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POE AND THE SUPERNATURAL

When one is dealing with the occult, a subject which has served as a battleground for theologians and philosophers since the time of Moses, one of the greatest barriers to understanding is the confusion of terms.

In its broadest sense the “supernatural” may embrace the most exalted mysticism and the darkest superstitions of witchcraft and devil worship. I should like to suggest my own application of the rather vague term “supernatural” to the works of Poe by borrowing a phrase from science, a useful phrase not without its own poetry. Astronomers call the side of a planet which is turned from the sun its Night Side. Humanity, also, at times turns its face from the light of day; and it is this night side of human nature which has engendered the body of ideas and beliefs we call the occult. We are all somewhat familiar with the development of this phase of human thought and emotion. Generally speaking, it may be said to fall into two major traditions, — one aristocratic and intellectual, the other popular and instinctive. The first may for convenience be called the line of occult science and philosophy; the second, the line of folklore. Since earliest antiquity literary men have drawn upon this reservoir of tradition, sometimes using the occult as a major theme, often introducing it merely to add color to verse, drama or fiction. When a writer employs ideas concerning the supernatural most common to his own race and time, we may say that he is in the orthodox tradition of the occult, providing that one may speak of orthodoxy in connection with heresy, perversion and rebellion. This orthodox canon of the supernatural is made up of themes which sublime poetry, and the most trivial romances employ again and again. Theocritus and the author of “The Goldon Ass,” — Shakespeare and Goethe, — the Gothic novelists and Bram Stoker have as a common storehouse the traditions of witch, vampire, and werewolf. The Faust of Goethe is not primarily a creature of the poet’s mind, but one of a larger family of the same name and basic character, the “Dracula” of Bram Stoker, and the “Lamia” of Keats ­[page 2:] have a Virginian wealth of elder cousins in poetry and legend. Many writers have seemed to take pride in preserving these ancient themes, seeking by mastery of words to transmute trivial, and often repellent folktales into something fine. A few have broken the chains of orthodoxy even in their treatment of the supernatural, and have made of the occult beliefs and practices of our ancestors a springboard to the ecstasy and terror of the unknown. One of the first of these, and beyond question one of the most gifted, was Edgar Poe. The dominant note of Poe’s life was his unorthodoxy. When he confessed to “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before” he was not writing idle verse. It is impossible for anyone with a knowledge of the poetry and the tales born of this extraordinary mind to look unmoved upon a portrait of Poe. The biographer is impotent before the mystery of what passed behind his delicate forehead and unquiet eyes. Even we, commonplace respectable citizens, have known moments of ecstasy and terror which we could not adequately express in words, even if we dared. But Poe ranged to uncharted distances and sank to depths which, had they been described, would have made his “William Wilson” seem a mere fantasy of the Sunday supplement. Still he sought, with an honesty surpassing the honesty of the matter-of-fact, to convey in black and white what he had experienced. Whether or not these excursions were accomplished by abuse of the delicate faculties of perception with alcohol has been very tediously argued for a century. Most serious modern students of Poe seem to agree that, considering his time and position in society, Poe was no sot. It is common knowledge that a few glasses of wine after dinner will bring forth a cascade of amusing fantasy from a man of brilliant mind and frail body, while that same amount of alcohol will not produce even a ripple upon the congealed surface of a dolt. If Poe was at any time spurred to greater heights or plunged lower in despair by an evening’s drinking, we who profit eternally by his moods, should have no censure for him, but only gratitude. When Poe was a student at Charlottesville, he doubtless felt none too sure of ­[page 3:] his position among the gilded youths with whom he mingled. If they gambled, drank and cursed like Virginia gentlemen, so must he, but like a prince in exile. Mr. Allan’s pocket suffered, Edgar’s digestion suffered. His natural turn for melancholy and introspection was intensified.

When one approaches the circumstances of Poe’s youth it is hard not to talk about a conjunction of the stars. Of course we have all been told that a poet is merely the product of his environment, plus the aptitudes and vices of his forbears, and very dull dishwater the knowledge is. Granting this, is it not amazing that a complex of influences, hereditary and social, should work so strongly in unison to force the growth of Edgar Poe into the unnatural genius he became in early manhood?

Always, one is aware of the recurrent theme of unorthodoxy. First in his parents, — actors who were also gentlefolk, and could thus not make a proper job of being either. Had they been successful on the stage they might have left Edgar a legacy of portable property and cash that would have smoothed his path, even in watertight Richmond society. But they were pitifully poor, and their death in Poe’s infancy left him to the bounty of others. The sensitive lad with a gift of words, who knew himself to be the child of obscure stage-folk, was already looking for self-justification.

