such incredible language? No, I imagine the stage of the Met, murky in a dull amber light, and a scene in an unwritten opera by Berlioz.

Not even the stage of the Met can provide a reality, or an artifice, sufficient for the mental staging of “Ulalume.” This ballad has to be taken on its own terms, or not at all. And what are its own terms but that the reader or hearer surrender his own will, his own sense of how things are, how poems move, how the language embodies a meaning—surrender all this to the hypnotic spell of “Ulalume.” Here Edgarpoe has contrived a meter of mechanical precision and a diction of portentous obscurity. He tells his tale slowly, doubling back with line after line of refrain-like redundancy, nearly smothering the story-line in a concatenation of improbable rhymes. Reading “Ulalume” is like making a meal of marzipan—there may be nourishment in it but the senses are deadened by the taste, and the aftertaste gives one a pain in the stomach.

For years, “Ulalume” made me sick. I refused to surrender my will, my rhythms, my hold on the reality of language, to go along on the trip Edgarpoe's melancholy ballad-singer describes. I have had on occasion—the occasion was the yearly recurrence of Poe in my course on American Literature—to flog myself through the poem again and yet again. And to read all the exegetes and commentators. Of whom Richard Wilbur is, as he is so often, the most helpful. And now, by God, now at last I've got it! Look—

The skies they were ashen and sober;
          The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
          The leaves they were withering and sere:
It was night, in the lonesome October
          Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
          In the misty mid region of Weir:—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
          In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Simple. What's he saying but that on a certain October night, an unforgettable sad anniversary, he went for a walk in the woods? But why is so slight a message delivered in such a pompous, inflated, elephantine style? When Poe chants ‘The skies they were ashen and sober,’ doesn't that periphrastic they indicate his loss of control of the rhythm, the mark of a frantic hack padding out the meter of his line? Ye gods, he does it again in line 2, and yet again in line 3! And then, introducing his ‘dim lake of Auber’ and his ‘misty mid region of Weir,’ what does he do but repeat these lines! Not until I took seriously the full title of the piece—“Ulalume—A Ballad”—did I recognize what he was up to. A ballad has incremental repetition, tells its story in song. Poe's tale can't move any faster than the music, the music is more important than any of the words. Poe even scores his words for a particular composer—for who is Auber but Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, whose piece ‘Le Lac des Fées’ was in the popular repertoire at the time (1847). Lewis Leary, who uncovered this, also identified ‘the misty mid regions of Weir’ as alluding to the artist Robert Walter Weir of the Hudson River School, a romantic landscape-painter. So I have to conclude that Poe, setting his scene with the help of a faëry ballet and a wispy painting, is not actually in the woods of Westchester County at all, but is already in an ideal landscape imaginable only to artists and bereaved lovers. At first convinced of madness in Poe's method, perhaps, I began to suspect, there was also method in his madness.

Here once, through an alley Titanic,
          Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
          Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
          As the scoriac rivers that roll—
          As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
          In the ultimate climes of the Pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
          In the realms of the Boreal Pole.

Ten lolloping lines to say, ‘I roamed with my Soul when my heart was as turbulent as a volcano’—in fact, like Mount Yaanek, which Edward Davidson identifies as the recently discovered Mount Erebus in the Antarctic, hence ‘the ultimate climes of the Pole.’ Well, all this sound and fury signifies something, doesn't it?

The ballad continues as a debate between Self and Soul, conducted in an allegorical nocturnal landscape. Self is swayed by the heart, when

                                                  a miraculous crescent
          Arose with a duplicate horn—
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
          Distinct with its duplicate horn.

Which in the language of “Ulalume” means the planet Venus, the image of the Goddess of Love. ‘And I said—“She is warmer than Dian: / She rolls through an ether of sighs …”’ Better watch out, Self, for this Astarte may be warmer than Diana but not as chaste: she's the figure of passion, so not to wonder that your enthusiasm for her makes Psyche droop her wings. Self ‘pacified Psyche and kissed her / And tempted her out of her gloom’; they take off in pursuit of Astarte, since Self thinks she'll lead them ‘To the Lethean peace in the skies’—but they're brought up short

          By the door of a legended tomb:—
And I said—“What is written, sweet sister,
          On the door of this legended tomb?”
          She replied: “Ulalume—Ulalume!—
          'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”

Ulalume? There's a chiming euphony among the names of Poe's lost loves: Ulalume, Eulalie, Helen, Lenore, Ulalume, surely, is a nonce-word, and it has been suggested that it means ‘light of the dead,’ for Ule is the Turkish word meaning ‘dead,’ as in ‘Ule Deguisi,’ which Poe misquoted in a note to “Al Aaraaf” as the Turkish name for the Dead Sea. With these exotic names—Auber, Weir, Yaanek, Ulalume—Poe is being at once exact and diaphonous, imputing the meaning in the music, such as it is.

