[In the following essay, Fletcher discusses Poe's limitations as a poet, suggesting that Poe's own awareness of those limitations caused him to revise his poetry extensively.]

Our findings from previous chapters [of The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe] include the following. Poe's creative development in poetry, far from being the spontaneous development he so fondly would have us believe it was, resulted only after arduous effort over a period of approximately fifteen years. Nor can we truthfully say that he ever achieved that instantaneous and effortless act of creation in verse that he sought to give the impression of possessing as an inborn capability. Instead, even after he had written a poem Poe continued to be plagued by uncertainties about the soundness of its tonal values, a sense of insecurity conditioned by a youthful egotistical assumption that what he had set to verse must be perfect could only the placement of punctuative devices within it somehow be improved to make its expression more forceful and eloquent. Thereafter, his relatively late insight into the importance of vowel and consonantal values in verse led him reluctantly in his last years to revise his poems in line with these more valuable considerations, which further intensified his by now habitual tendency to tinker and experiment with his earlier poetry.

Not only was Poe uncertain and hesitant in applying the proper word to the proper situation, he matured as an organic poet only by slow and painful stages. But dimly perceiving the potential philosophical content of his early poems, oftentimes he later modified and rewrote them merely to create novel sound values, unconcerned, since what he had written no longer contained special meanings for him, with modifying sound into a semblance of philosophical sense. Although many of his poems contain messages and significances that were not as meaningful to Poe as they have been to later critics, he cannot altogether be blamed for the absence of philosophy and cohesion in his poetry, however. Poetry was for him an act of dedication, which required exactly the right inspiratory moment of creativity coupled with exactly the right conjunction of hypnotic sounds in exactly the right proportions, factors obviously difficult to bring into proper harmony, and seldom completely within his control. Oftentimes, too, Poe's inspiratory moment was either of short duration or it was intruded on by other considerations, so that even his better poems contain inferior lines and stanzas.

Depending for inspiration on key words and expressions around which to compose the remainder of the poem, whenever he was driven to match by dint of labored effort an inspiratory momentum that had become stale and pallid Poe succumbed to whatever came easiest to mind. Unfortunately, what came easiest to mind was usually the trite, the inflated and the banal, which suggests that Poe's ability to discriminate among sound values was highly vagarious. During the incessant revisions he made to individual poems he also relied heavily and capriciously on alterations in punctuation within lines to effect miraculous clarifications between sound and sense, at times changing the spellings of words or capitalizing or hyphenating them, apparently for that same purpose. The result, which leaves an impression of inconsequent whimsy rather than reasoned logicality, suggests a poet who is inspired only on infrequent occasions to write poetry and who endeavors to cover up his various poetic deficiencies by using the same bag of supernumerary and ineffectual tricks from one poem to the next.

In Poe's defense, the point should again be emphasized that for the weight of other pressing affairs he had relatively little time to devote to poetry. His revising his extant poetry as frequently and conscientiously as he did, indicates his seriousness toward his craft as poet and his awareness that his work in print did not always show him at his best. Caught between his natural desire to see his efforts published and his finicky fastidiousness, we may assume that Poe felt suspended between need and vanity, the haste of the moment on the one hand and the wish to be considered a first-class poet on the other. We may assume that he was deeply chagrined and offended at being called a ‘Jingle man’ and conjecture that the careful and painstaking revisions he made of “The Raven”, the poem that brought him his greatest fame during his lifetime, reflected his burning determination to persuade his doubting American audience once and for all time of his mastery with metrics and verse.

Otherwise, in his later poetry Poe seems more sure of himself than in his earlier periods. Since he reworked none of his other final poems as assiduously or carefully as “The Raven”, he may either have felt more confident about them or less concerned about their reception by the public. Possibly, too, his fairly sustained poetic output during these last years provided him with the continual exercise he needed to maintain his skills at their tautest. The production of these years is scarcely large, however. Working forward from the beginning of this last, major phase, after “The Haunted Place” appeared “Sonnet—Silence” (15 11.), January 4, 1840; “The Conqueror Worm” (40 11.), January, 1843; “Dream-Land” (56 11.), June, 1844; “The Raven” (108 11.), January 29, 1845; “Eulalie—A Song” (21 11.), July, 1845; “A Valentine” (20 11.), February 21, 1846; “To M. L. S—” (18 11.), March 13, 1847; “To My Mother” (14 11.), July 7, 1847; “Ulalume—A Ballad” (104 11.), December, 1847; “An Enigma” (14 11.), March, 1848; “T—” (27 11.), March, 1848; “To Helen” (66 11.), November, 1848; “Eldorado” (24 11.), April 21, 1849; “For Annie” (102 11.), April 28, 1849; “Annabel Lee” (41 11.), October 9, 1849; and “The Bells” (113 11.), November, 1849.

