SOURCE: Smith, Dave. “Edgar Allan Poe and the Nightmare Ode.” Southern Humanities Review 29, no. 1 (winter 1995): 1-10.

[In the following essay, Smith examines “The Raven” as an expression of Poe's despair as an orphan and an outcast.]

When I left home for college at the University of Virginia, I must have imagined history was something confined to textbooks and roadside commemorative markers, which occur in Virginia nearly as often as azaleas and daffodils. Among the splendid benefits of college nothing outweighs awakening to the presence of the past as it shapes and changes one's life. In 1963, for example, I lived in a cottage next door to James Southall Wilson, the founder of the Virginia Quarterly Review and a Poe scholar. He was also husband to the formidable granddaughter of President Tyler. He seemed to me, and I think he was, in accent, courtesy, rose gardening, and tales about Poe, an embodiment of the Southern gentleman, a type parents, preachers, and teachers invoked freely for my moral edification. Professor Wilson embodied the lost world of Southern refinement, principle, and neoclassical culture our schools proclaimed our due heritage. He was nothing like the men in my family, for whom being a Southerner meant only raising the stars and bars with a liquid rendition of Dixie.

Perhaps we find ourselves in the men that history isolates. Once, dawdling by the serpentine wall which Mr. Jefferson, as we were taught to call our founder, had built with slave labor, I exchanged pleasantries with a man who had written books I read in my classes, a man named Faulkner. Almost daily I walked to class by the brick pavilion where Edgar Allan Poe had lived in 1826. Poe was as great a Southern presence to me as Faulkner, for I had read his stories and poems. My school teachers were assiduous in noting that Poe was a Virginian like all of us, not merely a name in a textbook. Poe and Faulkner suggested to me I was not wholly outside a history found in textbooks. I was of it and of them.

I don't think I much considered what I was until my first-year English class read Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, a book which made me so aware of “Southernness” that I remember where I read almost every page. I felt I was reading about family. Mine was the sort of family made mobile and modestly prosperous after the Second World War. I spent summers with my grandparents, often taking Sunday rides in a green Hudson automobile, meandering through the woody burgs of Yorktown and Williamsburg. These were places people lived in, not the toy villages they are now. I played on Virginia's much bloodied battlefields, but I did not trouble myself to know exactly whose blood was spilled or why.

Even as I began to see myself connected to others in the Southern story, I grew aware I also stood outside the official Virginia history, for I belonged to no patrician family and no prep school, hardly knew what an Episcopalian was, let alone a Catholic, and could point to no cultural ancestry which I possessed or whose loss, with family ground, shadowed me. I grew up in a subdivision where backyards debouched onto farms that had always been there, farms tended some by tractors, some by black laborers with names like “Peanut.” They seemed to think my name was “Mistuh.” Those farms are gone. Those who called me “Mistuh” are gone. Not gone with the wind but with the developers who bulldozed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses and schools for shopping centers, who made our Baptist Church an anachronism like Philip Larkin's in “Church Going.” Change in the South is the relentless bastard of greed. Its peculiar violence, so characteristic of a place in metamorphosis, leaves the Southerner orphaned, intensely aware of being there and simultaneously not being there.

That awareness marks Poe's writing, as actively in his poetry as in his fiction. Poe's university room, in 1963, was identified by a plaque that made it officially historic, yet a student lived in the room. I don't believe I ever saw its interior and so I could think of Poe, despite my old teachers, as a disembodied creator of tales, not a man. But I could also think of him as alive behind that door, a student with a university life not radically unlike my own. In this way, too, I was both in and out of Southern history. It did not then occur to me that Poe may have felt the same.

Today, the memorializers at the University have erected a barrier to this awareness. An impervious Plexiglas door seals his room, into which the monied visitor, that coveted pigeon, may gaze as if into Poe's soul. What the visitor will see is historically correct: a wooden bed, small desk, a few chairs, a rug, living accoutrements. Oddly, a raven (can it be plastic?) is perched on a branch as naturally as if it were a poster of Def Leppard. No stereos, no rack of books and tapes, no knickknacks, no letters from home, no photographs of mom and pop and favorite girl. The black-and-white prospect is sterile and chilling. They have buried Poe in plain view to a greater extent than Poe himself managed. University administrators seem to believe history is a containable pollutant. Undefiled, tourists come and stand and look for Poe as if he were Elvis, Sinbad, or Madonna. Some have read Poe and others have seen the Vincent Price movies. They want to see Poe, the bard of our nightmare of dispossession.

