Edgar Allan Poe: The Romantic as Classicist

Author(s): Darlene Harbour Unrue

Source: International Journal of the Classical Tradition , Spring, 1995, Vol. 1, No. 4
(Spring, 1995), pp. 112-119
Published by: Springer

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 Edgar Allan Poe:
The Romantic as Classicist
DARLENE HARBOUR UNRUE

Edgar Allan Poe's affinity with classical values has not been properly noted by critics and
other readers who have interpreted the romantic and Gothic elements in his fiction and
poetry as proof of Poe's predilection for the subjective, macabre, and fantastic, as well as
the transcendental. A careful examination of Poe's use of seemingly romantic materials,
however, reveals that he measured the romantic stance detrimentally against the objectiv-
ity and rationality of the classical. Poe drew allusion and structure from his reading of
classical literature to inform his own works with a classical worldview he sought in both
life and art.

uring his lifetime and since his death in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe has presented a
problem for readers and critics who, in trying to understand him, have attempted
to place him within a literary tradition. The wealth of contradictory designations at-
tests not only to the elusiveness of Poe but also perhaps to his genius and to the failure
of most critics and scholars, particularly American, to fully comprehend him.' Describ-
ing the tenor of Poe criticism since 1929, Eric W. Carlson concluded several years ago
that what was emerging-finally-as a consensus among critics and scholars was a
"transcendental-symbolic" reading of Poe that rests on a "'visionary' (sometimes
Gnostic) interpretation of Poe's works."2 Such a generalization encompasses Poe's ro-
manticism and Gothicism and takes into account his influence on the French symboliste
movement. It allows as well for current postmodern readings of Poe.3

1. See, e.g., Edmund Wilson, "Poe at Home and Abroad," New Republic 49 (8 December 1926):
77-80; Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs (Garden City, N. J.: Doubleday, Doran & Co.,
1928), 201-255; Constance Rourke, American Humor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931), 179-
186; George Snell, "The First of the New Critics," Quarterly Review of Literature 2 (1945):
333-340; Allen Tate, "The Angelic Imagination," Kenyon Review 14 (Summer 1952): 455-475;
Clark Griffith, "Poe's 'Ligeia' and the English Romantics," University of Toronto Quarterly 14
(October 1954): 8-25; Jay B. Hubbell, "Poe and the Southern Literary Tradition," Texas Stud-
ies in Language and Literature 2 (Summer 1960): 151-175; Stephen L. Mooney, "Poe's Gothic
Waste Land," Sewanee Review 70 (January-March 1962): 261-283; David Hirsch, "The Pit and
the Apocalypse," Sewanee Review 76 (October-December 1968): 632-652; Robert Kiely, "The
Comic Masks of Edgar Allan Poe," Unamesimo 1 (1967): 31-41; and Stuart Levine, Edgar Poe:
Seer and Craftsman (Deland: Everett/Edwards, 1972), 158, 167-168, 263.
2. See Eric W. Carlson, "Frames of Reference for Poe's Symbolic Language," in Critical Essays on
Edgar Allen Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 215-216.
3. See Barbara Johnson, "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," Psychology and the
Question of the Text: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1976-77, New Series, no. 2, ed.
Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 149-171; and Roland

Darlene Harbour Unrue, Department of English, University of Nevada, 4505 Maryland

Parkway, Box 455011, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89154-5011, USA.
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 1, No. 4, Spring 1995, pp. 112-119.

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 Unrue 113

What seem
sion, of Po
inspiration
knew any o
voted to de
articles, con
Duyckinck
pictorial or
and George
modern wr
and precise:
There is no
narrowly, G
oes and par
Coleridge,
came to ap
von Schlege
beauty abov
among the
shriek, and
of Poe's can
reunion wit
the essential Transcendentalist.9
There are, however, certain important differences between Poe's use of such
seemingly romantic materials and themes and their use by incontrovertibly roman-
tic-or Gothic or Transcendental--writers. The romantic writer who exalts nature,
primitivism, solitude, and individuality and exults in subjectivity and emotion, recol-
lected in tranquility or not, stands decidedly apart from Poe, who is indifferent to
nature and primitivism, is miserable in solitariness, and is frustrated by the restrictions
of the subjective perspective. He had general disdain for American romantics such as
Longfellow and Bryant, and with the possible exception of Byron, he rarely expressed
unqualified praise for the English romantics, declaring of Coleridge that "he went
wrong by reason of his profundity"10 and of Shelley, "In all his works we find no

