[page 312, continued:]

THE HAUNTED PALACE

This is one of Poe's finest poems, pre-eminent in melody and symbolism of the highest order. It is an allegory, very exact in detail. The protagonist has golden hair and — at first — intelligent eyes, fine teeth, and lips whence flows intellectual conversation. But madness seizes him, his eyes are bloodshot, and there come from his lips only raving and insane laughter. This prosaic synopsis of the elaborate “conceit,” worthy of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, may serve to emphasize the artistic mastery of the author, for the success of the poem is undeniable. Poe's only other poem that is a single conceit, “To [Elmira]” (“The bowers”) of 1829, is far less elaborately worked out.

Poe wrote Griswold on May 29, 1841, that by the palace he meant “to imply a mind haunted by phantoms — a disordered brain.”(1) “Afterwards,” Poe goes on to say, he “embodied the poem in a tale called ‘The House of Usher’ in Burton's Magazine.” The verses are there called a ballad and placed in the mouth of the protagonist, Roderick Usher. The poem had something to do with the genesis of the story; the converse is impossible. C. Alphonso Smith well says that to call the ballad “self-portraiture” of Edgar Allan Poe “is to deal flagrantly with both literature and life.”(2) [page 313:]

The principal source of “The Haunted Palace” can now be confidently pointed out in one of the New-Old Ballads of John Wolcot (1738-1819), in his own time very widely known under his pseudonym, “Peter Pindar.” It reads:

The similarity of this playful imitation of an Elizabethan lyric to Poe's “Haunted Palace” was actually pointed out in the New York Literary World of September 28, 1850, by an anonymous contributor who thought the resemblance probably fortuitous. The article seems to have attracted no attention for decades, although Killis Campbell mentioned it without discussion in Poems (1917), p. 238. This neglect is not surprising, since Wolcot is generally known only for comic verses, usually coarse satires on everybody from George III to the biographers of Dr. Johnson.(3) [page 314:] But there is proof that Poe, at precisely the time when he composed “The Haunted Palace,” did show an interest in Wolcot, a collected edition of whose poems had appeared in Philadelphia in 1835. In an article called “Literary Small Talk” in the Baltimore American Museum of January 1839, Poe wrote:

This note is taken in substance from a passage and footnote near the end of the fifty-third chapter of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but the comparison to Wolcot is Poe's own. Though apt enough, since many of Wolcot's compositions are in lines of irregular length, it is somewhat unexpected. “Literary Small Talk” also has a good deal more from the same chapter of Gibbon, including something about the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who is clearly referred to in lines 21-24 of Poe's poem.

There may also have been in Poe's mind a description of a madman in Shelley's Julian and Maddalo, lines 224-225: “... like weeds on a wrecked palace growing, / Long tangled locks flung wildly forth, and flowing.”

Other suggested sources have little to be said for them. An anonymous motto for the eleventh chapter of James Fenimore Cooper's Wing-and-Wing (1842), pointed out by Richard Beale Davis in the London Notes and Queries, September 1959, has not been found in print before Poe's poem.

John Forster's idea in a review of Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America in the London Foreign Quarterly of January 1844 that Poe imitated Tennyson must refer to the Laureate's “Deserted House.” It does not much resemble “The Haunted Palace.”

Poe's notion that Longfellow's “Beleaguered City” was plagiarized from “The Haunted Palace” may be dismissed here. It will be discussed in the volume containing Poe's criticisms of 1845. Another charge by Poe in the Broadway Journal of May 24, 1845, that William W. Lord plagiarized “The Haunted Palace” [page 315:] in “The New Castalia” was an ironic jest. Lord's poem was a deliberate parody, which Poe pretended to take seriously.

