The Portable Edgar Allan Poe
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2 Poe presumably identified Jupiter as a freed slave to avoid criticism from Northern readers that he meant to idealize slavery. Jupiter’s devotion and simplicity fit a common racial stereotype; yet he later manifests his independence by threatening playfully to beat Legrand.
3 The human-head beetle.
4 Eagerness.
5 When the tale first appeared in the Dollar Magazine, the cipher was correctly represented; in subsequent versions (including the one followed here) Poe inadvertently introduced minor inconsistencies.
The Oblong Box
1 The ship Independence sinks on or about July 4 near the site of the first English settlement in the New World.
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
1 Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-1815) developed a therapeutic treatment for nervous disorders that relied upon “animal magnetism” to place patients in a trance. The “magnetic control” of the mesmerist over the subject anticipated techniques of modern hypnosis.
2 Bedloe seems to refer here to Indian tribes that once inhabited Virginia but which had (by the 1840s) disappeared as a result of conflicts with white settlers.
3 No such venomous leech exists.
The Purloined Letter
1 There is nothing more inimical to wisdom than too much acuteness.
2 An undistributed middle term, which in formal logic produces fallacious reasoning.
3 You can bet that every public idea, every received convention, is nonsense, for it has suited the majority.
4 Ambitus denotes circularity; religio denotes superstition or (in another sense) scrupulousness; homines honesti was a Ciceronian epithet for partisans.
5 The force of inertia.
6 The descent into Hades is easy.
7 Horrible monster.
8 A scheme so deadly, if unworthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes.
Gotesqueries The Man That Was Used Up
1 In the magazine world of Poe’s day, to “use up” someone meant to annihilate them with criticism.
2 Written during the second Seminole war, as General Zachary Taylor led the U.S. Army against combined Indian forces in Florida that included some Kickapoos, Poe injects a skeptical note by equating Bugaboo and Kickapoo: In Poe’s usage, a bugaboo (or bugbear) referred to an imaginary, needless object of dread.
3 Weep, weep, my eyes, and dissolve into water! The first half of my life has put the other half in the tomb.
4 Poe here satirizes the national self-adulation that helped to justify Indian removal.
5 In which matters he figured greatly.
6 Poe cites Othello, III, iii, 330-33. Iago, plotting to excite in Othello doubts about Desdemona’s fidelity, remarks that the hero will never again know restful sleep.
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
1 Poe’s reference to the odd eccentricities of the “southern provincialists” alludes to prejudices about the America South, inspired in part by abolitionists whose ideas of reform Poe satirizes by reversing master-slave relations.
2 Numbers 13:33 refers to a race of giants, the sons of Anak, who rule a land that devours its inhabitants.
3 A horrible monster, enormous, deformed, and sightless. In shorter form, the same phrase from Virgil also appears in “The Purloined Letter.”
4 Phalaris, the tyrant who ruled Agrigentum, Sicily, in the fifth century B.C., placed prisoners in a hollow brass bull that amplified their screams.
5 The sheer incongruity of an orchestra of French lunatics playing “Yankee Doodle” in the midst of a revolt hints at American implications.
Some Words with a Mummy
1. Poe capitalized on the fascination with Egypt launched by Napoleon’s plundering of the pyramids and the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799. Champollion’s deciphering of the Rosetta stone launched the field of modern Egyptology, and by the 1830s and 1840s, museums in Europe and America were acquiring major collections of mummies and Egyptian artifacts.
2. George Robins Gliddon, a noted lecturer on Egyptology, decried the ransacking of tombs and monuments in An Appeal to the Antiquaries of Europe (1841).
3. James Silk Buckingham, an English traveler, had published several volumes about his excursions through the Near East.
4. Contemporary antebellum debates about the origins of the five principal races hinged on the competing theories of monogenesis (the progressive evolution of different races from a single people) and polygenesis (the simultaneous development of racially distinct peoples). Proponents of monogenesis tended to see the Anglo-Saxon race as the culmination of all evolutionary progress.
5. Emerging theories of eugenics typically focused on skull shapes.
6. See note 1 for “The Imp of the Perverse.”
7. Poe ridiculed the bad taste of this monument in Doings of Gotham.
8. The Dial was the journal of the Emersonian Transcendentalists, often a target of Poe’s satire.
9. Poe alludes transparently to the founding of the United States and the establishment of popular suffrage. His skepticism about Jacksonian democracy is apparent in this passage.
10. Poe wrote this tale, apparently, during the election of 1844, which hinged on territorial expansion and American destiny, issues successfully exploited by James K. Polk. The narrator’s sense that “everything is going wrong” seems to allude to U.S. jingoism on the eve of the Mexican War.
POEMS
The Lake—To——
1 The place described here, Lake Drummond, is situated in the Great Dismal Swamp between Virginia and North Carolina. It was in Poe’s day a site associated with mysterious disappearances by melancholy lovers—and also by fugitive slaves.
Sonnet—To Science
1 Poe identifies several mythic figures demystified by empirical science: Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, associated with the moon; the Hamadryad, a Greek wood nymph associated with trees; the Naiad, a Greek water nymph, associated with springs and fountains; the Elfin, elves or fairies, associated (here) with lawns and fields. The tamarind is a tropical fruit tree from India.
Fairy-Land
1 Namely.
2 Atoms.
Introduction
1 This poem incorporates lines later published as “Romance” and appeared in this form only once, as a verse introduction to Poems (1831).
2 Poe probably knew the Greek poet both through his early studies in the classical languages and by way of Thomas Moore’s popular translations and adaptations.
3 Greek god of marriage.
Alone
1 This poem did not appear in print during Poe’s lifetime. It was preserved in the album of a Baltimore woman and first published, with a title added by Eugene L. Didier, in Scribner’s Monthly in 1875.
To Helen
1 Famously inspired by Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of a Richmond boyhood friend, the poem obviously evokes the legendary beauty of Helen of Troy. Poe’s “Nicéan barks” may allude to ships either dedicated to the goddess Nike or originating from Nicea, an ancient city of Asia Minor. Psyche was the lover of the Greek god Eros and became a personification of the soul. For Naiad, see the note to “Sonnet—To Science.”
The Sleeper
1 In Greek mythology, the river of forgetfulness.
Israfel 1 Lightning (archaic). The Pleiades are a cluster of seven stars, formed, according to Greek mythology, by the daughters of Atlas.
2 The Houris are the beautiful virgins said in the Koran to inhabit paradise.
The City in the Sea
1 Poe’s subject was probably suggested by Sodom and Gomorrah, the biblical sunken cities of the Dead Sea. The poem complements “The Valley of Unrest.”
Lenore
1 We have sinned.
Dream-Land
1 An eidolon is a phantom; Poe’s subsequent allusion to “Thule” derives from Virgil’s reference to an “ultima Thule,” a remote island in the North Atlantic, perhaps Greenland.
The Raven
1 That is, her name must here
after remain unspoken.
2 Pallas Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom.
3 Legendary drug that relieved sorrow.
4 An eccentric spelling of Eden. Poe’s narrator wishes to confirm the existence of a spiritual afterlife, where he may again embrace Lenore. Yet the question is perverse: He inevitably anticipates the bird’s response.
Ulalume—A Ballad
1 Arguably Poe’s most difficult poem, a verse narrative complicated by esoteric astrological imagery, “Ulalume” presumably fictionalizes Poe’s own visits to the grave of Virginia in 1847. The name of the dead beloved here likely derives from the Latin verb ululare, to wail or howl.
2 Poe’s Mount Yaanek may refer to an Antarctic volcano, Mt. Erebus, discovered in 1840. The “scoriac” rivers refer to lava flows.
3 Presumably Halloween. Virginia Poe died, however, in January.
4 Astarte was the Phoenician goddess of love and hence the counterpart of Venus. The moon here seems to be in a crescent phase, perhaps “bediamonded” in juxtaposition with the planet Venus.
5 The constellation Leo. The juxtaposition of Venus and Leo would have been astrologically ominous. Psyche (the soul) expresses “mistrust” about the passion of Venus.
The Bells
1 Magical verse; a rune was a letter in the archaic Anglo-Saxon alphabet.
For Annie
1 Perhaps no other poem pertains more closely to a specific event in Poe’s life, here, the crisis of November 1848 in which the distraught poet swallowed laudanum hoping to bring “Annie” Richmond to his bedside.
2 Naphthaline is a clear compound derived from petroleum or tar and is used in making dyes, solvents, and explosives. Its figurative sense here seems to be that of a toxic, perhaps flammable influence.
3 Poe may be punning on the etymology of pansy, which (as he knew) derived from the French word for thought, pensée; the floral reference thus alludes to his thoughts of Mrs. Richmond, who lived in Massachusetts and possibly represented herself to Poe as a daughter of the Puritans.
Eldorado
1 The idea of a city of gold, a place of longed-for riches, also figures in Poe’s “Dream-Land,” but by 1849, “Eldorado” had become synonymous with California, and this poem hints that the quest for instant wealth may be a delusion. See Poe’s letter to Frederick W. Thomas of February 14, 1849, for further reflections on the gold rush.