Barthes, "Textual Analysis of a Tale by Edgar Poe," trans. Donald G. Marshall, Poe Studies
10 (June 1977): 1-12.
4. Review of the 1850 Griswold edition of Poe's Works, Literary World 6 (26 Jan 1850): 8.
5. "Introduction," Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose and Poetry (New York: Rinehart, 1950), xi.
6. "Edgar Allan Poe," The Nation [London] (16 January 1909); rpt. Pen Portraits and Reviews, by
Bernard Shaw (London: Constable and Co., 1932), 231-238; and Carlson, ed., Critical Essays on
Edgar Allan Poe, 86-90 [p. 90, quote].
7. See "Poe as a Literary Critic," The Nation 155 (1942): 452-453.
8. See Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972; New Yorck: Random House, 1985), pp.
84, 101; Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1933), pp. 151-155; and Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 47-48.
9. See Ottavio M. Casale, "Poe on Transcendentalism," Emerson Society Quarterly 50 (First
Quarter 1968): 85-97.
10. Quoted by Campbell, p. 32.

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114 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Spring 1995

conception thoroughly wrought.""1 He routinely faulted German romantics for a lack

of originality.
Although the identification of Poe's Gothicism has depended on his use of Gothic
trappings, especially in his prose fiction, there is an important distinction between the
end to which such trappings were bent by Gothic romanticists such as Anne Radcliffe,
Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Maturin, and the end to which similar trappings
were bent by Poe. Whether or not a traditional Gothic romance is didactic or moralis-
tic, it inevitably offers readers the thrill of vicarious fear through participation in
terrifying adventures and confrontations that are concluded with rational and moral
satisfaction. Poe, on the other hand, is never didactic, and the terror he generates in the
reader is never gratuitous. He uses Gothic machinery in his tales to symbolize states of
mind in characters tormented by intimations of death, insanity, and other forms of
annihilation and chaos that lead to no rational reconciliation.'2 Moreover, Poe viewed
most examples of literary Gothicism as vulgar and defended himself against such an
association.'"
Poe's particular transcendentalism has been likened to the dark transcendental-
ism of Hawthorne and Melville, but some critics have perceived a similarity even
between Poe and Emerson, their respective "Eureka" and "Nature" seen as addressing
the same universal mystery.'4 But Poe, who openly criticized Transcendentalism and
the Transcendentalists, disliking their optimisn, their moralistic aesthetic views, and
what he called their "quips, quirks, and curt oracularities,"s'5 sought rational proof of
spiritual transcendence rather than accepting its existence on intuitive faith. Of Emerson
he says, "I am lost in amazement at finding in him little more than a respectful imita-
tion of Carlyle," and he compares Emerson's imitation of Carlyle with the "aping of
Sallust by Aruntius, as described in the 114th Epistle" of Seneca.'6
What then, we may ask, did Poe admire? He admired a certain degree of origi-
nality, but he also appreciated and engaged in good imitation, and he demanded of
himself and others whom he evaluated and interpreted fidelity to predetermined rules
of correctness and style. Above all things Poe valued and yearned for order. Throughout
his art and life he turned to reason for solace--or lamented its absence--in the night-
mare world of his life and the nightmare worlds he created. Such objects of Poe's
admiration and such standards of valuation are decidedly classical, and, indeed, there
is much in Poe's social and intellectual environment and background that would have
directed him to classicism.
Most significant is the fact of Poe's classical education. At an early age he began
the study of Latin, and before he entered the University of Virginia in 1827 he was
accomplished in reading Horace and Cicero, scanning Latin poetry, capping verses,

