Text: Killis Campbell, “Poe's Knowledge of the Bible,” Studies in Philology (Chapel Hill, NC), vol. XXVII, no. 3, July 1930, pp. 546-551

[page 546:]

Of Poe's knowledge of the Bible the only statement that I have met with proceeding from any one who knew the poet in the flesh is that of C. F. Briggs, for a time associated with him in the con- duct of the Broadway Journal. Briggs in a letter to Lowell of August 21, 1845, declared that Poe believed the Bible to be “all rigmarole,” meaning to imply, I take it, that he knew little about the Bible and cared little for it. The same view has been put forward by Dr. A. H. Strong in his strange book on The American Poets and their Theology, who declares, evidently echoing Briggs, that Poe esteemed the Bible “mere rigmarole,”(2) and adds the gratuitous statement that Poe was a soured and self-willed unbeliever.”(3) The late Professor C. Alphonso Smith, on the other hand, in an article on “Poe and the Bible” published in the Biblical World for July, 1920, gave it as his opinion that Poe possessed an intimate knowledge of the Bible and that “God and the Bible were fundamental and central in his thinking”;(4) and he recorded a similar opinion a year later in his book Poe: How to Know Him.(5) In neither place, however, does Professor Smith go into detail in presenting the evidence in the case. Plainly, then, there was need for a detailed and thoroughgoing consideration of the matter; and this need has now been met, and in some ways satisfactorily met, by Mr. W. M. Forrest, Professor of Biblical Literature at the University of Virginia, in a volume which he entitles Biblical Allusions in Poe.

Mr. Forrest, in defiance of his title, devotes the first six of the nine chapters which make up the body of his book, to a discussion of Poe's religious beliefs; but he makes amends in good measure for this disproportion by supplementing these chapters with an [page 547:] appendix, running to upwards of fifty pages, in which he presents a tabular exhibit of the multifarious Scriptural passages — quotations, echoes, allusions, and the like — which he finds in Poe's writings. It is in this appendix, on which he has labored with very commendable zeal, that Mr. Forrest has made his chief contribution to his subject. But it is precisely here, I regret to have to add, that his book is most vulnerable to criticism. For a very considerable proportion of what he offers as evidence seems to me to be quite without value for his purpose.

All told, Mr. Forrest brings together in this appendix, under the head of “Quotations, Allusions, Reflections,” over six hundred passages from Poe's writings, besides a list of upwards of two hundred Scriptural proper names. Of the passages quoted, however, a dozen are either from the Episcopal Prayer Book or from the Catechism, and so, obviously, are not entitled to come into the reckoning. A dozen others — as “out-Herod Herod “ (mentioned five times), “heart of hearts,” “had fallen upon . . . evil days,” “man was made to mourn,” and “dew That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,” — are properly to be associated, not with the Bible, but with the immediate sources from which they were taken.” A score of others should have been omitted for the very good reason that they are from poems and reviews that we can be virtually certain are not the work of Poe.” But, what is of much more serious moment, a large number of the remaining citations-as, for instance, “This is an evil,” “the sins of youth,” “the gift of deciphering,” “all in all,” “under the sun” (cited more than a dozen times) — are either so general in nature or so obviously part and parcel of our daily speech as to be of little or no weight as evidence; while a good many others — as “labor of love,” “signs of the times,” “to the end of time,” “since the world began,” “the face of the earth” (cited some fifteen times), — though ultimately from the Scriptures, have long [page 548:] since become stereotyped expressions in common use, and as such have lost very largely, if not entirely, their Biblical connotation. Fully a third of Mr. Forrest's citations fall into one or the other of these categories.