[page 317, continued:]

VARIANTS

Title:  This is given only in context in B, C, D, H, K, Q

4  Radiant / Snow-white (A, B, C, E, L); reared / rear’d (E, F, G)

7  a / his (A)

15  ramparts / rampart (A)

16  wingéd / winged (A, B, C, E, G, H, K, L, Q, although accent was added in D)

17  Wanderers / All wanderers (A)

20  well-tunéd / well-tuned (A, G, J, K, M)

24  ruler / sovereign (A, B, C, changed in D)

29  sweet / sole (B)

34  Assailed / Assail’d (E, F, G, L)

35  morrow / sorrow (misprint in F and J, corrected in M)

38  blushed / blush’d (E, F, G, L); bloomed / bloom’d (E, F, G, L)

39  dim-remembered / dim remember’d (F, G); dim-remember’d (E, L)

40  entombed / entomb’d (E, F, G, L); old-time / old time (all others except P)

42  encrimsoned / encrimson’d (P); red-litten (all others)

45  ghastly rapid / rapid ghastly (A, B, C, E, H, K, L, Q)

[page 317, continued:]

NOTES

8  “Fabric” here means edifice, from Latin fabrica, as Richard Wilbur (Poe, p. 141) points out.

12  In “Time long ago” Poe characteristically turned a dialect phrase about, and made something magical of it. “Long time ago” is the title of an old minstrel song, containing the words “Down to Shinbone Alley, long time ago,” and extremely popular, even in New Orleans, according to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, January 16, 1841, although Shinbone Alley was then what is now Washington Mews in New York. The tune was “Comin’ thro’ the Rye,” played slowly, according to an article on the Ethiopian Minstrels in the Broadway Journal of July 12, 1845. George P. Morris composed a song to “a Southern refrain” with the phrase “long time ago,” published as Near the Lake (New York: James L. Hewitt, 1836). Poe is said to have been enraged when Henry B. Hirst wrote a parody on “The Haunted Palace” called “The Ruined Tavern,” including the lines “Never negro shook a shinbone / In a dance-house half so fair,” according to a letter from Thomas H. Lane in the New York Independent of November 5, 1896, quoted by Woodberry, Life, II, 420. The parody, which describes a fracas that led to a police raid at a Philadelphia tavern frequented by tough Negroes, was printed in Sartain's Union Magazine for May 1852, but the offending lines were omitted.

15  Pallid here, and in “The Raven,” means yellow (from Latin pallidus) as Wilbur pointed out in Poe, p. 141.

17  The subtitle of Dr. Johnson's Rasselas is “The Happy Valley.” [page 318:]

18  In “The Fall of the House of Usher” mention is made of the house having “vacant eyelike windows.”

20  The lute is here the heart, as in “Israfel.” The difficulty of keeping a lute in tune is proverbial.

22  No earlier use of the form “Porphyrogene” seems to be recorded. The reference is to the surname of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, “born to the purple.” Gibbon, in the forty-eighth chapter of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, explains it thus:

This is clearly what Poe has in mind. Constantine VII was himself a man of letters, composer of an elaborate treatise, On the Ceremonies of the Court at Constantinople, which Gibbon mentions in his fifty-third chapter. Poe gave a reference to this work as “a pompous ... book” in his essay “Literary Small Talk.”

29  Echo was originally a nymph deprived by Juno of all save repetitive speech. See Ovid's Metamorphoses, III, 356.

30f.  Professor W. P. Trent compared to these lines Lovelace's “To Althea from Prison”:

And note a prose parallel in Poe's “Literary Life of Thingum Bob”: “the rich wit and wisdom which continuously flowed from their mouths.”

42  (Earlier texts) “Red-litten” is paralleled by “gas-litten” in Poe's “Philosophy of Furniture” in Burton's for May 1840.

44  Robert Blair's poem was so well known that it is possible that Poe was here contrasting lines 545-547 of The Grave:

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 312:]

1  This simple explanation can escape few readers, but J. L. O'sullivan, editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review is said to have refused the poem because he did not understand it.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 312, running to the bottom of page 313:]

2  Edgar Allan Poe: How To Know Him (Indianapolis, 1921), p, 216. Smith is replying to Woodberry, who, in the Life, II, 174, wrote of “The Haunted Palace” as [page 313:] “intense, imaginative self-portraiture.” This unfortunate phrasing of Woodberry's has led to misunderstandings. Poe was so temperamental that his friends and he himself, perhaps, feared he might go mad, and in later life he had brief periods of mental aberration. But he never had an extreme attack of madness before he wrote this poem, any more than he had blonde hair.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 313:]

3  Few who have enjoyed excerpts from Bozzy and Piozzi know who wrote them, and fewer know the story that the King forbade a prosecution for libel because he “laughed at Peter” himself.