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

Style, Winter, 1999 by Brett Zimmerman

Poe's detective, Dupin, shows himself to have a mind of a poet--"I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself" ("The Purloined Letter" [6: 341])--for his frequent use of analogies shows his ability to see connections, correspondences, similarities between various things. Likewise, Dupin demonstrates his scientific mind; specifically, his knowledge of astronomy is evident in the analogy he uses: he is describing what astronomers call "averted vision."

The idea of analogy also figures in "Ligeia" when the narrator admits to his inability to express the nebulous sentiment, the vague idea, he feels when scrutinizing the mysterious expression in Ligeia's eyes. In other words, here is another instance of adynata (see above), and he uses the idea of analogy to deal with this adynata: "I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression" (2: 252). Considering the objects he goes on to name, we can guess that the analogous phenomena he lists suggest the idea of changeability, eclipse, transcendence, transformation-metempsychosis (the theme of the tale).

The concept of analogy is also important in "Mellonta Tauta" as a practical guide for everything from politics to cosmology. After sneering at the predominant Western ways of discovering Truth--Aristotelian logic (the epistemology of the medieval and Renaissance scholastic philosophers) and Baconian empiricism--the futuristic narrator offers intuition (imagination) and analogy in their place. As for cosmology, he complains about certain astronomical theories concerning the structure of the universe because "analogy was suddenly let fall" (6: 210). As for politics, condemning the "ancient" (nineteenth-century) unnatural and erroneous political philosophies of America, he speaks in disparaging terms of the democratic Mob that "taught mankind a lesson which to this day it is in no danger of forgetting--never to run directly contrary to the natural analogies. As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth--unless we except the case of 'prairie dogs,' an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government--for dogs" (6: 209). A similar condemnation of this "unnatural" form of politics figures as well in "The Colloquy of Monos and Una": after insisting that only the imagination could discover Truth through analogy, Monos informs Una that, on earth before the cataclysm, the idea "of universal equality gained ground; and in the face of analogy and of God--in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth and Heaven--wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made" (4: 203). The aristocratic-minded Poe seems, then, to have believed in something like the medieval and Renaissance notion of the Great Chain of Being, a system of metaphysical and physical forms ranging from God at the top, (the ens perfectissimum) through the various orders of angels and archangels, through to humanum genus in the middle, with our secular and ecclesiastical heads, down through the animal and plant kingdoms, ending with nothingness at the bottom of the Chain. Just as the natural and metaphysical worlds are based on the idea of gradation, so, by analogy, should the human socio political world. Poe also uses "Some Words with a Mummy" as a vehicle to attack democracy and the "usurping tyrant" to which it gives rise: Mob (6: 136 [cf. Tocqueville's concept of the "tyranny of the majority"]).