Many of these seventeen poems were composed considerably earlier than their publication dates indicate. Killis Campbell speculates that “The Haunted Palace”, first published in the Baltimore American Museum for April, 1839, may have been written following Poe's departure from Richmond in 1837, two years before it first saw print.¹ Campbell also surmises that “The Raven” was probably “not written before 1842”.² The histories of others of Poe's poems suggests, however, that he was not accustomed to allow any more time to elapse between composition and publication than he could possibly help: financial need—and doubtless authorial pride—were too great for that. “The Bells”, for example, he wrote in a 17 line version in the summer of 1848; he sent a revised variation to Sartain's Union Magazine that autumn, but before it could be published he delivered to the editor a revised version, followed by still a second, the version that was finally published in November, 1849.³ “Annabel Lee”, written in the spring of 1849, he “sent to Griswold in May or June to be included in the tenth edition of Poets and Poetry in America, which was published in December, 1849, though dated 1850”.⁴ “Eulalia—A Song”, which was first published in the American Review for July, 1845, was “sent by Poe to Robert Carter, associate of Lowell in editing the Pioneer, in a letter dated February 16, 1843”.⁵ By ill fortune the Pioneer, which had published Poe's “Lenore” in that same month's issue, folded soon thereafter, and the delay in having his manuscript returned to him and difficulties in getting it placed elsewhere probably account for “Eulalie's” not appearing in print earlier than it did. Of course we will never know exactly when Poe wrote this or that poem, yet the evidence from what we do know is sufficient to make the statement categorically imperative that the interval between composition and publication was as short as Poe could humanly make it, so keen was his need to be published. It is highly improbable that intervals of as long as two or more years occurred between composition and publication without binding cause. Poe, in a word, never leaves the impression during his career that he was inclined to lay his compositions aside merely to allow them to ‘age’ or ripen. He preferred to revise his creations after rather than before their publication.

Of the 17 poems that stem from Poe's last years beginning with “The Haunted Palace”, eight, or nearly half, are ephemeral and inconsequential. Their themes hark back to those in which the earlier, romantic, cavalier Poe had taken delight in addressing the various women in his life in amorously poetic terms. They include “Eulalie—A Song”, “A Valentine”, “To M. L. S—”, “An Enigma”, “T—”, “To Helen”, “To My Mother”, as well as the contemplative, ‘philosophical’ “Sonnet—Silence”. “Dream-Land” and “For Annie” are of interest for various reasons as we shall observe presently, although not for reasons that are altogether complimentary. This leaves seven poems, not all by any means first class: “The Haunted Palace”, “The Conqueror Worm” “The Raven”, “Ulalume—A Ballad”, “The Bells”, “Eldorado”, and “Annabel Lee”—poems which total 478 lines, however, or approximately a sixth of Poe's total production in verse.

If they are not all masterpieces, there is enough in these poems to warrant considerable interest and respect. Add to them “To One in Paradise”, “Israfel”, “To Helen”, and “Sonnet—to Science”, and we have a body of poetry that automatically includes Poe among the near greats, no matter how poorly he might otherwise have written. The point is of course that the other poems in his canon are the experiments and ‘scratch work’ which made these more formidable efforts possible. One may question whether in the long run any of his lesser poems were really necessary. Yet without them Poe probably would have derived less experience than he did; and considering the lengthy period of his maturation into the kind of poet he became, if nothing else they provided him experience with working in sounds and allowed him the satisfaction of gaining pleasure and confidence in writing poetry.

