Poe: for adolescents? - Poe International: The International Edgar A Poe Society

monday love · Veteran Member

RE: Poe: for adolescents?

Reynolds · Veteran Member

Maybe the relation of Poe to nature can be summed up this way.

To the Romantics, those inspired by Rosseau, the English poets who, according to a history of Britain I read recently, regarded nature walks as political acts, Nature is the standard, a state man should strive to get closer to, a source of instruction, beautiful in its unaltered nature. In short, Nature is to act on Man's morals and aesthetics.

Poe seems to have the opposite relationship. Nature is to be ordered to fit in with aesthetics that come from within. In a way, "The Fall of the House of Usher" fits in here. The story opens with a blighted landscape which is the reflection of the Usher mind just as the house is. "The Domain of Arnheim" is a positive projection of the internal mind. There's even the one essay, whose name I forget, when Poe says the uttering of words is an act of literal creation.

monday love · Veteran Member

I agree that Poe is multifaceted and hard to pin down in terms of politics--hippie v. conservative.

I do recall reading "Elk" but I forgot that the Elk at the end is revealed as a pet--that is such a Poe touch, and I agree with Reynolds this chimes in with the Poe of "The Domain of Arnheim" in which Man improves the natural world. I know that Poe wrote in one of his 'Marginalia' (late period Poe in which his mature political philosophy can be best glimpsed, though Poe seems to one of those writers who felt 'mature' right from the start) that "man's natural state" was an "advanced civilized" one, a typical Poe paradox; Poe was no Rousseau; he did not advocate radical or natural primitivism, though he was certainly acquainted with Man's ruins and folly. One can find Poe here and there lamenting the fate of the American Indian, for instance, or making note of the contagion of man's industry.

A further complication is that Britain, America's enemy when Poe lived, at least to some degree, dominated politically because, let's face it, the Brits in the 19th century were pretty good at dominating nature, and so once when a British commentator compared Poe's acumen to an Indian's, Poe shot back, "we have never seen an Indian in our lives," and I'm sure what Poe was saying was, "Don't assume my dear Englishman, that America is a wilderness and will always play second fiddle to your worldly dominance and urban sophistication..."

The Brook Farm experiment, which Poe ridiculed, was the sort of genuine eco-friendly experiment, I suppose, in which mankind gets out of nature's way and does as little harm as possible in a manner that did not seem practical to a 'civilization advocate' like Poe in his place in history.

I suspect that because Poe did have a falling out with the Brook Farm progressives in Boston he sealed himself off from a certain liberal sensibility which loves to sniff out those not properly hip; Horace Greeley of the NY Tribune was a huge pre-hippie and Poe, in one his late "Marginalia" entries dares to knock Greeley for his pro-commune stance; Greeley published his friend Griswold's infamous obituary. So the 'politics' of Poe is vague and trivial and hard to pin down on one hand, but perhaps on the other, a snake, that bit him, not only posthumously, but right where he lived.

Midnightdreary · Senior Member

It's definitely not meant to be a true story, Reynolds. I guess it's not easily categorized as "fiction" for a couple reasons. It is part travel essay, describing the Wissahiccon region fairly accurately, and there's no real story in there. Even the elk only makes a vague appearance over two or three paragraphs.

Reynolds · Veteran Member

So, Midnight, are you saying that "The Elk" is a work of fiction?

I guess, since I read it on the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore's website and it was in the essay category, I naively took it as an account of a real trip. (Of course, with Poe, it could have been a real trip with the appearance of the elk a fiction.)

Anyway, that whole essay or story ends with the elk as a pet and not some survivor of a previous natural order. One small element of the "natural" picture we get, the elk, is staged and order. It's at the beginning of a continuum that goes to "The Domain of Arnheim" with a completely ordered landscape.

Midnightdreary · Senior Member

What a fascinating turn this discussion has taken! I'm very much sold on Monday's analysis of the distinct types of literature and how some writers fall directly into one or the other pile.