CRITICAL PRINCIPLES
The Prose Tale (from a review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales)
1. The phrase may be translated, One proceeds most prudently by following a middle course.
The Object of Poetry (from “Letter to B—”)
1 Poe translates Aristotle’s Poetics somewhat inaccurately.
2 About all that can be known and certain other things.
3 Why so much anger?
4 Most sects are right in much of what they advocate but wrong in what they deny.
The Philosophy of Composition
1 All else being equal.
American Criticism
1 Theodore Fay was an editor of the New York Mirror and author of the novel Norman Leslie, which Poe savaged in 1835, as much for the extravagant “puffing” of the volume as for its flimsiness.
2 About all things and certain others.
3 Belier, my friend, begin at the beginning. Poe alludes to Le Bélier, an exotic tale by the Irish-French author Anthony Hamilton.
4 Smooth and round.
OBSERVATIONS
Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House
1 National spirit. Foster and Scott were New York publishers who reprinted cheap editions of British journals for the American literary market.
2 Mulberry tree (on which silkworms feed).
American Literary Independence
1 All else being equal.
2 Poe refers to John Wilson, editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, who in the persona of “Christopher North” delivered dismissive opinions about American writers (such as Lowell).
3 How long, Catalina?
4 That is, to the most remote sites of competing interest.
The Soul and the Self
1 Entity or real thing.
Poetical Irritability
1 Beauty.
Genius and Proportionate Intellect
1 Vexing question.
Adaptation and the Plots of God
1 Commencing in 1833, a series of philosophical and theological monographs by different authors on the general subject of God’s “power, wisdom, and goodness,” especially as manifested in the natural world. The project was instituted by Reverend Francis Henry Egerton, the eighth Earl of Bridgewater.
Works of Genius
1 Wonderful diligence or incredible industry.
Magazine Literature in America
1 With a running pen.
Art and the Soul
1 Zeuxis and Parrhasius, Greek painters of the fifth century B.C., competed to produce the most realistic painting imaginable. Zeuxis painted a cluster of grapes that birds attempted to eat; Parrhasius then showed Zeuxis a veiled painting that, when Zeuxis attempted to lift the veil, proved to be part of the painting itself.
Selected Bibliography
FIRST EDITIONS OF POE’S WORKS (BOOKS)
Poe, Edgar Allan. Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian. Boston: Calvin F. S. Thomas—Printer, 1827.
———. Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, By Edgar A. Poe. Baltimore: Hatch & Dunning, 1829.
———. Poems by Edgar A. Poe . . . Second Edition. New York: Elam Bliss, 1831.
———. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838.
———. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840.
———. The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe. No. 1. Philadelphia: William H. Graham, 1843.
———. Tales. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845.
———. The Raven and Other Poems. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845.
———. Eureka: A Prose Poem. New York: Putnam, 1848.
LATER EDITIONS
Griswold, Rufus W., ed. The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. 4 vols. New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850-56.
Harrison, James A., ed. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Virginia Edition. 17 vols. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902.
Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969, 1978.
Pollin, Burton R. Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe: Imaginary Voyages. Boston: Twayne, 1981; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1994.
———. The Brevities: Pinakidia, Marginalia, and Other Works. New York: Gordian Press, 1985.
———. Nonfictional Writings in the Broadway Journal. New York: Gordian Press, 1986.
———. Broadway Journal Annotations. New York: Gordian Press, 1986.
———. Nonfictional Southern Literary Messenger Prose. New York: Gordian Press, 1997.
Quinn, Patrick F., ed. Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America, 1984.
Thompson, G. R., ed. Essays and Reviews. New York: Library of America, 1984.
LETTERS
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by John Ward Ostrom. 2 vols. 1949; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1966.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dameron, J. Lasley, and Irby B. Cauthen, Jr. Edgar Allan Poe: A Bibliography of Criticism, 1827-1967. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974.
Hyneman, Esther F. Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English, 1827-1973. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1974.
BIOGRAPHY
Bittner, William. Poe: A Biography. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1962.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992.
Miller, John Carl. Building Poe Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biogr
aphy. 1941; rpt. New York: Cooper Square, 1969.
Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
CRITICISM: BOOKS
Allen, Michael. Poe and the British Magazine Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Auerbach, Jonathan. The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe,
Hawthorne, and James. New York: Oxford University Press; 1989. Bloom, Harold, ed. The Tales of Poe. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Bonaparte, Marie. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Trans. John Rodker. London: Imago Publishing Company, 1949.
Budd, Louis J., and Edwin H. Cady, eds. On Poe. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Carlson, Eric W., ed. Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
———, ed. The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.
Davidson, Edward. Poe, a Critical Study. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1957.
Dayan, Joan. Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Dell, 1966.
Fisher IV, Benjamin Franklin, ed. Poe and His Times. Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990.