The rest of the tale goes on another two stanzas—Self's heart ‘it grew ashen and sober,’ and Self recollects that tonight is the very date that he ‘brought a dread burden down here’—that is, he buried Ulalume a year ago, and now, on this night of October (what can it be but the 31st, All Hallow's Eve, when the dead have a special influence upon the living), he has unwittingly revisited her tomb. And Self and Psyche conclude that the ‘woodlandish ghouls,’ that is, the spirits of the dead who possess the dim woods of Auber on this night, have tried to assuage their grief with ‘the spectre of … This sinfully scintillant planet.’

Self, Self, how could you be so unwitting? How wander through such unforgettable landscape without knowing you'd been there before? The fact that Self doesn't even know where he is should tell us, this ballad-singer is mental. He has been driven wild with grief, his heart is a seething volcano of scoriac rivers, and he wanders in a trance. Some have thought that the Astarte image signifies that the singer's heart has been drawn away from the path of Psyche—the unending worship of his dead Ulalume—toward a new love, a more gross, less pure, heartfelt passion for a living woman, from which Psyche only with difficulty—and with the aid of the ghouls, or shades of the dead—redeems him.

That seems reasonable. But why, why, so many obfuscations in the telling? Why bury this kernel of meaning under such rivers of lava that roll?

Typical of Edgarpoe. His art conceals while it reveals, reveals while it conceals. Nothing is further from his intention than to sing a simple song, or use the language of clear and common speech. These meters, rhymes, redundancies, the portentous tone, the inflated diction, all, like the early references to musician and painter, put the actual experience at an aesthetic distance, impose upon it a new form, an expression completely different from that given to gross affairs like passions and hungers of the flesh, a language other than that in which this workaday world haggles over prices and orders breakfast. To explore his inward soulscape Edgarpoe had to take the vocables of this workaday dialect and from such unpromising stuff create moods and meanings ne'er attempted yet in prose or rhyme. Mallarmé understood his intention, but—I have asked it before and I ask it again—did Edgarpoe really ‘donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu’? Un sens plus pur? Aux mots de la tribu? Or did he obfuscate—not purify—the language of the human tribe, in order to disembody language from its gross husks of meaning. And what remained—what Edgarpoe wanted—was the rhythms of the songs sung by ghouls.

Ballads sung by ghouls and madmen. For the narrator of “Ulalume” is in a scoriac frenzy, insane with grief and frustration. So is the ballad singer of “The Raven,” although Poe very cleverly doesn't have him begin his ballad as though aware of the fact. But the ballad he sings tells us, shows us how it happened. In the course of his own ballad he traces the inexorable course of his condition, from his initial weakness and weariness, through his regretful grief at the death of Lenore, to a frenzied and masochistic persecution of his own soul. The plot of the ballad is, This is the way the narrator went mad of grief for Lenore. (The narrator is doubtless that same Guy de Vere whom we left at her bier in an earlier ballad.) All this is told in stanzas which combine inexorable metrical regularity with a rhyme and interior-rhyme scheme of fiendish complication—everything not only ending with but tending toward the one unbending, shiver-sending word in the refrain: ‘Nevermore!’

Edgarpoe at last wrote a poem based upon the repetition of a single word, that word said o'er and o'er until its meaning becomes as nothing, or legion; the mesmeric spell of the same repeated syllables overpowering the mind of his narrator, the sonorous chiming and sorrowful repetitions of ‘Nevermore’ sweeping away all propensity for independent thought.

Thus the mind of his narrator (Guy de Vere)—and of his reader—me—is paralyzed by all those Nevermores. They work their spell all the more inexorably because spoken by no one, spoken by a bird—the only bird (save the paroquet in “Romance” who taught young Edgar his alphabet to say) with the power of imitating human speech. The bird repeats its one-word glossary of woe with an insane regularity, a regularity which invites the still madder plausibility lent it by the narrator's arranging his questions not only so that they occupy the regularly spaced interstices between the bird's cacophonous utterances, but arranging them so that the raven's single word becomes a lingua franca of an oracular world, giving the inevitable reply as though decreed by the fates to the increasingly self-lacerating and desperate questions of its interlocutor.