To be banished from the garden is western civilization's most painful sanction. It is recorded in the Genesis case of Adam and Eve vs. God. It is recorded in a long literary tradition of gardens and exiles. The intellectual historian of the South, Lewis P. Simpson, explains the garden image in The Dispossessed Garden. He calls it a “pastoral plantation” and defines it as “a secure world redeemed from the ravages of history, a place of pastoral independence and pastoral permanence” (17) and “a homeland of the life of the mind” (23). Simpson believes there was little modernist alienation in the antebellum Southern mind which, as he says,

was cut off from what affected the general stream of literary culture because of the involvement of the Southern man of letters in the politics of slavery. He could not participate in the opposition to society which distinguishes the function of the man of letters in Europe, and in New England, where it marks in important ways the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne.

(38)

The antebellum mind viewed the Jeffersonian garden as encompassing, perhaps engendering, a civilization whose classico-Christian values link individuals to supernatural continuity, a community of souls. Yet the garden was lost to the encroachments of the modern world, to commercialized values, a dispossession and outage dramatized by civil war and so intensely felt that it became the signature of Southernness. The Southern literary voice is that of an outcast, an orphan, an outsider cut off from communal support and, importantly, communal definition which he once had and which henceforth he carries like a threatening headache. Or a pastoral memory. Or myth. James Joyce causes Stephen Daedalus to declaim, on Irish soil, this modern, nationalist, pathology: “History is the nightmare from which I cannot awake.” If Southerners could have thought it, they might have said it: Alienation, c'est moi.

The nightmare of half-being, half-knowing is that of not being and not knowing: dispossession. Until the twentieth-century so-called Renascence, Southern literature occupies only the garden of half-being and half-knowing, a netherland of knightly gentlemen, asexual ladies, and a contract Heaven. The divorce from reality experienced by protagonists is a denial of history, an orphaning. When the denial's lie festers sufficiently to invade the body of society, sickness requires treatment; writers probe the actual, becoming aware that historical conditions of ignorance, poverty, defeat, pain, brutality, hopelessness, self-delusion, and isolation from community have configured the South as different from the American ideal of positive change and credible hope.

That ideal empowered Jefferson to raise a university in the garden, to foster an enlightenment whose headache was slavery. The black man was, according to Simpson, “the gardener in the garden,” as much founder as Jefferson himself. The absent hand that let his garden go to seed was, inevitably, the slave's. Who more than a slave was the orphan dispossessed of his garden? Who more than an orphan could chronicle the simultaneously personal and cultural nightmare of outage?

We might answer that the nineteenth-century voice would be, wouldn't it, Charles Dickens? Or his American peer born scarcely three years earlier, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, I think, was also a gardener, a transplanter of the English garden of verse into dark American soil. From the first poems he published at age eighteen to his last, and in his remarks on form, Poe coveted an invariable, mechanistic prosody which might with legal force yield a predictable life, stable and evident, perhaps compensation for what his life lacked. His essay “The Philosophy of Composition” argues a dogmatic methodology he believes will lead him to improvisation and to an impression of platonic beauty which “The Raven” seems to many to have achieved. Even T. S. Eliot, no admirer, conceded Poe sometimes made the true magic of poetry. But Poe's rational blueprint of process tells us only what he thought about the poem; it does not tell us much of what he used to think the poem, or why.

“The Raven,” unequivocally the most famous of Poe's small body of poetry, may be among our most famous bad poems. Americans are fond of saying we do not read and do not care for poetry. It may be so. Yet Americans commonly recognize Poe's bird as subject of a poem by a weird guy who drank himself to death. Written and published in 1845, in print steadily for 148 years, the stanzas of “The Raven” are sonic flashcards. We may not know Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, or Eliot. But we do know Poe. We know “The Raven.”

A poem that might have been designed by Benjamin Franklin, “The Raven” purports to be explained by Poe's “Philosophy of Composition.” Poe wrote his essay for crowds smitten by his bird. Interestingly, he does not justify poetry with morality, as Emerson and Whitman would. He pretends to expose the poet's trade. Some recent criticism has seen “The Raven” as a parody of Romantic poems of personal discovery. Perhaps. What Poe leaves unsaid peels, layer by layer, toward two questions answerable only by speculation. The first asks why “The Raven” has for fifteen generations commanded the imaginations of people who have often enough known it to be a bad poem. The second question asks if Poe is a Southern writer. They are related questions.

