Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page A

Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Thomas Moore as his obvious literary models (though he was also inspired by others both in the Romantic movement proper and on the periphery of that movement), Poe wrote verse featuring intense passions, sometimes concerning fame, more often concerned with blighted love, which affected the speaker-protagonists, who desired successes in both areas. Gothic fiction also had a great impact on his imaginative writings.
    Poe was also influenced by Romantic landscape poetry and travel books, which were popular among contemporary readers. He repeatedly created natural and architectural backdrops that were diffuse and misty, perfect surroundings for characters’ emotional uncertainties and fears. In the wake of contemporary discoveries of the ruins of ancient civilizations and the fascination exerted by such artifacts, tangible evidence of once flourishing but long decayed cultures provided fitting literary symbols for his characters’ disintegrating minds. Biblical and classical themes are evident in such early Poe poems as “The Lake,” “The Coliseum,” “The Sleeper,” “To Helen” (published in 1831, the first of two poems with this title), “The City in the Sea,” and “Dream-Land.” Poe reworked such materials, usually with greater psychological sophistication, in later poems like “The Raven,” “Ulalume: A Ballad,” “Eldorado,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee.” All of Poe’s poems might aptly be called “visionary,” because the setting or the protagonist’s emotions and consequent outlook are expressed in a rhetoric using primarily visual symbolism or vivid imagery. Such vi sionariness often contributes to dream or (in most of Poe’s creative works) nightmare effects.
    Poe’s theoretical pronouncements on poetry make this visionary intent explicit. For him, poetry was “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” a definition that balances theme and form. He also thought that poetry should elevate or excite the soul, which, in his estimation, much American poetry did not do, tending instead toward the “heresy of the didactic” (that is, it was too preachy and moralizing). If poetry is beauty expressed as “music,” then the pronounced rhythms and rhymes in Poe’s poems exist to excite emotional responses in readers. In keeping with the time-honored concept of the poet as a wonderfully free (and, as a creature of nature, amoral) songbird, Poe’s poems are calculated to “sing” readers into the world of the poem at hand. In other words, poetry should enchant (the word means “to sing into”) a reader into the world or the magic interior of a poem by means of hypnotic outreach. Poe expected his poems and tales to appeal to readers’ ears as well as their eyes. To Poe the idea of music involved inherent brevity, and his championing of brief poems is wholly consistent with such thinking.
    Jane Austen’s likening her literary practices to polishing a tiny bit of ivory for refinement might be related to Poe’s composing verse in small quantity. Within such limits Poe created some remarkable poems. For poetic art in which sound and sense coalesce, we may turn to the earliest poem included here, “The Lake—To—,” the concluding piece in Poe’s first book of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). The poem’s eerie setting deftly stimulates the protagonist’s feelings of isolation, lost love, and a death wish. The opening unfolds ordinary youthful tendencies: first desiring solitude, at the lake, then attaching emotional significance to the terrain, which becomes increasingly grim and terrifying.
    The situation in Poe’s poem resembles Henry Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond; Thoreau’s imagination was stirred by the presence of water—the ultimate origin of all life—to celebrate uplifting excitement. Thoreau’s favorite images, the rising sun and moving water, are inverted in Poe’s landscape, which might be thought of as similar to what