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read his poems aloud in public; the effect on his audiences was memorable, and mesmerizing. Later, “The Raven,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee” all became staples of that Victorian parlor artistry called “melodeclamation,” in which a performer would recite the text while a musical composition—written, like a sound track, to swell behind the voice—was played on the piano. Even in the privacy of one’s own room, it is almost impossible to read Poe’s poems aloud without swaying, gesticulating, and working oneself into a kind of frenzied embodiment of the verses—such is their suggestive power.

These poems cast a spell; they are magical incantations, as Aldous Huxley and Richard Wilbur, among other critics, have noted. Even if we have decided they are childish, even if we have laughed at some of the effects, we are caught by them nonetheless. Repetitions of vowel sounds, onomatopoeia (his use of “tintinnabulation” is a textbook example), and his uncanny knack for hypnotic effects (such as the long ee and em sounds in “the summer dream beneath the tamarind tree”) do not simply describe feeling; they are meant to, and to a large extent do, create that feeling. Sometimes he drums like a shaman, as in “The Bells”:

... tolling, tolling, tolling,

In that muffled monotone,

Feel a glory in so rolling

On the human heart a stone—

They are neither man nor woman—

They are neither brute nor human—

They are Ghouls:—

And their king it is who tolls:—

And he rolls, rolls, rolls,

Rolls

A paean from the bells!

The ancient business of riddles and spells, in which words have the power to create worlds, and to make or unmake the men who seek those worlds, is central to Poe’s poetry. What it does to the reader, the listener, is to reduce him or her to a state of goggle-eyed excitement, to the state of a child.

And the voice of the writer? Perhaps it is wrong to say that his is the voice of a child; say, rather, that it is that of an older boy, an adolescent who has been somewhere strange (“a kingdom by the sea,” “the realms of the Boreal Pole,” “a July midnight,” “an ultimate dim Thule”) and is telling his tale by firelight. Poe wants to enthrall; you wish to be enthralled; his artistry, though at times a trifle bullying and crude, is absolute. You will be swept away by the sounds, you will be hypnotized; he has you forever, in “a dream within a dream.”

—April Bernard

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

Tamerlane and Other Poems, 1827 Poems

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, 1829 Poems

Poems: Second Edition, 1831 Poems

“MS Found in a Bottle,” 1835 Story

Politian—A Tragedy, 1835 Play

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 1838 Novel

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 2 vols., 1840 Stories

The Prose Romances, 1843 Stories

Tales, 1845 Stories

The Raven and Other Poems, 1845 Poems

Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, 1848 Criticism

ANTHOLOGIES

Harrison, James A., ed. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 1902. New York: AMS, 1979.

Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, et al., eds. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969-78.

Pollin, Burton. The Imaginary Voyages. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

Stovall, Floyd, ed. The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965.

Levine, Stuart, and Susan Levine, eds. The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Sisson, C. H., ed. Edgar Allan Poe: Poems and Essays on Poetry. London: Carcanet Press, 2006.

SELECTED BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

Alexander, Jean. Affidavits of Genius: Edgar Allan Poe and the French Critics, 1847-1924. Port Washington, NY: Kenikat, 1971.

Bloom, Harold. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Facts on File, 2007.

Budd, Lewis J., and Edwin H. Cady, eds. On Poe: The Best from American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Carlson, Eric, ed. Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

Clark, Graham, ed. Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. East Sussex: