Edgar Allan Poe: The Artist of the beautiful

American Poetry Review, The, Nov 1995 by Hoffman, Daniel

Virginia Poe, trained as a singer, spa blood one day--the first sign of the consumption from which, after a lingering illness, she died at twenty-three, in 1847. Poe, ill himself, depressed, half-mad with grief and loneliness. courted several literary women simultaneously, including a childhood sweetheart in Richmond whom he visited in hopes of arranging marriage. Unsuccessful, on his way back to New York he stopped in Baltimore and was found delirious in a gutter under conditions still unexplained. Taken to a hospital, he died four days later, on 7 October, 1849.

According to Poe biographers from Marie Bonaparte to Kenneth Silverman, the key events in this sad life were the successive wasting illnesses and deaths of Poe's mother, stepmother, and wife. The agonizing deaths of the women from whom he sought security and comfort surely marked his imagination in ways reflected in his tales and poems--particularly his poems; his fiction has a wider range of theme and feeling, including satires, hoaxes offered as aggression against his readers, and, in his tales of detection, ratiocinative plots for which there is little room in his verses.

In Poe's first volume of poems, Tamerlane, published when he was eighteen, the concluding poem, "The Lake," demonstrates not only his precocious facility but a strangeness, an original conception of theme. The genre to which "The Lake" belongs is the nature poem, much practised by such American followers of Wordsworth as William Cullen Bryant (as in "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"), Emerson ("Musketaquid," "The Rhodora," "Woodnotes," "Monadnoc"), and Longfellow ("Autumn," "Snow-Flakes"). In such poems the poet feels identified with the spirit of Nature, a source of benignity and beauty. But the young Poe chooses to memorialize "a wild lake, with black rock bound":

My infant spirit would awake

To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright-

But a tremendous delight.

And a feeling undefined

Springing from a darken'd mind.

Death was in that poison'd wave

And in its gulf a fitting grave

For him who thence could solace bring

To his lone imagining-

Whose solitary soul could make

An Eden of that dim lake.

Poe's originality is still more striking in his sonnet, "To Science," the introductory poem to his verse epic "Al Aaraaf" from which his second volume in 1829 took its title.

Science! True daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

Readers are prone to assume that Poe is attacking science, the Cartesian tradition, intellectual analysis, since the "dull realities" which hold Science aloft are the enemies of imagination, preventing the poet from "his wandering"/To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies." This antipathetic force has "driven the Hamadryad from the wood/To seek a shelter in some happier star. " All this is so, but overlooks a major symbol contribution to the sonnet's meaning. The image of a vulture or condor, as Richard Wilbur pointed out in his introduction to the Laurel edition of Poe's Poems (1959), recurs often in Poe's writings, always representing the destructiveness of Time, the ultimate enemy of or happiness. The vulture or condor feeds on carrion, which is to imply that it destroys mortality, and mortality is inexorably subject to change, death, and decay because imprisoned in the realm of Time. But the poetic imagination would soar free of this subjection to contemplate and express unchanging perfection, Beauty, found on "some happier star." As the next poem makes clear, that star is Al Aaraaf. In this one the formal execution is impressive, as Poe combines with the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet the development of theme characteristic of the Petrarchan form.