That “The Raven” is a bad poem is unacceptable to many readers, and Poe people are not swayed much by rational argument. Were they, the plot alone would convict Poe. A man sits late in a storm; he laments a lost lady love; a bird not ordinarily abroad at night, and especially not in severe weather, seeks entrance to the human dwelling; admitted, the bird betrays no fright, no panic, its attitude entirely focused on its host—an invited guest; the bird, then, enters into a ventriloquial dialectic with the host and is domesticated to become an inner voice; we might say it is the voice of the innerground as opposed to underground, which word means much to the American spirit with its reasons to run, to hide, to contain itself. Action then ceases.

Poe knew this one-man backlot production for the smoker it was. His embrace of gothic machinery includes a terrified, obsessed man, an inhospitable, allegorical midnight in December, a “gifted” animal, extreme emotional states, heavy breathing of both cadence and melodramatic signifiers (grim, gaunt), the supernatural presence of inexplicables (perfume, Pallas, bird), all to portray a psychic battle in the mind. Poe assembles a version of saloon theater for the mind's ear. But his poem's form emerges from the unbuckled ways of the ode, the loosened metrics of which Poe knew in the work of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Poe's editorial slush pile was full of their imitators. Odes attracted people because, as Gilbert Highet has said, they “soar and dive and veer as the wind catches their wing.” The capacity for passion, personal experience, ambitious public utterance, and a celebrative finish defines the ode. The boosterism, self-infatuation, and lyceum podiums of nineteenth-century America made Poe and the ode a natural match.

Poe was drawn to what was left of the Pindaric ode with its systemically recurrent parts. The classical ode, both Horatian and Pindaric, implies fixity and continuity. The form manifests noble purpose, dignity of subject and demeanor; it is ordinarily public address with an encoded civics lesson. The same explosions of social change which scattered people over the globe loosened the metrical grasp of this lyric form until it is, in American practice anyway, not readily different from an elegy. Indeed, as comedians know, ode is a word suspect to both poet and reader, a synonym for what Ezra Pound meant by “emotional slither.” Once, perhaps, the ode celebrated and the elegy lamented. Both are, in some measure due to Poe, less specialized in contemporary practice.

Poe was attracted to the ode because, as English Romantics had used it, a classical rigor was maintained while a daring shift had begun which would result in lyric, singular, interior expression. Paul H. Fry, in The Poet's Calling in the English Ode, points to Allen Tate's “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” where Tate stands at the cemetery but cannot enter and be among that historical order. The ode permits Tate, Fry says, to dramatize that moment of being there and not being there, an awareness of visionary discontinuity prerequisite to pastoral. With “abysmal frustration,” Fry says, the ode writer at that gate discovers there is “no threshold at all between the self and what is unknown, or other,” and the ode of all forms “most boldly and openly tests the possibility of calling in the Spirit” (2). The intent of the ode is to marry the poet's voice with the God-voice in order to manifest reality—life, death, or other. The ode-voice identifies with, i.e., celebrates, all that it summons because whatever its various registers of discourse may be, it means to praise a “belonging-to” quality.

That the language strategies Poe employs, largely yoked under the braided tropes of reiteration and interrogation, are distantly related to the Pindaric tradition of triadic movement which desires aesthetic completion as well as to the Horatian tradition of monody seems obvious enough. It is not my intent to follow Poe's descent from either. Nor do I mean to examine the micrometrical features of the poem, but a look at a single stanza is helpful to establish Poe's chains of repetitions:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“'Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
                                                                      Only this and nothing more.”