By the time he was twenty, circumstances and temperament had bound Poe into a career of letters as surely as though he had been articled to it at birth. It was the age of Byron. Well-bred maidens trembled before the vision of a dark stranger whose cheek was hollowed by sad vigils and internal fires. The figures of Lord Ruthven, Don Juan, the Corsair, — incarnations of the Fatal Man, walked at the side of Calvinist Mr. Allan’s adopted son.

Poe grew up in a world that was intoxicating itself with new ideas and discoveries. The strait-jacket of traditional religion was beginning to break at the seams. Science was still standing with reluctant feet between materialism and charlatanry. Mesmer and Cagliogstro were scarcely quiet in ­[page 4:] their graves. Experiments which are now undignified by the label of psychical research were just beginning to arouse the credulous and exasperate tidy minds. Scientists and literary men were commencing their ill-equipped excursions into the jungles of the human spirit. It was the dawn of our own age of “Inward Ho!” Minds like Edgar Poe’s were charmed by the problems of split-personality; of the return of the human spirit to its own plane after death; of retribution upon evildoers by agencies more intimate than divine justice.

Into regions of terror where Hawthorne, Scott or Irving would have shrunk back disgusted, Poe, exhilarated by the promise of a new thrill, forced his way onward. His earliest story, “The Ms. Found in Bottle” proved that he soon recognized his peculiar vein of talent. From then on he took the tale of terror for his own,

Paramount among themes on the Night Side of nature which he employed in his poetry and tales is the personalization of death. This, of course, is one of the oldest exercises of poet, artist, and theologian. But Poe was unwilling to accept ready-made the trappings with which both classical and Gothic poets had clothed their images of death. Poe’s conception of mortality grew out of temperament rather than experience. True, death had robbed him of his parents while he was yet too young to realize the loss, if indeed it can be counted a loss under the circumstances. A crueler bereavement was the death of Mrs. Stannard, Poe’s earliest love, whom he celebrated in the exquisite lines “To Helen.” The deaths of his kind foster-mother and of his young wife were a heavy toll. However, many men with affection as deep as Poe’s have had equal bereavements without taking up their residence in the churchyard. There is fear of death in the Tales, but to Poe, the poet, death was not so much fraught with horror as with mystery, drama and sadness.

Death’s aspect as the destroyer of the loveliest flowers of earth haunted Poe consistently. In his “Philosophy of Composition” Poe asks: “When is this most melancholy of topics most poetical? When it most closely ­[page 5:] allies itself to Beauty. The death, then, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world; and equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited to such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

The atmosphere of hopelessness that pervades Poe’s poems about Death is not often relieved.

The departed go out into cold and darkness and the worm feeds upon them:

In this poem, and in the “City in the Sea,” the Night Side of Nature seems an eternal Polar night. The latter is a vision of a lost Atlantis of the dream-world, where

The destruction of what is living is, unhappily, a commonplace. But the last lines of this poem present, amazingly, the death of what is already dead:

The idea of a resurrection of the flesh did not appeal to Poe, and his ideas about immortality show a remarkable freedom from conventional metaphysics and superstition. In his Tales, life after death seems to be, in most instances, of two dismal varieties. First, the soul might take possession of some other body. As always, Poe’s views on transmigration are unorthodox, far removed from the precepts of the Indian and German philosophers from whose works he probably picked up the idea. In “Metzengerstein” a man’s spirit is reincarnated in a horse; but the tale is quite without the humor ­[page 6:] that might be expected from a writer who grew up among fox-hunting Virginians of the old school.

The “Oval Portrait” tells of the transfer of a woman’s spirit, bit by bit, into her painted image, by a process suggestive of sympathetic magic. Here are echoes of the puppet-magic of all times and all races whereby a doll of wax or straw become the simulacrum of a living being, who must suffer any hurt inflicted upon the miniature. But here, as in every other case of Poe’s use of a supernatural theme, he devises his own materials and tells the story in his own way. “Morella” is a study of the merging of a dead woman’s personality into a living body, whereby the dead mother and her child become literally one flesh and one spirit.

These cases of transmigration are not presented as the working out of a universal plan. The process is affected by the individual’s will to survive. This brings us to a vital point in Poe’s use of the occult. In earlier literatures, the character who crosses the border of the supernatural usually becomes the puppet of forces external to and more powerful than himself. Man, even the self-sufficient Faust, comes into conjunction with the occult as though he were, at the best, picking up a hundred dollar bill in the gutter; or at the worst, being knocked down by a taxicab. In Poe and in later writers who have been influenced by his work, the powers of darkness move within the individual, — the hero is his own witch, his own vampire, his own Mephistopheles.

