Text: G. R. Thompson, “Notes,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. 197-239 (This material is protected by copyright )

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REFERENCE

MATTER

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Notes

 

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

Perspectives

1. See Henry James's comment in his essay on Baudelaire in French Poets and Novelists (London, 1878); D. H. Lawrence's chapter on Poe in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; reprint ed., New York: Viking, 1964); Aldous Huxley's essay “Vulgarity in Literature” in Music at Night and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931); and especially Yvor Winters's “Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism” in Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (1938; reprint ed., Denver: Alan Swallow, n.d., as part of In Defense of Reason); and T. S. Eliot's From Poe to Valéry (New York, 1948; reprinted in To Criticize the Critic, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965). For a concise overview of the critical response to Poe, see Floyd Stovall, “The Conscious Art of Edgar Poe,” Ch. VII of Edgar Poe the Poet: Essays Old and New on the Man and His Work (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), pp. 181-86. Stovall puts Poe's critics into six categories: (1) those who simply like to read Poe's poems, tales, and essays; (2) those who are content to analyze and interpret individual works without evaluating Poe as a writer; (3) those who dislike Poe's writings so thoroughly that they simply cannot see what other intelligent writers appear to see plainly; (4) those who use psychoanalysis (of the author) as a technique of criticism; (5) those who like Poe but feel as if they should not; (6) those who do not like Poe but feel as if they ought to because certain French writers and critics whom they admire have praised him. (Stovall emphasizes Poe's conscious control and intellectuality throughout the nine essays that [page 200:] comprise what is the only respectable book-length study of Poe as a poet yet to appear.)

2. Allen Tate, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” given as a speech and published 1949; reprinted in Collected Essays (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1959); see especially pp. 455, 470-71.

3. See, most notably, Joseph Wood Krutch's “psychoanalytic” biography, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (New York: Knopf, 1926), though a long list could be drawn up of those who, dissatisfied with Poe's humor, echo C. Alphonso Smith's judgment that Poe's laughter “is surely a falsetto cackle,” in Edgar Allan Poe: How to Know Him (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1921), p. 51. Smith was one of the first to try to take the humorous side of Poe seriously.

4. See N. Bryllion Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1949).

5. Leon Howard, Literature and the American Tradition (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1960). Howard's conception of Poe is based on Fagin's. See also Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (1933; reprint ed., New York: Russell & Russell, 1962); Campbell was one of the first to suggest that Poe was essentially a “player.” The best known “psychological” approaches to Poe, besides Krutch's, include nearly all the major French studies, such as those by Roger Asselineau, Gaston Bachelard, Jacques Bolle, Nicolas-Isidore Boussoulas, Jacques Castelau, Edmond Jaloux, Emile Lauvriere, Camille Mauclair, but especially Marie Bonaparte's The Life and Works of Edgar Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (1933; translated reprint ed., London: Imago Publishing Co., 1949). Poe's vogue in France is detailed in Patrick F. Quinn's The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957) and Westin P. Cambiaire's earlier The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France (1927; reprint ed., New York: Haskell House, 1970). See also several studies by Leon Lemmonier, one by Louis Seylaz, and especially Joseph Chiari's “Symbolisme” from Poe to Mallarmé: The Growth of a Myth (London: Rockcliff, 1956).

6. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Knopf, 1958), p. 163. Also see Richard Wilbur's brilliant speculation on the retreat into the “hypnagogic state” as the central theme of Poe's writings, “The House of Poe” (The Library of Congress Anniversary Lecture, May 4, 1959), reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 255-77, and in the Introduction to the Laurel Poetry Series Poe, ed. Richard Wilbur (New York: Dell, 1959), pp. 7-39.

7. No one's definition of irony suits many others. Just as the term Romanticism becomes complicated and ambiguous under scrutiny, so the term irony becomes increasingly slippery under use, threatening to encompass everything, so that one finds it hard to see anything that is not ironic. In the ensuing discussion of irony as a term, I attempt to adhere to simple, pragmatic meanings; the involuted subtleties of Romantic [page 202:] Irony soon to be detailed are complex enough without raising too many specters here. For general studies, see J. A. K. Thomson, Irony: An Historical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927), pp. 2-38 in particular; G. G. Sedgwick, Of Irony: Especially in the Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948); Norman O. Knox, The Word “Irony” and Its Context, 1500-1750 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1961); Douglas C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969). For satire, I cite only Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), especially pp. 257-75. Finally, the seminal work in the understanding of irony and satire and humor is a book focused on none of them, Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation (New York: Basic Books, 1964), a fine synthesis of philosophical, psychological, and physiological ideas on artistic creation, scientific discovery, and the logic of humor. The common denominator, Koestler suggests, is the simultaneous perception of a chain of logic applicable to two or more normally incompatible contexts. My basic assumptions about irony, satire, and humor follow Koestler, though at some distance.

8. Fuller documentation and discussion follows in Chapter 2, but here may be noted several works. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks in Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957), especially p. 397, provide an initial starting point, to be followed by reference to Wellek (W 2:16 ff). Lawrance Thompson in Melville's Quarrel with God (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), comes close, in his analysis of Melville's “triple-talk” and of Melville's sense of the perverse duplicity of all things, to seeing “Romantic” irony as Melville's basic mode. Poe's “quarrel,” however, was with an absurd universe, more than with an “evil God.” John Seelye in Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 2, mentions Melville's “sympathy with the forms and attitudes of romantic irony” derived from his reading of Coleridge and the Schlegels on Shakespeare; but Seelye drops the idea after this hint. Alfred A. Marks in “German Romantic Irony in Hawthorne's Tales,” Symposium 7 (1953): 274-304, is the only other critic I am aware of who has seen the significance of Romantic Irony for American Romanticists. But see R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 6-8, for discussion of the “three voices” of American intellectual history: the party of Hope (who rejected inherited sin), the party of Memory (who embraced the idea of inherited sin) and the party of Irony, who (characterized in one sense by Hawthorne) “seemed skeptically sympathetic toward both parties and managed to be confined by neither” (p. 7). The best overall study of Poe's place in the Romantic era is Edward H. Davidson's Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), one of the few important book-length [page 203:] studies to deal fairly with Poe's humor. A new, but idiosyncratic, study of Poe that takes into account the hoaxical and comic aspect is Daniel G. Hoffman's Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), though the occultist and Gothic side of Poe still predominates.

9. See, first, J. A. K. Thomson, Irony: An Historical Introduction, p. 185. In a once famous essay, “On the Irony of Sophocles” (first published in the British periodical, Philological Museum, in 1833), Bishop Connop Thirwall gave real currency to the English phrase “irony of fate.” He used it to mean a “mocking” discrepancy between appearance and reality. He associated “Sophoclean” irony with both irony of fate and with two-edged language — ultimately, then, a “dramatic irony” involving both author and spectator. In his preface to his translation of Ludwig Tieck's two novella “The Pictures” and “The Betrothing” (London: Whittaker, 1825), Thirwall showed caution in laying before English readers tales that had no obvious moral. He even comments on the “strange notions” of the Germans that “a tale may have high value, though its moral essence cannot be extracted in a precept or aphorism; they even think it better for having no didactic object ...” (p. xxxvüi). Thus the “undercurrent” of meaning is much like Muecke's basic definition of irony: “... the art of irony is the art of saying something without really saying it. It is an art that gets its effects from below the surface, and this gives it a quality that resembles the depth and resonance of great art triumphantly saying much more than it seems to be saying” (Compass of Irony, pp. 5-6). Although this is only a partial definition of an effect (but an important effect) of irony, it significantly parallels Schlegel's concept of mystic. Cf. Poe, H 8:126; 11:68; 10:61 ff.; 13:148.

10. Among the many discussions of “The Cask of Amontillado,” only one, in a textbook for freshmen, has presented such an acute analysis: see Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie L. Lewis, “The Nature of Fiction,” Introduction to Literature: Stories (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 2-9.

11. See especially Darrel Abel's brilliant “A Key to the House of Usher,” University of Toronto Quarterly 18 (1949): 176-85; see also Richard P. Benton, “Is Poe's ‘The Assignation’ a Hoax?” Nineteenth Century Fiction 18 (1963): 193-97; Roy P. Basler, “The Interpretation of ‘Ligeia,”’ College English 5 (1944): 363-72; three articles by James W. Gargano, “ ‘The Black Cat’: Perverseness Reconsidered,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 2 (1960): 172-78; “Poe's ‘Ligeia’: Dream and Destruction,” College English 23 (1962): 337-42; and “The Question of Poe's Narrators,” College English 25 (1963): 177-81; two articles by Clark Griffith, “Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” University of Toronto Quarterly 24 (1954): 8-25; “Caves and Cave Dwellers: The Study of a Romantic Image,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963): 551-68; Stephen Mooney, “Poe's Gothic Wasteland,” Sewanee Review 70 (1962): 261-83; and, more recently, James M. [page 204:] Cox, “Edgar Poe: Style as Pose,” Virginia Quarterly Review 44 (1968): 67-89.

12. For useful or revealing general studies of Poe's humor, satire, and penchant for hoaxing, see (in addition to items cited in the preceding note) Robert Kierly, “The Comic Masks of Edgar Allan Poe,” Umanesimo 1 (1967): 31-34; Terence Martin, “The Imagination at Play: Edgar Allan Poe,” Kenyon Review 27 (1966): 194-209; two articles by Stephen L. Mooney, “Comic Intent in Poe's Tales: Five Criteria,” Modern Language Notes 76 (1961): 432-34; “The Comic in Poe's Fiction,” American Literature 33 (1962): 433-61; two articles by Claude Richard, “Les Contes du Folio Club et le vocation humoristique d’Edgar Allan Poe,” in Configuration Critique de Edgar Allan Poe (Paris: Minard, 1969), pp. 79-94; “Poe and the Yankee Hero: An Interpretation of ‘Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,’ ” Mississippi Quarterly 21 (1968): 93-109; J. Marshall Trieber, “The Scornful Grin: A Study of Poesque Humor,” Poe Studies 4 (1971): 32-34; two articles by William Whipple, “Poe's Two-Edged Satiric Tale,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 9 (1954): 121-33; “Poe's Political Satire,” University of Texas Studies in English 35 (1956): 81-95; and James Southall Wilson, “The Devil Was In It,” American Mercury 24 (1931): 215-20.

13. Edward Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 235, 248-49.

14. Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Poe's satire on Blackwood's and the sensationist tale is a major topic of Chapter 3 of this study.

15. The conclusion of Clark Griffith in “Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics”; see Chapter 4 of this study.

16. K. W. F. Solger, Erwin, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1815), 2:286-87; passage translated in G. G. Sedgwick, Of Irony, p. 17; see W 2:300 ff.

 

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

Romantic Irony

1. Either Thomas W. White, owner, or James Heath, his short-term first editor, in “Editorial Remarks,” Southern Literary Messenger 1, no. 7 (March 1835): 387. These remarks appeared at the end of the issue; Poe's story appeared on pp. 333-36.

2. Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Studies in Philology 3 (1908): 1-104. See Cobb's third chapter, “Poe's Knowledge of the German Language and Literature,” pp. 20-30, where he lists several of the German literary figures that Poe refers to from time to time, including Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Wieland, Tieck, Novalis, Fouqué, Musaeus, Chamisso, Korner, Uhland, the Schlegels, Winckelmann, and others. Although Cobb concludes that Poe [page 205:] could read German with ease, he notes the great number of translations and critical essays available in English during this period. For a full discussion of German literature then available in translation in America, as well as for a full discussion (including the arguments of Cobb, Belden, Gruener, and others) of Poe's ability to read German, see Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 388 408 (especially pp. 388-92), and 709-22; cf. 381-82. Pochmann's detailed discussion strongly points to Poe's ability to read German, but I base the case for Poe's knowledge of German literature and German critical theory principally on translations and the “vast amount of discussion — charges, countercharges, denunciations, and vindications — of the Germans and Germanism” in American magazines during the period 1810 to 1864 (Pochmann, German Culture in America, pp. 328-29; on pp. 393 ff., Pochmann gives arithmetic frequency tables of translations, notices, reviews, critical articles, and biographical sketches). Thus, if Poe did have a reading knowledge of German, as would seem to be the case, the likelihood of such influence as I suggest here is redoubled.

3. The following works contain discussions of Romantic Irony: W 2; Raymond Immerwahr, “Romantic Irony and Romantic Arabesque Prior to Romanticism,” German Quarterly 42 (1969): 665-85; Morton L. Gurewitch, “European Romantic Irony,” Diss. Columbia 1957; Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die Romantische Ironie in Theorie and Gestaltung (Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1960), which synthesizes a number of previous studies in German; Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919; reprint ed., New York, 1955); M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953; reprint ed., New York: Norton, 1958); Douglas C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969); G. G. Sedgwick, Of Irony, Especially in Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948); A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock: A Study of Irony in Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1948); Oskar Walzel, German [page 208:] Romanticism, trans. Alma Elise Lussky (1932; reprint ed., New York: Putnam's, 1966); Robert M. Wernaer, Romanticism and the Romantic School in Germany (New York: Appleton, 1910); William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957); and several studies of Ludwig Tieck and the Schlegels, cited in subsequent notes. See also Ralph Tymms, German Romantic Literature (London: Methuen, 1955).

4. A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock, pp. 51 ff., uses Tieck's plays to illustrate simple Romantic Irony, and I follow him, for the most part, in this brief discussion of the plays. Translated passages from Tieck's plays, unless otherwise cited, are his. Wellek observes that “Tieck is an eclectic who reflects, almost year by year, the aesthetic theories of his contemporaries ...” (W 2:89). See the following for additional discussion of Tieck and Romantic Irony: Raymond Immerwahr, The Esthetic Intent of Tieck's Fantastic Comedy (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1953); A. E. Lussky, Tieck's Romantic Irony (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932); Percy Matenko, Tieck and Solger: The Complete Correspondence (1933; revised ed., New York: Modern Language Association, 1937); E. H. Zeydel, Ludwig Tieck and England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1931); E. H. Zeydel, Ludwig Tieck the German Romanticist: A Critical Study (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1935). Tieck was one of the most popular of the “new” generation of German writers after Schiller and Goethe; see the lists of translations in Matenko, Tieck and America, pp. 38-47; Zeydel, Ludwig Tieck and England, pp. 182-220; Stockley, German Literature as Known in America, p. 321; and Pochmann, German Culture in America, pp. 393 ff. For Carlyle's discussion, see The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, 30 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907), 21: 259.

5. Walzel, German Romanticism, p. 226 — an interesting metaphor that parallels Allen Tate's depiction of Poe's recurrent persona as a “forlorn demon” endlessly repeated in a series of mirrors — apparently derived from Schlegel: “Only Romantic poetry can ... become a mirror of the whole world round about ... and yet ... being free from all commitment to the real and the ideal, hover on the wings of poetic reflection midway between the artist and the artefact, raising this reflection to a higher power and a higher still and multiplying it as in an endless series of mirrors” (Athenäum, Fragment 116; trans. by Muecke in Compass of Irony, p. 204).

6. Walzel, German Romanticism, pp. 245-54; Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 211 ff.

7. Translated by A. R. Thompson, in The Dry Mock, pp. 58-59. Puss in Boots was translated during Poe's time. One such translation, by “Mrs. Osgood,” was published in 1846. An article on Puss, signed “L.,” appeared in The Southern Quarterly Review in Charleston, S. C., in 1846 [page 209:] (9:237-43); see Matenko, Tieck and America, pp. 21-22. The reviewer mentions the striking effect of the simulated audience and how these “pit performers” proceeded to “vent their jests upon the play itself.” In his essay on Tieck in German Romance (1827), Carlyle, as was mentioned, refers specifically to Puss, Topsy-Turvy, and Prince Zerbino. We find, he says, that under the “grotesque masque” of the dramatized fairy tale of Puss in Boots, Tieck “laughed with his whole heart, in a true Aristophanic vein, at the actual aspect of literature. ...” As readers, we find “a feast of broad joyous humour in this strange phantasmagoria, where pit and stage, and man and animal, and earth and air, are jumbled in confusion worse confounded” while the “copious, kind, ruddy light of true mirth overshines and warms the whole” (Carlyle's Works, 21:259). Poe was acutely aware of Carlyle; his references to Carlyle include H 4:218, 221; 11:22, 99, 114-15, 175-177; 13:195; 14:180; 15:78, 79, 260; 16:2, 7, 16, 74, 99-101, 122, 167, 175. In his review of Algernon Henry Perkirts's Ideals and Other Poems, Poe writes (Graham's, April 1842) that the author seems to try “to render confusion worse confounded” by introducing into his poetry the “hyper-ridiculous elisions” of Carlyle's prose (H 11:114-15). This phrasing confirms Poe's careful reading of the very section of German Romance that deals with Puss, Topsy-Turvy, Zerbino, and Tieck's Romantic Irony. It should be observed, however, that whatever debt Poe may have owed Carlyle for his translations and discussions of German literature, Poe did not much care for Carlyle's own writing; see especially references in H 11.

8. See A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock, pp. 62-63; Lussky, “The Sources of Tieck's Romantic Irony,” Chapter IV of Tieck's Romantic Irony, pp. 118-58.

9. See H 11:99; 16:161. Poe quotes the same passage twice from the same work, suggesting that the work had unusual impress on him. Peregrinus Proteus was translated (anonymously) into English as Private History of Peregrinus Proteus the Philosopher (London, 1749). Agathon had been translated by John Richardson in London, 1773. Wieland's most influential work in America, Oberon, was translated in London, 1778, and in New York, 1840. Don Silvio was translated by John Richardson as Reason Triumphant over Fancy in London, 1773, and a collection titled Select Fairy Tales from the German of Wieland, “By the translator of The Sorceror,” appeared in London, 1796. See Werner P. Friedrich, History of German Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), p. 72, and the lists of Stockley, German Literature in England, and Morgan, Bibliography of German Literature in English Translation.

10. See Lussky, Tieck's Romantic Irony, pp. 99-108; Sedgwick, Of Irony, p. 16. Also see Raymond Immerwahr, “Romantic Irony and Romantic Arabesque Prior to Romanticism,” pp. 673-82, for discussion of the relation between the arabesque and the Quixotic tradition. The Sorrows [page 210:] of Werter. A German Story appeared in English in London in 1779 and again in 1801. Wilhem Meister's Apprenticeship was translated by Carlyle (Edinburgh, 1824). Poetry and Truth appeared as Memoirs of Goethe in London in 1823. Poe's references to Goethe include[[:]] H 2:392; 7:28; 8:42; 9:202; 10:57; 11:5, 114; 12:13-14; 16:117. The earliest reference dates from 1829.

11. Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. 372. Poe would have had access to Leibnitz's thought in English not only in the many anthologies of German prose, but also in A Collection of Papers ... Relating to ... Natural Philosophy and Religion (London: J. Knapton, 1717). See Poe's humorous use of “Leibnitz's Law of Continuity — according to which nothing passes from one state to another without passing through all the intermediate states” (H 16:46). Other references to Leibnitz are: H 2:126; 4:134; 9:65; 12:165; 14:217; 16:25, 223-24. Many translations of Kant's works were available, though it should be noted that Poe refers to even lesser known works of Kant by the German titles (see H 2:276, for example). Among the better known translations and textbook discussions are: F. A. Nitsch's A General and Introductory View of Professor Kant's Principles (London, 1796); Project for a Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay (London: Vemor and Hood, 1797); A. F. M. Willich's Elements of the Critical Philosophy (London, 1798); Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysic (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1819); The Metaphysic of Morals, 2 vols. (London: W. Richardson, 1779), and translated anew with an introduction and appendices, including part of the Critique of Practical Reason (Edinburgh: Clark, 1836), Critik of Pure Reason (London: Pickering, 1838); An Analysis of the Critik of Pure Reason by Francis Haywood (London: Pickering, 1844); and Religion within the Boundary of Pure Reason (Edinburgh: Clark, 1838). Poe's references to Kant include: H 2:126, 271, 276, 359, 392; 4:218; 6:201; 11:136, 235; 16:188. Earliest references to both Leibnitz and Kant date before 1832.

12. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, p. 208.

13. See Walzel, German Romanticism, p. 41. In Carlyle's essay on “The State of German Literature,” first published in Edinburgh Review, no. 92 (1827), reprinted in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Collected and Republished, Fichte is quoted extensively and discussed in the context of the aesthetics of Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, Winck-elmann, and others, with special reference to those “chief mystics in Germany,” the “Transcendental Philosophers, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling!” See The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 26:58-84, especially. Carlyle pairs with these German authors the British writers Blair, Johnson, and Kames. Cf. Poe, who writes that the “critiques raisonnees” of Winckelmann, Novalis, Schelling, Goethe, and the Schlegels “differ from those of Kames, of Johnson, and Blair, in principle not at all” (H 11:5). Selections from Fichte were also available to Poe in German Prose [page 211:] Writers (1828) and Austin, Fragments from German Prose Writers (1841). Translations of Fichte available to Poe include: The Characteristics of the Present Age (London: Chapman, 1844); The Way Towards the Blessed Life (London: Chapman, 1844); On the Nature of the Scholar (London: Chapman, 1845); The Destination of Man (London: Chapman, 1846); The Vocation of the Scholar (London: Chapman, 1847); and Popular Works, 2 vols. (London: Chapman, 1848-49). For Poe's references to Fichte, see H 2:28, 359, 392; 11:136. The earliest reference dates from 1832.

14. Schiller argued that beauty and morality are inseparable, a view Poe seems to dispute, with his formulation of the “heresy of the Didactic”; but, as we have seen, Poe does not object to a moral as the “undercurrent of a poetical theme.” See his reviews of Longfellow's Ballads (H 11:64-85) and of Thomas Moore's Alciphron (H 10:65), where he notes that the term mystical is associated with such an undercurrent of idealism by the Germans. Cf. his remarks on truth and beauty and “harmony” in his 1845 review of Nathaniel Parker Willis (H 12:37-39).

15. Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, pp. 368-70; the section on satirical poetry is translated in Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lauter (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 307-13. Schiller was available to Poe not only in journal extracts and discussions (Pochmann, pp. 343-47, notes 187 Schiller items in American periodicals before 1864), but also in translated editions of the Philosophic and Aesthetic Letters (1837; London: Chapman, 1844), and the Correspondence with Goethe (London, 1845). Schiller's fiction, poetry, and drama were even more readily available, of course (see Morgan, Bibliography of German Literature in English Translation). Poe's references to Schiller include: H 2:279, 295; 6:155; 8:138; 9:202, 204. The earliest references date from before 1838.

16. Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. 368; W 2:74-76; Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 209-10. For echoes of these ideas in Poe's Eureka, see his remarks on poetic intuition in relation to induction and deduction as follows: H 16:183, 187-98, 205-7, 214, 221-22, 260-61, 275-76, 293, 304, 306, 312-15, all of which, however, are complicated by possible ironies. Schelling's ideas on tragedy and comedy help clarify his basic views: in tragedy the subjective and free choice of a human being clashes with necessity, or the objective order of the universe; in comedy human choice and character are fixed and fated but the world is treated subjectively, freely, ironically (W 2:81). Schelling also investigated occult sciences in pursuit (in part) of the secrets of the unconscious, discussed later in this study with reference to the sinister nightside of nature which was made use of increasingly by the Romanticist fiction writers. Abrams calls Schelling's Transcendental Idealism (1800) the “characteristic document of romantic philosophy in Germany”; the “extraordinary importance attributed to esthetic invention [page 212:] may be regarded as the climax of a general tendency of the time to exalt art over all human pursuits” (p. 209). Schelling was available in Austin, Fragments from the German Prose Writers (1841) and in a translation of his Philosophy of Art (London: Chapman, 1845). Poe's references to Schelling include H 2:29, 358, 392; 11:5, 136; the earliest references date before 1832.

17. See H 11:5; see also H 16:1-4, for Poe's attribution of his whole Marginalia series to the German critics and what they were calling “the ‘brain-scattering’ humor of the moment.” Cf. H 16:304.

18. Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. 379; W 2:16ff.; quotation translated in W 2:17. Cf. Muecke, Compass of Irony, p. 201. In his novel Lucinde (1799), Schlegel said he aimed at the interplay of imagination, illusion, moral responsibility, and subjectivity. Hans Eichner has edited Friedrich Schlegel's Literary Notebooks, 1797-1801 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957); in Poe's era Friedrich Schlegel's Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works were translated by E. J. Millington and published in London in 1849. This was too late, of course, for Poe to have made use of, but Friedrich Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature was translated by J. B. Lockhart and published in Edinburgh in 1818. Although I believe that Poe's general acquaintance with Friedrich Schlegel's thought probably determined his definition of arabesque, it should be noted that Schlegel was defining and labeling a body of literature with which Poe, too, was familiar. See Chapter 5 of this study. See also the following studies for discussion of Friedrich Schlegel: Hans Eichner, “Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of Romantic Poetry,” PMLA 71 (1956): 1018-41; Raymond Immerwahr, “The Subjectivity or Objectivity of Friedrich Schlegel's Poetic Irony,” Germanic Review 26 (1951) 173-91; Raymond Immerwahr, “Friedrich Schlegel's Essay On Goethe's Meister,” Monatshefte 49 (1957): 1-22; Victor Lange, “Friedrich Schlegel's Literary Criticism,” Comparative Literature 7 (1955): 289-305. Hanna-Beate Schilling, in “The Role of the Brothers Schlegel in American Literary Criticism ... ,” American Literature 43 (1972): 563-79, lists seventy-four periodical items from 1812 to 1833 in American magazines which dealt with the Schlegels.

19. See H 8:275-318; 12:36 40. Tate, Collected Essays, p. 44, suggests these ideas came to Poe directly from Coleridge, derived, of course, from the Germans. See, in this context, Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (1925; reprint ed., New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), pp. 68-79.

20. See W 2:14 ff. The translation of this passage, a famous one among the ironists, is from Sedgwick, Of Irony, pp. 14-15; cf. Muecke, Compass of Irony, pp. 194-95. See Schilling, “Role of the Brothers Schlegel,” p. 576, for two citations of Schlegel fragments from the Athenäum appearing in American periodicals in 1830. There are doubtless many more as [page 213:] yet unidentified. Pochmann lists twenty-four Schlegel items before 1864 (p. 346).

21. See Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), passim, but especially pp. 16-40, 12961; the concept of a select coterie of perceptive insiders is fundamental to the argument. An earlier, important study of this concept is Richard P. Benton, “Is Poe's ‘The Assignation’ a Hoax?” Nineteenth Century Fiction 18 (1963): 193-97.

22. See A. J. Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 52 (1953): 1-12; and Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory, pp. 30-35 ff., 68-78 ff., and passim.

23. See H 8:46-47, 126; 9:202; 10:65, 116; 11:5, 79, 250; 12:131; 13:43; 14:62, 180; 16:117, 144, for Poe's main references to the Schlegels. Earliest reference dates from 1835.

24. See Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel,” p. 11. Lubell, careful at first about charging Poe with plagiarism, is not quite as clear as he might be. He writes that Poe must have known Schlegel's work, because he praises R. H. Horne's introduction to a translation published in 1840 (H 11:244 ff.). But Lubell rightly concludes, after presenting parallel passages, that “it is quite obvious” that Poe stole from Schlegel (probably from the British translation of 1815 or the American edition printed in 1833), for Poe reproduces both the content and the order of Schlegel's argument. Schlegel writes that Greek drama is characterized by an “Ideality” linked with the “prevailing idea of Destiny.” Euripides’ work represents a degradation of this ideality, since in his works “fate is seldom the invisible spirit of the whole composition, the fundamental thought of the tragic world.” The “terrors of destiny” may “brighten” into indications of a “beneficent Providence,” but in Euripides this concept of fate degenerates into “the caprice of chance.” Poe writes that two of the three essential qualities of Greek drama are “Destiny or Fate” and “Ideality.” But in Euripides we see a “perversion” of the “terrible spirit of predestination,” a mellowing of this concept into “a kind Providence” that becomes in Euripides “the capriciousness of chance.” Schlegel then discusses the role of the Chorus as an “ideal spectator.” Sophocles, Schlegel remarks, “wrote a Treatise on the Chorus ... in opposition to the principles of other poets,” and “was able to assign reasons” for his usage. Poe writes that “Sophocles wrote a treatise on the Chorus, and assigned his reasons for persisting in the practice.” Poe adds that the Chorus “was, in a word, the ideal spectator.” (See Lubell, pp. 8-10; there are further parallels.) Poe's review of Euripides is in H 8:43-47; eventual reference to Schlegel, H 8:47.

25. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates (1841), trans. Lee M. Capel (London: Collins, 1966), pp. 260-61. [page 214:]

26. Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, pp. 260-61. For Hegel on the Schlegels and Tieck, see Matenko's edition of the Complete Correspondence between Tieck and Solger, especially the Introduction, pp. 43-61. For Poe on Hegel, see H 16:164. For Solger on Tieck, see Matenko, Complete Correspondence, pp. 6-16. Cf. W 2:301.

27. Schlegel's Lectures was translated repeatedly from 1815 on. My copy is A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, “by Augustus William Schlegel,” trans. John Black, rev. A. J. W. Morrison (London: Henry G. Bond, 1846; reprint ed., New York: AMS Press, 1965). References are by chapter and page number in parentheses in the text.

28. This Marginalia reference is omitted without explanation from the Harrison edition, as are a number of others. The entry can be found in the edition of Richard Henry Stoddard, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 6 vols. (New York: A. C. Armstrong, 1895), 5:283. The work referred to was translated as “The Old Man of the Mountain,” “The Lovecharm,” and “Pietro of Abano.” Tales from the German of Tieck (London: Moxon, 1831; New York, 1831). See Matenko, Tieck and America, p. 108. Matenko's fifth chapter, “Tieck, Poe and Hawthorne,” pp. 71-88, contains a discussion of Poe's knowledge of Tieck, pp. 71-75; cf. Pochmann, German Culture in America, pp. 381-84. Poe may have derived his association of Hawthorne with Tieck from an article on “American Humor” in the Democratic Review of April 1835; see Matenko's discussion of Poe's “third-hand” impression of the similarities of Hawthorne and Tieck. See also Edwin H. Zeydel, “Edgar Allan Poe's Contacts with German as Seen in His Relations with Ludwig Tieck,” in Studies in German Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Festschrift for Frederic C. Coenen, ed. Siegfried Mews, University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, no. 67 (Chapel Hill, 1970), pp. 47-54, a corroborative article that came to my attention after the present study had been completed. The fact remains, however, that Poe's quotation from The Old Man of the Mountain indicates that he read the work and that it made a striking impression. With Tieck's The Journey into the Blue Distance, Poe does more than “mention” it; he quotes from it, praising Tieck's humorous technique of misquoting (H 16:42). Tieck's fiction was available in many translations. Representative are the following: “The Sorcerors,” “The Enchanted Castle,” “Wake Not the Dead,” “Auburn Egbert,” “Elfin-land,” in Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations; “The Pictures” and “The Betrothing,” trans. Bishop Connop Thirwall (London: Whittaker, 1825); “Faithful Ekhart,” “The Fair Egbert,” “The Runenberg,” “The Elves,” “The Goblet,” in Carlyle's German Romance (1827); Tales from the Phantasus, trans. J. C. Hare, J. A. Froude, and others (London: Burns, 1845), which includes in addition to tales cited above, three tales not part of the German Phantasus: “The Reconciliation,” “The Friends,” and “The Brothers.” [page 215:]

29. Harry Levin, Power of Blackness (New York: Knopf, 1958), pp. 133-35.

30. See also Marginalia on the under-use of the dash for second thoughts and for a remark on an “inexcusable Gallicism” (H 16:130-32, 153).

31. H 3:287. Scholars have often pointed out that all the books in Usher's library are real except, apparently, for the Vigils of the Dead and The Journey. The difficulty in identifying the Tieck volume has been that Poe omits the first half of the title; the whole title is “The Old Book” and “The Journey into the Blue Distance.” See T. O. Mabbott's notes in Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library, 1951), p. 419; see also Matenko, Ludwig Tieck and America, pp. 72-73, who was unable to find any English translation. The common denominator of the titles has also puzzled critics, who have suggested such motifs as the deathwatch, marriage, satiric utopias, and inorganic sentience.

 

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

Flawed Gothic

1. References to letters written to Poe are to Harrison or to A. H. Quinn, Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1941); Quinn (p. 200 ) gives a facsimile of the letter and the succeeding first paragraphs of Poe's neat copying out of “Epimanes.”

2. “Maelström,” though published several years later in 1841, may be an early tale. But the evidence for this is suspect, being mainly the testimony of John Latrobe years later. Latrobe remembered that “Maelström” was one of the tales submitted to the Visiter prize contest, for which he served as judge, but Latrobe's other “recollections” of Poe seem to be somewhat inaccurate. For further discussion (beyond A. H. Quinn) and a summary of discussions by Jay B. Hubbell and J. O. Bailey, regarding Latrobe, see William H. Gravely, Jr., “A Note on the Composition of Poe's ‘Hans Pfall,’ ” Poe Newsletter 3 (1970): 2-5.

3. See Harrison's commentary on “Poe's Introduction for ‘The Tales of the Folio Club,”’ H 2:xxxv-xxxvi. T. O. Mabbott, in “On Poe's Tales of the Folio Club,’ ” Sewanee Review 36 (1928): 171-76, focused critical attention on this Introduction and printed a newly found letter to the Philadelphia publisher Harrison Hall in which Poe further explains and expands his scheme. James Southall Wilson in “The Devil Was In It,” American Mercury, 24 (1931): 215-20, discusses the burlesque quality of several of Poe's early “serious” tales, identifies satiric echoes from other writers, and suggests probable “Folio Club authors” for several tales. Alexander Hammond in “Poe's ‘Lionizing’ and the Design of Tales of the Folio Club,” ESQ 18 (1972): 154-65, shows that “Lionizing,” in addition to a burlesque of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, N. P. Willis, and [page 216:] others, is primarily a satiric imitation of Benjamin Disraeli's novel Vivian Grey and a burlesque of his early literary career. Hammond argues convincingly that Poe intended “Lionizing” to be the capstone tale for “Tales of the Folio Club.” (Hammond has an essay forthcoming, which I have seen in manuscript, reconstructing the sequence and the satiric targets of the Folio Club.)

