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and country houses of the Old World: Paris is a city of terror in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and Rome’s catacombs swallow up the narrator of “The Cask of Amontillado.” In the poems, as well, although the locales are rarely given precisely, there is an overwhelming feel of the Old World—in multiple allusions to classical literature, in the evocation of fairy-tale kingdoms, in the German, Norman, and Mediterranean place-names. In his Eurocentricity, Poe’s inclinations accorded with those of many others in early-nineteenth-century America. But in the way in which he emphasized the alien quality of the Old World, even as he focused his attention upon it—by having a sort of Ordinary Joe, or Ordinary Edgar, seduced and beset by its archaic strangeness—he created a new type that many subsequent writers explored. Think of the “innocent” Twain who went abroad, think of Hawthorne’s Italian stories, and think perhaps especially of Henry James’s American men and women plunged, in all their ignorant glory, into the mires of European intrigue.

Poe’s imaginative use of Europe had some of its origins in his own biography. Born to a pair of traveling actors and deposited at an early age with wealthy Virginia relatives, he was while still a boy taken to England and enrolled in a boarding school. While there is every evidence that he valued his education, his recurrence to the theme of the young man in strange Old World circumstances, reimagined as tales of horror, surely began with the strong impressions made on a lonely boy. In England he was also infused with the lifelong certainty that English tastes and education were superior, as were European architecture, furnishings, art, and literature. The high-handed snobbery that characterized his later criticism, and his disdain for most things American, reveal the gnawing fear of inferiority that such an attitude inevitably engendered.

A profound uneasiness reveals itself, in Poe’s essays especially—a sense of his trying too hard. Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Furniture,” while certainly amusing in its attack on American middle-class bad taste, can also be painful in its implicit self-disgust. “There could be nothing more directly offensive to the eye of an artist than the interior of what is termed in the United States ... a well-furnished apartment.” He complains of American taste as “preposterous” in its penchant for “straight lines” and “glare,” and disapproves of the use of gas for indoor lighting. Poe reaches for classical—especially Greek—models for alternatives. In this, Poe was actually no maverick; most of American high-cultural taste for the first half of the nineteenth century was already exhibiting this predilection, in its columns, Empire couches, parquet floors, and curvy klismos chairs. When, at the conclusion of the sketch, Poe conjures up a perfect room—with “two large low sofas of rose-wood and crimson-silk,” “four large and gorgeous Sevres vases, in which bloom a profusion of sweet and vivid flowers,” and “a tall candelabrum, bearing a small antique lamp with a highly perfumed oil”—I am struck as much by the enchantments of wealth as with the particulars of style. What a contrast to Poe’s adult life of grinding poverty, devoid of such luxuries, his imagination offered.

The urge for things classical was not confined to public buildings or the homes of the very rich, however. All across the country in the early nineteenth century, young ladies were being trained to copy classical art; young men wore togas to deliver Latin orations at school; and the Athenaeums of cities and small towns were regularly visited by traveling exhibits of Greek and Roman sculptures, with plaster fig leaves strategically attached. One area of domestic life that also absorbed classical tendencies was the funereal. “Mourning pictures” of the period typically depict an urn, a weeping willow, and a female figure bent over with sorrow. Often an inscription is written on the urn; one example in the Baltimore Museum of Art reads:

A slight memorial of real merit

Solomon Moulton

Died 26 May