Or so it seems, as long as we willingly sink into the intellectual stupor which Edgarpoe's pounding rhythms and clanging rhymes are intended to produce in us. Just let your mind fight back, just a little, against the maniacal regularity, the hypnotic fanfare in which the same combinations of rhyme recur with the inexorability of a Chinese water torture—just resist the spell a little bit, and the whole contraption suddenly comes apart at the seams. You shake your ears and your tongue gasps for a fresh breath. A body'd have to be stark raven mad to go along with Poe's ludicrous poem! What an imposture. Are we supposed, supinely, to admit the plausibility of a raven knocking on the door of a lonely chamber on a stormy night, entering as the door is flung open, installing itself upon the bust of Pallas, and forever croaking ‘Nevermore’? Are we expected to believe that the youth in his chamber actually would address the errant bird as

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird
          or devil!—
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee
          here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—
On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”

And we're not supposed to laugh when

                                                            Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

Now, I confess that one of the chief powers exercised upon me by the poems of Edgarpoe is the power to make me wince. As I once told an audience in France. I'm prone to wince because—well, maybe not so much because of Poe as because of my own taste in verse. Growing up, as I did, when the New Criticism was shaking the periwigs from their Chairs in the graduate schools and each new issue of the Kenyon or Sewanee review exposed still another poem of Donne's or Eliot's to the deft scalpel of a skilled explicator, I took it as a matter of faith that the highest art in poetry is that which heals dissociation of sensibility, the poem that thinks and feels simultaneously. Being a child of the age, I didn't question the cognate apothegms (a) that poetry which thinks at the expense of feeling is but versified prose; and (b) that verse which feels without the analytical aid and enrichment of the intellect is but slush or musical nonsense. How could I fit the strophes of Edgarpoe into a sensibility so straitened by training and circumstance?

Not only the foregoing, but also other, later accretions of the Sensibility of the Age worked on me against the poems of Poe. The idea that the language of poetry should not be a special, artificial diction, but should partake of the demotic power of street-corner speech—this notion, enacted in an out-of-date way by Wordsworth and revived in cracker-barrel fashion by Frost and Williams, is rampant in our land. It is intrinsic with other muzzy notions about democracy, hatred of elitism in art as in politics, and a widespread need to accept—even to make imagination dine upon and digest—the very banality of the thing-ridden life which surrounds us. All of these impulses militate against one's finding plausible Edgarpoe's entire poetic enterprise. His desperate avoidance of ordinary life, of usual language, of the flexible rhythms of actual speech, all tend to make his verse seem either grotesquely incompetent or purposively artificial, mannered, and ridiculous.

So, although it was Eliot who helped to rescue Edgarpoe from the opprobrium of an age which, in English-speaking countries considered his œuvre jejune, it was also Eliot who had earlier on urged Anglo-American taste away from any possibility of appreciating what Edgarpoe had wrought. History has many cunning passages. Turn the corner once again, and look—it's Edgarpoe himself who has so well instructed us in explication de texte that for years, for decades, we've used his own analytical method of reading poetry—against his poems. For what, after all, is Poe's famous essay, “The Philosophy of Composition,” but a demonstration of how he wrote—and how we should read—“The Raven”? Unless, by an act of will (like that by means of which I wrote those appreciative paragraphs about “The Raven” a page or so ago) we allow Poe's fantastication of language and the insistence of his meter to mesmerize our judgment, we will be likely to agree with Eliot's remark about “The Philosophy of Composition”:

It is difficult for us to read that essay without reflecting, that if Poe plotted out his poem with such calculation, he might have taken a little more pains over it!: the result hardly does credit to the method.

I propose to re-read “The Philosophy of Composition” and to try to determine—once and for all!—whether Poe's professed method has merit, or whether the whole show is a put-on. We mustn't forget how much Edgar A. Poe liked to trip us up—us, his readers, the very ones on whose complicity with his designs his fame and immortality depend. Is Poe a mad dog, biting the hands that would clasp his hand? Or is his setting of intricate intellectual traps indispensable to the exercise of his genius, and those traps being baited for and then sprung upon us the unavoidable circumstances to which we must accommodate ourselves in order to savor the strange gifts and visions which Poe's genius dictates that he give us on no other terms? What, then, is the ‘philosophy’ which Poe secretes in his poetic compositions so that he may have the duplicitous pleasure of revealing it, so that he may revel in both the witless ignorance of those who cannot comprehend him and in injuring the sensibilities of those who can but find that they've been diddled by his mastering mind? Let me not conclude so prematurely: for perhaps in Edgarpoe's philosophy there is a verity about the poetic process—how the poet makes the poem, what the poem does to the reader, what the meaning of the poem means. That's what he says is there; let's see.