It is also much to be regretted that Mr. Forrest has made no attempt to differentiate between the various kinds of Biblical passages that he assembles, but has thrown together indiscriminately, into one large comprehensive list, quotations (whether exact or inexact), echoes great and small, and mere allusions of what- ever character or degree. To distinguish between quotation and echo, or between echo and allusion, is, I grant, not always easy, as it is not always easy to distinguish between expressions that have lost their Biblical association and those that retain it; but I submit that the difficulty is not so serious as to forbid all attempt at billing and ticketing. One can at least approximate the facts; whereas without some attempt at classification, the reader is left in confusion worse confounded. Of actual quotations from the Bible, there are, by my reckoning, less than a hundred in the passages assembled by Mr. Forrest. To be very precise, I find a total of eighty-four quotations, of which a little more than half are in some way inexact; and I include in the list such doubtful examples as “of the earth, earthy” (cited five times), “he who runs may read” (also cited five times), “the fat of the land,” “walk in his father's footsteps,” “after my own heart,” “after many days,” “the tender mercies of,” any one of which may well have been drawn from some immediate source other than the Bible.

To this list should be added the following quotations, most of them from Poe's uncollected writings, and all of them inexact: From Migdol to Syene, even unto the borders of Ethiopia “ (Poe's Works, ed. Harrison, X, p. 8); “Everyone that goeth by shall be astonished” (ibid., X, p. 14); “Eating the bread of idleness” (Valentine Letters, p. 60); “curse the day when I was born” (ibid., p. 279); “behold as in a glass darkly” (Southern Literary Messenger, I, p. 315); “Why cumbereth he the ground?” [page 549:] (Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, VI, p. 235); “that which leadeth to destruction” (Doings of Gotham, p. 24).

The Biblical echoes in Poe's writings naturally exceed in number the quotations. There are in Mr. Forrest's list, by a rough estimate, nearly two hundred — though here again, wishing to give both Poe and Mr. Forrest the benefit of every doubt, I take account of a not inconsiderable number of passages that were probably borrowed from the Bible at second-hand. And there are something less than a hundred allusions to Biblical incidents or passages if we exclude the more than two hundred instances recorded by Mr. Forrest of the mere mention of Scriptural proper names.

What conclusions may be drawn from the evidence so industriously collected by Mr. Forrest? The evidence that he assembled seems to me to establish beyond any peradventure his rather cautious generalization (p. 147) to the effect that Poe “possessed considerable knowledge of the Bible.” It does not sustain him, however, I think, in speaking (p. 146) of Poe's “saturation with biblical style.” Two of Poe's prose sketches “Shadow” and “Silence,” to be sure, together with occasional passages in other stories, would seem to lend color to such a statement, but they are obviously insufficient of themselves to establish so sweeping a generalization. And there is no ground for holding that Poe possessed a close or intimate knowledge of the Bible if that is what Mr. Forrest means to imply in his statement (p. 150) that “there is no mystery about [Poe's] familiarity with Scripture.” Such a statement may be made of Tennyson, as Miss E. M. Robinson has shown,(10) or of Longfellow or of Whittier, but surely not of Poe.

The text of the Bible on which Poe drew for his citations from the Scriptures was almost invariably the King James Version; but in at least two instances(11) he quoted from the Greek text, and [page 550:] once at least from the Vulgate;(12) and in a separate section dealing with “Poe's Hebrew”(13) Mr. Forrest points out that the poet makes use of the Hebrew Bible in upwards of a dozen passages (most of them in his review of Stephen's Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, etc.,(14) in which, as comes out in his correspondence,(15) he had the aid of Professor Charles Anthon, well known classical scholar of the time). Particularly interesting — and not without significance, I think, for his knowledge, such as it was, of the Hebrew-is Poe's use of the word huggab (in “A Tale of Jerusalem ”),(16) a word which does not appear in the Authorized Version of the Bible or apparently in any of the English versions,(17) but is the poet's spelling of a word which is used several times in the Hebrew text of the Bible,(18) and which would more properly be spelled, as I am informed by an able Hebraist, without the initial h.