11. "Marginalia," Southern Literary Messenger 15 (May 1849), 292-96; in Edgar Allan Poe: Marginalia,
ed. John Carl Miller (Charlottsville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 181.
12. See Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: A Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New Yorlc
Harper Collins, 1991), 111-114; Stephen L. Mooney, "Comic Intent," Modern Language Notes
76 (May 1961): 432-434; and Leslie Fiedler, "The Blackness of Darkness," Love and Death in the
American Novel (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960; rev. 1966), 391-400.
13. See Silverman, pp. 153-154.
14. See Silverman, pp. 532-533.
15. See Silverman, p. 265.
16. "Marginalia," Graham's Magazine 29 (December 1846): 311-313; in Edgar Allan Poe: Marginalia,
143-144.

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Unrue 115

and compo
the many
of Voltaire
read widel
in Tasso.'7
of a region
externally
ings, many
Poe's earli
1827 when
was thirtee
pessimistic
revisions o
poetic infl
from class
a third vo
more classi
In the sam
comic, or s
story, "Th
souls of P
Freudian c
represents
From ther
neoclassica
"MS. Foun
illustrate t
be insane.
his notorio
the reader
scribes. Th
experience
tor, and P
the style
continuing
thirst... fo
and praises
all that is
Poe depart
sience of p
Time or G
continue t
greater tha

17. See Silve

(Cambridge
18. Silverm
19. See, e. g.
tation, tran

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116 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Spring 1995

Between 1835 and 1840 Poe continued to write poems and tales, including
"Berenice," with its narrator one Aegeus,2 but he turned also to other kinds of writ-
ing. He was fond of puzzles and mental games, and both his fiction and nonfiction in
these years often included such mental exercises, in retrospect, preparation for his
later detective stories. He also published five sections from his uncompleted blank
verse tragedy Politian, set in sixteenth-century Rome and containing a long passage
from the Odyssey, presumably translated by Poe. The criticism Poe wrote during this
time, mostly in the form of reviews for The Southern Literary Messenger and Burton's
Gentlemen's Magazine, established his exacting standards and his reputation for harsh
judgments. Poe began his critical assessments with a set of uncompromising rules for
good writing, the first of which was simply correctness. Like Alexander Pope, he often
attacked prideful critics, and he spoke frequently of taste, a subject uncongenial to
romantic art and romantic criticism.21
Two stories, "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," both published in
1839, show clearly Poe's continual turning to classical values and themes. Although
critics and readers generally have considered Ligeia's name made-up by Poe,22 it is, of
course, the name of one of the sirens in Greek mythology. In Poe's story, his narrator
uses Homeric epithets to describe Ligeia's "hyacinthine" hair and voice that is "more
than mortal melody." When the narrator says that he never knew a woman or a man
who knew the classical languages and the sciences as Ligeia knew them, the reader is
reminded that the dulcet-voiced sirens of the Odyssey were also all-knowing. One critic
has argued persuasively for the importance of the classical allusions in the story and
sees the story as a representation of the conflict between romanticism and classicism?3
The title of "The Fall of the House of Usher" suggests a reference to the House of
Atreus, and the family history and present reality of the ill-fated Ushers, with their
incest and various familial murders, parallel in spirit the events and stories within the
Oresteia. We recall, too, that the brother of Agamemnon, a descendant of Atreus, was
the husband of Helen, whose interest to Poe as an ideal of beauty and symbol of
classicism is commemorated in several of the early poems."
The classical value of "The Fall of the House of Usher" lies in the symbolism of
the story and in the similarity between Roderick Usher and the mansion that is the
literal referent of the title. More than one critic has seen the opposition between Life-
Reason and Death-Madness implicit in the house and the last representatives of the
family.2 The narrator of the story anticipates Melville's Ishmael of another ten years,
and still later Henry James's Ralph Touchett and Lambert Strether, in that they witness
the experiences of others and reach logical conclusions as if from the progress of an

20. Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, "A Note on Poe's 'Berenice': A Classical Source for the
Narrator's Fantasy," The University of Mississippi Studies in English 3 (1982): 64-67.
21. See Silverman, p. 165.
22. See D. H. Lawrence, "Edgar Allan Poe," in The Symbolic Meaning: The Uncollected Versions of
Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Armin Arnold (Fontwell, Arundel, Sussex: Centaur
Press, 1962), 116-130; and J. Schroeter, "A Misreading of Poe's 'Ligeia,'" PMLA 76 pt. 1
(1961): 397-406.
23. See Joy Rea, "Classicism and Romanticism in Poe's 'Ligeia,'" Ball State University Forum 8
(Winter 1967): 25-39.
24. See Silverman, pp. 69-74.
25. See Darrel Abel, "A Key to the House of Usher," The University of Toronto Quarterly 18
(1949): 176-185.

