Mark​​​​ Canada, Ph.D.​

Fellow poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson called him a genius. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the other hand, he was "the jingle man." He stirred poet Charles Baudelaire, impressed novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, and inspired painter Rene Magritte, but poet T. S. Eliot accused him of "slipshod writing" and "puerile thinking." He elicited such opposite responses not only from different people, but even from individuals, who found themselves torn over his talent or contributions. The poet W. B. Yeats said, “I admire a few lyrics of his extremely and a few pages of his prose, chiefly in his critical essays, which are sometimes profound. The rest of him seems to be vulgar and commonplace.” More colorfully, James Russell Lowell described him in this way in one of his poems:

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Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge.
Three fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.​

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What are we to make of this Poe-larization?​

 

Well, for starters, we need to acknowledge that some of Poe's work really is pretty bad. I mentioned in last week's column that his attempts at humor are typically not very funny, but, more to the point, even some of the work he did in his wheelhouse — serious poetry and prose — is uneven or worse. I mean, come on, would a true genius really write something as sophomoric as "A Dream within a Dream" or as contrived as "Eldorado"?

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Geniuses do strike out, and sometimes they take a while to blossom. (Exhibit A: F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, which I still haven't finished.) In Poe's case, we should remember that he was desperately poor and sometimes seriously ill — not a good combination. I can imagine him churning out work, even when he was not in a lucid frame of mind, just to maintain the trickle of income he needed to keep himself, along with his wife and mother-in-law, alive. (That's no exaggeration, by the way. One acquaintance recalled that Poe was in "a state of starvation.")

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There's something else going on here, though, I think. Many years ago, when I was beginning my career as an English professor, a colleague asked me to give a guest lecture on Poe to her American literature students. This colleague was no slouch; she knew literature. Maybe she was simply giving me a chance to spread my Raven wings (and, ideally, croak something more than "Nevermore"), but I had the impression that she just wasn't sure what to do with Poe. His poems and stories are . . . different, weird even. Stories of murderous — sometimes sadistic — madmen, undead women, and twisted torture seem rather sensational for a serious writer. Poe's contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville sometimes dabbled in the dark, but works such as "Rappaccini's Daughter" and Moby-Dick seem less outlandish and more tasteful than "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Pit and the Pendulum."

 

It's helpful here to note that Poe began writing horror because he knew it was popular. That may seem a little odd for Poe, who could be a purist when it came to literature, but he also craved attention. His troubled childhood may have played a role here. Biographer Kenneth Silverman has observed, "In wanting to excel and to command, Edgar resembled many other orphans, in whom a feeling of nonexistence and the need to master changeable surroundings often produce a will for power."

 

He needed money, too. After producing three books of poetry with less than sensational sales, he surely realized that he was going to have a hard time making a living off poems about, say, "Fairy Land." When he turned to fiction and began penning stories such as the grisly "Berenice," he explained to editor Thomas White, "The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature — to Berenice . . . . To be appreciated you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity."

 

All of this horror, sensationalism, and just plain weirdness can get in the way when it comes to appreciating Poe. Let me then propose four keys to understanding Poe's stories and poems:

 

4. Embrace the complexity.

 

Life is complex enough as it is. Some of us are content to keep things simple whenever we can — not Poe. He reveled in complexity and went out of his way to create it. As an English professor, I have read and taught a lot of literature, and much of it is more brilliant or profound than anything Poe created, but I can think of nothing more dazzling in its intricacy, more cleverly crafted than his story "The Purloined Letter."

 

This work and many others are typical of Poe, who loved patterns, puzzles, detection — in short, complex things to be figured out or just admired. This is the man, after all, who invented the detective story. While working as a magazine editor, he challenged readers to create a cryptogram that he could not solve. He sought to unravel the mystery around a contraption that supposedly could play chess against a real person. He called his first collection of stories Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. That last word refers to things that are often intricate — like his stories, but also his poems.

 

For some readers, these poems may have been over the top. Fellow writer Aldous Huxley remarked, "To the most sensitive and high-souled man in the world we should find it hard to forgive, shall we say, the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger. Poe does the equivalent of this in his poetry; we notice the solecism and shudder.” To go over the top, however, you first have to get to the top. When it came to versification, Poe knew what he was doing, as this excerpt from his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" shows:

 

Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre of the “Raven.” The former is trochaic — the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic.