As for other intangible considerations, the time and effort Poe devoted to these lesser poems undoubtedly enabled him to express attitudes and feelings that he might have experienced more difficulty treating in prose. Mirrored in them is his fondness for amorous verse, possibly his subjective means for achieving the self-expression he could not as adequately delineate in other terms. To the modern ear a great deal of this poetry takes on a maudlin, self-pitying aura that verges on the bathetic; and the modern critic has been fascinated to discover that in half of Poe's total poetic output, 26 poems published either during his lifetime or in the Griswold edition of 1850, he is concerned in some idealized form with the subject of love.⁶ These love poems are also strikingly similar in mood and attitude to a further group of 10 poems which deal with dreamy, contemplative philosophizings on life's meaning, so that in better than three cases out of five Poe limited himself to one of two themes.⁷

His remarkably consistent devotion to these two themes throughout his career can be indicated, too, from another side. Only two of the 12 poems that saw publication after “The Raven”—“Eldorado” and “The Bells”—are not concerned with love in some guise, while two of the 14 poems added to the edition of 1845—“The Conqueror Worm” and “The Haunted Palace”—are not related to this topic. ‘Love poetry’ is a term that is not appropriate to Poe's verse, since in much of it he treats women not as objects of veneration or passion, but as mystical or supernatural representations of the beautiful. Nor is he varied in his range of romantic interests, which are limited to the pathetic and tragic, the agony of loss and the tortured repining for the might-have-been. Yet if Poe found the balm of surcease and the joy of tranquil fulfillment either unrewarding as poetic subjects or impossible to describe coherently through the poetic medium, critics never tire of reminding us that the aura of etiolation in his verse coupled with an omnipresent sense of ethereal unreality contribute a coating of charm to what is essentially mawkish and insipid. Indeed, comparing what Poe felt were topics for poetry with later attitudes toward his choice of subject matter, the terms used to characterize them—their air of unreality, their ethereal nature out of time out of place—make it appear that Poe was attempting to deal with concerns that do not exist.

Were he aware of these strictures about his verse, Poe probably would have remained unconvinced and undismayed, however, and for good reason. I have remarked that approximately half his verse deals with love as its theme, but this does not tell the whole story: 12 of these 26 poems are addressed to specific women and should be regarded as occasional verse that is philosophically unimportant, which is how Poe seemed to view them. Three others—the early “To Helen”, “For Annie”, and “Annabel Lee”—may be accorded a more tenuous niche in this same category, since they are not so definitely concerned with a specific woman and which possibly is why they are superior to the others in their evocative aura of the connotative and imaginative. The remaining nine are experiments with various attitudes and poses concerning love's implications and consequences on the sufferer or repiner and hence deal with love as a theoretical topic for poetic expression. Few of them come off successfully, for either they veer toward the nostalgically sentimental, like “To One in Paradise” (patently a weakness, too, of “For Annie” and “Annabel Lee”), or they are overly onomatopoetic and become unintentionally amusing, which is a major weakness in “The Raven”, “Eulalie”, and “Ulalume”.

The other principal category in Poe's poetic interests, his devotion to haunting, melancholy daydreams, reaches its apogee in “Dream-Land”, first published six months before “The Raven”. In this poem Poe plummeted to the lowest level in his development along this line with verses in which repetitive onomatopoetic sound values become inadequate substitutes for meaningful verse.

Their lone waters—lone and chilly
Their still waters—still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily.

Here the vowels i and o were intended to create a mournful plaintive effect, but the result is nursery rhyme nonsense. Poe also experimented with a repeated refrain—“From an ultimate dim Thule”—in which he employed i and u vowel sounds. By itself this line is not ineffective, but in context it is so reminiscent in sound to an unintentional lisp that the suggestive romantic aura of the exotic which it should conjure up is destroyed. What is significant is that Poe's dissatisfaction with the poem is suggested not in emendations to these obviously banal lines but in changes in lines around them. We may conclude that if he was not unaware of the incongruity in sense of the words I have indicated, either he did not find their banality offensive or he was convinced that his audience would not notice that its leg was being pulled; possibly it would not even find these lines objectionable.

Although the element of the charlatan in Poe's writings will be of more concern to us when we investigate his prose stylistic methods, especially since they are more easily identifiable in his prose than in his poetry, here I should like to suggest that his success in duping his public in “Dream-Land” prompted him to try once more in “The Raven”. His success with “The Raven”, in turn, led him to concoct one of the very worst poems in the language, “Eulalie—A Song”. Curious in this conjunction, although of course not necessarily significant, is the bizarre fact that “Eulalie” followed “The Raven” in print by six months, just as “Dream-Land” had preceded it by the same time span, which suggests that Poe felt the need to test his audience's reaction between poems before perpetrating another hoax.