Reynolds, bringing up "The Elk" is an interesting one - I'm sure nature lovers out there use it as a real talking point in including Poe as a potential green activitist if he were alive today. I've wondered, however, if the story should be considered worthwhile in any context. If I recall, Poe was given an engraving and told to write a story about it, so he spat out "The Elk" (also known as "Morning on the Wissahiccon" or something to that effect). My guess is he didn't give a rat's ass about the engraving, or the accompanying story he hurriedly wrote for it. However, you throw in that "Sonnet - To Science" and maybe there's a little hippie in Poe after all.

I think it all goes to show that Poe really plays all sides in his writing - not hypocritically, but experimentally, so that he can consider all sides of thinking. Maybe.

-- Edited by Midnightdreary at 14:54, 2009-02-03

Reynolds · Veteran Member

Outdoor writer vs indoor writer?

That obliquely touches on something I've noticed in starting to read Poe's essays for the first time (though I read Eureka years ago). The famous Poe, the macabre Poe is literally an indoor writer. I can't think of a single of his famous terror tales not taking place indoors (though parts of Metzgerstein do if I remember right).

But there's also Poe the outdoor writer of Pym, the aborted Journal of Jules, and the most outdoor of all works: Eureka which covers the universe.

But Monday's right in that there doesn't seem to be the lure of nature the Romantics felt in Poe. Sure, in "The Elk", he talks about natural wonders and was a partisan for America's natural beauty. In the "The Elk" and in some other works, I get the impression that Poe sometimes had a Romantic-like depression over nature being altered to serve Benthamish utility.

However, Poe was clearly interested in technology as well as natural science. He didn't reject them regardless that they were used to destroy natural beauty. He argued for instinct but also said mathematical reasoning was the highest form of imagination.

In fact, the two strains, I'd argue, reach some sort of culmination in "The Domain of Arnheim" where notions of beauty and science merge to alter the very land towards an aesthetic end. My impression of the Romantics is that they would have rejected the rejection of nature as you found it, modern man improving the beauty of the land.

monday love · Veteran Member

Right about the time Poe died, American Letters was, for the first time, divided in two: Outdoors and Indoors.

Benjamin Franklin, Americas first scientist and sage, had no literary flair and because young America, truly the land of Franklin, was an industrious, pragmatic country--not by design, but by necessity in its struggle for independence from Europe.

America was inventive in law and technology, not Letters, for it had little time or energy for the latter.To Franklins America, Outdoors and Indoors was all a piece; there was no distinction.

European Romantics had Alp and woods and the Mediterranean as their backdrop; they embraced Nature as a counter to the Enlightenment drawing-room and the dark, Satanic mills of industrial England--those mills the price England paid for almost taking over the world.European Romanticism was all about longing: escape from the artificial.

Unlike England, America had very little that was artificial; early America had plenty of nature, almost too much of it; Coopers Hawkeye lived cunningly and happily in the forest; America had no alienated and heart-sick Byron or Shelly or Keats, for America was a paradise in the eyes of the European Romantics.Coleridge and Southey planned to start a commune in America, Keats celebrated the fact that his brother was starting a family in the U.S.America had no Manfred, no indoor person longing to be outdoors. America was dominated by the outdoors as a natural fact, and so Romanticism had little sway in the U.S. before the Civil War.

After mid-century, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman gradually eclipsed Longfellows reputation.Why?Because Longfellow was not a Romantic, he was comfortable both indoors and outdoors; he was essentially Victorian, but a strange thing happened in America after mid-century:

European Romanticism gained ascendancy in the U.S.Champions of the Outdoors became fashionable: Whitman, roaming the countryside with shirt open was a throw-back to European Romanticism and, whats more, Whitman was not popular in the U.S. but became more famous only when the European pre-Raphaelites took notice of him, Oscar Wilde came to visit him, etcEmerson, too, found notoriety in England when he made visits there. Thoreau lived on Emersons private property and was Emersons handy-man, and Whitmans poetry is largely an imitation of Emersons early prose, which is Romanticism in prose-essay form, telling the would-be poet, for instance to go into the woods to find inspiration and to turn his back on the courts of Europe, etc.

