The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [307]
1. Poe capitalized on the fascination with Egypt launched by Napoleon’s plundering of the pyramids and the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799. Champollion’s deciphering of the Rosetta stone launched the field of modern Egyptology, and by the 1830s and 1840s, museums in Europe and America were acquiring major collections of mummies and Egyptian artifacts.
2. George Robins Gliddon, a noted lecturer on Egyptology, decried the ransacking of tombs and monuments in An Appeal to the Antiquaries of Europe (1841).
3. James Silk Buckingham, an English traveler, had published several volumes about his excursions through the Near East.
4. Contemporary antebellum debates about the origins of the five principal races hinged on the competing theories of monogenesis (the progressive evolution of different races from a single people) and polygenesis (the simultaneous development of racially distinct peoples). Proponents of monogenesis tended to see the Anglo-Saxon race as the culmination of all evolutionary progress.
5. Emerging theories of eugenics typically focused on skull shapes.
6. See note 1 for “The Imp of the Perverse.”
7. Poe ridiculed the bad taste of this monument in Doings of Gotham.
8. The Dial was the journal of the Emersonian Transcendentalists, often a target of Poe’s satire.
9. Poe alludes transparently to the founding of the United States and the establishment of popular suffrage. His skepticism about Jacksonian democracy is apparent in this passage.
10. Poe wrote this tale, apparently, during the election of 1844, which hinged on territorial expansion and American destiny, issues successfully exploited by James K. Polk. The narrator’s sense that “everything is going wrong” seems to allude to U.S. jingoism on the eve of the Mexican War.
POEMS
The Lake—To——
1 The place described here, Lake Drummond, is situated in the Great Dismal Swamp between Virginia and North Carolina. It was in Poe’s day a site associated with mysterious disappearances by melancholy lovers—and also by fugitive slaves.
Sonnet—To Science
1 Poe identifies several mythic figures demystified by empirical science: Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, associated with the moon; the Hamadryad, a Greek wood nymph associated with trees; the Naiad, a Greek water nymph, associated with springs and fountains; the Elfin, elves or fairies, associated (here) with lawns and fields. The tamarind is a tropical fruit tree from India.
Fairy-Land
1 Namely.
2 Atoms.
Introduction
1 This poem incorporates lines later published as “Romance” and appeared in this form only once, as a verse introduction to Poems (1831).
2 Poe probably knew the Greek poet both through his early studies in the classical languages and by way of Thomas Moore’s popular translations and adaptations.
3 Greek god of marriage.
Alone
1 This poem did not appear in print during Poe’s lifetime. It was preserved in the album of a Baltimore woman and first published, with a title added by Eugene L. Didier, in Scribner’s Monthly in 1875.
To Helen
1 Famously inspired by Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of a Richmond boyhood friend, the poem obviously evokes the legendary beauty of Helen of Troy. Poe’s “Nicéan barks” may allude to ships either dedicated to the goddess Nike or originating from Nicea, an ancient city of Asia Minor. Psyche was the lover of the Greek god Eros and became a personification of the soul. For Naiad, see the note to “Sonnet—To Science.”
The Sleeper
1 In Greek mythology, the river of forgetfulness.
Israfel
1 Lightning (archaic). The Pleiades are a cluster of seven stars, formed, according to Greek mythology, by the daughters of Atlas.
2 The Houris are the beautiful virgins said in the Koran to inhabit paradise.
The City in the Sea
1 Poe’s subject was probably suggested by Sodom and Gomorrah, the biblical sunken cities of the Dead Sea. The poem complements “The Valley of Unrest.”
Lenore
1 We have sinned.
Dream-Land
1 An eidolon is a phantom; Poe’s subsequent allusion to “Thule” derives from Virgil’s reference to an “ultima