I am not suggesting, however, that Poe was only the ‘jingle man’ that he is oftentimes called. Earlier I remarked that “The Raven” and similar poems were aberrations from his normal, motivated development. Even at this late juncture in his career I believe this statement can be substantiated. An element of whimsical charm underlies much of his poetic as well as his prose writings and seldom is Poe so bowed by grief or overwhelmed by sorrow to take himself with complete seriousness. Oftentimes the poignant or dramatic effect in his poetry depends on his reader's assuming that Poe and the speaker or narrator in his poems are the same. If this establishment is made by the reader, Poe succeeds in effecting a sentimental empathic relationship without having to wrest the conviction of suffering or sorrow by assuming the role of mysterious narrator or world-weary hero. Contrary to customary belief, the role of Byronic hero was one that Poe did not find congenial to his temperament for long. As we shall observe, he was most at ease when he could conceal himself behind some figment hero of his creation like Auguste Dupin or Roderick Usher. In his poems, because of their shortness, he was even more hard pressed to establish a persona, nor did he ever succeed in creating an effective one, or one that becomes a unified representation and synthesis of his attitudes and sentiments. In his early poetry he indulged in bombast and an aura of Gothic gloom and mystery, but achieved disappointing results with “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf”, whose heroes are too derivative and Byronesque to be taken seriously either by his audience or by Poe. Thereafter he created his mythical as well as genuine feminine persona to adore, with a speaker as idolizing worshipper. The results of this change in emphasis are apparent in the charming and evocative “To Helen” and “Romance”, although in the process the narrator ceases to function even nominally as a conjecturable person. Instead he becomes a disembodied voice that is even more indistinct and ethereal than the women who are being rhapsodized. Either regretting that he had blotted out the personal identity of his narrator, or eager to experiment in new ways with old materials, Poe soon abandoned such experiments in favor of poems like “Israfel”. Here we are not concerned with heroes at all; the narration is recounted in the third person. Yet Poe still felt compelled to introduce a first person observer in the final stanza to envy Israfel and yearn that

          I could dwell
Where Israfel
          Hath dwelt, and he where I …

Happily, since this pattern was not irreversible, Poe could experiment both ways. In “The City in the Sea” he once again established his auctorial philosophizings through the impersonality of third person narration, and with better success. With its companion pieces, “The Haunted Palace” and “The Conqueror Worm”, “The City in the Sea” is his best realized effort at creating a patina of gloomy Gothic description with an overlay of suggestion foreshadowing the onset of some indefinable and agonizing catastrophe. Although the poem is frequently awkward in expression and sing-song in meter, the reader is carried along on a flow of suggestive and evocative rhythmic cadences which address the ear and the eye.

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 lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!

Other lines in the poem are less felicitous and remind us that Poe experienced considerable difficulty with this poem. Later he excised several portions of his original version. Despite extensive revisions, however, the opening verses remain gauche and awkward.

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.

Nor, although it was written nearly a decade later, is the opening stanza of “The Haunted Palace” necessarily an improvement over these earlier lines.

In the greenest of our valleys
          By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
          Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion—
          It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
          Over fabric half so fair!

What is evident in this latter poem is Poe's increasing command of onomatopoetic devices as well as his growing realization that meter, as surely as any other poetic device, can be employed solely for effect. His indifference to metrical regularity, which is particularly apparent by the fourth stanza of “The Haunted Palace”, is suggested by his dexterously moving the pattern of sound vowels from the open and sonorous vowels of the first few syllables to the high-pitched, constricted close to the stanza, ending with the work king.

Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
          And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
          Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
          The wit and wisdom of their king.

Here, as again in “The Conqueror Worm”, Poe's command of sound is matched by his fluency in handling cadences and his accurately delineated distinctions between accented and unaccented syllables in each line. The structure of “The Conqueror Worm” indicates that Poe was at his best whenever he allowed his inclination to experiment with sound values take precedence over ordinarily accepted rhyming conventions. In this poem he did not achieve a complexity that in any way seems intellectually reasoned; what we are given is a tour de force of suggestive meanings which are not encumbered by his usual self-conscious awkwardnesses of expression and consequent infelicities in sensory and tonal balance. If “The Conqueror Worm” is one of Poe's better poems, it is also one in which he made the fewest emendations. Although published seven times before his death, twice in his tale “Ligeia”, Poe effected but four changes in this 40 line poem, a fact which in view of his earlier tortured labors with his poems demonstrates how far he had come in the task of reassuming the role of poet after the extensive period during the 1830s when he had set nothing to verse. The language of “The Conqueror Worm” also indicates that Poe's capacities now extended beyond the mere ability to establish felicitous sound values through poetic rhymes. His command of onomatopoetic devices suggests that he was beginning to master his materials with a virtuoso's range of insights and skills. Beginning with line two, “Within the lonesome latter years!” Poe establishes an alliterative resonance in the poem which he successively reiterates through repetitions as “bewinged, bedight”, “Mutter and mumble low”, “shift the scenery”, “self-same spot”, and “scenic solitude” as the stanzas progress. In his earlier poetry he had not always so capably been in command of his material, his tendency having been to sacrifice sense at the expense of arresting sound values. Here, however, his images make meaningful sense to the mind as well as to the ear. His newfound skill and assurance become immediately apparent from the vivid description of the cosmic rout with which the poem begins.

