Text: William Mentzel Forrest, “Spirituality,” Biblical Allusions in Poe, 1928, pp. 11-18 (This material may be protected by copyright)

[page 11:]

The records of Poe's life give glimpses of him in many places at various times. He is seen amid the home surroundings of his squalid infancy, his prosperous boyhood, his meager married life. At school, academy and university, in fields and woods, parks and cemeteries, he is found. He journeyed by land and water, moved in business places and social circles, frequented lecture halls and theaters, visited houses of refinement and haunts of vice. But at no time is he ever found in a church or other religious assembly. No doubt he was taken to church as a child. For five years he quite certainly had to attend services twice each Sunday while in school in England.(1) Also while at West Point and in the army he could hardly have escaped religious exercises. Nowhere, however, is it explicitly shown in his life records that he thus conformed to religious customs, and it is not to be supposed he ever did so during his manhood years.

On one occasion, certainly, Poe had an excellent opportunity to go to church. Both self-interest and gallantry should have prompted him to do so. It [page 12:] was when he called upon Mrs. Shelton in Richmond in 1849 as a preliminary to renewing a suit for her hand which he had begun over a score of years earlier, when she was Miss Royster. Apparently he was actuated only by mercenary motives in seeking to marry the wealthy widow, but his assiduity did not carry him to church at her side. “I was ready to go to church,” this lady wrote later in giving an account of Poe's Sunday morning call so many years after they had been parted as youthful lovers, “when a servant entered and told me that a gentleman in the parlor wished to see me. ... I told him I was going to church, that I never let anything interfere with that, and that he must call again.”(2) It seems that he did not accompany her; he called again.

It is much the same with his characters as with himself. They are shown in almost all circumstances and attitudes except the religious. Several of them appear as quite devout pagans.(3) Others are good Roman Catholics.(4) Morella was baptized, presumably in church, but it is not so stated.(5) Since he was a romanticist the phases of formal religion that attracted Poe most naturally were Catholic. The only conspicuous exception in the way of a character in Poe's work found often in church is William Wilson, and he went only because he was a boy at a school where all had to go.(6) [page 13:]

Nor do we come upon the man anywhere at worship. In letters, and occasionally elsewhere, are met what might possibly be regarded as ejaculatory prayers. “May God grant her life,” he wrote of his wife; and added to Mrs. Shew for her kindness, “Heaven bless you.”(7) Not a few such prayers are put on the lips of his characters in times of crisis and peril. There is a great deal of it in the most terrific of the Tales, the devout utterances of Arthur Gordon Pym. If Griswold is to be relied upon here, such no doubt were the sentences Poe uttered when “he walked the streets with eyes upturned in passionate prayers for their happiness who at that moment were objects of his idolatry.”(8) Oftenest, however, his use of the name of the Deity was but a figure of speech, an apostrophe or exclamation to intensify his most earnest sentences. Such are the “Would God,” “Ah God,” “Oh God,” “Thank God,” “God bless you,” and the like, met in various compositions, but especially in his impassioned letters. It was in such a letter that he practically expressed his inability to believe in the efficacy of prayer.(9)

Despite this negative evidence, it may be confidently asserted that Poe had an interest in religion which shows itself in many ways. His soul was not devoid of sympathies with moral and spiritual things. Notwithstanding his employment of the ordinary language of sensual desire in his poems and letters to various [page 14:] women, close study shows that he seems to have burnt all the grossness out of the words in the fires of ethereal devotion. The lines For Annie lose all fleshly taint when it is recalled that the writer is supposedly speaking from beyond death's portals. His glowing letters to Helen, though speaking of kisses and embraces, put the emphasis upon spiritual affinity — a union of souls that the age or infirmities of his beloved could by no possibility shake, and that would continue in the night of the grave, and in any heaven the writer could conceive.(10) So all the women of his songs and dreams move spirit-like across his pages, as incapable of stirring the lower passions as are visions of angels from that region where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.(11)

While it is also true that Poe bathed his soul in beauty and worshiped it, the beauty was far more moral and spiritual than sensuous and physical. What poem can be cited that does not have the music of its form and the images of its fancy merely as the vesture or medium of spiritual ideas? Even The Bells is no exception. Likewise the Criticisms, wherein the critic so often revealed what in the writings of others charmed him most, testify to his spiritual interest. An illustration of that dominant interest is impressively given in the lecture on the Poetic Principle.(12) Many poems are quoted therein — all have a spiritual element in their beauty. Near its close the poet tried [page 15:] to tell what true poetry is by a melodious roll call of things beautiful that had power to awaken in him the spirit of, poesy. Answering that summons there first moved by with music in their feet the beauties of starry skies and illimitable seas and wooded hills, all resonant of sighing winds and singing birds, all redolent of fragrant flowers. Last, there came woman, in whose charms of person and witchery of adornment, in whose endearments and enthusiasms and endurances, and especially in whose love there is ever a minstrelsy more potent than that which of old brought down the divine afflatus upon God's prophet.(13) And between such, first and last, what is there recognized by the poet as “the ambrosia which nourishes his soul”? “He owns it in all noble thoughts — in all unworldly motives — in all holy impulses — in all chivalrous, generous and self-sacrificing deeds.”(14) Such was Poe's appraisal of the beautiful at its highest.

