3º Grado de Estudios Ingleses

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)

Poe embodies the Romantic conception of literature as creation, originality,

and personal vision. With him starts to fade the notion that literature may be
defined for its collective use or its potential for knowledge.

He led a fairly tragic life: Orphan at a very early age; raised by foster parents
with whom he did not get along; an alcoholic since very young, he lived in
relative poverty most of his life, partly because of his alcoholism, and partly
because of his uneven temperament and his inability to manage his finances.

He served as editor of several literary journals: Southern Literary Messenger,

Burton's Gentlemen Magazine, Broadway Journal.

He also wrote, in a free-lance capacity, poems, short stories, and literary

criticism. In many ways Poe was the first well-rounded, versatile professional
man of letters in America.

CRITICISM:
Poe’s criticism shows a deep concern with literary technique and with the
function and nature of literature at large. His ideas are found in theoretical
essays like "The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition," and
in reviews of his contemporaries--notably of N. Hawthorne. He was a keen,
often witty, critic of his contemporaries.

POETRY:
He was a prolific poet, perhaps his less known aspect nowadays. His most
famous works are "The Bells" (1849) and "The Raven." (1845). They are
extremely musical and rhythmic, to the point of hysteria. Notice the wild
alliterations:

"The Bells"
Hear the sledges with the bells--
Silver bells!
What a world of merryment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
all the Heavens, seem to twinkle
with a crystalline delight...

“The Raven”
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
......
Open here I flung the shutter when with many a flirt and flutter
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore....

SHORT STORIES:
Poe's contemporary fame stems from his short stories, which he published in
assorted journals throughout his lifetime. He gathered some of them in Tales
of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).

These stories are fully in the Romantic tradition:

* They deal with the fantastic, with mystery and horror. They follow one of
Poe's maxims, which he attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, but he probably
invented: "Beauty has an element of strangeness in it." He stated, for
example, that in writing the short story "Berenice" he attempted: "The
ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful colored into the horrible;
the witty exaggerated into burlesque; the singular wrought out into the
strange and mystical."

This strangeness that he valued so much as an indispensable ingredient of the

beautiful is evident in:

* SETTINGS: they are usually detached from the present and the immediate;
his plots take place in the unspecified past, in vague, unspecified locations, or
in a semi-fantastic, invented geography.
* INTENSE SUBJECTIVISM--conveyed by 1st person perspective. In Poe’s
writing we usually see everything from the perspective of a character.
* The strangeness of this first-person perspective is highlighted by
EXTREME SUBJECTIVE STATES: Poe’s characters are usually prey to
nervousness, madness, or drug-induced hallucination.
* In general, his characters are OUTSIDERS, EXTRAORDINARY
INDIVIDUALS. They are people who usually have little to do with the
ordinary working world--dreamers, extremely cerebral people, people with a
pathological sensitivity, insane....

As examples, two beginnings:

"Mad I am not--and very surely I do not dream. But tomorrow I die, and
today I would unburden my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before
the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere
household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified--have
tortured--have destroyed me." "The Black Cat"

"True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why
will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses.... Above
all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the
earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe
how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story." “The Tell-Tale
Heart”

Further characteristics of Poe's work:

* CAREFUL CONSTRUCTION AND GRADATION of effects. This shows
mostly in his detective stories: "The Murders or the Rue Morgue," "The
Purloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget." Poe is credited with
inventing the detective story.
* LOGICAL HORROR: No matter how strange the situation and how
fantastic the atmosphere, the horrific in Poe shows some sense of order, and
has a logical explanation. Explanations are often cooly and scientifically
purveyed: for example, in "The Black Cat" and "The Fall of the House of
Usher."
* In general, Poe's characters are unable to control their lives and
environment. They seem immersed in situations that work according to their
own rules and about which they can do nothing.
* This has been taken as a COMMENT ON CONTEMPORARY
AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. Poe's literature shows the dark side of
American society and culture at the time. But this quality has also made his
work close to that of Kafka and of many modernist and postmodern writers.
* For others Poe is simply a PRANKSTER: a JOKER intent on pushing
absurdities as far as they will go.
* Poe had considerable fame in Europe. He was translated by Charles
Baudelaire and became very influential in French letters. He was regarded a
precursor of symbolism--poetry of technical virtuosity that dealt with
evanescent feelings and suggestions.

Poe was found unconscious in the street in Baltimore, completely drunk on

an election day in late October 1849. He was taken to a hospital in a delirious
state from which he barely recovered and died a few days later.

Bibliography (basic)

Kenneth Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful, Neverending Remembrance

(New York: Harper and Row, 1992)
Kenneth Silverman, ed. New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales (Cambridge
University Press, 1993)

Kevin J. Hayes, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)