Lo! 'tis a gala night
          Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
          In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
          A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
          The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
          Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
          Mere puppets they, who come and go
At the bidding of vast formless things
          That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
          Invisible Wo!

One can not satisfactorily define the artistry of these two stanzas by calling them musical or hypnopaedic. These elements are of course evident in the ‘musicality’ of the lines and in the repetitive effects which are established here and there through similarities and resemblances in tonal values among the various stanzas. Repetition and ‘musicality’, however, are not employed until late in stanza one, Poe first having experimented with the consonantally repeated b in “bewinged, bedight”, and the l in “lonesome latter”, while alliterating “drowned in tears” with “hopes and fears” and pairing the sibilance of “orchestra breathes” with “music of the spheres”. Although he did not abandon similar sound patterns in stanza two, he shifted his major sound emphasis elsewhere, from the m of music in the last line of stanza one to the opening word of stanza two, Mimes, which thereafter progresses through successive repetitions in form, Mutter, mumble, mere, and come, to formless and from. By mid-stanza this letter reiteration has subtly shifted to the next consonant in the alphabet, beginning with things at the end of line five to scenery, Condor, wings, Invisible. And in this stanza Poe also repeatedly employed f and w sounds for their tonal values to effect an amalgam between sound and sense, sound which is suggestively connotative of more than what is conveyed by the sense of the passage, but which does not intrude on or make amusingly facetious whatever possibilities of imaginative suggestion may be evoked in the reader's mind by variations in the structure of what is being expressed.

Thus, the products of Poe's maturity as poet are not the consequence of that cold-blooded assembly line approach to art which in “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe sought to persuade his audience was his poetic, almost God-given ability. Instead, Poe's method can be regarded as the disciplined expectation of a sustained inspiratory thrust extensive enough for its momentum to carry him through successive stanzas rather than merely through successive lines. If this statement does not refute Poe's frequently derided assertion that the manner of composition as well as the content of his poems were elements which he shrewdly plotted out before setting himself to the task of actual creation, the weight of evidence from the internal structure of his verse as we have been examining it points to his having done exactly that. What Poe apparently needed for creation to proceed effortlessly was the evocative inspiratory suggestion which certain words offered him under certain conditions or in certain contexts. Once their connotative implications had begun to stir his imagination, and once the indefinable suggestiveness conveyed to him by this special vocabulary had become established in his thoughts, Poe's task was to unravel the poem as a seamless whole, using this imaginatively creative associative framework as points of reference.

One problem which these surmises about Poe's poetic method immediately raises is the fact as we have seen that within the larger context of his collective poetry Poe fumbled with this or that word or this or that individual line. Yet it will also be noted that through successive revisions the meanings of his poems scarcely change. However frequently he amended individual words or lines, it was never Poe's way in his poems to make such basic structural alterations that they affected either the content or the atmosphere of the original. We are left with the inference that Poe was convinced success in communicating his meaning would be altogether his if his words could be properly attuned to his readers' emotional sensibilities. For this reason Poe placed his primary emphasis on the sound rather than the sense of the words he used in his poetic vocabulary, believing that once the proper conjunction of sound had been established, the correspondence between his range of responses and that of his reader would instantaneously and intuitively elucidate of its own volition the meaning or meanings he wished his poetry to express.