Poe was not an Outdoors writer; Poe was a Benjamin Franklin American and Poe only resented Englands attempts to portray America as a wildernesssomething which the school of Emerson and Whitman more or less played right into.So here is the great split, and it can also be described in this way: the Anglo-American school of Emerson (Experience) v. the German/French school of Poe (Theory).

In the school of Theory (Poe), experience is boiled down in order to understand it.In the school of Experience, experience is milked for overt moral guidance. Emerson stands for lessons to make a person behave with a deeper understanding of nature, but Poe, I think, goes deeper, never minding behavior or nature, but going deeper for reasons of science, not morale.

I think most literary scholars today belong to the Anglo-American school, and these either ignore Poe or slight him.

Midnightdreary · Senior Member

That's an interesting story, Monday love. I think it's especially fitting that a French scholar of Lacan brought you into Poe!

But, to speak more on Whitman, there is some irony there. Whitman as the "poet of democracy" was trying to write poetry for all classes of American but, most specifically, aiming for the "everyman" to become an appreciator of poetry. These days (and, perhaps, even in his days), the opposite is quite true! Generally speaking, of course, the reading public doesn't jump for poetry, but they certainly aren't looking for Whitman first when they do. Poe, on the other hand, was writing (in my opinion) specifically for higher intellectuals (with some exceptions; he did occassionally write just to please his mainstream audience). Would anyone care to speculate: do the majority of literary scholars today dismiss Poe, or do the majority try to reclaim him?

monday love · Veteran Member

Of course split-second neuron-firing billion-headed reality cannot be represented by fiction or literature; this vanity and folly Poe properly avoided. Nor can 'relevance' be represented by fiction or literature, and this is the Idol most pertinaciously worshiped by those who consider themselves the most astute on such matters.

I, like others had my obligatory dose of Poe before college, but once I entered 'higher ed' it was my particular experience to be beat over the head with Whitman (as some great icon of 'democracy' or writing poetry which didn't have to rhyme, or some such thing) while the door to Poe was shut upon me with taciturn indifference. There was one exception. There happened to be a guest professor from France who lectured on Poe in terms of 'the signifying chain' (Lacan and the 'Purloined Letter') and the English professors of my college (the ones enamoured of Emerson's "The Poet") openly laughed in the Frenchman's face.

Reynolds · Veteran Member

Midnightdreary wrote:

Remember that Kay is an example of a larger group - he's not the only one to find Poe's work apparently intended for a juvenile audience.

I'd argue, to add another possibility, can we really presume that adolescents would be able to understand all the profound nuances of an even simple-seeming story like "The Tell-Tale Heart"? I know when I read it for the first time back in 7th grade I loved it - and when I read it again a week ago I found myself contemplating an entirely new possibility of what the story was really about. Heck, in 7th grade, I don't think I even knew what "tell-tale" meant!

I suspect Kay meant some state of aesthetic adolescence, but your point is good about literal adolescence. I first came across Poe on my own in 5th grade. After reading a book of O'Henry stories, I moved on to the next collection which was Poe. I liked the first one I read, "The Tell-Tale Heart". I don't remember how many other Poe works were in the book nor do I remember if I read them. I do vividly remember trying to read "The Cask of Amontillado" and being bored and not figuring it out.

I'm not sure when I read it next, but it's now one of my favorite Poe stories. When taught Poe in high school, it was by a teacher who didn't like Poe by her own admission, and the story was "The Tell-Tale Heart". In college, my desultory Early American Literature professor half-heartedly assigned "William Wilson" though I did a paper on Poe's contribution to science fiction. So, from my own experience, I fell in love with Poe as an an adult with no encouragement from academia.

I came to appreciate Poe through the work of Sam Moskowitz and James Gunn on him as a pioneer of science fiction and Stephen Peithman's annotated edition of most of Poe's tales. (Anyone else read that one?) Listening to the Alan Parson Project's Tales of Mystery and Imagination also motivated me to read more Poe.

Perhaps my mind remains adolescent, but it certainly wasn't as a teenager that I came to appreciate Poe.

