SOURCE: Ljungquist, Kent. “From Sublimity to Pictorialism: ‘Tamerlane,’ ‘Al Aaraaf,’ and Some Revisions in the Later Poetry.” In The Grand and the Fair: Poe's Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques, pp. 141-84. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1984.

[In the following essay, Ljungquist explores the aesthetic shift that Poe's poetry undergoes over the course of his writing career.]

In detailing thus far Poe's transition from the sublime to the picturesque mode, our sharp focus on the tales and criticism has scanted attention to the poetry, despite occasional allusions to “Dream Land,” “Fairy-Land,” or “The Coliseum.” The poetry, like the prose, however, presents a similar aesthetic shift. Nowhere in the poetry does the term “picturesque” appear, and Poe uses the term “sublime” just twice. Nevertheless, it would be unlikely that his aesthetic principles would bulk so large in the prose without having a similar impact on the poetry. In fact, the term “pictorial” has often been used to describe many of Poe's poems, such as “The City in the Sea,” without reference to the aesthetic assumptions that support such an assertion. Without acknowledging the vaguely phenomenological tenor of his term, Edward Davidson suggestively finds in Poe's poetry a “picturesque of consciousness,”¹ a phrase binding Poe to the pictorial conventions of his time but also indicating an uneasy encounter between persona and place. As in his fictional “landscapes,” Poe's poetry broaches the tensions and hazards for his speakers' connection with “the genius of the place.” His poetic settings are daemonically charged, whether by oracular agents in “Al Aaraaf” or by less benign spirits of the wood in “Ulalume.” Although Poe's aesthetic assumptions remain implicit in the poetry, he turns away from the awesome grandeur of “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf,” consonant with the themes of overweening pride and cosmic power, toward specifically pictorialized treatments in “The Raven” and “Ulalume.” Furthermore, the revisions of “The Valley of Unrest” and “The City in the Sea” follow the general modifications of Poe's aesthetics thus far outlined. Although landscape settings play a significant role even in minor poems like “Stanzas” and “Spirits of the Dead,”² this chapter will focus on “Tamerlane,” “Al Aaraaf,” and selected later poems that were revised according to this pattern.

I

The complicated syntax and the varied texts of “Tamerlane” have invited questions about its meaning. According to David Halliburton, “Tamerlane” is “a narrative poem trying to become a lyric,”³ a monologue delivered by a high spirit who cannot, except equivocally, assert his will. In contrast, Robert D. Jacobs finds a loosely-structured narrative revealing the title character's consciousness via his failure to come to grips with conflicting inclinations.⁴ Scholars have commented on the density of negative constructions in “Tamerlane,”⁵ a technique also used in the final stanza of “The Coliseum” to establish Poe's focus by suggesting what it is not. Poe's tortuous syntax reflects the struggle in Tamerlane's mind, the inner conflict represented by his desire to assume a higher order of experience. Approximation of this elevated stature, represented by Tamerlane's pride and vaulting ambition, demands a special syntax, a rhetoric of indirection. According to one of the rhetorical authorities of Poe's time, nothing could be “nobler or more majestic” than

when a description is carried on by continued negation; when a number of great and sublime ideas are collected, which, on comparison with the object, are found infinitely inferior and inadequate. Thus the boundaries are gradually extended on every side, and at length totally removed; the mind is insensibly led towards infinity, and is struck with inexpressible admiration, with a pleasing awe, when it first finds itself expatiating in that experience.⁶

In addition to using such a profusion of negative constructions, “Tamerlane” follows the pattern established by “A Descent into the Maelström” as well as other sublime works. The main character's faculties and emotions engage in a struggle by which he must become adequate to an unprecedented experience. The attendant response rekindles his imagination so that it can assert its power and thus put into perspective those objects that limit its dominance. Tamerlane's struggle is complicated by his lofty aspirations—pride and ambition—as well as by Poe's injection of themes that may or may not be resolved in the poem. Has Tamerlane, for example, put passion into perspective, or has passion inhibited him from sustaining earthly power? Moreover, what is the role of the natural world in Tamerlane's quest? Has natural grandeur inspired lofty thoughts, or has its unmediated, raw character seduced Tamerlane into wild imaginings? Even if resolution of these themes remains imperfect, the poem introduces a sublime realm described in the conventional aesthetic terminology of the period. Ambition may be “chain'd down” in the human spere, but not in the “world elsewhere” of the poem:

(As in the desert, where the grand,
The wild, the beautiful conspire
With their own breath to fan its fire)

(ll. 253-5)

Poe's appropriation of the grand and the fair in nature follows a familiar pattern of sublime evocation, his injection of terror into the 1827-8 fragmentary version of the poem reflecting perhaps an even more conventional triad of terms:

Not so in deserts where the grand,
The wild, the terrible conspire
With their own breath to fan his fire

(ll. 253-5)

Thus, as Jacobs has noted, the experience of majestic scenery—encompassing the grand and the terrifying—has a significant impact on Tamerlane's development. In the words of the earliest version of the poem, “the deep thunder's echoing roar” (1. 53), the rain, the wind, “the torrent of the chilly air,” the storm of nature startle him from his child-like slumbers. He awakens transformed, a participant in natural processes rather than a passive voyeur:

For I was not as I had been;
The child of nature, without care,
Or thought, save of the passing scene.

This passage, excised in the 1829 version, suggests that Nature may overwhelm the child-like or the faint of heart. For Nature possesses a “fearful beauty”; in terms of the aesthetics of obscurity, experience in nature may appall by challenging the faculties of clear perception and precise recollection. With passion unleashed, clear memory of Ada, with whom Tamerlane roams “the forest and the wild,” is obliterated. In attempting to remember, Tamerlane pursues the inexpressible, his strain articulated by a process of “continuous negation”:

I have no words, alas! to tell
The lovliness of loving well!
Nor would I dare attempt to trace
The breathing beauty of a face,
Which ev'n to my impassion'd mind,
Leaves not its memory behind.

(ll. 88-93)

With memory blurred, vision also becomes obscured, a confusion of the senses and faculties that marks the confrontation of Poe's characters with the sublime in his fiction as well as poetry:

In spring of life have ye ne'er dwelt
Some object of delight upon,
With steadfast eye, till ye have felt
The earth reel—and the vision gone?
And I have held to mem'ry's eye
One object—and but one—until
Its very form hath pass'd me by,
But left its influence with me still.

Poe expresses here a distinction between two forms of memory, the difference articulated perhaps more clearly by Wordsworth. In detailing the impact of retrospection, the British poet distinguishes between the emotional and factual content of memory:

                              The soul
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity.(7)

Unlike Wordsworth or his American counterpart William Cullen Bryant, however, Poe does not endorse a submission to a vast, “great whole.” Distinct from the nature lover in “The Island of the Fay,” Tamerlane does not pine for a unific whole that overpowers and obscures vision and memory. Contact with the “overpow'ring loveliness” of nature induces an over-stimulation, a disorientation that combines bliss and agony, the emotional complex of pleasure and pain:

There is of earth an agony
Which, ideal, still may be
The worst ill of mortality,
'Tis bliss, in its own reality,
Too real, to his breast who lives
Not within himself but gives
A portion of his willing soul
To God, and to the great whole—
To him, whose living spirit will dwell
With Nature, in her wild paths; tell
Of her wond'rous ways, and telling bless
Her overpow'ring loveliness!
A more than agony to him
Whose failing sight will grow dim
With its own living gaze upon
That loveliness around: the sun—
The blue sky—the misty light
Of the pale cloud therein, whose hue
Is grace to heav'nly bed of blue;
Dim! tho' looking on all bright!

(ll. 303-22)

By the 1829 version of the poem, however, Poe did not deem it appropriate to include this description of loveliness too bright to see. The disorientation induced by absorption in utter radiance gives way to a chiaroscuro of effects, a reflection of the disappointment and melancholy of the speaker. In Tamerlane's words, he has “won the earth”; no more physical territories exist to conquer. But human achievement measured in terms of sheer physical magnitude, the mathematical sublime, guarantees disappointment. In the words of “Al Aaraaf,” there will always be a “barrier and a bar” to human aspirations. Tamerlane comments on the feelings of lassitude attending his conquests:

By sunset did its mountains rise
In dusky grandeur to my eyes:
But as I wandered on the way
My heart sunk with the sun's ray
To him who would still gaze upon
The glory of the summer sun,
There comes, when that sun will from him part,
A sullen hopelessnss of heart.
That soul will hate the ev'ning mist
So after lovely, and will list
To the sound of the coming darkness (known
To those whose spirits hark'n) as one
Who in a dream of night would fly
But cannot from danger nigh.

Tamerlane and Ada walk together on a high mountain, their view from an eminence rendering the surrounding scenery paltry and insignificant as they observe “the dwindled hills” (l. 43). But their panoramic view from the heights ultimately depresses, foreshadowing Poe's statement in “The Domain of Arnheim” that magnitude, gauged in terms of sheer extent, fatigues the eye.