What is being said here is that in a certain sense Poe was a symbolist. He used words in the same symbolic manner that characterizes the symbolist's efforts to communicate some general if not actually inexpressible significance within the framework of tangible concepts and entities which thereby assume the wider function of delineating the inexplicable or universal. Yet thereafter Poe's intentions diverge from those of the symbolist in the conventionally applicable meaning of the term since he was concerned solely with conveying emotional mood reactions rather than anything expressive of philosophical relationships or moral profundities. And it is on this point where Poe and the symbolist as he is customarily thought of diverge in their attitudes: Hawthorne as we noted earlier sees in the scarlet letter some symbolic connection with the mystery of life's meaning; Poe on the other hand perceives in his individualized ‘symbols’ a way to reach his reader's ‘soul’ or emotions. Hawthorne, therefore, is a symbolist as we would understand the term today in that he endeavored to speak through his writings to the mind, the intellect, whereas Poe's desire was to reach his reader's emotions and manipulate his moods.

If Poe's purpose was scarcely intellectual, his method can not be called transparent, however. On the contrary, it is extremely complex and subtle despite the obvious limitations to its scope, the constricted emotional response that can be wrested from the reader, and the restrictions that its narrow spectrum of emotional possibilities places on the writer's vocabulary. Of necessity Poe was forced to employ the same handful of special particularized words again and again in his works to achieve the effects he desired. Moreover, Poe's reader must somehow also be persuaded to read enough of his writings for this vocabulary, limited though it may be, to become fixed and familiar in his mind. Indeed, like Pavlov's dog, unless the reader is sufficiently conversant with Poe's terminology, he might fail instinctively and correctly to register the proper emotion at the proper moment in the given story or poem, which would negate Poe's purposes. Thus, in addition to whatever other ingenuity he might apply to them, Poe had to face the task of making his writing dynamic and interesting enough to induce his audience to sample widely from his works.

Although none of what has just been said is necessarily new or startling, interesting and significant in Poe's attitudes toward words is his evident belief that the poet's and his reader's responses to sound values can be made to coincide exactly. It is the poet's task to come up with a vocabulary that will bring this correspondence into focus. Readers may of course be affected by words in different ways because of their differing individual connotative reactions to their meanings. Yet Poe apparently believed that after natural distinctions in accent and dialect have been taken into consideration, every reader's response to words as sounds is the same. Expressed in other terms, if words are written in their conventionally accepted forms, the sounds they produce will be the same to every individual reader. Thus Poe was convinced that as a sensory stimulus sound is superior to sight because in silent reading the eye serves as a substitute for the aural sense in conversation by enabling the ear through visualizable representations of sound values to ‘hear’ what is written on the printed page.

To test ways in which Poe applied his theory about the importance of sound values, let us examine one of his later poems, which is also one of his best. Although “Ulalume” may not rank with the greatest short poems in the language, in terms both of Poe's attitudes toward the purposes he felt poetry should serve and his manner of achieving in his poems the results he desired, this work must rank among his several masterpieces. In it are fused in their finest form the proper mixture of sound and mood whose consequence is an unmistakably and unforgettably Poe-induced evocation of mystery, gloom, wonder and despair, all the elements of the technical repertoire which he believed were necessary if the beautiful is to be created effectively in visualizable terms through the written word. The evident lack of sophistication in the content of the poem has imbued it to the modern ear with a gauche and somewhat ridiculous naiveté; possibly for that reason Poe is neither today, nor ever was, a writer who is altogether satisfactory to the sophisticate. An attitude of romantic insouciance is necessary for a tolerant acceptance of many writers besides Poe; yet he need not be relegated to reading matter for children, either, especially if his reader is as aware as was Poe of the potentialities in sound values for creating illusions which are at variance with mundane reality. Witness the effective use to which background music can be put in sound tracks for horror films and the like, which depend on the same principles of suggestion and effect as governed Poe's uses of words.

Another observation that bears scrutiny is that within the limitations imposed by his frame of reference, Poe's works are realistically delineated. Although by using this term we face the danger that by analogy Poe's writings will be associated with tendencies which emerged in American literature after his time, the point is that Poe's most successful poems and short stories are as ‘real’ as they are dramatic. Which is to say that once he establishes the framework within which he proposes to operate, Poe consistently handles his material in terms of a dimension which is consistently visualizable, i.e., realistic. There are no surrealistic incongruities to the world of his devising, no inconsistencies or irrelevancies which do not fit logically and explicably into his fictive environment. Indeed, whereas the customary attitude toward Poe is that since he so frequently deals with the macabre and the grotesque the world of his creating must be disjointed, ‘unreal’ and misshapen, within their boundaries Poe's fictions are perfectly oriented, almost mathematically exact in their organization, and readily capable of being visualized by the mind's eye.