Midnightdreary · Senior Member

Remember that Kay is an example of a larger group - he's not the only one to find Poe's work apparently intended for a juvenile audience.

I'd argue, to add another possibility, can we really presume that adolescents would be able to understand all the profound nuances of an even simple-seeming story like "The Tell-Tale Heart"? I know when I read it for the first time back in 7th grade I loved it - and when I read it again a week ago I found myself contemplating an entirely new possibility of what the story was really about. Heck, in 7th grade, I don't think I even knew what "tell-tale" meant!

Date: Jan 28, 2009

Thanks for bringing that National Post article to our attention here. The National Post is an editorially hollow newspaper that got its start back in the late 90s. Even though they're supposed to be a national newspaper they've actually ceased distribution to much of western Canada and some other areas, too, I think.

Anyway, regardless of the paper's pulpy status on the Canadian newspaper scene, I find the argument by Jonathan Kay to be foolish, specious, petty and snobbish. So he's outgrown Poe? Too sophisticated now to appreciate Poe, so he dismisses him along with various modern genre writers? Then I guess he would dismiss the Romantic painters for being too idealistic, or mock films like Citizen Kane for their old-fashioned acting and directing. Yes, adolescents enjoy Poe because of his strong storylines and vivid imagery, but you have to appreciate the glorious architecture of Poe's writing and how it became a brilliant template for so many other writers who were influenced by him. I knew the sniffing and snobbery and literary elitism would appear this year, but I never expected such a shallow, shlocky argument against Poe to be given that kind of exposure.

Reynolds · Veteran Member

Midnightdreary wrote:

And yet, we as Poeists go crazy over even the most minute details! We are able to tell the story, to use your example, of Montresor and Fortunato even without the in-depth details thrown at is. We can debate of Montresor was insane, if Fortunato deserved it, if the two were truly friends, just based on a couple thousand words. It is this method of characerization which makes Poe so successful!

-- Edited by Midnightdreary at 14:10, 2009-01-28

That's an interesting observation, Midnight. What I like about "The Cask of Amontillado" is not quite the same. I like the absences and don't wonder so much about what's missing. I like that we don't know what Fortunato has done, that Poe's telling us that's not important. This is a story about revenge and the glee it's carried out with. I think what you identify, entering a fictional world which invites thought on unspecified details, the background of the world and characters, is a different aesthetic reponse. You seem to be interested in those details and the missing elements. I think that's a taste that a lot of people feel toward certain fictional works -- film or literature. I'd argue that it is at least as widespread as the taste, as Kay puts in, for nuanced characterization. I'm not arguing that it's better, just different, and that nuanced characters shouldn't be regarded as the final, supreme criteria of good literature.

Of course, the supreme example of what you talk about is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym which is probably so many others (Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti) have done sort of spiritual sequels to it, taken some of its mysterious elements. (I'm assuming that the novel appears as Poe wanted it even though the story seems unfinished. However, I've never researched the matter.)

Another bit of snobbery towards Poe probably goes back to his famous refusal to do moral tales. Certain purveyors of literature try to tell us its job is to convey moral and psychological truths. Poe famously rejected his moral duty. So, I think, however well done his psychology, there was a taint about him, the taint of sensationalism and mere entertainment. He didn't, it seem, try to convey truth.

But, I'd argue, he did. "Mellonta Taunta" invited his readers to view the world through an objective (and satiric), historical lens. "Valdemar" and "The Balloon Hoax", in their own way, tried to give his reader a sense of how science and technology were (or could) change existence. Yet that has often not been regarded (unless done retrospectively in the historical novel) as a worthy pursuit because it isn't the delivery of a truth but an awareness of impermanence and change.

And I can't understand how anyone, serious about English literature, can regard Poe as not really being worthy of study. So we ignore his importance in developing commercial genres of fiction. We banish Eureka. He still helped develop a theory of the short story and exhibited that theory. There are still his poems of obvious skills. And, as been said here, he furthered the formal theory of poetry.