When Hope, the eagle that tower'd, could see
No cliff beyond him in the sky,
His pinions were bent droopingly—
And homeward turn'd his soften'd eye.
'Twas sunset: when the sun will part
There comes a sullenness of heart
To him who still would look upon
The glory of the summer sun.
That soul will hate the evening mist
So often lovely, and will list
To the sound of coming darkness (known
To those whose spirits harken) as one
Who, in a dream of night, would fly
But cannot from a danger nigh.

1827-8 / 1845 (ll. 187-200)

Thus, in “Tamerlane” the conventions of the sublime play a significant role: lofty mountains, panoramic prospects, austere deserts, roaring thunder, dark storms, and awesome blasts. Poe draws upon the full range of forms grand and fair in nature. The title character, moreover, experiences a “fearful beauty,” a “beauty of so wild a birth” that recalls familiar aesthetic categories. As early in his career as Poe's revisions were carried out, however, we can see him modifying his portrayal of sublime scenery in evolving texts of the poem. Rather than exploiting the conventional categories of the mathematical and dynamic sublime—the natural world couched in terms of sheer physical extent and raw energy—Poe makes an attempt, albeit imperfect, to make natural vistas reflect his speaker's psychological conflict. Poe's injection of greater psychological interest into a poem that supposedly deals with the main character's conquest of earthly grandeur is evident from his attachment of an early version of “The Lake” to the 1827-31 version:

For in those days it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less,
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake with black rock bound,
And the sultan-like pines that tower'd around!
But when the night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot as upon all,
And the black wind murmur'd by,
In a dirge of melody;
My infant spirit would awake
To the terror of that lone lake.
Yet that terror was not fright—
But a tremulous delight—
A feeling not the jewell'd mine
Could ever bribe me to define,
Nor love, Ada! tho' it were thine.
How could I from that water bring
Solace to my imagining?
My solitary soul—how make
An Eden of that dim lake?

(ll. 79-93)

The sublime aesthetic in this passage, rather than affording a range of typical images reflecting nature's grandeur, allows Poe to evoke the delightful horror that would become a hallmark of his finest prose and poetry. Nor are the images rendered indistinct by the darkening gloom and murmuring wind. Fulfilling Martin Price's claim that the sublime tends to evoke powers rather than pictures,⁸ Poe's pictorial treatment here does not render a scene in precise detail nor in photographic accuracy. The power awakened here carries a “tremulous delight,” a feeling akin to what Poe would later call perversity, a force that Tamerlane would not trade for earthly reward or even for love. He imagines that this power can transform a dim solitude into a kind of paradise.

With a sublime setting as a backdrop, “Tamerlane” presents the title character's encounter with passionate love. His spirit is moved by ambition but also by tenderness for Ada:

My spirit with the tempest strove,
When on that mountain peak alone,
Ambition lent it a new tone.

(1827 version, ll. 146-148)

A figure of supposed genius ultimately broken by pride and ambition, Tamerlane eventually comes under the assault of “bodiless spirits,” the genii of storms, sunshine, and calm. Faced with forces of terror and beauty, he looks nostalgically to Samarcand, but like other figures who harken to forms of dusky grandeur, he witnesses the sunset and obscuring mist, the sounds of coming darkness, the sense of all things withering at the evening hour. A cottager who has made half the earth his own, he faces the prospect of death “coming from the regions of the blest afar.” Interestingly, these “crowded, confused” inclinations of Tamerlane are described in both angelic and daemonic terms. At one point, he says of his love for Ada: “I lov'd her as an angel might” (l. 54). Just a few lines later, he acknowledges that the firmament is fraught with Ada's “unearthly beauty,” creating a struggle with “some ill demon, / With a power that left me in an evil hour” (ll. 173-4). Behind the “bodied forms / Of varied being” lies an entire array of “bodiless spirits,” both daunting and attractive. As Poe's speaker oscillates between consideration of these benign or malevolent beings, the attraction and terror of these varied forms can perhaps be encompassed in the ancient term “daemon,” a fuller expression of which is found in “Al Aaraaf.”

“Al Aaraaf” falls within the context of what J. B. Beer calls “the daemonic sublime.”⁹ In ancient Greece and Rome, the word “daemon” did not have the unfortunate connotations that it has subsequently acquired.

The common Christian idea presents a daemon with horns and a pitchfork, a devil, but this is the simplest stereotype, arising from equating daemons with Fallen Angels. This equivalence shows that the daemonic and angelic are closely related and shows that in Hebrew religious myth, as well as Greek myth, the daemons could be either good or evil.¹⁰

In ancient times, a daemon could bode ill or well, depending on one's intimacy with supernatural power. The daemonic has associations with force, uncanniness, a paradoxical feeling of awe and fear. Rather than having an exclusively evil coloration, the daemonic can provoke a positive emotional response. An occult source of power, the daemonic suggests emotions consonant with the experience of the sublime. In addition to the categories of dynamic or mathematical greatness, however, the sublime, according to Rudolf Otto, signifies the impress of the numinous.¹¹

An aspect of the impact of the numinous or the sublime, daemonic dread suggests the presence of the uncanny. Like the sublime, the daemonic can instill sensations of mystery, fascination, energy, vehemence; in its ancient context, it was either positive or active, rather than diabolical, in its implications.

An authentic form of the daemonic, in this sense, derives from the Near East, to many nineteenth-century American authors a geographical source of radical, primitive energies. Oriental daemonology surfaced prominently in Zoroastrianism, which attempted to account for the mingled existence of good and evil in the world. The co-existence of benevolent and malevolent principles leads to an experience of fear and awe derived from the impress on the human emotions of warring forces. Zoroastrianism, which partakes of a dualism between good and evil as does Christianity, received cogent expression in America in the characterization of Melville's Fedallah, the Near-Eastern daemon of Moby-Dick.¹² The strange deities of Arabia, which evolved as supernatural agents rather than as participants in natural rites, acted as pure products of religious consciousness. With all its Near-Eastern elevation and flavor and its counterpoise between good and evil, “Al Aaraaf” contains just such daemonic agents. Nesace and Ligeia, rarefied agents of God's mystery, become numinous messengers carrying the sublimity of the divine message. Poe's knowledge, use, and exposure to this sense of the daemonic can be clearly substantiated, for he associated daemonic energy, at least implicitly, with the sublime.

Committed to daemonology for other reasons than amateur dabbling in occult lore, the Romantics were fascinated by the concept of genius as a kind of daemonic urge.¹³ If Socrates, for instance, were guided by a personal daemon, his example showed that a supernatural force held sway over human understanding. From an ancient tradition, the Romantics learned that daemons were intermediary spirits, half-mortal and half-divine. Their responsibility was to “distribute” the destiny of individual men. Even in Christian antiquity, daemons need not have an evil coloring, since they acted as guardians of mankind. Later in works like Shelley's Promethus Unbound with its Aeschylean agent of destiny and Poe's “The Power of Words” with its names of Greek flavor (Oinos and Agathos), daemons possessed oracular charge of divine will. The Greek notion of daemonology became particularly attractive to the Romantics because of its association with skill or knowledge. In the artist-centered world of Romantic poetry, the poet could be literally and metaphorically possessed. Thus, the daemonic impulse suggested inspiration or inward energy without the attendant stricture of Christian orthodoxy. Possession became a morally ambivalent experience, both elevating and terrifying. Sir Walter Scott expressed these notions in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, wherein he commented: “The idea of identifying the pagan deities, especially the most distinguished of them, with the manifestation of demonic power … is not certainly lightly to be rejected.”¹⁴

The works of Shelley and Coleridge, two of Poe's literary models, also described extensively the mysterious potentialities of the mind impelled by the daemonic, whether these forces were good, bad, or indifferent. Poe was undoubtedly aware of the daemonic implications of “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Contrary to the common supposition, the title of Shelley's poem Alastor,¹⁵ rather than naming the hero, signifies an evil genius or cacodaemon. The Preface to Shelley's poem, moreover, contains explicitly sublime elements in reference to the protagonist's mental powers.

Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imagination unites all the wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture.¹⁶

In addition, Shelley gives considerable attention in Alastor to daemonic agents, grand landscapes, and the ultimate knowledge associated with the sublime.

Shelley's Queen Mab, in its revised and abridged form, was entitled The Daemon of the World, and according to Daniel Hoffman, served as Poe's prime poetic model in “Al Aaraaf.”¹⁷ In spite of the overtly revolutionary themes in Shelley's poem, both Queen Mab and “Al Aaraaf” contain daemonic supernatural agents, imaginary landscapes on a vast scale, and figures named Ianthe. In addition, Queen Mab, a transporter of divine knowledge, prefigures Nesace, the presiding spirit of Al Aaraaf. The diction used by each poet to exemplify his theme presents striking similarities. In Shelley's poem:

I am the Fairy Mab: to me 'tis given
The wonders of the human world to keep:
The secrets of the immeasurable past
In the unfailing consciences of men.

(Shelley, p. 5)

For Nesace:

By winged Fantasy,
My embassy is given
Till secrecy shall knowledge be
In the environs of Heaven.

