A Catalogue of Selected Rhetorical Devices Used in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Style, Winter, 1999 by Brett Zimmerman

Enargia was used by several of Poe's contemporaries to describe him, and in each vivid description of his remarkable head we find references to phrenology. The editor of the Aristidean, Thomas Dunn English, describes Poe thus:

His face is a fine one, and well gifted with intellectual beauty. Ideality, with the power of analysis, is shown in his very broad, high and massive forehead--a forehead which would have delighted GALL [one of the founders of phrenology] beyond measure.

(Thomas 529)

Author and editor Charles Frederick Briggs describes Poe in even greater detail and in a vein of animosity:

Mr. Poe is about 39.... In height he is about 5 feet 1 or two inches, perhaps 2 inches and a half [actually 5 ft. 8 in.]. His face is pale and rather thin; eyes gray, watery, and always dull; nose rather prominent, pointed and sharp; nostrils wide; hair thin and cropped short; mouth not very well chiselled, nor very sweet; his tongue shows itself unpleasantly when he speaks earnestly, and seems too large for his mouth; teeth indifferent; forehead rather broad, and in the region of ideality [above the temples where Poe had a large protuberance on each side of his head] decidedly large, but low, and in that part where phrenology places conscientiousness and the group of moral sentiments [the top of the head] it is quite flat; chin narrow and pointed, which gives his head, upon the whole, a balloonish appearance....

(Thomas 643; see also 693)

the broad, capacious forehead of the author of "The Raven,"...was still there, with a width, in the region of ideality, such as few men have ever possessed. (Thomas 844)

Four days before Poe's death, Joseph Evans Snodgrass encountered him:

When Poe was not using enargia to describe his characters in vivid detail, he would use it to describe events vividly. Washington Irving even criticized Poe for laying on the enargia too heavily in "The Fall of the House of Usher": "you have been too anxious to present your pictures vividly to the eye, or too distrustful of your effect, and have laid on too much colouring. It is erring on the best side--the side of luxuriance. That tale might be improved by relieving the Style from some of the epithets" (Thomas 275).

EPANALEPSIS: see Zimmerman, "Versatility" (103).

EPICRISIS: see Zimmerman, "Catalogue" (746).

EPIPHONEMA: a moral note expressing disapproval or admiration on the part of the writer, narrator, or speaker; or an epigrammatic or sententious statement that summarizes and concludes a passage of prose or poetry or a speech:

There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell--but the imagination of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful--but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us--they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.

Some rhetors insist that the epiphonema must be an exclamation (that is, must include ecphonesis). Dupriez, for instance, cites this passage from Poe as an example (168):