When one is dealing with the occult, a subject which has served as a battleground for theologians and philosophers since the time of Moses, one of the greatest barriers to understanding is the confusion of terms.
In its broadest sense the "supernatural" may embrace
the most exalted mysticism and the darkest superstitions of witchcraft
and devil worship. I should like to suggest my own application of the rather
vague term "supernatural" to the works of Poe by borrowing a phrase from
science, a useful phrase not without its own poetry. Astronomers call the
side of a planet which is turned from the sun its Night Side. Humanity,
also, at times turns its face from the light of day; and it is this night
side of human nature which has engendered the body of ideas and beliefs
we call the occult. We are all somewhat familiar with the development of
this phase of human thought and emotion. Generally speaking, it may be
said to fall into two major traditions, — one aristocratic and intellectual,
the other popular and instinctive. The first may for convenience be called
the line of occult science and philosophy; the second, the line of folklore.
Since earliest antiquity literary men have drawn upon this reservoir of
tradition, sometimes using the occult as a major theme, often introducing
it merely to add color to verse, drama or fiction. When a writer employs
ideas concerning the supernatural most common to his own race and time,
we may say that he is in the orthodox tradition of the occult, providing
that one may speak of orthodoxy in connection with heresy, perversion and
rebellion. This orthodox canon of the supernatural is made up of themes
which sublime poetry, and the most trivial romances employ again and again.
Theocritus and the author of "The Goldon Ass," — Shakespeare and Goethe,
— the Gothic novelists and Bram Stoker have as a common storehouse the
traditions of witch, vampire, and werewolf. The Faust of Goethe is not
primarily a creature of the poet's mind, but one of a larger family of
the same name and basic character, the "Dracula" of Bram Stoker, and the"Lamia"
of Keats
When one approaches the circumstances of Poe's youth it is hard not to talk about a conjunction of the stars. Of course we have all been told that a poet is merely the product of his environment, plus the aptitudes and vices of his forbears, and very dull dishwater the knowledge is. Granting this, is it not amazing that a complex of influences, hereditary and social, should work so strongly in unison to force the growth of Edgar Poe into the unnatural genius he became in early manhood?
Always, one is aware of the recurrent theme of unorthodoxy. First in his parents, — actors who were also gentlefolk, and could thus not make a proper job of being either. Had they been successful on the stage they might have left Edgar a legacy of portable property and cash that would have smoothed his path, even in watertight Richmond society. But they were pitifully poor, and their death in Poe's infancy loft him to the bounty of others" The sensitive lad with a gift of words, who knew himself to be the child of obscure stage-folk, was already looking for golf-justification.
By the time he was twenty, circumstances and temperament had bound Poe into a career of letters as surely as though he had been articled to it at birth. It was the age of Byron. Well-bred maidens trembled before the vision of a dark stranger whose cheek was hollowed by sad vigils and internal fires. The figures of Lord Ruthven, Don Juan, the Corsair, — incarnations of the Fatal Man, walked at the side of Calvinist Mr, Allan's adopted son.
Poe grew up in a world that was intoxicating itself
with new ideas and discoveries. The strait-jacket of traditional religion
was beginning to break at the seams. Science was still standing with reluctant
foot between materialism and charlatanry. Mesmer and Cagliogstro were scarcely
quiet in
Into regions of terror where Hawthorne, Scott or Irving would have shrunk back disgusted, Poe, exhilarated by the promise of a new thrill, forced his way onward. His earliest story, "The Ms. Found in Bottle" proved that he soon recognized his peculiar vein of talent. From then on he took the tale of terror for his own,
Paramount among themes on the Night Side of nature which he employed in his poetry and tales is the personalization of death. This, of course, is one of the oldest exercises of poet, artist, and theologian. But Poe was unwilling to accept ready-made the trappings with which both classical and Gothic poets had clothed their images of death. Poe's conception of mortality grow out of temperament rather than experience. True, death had robbed him of his parents while he was yet too young to realize the loss, if indeed it can be counted a loss under the circumstances. A crueler bereavement was the death of Mrs. Stannard, Poe's earliest love, whom he celebrated in the exquisite lines "To Helen." The deaths of his kind foster-mother and of his young wife were a heavy toll. However, many men with affection as deep as Poe's have had equal bereavements without taking up their residence in the churchyard. There is fear of death in the Tales, but to Poe, the poet, death was not so much fraught with horror as with mystery, drama and sadness.
Death's aspect as the destroyer of the loveliest
flowers of earth haunted Poe consistently. In his "Philosophy of Composition"
Poe asks: "When is this most melancholy of topics most poetical? When it
most closely
The atmosphere of hopelessness that pervades Poe's poems about Death is not often relieved.