Both poems also trace the theme of most cosmological poems of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—that of putting passion into perspective. As Angus Fletcher has noted, poems in the sublime mode have as one of their major thrusts the elimination of slavery to pleasure.¹⁸ Such large-scale poems serve to arouse readers from dullness, complacency, and habitual pleasure and to lead them to ideal, sublime, “Shelleyan” worlds. Following in this tradition, Poe indicates that carnal love and passion cannot be excused in the realm of Al Aaraaf:

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

(I:95-99)

Angelo and Ianthe fall, in particular, because they become enslaved in sensuous awareness rather than in the sublime enlargement of mental powers:

But two: they fell: for Heaven no grace imparts
To those who hear not for the beating of their hearts.

(I:176-177)

This literary continuity from the English Romantics to Poe receives support from his statement that Shelley's poetry is in “the sublime spirit” (H [The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe], XI, 255).

Although Poe's general familiarity with the sublime aesthetic has been established, his awareness of the importance of the daemonic merits further scrutiny. One readily recalls that one entire story, “Silence—A Fable,” focuses on a figure referred to only as “the Demon.” In the sublime “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the vast seascape contains “demons of the deep” (M [Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Talks and Sketches], II, 144). In a more circumscribed setting, the eyes of Poe's raven “have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,” while the poem “Alone” presents a speaker who faces the horrifying specter of “a demon in my view.” In “Ulalume,” the narrator encounters the grave of his lost loved one and asks, “What demon hath tempted me here?” Most significantly, “Shadow—A Parable” outlines the concept of the daemonic as an inward mental force. In this story, the demon's name is Zoilus: “Dead, and at full length he lay, enshrouded;—the genius and the demon of the scene” (M, II, 190).¹⁹ Suffice it to say that Poe's Dark Romanticism partakes generously of a merging of an explosive mental power and the ominous onset of daemonic dread. In summary, Poe's works, like those of Shelley and Coleridge, display the attributes of the daemonic sublime.

The connection between the daemonic and the sublime can be strengthened by reference to Poe's familiarity with the works and assumptions of the Gnostic writers and philosophers. Whether acquiring his knowledge from primary or secondary sources, Poe sprinkled his writings with references to Neo-Platonic philosophers such as Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, Eusebius, and Porphyry, and such Church Fathers as Origen, Tertullian, Augustine, and Epiphanius, who argued against the doctrines of the Gnostics and sometimes quoted extensively from them.²⁰ According to the Gnostics, this world is an enclosed cell, a temporary dwelling place that can be transcended by a burst of sublime knowledge (gnosis) to a world beyond and without limits. This greater world, a power system or daemonic realm charged with compulsive forces,²¹ encompasses a vast universe which admits of a plurality of smaller units with supernatural agents acting in spatial realms as well as within persons. Such Gnostic assumptions may explain, in part, “the happier star” of “Al Aaraaf,” which is inhabited by daemonic agents whose functions become compartmentalized by an unseen, divine spirit. Nesace and Ligeia live in such a semi-divine realm which inspires feelings of greatness and grandeur. Beyond the response to majesty, however, lies the experience of power.

On Al Aaraaf, God's power lies temporarily at rest, not overtly expressing divine will except in nature's tumultuous demonstrations. As Floyd Stovall first noted, the theme of divine power underscores that of majestic beauty in “Al Aaraaf”: “The poem is thus a representation, mainly pictorial, of the relation of God to the whole universe, but to the inhabitants of Earth and Al Aaraaf in particular, expressed in terms of power and beauty.”²² A misunderstanding develops, however, over the means of communication between God and His mortal creatures. In a passage which evokes the boundlessness of the mathematical sublime and the energy of the dynamic sublime, God speaks:

“What tho' in worlds which sightless run,
Link'd to a little system, and one sun—
Where all my love is folly, and the crowd
Still think my terror but a thunder cloud,
The storm, the earthquake, and the ocean wrath
(Ah! will they cross me in my angrier path).”

(I:133-138)

God's manipulation of natural forces is an emblem of His power but not its requisite. Man has misinterpreted God's power by seeing His will in the natural sphere alone; the sublime realm of ultimate knowledge, however, points out of space and out of time. Man has, in addition, lived under the misapprehension that the mortal realm represents his exclusive domain, but according to the Gnostic assumptions that Poe apparently appropriated in “Al Aaraaf,” our “one little system and one sun” resides amidst an array of systems, all pulsating with daemonic power. According to the Gnostic “daemonological interpretation of inwardness,”²³ man should deprecate his natural, miniscule state, dwarfed by the vast system of the cosmos, and attune his inner life to that wider locus of daemonic activity. One's inner mind can become possessed in the literal daemonological sense, since energetic powers can act either inside or outside the human constitution. In the realm of Al Aaraaf, the cosmic drama becomes externalized as each supernatural agent performs one particular function. As the texture of Poe's later poetry becomes more thoroughly pictorialized and the landscapes more circumscribed, such daemonic activity becomes internalized. According to the Gnostics, man's inner life becomes “an abyss from which the dark powers rise to govern our being,”²⁴ an apt description of human vulnerability to irrational forces and an appropriate gloss on the character of Poe's Gothic fiction.

Jacob Bryant's six-volume A New System of Antient Mythology ([London: J. Walker, hereafter cited as B.] 1807), as we have seen before, provides an even more immediate source for Poe's knowledge of daemonology. Most of the Gnostic and anti-Gnostic writers already mentioned receive ample treatment within the pages of Bryant's work. In addition, he provides considerable information on Near-Eastern and classical daemon worship that may have informed the composition of “Al Aaraaf”:

In short, the whole religion of the antients consisted in the worship of Daemons; and to those persons their theology continually refers. They were like the Manes and Lares of the Romans, supposed to be the souls of men deceased: and their deportment is thus described by Plato, as he is quoted by Plutarch: ‘Plato mentions the Daemons, as a race of Beings, by whom many things are discovered, and many good offices done, to men: and he describes them as an order between men and Gods. They are the persons, who by their meditation carry the vows and prayers of mortals to heaven: and in return bring down the divine behests to earth.’²⁵

Bryant, on several occasions, refers to benign agents or “Daemons, a set of benevolent beings, who resided within the verge of earth, and were the guardians of mankind” (B, III, 110). He labels one of these agents “Agathodaemon” (B, IV, 201-202, 210-211, 464; V, 308), thus nearly conforming to Poe's name Agathos in “The Power of Words.” Poe's reading in Bryant provides a likely source for his knowledge of the daemonic and his awareness of an inward force or power that could work positively or negatively, depending on one's rapport with the supernatural. These agents acted as messengers of God's will, vindicators of divine behests. Nesace and Ligeia, in other words, fall precisely within the daemonic framework outlined by Bryant.

In addition to the context provided by Poe's reading in the Romantic poets, the Gnostic philosophers, and Jacob Bryant, other sublime elements appear in “Al Aaraaf.” The star itself represents a visionary landscape of expansive splendor. In the first score of lines, the reader receives a typically sublime view from an eminence:

Away—away—'mid seas that roll
Empyrean splendor o'er the unchained soul—
The soul that scarce (the billows are so dense)
Can struggle to its destin'd eminence—
To distant spheres.

(I:20-25)

The God that inhabits such a realm appears both daunting and attractive, encompassing the paradox of fear and reverence that significantly marks the sublime. In his description of the deity, Poe invokes a vision of boundlessness as well as a mixture of terror and beauty, hallmarks of sublimity:

Spirit! that dwellest where,
In the deep sky,
The terrible and fair,
In beauty vie!
Beyond the line of blue—
The boundary of the star
Which turneth at the view
Of thy barrier and thy bar.

(I:82-89)

As in the sea tales, the sublime enlists man's reflective powers. Great proportion and intense energy suggest the dual attributes of the sublime but not its absolute requisites in “Al Aaraaf.” Poe therein associates Nesace's responsibilities with ultimate knowledge, “the never-to-be-imparted secret” mentioned in “MS. Found in a Bottle.” She will “bear my God's secrets thro' the upper Heaven” (“Al Aaraaf,” I:142), and “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” (“Al Aaraaf,” I:147-150). Sublime knowledge humbles; it dims the pride of the most confident, circumscribes and daunts as well as exalts the soul, fulfilling once again the dual attributes in “Tamerlane.”

As Nesace stares into the mysterious expanse of the heavens, she uses diction that is a harbinger of Poe's other major experiment in the sublime, “A Descent into the Maelström.”

She (Nesace) look'd into Infinity—and knelt.
Rich clouds, for canopies, about her curl'd—
Fit emblems of the model of her world
Seen but in beauty—not impeding sight
Of other beauty glittering thro' the light.

(I:35-39)

This passage does not merely exemplify neo-Platonism, for Poe uses the word “model” in a way that recalls the quotation from Joseph Glanville in “A Descent into the Maelström.” God's grandeur suffers debasement since man has dreamed for God's infinity a model of his own. The “model” here suggests a derived, pallid imitation, a representation in low form of something higher. Man's works, his “models,” pale before God's; they remain incommensurate with the wonder of His divine message.

Tho' the beings whom thy Nesace,
Thy messenger, hath known,
Have dream'd for thy Infinity
A model of their own.