Poe termed the meter of this quintet-plus-a-hemistich stanza “octameter acatalectic,” with alternation of “heptameter catalectic” in line five and “tetrameter catalectic” in the bob, or sixth line. The norm is a duple foot, either trochaic (louder) or iambic (softer). Lines one, two, and three have sixteen syllables; lines four and five have fifteen, and line six has seven. Full lines are broken by a mid-caesura and halves of each line link internally by rhyme exact or slant. The half-line, a lyric staple, surges against the longer and outswelling rhythm of the full line. The full line is a prose rhythm by virtue of both its feet-patterns of ascent and descent and its unitary sprawl and self-containment. The sonic adventure of each stanza is like a contained body of water into which some weight is dropped, causing outward swelling of wave action. When these waves reach and rebound from the containing walls, they dash against each other. Narrative events create new waves. The result is a psychic chaos, a pace that stumbles, almost, upon itself, imitating panic, queasiness, and fear. Poe wanted a rhythmic trance he felt was conducive to an impression of beauty but wanted the trance to dispossess the reader from tranquil stability. He relies on the catalectic, or broken pattern, a missing syllable that “bumps” our progression. Poe exploits a ballad half-line, with its comfortable lyric expectations, its mnemonic power, and its narrative momentum to tell a virtually plotless story, a story entirely interior and psychological. He has telescoped the ballad line into the ode's stanzaic regularity, controlling tropes, public address, and mixed dictions to accomplish what appears a personal complaint, not the ode's meditational tone for imponderables such as art, beauty, life, and death. The tale served by his machinery is the dispossessing myth of lost love, which Poe routinely furnishes with classical allusions to establish eternal resonance.

Our affection for Poe's bird must be, in some measure, due to his adaptations, clunky and juryrigged as they appear. Poe thought his work daring, and it is, in the presentation of the nightmare of absent consolation, or belonging-to. “The Raven” reverberates not with the usual flight-to-vision, return-enlightened celebration, but with the psychic thrill of confronting despair, isolation, and the utter futility of lovely words. The nightmare vision made the poem an allegory of the darkest self in terror.

Robert Lowell, in “Skunk Hour,” echoes Milton when he says “I myself am hell; nobody's here.” Poe's parable of loneliness, like Lowell's, nudges the reader beyond the problem of man without woman. The condition of self's hell is an orphan sensibility. It does not require too great a leap to read Poe's poem as the figure of a dispossessed garden, an eroded Southern culture, in which Poe seeks to know what, in any real sense, we might belong to. If the poem centers the bereaved lover, it emphasizes his plight as outsider. Poe finds himself alone in the time and season of human intercourse at its lowest ebb; a time, indeed, when we remind ourselves that we had better change our ways, or else—as Dickens' Scrooge learns. A knock at his door should bring Poe a human visitor, if any, an emissary from the community; yet there is darkness, and then the Raven, the predator. And a predator who seems to know Poe is doomed to an absence of civil intercourse, a silence, and words which echo without effect. Poe understands and declares that even the bird will leave him, as all others have done, as hope has done. With this, Poe's poem has arrived at nightmare, the living isolation from fellowship that popular horror movies have turned into the ghoulish marches of the living dead. If Poe's bird seems deadly, the incantatory rhythms which evoked the birdspell are the forbidding stanzas which clank forth and enchant us as if the bird were enacting some chthonic ritual. The bird, in fact, makes no move after arrival. It does not threaten, seems entirely content, is a creature not unfamiliar to odes. Yet how different from, say, a nightingale so sweetly caged by a form which for Poe permits the witness to come close to his creature and yet keep safe, a glimpsed but not engaged threat. Still, having summoned the raven, Poe cannot so easily deny or repress it: he tells us the bird sits in the forever of that last stanza, a curse neither expiated nor escaped. The bird is, as Ted Hughes has seen and shown with Crow, a nightmare.

I had better, at this point, say a nightmare of alienation. Alienation from what? Lenore, the woman who is always there and constantly not there, of course. I remind myself, again, that the ode is a celebratory form, a public form, and I am not apt to think of the “raven” as either, so private is its agon from start to finish. Again what is dramatized is what doesn't happen, the human visit; a moment of social cohesion fails; but a visit occurs that shifts the abandoned speaker toward public experience. The erotic, aesthetic, and familial resonances Poe celebrates in the missing Lenore may be read as symbolic of community. It will be missing eternally, for Poe cannot lift his soul “from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor” and that in-escape is the nightmare of alienation.