The departed go out into cold and darkness and the worm feeds upon them:
The angels all pallid and wanIn this poem, and in the "City in the Sea," the Night Side of Nature seems an eternal Polar night. The latter is a vision of a lost Atlantis of the dream-world, where
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy "Man"
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
from a proud tower in the townThe destruction of what is living is, unhappily, a commonplace. But the last lines of this poem present, amazingly, the death of what is already dead:
Death looks gigantically down.
But lo! a stir is in the airThe idea of a resurrection of the flesh did not appeal to Poe, and his ideas about immortality show a remarkable freedom from conventional metaphysics and superstition. In his Tales, life after death seems to be, in most instances, of two dismal varieties. First, the soul might take possession of some other body. As always, Poe's views on transmigration are unorthodox, far removed from the precepts of the Indian and German philosophers from whose works he probably picked up the idea. In "Metzengerstein" a man's spirit is reincarnated in a horse; but the tale is quite without the humor
The wave — there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide;
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow,
The hours are breathing faint and low;
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence!
The "Oval Portrait" tells of the transfer of a woman's spirit, bit by bit, into her painted image, by a process suggestive of sympathetic magic. Here are echoes of the puppet-magic of all times and all races whereby a doll of wax or straw become the simulacrum of a living being, who must suffer any hurt inflicted upon the miniature. But here, as in every other case of Poe's use of a supernatural theme, he devises his own materials and tells the story in his own way. "Morella" is a study of the merging of a dead woman's personality into a living body, whereby the dead mother and her child become literally one flesh and one spirit.
These cases of transmigration are not presented as the working out of a universal plan. The process is affected by the individual's will to survive. This brings us to a vital point in Poe's use of the occult. In earlier literatures, the character who crosses the border of the supernatural usually becomes the puppet of forces external to and more powerful than himself. Man, even the self-sufficient Faust, comes into conjunction with the occult as though he were, at the best, picking up a hundred dollar bill in the gutter; or at the worst, being knocked down by a taxicab. In Poe and in later writers who have been influenced by his work, the powers of darkness move within the individual, — the hero is his own witch, his own vampire, his own Mephistopheles.
The case of "Ligeia" best brings out the victory
of the Will over Death. Not only did the beautiful woman return to life
but she is the only one of Poe's characters who, conquering the tomb, is
still above ground when the story ends. Another means for escaping death
conceived by Poe in the Tale belongs to the realm of the insanely macabre
rather than to metaphysics. This is the device of holding the present body
by supernatural means against the assaults of death. Poe's story of hypnotism,
"The Facts in the Case of
What links these horrors with the tales of transmigration is the triumphant will of the individual. In "Mesmeric Revelation" the will of the hypnotist wins out, and in the "Facts in the Case of Monsieur Valdemar" the body of the protagonist might have been kept from dissolution indefinitely, as easily as it was preserved for the seven months of the experiment.
The idea of a living person's being buried while in a cataleptic trance terrified and fascinated Poe. Yet the horror of premature burial did not concern him as much as its suggestion of return from a land whence (so sanity and tradition claim) no traveller returns. What, he asks of science and philosophy, is Death? At what point does the mystery of life end unsolved and the vast insoluble mystery of Death begin? Has not one whose heart has ceased to beat, whose flesh is cold, actually set foot in the Valley of the Shadow, even though life may return to the cataleptic after hours in the tomb? In the "Fall of the House of Usher" Poe adapts the subject he approached in "Premature Burial" to a supernatural theme. The wretched girl who cannot find, even in the grave, release from the curse that pursues her family, may, in the vague term of poetry and medical science, have actually been dead. What awful revelation was she bringing to her unhappy brother when the house of Usher, with its windows like dead eyes, sank forever beneath the dark waters of the tarn?
As I have chosen to confine myself to the Night Side
of Nature I can only suggest that there are hints of a more exalted immortality
in some of Poe's poetry and philosophical writing, notably "Lenore,""Politian"
"Eiros and Charmion," and "Monos and Una" However, in the often-quoted
lines of Poe's
Over the MountainsPoe knew how to give a phrase a blasphemous twist in order to heighten a situation of horror. The last three words of "The Cask of Amontillado" directed at the wretch who has been left called up in a wine cellar to die, "Requiescat in Pace," add a final touch of horror to a revenge devised with the most exquisite artistry. Later writers of the decadence, notably Joris Karl Huysmans, refined this device in the use of liturgical terms to suggest the most unholy human behavior. In "William Wilson," Poe handles the legend of man's good and evil selves warring for possession of his soul in the form of an allegory. There is a foreshadowing of the modern conception of "split-personality" in this tale, which undoubtedly influenced Stevenson' s "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.''
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,
The shade replied
If you seek for Eldorado.
Poe was not alone among the brilliant minds of his day in casting his eye toward the unchartered waters and reefs of psychology. Speculations about the mysteries of being had more charm than the prosaic discoveries of Lavoisier, Dalton, and Priestley, for most early 19th century gentlemen of wide reading and educated taste. The purely analytic action of science is often repellent to lovers of the Humanities.