4.See A. H. Quinn, Poe: A Critical Biography, p. 250 , for a description of the exchanges.

5. Kennedy to Poe, 9 February 1836 (H 17:28). Poe to Kennedy, 11 February 1836 (H 17:30; and O 1:84).

6. June 1836; see A. H. Quinn, Poe: A Critical Biography, pp. 250-51.

7. The details of Willis's affectations are from Kenneth L. Daughrity, “Poe's ‘Quiz on Willis,’ ” American Literature 5 (1933): 55-62. Poe apparently had Willis in mind, along with others, again three years later when he published “Lionizing” in the Southern Literary Messenger of May 1835. For commentary on the sources and meaning of “Lionizing,” see Richard P. Benton, “Poe's ‘Lionizing’: A Quiz on Willis and Lady Blessington,” Studies in Short Fiction 5 (1968): 239-44; G. R. Thompson, “On the Nose — Further Speculation on the Sources and Meaning of Poe's ‘Lionizing,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (1968): 94-96; and Richard P. Benton's “Reply to Professor Thompson,” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (1968): 97. John Arnold, “Poe's ‘Lionizing’: The Wound and the Bawdry,” Literature and Psychology 18 (1967): 52-54, expands on the frequently observed sexual innuendo in the tale.

8. The story appeared in the Courier on 3 March 1832. The Courier versions of the five tales are reprinted in J. G. Varner's Edgar Allan Poe and the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1933), now out of print. Harrison in Works gives other variant readings of these early tales, but was unaware of their having been first published in the Courier.

9. David L. Carson in “Ortolans and Geese: The Origin of Poe's Duc de L’Omelette,” College Language Association Journal 8 (1965): 277-83, objects to what he calls the “tenuous assumption” by William Bittner in Poe: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962) that Willis “was the sort of dilettante who reclined on ottomans — while eating olives — and who was certain to have known all of the currently fashionable haberdashers” (p. 277). It is true that Poe uses “ottomans” in more than one story, but Carson is unaware of the detailed evidence in Daughrity's article, “Poe's ‘Quiz on Willis,’ ” which Bittner merely summarizes. Carson goes on to make a much more “tenuous” conjecture that the tale is based on a practical joke Poe is supposed to have played while at West Point. Moreover, Carson also ignores the evidence of R. L. Hudson in “Poe and Disraeli,” American Literature 8 (1937): 402-16; Hudson suggests that Disraeli's The Young Duke is the butt of the satire. Her parallels are convincing, but she misconstrues the primary [page 2174:] target; Poe uses the episode from Disraeli to satirize Willis, puncturing both at the same time. The Young Duke has a “pretty bird,” prays to “die eating ortolans,” owns an elegant apartment, and has trouble at ecarte. (Hudson also points out that a description of May Dacre in The Young Duke bears a resemblance to Ligeia.) David H. Hirsch in “Another Source for Poe's ‘The Duc de L’Omelette,’ ” American Literature 38 (1967): 532-36, points to a review of The Young Duke in the Westminster Review for October 1831, but, like Carson, he omits mention of Daughrity's findings.

10. A probable Folio Club author is Mr. Snap, an editor.

11. The story appeared in the Courier on 9 June 1832.

12. The Courier version was a little more blatantly satiric. To “Abel Shit-tim,” for example, Simeon declares “Let me no longer be called Simeon ... ‘he who listens’ — but rather Boanerges, ‘the son of thunder’ ” — that is, he-who-sounds, or the son-of-farts, supposedly a condition resulting from the eating of pork. Edward H. Davidson discusses indelicate innuendo in Poe's early works in Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 145-48. The likely Folio Club author for the tale is Chronologos Chronology, who admired Horace Smith, and had a very big nose which had been in Asia Minor.

13. See A. H. Quinn, Poe: A Critical Biography, p. 194 , for comments on the satiric butt of the story. Quinn suggests, however, that Poe makes some “parade” of his own, which is no doubt true but is to miss the point and fun of the parade. A possible Folio Club author for “Bon-Bon” is De Rerum Natura since he and the Devil in the tale both wear green spectacles (cf. Bittner, p. 290) and since the name is appropriate to the “philosophizing” of the tale.

14. The Courier publication was 10 November 1832.

15. September 1835. The subtitle was amended in 1846 to “A Tale Neither In nor Out of Blackwood.” In the 1836 letter to Kennedy mentioned earlier, Poe specifies “Loss of Breath” as a satire aimed at the “extrava-gancies of Blackwood” (O 1:84). The obvious Folio Club author is Mr. Blackwood Blackwood, who had written certain articles for foreign magazines.

16. See Stephen L. Mooney, “Poe's Grand Design: A Study of Theme and Unity in the Tales,” Diss. Tennessee 1962, pp. 116-17; and Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (1925; reprint ed., New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), p. 11.

17. “Perversity” thus makes its appearance in the earliest of Poe's fiction. The human propensity to act against one's own best interests, an ultimate irony or grotesquerie, is a major theme in “Metzengerstein” and became an increasingly major theme in Poe's work. “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845) is but a codification of the theme, rather than a new idea in Poe's thinking. The beginning of “Imp” is vigorously sarcastic about the “systems” that psychologists and phrenologists have tried to [page 218:] impose on the mysterious realms of personality and subconscious motivation, suggesting a certain presumptuousness in trying “to dictate to God” (H 6:145-46). T. O. Mabbott suggests that the anonymous writer of Ramblings and Reveries of an Art Student is clearly right in attributing the immediate source of “Imp of the Perverse” to the “perverse” behavior of Lady Georgianna in Chapter XXII of Fullerton's Ellen Middleton, a book that Poe reviewed six months prior to the publication of “Imp” (H 16:34, from the Democratic Review, December 1844); but both the concept of “perversity” and the term perverse date from 1831 in Poe's works. See Mabbott's notes to the tale in his edition of the Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library, 1951).

18. See M. S. Allen, “Poe's Debt to Voltaire,” University of Texas Studies in English 15 (1935): 70.

19. The later versions show reduction of obvious exaggeration and absurdity; two notable changes are emphasis on mock learning and, what is more reasonable in a first-person story, keeping the hero alive. All the later versions are titled “Loss of Breath,” though there are variations in the subtitle, as noted earlier.

20. The first corpse is fat and bloated, whose terrible lot it has been not to walk but to waddle, “whose circumgyratory proceedings” have been a “palpable failure,” for in “taking a step forward, it has been his misfortune to take two toward the right, and three toward the left.” Stephen Mooney suggests (“Poe's Grand Design,” pp. 116-17) that Poe's description recalls Hazlitt's description of Coleridge's method of walking in “My First Acquaintance with Poets” (1823); I find this rather strained. But W with his long nose does suggest Wordsworth when one considers the two corpses together, though Poe may have had almost anyone in mind, Emerson or Longfellow, for example, or possibly John Wilson.

21. Confirming the sly indecency of the real “loss”; see Marie Bonaparte The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (1933; translated reprint ed., London: Imago, 1949), pp. 373-410, for an application of “impotence” to Poe himself.

22. A. H. Quinn, Poe: A Critical Biography, pp. 192-93. “Metzengerstein” was the first of the five stories that the Courier published, 14 January 1832.

23. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, pp. 138,142. Davidson does, however, offer “Metzengerstein” as a “lampoon” in his anthology of Poe, Selected Writings (Boston: Riverside Press, 1956), but he gives only brief comment. For an attempt to discredit any such burlesque reading of the tale, see Benjamin F. Fisher, “Poe's ‘Metzengerstein’: Not a Hoax,” American Literature 42 (1971): 487-94.

24. Bittner, Poe: A Biography, pp. 85-87. Bittner follows Bonaparte in the view that Poe began to see the young Baron Metzengerstein as himself and the old Count as John Allan! [page 219:]

25. See discussion of Schlegel's Lectures in preceding chapter; cf. Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

26. See Davidson's chapter on “Death, Eros, and Horror” in his Poe: A Critical Study, pp. 105-35, for comment on the Gothic fashion in the literature of the time. For detailed consideration of short American Gothic works, see Mary Mauritia Redden, The Gothic Fiction in the American Magazines (1765-1800) (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1939). For more general discussion, see Oral S. Coad, “The Gothic Element in American Literature before 1835,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 24 (1925): 72-93; Chapters X and XI of Edith Birkhead's The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (London: Constable & Co., 1921); and the next chapter of this study.

27. Published in January. Poe also italicizes the last word of the tale (“a horse”), apparently to emphasize the absurdity of the concluding event. He later removed the subtitle, apparently because his readers continued to take the tale seriously.

28. Hoffmann's works are repeatedly cited as the source of Poe's Gothic works and especially of “Metzengerstein” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But similarities to Hoffmann in these may be through Scott: Hoffmann's “Das Majorat” makes use of a “dismal uninhabited castle tenanted by an eccentric hero, the last of his noble race,” writes Palmer Cobb in The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Studies in Philology 3 (1908): 9. As noted before Cobb argues for Poe's knowledge of German, but G. P. Smith, in “Poe's ‘Metzengerstein,’ ” Modern Language Notes 48 (1933): 356-59, writes that Poe had access to Hoffmann's works in translation in the Baltimore Public Library. Translations of Hoffmann's tales were available in J. Strang's Tales of Humour and Romance from the German ... (before 1836); in R. P. Gillies's German Stories, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1826), including “Rolandsitten” (“The Entail”) and “Mlle. de Scuderi”; and in Carlyle's German Romance (1827), including both “The Golden Pot” and an introduction to Hoffmann's life and works in which he mentions the Fantasiestücke, the Elixiere des Teufels, which had just been published (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1824), Fouqué's versification of Hoffmann's opera of Undine, the Nachtstücke, Klein Zaches, the Serapionsbrüder (small tales based, writes Carlyle, on “a little club of friends, which for some time met weekly in Hoffmann's house”), Prinzessin Brambilla, Kater Murr, and Meister Martin; Carlyle observes of such writings that there is “something player-like” in Hoffmann's character. “Master Flea” appeared in G. Sloane's Specimens of the German Romance (London: Whitaker, 1826), and “The Datura Fastuosa: A Botanical Tale,” in the Dublin University Magazine 13 (1839): 707. In 1844, “The Elementary Spirit,” “The Jesuits’ Church in G——,” and “The Sandman” appeared in J. Oxenford and Feiling's [page 220:] Tales from the German (New York: Harper, 1844). In 1845, Signor Formica appeared (New York: Taylor). And “Master Martin and his Workmen” appeared in Beauties of German Literature (London: Burns, 1847). See also Lieselotte Dieckmann, “E. T. A. Hoffmann und E. A. Poe: Verwandte Sensibilitat bei verschiedenem Sprach- und Gesell-schaftsraum,” in Dichtung, Sprache, Gesellschaft: Akten des IV. Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses 1970, ed. Victor Lange and Hans-Gert Roloff (Frankfurt/Main: Athenanm, 1971), pp. 273-80; and Gisela Vitt-Maucher, “E. T. A. Hoffmanns Ritter Gluck und E. A. Poes The Man of the Crowd: Eine Gegenilberstellung,” German Quarterly 43 (1970): 35-46. See H 10:39 for Poe's reference to the “Phantasy Pieces of the Lorrainean CaIlk.” Actually, Poe could have gotten all the German decor he needed from Walter Scott's essay devoted to Hoffmann, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” Foreign Quarterly Review 1 (July 1827): 60-98, and current English Gothic novels.

29. See Mabbott's notes to the tale in his edition of the Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library, 1951), p. 414; the actual setting of “Metzengerstein” is Hungary, the land of black magic, as Mabbott points out.

30. Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963), pp. 33, 73, 183n, 164, 167; Mabbott, Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 414. G. P. Smith, “Poe's ‘Metzengerstein,”’ p. 357, points out the motif of the animated portrait. Another interesting possibility for Poe's source, especially for the idea of a satiric hoax, is a mildly clumsy Gothic poem called “The Spectral Horseman,” ostensibly by one Margaret Nicholson (Posthumous Fragments, Oxford, 1810, pp. 23-25) but actually by Shelley. Shelley and some friends intended the volume as a “practical joke,” a Romantic hoax somewhat in the manner of Chatterton but with satiric overtones. Thus they invented a mad washerwoman, whose decayed mind not only led her to write poetry but also to attempt regicide.

31. The rooms and their furnishings in “A Bargain Lost” are similar to a description of Vivian Grey's rooms. In a version of “Loss of Breath,” as we have seen, the half-dead hero thinks of “falsities in the Pelham novels — beauties in Vivian Grey — more than beauties in Vivian Grey — profundity in Vivian Grey — genius in Vivian Grey — every thing in Vivian Grey.” J. S. Wilson, “The Devil Was In It” (p. 220), also notes the parody of Vivian Grey in Poe's “King Pest” (1835). See also Hudson, “Poe and Disraeli.”

32. The text is that of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), which preserves the early satiric gibes.

33. Mabbott's translation and identification of source (Luther's letters), Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 414.

34. This passage may have a political or historical implication. Given the allusion to Ethan Allen in the footnote, the passage here suggests the [page 221:] Vermont-New York controversy in which Allen was involved and which was interpreted with further suspicion by the Congress. This hint is strengthened in a moment by the statement that Metzengerstein's boundaries have never been clearly settled. Nothing more, however, is made of this in the story. But Allen was involved in what some considered “treasonable” correspondence with the British; see Stewart H. Holbrook, Ethan Allen (New York: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 181 if.; also see pp. 231-33 for Allen's “religious” image.

 

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

Explained Gothic

1. For useful general treatments of American Gothic fiction see: Oral Sumner Coad, “The Gothic Element in American Literature before 1835,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 24 (1925): 72-93; Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Co., 1951); David Brion Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957); Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966); James H. Justus, “Beyond Gothicism: Wuthering Heights and the American Tradition,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 5 (1960): 25-33; Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York: Knopf, 1958); Henry Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971); and Mary Mauritia Redden, The Gothic Fiction in the American Magazines (1765-1800) (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1939). See also D. E. S. Maxwell, American Fiction: The Intellectual Background (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969); Daniel G. Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961); and Jane Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the European Literary Romance (1947; reprint ed., New York: Russell & Russell, 1965).

2. The word Gothic is found in the translators’ preface to the Authorized Version of the Bible in 1611 to indicate the peoples of Eastern Europe [page 223:] (those who speak the “Gothicke tongue”). See Redden, Gothic Fiction in American Magazines, p. 11; Lovejoy, “The First Gothic Revival,” pp. 136-65.

3. Quoted in Lovejoy, “First Gothic Revival,” pp. 137-39.

4. Parentalia, pub. 1750; Lovejoy, “The First Gothic Revival,” p. 139.

5. See Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1941), p. 289 : “He [Poe] eluded a definition of the terms ... but generally speaking, the Arabesques are the product of powerful imagination and the Grotesques have a burlesque or satirical quality.” This bifurcation has persisted despite occasional attempts to modify it. L. Moffitt Cecil, in “Poe's ‘Arabesque,’ ” Comparative Literature 18 (1966): 55-70, points out the meaning of “Eastern” or “Near Eastern” in Poe's usage of “arabesque” but neglects to mention the German Romanticists’ transmutation of the Oriental tale and the term arabesque into a genre of and term for Gothic irony. Similarly, Lewis A. Lawson, in “Poe's Conception of The Grotesque,” Mississippi Quarterly 19 (1966): 200-205, neglects the European uses of grotesque. For discussion of the German conception of tales of the grotesque and arabesque, see Kayser and Wellek as cited in Chapter 5.

6. See Lovejoy, “The First Gothic Revival,” pp. 153-56; cf. W. D. Robson-Scott, Literary Background of the Gothic Revival, and Kenneth Clarke, The Gothic Revival.

7. The phrase is W. P. Ker's, Cambridge History of English Literature, 10: 217; see Lovejoy, “The First Gothic Revival,” p. 164; cf. Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory.

8. Clara F. McIntyre, “The Later Career of the Elizabethan Villain-Hero,” PMLA 40 (1925): 874-80. Cf. Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, University of California Publications in English, no. 13 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1947). Cf. Coad, “Gothic Element in American Literature,” p. 72. Lionel Stevenson notes in The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) that elements of “mystery and terror” appear in the novel at least as early as 1753 in Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom.

9. Horace Walpole, “The Castle of Otranto,” “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” “Northanger Abbey,” ed. Andrew Wright (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1963), pp. 3-4.

10. See Kayser, The Grotesque, passim. Fuller discussion follows in Chapter 5.

11. See Birkhead's seventh chapter in The Tale of Terror (pp. 128 44), George Kitchin, A Survey of Burlesque and Parody in English (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1931), and Redden, Gothic Fiction in American Magazines, pp. 19-67.

12. Nathan Drake, “On Gothic Superstitions,” reprinted in Literary Hours (London, 1804). [page 224:]

13. Tompkins, The Popular Novel, p. 263.

14. Arthur Ransome, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Study (1910; reprint ed., Folcroft, Pa., 1970), pp. 109-11.

15. Coleridge, Monthly Review (November 1794); Tompkins, The Popular Novel, p. 291. Although Tompkins's treatment of Radcliffe is not extensive, her observations on Radcliffe and on the English and German styles of Gothic stand almost alone in critical and historical insight. It is surprising that no one has followed up her perceptive analysis of the development of the Gothic romance — or her insightful suggestions about Mrs. Radcliffe.

16. See Coad, “The Gothic Element in American Literature,” pp. 91-92, where he also comments on the American predilection for “sportive” Gothic and on the failure of American writers to make use of new sources of terror in Indian demonology and New England witchcraft.

17. William B. Cairns, On the Development of American Literature from 1815 to 1833, with Especial Reference to Periodicals (Madison: University of Wisconsin Publications, 1898), p. 64.

18. See O 2:433. Cf. James K. Paulding and John P. Kennedy on Poe's first satires (see Chapter 3 of this study); cf. Schlegel (see Chapter 2 of this study). Poe, in “Letter to B——” (1831), comments on the “old Goths of Germany” most provocatively, given the context suggested here. Judgment can be “too correct,” he writes, an idea the Goths “would have understood [for they] used to debate matters of importance to their State twice, once when drunk, and once when sober ...” (H 7:xi).

19. Roy P. Basler, “The Interpretation of ‘Ligeia,’ ” College English 5 (1944): 363-72.

20. Cooke's letter is given complete, H 17:49-51. See James Schroeter's “A Misreading of Poe's ‘Ligeia,’ ” PMLA 76 (1961): 397-406. In his denunciation of a psychological reading of the tale (and of such misguided critics), Schroeter is vigorously seconded by Edward Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 248-49.

21. See “Notes” to “Ligeia,” H 2:388, 390, for the variant readings.

22. Willis is a butt of “The Duke de L’Omelette” and “Lionizing”; and Disraeli figures m “Lionizing,” “Loss of Breath,” “Silence,” and “King Pest.” See Chapter 3. But Poe seems to have been, in general, friendly towards Cooke even though he may have occasionally pulled his leg; see references to Cooke in Ostrom, Letters of Edgar Allan Poe.

23. Griffith, “Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” University of Toronto Quarterly 24 (1954) 8-25.

24. See Richard Wilbur's Introduction to the Laurel Poetry Series of Poe (New York: Dell, 1959) and his “The House of Poe” (The Library of Congress Anniversary Lecture, May 4, 1959), reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829, ed. Eric W. [page 225:] Carlson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 255-77, for comments on “Ligeia.” William Whipple in “Poe's Political Satire,” University of Texas Studies in English 35 (1956): 81-95, convincingly shows that “The Man That Was Used Up” is aimed principally at Johnson.

25. Edward Hungerford, “Poe and Phrenology,” American Literature 2 (1930): 209-31.

26. See John E. Wilson, “Phrenology and the Transcendentalists,” American Literature 28 (1956): 220-25.

27. See, in addition to those essays by Basler, Schroeter, Griffith, and Hungerford that I have already cited, the following. John Lauber, “ ‘Ligeia’ and Its Critics: A Plea for Literalism,” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1966): 28-32, states clearly the desire of one critical group to see Poe interpreted “simply,” but he is so resistant to seeing Poe's narrators as anything but straightforward and “simple” that he really does not engage the issue. James W. Gargano in “The Question of Poe's Narrators,” College English 25 (1963): 177-81, briefly summarizes the case for the unreliability of Poe's first-person narrators in a handful of stories; and in “Poe's ‘Ligeia’: Dream and Destruction,” College English 23 (1962): 335-42, Gargano emphasizes Poe's conception of the “Romantic” personality as unstable and furthers Basler's interpretation by detailing the mad narrator's attempt to “possess” a mere “dream.” See, for similar interpretations, Jack L. Davis and June Davis, “Poe's Ethereal Ligeia,” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 24 (1970): 170-76; James M. Cox, “Edgar Poe: Style as Pose,” Virginia Quarterly Review 44 (1968): 67-89. Joel Porte in The Romance in America, adopting a Freudian stance that becomes unusually productive, suggests that the narrator conjures up the “voluptuous Ligeia” as the consummation of “erotic dreaming” (pp. 70-76).

28. The double, the skull motif, and theme of mental and moral collapse are the most obvious similarities, and I propose here the further similarity of the conception of the meaning of a narrative. See Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 68.

29. Several studies of “The Fall of the House of Usher” may be mentioned here. Darrel Abel in “A Key to the House of Usher,” University of Toronto Quarterly 18 (1949): 176-85, shows how the environment and Usher's fear terrorize the narrator to the point of hallucination. Abel's essay, a pioneering statement on the issue of the supernatural vs. the psychological reading of “Usher,” has for twenty years almost never been given due acknowledgment. Leo Spitzer's often cited “A Reinterpretation of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” Comparative Literature 4 (1952): 351-63, for example, essentially repeats and finally obfuscates what Abel pointed out four years earlier. J. O. Bailey, “What Happens in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’?” American Literature 35 [page 226:] (1964): 445-66, argues for a supernatural interpretation based on vampire lore but clearly sets up the ironic dramatic tension between the two points of view of the tale. Also pertinent here is Maurice Levy's “Poe et la tradition ‘gothique,’ ” Caliban: Annales de la Faculte des Lettres de Toulouse 4 (1968): 35-51; translated and revised in ESQ 18 (1972): 19-29; Levy rejects certain biographical Freudian interpretations of Poe's Gothic tales, and suggests instead that Poe was perfectly aware of a variety of Gothic techniques and that his imagery reflects a psychological archetype that the Gothic embodies. Thus we have three kinds of “psychological” approaches which must be carefully differentiated: (1) a biographical, “psychoanalytic” approach in which Poe himself is the subject; (2) a “psychological” interpretation of the characters and their actions and perceptions in the dramatic world of the tale; (3) an “archetypal” approach, which sees certain universal human responses deeply embedded in the works.

30. See Jean Ricardou, “L’Histoire dans l’histoire; La Mise en abyme ... ,” in Problemes du Nouveau Roman (Paris: Let Seuil, 1968), pp. 171-76, for a slightly different discussion of the “Mad Trist” as a synecdoche of the story itself, and as representing a kind of preknowledge for the narrator of the inevitable outcome of the main narrative. See Claude Richard, “Poe Studies in Europe: France,” Poe Newsletter 2 (1969): 22.