Doubtless, for most readers, Lenore, whoever she might have been and may be in her is-ness, constitutes the drawing power of the poem. We have loved and lost, felt heartbreak, felt ourselves abandoned. This is a basic country-western song and it sells more than we may want to think about. Yet few country-western songs last in admiration or consciousness as “The Raven” does. Poe's addition of the nearly voiceless but intimidating bird employs Gothic machinery to touch unresolved fears of what's under the bed or behind the door. But Poe's bird has the power of knowledge—it knows us—and this makes the world a more slippery place than we had thought. It exposes our inside. That is a problem for Poe, and for all of us, because he knows that the inside without connection to an outside is an emptiness, a desert. No self can supply love's support, community sustenance, or the hope we once drew from an outside system. Poe's terrible fable sticks with us because no matter what our intellects conceive, our hearts believe we are alien, each of us, and there is a god-bird that knows it, too.

But alienation from Lenore seems, finally, not enough. Poe is paralyzed, room-captured, divorced from books, ideas, poetry itself, and in the last stanza from the goddess of wisdom, Pallas, who has until this minute sat Virgil-like over Poe's bower. Not Pallas now; now the Raven. Why? Can being dumped by hard luck account for this depth of despair? Poe, in some important ways, has a modern's existential attitude. He has understood the relentless industrial rapacity which Dickens so brutally knew. The connection between them is that both were dispossessed. Poe may have gotten his bird, as some argue, from Dickens. He got his alienation from hard times.

Poe loved women who died, often violently, diseased. His mother went first; he was two and an orphan. He was taken in and raised as ward of John Allan and his wife Frances, a sickly woman who would die on him, but first there would be Jane Stanard, on whom he had a fourteen-year-old's crush. She was thirty-one when she died insane. Poe suffered the death of three women before he finished being a moody teenaged boy. His foster father Allan wanted and had children by a second wife, who had little interest in Poe. Allan raised Poe as the squire-son of a rising businessman—to a point. But Poe was not Allan's blood son.

Poe felt he had second-class treatment from his foster family. He felt himself orphaned. At eighteen he went to the University of Virginia, where he was undercapitalized and made to feel his inferior circumstance. He was pushed outside that society, too. Returned to Richmond, he found himself an outsider, and he embarked on one of his secret journeys. Wandering, turning up, writing, editing, trying to establish a domestic community, then wandering off—this was the pattern of Poe's life. In every relationship and in every circumstance, he was the outsider, the orphan.

No one feels the powerful attraction of the being there and the not being there more than the orphan. Jay Gatsby shows it. Poe lived it. Americans are, by definition, orphans. We were all, at one point, come-heres, all by scheme equal in opportunity taken according to ability. The positive idea of national possibility underwrites the very imagining of the “new world.” Poe's foster father, John Allan, a Scot, embodies the chance to make it, and one cannot doubt he would trumpet the values of American opportunity were he with us, no less than that great Kiwanian Walt Whitman. But with Poe the brilliant shimmer of hope brought by morning sun was leaden early on. It grew heavier all his life. He did not belong. He could not declare a belonging-to, as Gatsby would learn. And he could not lie about the world as he saw it. He was an artist, a truth-teller—nothing is more obsessive in his tales than that need. His truth was a nightmare.

If we read “The Raven,” despite its absence of specific local details, as an “awareness” of the life of America in 1845, we see that Poe has conjectured the nightmare of the individual cut off from history, abandoned by family, place, and community love. He experiences personally what the South will experience regionally and the country will, down the long road, experience emotionally. Though he means to celebrate Lenore, what he most intensely celebrates is the union with community, the identity of place and people which Poe simultaneously has and has lost. In this, in 1845, he speaks for the Southern white and, paradoxically, for the slave paralyzed in his garden and also dispossessed. This story is still the nightmare. Having seen it, Poe celebrates the sensibility or imagination that suffers and knows simultaneously, ultimately the figure of the artist. This figure will sit in the lost garden, knowing its lostness, without explanation, but aware that the change is hopeless and continuous. This poem will, in its late variations, become our outlaw song of the renegade, the cowboy in black, the rebel without a cause. “The Raven” is the drama of nightmare awakening in the American poetic consciousness where there is no history which is not dispossession, little reality to the American promise, and nothing of consequence to place trust in except the song, the ode of celebration. Poe knew that he stood, like Tate, who called him cousin, at the gate to the answers. But he could not go beyond it. Like Tate, he sought to form a culture (because one did not exist) out of the English poetic baggage, but too often it failed. “The Raven” is the croaking and anguished nightmare ode of allegiance, and we have been finding ourselves in it ever since Poe began hearing “Nevermore.”