Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Preface,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. vii-x (This material is protected by copyright)

[page vii:]

PREFACE

Discoveries in Poe presents a basic theme — that there is much for any reasonably curious reader still to discover about the works and therefore about the life of Poe. I have had to forego, however, attempting to convey much of the excitement or mere sense of discovery, so gratifying to the curiosity. That was inevitable, I suppose, in the process of validating guesses, of tracing the chain of circumstances which led Poe from one author to another or from one borrowed allusion to a second from the same source, of demonstrating connections between his life, his reading, and his creative conceptions. These procedures of mine are very different from the intuitive and instantly perceptive processes in Poe. The thrill of my own discovery was too often inexpressible, in ordinary terms, and required a summation in “slow time” that could not possibly represent either my own flash of apprehension or Poe's much faster insights and his ingenious dexterity in handling resources.

I should have liked to recapture here my feelings of shock and fascination, as a child, in discovering “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Both were read in the dim, somewhat eerie room that we called “the library,” high up in a large house perched on a steep hill in Massachusetts. The winds that howled around that building and seemed to sweep in through the French doors of the room, at times, came directly out of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” My imagination supplied the long ascent of Lady Madeleine from the deep cellar of my home, as the floorboards creaked occasionally. I never rambled in the woods or slogged through the swamps without expecting to find some traces of the buried treasure of “The Gold Bug,” far as I was from pirate country. [page viii:]

When I moved to New York City, I was able to discover the “very man” himself who stalked through the streets of “The Man of the Crowd,” although I soon guessed that it was London, not New York, that Poe intended. Walking around Poe's cottage in Fordham, near the Grand Concourse and then over toward High Bridge and the polluted river, I was able to reconstruct in my mind the countryside in “Landor's Cottage” in its rustic purity. I must admit, however, the imaginative effort needed for transmuting Poe's special atmospheres into internal reality dwindled with my youth, except on a few rare occasions when a new scene would suddenly bring back the intensity of that first vision. Thus, I recently sought out the catacombs in Paris to check on Poe's accuracy in elaborating a short magazine sketch into the detailed views of eerie caverns and passageways in “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The macabre corridors were amazingly suggestive of Poe's descriptions, and those tales reassumed for me all their grim life and emotional intensity. I also sought out the port of Irvine in Ayrshire, Scotland, hoping to enjoy some of the special flavor of the sea which went into Poe's “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” the Narrative of Pym, and other works. There I found only a sand-filled harbor, disappointingly quiet but appropriately melancholy, with an old rusty dredge at the one dock that still seemed to function. But the gray day and the blackened old buildings of the town itself, which one biographer identifies with “The Devil in the Belfry” setting, put me into unexpected touch with another phase of Poe, that of the “Sonnet — Silence,” and all the other works that speak of quiet extinction or the faint musings that spirits hold with each other.

Early in my development of these studies, I knew that I could not manage to convey the emotional excitement of this type of recognition and association. Only a poet or master essayist, like Lamb, could do that properly. But I felt that I could, at least, share my delight in tracing Poe's materials and the way he adapted them to his own themes, in showing the [page ix:] constancy of several of his prepossessions and his combination of the intuitive and the rationalistic, and above all in revealing a glimmer of the brilliant and often sardonic humor with which he buried private jokes — “jeux d’esprit” as he liked to call them. It has been like playing against a powerful opponent who enjoys the sport and yet, half wishing to be downed, grandly throws away the victory with some interesting gesture. Almost every chapter incorporates some of these conjectures, assumptions, and findings of my own.

In the first few chapters I deal with Poe's determination to assume an insouciant familiarity with French literature and culture, without betraying his insecure foundation and the secondary sources of his erudite or flashy allusions. Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, I found, was a rich quarry from which he could draw the stores for constructing tales and “Marginalia” paragraphs. The poet Béranger served for several sophisticated references in his criticism, although Poe had probably read a very small portion of his writings.

While working on problems in this area I chanced upon new ones involving British writers. For example, concepts and phrases reminiscent of Byron made me return to the British romantic and then to Byron's friend, Mary Shelley. There was nothing surprising in this, since I had previously traced the importance of Godwin, Mary's father, in Poe's criticism. Later, I noticed the extraordinary praise that Poe gave to Miserrimus, one of the lurid tales of the Godwin school. This inquiry brought to light a disparaging poem about Poe written by Stoddard, one of Poe's editors; curiously, the poem, too, had the name “Miserrimus.” I was then plunged into such fascinating incidental materials as Wordsworth's original misconception of the identity of the man buried under the “Miserrimus” tombstone in Worcester cathedral, a misconception which was carried over into Miserrimus, the novel by Reynolds. Finally, it became clear to me that Poe's last distraught word in the Baltimore hospital might well have referred to this novelist.

My attention was shifted to another British novel of the [page x:] early Victorian period which was highly praised by Poe but which has since been thoroughly forgotten, the story of Ellen Wareham. Here the “chase” led me to examine and ascribe reviews in Graham's and the Broadway Journal and to a further consideration of Poe as a critic.

The discoveries of the last three chapters were perhaps the most exciting, since they concern the final pages of Poe's life, the denouement, so to speak, of major plots which had taken many years to unfold. The “Von Kempelen” chapter developed from my interest in Poe as an admirer of Godwin; as a Rosicrucian tale, it could be deemed an epigone of Godwin's St. Leon. Most engrossing, I found, was the theme of Poe's Penn-Stylus dream, which required me to invoke the aid of Poe as artist, with his graphic illustration of the theme of the iron pen. Here I had the generous aid of two libraries, which allowed me to publish two auxiliary documents, and my acknowledgments will be made to everyone who aided my searches and researches. This dream of having his own magazine, which would serve as a cultural force in benighted America, Poe maintained for at least the last decade of his life.

I have humbly sought, in my Discoveries, to tell a little more of the truth about Edgar Allan Poe — unflattering at times, laudatory on occasion — whether it be the truth about themes or ideas that he borrowed or absorbed, about tricks that he played upon the reader, about ideas or propossessions (such as his attitudes toward different types of waterscape which are revealed in his works ), or about his relations with a wide range of personalities. I have considered that the pursuit of truth had best be conducted in a mood of dispassionate calmness, my fervid accompanying feelings being muted but not banished, I hope, for who can treat of Poe's varied literary performance without astonishment and admiration?