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 Unrue 117

argument.
also true th
Ushers's. In the course of the events described in the tale the narrator moves from a
point of relative naivete to a point of certain knowledge. In confronting the horror of
Death-Madness, he affirms the value of Life-Reason, as does the author Poe.
In the last decade of Poe's life, he produced some of his most significant works
and some that are most revealing of his classical alliance. In the 1840s he published all
of his so-called tales of ratiocination, the first being "The Murders in the Rue Morgue,"
introducing his detective hero, C. Auguste Dupin. Credited by nearly everyone with
fathering the modern detective story, Poe was initially inspired by Zadig, a 1748 work
of his unacknowledged neoclassical mentor, Voltaire. The ratiocination stories incor-
porate many of the themes and techniques Poe was developing over the course of
fifteen years. The stories are puzzles solved by a rational, if eccentric, genius, through
complicated processes of induction and deduction. They are mental games played by
an intellectual virtuoso, but they also rationalize death. They take the mystery--and
ultimately the horror-from it, by treating it with detachment and by "solving" it.26
In 1844 Poe published his most famous poem, "The Raven," and during the last
five years of his life wrote his two best known pieces of criticism, "The Philosophy of
Composition" and "The Poetic Principle." All three works strongly illustrate Poe's use
of classical materials and his sustained inclination toward classical values. The events
within "The Raven" are recounted by a narrator who experienced them in the past. He
recalls himself as grieving over his lost love and as "weak and weary" from searching
vainly for comfort in his books. Because the narrator is napping when he first hears the
raven's tapping, the reader is expected to wonder whether the whole experience is
meant to be a dream-nightmare or reality. The first seven stanzas of the poem build
the suspense and establish the atmosphere, and the remaining eleven carry the poem
through to its conclusion, a conclusion, however, without resolution. The narrator's
state of mind and his negativism are apparent in the images and refrains of the first
seven stanzas. The setting is midnight in bleak December, the death phase of the solar
day and of the year, dramatized by darkness and wind and silence save for the myste-
rious tapping. From the point of the bird's entrance at the end of stanza seven, the
narrator poses a series of questions to the bird, who knows only one word, "Never-
more," the narrator, by the phrasing of his questions, ensuring the confirmation of his
own worst fears about death and loss and the annihilation of the soul. The essential
meaning of the poem lies in the carefully crafted symbolism of the raven, traditionally
the scavenger, the bird of ill-omen (as Poe acknowledges in "The Philosophy of Com-
position"), the foreboder of foul weather and death. In creating his poem, Poe drew on
the mythology of the raven and accounts of the bird in literature, much of which Poe
no doubt knew. According to ancient legend, we recall, ravens were once large white
birds, but one day a raven told Apollo that Coronis, a nymph the god loved, was
faithless. Apollo killed the nymph, but he hated the messenger and vengefully colored
him black. Poe probably had read Ovid's account of the raven's history, and he surely
would have known that Cicero, one of his favorite writers, was said to have been
forewarned of his death by the fluttering of ravens. The talking raven appears consis-

26. For a good overview of the genre, see Robin W. Winks, "Introduction," Detective Fiction
(Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980). See also Dorothy L. Sayers, "Introduction,"
The Omnibus of Crime (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929), 9-44.