(I:102-106)

The world of mortal man, not to mention Nesace's semi-divine habitat of clouds, is a realm of secondary creation. An atmosphere of melancholy and lassitude prevails in any region not constituted by God, as reflected in the plight of the seraphs, who are divine in all but sublime knowledge:

Seraphs in all but “Knowledge,” the keen light
That fell refracted, thro' thy bounds, afar
O Death! from eye of God upon that star.

(II:159-161)

However sad their fate, these seraphs bear no inherent sin or taint as do the “models” created by inferior mortals. A more ignoble accounting awaits Angelo, who must witness God's angry power in a trembling world threatened by the approach of the fiery star, Al Aaraaf. A creature of passion, inhabiting a world of secondary creation incommensurate with the profound inscrutability of God's works, he confronts death, described in terms of the dynamic sublime replete with apocalyptic overtones.

Perhaps my brain grew dizzy—but the world
I left so late was with chaos hurl'd—
Sprang from her station, on the winds apart,
And roll'd, a flame, the fiery Heaven athwart.

(II:233-236)

Thus ends “Al Aaraaf,” a sometimes confusing poem but an ambitious experiment for a young poet. The portions of the poem which suggest Miltonic imitation reflect the widespread Romantic bardolatry of the author of Paradise Lost²⁶ (See Chapter I). “Al Aaraaf” thus represents an American Romantic manifestation of neo-Miltonic sublimity. What other critics have seen as a poor imitation of Miltonic grandeur is an experiment in the daemonic sublime informed by reading in the Romantic poets and other occult lore. The daemonic, held in kinship with the sublime by its association with energy, serves as a useful tool in “Al Aaraaf” since it allows Poe to bind his mythic universe together through supernatural agents.

If the prevailing impulse of Poe's work tends toward the cosmological, “Al Aaraaf” takes him on an important first step toward Eureka. The semi-divine world of the happier star allows him to describe at once the spiritual and the mortal, showing through pictorial treatment the disparity between the two. If the never-to-be-imparted secret of Nesace's message remains locked in a dream land out of space and time, Poe resigns himself in “Al Aaraaf,” not to divine knowledge, but to daemonic power. This fascination with energy (externalized in “Al Aaraaf”) prefigures his dabbling in the pseudo-sciences that investigated mental powers and faculty psychology, such as animal magnetism, mesmerism, and somnambulism.²⁷ But Poe did not consult daemonic lore merely to find quaint poetic images and items for far-fetched scientific speculation. The daemonic later becomes an important vehicle for studying the abyss of self. The daemonic ambivalence suggested by Fletcher provides a fertile beginning for explorations in terror, since a human being invested with daemonic power could never truly be at home in the fallen world after he had glimpsed and felt the impulse toward the semi-divine. Conversely, given Poe's theory of human perversity, the man who had glimpsed paradise would be impelled inevitably to the brink of the abyss.

Such is the case in “The Coliseum,” an early poem on the subject of ruins. Poe's interest in ruins, evident in his review of J. L. Stephens' Arabia Petraea, “The Coliseum,” and selected tales, connects him to that Romantic tradition described by Thomas McFarland in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin.²⁸ As McFarland points out, behind the overt Romantic obsession with unity and oneness lay an uneasy sense of incompleteness and fragmentation. In Romantic prose and poetry, physical ruins served a more serious function than generating an atmosphere of melancholy. Rather, ruins were diasparactive forms that could produce subtle psychological or symbolic effects. Among those figures who reflect what McFarland calls “modalities of fragmentation” are Coleridge and Wordsworth; to his list, one might add writers like Emerson and Carlyle who display an even greater kinship with Poe in their adoption of a tone of secular prophecy.²⁹ For Poe in particular, ruins, in their mystery, silence, and desolation, serve a prophetic function, offering premonitions, suggestions, and submerged meanings that resist representation in ordinary language.

Sometimes dismissed as an exercise in mutability rhetoric or as an uncharacteristic venture into blank verse, “The Coliseum” represents Poe's most direct poetic expression on the power of ruins. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, in surveying the sources of “The Coliseum,”³⁰ has suggested that Poe may have sought an answer to Lord Byron, who found the Roman ruins symbolic of imperial declension. In doing so, Mabbott may have unwittingly pointed to a neglected aspect of “The Coliseum.” In providing an “answer,” the majestic structures participate in a dialogue, one of the hallmarks of the literature of ruin.

Byron's impact may have been so pervasive as to provide an immediate source for Poe, but “The Coliseum” derives from a more long-standing poetic tradition that extends well back into the eighteenth century. John Dyer's The Ruins of Rome (1720) is often cited as one of the earliest evocations of Italian ruins, while Thomas Warton's Pleasures of Melancholy (1745) contains almost a full range of conventional properties associated with ruined landscapes: fallen columns, ivy, fungi, adders, lizards, ravens, bats, owls, reeds, and thistles. In such poems, aesthetic gratification derives from the perceived contrast between present desolation and former glory. This contrast could often take the form of a dialogue, sometimes with two discrete speakers, as in the famous A Dialogue on Stowe (1751).³¹ More commonly, the dialectical interchange reflected two architectural styles, the classical, for example, played off against the Gothic. Sometimes the contrast of silence and sound could induce a complex of mingled feelings in the observer, the melding of awe and melancholy roughly consonant with the experience of sublimity. And Wordsworth's “Salisbury Plain,” rather than presenting two separate corporeal speakers, offers instead a disembodied voice or presiding spirit addressing the observer of ruins as the poet alludes to Dyer's The Ruins of Rome.³²

Thus, the dialectic of poetry about ruins provided a conventional framework within which a wide range of tensions and dilemmas could be explored. In “The Coliseum,” the fragmentary nature of the ruined forms mirrors the partial character of expression offered by each speaker in the dialogue. Confirming Schlegel's dictum that “a dialogue is a chain or garland of fragments,”³³ the exchange between Poe's speaker and the Echoes does not constitute a simple statement and unequivocal answer but an independent voicing of discrete attitudes. Each side of the argument resorts to rhetorical flourishes that are really just fragments. Poe's speaker lapses into “lofty contemplation” calling forth associations with the heroic past: “Here, where a hero fell, a column falls! / Here, where the mimic eagle glared in gold, / A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat!” The speaker, nevertheless, discovers that the desolate silence of the ruins still possesses strength. While each grand property of the past finds its visual counterpart in a current, muted remnant of its former glory, an analogous auditory relationship develops in which awesome silence comes to suggest majestic sound. The ruins provoke the exclamations “Vastness! and Age!” and the Echoes that reply to the speaker claim that ruins still have the power to chasten and subdue. Poe's contrast of observed ruin and unseen glory, awesome silence and suggested sound, surface desolation and submerged grandeur—all these pairings reflect his manner of allowing undercurrents of prophetic meaning to emerge from what appears to be dismal waste.

Like Constantin François Volney's The Ruins, numbered among the “valuable books of Eastern travel”³⁴ in Poe's review of Arabia Petraea, “The Coliseum” provides a response to any charge about the ruins' incapacity to provoke sustained inspiration. “The Coliseum” also consists of a dialogue between a speaker and an unseen but palpable presence, much like the Genius of the ruins addressed in Volney's “The Invocation.”³⁵ Poe's pairing of the observed and unseen, the audible and unheard, despite his term “Echoes,” does not reflect a simple antiphonal pattern. The Echoes do not merely answer back and assert a superior role in the argument. They function, after all, not as a collective voice of response or repetition but more as a presence, a presiding spirit similar to the Genius in Volney's work. Their function is, paradoxically, to go unnoticed until they must be heard, to declaim most forcefully when the observed structures, the ruins, appear their weakest.

Through their paradoxical nature, the ruins allow Poe to include a degree of psychological penetration that transcends fragmentary rhetorical flourishes. As Richard Wilbur has pointed out, “The Coliseum” comments on all ruin by acknowledging man's despotic nostalgia for the world's past.³⁶ Poe's speaker recalls the narrator of “MS. Found in a Bottle,” that inveterate traveler in ruined cities, who remarks: “I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin” (M, II, 145). The speaker of the poem also drinks within his soul the gloomy grandeur of fallen empires, but Poe includes two puns, the multiple meanings of which cause one to question the health of such a single-minded pursuit. The phrase “At length—at length” implies temporal duration and physical distance, both required to reach the destination of crumbling ruin. A linked phrase from a later line, “I kneel, an altered and humble man,” indicates the physical and psychological toll of the journey, which has left the speaker supine (“at length”) and humbled before the ruins. Moreover, Poe also insinuates that the “altered” speaker is prostrating himself before what has become, for him, an “altar” of crumbled stones.³⁷ If one also entertains Volney's theme—that greater ruin suggests the greater loss of prized civilization and, by implication, an intensification of human decline—“The Coliseum” becomes much more than an updating of Byronic rhetoric. As Monos says in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” “But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization” (M, II, 611). Beyond the claim that ruins retain their sublime power, “The Coliseum” comments, much as the prophetic rationalist Volney warned, on the hard exchange exacted for the loss of civilization.

