The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [3]
But somehow the heart seems squeezed out by the mind.
Even Walt Whitman, the greatest American poet of the century, dismissed him, claiming Poe ought to be regarded as “among the electric lights of literature, brilliant and dazzling, with no heat.”
It was left mostly to French readers and critics to elevate Poe to the literary pantheon: Baudelaire adored and translated him, Stephane Mallarmé called him “my great master,” and Paul Valéry considered him “profound and so insidiously learned.” André Gide described Poe as “the only impeccable master.” Eventually—some fifteen years after his death—Poe was recognized in his own country by a memorial volume edited by Sara Sigourney Rice. Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes joined Tennyson and other Europeans to proclaim Poe’s originality and genius as a poet and storyteller. Lord Tennyson struck the most vivid note when he called Poe “the most original genius that America has produced,” one “not unworthy to stand beside Catullus, the most melodious of the Latins, and Heine, the most tuneful of the Germans.”
II.
“Tamerlane” was Poe’s first important poem, and it remains a fascinating work. The historical figure on whom the poem is based was born in Samarkand, in central Asia, in the fourteenth century. This ruthless conqueror ruled an empire extending from the Black Sea to central China, but relatively little is actually known about the historical Tamerlane. Certainly Poe knew next to nothing about him, as he admitted in his preface to that volume, and so the Tamerlane of his poem is a glorious invention. Indeed, Poe begged the reader’s pardon for making his hero “speak in the same language as a Boston gentleman of the nineteenth century.”
The poem, which shows the direct influence of Lord Byron, is typically Romantic in style, echoing popular themes of the period: the thirst for power, blighted love, and fate. In Poe’s hand the poem becomes an allegory of the poet’s own ambition and an elegy for lost love. In a telling moment, the aging conqueror admits to a Christian friar that his worldly quest for power had actually thwarted his desire to attain human love:
How was it that Ambition crept, Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt In the tangles of Love’s very hair?
“Tamerlane” was reproduced in Poe’s second volume, two years later, along with another long poem, “Al Aaraaf.” The title refers to a state of limbo described in the Koran, which Poe identifies here with a mysterious star discovered in 1572 by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Running to 264 lines, the poem is rambling and diffuse, echoing Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) in many places. It is best read as a sequence of disconnected lyric moments, as in the following hymn to Ligeia, the goddess of harmony, where Poe’s mastery of the two-beat line is gorgeously in evidence:
Ligeia! Ligeia! My beautiful one!
Whose harshest idea Will to melody run.
O! is it thy will On the breezes to toss?
Or, capriciously still Like the lone Albatross,
Incumbent on night (As she is on the air)
To keep watch with delight On the harmony there?
The poem celebrates a place out of time where absolute beauty may be experienced directly instead of through earthly things, which are inevitably disappointing. Poe sings this perfection in some lovely lines:
Now happiest, loveliest in yon lovely Earth,
Whence sprang the “Idea of Beauty” into birth
(Falling in wreaths thro’ many a startled star,
Like woman’s hair ‘mid pearls, until, afar,
It lit on hills Achaian, and there dwelt),
She look’d into Inanity—and knelt.
The “She” mentioned above is one of the author’s mysterious intergalactic women, an astral goddess of perfect beauty; this figure will reappear, in earthly embodiments, in Poe’s later verse.
The finest poem in Poe’s second volume was surely his “Sonnet—To Science,” which in true Romantic fashion argues against rationalism of the kind that destroys the imagination:
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture, whose wings are