Text: William Whipple, “Summary,” A Study of Edgar Allan Poe's Satiric Patterns Story, dissertation, 1951, pp. 181-188 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 181:]

Edgar Allan Poe was not a first-rate satirist; but so many of his tales were satiric that it is impossible to attain a rounded concept of Poe's literary position, of his successes and failures, and of his creative development without making a study of his efforts in the satiric genre. Such a study will not serve to alter, to any appreciable extent, the relative number of his tales in the ever-lengthening roster of eminent American literary classics. Such a study will, however, make our judgment more valuable because it will be based on a more complete knowledge of what Poe was attempting to do.

Poe felt that satire should appear to be the out pouring of “irrepressible merriment,” that it should reflect conscientious polishing, that it should indicate painstaking attention to detail, and that it should be vigorous and original. Such satire would include the characteristics of sarcasm, invective, and burlesque. Poe apparently felt that satire was unified enough in its [page 182:] desire to render its objects absurd and did not require a further singleness of purpose. This resulted in Poe's satire being diffuse in its effect because of its lack of singleness of satiric aim.

Poe's satire tended to fall into certain definite, observable patterns. The most consistent of these patterns was Poe's satire of periodical fiction and editorial practices. In “Loss of Breath” Poe satirized the characteristics of Blackwood stories — Blackwood being used as a generic term rather than to 1imit the satire to the stories found only in Blackwood's. Poe satirized, among other things, the episodic quality of the stories, the didacticism, the predicament, the period of melancholy contemplation, the irrelevant discourses on art or philosophy, and the sprinkling of literary quotations. In “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament,” Poe satirizes the failure to follow sound literary principles in writing the current fiction accepted by such magazines as Blackwood's. Such stories are not constructed with unity of effect in mind, but are simply a compilation of proven techniques which are frequently either irrelevant to the tale or improperly used. The heterogeneous tone,” the “filler,” the use of “piquant expressions” and “piquant facts for similes,”“ and the misuse of quotations all make up an integral part of Poe's burlesque of such faulty stories. “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob” and [page 183:] “Xing a Paragrab” are both satires of the editorial practices of the time. Specifically, Poe makes allusion to “toadying,” “tomahawking,” “puffing,” cliques, low pay for authors, and to the billingsgate which filled the editorial pages. Unfortunately, these were all vices to which Poe succumbed in his struggle to earn his living by writings.

Most of Poe's early satire was devoted to foreign literati. “The Duc De L’Omelette,” published in 1832, was a satire on Benjamin Disraeli and a burlesque of his book, The Young Duke. Poe particularly points up Disrae1i's dandyism, his effeteness, his Epicureanism. “A Tale of Jerusalem” is a burlesque of Horace Smith's novel, Zillah: a Tale of Jerusalem. “Bon-Bon” may be a reworking of the Disraeli theme, because of a similarity between the story and “The Duc De L’Omelette, “ but more probably it is a satire of Bulwer and his Epicurean, Guloseton, drawing elements of its satire from Pelham and Paul Clifford. “Lionizing” has been widely accepted as a quiz on Nathaniel P. Willis, a contemporary of Poe's, but a re evaluation of the evidence supporting the claim seems to indicate that at least Poe intended it as a satire on Bulwer, however it may have been interpreted by his contemporaries.

The tale is modeled after Bulwer's “Too Beautiful for Anything,” and seems to coincide closely with Poe's [page 184:] opinion that Bulwer tended to model his fiction-heroes after himself. “Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Hand in a Sling” may be a take-off on Lady Morgan's mixing of Irish and French elements in her stories. “Three Sundays in a Week,” on the other hand, does not allude to an author at all but to a British lecturer, Dr. Dionysius Lardner, who was lecturing in New York. And for his final satire against foreign literati, Poe turned to Charles Dickens from whom he was, at the moment, estranged. The story, “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” was a satire of the psychiatric “moral treatment” which was just coming into vogue in 1844 but, coupled with that, Poe may have been satirizing Dickens, for the elements of the satire compare closely with Dickens's American Notes.