 

Poe was a master of rhyme, as well as rhythm. Indeed, his ability to weave various kinds of rhyme — one-syllable and two-syllable, internal and end — into "The Raven" is a major reason for its broad and persistent appeal.

 

Such intricately woven sound patterns are dazzling surface features of Poe's poetry, but there are other, less obvious patterns in his fiction. Why would a writer take pains to embed such complexity in his work, especially since the vast majority of readers would never even notice it? It may be that Poe loved complexity for the sake of complexity, but I suspect that he delighted in sheer craftsmanship. Like Jan van Eyck in painting and Johann Sebastian Bach in music, Poe showed what was possible in literature. Then there's Poe's compulsion to show off his intellect. He knew he was a genius, and complexity was one way to see to it that others knew, as well.

 

In short, Poe was not the most brilliant of our authors, but he surely was one of the most clever. When we embrace his complexity, we are more likely to appreciate his work.

 

3. It's about creating an "effect."

 

In an essay called "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe stated flatly, "I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect." He goes on to explain that, when writing "The Raven," he chose certain details that would help him evoke a feeling of "sadness" in his readers. Death, he notes, is the most "melancholy" topic, and specifically "the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."

 

This aspect of Poe's aesthetic may help to explain some passages or entire works that seem short on substance. If we expect a work of literature to plumb the depths of the human condition, expose the workings of social forces, or instruct us on how we should live, then a work such as "Annabel Lee" is likely to come across as a flimsy shred of tinsel — shiny, but ultimately trivial.

 

If, on the other hand, we measure a poem or story the way we might measure a painting or a work of music — as something that can move us to tears — or horror or disgust — then Poe's work demands a different kind of appreciation. It is perhaps no coincidence, in fact, that much of Poe's work is musical and painterly. Just think of the insistent rhythm of "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven" and the vivid imagery of "The Masque of the Red Death" and "Ligeia." (Later this month, I will make the case that Poe was tapping into our right brains with his musicality, imagery, and appeals to our emotions.)

 

2. . . . but it's not just about creating an effect.

 

Poe did do a masterful job of moving us to tears (or shrieks), but he did more. Take "The Tell-Tale Heart," for example. Yes, the narrator murders a man he claims to have loved. Yes, he hides the body under the floorboards. Yes, he — well, I'll stop there in case you are the only person who has not read this story. The point is that it's a horror story, probably the most famous ever written.

 

To see more, we have to consider, among other things, Poe's use of symbolism, which was very popular among some of the leading American writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Alongside Hawthorne's scarlet letter and Melville's white whale, Poe's Evil Eye is one of the supreme examples of a suggestive symbol from this era. That word, "suggestive," is important. Some readers may mistakenly believe that a symbol is an object that simply stands in for something else — a bird representing freedom, for example. Well, that may or may not be true for Lynyrd Skynyrd, but authors often use symbols not merely to represent one other thing, but rather to suggest a variety of things. In this case, an eye is associated with observation, which may disturb the murderous narrator because he is paranoid or has something to hide. The word eye, however, also is a homophone for the pronoun I, so it evokes thoughts of the self, as well. The narrator may wish to destroy anything that might be watching him or to destroy himself or to destroy his own internal conscience. In short, even while Poe is horrifying us, he also is exposing truths outside his fiction.

 

1. It's not out there. It's up here.

 

Exploring truths is common among writers, such as Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. What makes Poe's work a little harder to grasp, perhaps, is that he was primarily interested in something intangible, namely the workings of the human brain. On the surface, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a horror story about a live burial (a perennial favorite subject of Poe's). It certainly works on that level, but it's worth noting that the House of Usher is compared to a face and that Roderick Usher's studio might be considered an artistic region of the brain behind that face. This reading becomes all the more credible when we consider that Poe was fascinated by the pseudoscience of phrenology, which posited that the brain had different physical regions controlling different faculties.

 

I could cite numerous other examples, but suffice to say that you often will get much more out of a Poe story if you think of the characters, objects, settings, and actions as symbolic of psychological states, actions, or regions. Take "William Wilson," which contains one of literature's best-known examples of a doppelganger, a kind of double or shadow self. As simply another character, this doppelganger seems like merely an eerie figure haunting the narrator. That may be good enough for a horror story, but the tale takes on greater interest and significance when we see him as a psychological entity.

 

To get the most out of many of Poe's works then, remember that the substance often lies in the things that have no substance.

 

That last point is particularly appro-Poe. It's a puzzle, and so was he.