A reviewer once remarked that experiments in art, like experiments in evolution, usually fail. If you extend the metaphor, Poe stands near the beginning of three clades of literature. The mutations of Poe so far seem pretty viable despite the changes in the literary ecosystem. Will they last as long as man? How should I know. But I would guess that the danger time for popular authors seems to be around 50-100 years after their time of peak popularity. If people still voluntarily seek you out after a hundred years, you'll probably endure for centuries.

Midnightdreary · Senior Member

Reynolds, I like what you pointed out and it was my first reaction too. People who criticize Poe neglect first that he was innovative (so it's hard to judge with a backward-peering lens) and that his theory of keeping stories minimal was solid. It's interesting too that he points out the lack of characterization (which, let's be honest, is the only thing many readers respond to these days, hence the ridiculous popularity of the memoir) in his stories. And yet, we as Poeists go crazy over even the most minute details! We are able to tell the story, to use your example, of Montresor and Fortunato even without the in-depth details thrown at is. We can debate of Montresor was insane, if Fortunato deserved it, if the two were truly friends, just based on a couple thousand words. It is this method of characerization which makes Poe so successful!

-- Edited by Midnightdreary at 14:10, 2009-01-28

Reynolds · Veteran Member

The key to understanding Kay is the second paragraph. Poe, you see, isn't entirely respectable because he's, umm, genre, you know. (And not even one genre but three!) Genre is not of the type of mimetic (of a reality contemporary or historical to the author), characterization heavy type of fiction Kay favors. Thus we talk of the "Weird Science periphery of true literature" and name a list of guilty pleasures, all genre authors who, Kay hopes, will be the gateway to the delirium of true literature.

But, of course, he admits Henry James just isn't up to producing that sort of delirium, the joy of pure story telling that genre fiction, by its sheer sales, self-evidently delivers to an audience. This is not to say that Dan Brown is going to be read in a hundred years. But then neither will most contemporary authors admired, I suspect, by Kay. History will make its judgements and, in Poe's case, it has so far delivered the verdict that he is an author that people appreciate on their own and not just have him forced on them in school. (Though some Poe is. In my case, I was only ever assigned to read one Poe story before college.) Would Henry James really be read (or, at least, finished) today if he wasn't assigned reading?

You will note what Kay lists as Poe's great strength. Again, it revolves around character, the ability to portray madmen. That ignores a lot of Poe's skills and a lot of Poe work. "The Cask of Amontillado", I suspect would gain Kay's appreciation for its "madman" (though I doubt he is) and get demerits for its streamlined prose which ignores characterization (what has Fortunato really done? what is the nature of Montrosor and Fortunato's relationship?) to emphasize effect, a psychological or aesthetic idea, above all else. That emphasis on effect, on an idea, with characterization sacrificed (at least in the short story) is a criticism often leveled at modern science fiction. It's not surprising that Poe, it's literary grandfather, would come in for the same criticism.

As for characterization, a lot of classic literature gets grandfathered in by sheer age though its characterization is not very sophisticated. Homer and Beowulf come to mind.

Between James and Freud, I suspect a lot of modern "literary" fiction has sidetracked itself into minute character studies - a form whose invitation (a genre, in other words) a lot of readers aren't accepting. And, in terms of length practiced, a very recent innovation. And perhaps something of a dead end in the evolution of the literary arts.

monday love · Veteran Member

Poe is not schlock. These charges do not warrant replies they are so without merit. Yet T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Aldous Huxley, Ralph Emerson, WB Yeats, and Harold Bloom have all said Poe is schlock--which says more about them than Poe. Understanding the hatred expressed by well-reputed writers for Poe is a fascinating tale in itself and needs to be told, but, alas, none really step up to the plate for Poe in this regard. The task is too immense, perhaps.

Midnightdreary · Senior Member

What do we say to people like the writer of this article for the National Post? In it, the writer refers to Poe's "shlock" appeal. He says Poe wrote stories that have value only to adolescents and which cannot be classified as great literature.

I've heard the argument before (and quite often, at that). I'm curious if others have suggestions: How should we respond?

-- Edited by Midnightdreary at 20:46, 2009-01-27