Less schematically than the review of Arabia Petraea, “The Coliseum” shows how fascination with ruin can alter individual psychology. Poe's systematic contrasts, deriving from the discrepancy between past grandeur and present waste, are reinforced by the dialectical quality of the poem. Moreover, these contrasts contribute to the mixed mood of exaltation and lassitude that characterizes his speaker, a melding of emotions similar to that in “Tamerlane.” Because the speaker's pronouncements represent only one side of an exchange, the reader must infer from a complex dialectic what prophetic meaning is suggested by the poem. Or to put the matter in different terms: Poe allows the fragmented remnants, the broken masses of ruin, to suggest significances that belie their pallid, broken appearance. What significance Poe intended is never made completely clear in the poem, but one apparently innocuous allusion provides some clarification. In what appears to be an heretical touch, the speaker suggests that the Roman ruins possess “spells more sure than e'er Judaean king / Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane!” Here, another significant contrast is introduced, that between the historical depth of pagan Rome and Christ's teachings. “The Coliseum” is “Type of the antique Rome,” center of spectacular bloodshed; Poe's allusion to Gethsemane thus suggests that the modern world has come under Rome's violent but riveting “spell” rather than following the tender messages of Christ. Consonant with the ominous, prophetic tone of his review of Arabia Petraea, Poe implies that an orthodox source of spiritual wisdom has been slighted or rejected in favor of darker obsessions. His prophetic meaning does emerge in partial, broken form through imagery and allusion. Tracing a course of empire that cuts a broader swath than that associated with one locality, his speaker, prostrate before an altar of crumbling waste, completes his pilgrimage to a decidedly fallen city rather than to the City of God. “The Coliseum” represents yet another example of the difficulties and tensions involved in the attempts of Poe's speakers to connect with the “genius” of a place.

Poe's ability to inject a degree of psychological interest into a poetic landscape, as we have already noted, presents itself in “The Lake,” a poem that supposedly deals with a legend of the Dismal Swamp about two dead lovers who haunt their favorite spot. This story may have inspired Poe to place his speaker in a daemonic locale frequented by uncanny presences, but in this early poem, Poe fuses psyche and setting.³⁸ In other words, Poe uses landscape scenery as a “frame” for the experiences of the speaker. As in the prose pieces dealing with scenic desolation, the speaker projects his feelings of despair and delight into a prospect that once had been a kind of Eden. But in contrast to his “spring of youth,” the speaker apparently can no longer “solace bring / To his lone imagining.” Characteristically, the feelings that Poe evokes resist categorization as simple fear or pleasure. One encounters once again the paradoxical experience of the sublime in which “the terror was not fright / But a tremulous delight.” And this feeling remains undefined, not explained conceptually. Although the subsequent versions of the poem do not change drastically, Poe does emphasize the internal state of the speaker, a more obvious set of references to the “I” of the poem.

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less—
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.
But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody—
Then—ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake
Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight—
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define—
Nor Love—although the Love were thine.
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

“The Lake—To—,” although an early poem, points forward to a pattern in the later poetry in its manifestation of psychological tension through scenic detail. Its revisions, however slight, show a more intense focus on interior states of consciousness.

II

As our discussion of “The Lake—To—” indicates, Poe's poems underwent significant revision throughout his career. Poe's elimination of the narrative elements of the 1831 version of “Fairy-Land,” for example, serves as a case in point. These narrative features, complete with a drowsy fay named Isabel, practically constitute a wholly different poem in the 1831 version, entitled “Fairyland.” In all subsequent texts of the poem, finally called “Fairy-Land,” the treatment becomes thoroughly pictorial without any intrusion of plot or story line in the Aristotelian sense.

In a general discussion of the revisions of Poe's poetry, Killis Campbell remarks, “The manifold changes in phrasing were dictated by a variety of considerations. A good many came in response to an effort to find a more picturesque wording.”³⁹ Campbell's use of the term “picturesque” suggests a matching of visual and verbal vocabularies, although he probably uses it in its most general sense without reference to the picturesque movement of the 1840s and 1850s. In any case, the apparent reason for most of the revisions in poems that treat external landscape derives from an effort to intensify the enclosure of space, to frame or pictorialize a particular prospect.

Poe's revisions of “The Valley of Unrest” constitute the clearest example of this pattern. Poe's changes, as in “Fairy-Land,” remove some of the clearer allusions and all of the story. The early proper name title, “The Valley Nis,” almost an allegorical label representing negation, is dropped in favor of the more universal “The Valley of Unrest.”⁴⁰ As this title suggests about the final version, with all the narrative elements removed, “the reader may choose to regard the poem as a picture of dreams alone” (M, I, 190). In the earlier text, Poe deals with a purely moralistic myth in which the explanation of guilt is laid to “Satan's dart.”

“THE VALLEY NIS”

Far away—far away
Far away—as far at least
Lies that valley as the day
Down within the golden east—
All things lovely—are not they
Far away—far away?
It is called the valley Nis
And a Syriac tale there is
Thereabout which Time hath said
Shall not be interpreted.
Something about Satan's dart—
Something about angel wings—
Much about a broken heart—
All about unhappy things:
But “the valley Nis” at best
Means “the valley of unrest.”
Once it smiled a silent dell
Where people did not dwell,
Having gone unto wars—
And the sly mysterious stars,
With a visage full of meaning,
O'er the unguarded flowers were leaning:
Or the sun ray dripp'd all red
Thro' the tulips overhead,
Then grew paler as it fell
On the quiet Asphodel.
Now, the unhappy shall confess
Nothing there is motionless:
Helen, like the human eye
There th' uneasy violets lie—
There the reedy grass doth wave
Over the old forgotten grave—
One by one from the tree top
There the eternal dews do drop—
There the vague and dreamy trees
Do roll like seas in northern breeze
Around the stormy Hebrides—
There the gorgeous clouds do fly,
Rolling like a waterfall
O'er th' horizon's fiery wall—
There the moon doth shine by night
With a most unsteady light—
There the sun doth reel by day
“Over the hills and far away.”

The fall of the valley into unhappiness becomes, in other words, blamed on external force. However, in the final version, Poe deals with purely psychological symbolism, and the guilt becomes subject to the reader's inference. He, moreover, eliminates directional references so that the valley no longer represents a “silent dell” in the “golden east,” but a place of indeterminate location.

“THE VALLEY OF UNREST”

Once it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers,
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
The red sun-light lazily lay.
Now each visiter shall confess
Nothing there is motionless.
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees
That palpitate like chill seas
Around the misty Hebrides!
Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven
That rustle through the unquiet Heaven
Uneasily, from morn till even,
Over the violets there that lie
In myriad types of the human eye—
Over the lilies there that wave
And weep above a nameless grave!
They wave:—from out their fragrant tops
Eternal dews come down in drops.
They weep:—from off their delicate stems
Perennial tears descend in gems.

In contrast to “Al Aaraaf,” Poe internalizes daemonic forces in the poem rather than treating them as outside supernatural agents. He maintains the ambiguous, watching stars, no longer referring to their “sly, mysterious” character. Their equivocal role as symbols of trust to the people of the valley becomes intensified by their more neutral, impassive characterization as “mild-eyed.”

The final version also falls within the genre of the contrasted landscape, similar, in this respect, to “The Island of the Fay.” In eliminating any extraneous narrative feature, the completed text posits a direct contrast between the “silent dell” which “once” existed as a sweet retreat from the outside world and the troubled, “restless” valley that “now” exists, in which the visitors are haunted by memories of the prelapsarian world. With reference to Poe's aesthetics more particularly, the 1831 “The Valley of Nis” begins with lines that give the distinct impression of distance:

Far away—far away—
Far away—as far at least
Lies that valley as the day
Down within the golden east
—All things lovely—are not they
Far away—far away?

The spatial expansiveness here recalls that in “Al Aaraaf” (cf.I:20-25). The 1836 version, nearly identical except for the last fifteen lines, makes some interesting diction changes in order to circumscribe the setting and to make the psychological symbolism less overt. Rather than blatantly labelling the present inhabitants of the restless valley as the “unhappy,” the 1836 version lets the reader draw his own conclusions about their plight.

1831

Now the unhappy shall confess
Nothing there is motionless

1836

Now each visiter shall confess
Nothing there is motionless

In addition, while the earlier version ends on an impression of vast expanse, the later text concludes with “Eternal dews” descending “in gems,” symbolic of the relentless cycles of natural existence that continue restlessly without any overt intervention from an outside presence.

The final, shortest (1845) version of the poem follows the process of more intense circumscription to its logical conclusion. In fact, all of the representative sublime elements have been totally eliminated. The trees that “roll like seas / Around the stormy Hebrides” have been removed, though Poe maintains this single vaguely geographical reference to western isles. The “terror-stricken sky, / Rolling like a waterfall / O'er the horizon's fiery wall” does not appear. The energy of the earlier poetic pictures, associated with the dynamic sublime, gives way to a restlessness more effective in its taut suspense because of the elimination of overt dynamism. The expansive lines “O'er the enchanted solitude” and “O'er the valley world” are excised. In the 1845 version, the feeling of unrest presents itself without a powerful wind; the “airs” merely brood. The fallen world pulses daemonically and restlessly, filled with latent inward stress rather than blatant dynamic power. The final poem, built upon a deceptively simple contrast of two imaginary landscapes, becomes all the more elusive and indefinite in its meaning because of the thoroughly pictorialized treatment.