31. See H 14:167 for Poe's comment on miasmata; although he says that “injury” to the public from miasmata is questionable, his comment shows his awareness of the supposed properties of such gas (cf. H 14:168), thus making it a proper device for a fictional narrative. See I. M. Walker “The ‘Legitimate Sources’ of Terror in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” Modern Language Review 61 (1966): 585-92, for discussion of this and for a lucid “psychological” analysis of the dramatic action.

32. See in particular Maurice Beebe, “The Fall of the House of Pyncheon,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 11 (1956): 1-17, and “The Universe of Roderick Usher,” Personalist 37 (1956): 146-60; Joseph Gold, “Reconstructing the ‘House of Usher,’ ” Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 38 (1964), pp. 74-76; John S. Hill, “The Dual Hallucination in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ “ Southwest Review 48 (1963): 396-402; Lyle Kendall, “The Vampire Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” College English 24 (1963): 450-53; D. H. Lawrence, Chapter VI of Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; reprint ed., New York: Viking, 1964); Bruce Olson, “Poe's Strategy in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” Modern Language Notes 75 (1960): 556-59; Patrick F. Quinn, “That Spectre in My Path,” Chapter VII of The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957); Paul Ramsey, Jr., “Poe and Modern Art: An Essay on Correspondence,” College Art Journal 18 (1959): 210-15; E. Arthur Robinson, “Order and Sentience in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” PMLA 76 (1961): [page 227:] 68-81; William B. Stein, “The Twin Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” Modern Language Notes 75 (1960): 109-11; Allen Tate, “Our Cousin Mr. Poe” in Collected Essays (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1959); Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,” pp. 255-77. A symposium on “Usher,” including six essays, a review-essay on three recent casebooks on “Usher,” and a “Checklist of Criticism Since 1960,” appeared in Poe Studies 5 (1972): 1-23.

33. See Richard P. Benton, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt — A Defense,” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (1969): 144-51; and John Walsh, Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1968) for two recent analyses of this work.

34. Hawthorne's Works, ed. George Parsons Lathrop, 15 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Riverside Press, 1882-1891), 1:52. For an interesting speculation on Poe's hoaxing in his review of Twice-Told Tales, see Robert Regan, “Hawthorne's ‘Plagiary’; Poe's Duplicity,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 25 (1970): 281-98; see also Alfred H. Mark's “Two Rodericks and Two Worms: ‘Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent,’ ” PMLA 74 (1959): 607-12, for speculation on the Poe-Hawthorne relationship.

 

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

Grotesque and Arabesque

1. John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 2, The Stones of Venice, Chapter IV, “The Nature of Gothic” (London: G. Allen, 1904).

2. The discussion that follows relies heavily on K. Other studies I find much less useful. Arthur Clayborough, for example, in The Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) spends too much time trying to find fault with Kayser without really offering much that is new — nor are his reservations about Kayser's work compelling. What I hope to show in this chapter is the close connection of Romantic Irony and the grotesque in terms of a “transcendental” vision generated by an almost Hegelian dialectic resolving contradictions. See also Lewis A. Lawson's “Poe's Conception of the Grotesque,” Mississippi Quarterly 19 (1966): 200-205; and “Poe and the Grotesque: A Bibliography, 1695-1965,” Poe Newsletter 1 (1968): 9-10. Another interesting but incomplete study relevant here is L. Moffitt Cecil's “Poe's ‘Arabesque,’ ” Comparative Literature 18 (1966): 55-70, which suggests that Poe used the word arabesque as a counter to the word Germanism, details the many Near Eastern allusions and settings in Poe's tales, and reinforces the idea that arabesque means primarily Arabian and “patterned strangeness” in the manner of abstract pictorial design reproducing no natural forms (proscribed by the Koran), as in an arabesque screen. [page 228:] But Cecil neglects the European parallels we have seen-namely, the conception of the arabesque as an intricate design of ironies and tensions. See also Michael Steig, “Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 29 (1970): 253-60; Donald H. Ross, “The Grotesque: A Speculation,” Poe Studies 4 (1971): 10-11; Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in Post-Romantic German Prose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963). For expert corroboration of the generalizations about the arabesque and its relation to Romantic Irony, see Raymond Immerwahr, “Romantic Irony and Romantic Arabesque Prior to Romanticism,” German Quarterly 42 (1969): 655-86.

3. That bifurcation between grotesque and arabesque mentioned earlier; see A. H. Quinn, Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1941), p. 289. See K 24-27. Kayser points out that, despite this tendency to emphasize the comic from the seventeenth century on (in French usage), Larousse's Grand Dictionnaire Universal of 1872 mentioned a deeper and more sinister meaning prominent in the age of Romanticism.

4. Burton R. Pollin, “Victor Hugo and Poe,” in Discoveries in Poe (Notre Dame, Ind., and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), pp. 3-5; see Foreign Quarterly Review 2 (June 1828): 715-18. See W 2:255 and K 58-59. For further comment on Poe and Hugo and Poe's acquaintance with French Romantic writers in general, see Charles Lombard, “Poe and French Romanticism,” Poe Newsletter 3 (1970): 30-35.

5. Hoffmann changed his third Christian name from Wilhelm to Amadeus, thus E. T. A., and thus the discrepancy between the standard appellation and Scott's title.

6. Pollin's attitude is curious. Noting Scott's “strong disapproval of Hoff-mann's style,” Pollin seems to think that Poe could not have read the review without adopting Scott's own views and therefore could not have been much influenced by Scott's own discussion of Gothic, grotesque, and arabesque effects. This is a bit condescending toward Poe. As Scott's title indicates, his dual concern is with Hoffmann in particular but with the “supernatural in fictitious composition” generally. See Paul A. Newlin's “Scott's Influence on Poe's Grotesque and Arabesque Tales,” American Transcendental Quarterly, no. 2 (1969): 9-12. Scott's article appeared in Foreign Quarterly Review 1 (July 1827): 61-93.

7. For a relevant and illuminating discussion of Poe's “mysterious” effects, see S. K. Wertz and Linda L. Wertz, “On Poe's Use of ‘Mystery,’ ” Poe Studies 4 (1971): 7-10.

8. In the Marginalia series in Graham's Magazine for December 1846, Poe accused “German criticism” in general of abounding in “brilliant bubbles of suggestion” that “rise and sink and jostle each other, until the whole vortex of thought in which they originate is one indistinguishable [page 229:] chaos of froth.” He concludes with an offhand attack on the Schlegels, which, given his thefts from them, reflects ironically on the whole note (H 16:115-17) [[P 2:305]]. For an interesting reference to Jean Paul, see H 11:185-86.

9. See K, passim, and Lawson, “Poe and the Grotesque: A Bibliography,” pp. 9-10.

10. In addition to previous references, see Kayser's last chapter, “An Attempt to Define the Nature of the Grotesque,” pp. 179-89.

11. On this complex matter of interior design and landscape aesthetics as manifest in “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Philosophy of Furniture,” “Eleonora,” “The Assignation,” “The Island of the Fay,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” “The Landscape Garden,” “Landor's Cottage,” “The Oval Portrait,” and other tales, the following works are relevant: Sam S. Basket, “A Damsel with a Dulcimer: An Interpretation of Poe's ‘Eleonora;’ ” Modern Language Notes 73 (1958): 332-38; Cleanth Brooks, “Edgar Allan Poe as Interior Decorator,” Ventures 8 (1968): 41-46; Jeffrey Hess, “Sources and Aesthetics of Poe's Landscape Fiction,” American Quarterly 22 (1970): 177-89; Robert D. Jacobs, “Poe's Earthly Paradise,” American Quarterly 12 (1960): 404-13; F. DeWolfe Miller, “The Basis for Poe's ‘The Island of the Fay,’ ” American Literature 14 (1942): 135-40; Joseph P. Roppolo, “Meaning and ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ ” Tulane Studies in English 13 (1963): 59-69; Alvin Rosenfeld, “Description in Poe's ‘Landor's Cottage,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1967): 264-66; Georges Poulet, “Edgar Poe,” in The Metamorphoses of the Circle, trans. Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), pp. 182-202; Kermit Vanderbilt, “Art and Nature in ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ ” Nineteenth Century Fiction 22 (1968): 379-89. See also works by Evans, Benton, and Mabbott cited subsequently in this chapter.

12. Oliver Evans, “Infernal Illumination in Poe,” Modern Language Notes 75 (1960): 295-97.

13. Richard P. Benton, “Is Poe's ‘The Assignation’ a Hoax?” Nineteenth Century Fiction 18 (1963): 193-94.

14. T. O. Mabbott, Notes to Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modem Library, 1951), p. 415.

15. See, for example, Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), pp. 257-75; James Hafley, “Malice in Wonderland,” Arizona Quarterly 15 (1959): 5-12. See also Richard W. Dowell, “The Ironic History of Poe's ‘Life in Death’: A Literary Skeleton in the Closet,” American Literature 42 (1971): 478-86, for an unconvincing negative discussion of the unity of the tale, which nevertheless reveals some interesting facts about its publication history.

16. Seymour L. Gross, “Poe's Revision of ‘The Oval Portrait,’ ” Modern Language Notes 74 (1959): 16-20. [page 230:]

17. Dramatic Lectures, Lecture xxxn, pp. 369-70. See Chapter 2, Section III, this study.

 

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

The Nightside

1. A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1948), pp. 78-79; W 2:98-100.

2. Oskar Walzel, German Romanticism, trans. Alma Elsie Lussky (New York: Putnam's, 1966), pp. 60-61,245.

3. See Henry Pochmann, German Culture in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 394-97, for a consideration of these tales as derived from German sources. Doris Falk in “Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism,” PMLA 84 (1969): 536-46, discusses the theoretical conception of mesmerism and animal magnetism as Poe must have understood these ideas and deals with three “mesmeric” tales, but she betrays no sense of irony.

4. H 6:132-33. Gall and Spurzheim were the founders, more or less, of phrenology. Poe reviews an American edition of Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology ... from the First Published Works of Gall and Spurzheim, to the Latest Discoveries of the Present Period in the March 1836 Southern Literary Messenger. He seems on the surface to be serious — but it is hard to tell: “Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at. ... It is assumed the majesty of a science ...” (H 8:252). See also Burton R. Pollin, “Poe's ‘Some Words With a Mummy’ Reconsidered,” Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 60 Suppl. (1970), pp. 60-67.

5. H 4:236. R. A. Stewart in his notes to “Eleonora” in the Harrison edition remarks that “adventures” for “adventurers” is a “bad error” of the Griswold edition (1857-58) which has been perpetuated.