The age had an insatiable appetite for wonders, and
the agile-minded and imaginative Poe was usually three jumps in advance
of the boldest of his contemporaries. However in these matters a sense
of the ridiculous (which the fairies might well have brought to the cradle
of Wells) came to Poe's rescue. New discoveries in science and mechanics
which were the pride of his soberer fellow-citizens never lost for Poe
their quality of the grotesque. The "Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade"
is a catalog of
It is natural that Poe should have made small use of the conventional apparatus of the Gothic novelists when dealing with the subject of return after death. The spectre with moldy shroud and noisy ironmongery smells too strongly of the footlights for genuine terror. The fear inspired by Poe's tales of death is not catharsis, it is terror of what is, or must someday be. Anyone who can read "Berenice" unmoved had better go to Vienna and have his reflexes checked. Poe with his clarity of vision was aware that nine-tenths of our horror of death is bound up with the fate of the body after the breath has loft it. In a dozen stories of Death he maintains a connection between the victim's mortal body and his influence over his loved ones, or the enemy who has been his ruin. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" the murderer's punishment is brought about not by a misty phantom or a celestial voice, but by the insistent beating of a thing so terribly alive, and yet so terribly dead, as a human heart torn from the breast which it had animated. In "The Black Cat" the body of the murderer's wife and the presence of a cat reveal the criminal to the police. Of course the supernatural element is there, indeed it is the all of these stories. It is not applied like sham Gothic decorations tacked onto a Victorian manor house, but is the essential architecture of the tale.
There is no clear line of demarcation between the
subject matter of Poe's verse and of his serious tales. His stories of
death and terror would make magnificent poems: with a few exceptions the
poems, particularized and amplified, might have been written as tales.
''The Raven'' is not only a poem of atmosphere, but a narrative as well.
One of Poe's few links with what I have called traditional occultism is his use on several occasions of the demon animal, which European literature has employed from the earliest times. This conception may have its root in the primitive belief that assigned to each man, or tribe, an appropriate beast spirit as a totem. We have later instances of the superstition in the witch's familiar and the black dog, cat or horse which accompanied the emissaries of Satan. In this tradition is Poe's tale of abnormal crime. "The Black Cat" The demon horse of "Metzengerstein" is a combination of the theme of reincarnation, as I suggested a few minutes ago, and that of the demon-familiar. It is inconceivable that the raven which haunted the bereaved lover could have any intimate connection with the soul of his lost mistress, "His eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming." He is what the Greeks call a "ker," a messenger of the lords of death and terror; and very significantly he takes the bird-form in which these underworld messengers often appear in Greek art and literature.
Poe's humor was never of the red-blooded variety
which the American public takes to its heart. The breath of something ghastly
is on the back of the reader's neck; his laughter is checked by finding
himself with one foot suspended over an abyss of pain and terror. This
is true even of such drolleries as "Loss of Breath," "Some Words With a
Mummy" and "The Man Who Was Used Up." Poe shows us a number of amusing
demons who display his curious satiric humor. In "Never Bet the Devil Your
Head," when Toby Dammit makes his rash assertion, he beholds the figure
of a little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect, "Nothing could be more
reverend than his whole appearance; for he not only had on a full suit
of black, but his shirt was perfectly clean and the collar turned down
very neatly over a white cravat, while his hair was parted in front like
a girl's. His hands were clasped pensively over his stomach, and his two
eyes were carefully rolled up into the top of his head." This clerical
personage, who reminds us of the devil in "Peer Gynt"
There is a folk-belief of the Skibo tribe that wolves eat ghosts and are nourished by them. The Devil in Poe's "Bon Bon" declares with gusto that he eats spirits of mortals and finds them very appetizing indeed.
Poe was not strongly attracted by the survival of European superstition and folk lore, used as themes by many of his fellow poets. True, he was somewhat influenced by German Romanticism, especially ballads of the supernatural such as Berger's ghostly tale "Lenore," which, among others, he translated. There are striking similarities between Poe and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Poe has combined the themes of mesmerism, metempsychosis, dual existence, the dream element, and so forth, in almost exact agreement with the groupings employed by Hoffmann. It is notable that Hoffmann and Poe both wrote tales of a supernatural portrait in which the wife-model dies as a sacrifice to the painting.
The cult of horror in German literature as evidenced in the work of Hoffmann, Kleist, Tieck, Arnim, Fouque and Chamisso has had a potent influence on English and American literature of the supernatural throughout the nineteenth century down to our own time.
There is, in many recent writers, Russian, French, and German as well as English, a type of supernatural theme that is closely associated with insanity, deriving directly from the inspiration of Poe. One may not tell just where the line is drawn, just how much of the element of the uncanny is the result of the broodings of the character's unbalanced brain, and how much is real ghostliness. Maupassant, Dostoevsky, Remizov, and Machen, like Hoffmann and Poe, employ association between insanity and the supernatural to heighten the effect of both.