Poe's use of the New York literati as objects of his satire is strangely limited. It seems probable that Poe's sarcastic criticism and his satiric tales sprang basically from the same impulse, and that when he had satisfied his pique in his criticisms he was less likely to satirize the same people in his fiction. One of the exceptions to this was Lewis Gaylord Clark, whom Poe attacked both in his “Literati papers in 1846 and in “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob” in 1844. Besides its satire on editorial practices, “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob” attacked L. G. Clark by satirizing his twin [page 185:] brother whose Literary Life Lewis Clark had published just a few months before. Many of the allusions in Poe's tales referred to the Knickerbocker magazine which Lewis Clark edited. The second satire of New Yorkers was more general, for in “Mellonta Tauta” Poe satirized John W. Draper, a New York university professor, Horace Greeley's Fourierism, and New York's buildings, commercialism, and social customs. The story also contains other tangential satire that may have had its germination in Poe's observing life in” New York: the satire of the mob is an example of this.

Poe's satire of the New England literati begins to take on importance with his satire of Margaret Fuller in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” in 1839. The reason Poe was prompted to satirize Margaret Fuller is obscure, for Miss Fuller was not, in 1839, the important literary figure she became. “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” a story burlesquing the “moral tale,” contains a secondary theme which is a satire of transcendentalism and the Dial. The tale retains some of its humor, a characteristic not common to Poe's satiric tales. Some Words with a Mummy” contains incidental satire of Silk Buckingham, a New England writer of travel literature, and of the Dial. “Xing a Paragrab,” Poe's last story, is a burlesque of two New England editors, the exact identity of whom is still hidden by our failure to place certain [page 186:] of Poe's references which seem to be clues to the identification of the editors.

Poe's political satire centered around the Jackson-Van Buren terms of office. His first satire was “Four Beasts In One,” and it seems to have been written with Jackson's first term of office in mind and particularly with the mobs which followed Jackson. “King Pest” cannot be so easily typed but its allusions seem to bear out the possibility that it was a satire of Jackson's Kitchen Cabinet, perhaps suggested by the political reference attributed to Vivian Grey, from which the model for the grotesque was taken. “The Devil in the Belfry,” published in 1839, shortly before the election, is clearly ga satire of Van Buren and his political machine, with its New York origin and its practices of using Irish riff-raff as ‘repeaters’ to insure its control of the election. “The Man That Was Used Up”“ is a satire of that now almost-forgotten figure, Richard M. Johnson, Vice President under Van Buren. Johnson, who owed his election to his western origins and to his military heroism, is satirized by Poe as a man who was literally shot to pieces, a used-up man. There are a number of other satiric allusions to Jacksonianism, the principal ones being those found in “Some Words with a Mummy” and “Mellonta Tauta,” but, in the main, Poe's interest in politics as a subject of satire ended with the 1840 campaign. [page 187:]

In conclusion, a few words should be said of Poe as a satirist. It is recognized that Poe was not an important satirist in American literary history; the reasons for this are varied. Poe did not grow up in an age when good satire was produced in America. Poe's satires have failed to live in the interest of the modern reader but so also have the other satires of his time, with the possible exception of Lowell's Fable for Critics” and the “Bigelow Papers,” and perhaps a few of Oliver Wendell Holmes satiric verses. But these are verse satires and Poe confined his energies to prose satires. Furthermore, like most writers, Poe was writing in tune with his age, and while he could stamp his serious fiction with the imprint of his genius, he was not able to raise the popular taste for billingsgate, punning, and invective to the level of good satire — possibly because he, too, shared this taste in common with his age. Undoubtedly some of the fault of Poe's poor satire lies in his own personality. Poe was never able to generalize his attack on a single man to an attack upon mankind. He lacked the philosophical objectivity. He was never concerned, apparently, with unifying his satire so that it meets the reader with the impact of his better Gothic stories. And finally, the obscurity of his reference robs the satires of interest for those readers who do not read them with the same background, knowledge, and [page 188:] emotional impetus that roe had when he wrote them. Nevertheless, although Poe never rose to the heights of a great satirist, his attempts at satire make up a large share of his fiction, and in all probability account for part of Poe's failure to achieve a higher position than he does as a short-story writer.