6. See Hardin Craig, Introduction, Edgar Allan Poe: Representative Selections, ed. Margaret Alterton and Hardin Craig (1935; reprint ed., New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. cii — ciii. Quinn and O'Neill (B 2:1079), following long established tradition, comment that Poe's relations with Virginia are obviously the basis of the tale. It is true that Eleonora is the narrator's cousin and that her mother figures shadowily in the story. But then we are faced with the curious implications that Virginia was two-soulled and that Poe came to love one part of her better than the other. Autobiographical allegory seems rather doubtful to me. But such autobiographical presentation of the author's personal conditions fits well with Jean Paul's conception of the ironic annihilation of mere self-ness, as noted at the end of this chapter. See also Richard P. Benton, “Platonic Allegory in Poe's ‘Eleonora;’ ” Nineteenth Century Fiction 22 (1967): 293-97; and Sam S. Basket, “A Damsel with a Dulcimer: An Interpretation of Poe's ‘Eleonora,’ ” Modern Language Notes 73 (1958): 332-38. [page 231:]

7. Novalis, at the same time that he thought poetry should be the musical rendering of subconscious dreams, also called for a conscious irony. Poetry, according to Novalis, is the “truly, absolutely real”; it is thought, play, truth, aspiration — in short, all of man's volitional, “free” activity. Novalis thought language to be a system of hieroglyphics wherewith we are able to read the natural world. True poetry, then, is symbolic and, as such, partly conscious thought and partly subconscious (reflecting the real). Poetry, according to Novalis, is, or should be, dreamlike, making use of free association and wordplay; there might even be a poetry “without connection, but with association, like dreams — poems merely euphonious and full of beautiful words, but without sense or connection” (W 2:84). The supremacy of poetry, the insistence on symbol and dreamy, associative verbal music are all obviously relevant to Poe's concepts of poetry. Regarding fiction, however, and regarding conscious craftsmanship in general, Poe's evaluation of Novalis's ideas is ambivalent. Novalis claimed that the greatest freedom for the literary artist lies in fiction, and especially in the fairy tale since it deals with the world before and beyond time and history. The novel should be but a variant of the fairy tale, making use of an “irony” that aims at the “annihilation” of apparent contradictions and the attainment of a harmonious concept of wholeness. Irony, Novalis wrote, involves the union in the human being of both the conscious and the subconscious facets of the mind. Irony records an illumination through a double-vision; it reveals a true presence of mind attained through the ego's having passed through the subconscious realm [[(W 2:83-86)]]. Poe was interested in the fictional uses of “perception” through the subconscious, through half-conscious sleep-states, through mesmeric trances, and the like. But Poe the craftsman could not accept Novalis's ideas about the artist's reliance on the subconscious mind. Poe quoted in the Marginalia Novalis's aphorism that “the artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist,” and commented that: “... in nine cases out of ten it is pure waste of time to attempt extorting sense from a German apothegm; — or rather, any sense and every sense may be extorted from all of them” (H 16:98-99). Poe then said that if the meaning of the aphorism is that the artist is a slave to his materials, to his theme, Novalis is wrong; for the true artist selects his materials according to the impression he wants to convey, although he must conform to whatever inner logic the materials selected may possess. Poe characteristically, and shrewdly, has it both ways. He calls for both conscious craftsmanship and intuitive recognition of the essence of the object, and he also both attacks another writer and yet partially accepts his ideas. Cf. his comments on Montaigne in the Marginalia (H 16:87-90). See the ironic application of a passage from Novalis's Moral Opinions (about coincidence and the imperfection of real events as modified from the ideal realm) in the motto to “Marie Rogêt” (1842). Novalis's prose was available in translation in Fragments from the German Prose Writers (1841); Carlyle's [page 232:] Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1840); Translations from the German, by H. Reeve and J. E. Taylor (London: Murray, 1842); Christianity or Europe, trans. J. Dalton (London: Chapman, 1844); Henry of Ofterdingen, with Tieck's “Life of Novalis” (Cambridge, Mass.: Owen, 1842). The poems were available in numerous translated collections of German writing, and in several book-length collections of Novalis's songs and hymns. Poe's references to Novalis include H 5:2, 171; 9:202; 11:5; 16:98-99. The earliest reference dates from 1836. Carlyle's essay on Novalis, with selected Fragments, first appeared in the Foreign Review, no. 7 (1829).

8. Sidney E. Lind, “Poe and Mesmerism,” PMLA 62 (1947): 1078-85.

9. Boyd Carter, “Poe's Debt to Charles Brockden Brown,[[”]] Prairie Schooner, 27 (1953): 190-96.

10. See Carter, “Poe's Debt to Charles Brockden Brown,” pp. 191-93, where the material is presented somewhat differently. Mukhtar Ali Isani in a forthcoming essay, which I have seen in manuscript, discusses Poe's borrowings from Macaulay and others for the Orientalism of the tale.

11. Old Deb is introduced as such in Chapter XIX. See Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799; reprint ed., Port Washington, New York, 1963), p. 197; the name is also remarked by Carter as a noncomic parallel. Burton R. Pollin speculates on the influence of Victor Hugo on this tale in Discoveries in Poe (Notre Dame, Ind., and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), pp. 24-28.

12. In two letters written in July 1844, just before the publication of “Mesmeric Revelation,” Poe wrote James Russell Lowell and Thomas Holley Chivers brief summaries of his alternative to believing in “spirituality” that are parallel in phrasing to the tale (O 1:256-60). But, as always, it is hard to tell how serious Poe was. At this time Poe was trying, without luck, to get Lowell to join him in a magazine venture, and one year afterward in a note on Lowell's latest “farce” of a book Poe called him “the Anacharsis Clootz of American Letters” (H 16:69-70). In his letter to Chivers, Poe did write that his “own faith” was indeed his “own,” and that Chivers would “find it, somewhat detailed, in a forthcoming number of the ‘Columbian Magazine’, published here [New York]. I have written for it an article headed ‘Mesmeric Revelation,’ which see” (O 1:259). But in “A Chapter on Autography,” Poe called Chivers “at the same time one of best and one of the worst poets in America” for “even his worst nonsense (and some of it is horrible) has an indefinite charm of sentiment and melody,” but “we can never be sure that there is any meaning in his words ...” (H 15:241-42). Thus, Poe may well have been contemptuously hoaxing both of them. That Poe was hoaxing them seems to be borne out also by his telling Chivers that “Mesmeric Revelation” was a philosophical “article” and then exuberantly proclaiming in print that the article was “pure fiction” (H 16:71). Although [page 233:] such usage is not everywhere consistent in Poe, the context tips the balance: the Swedenborgians, he said, had found everything he said to be true, though they initially doubted his veracity — “a thing which, in that particular instance, I never dreamed of not doubting myself” (H 16:71), as he remarked later. See also the letter (January 4, 1845) to George Bush (O 1:273), which seems to me primarily an attempt (as always with Poe) to gain wider recognition.

13. N. Bryllion Fagin remarks that the tale is rather like a “deadpan cartoon” of a sententious pedant; Histrionic Mr. Poe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), p. 73. The object of such satire would be an amalgam of a contemporary occultist and some more commanding theological figure; the name “Vankirk” suggests “of the church” (van + kirk) and a Scandinavian, possibly, then, Swedenborg (who spent much of his last years in Amsterdam). See H 16:71 and the conclusion to Section III of this chapter.

14. Omitted from Harrison; see Richard H. Stoddard, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 6 vols. (New York: A. C. Armstrong, 1895), 5:179-82; also see O 2:336.

15. See Lind, “Poe and Mesmerism,” pp. 1086-87; the quotation from Davis is given by Lind.

16. See B 2:683 for the correct version. H 6:295 gives “Poughkeepsie Seer” (Davis's actual label) for Poe's “Toughkeepsie.”

17. Kerner, as already noted, sought the “truth” about human existence and the nature of the universe in epilepsy, madness, and the like, as well as in mesmeric sleep. His Seeress of Prevorst was translated by Mrs. Catherine Crowe (London: Moore, 1845; New York: Harper, 1845) the year “Valdemar” was published. The death of Mrs. H—, the seeress, is similar to Valdemar's, although she dies joyfully. The similarity was first pointed out by the anonymous work, Ramblings and Reveries of an Art Student in Europe (1855); see Lind, “Poe and Mesmerism,” pp. 1091-92. Also see Pochmann, German Culture in America, p. 396, for a standard comment on the connection between the two tales. Kerner's works were also available in many English collections of German writing (see B. Q. Morgan, Bibliography of German Literature in English Translation, Madison: University of Wisconsin Studies, 1922, p. 265).

18. The languages may be important too, for Poe once found a translation of the Book of Jonah into German hexameters comic, though he said he did not know why (H 16:40). See T. O. Mabbott's notes to “Valdemar” in Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library, 1951), p. 424, for a comment on Issachar, Schiller, and Rabelais; Mabbott thinks Poe did not care for Schiller or Rabelais, but the thrust is clearly at Valdemar rather than at them, and an intended comic clue to the qualities of the hoax, satire, or parody in the tale. [[See M 3:1243n1.]] A. H. Quinn, in Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1941), p. 330, seems so puzzled by the [page 234:] humor-horror of the story that he calls “Valdemar” a “lapse from artistic sanity.”

19. Omitted in Harrison; see Stoddard, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 5:183.

20. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 211.

21. Quoted by Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 212.

22. According to William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1957), pp. 378 if., Jean Paul's concept of humor evolved from the English concept of “humours” associated with character types and especially with exaggerations and oddities, and developed into a philosophy of toleration, of sweeping insight into the contradictions of the world. For a fair sample, in translation, of Jean Paul's theory of humor in the Aesthetics, see Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lauter, pp. 314-23. See also W 2:106. Jean Paul considered the subconscious capable of guiding the artist as though by divine wisdom, as well as frightening him. Hazlitt's first lecture is also reprinted in Lauter, pp. 262-94. See Poe on Hazlitt (H 12:226-28) and a reference to Jean Paul (H 11:185-86) that implies familiarity. Selections from Jean Paul were available in numerous anthologies (see Morgan, p. 391), and forty-six items appeared in American periodicals before 1864 (see Pochmann, p. 346). DeQuincey published “Specimens from Flegeljahre” in the London Magazine 4 (1821): 606, and “Analects from Richter” and “The Dream of the Universe” in the London Magazine 9 (1824): 117, 242. Carlyle included “Schmelzle's Journey” and the “Life of Quintus Fixlein” in German Romance (1827), and his essay on Jean Paul in that volume emphasizes his “Humour” with reference to the Introduction to Aesthetics; in the essay on Tieck, Carlyle links Jean Paul to the Schlegels, Novalis, and Kant. Carlyle also published a version of his essay on Jean Paul in the Edinburgh Review, no. 92 (1827), and in 1830 he published a translation of “Jean Paul Richter's Review of Madame de Stael's ‘Allemagne’ ” in Fraser's Magazine, nos. 1 and 4. “The Moon” appeared in Holcraft's Tales from the German (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, 1826), reprinted as Tales of Humour and Romance (London, 1829; New York: Francis, 1829). A. Kenney's translated collection of sixty-eight of Jean Paul's prose pieces appeared as The Death of an Angel, and Other Pieces (London: Black, 1839). Jean Paul's autobiography, trans. Mrs. Eliza B. Lee, appeared in her Life of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (London: Chapman, 1845), and her translation of Flegeljahre appeared as Walt and Vult; or, the Twins (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846). Miss L. Osgood translated The Diadem (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1846).

23. Or as Irving Babbitt in Chapter VII of Rousseau and Romanticism (New York, 1955) translates it, “hot baths of sentiment” are followed by “cold douches of irony.” Cf. Walzel, German Romanticism, pp. 231-32. [page 235:]

24. W 2:102; cf. Muecke, Compass of Irony (London: Metheun, 1969), pp. 196-204.

25. Translated by A. R. Thompson in Dry Mock, p. 51.

26. Translated by Thompson in Dry Mock, pp. 66-67, my italics.

27. See Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. 379.

 

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

Romantic Skepticism

1. Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 189-94.

2. Notably Davidson, in Poe: A Critical Study, Chapters VI, VII, and VIII. Richard Wilbur sees Eureka as the key to Poe's work in a seminal essay, “The House of Poe” (The Library of Congress Anniversary Lecture, May 4, 1959), reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 255-77. Eureka and Arthur Gordon Pym have received a sudden flood of critical attention recently, as documented subsequently.