The same shifting aesthetic pattern becomes evident from analysis of the revisions of the companion piece to “The Valley of Unrest,” “The City in the Sea.” The 1831 version of the poem was entitled “The Doomed City.”

Lo! Death hath rear'd himself a throne
In a strange city, all alone,
Far down within the dim west—
And the good, and the bad, and the worst, and the best,
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines, and palaces, and towers
Are—not like any thing of ours—
O! no—O! no—ours never loom
To heaven with that ungodly gloom!
Time-eaten towers that tremble not!
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
A heaven that God doth not contemn
With stars is like a diadem—
We liken our ladies' eyes to them—
But there! that everlasting pall!
It would be mockery to call
Such dreariness a heaven at all.
Yet tho' no holy rays come down
On the long night-time of that town,
Light from the lurid, deep sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Up thrones—up long forgotten bowers
Of sculptur’d ivy and stone flowers—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Upon a melancholy shrine
Whose entablatures intertwine
The mask—the viol—and the vine.
There open temples—open graves
Are on a level with the waves—
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye,
Not the gaily-jewell'd dead
Tempt the waters from their bed:
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings hint that winds may be
Upon a far-off happier sea;
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from the high towers of the town
Death looks gigantically down.
But lo! a stir is in the air!
The wave! there is a ripple there!
As if the towers had thrown aside
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if the turret-tops had given
A vacuum in the filmy heaven:
The waves have now a redder glow—
The very hours are breathing low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell rising from a thousand thrones
Shall do it reverence,
And Death to some more happy clime
Shall give his undivided time.

In 1836 Poe chose the title “The City of Sin.” The final title shows a movement away from an allegorical interpretation and toward psychological symbolism rendered through visual details.

“THE CITY IN THE SEA”

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light 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 wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along the wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
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.

Richard Wilbur underscores the indefiniteness of Poe's treatment when he claims that the poem “is so thoroughly pictorial, so lacking in argumentative or narrative structure, that all evidence of Poe's true meaning must be drawn from external sources; largely from prose pieces of later composition.”⁴¹ In any case, Poe's removal of some of the more expansive imagery in revisions of the poem conforms to the pattern followed in development of “The Valley of Unrest.” The looming towers of the 1831 version, giving the impression of great height, do not appear in the final version. Poe also eliminates the description of a heaven filled with stars, reminiscent of the vast, daemonized cosmology of “Al Aaraaf.” The emphasis on the depth of the sea in “The Doomed City” disappears from “The City in the Sea.” Poe transforms so-called “entablatures” of stone, inviting sublime recollection of ruin in the 1831 version, into “wreathed friezes,” evoking the patterned strangeness and febrile energies of arabesque or picturesque art. He transmutes “the far-off happier star” of “The Doomed City,” evoking a strong sense of distance, into “seas less hideously serene” in “The City in the Sea.” In general, simple details of expansive geography receive less spatial emphasis and greater psychological implication. The concluding two lines of the earliest version (“And Death to some more happy clime / Shall give his undivided time”) do not appear in the final text of the poem. Once again, Poe aims at a less allegorical and more pictorial presentation of the prospect.

In any case, although “The City in the Sea” has justifiably been called the companion piece to “The Valley of Unrest,” one outstanding difference between the two poems emerges. In the earlier poem, Poe emphasizes movement, restlessness, psychological tension aroused by a landscape filled with repressed activity. The wind may not move the trees, but they palpitate with Hebridean chills. Here in “The City in the Sea,” Poe acknowledges no western energies whatsoever, only a vision of the westering spirit in utter stasis or “eternal rest.” A pictorial symbol of paralysis, the city becomes circumscribed by the sea, giving a sense of enclosure reminiscent of Poe's fictional “landscapes.” In contrast to “The Valley of Unrest,” he includes practically no motion, no activity, none of the energy associated with the sublime. Psychological tension is aroused by an absence of movement. Thus, the poem becomes a representation of a landscape of dreams with no future.⁴² No one, not even the morally upright, avoids total annihilation since “the good and the bad and the worst and the best” all meet their destiny in “the dim west.” As indicated by the exclusion of the last two lines of “The Doomed City,” even death falls into the all-consuming void, since death cannot reign where nothing exists. In the penultimate image of the poem, Poe evokes a pitiless landscape of eternal silence. In other words, the apocalyptic vision of Eureka and the colloquies receives pictorial treatment in “The City in the Sea.”

III

In suggesting greater emphasis on circumscription of space as the aesthetics of Poe's poetry develop, I do not mean to imply that the daemonic, so essential to an understanding of the sublimity in “Al Aaraaf,” is subsequently dropped. For Poe's interest in the daemonic continued without an attendant fascination with the sublime in external nature. A case in point is Poe's most famous poem, “The Raven.” In all probability, the background on classical raven lore in Jacob Bryant's Antient Mythology asserted an influence on Poe's poem. Poe develops a complex interplay between the angelic and daemonic, perhaps inspired by an authority on ancient mythology like Bryant. This kind of daemonic ambivalence may explain the inconsistencies with which some critics have charged Poe in “The Raven.” Bryant provided Poe with ample background on daemon worship in ancient Greece and Rome, but one major difference distinguishes his use of the daemonic in “The Raven” from that in “Al Aaraaf.” In the later poem, as “The Philosophy of Compostition” indicates, enclosure rather than expansiveness becomes an aesthetic preference for Poe. The famous passage deserves citation in this context in order to underscore Poe's pictorial emphasis and his tentative entertainment of placing his bereaved lover in an external setting.

The next point to be considered was the mode of bringing together the lover and the Raven—and the first branch of this consideration was the locale. For this the most natural suggestion might seem to be a forest, or the fields—but it has always appeared to me that a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident:—it has the force of a frame to a picture. It has indisputable moral power in keeping concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with mere unity of place.

(H, XIV, 204)

Rather than the broad sweeping canvass of “Al Aaraaf,” the raven as a daemonic agent enters an intensely insulated interior, Poe's technique evident in his desire to impose a frame on the picture.

Into this circumscribed interior, Poe introduces a daemonic agent, deriving some of its power from ancient associations. Contrasted with the dove, which was a symbol of hope to the gods, “the raven, which disappointed the hopes reposed in his (the Deity), and which never returned, was held in a different light; and was for the most part esteemed a bird of ill omen” (B, III, 115). The last four words, while not unique, follow Poe's phrasing in “The Philosophy of Composition” (H, XIV, 200). Bryant further mentions that the bird did not immediately become a symbol of unmitigated evil: “The raven, however, did not entirely lose its credit. It was esteemed an augural bird; and is said to have preceded, and directed the colony which Battus led to Cyrene” (B, III, 115). By such a statement, Bryant classifies the raven as a daemon, a supernatural agent which did not acquire evil associations until Christian times. In view of Poe's extensive reliance on the Antient Mythology during the years before the genesis and composition of “The Raven,” such symbolic (daemonic) associations would not be lost on him.

The interplay between the angelic and the daemonic emerges from the very outset of the poem. The gentle tapping at the student's chamber inspires thoughts of “the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” The student temporarily entertains the confused hope that his visitor comes as an angelic messenger, a beneficent spirit-guide from his lost loved one. His initial reaction, by no means instant revulsion to a symbol of total depravity, introduces instead a note of welcoming invocation: “In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.” In addition, the bird has “the mien of lord and lady” and “a grave and stern decorum.” In these early stanzas, the raven, hardly “the thing of evil” that the student later curses, functions as a daemonic agent, morally ambiguous in a pagan context. As has been noted, the raven as a possible symbol of hope becomes perverted by the student “half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture” (H, XIV, 202).⁴³ The student's “phrensied pleasure” (H, XIV, 202) to torment himself reverses the raven's potential value as a positive daemonic symbol. As the poem progresses, the raven becomes more a private symbol, an hallucinatory projection of the narrator's penchant for self-recrimination. The supposedly learned, rational student transforms, through superstition, a bird of possibly neutral associations into a fiendish daemon. This pattern of angelic-daemonic ambivalence develops an added ironic twist when the student entertains the possibility that the raven was sent by the so-called “angels” of God, who will not allow the oblivion of forgetfulness. Poe's prophetic pattern of “thou saying” or invocation, reminiscent of “The Coliseum,” becomes evident in the student's direct address to the bird:

“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore!”

Consonant with Bryant's previously quoted assertion, the raven as a messenger of God never returns to its master and becomes a bird of ill omen.

Poe encountered varied conceptions of the daemonic from his reading. For example, Bryant outlines the Biblical story of Noah and the Deluge:

The history of the raven is well known, which he (Noah) sent out of the ark by way of experiment: but it disappointed him, and never returned. The bird is figured in the sphere: and a tradition is mentioned, that the raven was once sent on a message by Apollo: but deceived him, and did not return, when he was expected.

