SELECTED WRITINGS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE…
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Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
edited by
David H. Davidson
Note: Davidson places the introductions to his four sections–Poems, Tales (short stories), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Poe’s only novel), as well as Essays and Criticism–together with an overview of Poe at the front of his book. I’ve chosen here to place my notes on those introductions together with my notes on Poe’s works as they are presented.
Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 19 January 1809. He died in Baltimore, Maryland, on 7 October 1849.
…to assume, other words, that what a man wrote he inevitably was in his own person. If a writer dealt with corruption, horror and eroticism, he was of necessity corrupt, horrible and erotic. (vii)
Perhaps one might lay down the truism that Poe wrote what he did because it was as remote as possible from his own experience. (vii)
He effected poses and manners and made profound impressions on easily impressionable ladies. (vii)
One would like for all time, to destroy the fiction that Poe was a drunkard (he could not drink: owing to a curious but well-known nervous sensibility, one drink of wine or whiskey made him virtually senseless); he was not a dope fiend (only once in his life he took laudanum to calm his nerves, and he became violently ill); he was not a rake. His life was, in fact, one of the dullest any figure of literary importance has lived in the past two-hundred years. (viii)
[Poe] was America’s major poet before the coming of Walt Whitman and yet his poetry today is considered mere noise and nonsense. (ix)
Generally speaking, [Poe’s literary] criticism still commands respect; but recent critical theory has moved far from Poe’s attempts at making psychology of artistic creation and from his assertions that there can be devised rules for art as cogent, and logical, as the rules of science. (ix)
Poe, in short, acted out for us our own childish, arrogant, violent inner world which, because we are civilized people, we all keep under control: Poe has done for us what we wouldn’t dare do for ourselves. (ix)
…a century’s accretion of legends and half truths… Accretion: The process of growth or enlargement by a gradual buildup.
Within that four-year span of the last years came such acknowledged masterpieces as The Raven, Ulalume, For Annie, Anabel Lee [When I was 16, I worked as an usher at the Colony Theater in Marietta, Ohio. This was back in the day when movies included shorts and cartoons before the feature. One such short was a reading of Annabel Lee set over dark and misty scenes of ocean waves crashing on a shore. I looked on YouTube but did not find that particular reading. During the run of that film—I do not recall which one it was—I would have heard and seen the short eight times. JH] and The Bells; yet much of that later verse was occasional or addressed to certain ladies by a forlorn widower who wanted to marry again. They suggest that Poe had virtually abandoned poetry as a serious expression. The reason for such a cessation might be that poetry did not make money, and short stories could earn a few dollars, or that the pressures of a grinding, poverty-ridden existence kept Poe from directing his best efforts into the writing of poetry. (x)
Poetry is itself a way of learning; it in no way employs the methods of logical, positivistic investigation; it acts only as poetry; and what it reduces to order or brings into the range of comprehension is rendered only poetically. (x)
It was, in Poe’s terms, a complex journey of the mind from some supposed “here” to some indeterminate, presume “there;” it was a different mind journey every time it was undertaken, or every time a poem was written or read. (x)
Poetry was the one instrumentality of man, and the only one, which could go through and beyond the world or brute fact and enter into the world of pure mind or what Poe termed “ideality.” Thus, Poe’s poetry is difficult because it does not do what readers expect of poetry to say and do.
Poe was attempting to to break down two obstructions both to the creation and to the understanding of poetry. One was the generally held view that poetry was moral or didactic and had meanings applicable to the everyday lives of men and women.(x-xi)
The other misconception was that poetry can exist as pretty word-spinning, that it helps draw fresh or startling connections between things and ideas, and that it makes us read the world anew. Poetry was, for Poe, one of the oldest and surest ways man had so far discovered whereby he might leave the flux and meaninglessness of daily existence and penetrate to the world of essence, or pure idea, of order. (xi)
“If, indeed, there by any one circle of thought distinctly and palpably marked out from amid the jarring and tumultuous chaos of human intelligence,” Poe wrote in the Drake-Halleck review, “it is that evergreen and radiant Paradise which the true poet knows, and knows alone, as the limited realm of his authority…”
Poe’s poems seem, therefore, ephemeral, shapeless or confused in their imagery and lacking in the solidities of thought because they are concerned, not with statements about or projections of thought, but with the aesthetic approaches to thought. (xi)
Poe was, consequently, one of the first poet-critics to be interested in the “psychology” of poetry; and by “psychology” we mean what happens both to the poem and reader when the poem, as something quite distinct from the poet who wrote it, slowly releases its meaning. The question of poem an reader is forever new and different every time it occurs; poetry was, for Poe, the tentatively charted way toward and understanding of man and his world which was nonrational and intuitive—an understanding of madness, passionate love, evil, the past and the present, or death. (xi-xii)
Poe’s poetry was necessarily incomplete; it could not force words bound to the world of sense and existence, to convey an apprehension of the spirit, the absolute, the Ideal; it could not fulfill its purposes, and it eventually failed. (xii)
[The Raven] is, therefore, a demonstration not only that mind can go to pieces under the impact of a nonrational, external agency but, what is even more horrifying, that the mind can watch itself in the very process of going mad. (xii)
Thought tried to run away with feeling. (xiii)
In making a split between emotion and thought, he virtually destroyed [Ulalume]. (xiii)
From first to last, Poe did no think hard or well enough as a poet. He was, in his way, capable of quite profound feeling and thought, but he made them separate functions and could not think feel at the same time. In short, he was not able to be a poet with his whole being: he was by turns lyrical, dramatic, musical meditative, even expository; and he made the nearly fatal error of thinking that he could made a “science” of poetry. There is some justice in the charge that Poe’s poetry sought spectacuar effects rather than be, simply, poems. (xiv)
First published in 1827, Tamerlane consisted of 403 lines, Davidson includes the 1829 version, edited by Poe, to 243 lines. This is the first stanza.
Kind solace in a dying hour!
Such, father, is not (now) my theme—
I will not madly deem that power
Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell’d in—
I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope—that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
If I can hope—Oh God! I can—
Its fount is holier—more divine—
I would not call thee fool, old man,
But such is not a gift of thine.
(Note: I have formatted this first stanza to match that found in Davidson’s text. This does not match that presented by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.)
After several readings I cannot state emphatically that Poe writes here of Tamerlane’s own death—thus setting the whole poem a retrospect—or of the death of Tamerlane’s father and therefore making it biography.
The second line of the second stanza—Bow’d from its wild pride into shame—is a perfect example of how American (our particular perfection/perversion of English) frustrates those whose first language is not ours. The first time I read the poem, I heard bowed, as in humbled, in my head. Later readings, however, caused me to wonder if bowed, bent as if by an archer and able to snap back once released, was more correct.
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