3. Killis Campbell in The Mind of Poe (1933; reprint ed., New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), p. 163, suggests that Bulwer's “Manuscript Found in a Madhouse” (which appeared in an early edition published in Boston by Phillips, Sampson, and Company) may have suggested the title of “MS. Found in a Bottle.” J. S. Wilson in “The Devil Was In It,” p. 219, suggests that the tale is told by the Folio Club author Solomon Seadrift and that the literary butt of the satire is Jane Porter's Narrative of Sir Edward Seaward (1831). The emphasis on “discovery” and the use of polar openings into the interior of the earth also suggest John Cleves Symmes's Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820) as a satiric butt. Other sources have been suggested, but these are not our concern here. Clark Griffith in “Caves and Cave Dwellers: The Study of a Romantic Image,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963): 560-63, not only clearly details the change in style from crisp and analytical to cadenced and emotional but also suggests that the discovery is about the self: the narrator discovers that the world can drive one mad and that after death there is only silence. But surely the narrator never discovers anything about himself; he is merely the victim of the tale, of the hoax that perverse fortune (and Poe) plays on him. The theme of ultimate discovery is, however, extended somewhat in “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “A Descent into the Maelström,” though each has its ironic reversals. Donald Barlow Stauffer's “The Two Styles of Poe's ‘MS. Found in a Bottle,’ ” Style 1 (1967): 107-20, derives from Griffith's article. Randall Helms's “Another Source for Poe's Arthur [page 236:] Gordon Pym,” American Literature 41 (1970): 572-75, derives from Wilson. See also Claude Richard's speculation on the place of “MS. Found in a Bottle” in the Folio Club sequence, Poe Newsletter 2 (1969): 23.

4. The Latin motto to the tale is comic: “My friends said that my troubles would be in some measure relieved if I would visit the tomb of my sweetheart.” Hardin Craig suggests that “Berenice” is the story of “ardent imagination in which a logical element is perceived as coming into the control of pure fancy. The hero is a monomaniac conscious of the decay of his reason. The thought takes possession of him that the teeth of Berenice will restore him” (Edgar Allan Poe: Representative Selections, ed. Margaret Alterton and Hardin Craig, New York: Hill and Wang, 1962, p. 512); Darrel Abel, “Coleridge's ‘Life-in-Death’ and Poe's ‘Death-in-Life,’ ” Notes and Queries 2 (1955): 218-20, argues unconvincingly for a supernatural interpretation (even while admitting that Berenice may have the cataleptic disorder of Madeline Usher) and tries to expand all apparent psychological devices in Poe into the super-natural — the reverse of the thesis of his seminal article on “Usher.”

5. T. O. Mabbott in “The Source of the Title of Poe's ‘Morella,’ ” Notes and Queries 172 (1937) 26-27. Walter G. Neale, Jr., in “The Source of Poe's ‘Morella,’ ” American Literature 9 (1939): 237-39, points out parallels to Henry Glassford Bell's “The Dead Daughter” in the Edinburgh Literary Journal (January 1, 1831). Neale takes “Morella” as a serious tale; but “The Dead Daughter” provides a clear butt for the literary burlesque of the Folio Club. See Killis Campbell, Mind of Poe, pp. 14 ff., on Poe's reading of Schelling and Locke; and Palmer C. Holt, “Poe and H. N. Coleridge's Greek Classical Poets: ‘Pinakidia,”Politian, and ‘Morella’ Sources,” American Literature 34 (1962): 8-10, for Poe's use of Coleridge on the Platonic Theory of love and unity — which, of course, is inverted in the tale. For an important discussion of Platonic love in Poe, see Richard P. Benton, “Platonic Allegory in Poe's ‘Eleonora,’ ” Nineteenth Century Fiction 22 (1967): 293-97.

6. H 16:161. For commentary on “Silence,” see J. S. Wilson, “The Devil Was In It,” American Mercury 24 (1931): 215, and Clark Griffith, “Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” University of Toronto Quarterly 24 (1954): 14. Other commentary has been essentially repetition of Wilson.

7. The mirror motif in Pym also reflects nothing, as discussed later. See Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, pp. 198-201, for an interpretation of “Wilson” as a “Romantic individualist for whom the world is nothing but the externalization of the self: at any instant what the self wills the world must become” until the world and the self annihilates itself — an interesting parallel with the metaphysics of Romantic Irony. Other pertinent discussions of “William Wilson” include two articles by James W. Gargano, “ ‘William Wilson’: The Wildest Sublunary Visions,” Washington [page 237:] and Jefferson Literary Journal 1 (1967): 9-16, and “Art and Irony in ‘William Wilson,’ ” Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 60 Suppl. (1970), pp. 18-22.

8. See Mabbott, Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library, 1951), pp. 419-20. I am indebted to Mr. Athar Murtuza for the observation of the lens motif and the biblical echo. For recent discussion of this tale, see Herbert Ranter, “Edgar Allan Poes [[Poe's]] The Man of the Crowd,” in Amerika: Vision und Wirklichkeit, ed. Franz H. Link (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1968), pp. 115-27; and Gisella Vitt-Maucher, “E. T. A. Hoffmans Ritter Gluck und E. A. Poes The Man of the Crowd: Eine Gegenitherstellung,” German Quarterly 43 (1970): 35-46.

9. See Margaret J. Yonce, “The Spiritual Descent into the Maelström: A Debt to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ” Poe Newsletter 2 (1969): 26-29.

10. See Clark Griffith, “Caves and Cave Dwellers,” pp. 563-64; James Lundquist, “The Moral of Averted Descent: The Failure of Sanity in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ” Poe Newsletter 2 (1969): 25-26; and David H. Hirsch, “The Pit and the Apocalypse,” Sewanee Review 76 (1968): 632-52.

11. John E. Reilly, “The Lesser Death-Watch and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ ” American Transcendental Quarterly, no. 2 (1969), pp. 3-9. Also see James W. Gargano, “The Theme of Time in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 5 (1968): 378-82; E. Arthur Robinson, “Poe's ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ ” Nineteenth Century Fiction 19 (1965): 369-78.

12. See James W. Gargano, “ ”The Black Cat’: Perverseness Reconsidered,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 2 (1960): 172-78.

13. Perversity is not strictly a phrenological term, as some critics assume, but is merely linked with the phrenological category of “combativeness” in “The Imp.” Poe specifically says that the phrenologists are limited in their understanding of the human personality. As noted before, Poe is skeptical about the “systems” that psychologists and phrenologists have tried “to dictate” to God the Creator, whom Poe yet seems to hold responsible for man's grotesque condition. The most insightful commentary on this tale yet published is Eugene Kanjo's “ ‘The Imp of the Perverse’: Poe's Dark Comedy of Art and Death,” Poe Newsletter 2 (1969): 41-44.

14. See Barton Levi St. Armand, “Poe's ‘Sober Mystification’: The Uses of Alchemy in ‘The Gold-Bug,’ ” Poe Studies 4 (1971): 1-7. Several other studies of the ratiocinative stories, while excellent, are not pertinent here. I am indebted to Mr. Roger O’Connor for the discovery of several mockingly erroneous details in the story.

15. See Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, pp. 156-80, and Patrick F. Quinn, French Face of Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1949), pp. 169-215 for especially fine discussions of Pym; [page 238:] my own discussion, as will be apparent, relies heavily on theirs, though the perspective is different. Pym has received a great deal of critical attention lately. Other relevant, though less pertinent, discussions include: Walter E. Bezanson, “The Troubled Sleep of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Essays in Literary History Presented to J. Milton French, ed. Rudolf Kirk and C. F. Main (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960), pp. 149-75; L. Moffitt Cecil, “The Two Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5 (1963): 232-41; Pascal Covici, Jr., “Toward a Reading of Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” Mississippi Quarterly 21 (1968): 111-18; Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), pp. 392-400; Evelyn J. Hinz, “ ‘Tekeli-li’: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as Satire,” Genre 3 (1970): 379-97; Sidney Kaplan, Introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), pp. vii-xxv; Richard A. Levine, “The Downward Journey of Purgation: Notes on an Imagistic Leitmotif in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Poe Newsletter 2 (1969): 29-31; Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Imagination and Perversity in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 13 (1971): 267-80; Sidney P. Moss, Arthur Gordon Pym or the Fallacy of Thematic Interpretation,” University Review 33 (1967): 299-306; Charles O’Donnell, “From Earth to Ether: Poe's Flight into Space,” PMLA 77 (1962): 85-91; Joel Porte, “The Ultimate Romance,” in The Romance in America (Middleton, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), pp. 84-94; Jean Ricardou, “Le Caractere singulier de cette eau,” Critique 243 and 244 (1967): 718-33; Joseph V. Ridgely, “The Continuing Puzzle of Arthur Gordon Pym: Some Notes and Queries,” Poe Newsletter 3 (1970): 5-6; Joseph V. Ridgely and Iola S. Haverstick, “Chartless Voyage: The Many Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 7 (1966): 63-80; John H. Stroupe, “Poe's Imaginary Voyage: Pym as Hero,” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1967): 315-21.

16. Pym is from Edgarton (H 3:5), a real place, it may be noted.

17. See Patrick F. Quinn, “Arthur Gordon Pym: ‘A Journey to the End of the Page’?” Poe Newsletter 1 (1968): 13-14.

18. Cf. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, pp. 399-400.

19. See Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision,” PMLA 83 (1968): 284-97. Craig anthologizes “Monos and Una” as “philosophy” and juxtaposes it with Eureka in Representative Selections, pp. 427ff.

20. See H 6:295. “Mellonta Tauta” until recently had never been thoroughly explicated either in terms of specific satiric thrusts or large outline, though Burton R. Pollin has now identified several satiric targets in his “Politics and History in Poe's ‘Mellonta Tauta’: Two Allusions Explained,” Studies in Short Fiction 8 (1971): 627-31. I am indebted to Mrs. Roberta Sharp for the suggestion that the balloon is a miniature [page 239:] image of the cosmos, and that its collapse is a comic variation on the collapse of the universe in Eureka, from which work the tale's dissertation on logic and the degradation of society is directly derived.

21. See Richard Wilbur's Introduction to the Laurel Poetry Series Poe (New York: Dell, 1959), pp. 11-13, and “The House of Poe,” reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 255-77.

22. Moldenhauer, “Murder as a Fine Art,” p. 296n.

23. Like Pym, Eureka has received much attention lately. Most relevant here are Patrick F. Quinn's “Poe's Eureka and Emerson's Nature,” Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 31 (1963), pp. 4-7; and Harriet R. Holman's “Hog, Bacon, Ram, and Other Savans’ in Eureka: Notes Toward Decoding Poe's Encyclopedic Satire,” Poe Newsletter 2 (1969): 49-55.

24. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, pp. 222-53; Eliot, “From Poe to Valéry,” in To Criticize the Critic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965), pp. 27-42.

25. In this connection, see Robert Martin Adams, NIL: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void During the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 41-50.

26. Robert Mallet, ed., Andre Gide — Paul Valéry: Correspondence 1890-1942, (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).

27. Eliot, “From Poe to Valéry,” pp. 35, 40-41. Morse Peckham's formulation of the concept of “Negative Romanticism” also describes Poe's stance. The Negative Romantic is caught between two value-systems (the static eighteenth-century mechanistic universe and the dynamic nineteenth-century organic universe), no longer content with the old nor quite able to accept fully the new orientation. See Part I, “Theory,” Chapters 1-4, of Peckham's The Triumph of Romanticism: Collected Essays (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 3-83; and also Peckham's Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century (New York: George Braziller, 1962), passim.