The Tales confirm the conclusion that their author was deeply interested in the higher realm. With a few exceptions in a lighter vein they belong to the domain of morals and conscience. Therein good and evil are shown in mortal combat in the soul of man. William Wilson, the prototype of Stevenson's famous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is a study of such warfare. In the Man of the Crowd is beheld the wicked fleeing though pursued by nothing but that inexorable law, “Be sure your sin will find you out.” How many other stories proclaim one great fiat, “The wages of [page 16:] sin is death.”(15) The most tragic commentary upon such delineations of remorse and judgment and conscience is what is told of the writer's conception of his own doom. Griswold declares of Poe, “He felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned.”(16) This is confirmed by a letter from Poe's friend, the southern poet and editor, Thompson, which says: “He spoke of himself as the victim of a pre-ordained damnation, as l’ame perdue, a soul lost beyond all hope of redemption.”(17) Even the somewhat doubtful report of his last words may be an echo of that dark belief rather than a profane utterance: “My best friend would be he who would take a pistol and blow out these damned wretched brains.”(18)

It would be interesting to know whether this belief of Poe's arose from the teaching of his foster father. The latter probably held the beliefs of Scotch Calvinists generally of his day.(19) If the doctrine of unconditional foreordination and election was taught the impressionable child it was sure to exert a profound influence on his later life. Poe's predestinarianism may have developed from his sense of inability to master what his conscience condemned. But the deep notes of destiny and doom in so much of his best literary work give the impression of being out of keeping with his immediate ancestry and a nature otherwise proclaimed a compound of levity and [page 17:] aestheticism. Perhaps he was foredoomed to the tragic struggle reflected in his life and writings by having had grafted upon his inheritance from his Bohemian theatrical parents the stern Scotch creed of his foster father. Whencever derived, the elements were so mixed in him that he became a moralist in spite of himself.

An added evidence of his religious bent is furnished by his Pinakidia(20) and Marginalia.(21) The former collection of notes and extracts was published in 1836, the latter in 1844 to 1846. Both indicate a wide range of reading and are evidences of their collector's diversified interest. Poe was only twenty-seven years old when the Pinakidia were printed, after years of garnering. There are some one hundred and seventy of them. Considerably more than one-third of them are more or less closely related to religion. The relation ranges all the way from the names of persons and things, significant from their connection with some faith, up to direct quotations from the Bible. In the same fashion it is found that about one-fifth of the three hundred Marginalia are religious. Considering the wide range taken by these notes, and the popular verdict on the young writer's irreligion, this is an astonishing result, even when the notes are weighed and not merely counted.

From them, however, as from his other writings, no creed or confession or reflection of religious practice can be deduced. There is not much distinctively [page 18:] Christian to be found in them. The spiritual element stops short of the highest always. The religious interest is general. Like the ethical, it might have come from any highly enlightened pagan in any civilized age. But it is worth emphasizing that this devotee of beauty for its own sake saw beauty at its highest in spiritual relations. Edward Fitzgerald said that when Romney's wife, who deserted her husband for over a quarter century that she might not encumber him in his race for fame, received him back as a broken, dying man and tenderly nursed him to the end, that quiet act of hers was worth more than all the pictures the artist ever painted. A careful student of Poe can hardly doubt that he would have given the same verdict. The two poets probably would have justified their decision by saying the act was worth more than the pictures because it was more beautiful. Of such was their kingdom of heaven.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 11:]

1 See William Wilson. Tales, III. 301, 302; cf. Biography, I. 18, 19; also see below, pp. 148-150.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 12:]

2 Biography, I. 314.

3 Tales, IV. 1; 200; Poems, VII. 23.

4 Poems, VII. 1; 59.

5 Tales, II. 33.

6 Tales, III. 301, 302.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 13:]

7 Biography, I. 265.

8 The Ludwig Article, Biography, I. 355,

9 Letters to Sarah Helen Whitman, 5.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 14:]

10 Ibid., 10. 11. 15. 18.

11 Mrs. Whitman spoke of Poe's “unworldliness — may we pot say his unearthliness” (Biography, I. 248) .

12 Essays, XIV. 266-292.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 15:]

13 2 Kgs. 3:15.

14 XIV. 291.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 16:]

15 E. G., The Black Cat, Hop Frog, The Tell Tale Heart, The Imp of the Perverse.

16 Biography, I. 355.

17 Letters, XVII. 404.

18 Report of Dr. Snodgrass in Biography, I. 334.

19 For his religious affiliation see below, pp. 148-150.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 17:]

20 XIV. 38-72.

21 XVI. 1-178.