With respect to the time at which Poe obtained such knowledge of the Bible as he possessed, Mr. Forrest expresses the opinion that it was mainly in his youth,(19) — in which he is in all likelihood correct; and he might have remarked in the same connection that there is in one of the bills for Poe's schooling at Stoke-Newington a charge for instruction in the Catechism,(20) which makes it not improbable that he was given at the same time instruction in the Bible. It would have been proper, also, to bring into the record some mention of the Bible, now preserved in the Poe Cottage at Fordham, which once belonged to Poe, though this has less value than could be wished, since it bears the imprint of the year 1846.(21) That Poe was required to attend religious services while a cadet at West Point may be taken for granted. But Mr. Forrest is wrong in holding (p. 11) that he [page 551:] was “at no time. . . ever found in a church or other religious assembly” after attaining to maturity. We have the testimony of both Mrs. Shew and Mrs. Weiss to the contrary.(22)

On the other hand, Mr. Forrest is entirely right in holding, in his discussion of Poe's religion, that there is no good reason for believing that Poe was an unbeliever or essentially irreligious. There are certain inconsistencies, I know, in his declarations on religious matters, but the evidence to this effect is, to me, altogether convincing. He is quite right, too, in holding that Poe displays at times in his writings a genuine interest in theological questions, and he might have instanced the poem “Al Aaraaf” as revealing an interest in the subject even in his early years. He is wrong, I think, in raising any question (p. 81) as to Poe's belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, though I grant that the evidence in the case is inconclusive. But, again, he is right in stressing the mystical side of Poe, which comes out in both poems and tales as well as in his miscellaneous prose writings, but which has been virtually ignored by his biographers.

University of Texas.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 546:]

1 A review of W. M. Forrest's Biblical Allusions in Poe, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1928.

2 Woodberry, George E., Life of Poe, Boston, 1909, II, p. 146.

3 American Poets and their Theology, Philadelphia, 1916, p. 161.

4 Biblical World, V, p. 354.

5 Poe: How to Know Him, Indianapolis, 1921, p. 58. 546

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 547:]

6 The first with Shakespeare, the second with either Shakespeare or Wordsworth, the third with Milton, the fourth with Burns, and the fifth with Webster.

7 I refer to “The Mammoth Squash,” “The Fire Legend,” “The Skeleton Hand,” and “The Magician” (Poe's Works, ed. Harrison, VII, pp. 236 ff., 252 ff.), and the reviews of Bulwer's Zanoni and the “Poems of Tennyson (ibid., XI, pp. 115 ff., 127 ff.), all of which have been shown to be either spurious or of extremely doubtful authenticity.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 548:]

8 Mr. Forrest rightly infers from the fact that a good proportion of Poe's quotations are inexact (see p. 147) that the poet quoted more or less habitually from memory.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 549:]

9 In calling attention to these few additions to be made to Mr. Forrest's list, I owe it to him to say that, before the appearance of his book, I had made some inquiry into the number of Poe's quotations from the Bible in connection with a study of the poet's mind and his intellectual equipment, and that Mr. Forrest, with his superior knowledge of the field, has collected a good many quotations that I had overlooked.

10 In her dissertation, Tennyson's Use of the Bible, Göttingen, 1917.

11 Forrest, pp. 178, 186-87, 191.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 550:]

12 Ibid., pp. 169, 187.

13 Ibid., pp. 205-8.

14 Poe's Works, X, p. 1 ff.

15 Ibid., XVII, p. 42 ff.

16 Ibid., II, p. 219.

17 Nor has it as yet made its way into either the Oxford or the Century Dictionary.

18 Genesis 4: 21; Job 21: 12, 30: 31; Psalms 150. 4.

19 Forrest, p. 11.

20 See the Chicago Dial, LX, p. 144 (February 17, 1916). 21

21 Mr. T. O. Mabbott, who describes this volume in his edition of Poe's Politian, p. 72, calls attention to certain marked passages in the volume.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 551:]

22 See my edition of Poe's Poems, p. 223.