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118 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Spring 1995

tently in literature. Chaucer's "Manciple's Tale," for example, is a medieval rendering

of Apollo and the tale-telling raven, and Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth includes
Lady Macbeth's triumphant declaration that "The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks
the fatal entrance of Duncan" (I.v). John Gay's Pastorals include the verse, "The boding
raven on her cottage sat, / And with hoarse croakings warned us of our fate" (The
Dirge). Poe's raven in this context is predetermined as the messenger of only bad news,
and the fate of Poe's narrator is to ask only questions that can be answered "Never-
more." One could argue, furthermore, that because each of the first seven stanzas ends
with the word more combined with some form of negation, usually the word nothing,
the rigid rhyme scheme itself predetermines the word "nevermore," an example of the
harmony Poe often achieved between theme and form.
What is equally important symbolically in the poem is that the raven is associ-
ated with the narrator's chamber door and with a bust of Pallas Athene that sits on the
transom of the chamber door's frame. The Freudian critics have taken up the symbol-
ism of doorway as the threshhold to the unconscious, but the bust of Pallas has been
considered only in passing. The bust of Pallas Athene, one of the chief Olympian
deities, goddess of wisdom and patroness of the arts and trades, is represented in
ancient art as grave and majestic. At the bird's entrance into the narrator's chamber, it
perches on the bust of Pallas, heretofore unmentioned in the poem, and remains there,
nevermore to leave. It is the narrator's obsession with his grief that obscures the view
of Wisdom and Art, which the bust represents. Art and Wisdom might offer resolu-
tion, but the tormented, half-mad narrator can see and hear only the bird of ill-omen.
Some scholars who have had trouble fitting Poe's critical essays into his romanti-
cism have concluded that "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Prin-
ciple," in particular, are elaborate put-ons, satires. If taken seriously, however (and I
believe they must be), "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle"
point unmistakably to Poe's classical method of creating art and to classical elements
in his aesthetic theory. Poe reveals himself to be a crafter, a careful shaper of art,
working backwards from an a priori effect, making all technical and thematic decisions
in conformation to it. He also argues in both pieces for variations of Aristotle's unities,
insisting on a unity of Effect and a unity of Time. Just as some of Aristotle's interpret-
ers, such as Corneille, whom Poe had read, perceived a time limit on the action of a
drama, Poe declared that a poem is a poem only if it can be read in one sitting.27
Such aesthetic definitions point significantly to Poe's classical values, and in fact
the overall case for Poe's classicism has significant support throughout the canon, as
numerous allusions, quotations, and epigraphs indicate the breadth of Poe's familiar-
ity with classical materials.23 The fantasy worlds Poe created have led some readers

27. See The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. A. Harrison, 17 vols., The Virginia Edition
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902; rpt. AMS Press, 1965), vol. 14, pp. 193-208; 266-292.
28. Only a few have been pointed out, however. In addition to Blythe/Sweet and Rea, see V.
Rendell, "Poe: A Classical Reference," Notes and Queries 9 (May 30, 1914): 426-427; Thomas
Ollive Mabbott, "Some Classical Allusions in Poe," Classical Weekly 12 (January 20, 1919), 94;
and Herbert Mierow, "A Classical Allusion in Poe," Modern Language Notes 31 (March 1916):
184-185. A representative selection of epigraphs to Poe's tales includes quotations from
Plato ("Morella"), Lucan ("A Tale of Jerusalem"), Alcman ("Silence-A Fable"), Euripides
("Conversation of Eiros and Charmion"), Servius ("The Island of the Fay"), Sophocles
("Eleonora"), and Seneca ("The Purloined Letter").

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 Unrue 119

and critics
but Poe gav
of his nonf
are repres
ancient my
important
efforts to
altogether
Plato and A
searched in
the chaos a
as an instr
classicism a
more classi
ciples of co
elements o
of Homer,
Poe was a t
categorizin
ing especia
erner, he w
native cult
to the prev
Rome and
order the darkness.

29. A number of scholars have commented upon Poe's social realism and social criticism,
particularly in the tales. See, e.g., Donald Barlow Stauffer, "Style and Meaning in 'Ligeia'
and 'William Wilson,'" Studies in Short Fiction 2 (Summer 1965): 113-127.
30. Mabbott points out a debt to Sappho that Poe acknowledged.

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