Returning to “Ulalume” as our example, let us observe how Poe goes about converting the ‘unreal’ and occult into the visualizable and ‘real’. Edward Davidson has pointed out that the place names Poe employs in this poem are readily identifiable, “Weir” referring to Robert Walter Weir, a popular landscape painter of the time; “Auber” the name of the French composer, Jean François Auber; while the region described is distinguishable as a stretch between Fordham and Mamaroneck, where Virginia, Poe's wife, was buried.⁸ In discussing this poem Davidson also remarks that it “is more than an autobiographical moment, concealed behind an elaborate and rather absurd masquerade; it is a nightmare journey of a self which has been deluded into thinking that external reality is not real but can be shaped into anything the imagination decrees”. Somewhat later he adds: “… at the end the protagonist has come to a spot where death exists as a fact and where place and time are not elements to be manipulated according to the mind's desire”.⁹

The ingeniousness of this and other interpretations of the poem give graphic demonstration of the skill Poe was developing in the handling of his materials.¹⁰ The poem's first line depends on the hard sibilance of s sounds, with the adjectives ashen and sober providing a somber mental picture which, if ‘unrealistic’ in their incongruous conjunction to each other with respect to their denotations, evoke exactly the gloomy picture of gloom and despair which Poe wishes the reader to visualize. This line

The skies they were ashen and sober …

is followed by a refrain that relates this universal despair of the elements to the despair of the physical world of reality:

The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere …

And immediately we are drawn into the real world through various successive pieces of information which seem to tell us something concrete without in actuality being more factual than the indefinite and illusive ‘details’, vague and generalized, which have been given us thus far in the poem's first three lines.

It was night, in the lonesome October
          Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
          In the misty mid region of Weir:—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
          In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

At a later point [in The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe], when discussing Poe's major themes I propose to return to possible levels of meaning in “Ulalume”. But since I am limiting myself here to these brief introductory remarks on the poem's structure and the way in which it is put together, it is reasonable to propose that although “Auber” and “Weir”, for example, refer to concrete persons, for Poe's purposes they do so by accident rather than design. Poe took names where he found them, his intentions usually being to create certain definite effects rather than to establish associations to real events or persons in his readers' minds. In the first stanza of “Ulalume”, needing a rhyme for “October”, he used “Auber”, quite by coincidence making an effective pun on the way it probably would be pronounced by a native of English. Similarly, he used “Weir” because it rhymes with “year” and because Poe found w sounds mournful and poetic. We should take care, therefore, not to assume that Poe used certain words because of their symbolic connotations or associative resemblances within given contexts to other things. In Poe's writings meaning is forever subordinate to sound; and whenever sound produces effective meanings, the inference lies near at hand that the correspondence has occurred by accident more than by design, and that profundities in Poe's works should be appreciated as largely gratuitous.

It is not my intention to denigrate Poe's writings or to belittle his literary accomplishments. The evidence is strong, however, that those who derive meanings and subtleties in Poe's writings are serving interests other than those that concerned Poe. If fascinating as a stylist, I can not regard Poe as an intellectual nor as a reasoned, systematic thinker. To him technique was of paramount importance—the way in which elements in writing fit together; meanings, of secondary interest in his scheme of things, he frequently neglected or ignored. When late in his career he attempted with Eureka to evolve an intellectual system, he resorted to derivative borrowings to construct a philosophy which is murky and illogical at best. As a stylist, however, and methodologist, Poe remains pre-eminently the American artist par excellence.

Notes

1. Poems of Poe [Floyd Stovall, ed. The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. (Charlottesville, Va., 1965]. 237.

2. Poems of Poe, 247.

3. Stovall, Poems of Poe, 276-279.

4. Stovall, Poems of Poe, 287.

5. Stovall, Poems of Poe, 266.

6. Davidson, of a somewhat different mind, states that “One of the major themes in Poe's whole corpus of writing is his longing for the mother, for a kind of female night-shape, who is never there and will never come” (p. 47). [Davidson, Edward. Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1957.]

7. See Stovall's capsule summary of various critics' attitudes about Poe's writing, pp. xxvii-xxxii.

8. A Critical Study, 93-94.

9. A Critical Study, 96.

10. The poem will be appended at a later point in this discussion. See Chapter IX [of The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe], pp. 179-182.