(B, III, 54)

This Old Testament legend can be supplemented by similar treatments in Hebraic folklore, where the raven, originally white, was turned black in punishment for not returning to the ark after Noah sent it out to survey the flood conditions.

A final instance of classical raven lore outlined in the Antient Mythology may have a significant impact on Poe's poem. Bryant discusses appeasing the “Daemons” at Roman marital rites.

The two birds, which were introduced on these occasions were the Raven and the Dove. The history of the latter is well-known. In respect to the former many have thought it a bird of ill omen; and it is said that the very croaking of the Raven would put a stop to the process of matrimony.

(B, III, 253)

This classical association adds a note of poignancy to Poe's poem since the raven functioned as a symbol of prophecy that could prevent marital union. Bryant, in this regard, details associated hymeneal rites:

And we are told by Aelian … “that at nuptials, after the Hymeneal hymn, they used to invoke the Raven.” The bird was also many times introduced, and fed by the bride; there was a customary song upon the occasion, which began … “Come, young woman, feed the Raven”. … This ceremony was doubtless in consequence of a tradition, that the Raven upon a time was sent by Apollo upon a message; but disappointed him and did not return.

(B, III, 154)

In this ritual, the women did service to a whimsical daemonic agent that could sanction or destroy a marriage. In Poe's poem, the raven's darker prophecy fulfills itself. A Freudian critic would be intrigued by the raven's association with hymeneal rites and the student's self-torture at being denied sexual consummation with Lenore, but such psychoanalytic theorizing, however stimulating, would be reductive in a poem with multiple associations. Suffice it to say that this example of classical raven lore, part of the “suggestiveness” or “undercurrent of meaning” outlined in “The Philosophy of Composition,” provides a context for the raven's prophecy, its daemonic intercession, and the denial of union with Lenore.

As Poe moved from “Al Aaraaf” to “The Raven,” he tended less to compartmentalize the functions of his daemonic agents. The responsibilities of Nesace and Ligeia have clear demarcation; the raven, a more open-ended symbol of daemonic and prophetic intervention, reflects multiple meanings, a range of suggestions and undercurrents. In “The Raven” as opposed to “Al Aaraaf,” moreover, the daemonic agent appears in a tightly closed setting. Poe thus transfers his daemons from a sublime landscape charged with supernatural energy to a single chamber inhabited by a solitary individual. As circumscription of space replaces sublime expanse, the carefully delimited setting allows Poe to focus more subtly on psychological themes.

These psychic daemons play an important role in “Ulalume,” Poe's last prolonged poetic evocation of external landscape. “Ulalume” derives from a long tradition of poems about the evening star, invoked by Poe in his early lyric “Evening Star” (1827). In such pieces, the star acts as a presiding presence or spiritual guide, inviting a lover to his beloved in dangerous darkness.⁴⁴ What Mabbott refers to as the poem's “steady, quiet, and restless” music, as well as the “crisped and sere” landscape, serve as an enveloping veil that lends a picturesque effect.

As several commentators have observed, the poem records a dramatic debate between the narrator, tempted by the planet Venus-Astarte, and Psyche, who wants to keep alive the memory of the lost Ulalume. The sensuous, emotional self tensely confronts Psyche, the Greek symbol for the soul. In terms of landscape, all images of energy and restlessness express internal, psychological tension. The “alley Titanic, / Of cypress,” “the scoriac rivers that roll,” “the lavas that restlessly roll,” the “sulphurous currents down Yaanek”—all these references, in another context, might possibly reflect sublime energies. But these geographical and scenic features project the seething emotions that rumble beneath the authentic landscape of “Ulalume,” a picturesque landscape where “the leaves are crisped and sere.” The poem's locale, “the misty mid region of Weir,” offers no precise geographical positioning but another version of the enclosed valley of unrest. The reference to Robert Weir,⁴⁵ the Romantic landscape painter of the Hudson River School and an illustrator of the works of Cooper and Scott, underscores the pictorial quality of the poem. In fact, the reference to “drawing up” the specter of the planet in line 101 may be a punning allusion to the painterly manner in which Astarte's crescent is presented to the speaker.

The narrator feels the attraction to travel to the expansive realm of Astarte's planet, “the path to the skies” reminiscent of the paradise of “Al Aaraaf.” But the path to the sublime realm, out of space and time, becomes literally a dead end. The equivocal nature of the evening star's role as guardian or guide reveals itself, since the “crystalline light” that was to lead them “aright” becomes a “mere spectre.”⁴⁶ No benign Hesperian light leading the speaker to a safe haven in more cogenial regions, the star proves deceptive and ambiguous. The shock of the protagonist's true location in an enclosed valley of unrest awakens him to reality. He finds himself in a fiendishly depraved valley beside a dark tarn haunted by ghouls. As if acknowledging that his spiritual guide has led him astray, he asks: “Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?” Reflecting the ambiguous nature of the daemonic in Poe, his question provides perspective on his fatuous hopes that sensuous love can replace the ideal love that he felt for Ulalume. The very insulation of the landscape becomes a pictorial representation of the denial of such an other-worldly rationalization. But the daemon also relates thematically to the ghouls that haunt the woodlands. Not the merciful ghouls or benign spirits of the dead, as some critics have speculated, these are the near-Eastern daemons who eat the dead and have the magical power to conjure up the ghost of the planet of the oriental sex goddess Venus-Astarte.⁴⁷ The ghouls recall the restless sexual impulse that surfaces as a temporary option to recurrent visitation of the dead body of Ulalume. As in “The Coliseum,” the poem enacts an ironic ritual or pilgrimage, since the ghouls, eaters of flesh and associated with the destruction of the body, cause the narrator to fall in love again and to repeat the cycle of passionate love and loss. Thus, the so-called merciful ghouls provide a deceptive temptation in their offer to him to love once again, only to rediscover the pangs of loss.

In the context of Poe's aesthetics, “Ulalume” places the narrator in an external landscape that mirrors his psychological imprisonment. In one sense, the poem transcends a facile identification between man and nature, since the protagonist discovers that the spectre-star does not serve him as a benign guiding light. In another sense, it presents a more radical fusion of man and landscape, since the invocation of ghostly presences prepares a deeper, ceremonial merging of the speaker's spirit and the true memory of Ulalume. The description of the landscape with its “ashen and sober” skies and “withering and sere” trees represents a direct contrast to the imagery of openness and extension in “Al Aaraaf.” Rather than supernatural agents that have external and official functions in “Al Aaraaf,” the daemons in the landscape of “Ulalume” all have a subjective import. Even the eastern and western references in the poem have either psychological or mythic significance, rather than geographical distinction. The woodland suggests a pictorial representation of the buried spirit of the place, the interred memory of the lost Ulalume. The energetic, volcanic currents symbolize the latent, false hopes that sensual passion can replace ideal love. As in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” however, the narrator must reject such energy since the scenery generates psychic depression rather than Burkean sublimity. Astarte's bediamoned crescent serves as an astral symbol of the narrator's futile hopes. Finally as the circular journey reaches its culmination, reminiscent perhaps of the ironic pilgrimage of the speaker in “The Coliseum,” the narrator ends where he began. Perhaps in a Poe-esque “All Hallow's Eve” ritual, he repeats his homage to Ulalume exactly one year after her death. Returning to that terrifying symbol of enclosure and negation—the tomb—he finds a “bar” and a “ban” to his hopes. The end of the “vista” in “Ulalume” provides perhaps the most unsettling prospect for any of Poe's poetic speakers.

IV

In general, the shift from expansive prospects, vast images, and spatial openness to enclosure, circumscription, and pychological limitation occurs in Poe's poetry as well as his prose. Other poems, such as “The Haunted Palace,” “For Annie,” and “The Sleeper,” show a similar pattern of spatial limitation in that external scenery mirrors the psychological barriers of the mortal world. The living world does not allow the opportunity for expansive connection and easy fusion since man inhabits, literally and metaphorically, a valley of unrest. “Al Aaraaf,” similar to later poems such as “The Raven” and “Ulalume” in that Poe's interest in the daemonic emerges, presents vast, cosmic proportions ultimately replaced by the internal, subjective focus of the later poetry. The aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque provide an implicit backdrop for such a shift. Their aesthetic impact can hardly be gainsaid in view of the importance of such terminology in Poe's critical vocabulary.

Notes

1. Edward Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 83. Davidson discusses Poe's pictorialism, pp. 77-78, 84, and 114-115.

2. See G. R. Thompson, Circumscribed Eden of Dreams: Dream-Vision and Nightmare in Poe's Early Poetry (Baltimore: Baltimore Poe Society, 1984).

3. Halliburton [, David. Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).] pp. 50 ff.

4. Jacobs, “The Self and the World: Poe's Early Poems,” Georgia Review, 31 (1977), 638-68.

5. Halliburton and Geoffrey Rans, Edgar Allan Poe (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1965), p. 47.

6. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (Boston: Joseph Buckingham, 1815), p. 218. Lowth discusses the sublime in Lectures XIV-XVII.

7. Quoted in Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), p. 10.

8. Price, “The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,” Yale Review, 58 (1969), 194-213.

9. See the chapter, entitled “The Daemonic Sublime,” in Coleridge the Visionary, pp. 99-132.

10. Fletcher [, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of the Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964)] pp. 41-42. See Fletcher's entire chapter, entitled “The Daemonic Agent,” pp. 25-69.

11. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 42-43.

12. Fedallah is a “dive” or evil spirit designating the powers of darkness. “In Islamic imagery the dives were a species of ‘jinn’ or genii, a race of spirits which was supposed to pervade the universe and was an indispensable part of the romantic machinery. Fedallah and his companions easily lend themselves to this interpretation, for Ahab's five dusky phantoms, in the traditional manner of Arabian jinn, ‘seemed fresh formed out of air’”—Dorothee Finkelstein, Melville's Orienda (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 227. See also Muhktar Ali Isani, “Zoroastrianism and the Fire Symbolism of Moby-Dick,” American Literature, 44 (1972), 385-397. Emerson's comments on daemons are cutting: “It is a midsummer madness, corrupting all who hold the tenet. The demonologic is only a fine name for egotism, an exaggeration namely of the individual, whom it is Nature's settled purpose to postpone”—Lectures and Biographical Sketches (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p. 20.

13. Beer [, J. B. Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969)], p. 104.

14. Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (London: Routledge & Sons, 1885), p. 85. For Poe's knowledge of Scott, see [Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Talks and Sketches (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1978) Hereafter cited as M] II, 375 and M, III, 859.

15. For Poe's reference to Alastor, see H [Harrison, James A. ed. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, [New York: AMS Press, 1902/1965)], XVI, 149.

16. Shelley [, Percy Bysshe. Selected Poetry, ed. Neville Rogers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968)], p. 29. For a discussion of Shelley's reliance on this tradition of daemonology, see Neville Rogers, “Daemons and Other ‘Monsters of Thought,’” in Shelley at Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 64-90.

17. Hoffman [, Daniel. Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, (New York: Anchor Press, 1973.], p. 38.

18. Fletcher p. 247.

19. Poe may have encountered the name Zoilus in Lemprière's Classical Dictionary, revised by Charles Anthon, his consultant on Pym. Zoilus is there characterized as a severe critic of Plato and Isocrates and the “chastiser of Homer.” Zoilus was persecuted and purportedly executed by torture. Anthon adds, “The name of Zoilus was generally applied to austere critics”—J. Lemprière, A Classical Dictionary (New York: Duyckinck, Gilley, Collins, 1825), p. 803. This and other information (the intoxication of the characters in the tale) lead to the speculation that “Shadow—A Parable” is a veiled autobiographical piece on Poe's career as an acerbic critic.

20. Barton Levi St. Armand, “Usher Unveiled: Poe and the Metaphysic of Gnosticism,” Poe Studies, 5 (1972), 1-8. See also Thomas Vargish, “The Gnostic Mythos in Moby-Dick,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 272-277.

21. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 281-283.

22. Stovall [, Floyd. Edgar Poe the Poet (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969).], p. 103.

23. Jonas, p. 283.

24. Ibid.

25. Bryant also devotes considerable attention to Zoroastrianism (I, 388, 397, and IV, 204). Referring to “daemonic ambivalence,” whereby one encounters either good or bad agents, Fletcher uses the terms “agathodaemon” and “cacodaemon.”

26. Thomas P. Haviland, “How Well Did Poe Know Milton?” PMLA, 69 (1954), 841-860.

27. See Sidney Lind, “Poe and Mesmerism,” PMLA, 62 (1947), 1077-1094 and Doris Falk, “Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 536-546.

28. See especially McFarland's “Introduction: Fragmented Modalities and the Criteria of Romanticism,” pp. 3-55. As an encompassing term for Romantic incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin, McFarland uses the word “diasparaction,” pp. 4 ff. For comments on the sublimity of fragmented forms, see pp. 29-30.

29. See William Mentzel Forrest, “Poe Among the Prophets,” Univ. of Virginia Alumni Bulletin, 17 (1924), 163-177, 326-335 and Killis Campbell, “Poe's Knowledge of the Bible,” Studies in Philology, 27 (1930), 546-551 for relevant discussions of Biblical prophecy. David Halliburton's brief comment (p. 101) seems more germane to my discussion here: “one might be able to determine not merely Poe's exploitation of sources, but his place in the tradition of secular prophecy that, as Albert LaValley has shown, starts with Blake, and proceeds through a notable line of thinkers including Carlyle, Nietszche, and Marx.” Halliburton alludes to LaValley, Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern.

30. Mabbott Manfred, III, iv, 10-41 and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, IV, cxlii-cxlv (M, I, 226).

31. A work mentioned by Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), pp. 29-31, in her discussion of contrasts and pairings in poems about ruins. See also Macaulay, p. 199.

32. Laurence Goldstein discusses Wordsworth's poem as a response to Dyer in his suggestive discussion of cultural contradictions and dilemmas in the literature of ruin, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), pp. 130 ff.

33. Quoted in McFarland, p. 100, from Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe.

34. Poe (H, X, 2) also quotes Volney in the “Marginalia” for the Democratic Review, 16 (1844), 32. Wilson O. Clough has suggested Volney's Ruins as an influence on “The City in the Sea” in “Poe's City in the Sea Revisited,” in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, ed. Clarence Gohdes (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 77-90. Volney's Ruins appeared in six editions—four American—before the publication of “The Coliseum.” Although Volney may not be a direct source for Poe's poem, the series of associations with heroic places, the dialectical interchange between the respective speakers and unseen voices, the declamatory and exclamatory qualities of the language, the somewhat heretical touch in Poe's second stanza (reminiscent of the notorious anti-clericalism and anti-religious bias of Volney)—all these elements make The Ruins, at least, an apt prose analogue for Poe's poem.

35. Volney's highly rhetorical “The Invocation” is quite different in tone from other portions of The Ruins: or A Survey of the Revolution of Empires (Philadelphia: James Lym, 1799). The Genius is addressed in “The Invocation” (pp. iii-xix), and the declamatory dialogue, evoking “sublime meditations,” continues in Chapter III, “The Apparition,” and subsequent chapters, pp. 15-49. Poe would have come across passages from Volney's Ruins in his reading of Rev. Alexander Keith's Evidence of Prophecy (1832) in which Volney's factual reports on ruins seem to fulfill Biblical predictions, Volney grudgingly acknowledged despite his avowed infidelity. Paradoxically, the agnostic Volney's accounts were taken as evidence of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, as noted by an anonymous reviewer, “Keith's Evidence of Christianity,” American Monthly Review, 2 (1832), 466-473.

36. Poe, p. 38.

37. Poe chose the Coliseum as the setting of Scene XI of Politian in which his protagonist, an “altered” man (M, I, 265), delivers as a soliloquy a slightly revised version of “The Coliseum.” The scene takes place at an altar (M, I, 287). In Scene I of the play, Ugo comments: “Most men are sadly altered when they're drunk / Oh, I am sadly altered when I'm (hiccup) drunk” (M, I, 249).

38. Eric W. Carlson acknowledges the daemonic implications of the poem in Introduction to Poe: A Thematic Reader (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman & Co., 1967), pp. 464-465.

39. Killis Campbell, ed., The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: The Athenaeum Press, 1917), p. xxxix.

40. See Thomas Bledsoe, “On Poe's ‘Valley of Unrest,’” Modern Language Notes, 61 (1946), 91-92; Roy Basler, “Poe's ‘The Valley of Unrest,’” Explicator, 5 (1946), 25; and James Kiehl, “The Valley of Unrest: A Major Metaphor in the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe,” Thoth, 5 (1964), 45-52.

41. Wilbur [, Richard.] Poe, [(New York: Laurel Poetry Series, 1958], p. 32.

42. In addition to Clough, see Roy Basler, “Poe's ‘The City in the Sea,’” Explicator, 4 (1946), 30, and Frederick Keefer, “‘The City in the Sea’: A Reexamination,” College English, 25 (1964), 436-439.

43. John F. Adams, “Classical Raven Lore and Poe's Raven,” Poe Studies, 5 (1972), 53. A study that treats classical sources is John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz, “‘Quaint and Curious’ Backgrounds for Poe's ‘Raven,’” Southern Humanities Review, 7 (1973), 411-419.

44. For comments on William Collins' role in the tradition, see Hartman, “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci,” [in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)], p. 322. For reference to Collins' influence on Poe, see M, I, 410.

45. Lewis Leary, “Poe's ‘Ulalume,’” Explicator, 6 (1948), 25. See also Eric Carlson, “Symbol and Sense in Poe's ‘Ulalume,’” American Literature, 35 (1963), 22-37; James Miller, “‘Ulalume’ Resurrected,” Philological Quarterly, 34 (1955), 197-215; and Glen Omans, “Poe's ‘Ulalume’: Drama of the Solipsistic Self,” in Papers on Poe, pp. 62-73.

46. See Lou Ann Kriegisch, “‘Ulalume’—A Platonic Profanation of Beauty and Love,” Poe Studies, 11 (1978), 29-31.

47. For further comments on irony in the poem, see David Robinson, “‘Ulalume’—The Ghouls and the Critics,” Poe Studies, 8 (1975), 8-10.