The case of “Ligeia” best brings out the victory of the Will over Death. Not only did the beautiful woman return to life but she is the only one of Poe’s characters who, conquering the tomb, is still above ground when the story ends. Another means for escaping death conceived by Poe in the Tale belongs to the realm of the insanely macabre rather than to metaphysics. This is the device of holding the present body by supernatural means against the assaults of death. Poe’s story of hypnotism, “The Facts in the Case of ­[page 7:] M. Valdemar” is an instance of this device. The dying man is mesmerized in the moment of death and remains in that condition, dead, yet undecaying, repeating with his swollen tongue the statement, “I am dead.” After some months, further experiments break the spell; and he, pleading for release in death, falls into sudden decomposition before the spectators eyes.

What links these horrors with the tales of transmigration is the triumphant will of the individual. In “Mesmeric Revelation” the will of the hypnotist wins out, and in the “Facts in the Case of Monsieur Valdemar” the body of the protagonist might have been kept from dissolution indefinitely, as easily as it was preserved for the seven months of the experiment.

The idea of a living person’s being buried while in a cataleptic trance terrified and fascinated Poe. Yet the horror of premature burial did not concern him as much as its suggestion of return from a land whence (so sanity and tradition claim) no traveller returns. What, he asks of science and philosophy, is Death? At what point does the mystery of life end unsolved and the vast insoluble mystery of Death begin? Has not one whose heart has ceased to beat, whose flesh is cold, actually set foot in the Valley of the Shadow, even though life may return to the cataleptic after hours in the tomb? In the “Fall of the House of Usher” Poe adapts the subject he approached in “Premature Burial” to a supernatural theme. The wretched girl who cannot find, even in the grave, release from the curse that pursues her family, may, in the vague term of poetry and medical science, have actually been dead. What awful revelation was she bringing to her unhappy brother when the house of Usher, with its windows like dead eyes, sank forever beneath the dark waters of the tarn?

As I have chosen to confine myself to the Night Side of Nature I can only suggest that there are hints of a more exalted immortality in some of Poe’s poetry and philosophical writing, notably “Lenore,” “Politian,” “Eiros and Charmion,” and “Monos and Una” However, in the often-quoted lines of Poe’s ­[page 8:] last poem, “Eldorado” I find more irony than suggestion of a glorious life beyond life.

Poe knew how to give a phrase a blasphemous twist in order to heighten a situation of horror. The last three words of “The Cask of Amontillado” directed at the wretch who has been left walled up in a wine cellar to die, “Requiescat in Pace,” add a final touch of horror to a revenge devised with the most exquisite artistry. Later writers of the decadence, notably Joris Karl Huysmans, refined this device in the use of liturgical terms to suggest the most unholy human behavior. In “William Wilson,” Poe handles the legend of man’s good and evil selves warring for possession of his soul in the form of an allegory. There is a foreshadowing of the modern conception of “split-personality” in this tale, which undoubtedly influenced Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Poe was not alone among the brilliant minds of his day in casting his eye toward the unchartered waters and reefs of psychology. Speculations about the mysteries of being had more charm than the prosaic discoveries of Lavoisier, Dalton, and Priestley, for most early 19th century gentlemen of wide reading and educated taste. The purely analytic action of science is often repellent to lovers of the Humanities.

The age had an insatiable appetite for wonders, and the agile-minded and imaginative Poe was usually three jumps in advance of the boldest of his contemporaries. However in these matters a sense of the ridiculous (which the fairies might well have brought to the cradle of Wells) came to Poe’s rescue. New discoveries in science and mechanics which were the pride of his soberer fellow-citizens never lost for Poe their quality of the grotesque. The “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” is a catalog of ­[page 9:] authentic biological, chemical and mechanical wonders, rejected by the matter-of-fact Oriental potentate of the tale as sheer nonsense. In this tale Poe perfected the metier of Ripley a century before that Barnum of the Unarguable discovered in it a yearly income that exceeds the total earnings of Poe’s lifetime.

It is natural that Poe should have made small use of the conventional apparatus of the Gothic novelists when dealing with the subject of return after death. The spectre with moldy shroud and noisy ironmongery smells too strongly of the footlights for genuine terror. The fear inspired by Poe’s tales of death is not catharsis, it is terror of what is, or must someday be. Anyone who can read “Berenice” unmoved had better go to Vienna and have his reflexes checked. Poe with his clarity of vision was aware that nine-tenths of our horror of death is bound up with the fate of the body after the breath has left it. In a dozen stories of Death he maintains a connection between the victim’s mortal body and his influence over his loved ones, or the enemy who has been his ruin. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the murderer’s punishment is brought about not by a misty phantom or a celestial voice, but by the insistent beating of a thing so terribly alive, and yet so terribly dead, as a human heart torn from the breast which it had animated. In “The Black Cat” the body of the murderer’s wife and the presence of a cat reveal the criminal to the police. Of course the supernatural element is there, indeed it is the all of these stories. It is not applied like sham Gothic decorations tacked onto a Victorian manor house, but is the essential architecture of the tale.

