The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [224]
Although Poe published three volumes of poetry by the age of twenty-two, none met with commercial success. In his “Letter to Mr.————,” which introduced the Poems of 1831, he acknowledged “the great barrier in the path of an American writer”: the popularity of established European writers, whose works sold cheaply in the absence of an international copyright law. Abandoning the idea of a career as a poet, he turned to periodical fiction and became “essentially a magazinist” but continued to write occasional poems, incorporating a few in tales such as “The Fall of the House of Usher.” He returned to poetry more concertedly when “The Raven” brought literary celebrity in 1845; his last four years produced several poems that rank among his best.
Poe regarded beauty as the sole province of the poem and valued indefinite sensation. Through meter, rhyme, and sonority he created musical effects and believed the beauty of woman inspired the “elevating excitement of the soul” essential to poetry. By a logical extension, “the death of a beautiful woman” represented “the most poetical topic in the world” and many of his most memorable poems grapple with the loss of an idealized female presence. Poems about dying women abounded in the sentimental literature of the day; what sets Poe’s work apart (beyond verbal brilliance) is the obsessive intensity and occult strangeness of the poet’s attachment to the dead beloved.
Among the early poems included here, “Fairy-Land” epitomizes indefiniteness in its evocation of a nocturnal landscape where “huge moons wax and wane,” burying the “strange woods” in “a labyrinth of light.” “Alone” offers revealing self-reflection: the speaker acknowledges a strangeness or difference that from childhood has alienated him from the rest of humanity. “Introduction” extends this confessional mode, tracing the beginnings of the “dreaming-book” his poems comprise. Poe tellingly admits that he “fell in love with melancholy” and “could not love except where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath”—that he felt doomed to love only dying women. A similar note of fatality informs “The Sleeper,” where the poet broods on the strange “pallor” and “silentness” of his “sleeping” love. It suffuses “To Helen,” where his homage to Helen of Troy privately eulogizes the late Mrs. Stanard, the nurturing, cherished confidant of Poe’s early adolescence.
But two other early poems deliver notable meditations on the poetic imagination itself. “Sonnet—To Science” asks why systematic knowledge, suggestively portrayed as a “vulture,” preys upon “the poet’s heart,” substituting “dull realities” for romantic illusions. Poe based “Israfel” on a reference in the Koran to an angel possessing “the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.” Inhabiting a sphere of “perfect bliss,” Israfel derives the “fire” of his “burning measures” from a lute strung by his own “heart-strings,” and the poet envisions changing places with the angel so that he might sound a “bolder note” in heaven.
The 1831 Poems also reveal a developing fascination with unreal landscapes. “The Valley of Unrest” depicts a “silent dell” depopulated by war and changed from an idyllic place into a restless “sad valley” where trees “palpitate” supernaturally and lilies wave over “a nameless grave.” “The City in the Sea” envisions a necropolis surrounded by “melancholy waters,” where from a “proud tower . . . Death looks gigantically down.” Perhaps alluding to an ancient natural catastrophe, the poet depicts the hellish sinking of the city beneath a reddened wave.
In several short verses composed between 1831 and 1845, Poe elaborated the notion of death as a place. The surreal terrain of an early prose-poem (“Silence—A Fable”) anticipates this progression. The later “Sonnet—Silence” succinctly maps dual regions of silence—one corporeal, encountered in “lonely