There is no clear line of demarcation between the subject matter of Poe’s verse and of his serious tales. His stories of death and terror would make magnificent poems: with a few exceptions the poems, particularized and amplified, might have been written as tales. “The Raven” is not only a poem of atmosphere, but a narrative as well. ­[page 10:]

One of Poe’s few links with what I have called traditional occultism is his use on several occasions of the demon animal, which European literature has employed from the earliest times. This conception may have its root in the primitive belief that assigned to each man, or tribe, an appropriate beast spirit as a totem. We have later instances of the superstition in the witch’s familiar and the black dog, cat or horse which accompanied the emissaries of Satan. In this tradition is Poe’s tale of abnormal crime, “The Black Cat.” The demon horse of “Metzengerstein” is a combination of the theme of reincarnation, as I suggested a few minutes ago, and that of the demon-familiar. It is inconceivable that the raven which haunted the bereaved lover could have any intimate connection with the soul of his lost mistress. “His eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.” He is what the Greeks call a “ker,” a messenger of the lords of death and terror; and very significantly he takes the bird-form in which these underworld messengers often appear in Greek art and literature.

Poe’s humor was never of the red-blooded variety which the American public takes to its heart. The breath of something ghastly is on the back of the reader’s neck; his laughter is checked by finding himself with one foot suspended over an abyss of pain and terror. This is true even of such drolleries as “Loss of Breath,” “Some Words With a Mummy” and “The Man Who Was Used Up.” Poe shows us a number of amusing demons who display his curious satiric humor. In “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” when Toby Dammit makes his rash assertion, he beholds the figure of a little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect. “Nothing could be more reverend than his whole appearance; for he not only had on a full suit of black, but his shirt was perfectly clean and the collar turned down very neatly over a white cravat, while his hair was parted in front like a girl’s. His hands were clasped pensively over his stomach, and his two eyes were carefully rolled up into the top of his head.” This clerical personage, who reminds us of the devil in “Peer Gynt” ­[page 11:] claims the bettor’s head and carries it off neatly under his arm.

There is a folk-belief of the Skibo tribe that wolves eat ghosts and are nourished by them. The Devil in Poe’s “Bon Bon” declares with gusto that he eats spirits of mortals and finds them very appetizing indeed.

Poe was not strongly attracted by the survival of European superstition and folk lore, used as themes by many of his fellow poets. True, he was somewhat influenced by German Romanticism, especially ballads of the supernatural such as Berger’s ghostly tale “Lenore,” which, among others, he translated. There are striking similarities between Poe and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Poe has combined the themes of mesmerism, metempsychosis, dual existence, the dream element, and so forth, in almost exact agreement with the groupings employed by Hoffmann. It is notable that Hoffmann and Poe both wrote tales of a supernatural portrait in which the wife-model dies as a sacrifice to the painting.

The cult of horror in German literature as evidenced in the work of Hoffmann, Kleist, Tieck, Arnim, Fouqué and Chamisso has had a potent influence on English and American literature of the supernatural throughout the nineteenth century down to our own time.

There is, in many recent writers, Russian, French, and German as well as English, a type of supernatural theme that is closely associated with insanity, deriving directly from the inspiration of Poe. One may not tell just where the line is drawn, just how much of the element of the uncanny is the result of the broodings of the character’s unbalanced brain, and how much is real ghostliness. Maupassant, Dostoevsky, Remizov, and Machen, like Hoffmann and Poe, employ association between insanity and the supernatural to heighten the effect of both.

Poe’s influence upon the tale of pseudo-science, notably Jules Verne, and upon the detective novel, is outside the scope of this paper; but none the less it deserves mention. The penniless Poe seems to have a gift ­[page 12:] for suggesting to other literary men how to make a fortune from the plodding repetition of his ideas.

Poe’s scientific stories are the fountain-head of a current of modern fiction which attempts to make a tall story plausible by the use of scientific terms. Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom,” “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” and others were a new departure in the manner in which they united the scientifically real and the supernatural. “The Pit and the Pendulum,” with its diabolical machinery, is akin to the modern mechanistic story. Poe bridged the way for H. G. Wells’s use of mechanistic and scientific themes, just as his stories of hypnotism doubtless suggested certain psychological horrors to Arthur Machen.

No matter how intense a penchant Poe may have had for the occult he did not let his imagination run away with him. The outlines of his tales and poems were so clearly conceived, and the metier so familiar to him, that he had leisure to choose his words accurately and dispose his sentences with the final effect in view. The impressions he flashes upon our minds and senses are vivid and enduring.

The works of Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin were not unknown to Poe. He refers more than once to Beckford’s “Vathek.” Certain of the physical situations and settings of his tales and poems suggest the Gothic novel, purged of its obvious theatricalism and crudity.

Poe was an omnivorous reader, and a brilliant critic, — still he was not soaked in the atmosphere of ancient and mediaeval literature as were Shelley, Byron, Schiller and Goethe. The Atlantic, now a river of ocean with uninterrupted ferry service, was then an abyss which one crossed once, perhaps twice, in a lifetime. In Poe was the seed of a Parisian blown by chance winds to a community which, in spite of its superficial culture, was still the western frontier of civilization. The brain that would have absorbed riches to saturation in the fertile air of Oxford or the Sorbonne matured in the companionship of a few fine scholars and a horde of well-bred ­[page 13:] young savages. Poe had to dig for the food his rapidly expanding intellect required. Not surprisingly, his appetite was to some extent turned inward and he was forced to feed upon himself.

Original as was Poe’s treatment of the supernatural, his influence upon later writers in the same field has been enormous. He did not fall into a tradition, but created his own. Earlier writers employed the materials of the past with individual variations and embellishments. There is scarcely a supernatural figure that is not traditional in the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Goethe, Byron, Mary Shelley, or in any of the Gothic novels. Poe broke new ground. He twisted, combined, invented. Not only had mortals feared “to dream such dreams before”; apparently they were incapable of it. Since Poe, the lid has been off the Pit of Hell in European literature. In France especially the supernatural elements in prose and verse often bear a clear mark of Poe’s paternity. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Maurice Rollinat, Verlaine, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and Joris Earl Huysmans are indebted to Poe for a large measure of their terrors and exquisite revulsions.

Poe’s critics have called him an unhappy man. True, he did not go about with a silly grin on his face, pounding friends between the shoulders and kissing infants like a candidate for public office. Appearances are a poor gauge of a poet’s ecstacy, or his despair. Consider the joy, holy or unholy, of knowing oneself to be the creator of the beauty and terror that were so intimately Poe’s own. Save on the rare occasions when we have the aid of music or a flash of sympathetic revelation, we must glimpse the true Edgar Poe “in a glass darkly,” through such written things as he permitted the world to examine. In dealing with such minds as Poe’s, the critic or biographer is as limited as the war correspondent who gets no nearer to the battle than the echo of distant guns.

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A CLASSIFICATION OF POE’S POEMS AND TALES
IN WHICH HE MAKES USE OF SUPERNATURAL THEMES

The Demon Animal

• Metzengerstein
• The Black Cat
• The Raven (Poem)

Dramatic Personalization of Death

• The Masque of the Red Death
• King Pest
• The City in the Sea (Poem)
• The Conqueror Worm (Poem)

Humorous Demons

• The Devil in the Belfry
• Never Bet the Devil your Head
• The Angel of the Odd
• King Pest

Hypnotism

• Mesmeric Revelation
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Mortal Love Beyond the Grave

• Ligeia
• Morella
• Eleonora
• Beatrice [[Berenice]]
• The Raven (Poem)
• Lenore (Poem)
• Ulalume (Poem)
• Annabel Lee (Poem)

Metempsychosis (Transmigration of Souls)

• The Oval Portrait
• Ligeia
• A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
• Morella
• Metzengerstein ­[page 15:]

Physical Immortality

• Some Words With a Mummy
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Premature Burial

• [[Berenice]]
• The Fall of the House of Usher
• Premature Burial
• [[The Cask of Amontillado]]

Revenance (Ghosts)

• Ligeia
• Eleonora
• The Ms. Found in a Bottle
• The Raven (Poem)
• The Haunted Palace (Poem)
• Spirits of the Dead (Poem)

Supernatural Retribution

• The Black Cat
• The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Man of the Crowd
• The Imp of the Perverse
• William Wilson
• The Masque of the Red Death
• Metzengerstein

Tales of Pseudo-Science

• The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall
• The Balloon Hoax
• The Ms. Found in a Bottle
• A Descent into the Maelstrom
• The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade
• Some Words With a Mummy
• Mesmeric Revelation
• Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
• The Pit and the Pendulum
• Mellonta Tauta