Poe's influence upon the tale of pseudo-science, notably Jules Verne, and upon the detective novel, is outside the scope of this paper; but none the less it deserves mention. The penniless Poe seems to have a gift [page 12:] for suggesting to other literary men how to make a fortune from the plodding repetition of his ideas.
Poe's scientific stories are the fountain-head of a current of modern fiction which attempts to make a tall story plausible by the use of scientific terms. Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom'', "Ms. Found in a Bottle'', and others were a new departure in the manner in which they united the scientifically real and the supernatural. "The Pit and the Pendulum," with its diabolical machinery, is akin to the modern mechanistic story. Poe bridged the way for H. G. Wells's use of mechanistic and scientific themes, just as his stories of hypnotism doubtless suggested certain psychological horrors to Arthur Machen.
No matter how intense a penchant Poe may have had for the occult he did not let his imagination run away with him. The outlines of his tales and poems were so clearly conceived, and the metier so familiar to him, that he had leisure to choose his words accurately and dispose his sentences with the final effect in view. The impressions he flashes upon our minds and senses are vivid and enduring.
The works of Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin were not unknown to Poe. He refers more than once to Beckford's ''Vathek." Certain of the physical situations and settings of his tales and poems suggest the Gothic novel, purged of its obvious theatricalism and crudity.
Poe was an omnivorous reader, and a brilliant critic, — still he was not soaked in the atmosphere of ancient and mediaeval literature as were Shelley, Byron, Schiller and Goethe. The Atlantic, now a river of ocean with uninterrupted ferry service, was then an abyss which one crossed once, perhaps twice, in a lifetime. In Poe was the seed of a Parisian blown by chance winds to a community which, in spite of its superficial culture, was still the western frontier of civilization. The brain that would have absorbed riches to saturation in the fertile air of Oxford or the Sorbonne matured in the companionship of a few fine scholars and a horde of well-bred [page 13:] young savages. Poe had to dig for the food his rapidly expanding intellect required. Not surprisingly, his appetite was to some extent turned inward and he was forced to feed upon himself.
Original as v/as Poe's treatment of the supernatural, his influence upon later writers in the same field has been enormous. He did not fall into a tradition, but created his own. Earlier writers employed the materials of the past with individual variations and embellishments. There is scarcely a supernatural figure that is not traditional in the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Goethe, Byron, Mary Shelley, or in any of the Gothic novels. Poe broke new ground. He twisted, combined, invented. Not only had mortals feared into dream such dreams before"; apparently they were incapable of it. Since Poe, the lid has been off the Pit of Hell in European literature. In France especially the supernatural elements in prose and verse often bear a clear mark of Poe's paternity. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Maurice Rollinat, Verlaine, ViIliers de l'Isle Adam, and Joris Earl Huysmans are indebted to Poe for a large measure of their terrors and exquisite revulsions.
Poets critics have called him an unhappy man. True, he did not go about with a silly grin on his face, pounding friends between the shoulders and kissing infants like a candidate for public office. Appearances are a poor gauge of a poet's ecstacy, or his despair. Consider the joy, holy or unholy; of knowing oneself to be the creator of the beauty and terror that were so intimately Poe's own. Save on the rare occasions when we have the aid of music or a flash of sympathetic revelation, we must glimpse the true Edgar Poe "in a glass darkly," through such written things as he permitted the world to examine. In dealing with such minds as Poe's, the critic or biographer is as limited as the war correspondent who gets no nearer to the battle than the echo of distant guns.
The Demon Animal
Metzengerstein
The Black Cat
The Raven (Poem)
Dramatic Personalization of Death
The Masque of the Red Death
King Pest
The City in the Sea (Poem)
The Conqueror Worm (Poem)
Humorous Demons
The Devil in the Belfry
Never Bet the Devil your Head
The Angel of the Odd
King Pest
Hypnotism
Mesmeric Revelation
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Mortal Love Beyond the Grave
Ligeia
Morella
Eleonora
Berenice
The Raven (Poem)
Lenore (Poem)
Ulalume (Poem)
Annabel Lee (Poem)
Metempsychosis (Transmigration of Souls)
The Oval Portrait
Ligeia
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
Morella
Metzengerstein
Physical Immortality
Some Words With a Mummy
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Premature Burial
Berenice
The Fall of the House of Usher
Premature Burial
The Cask of Amontillado
Revenance (Ghosts)
Ligeia
Eleonora
MS Found in a Bottle
The Raven. (Poem)
The Haunted Palace (Poem)
Spirits of the Dead (Poem)
Supernatural Retribution
The Black Cat
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Man of the Crowd
The Imp of the Perverse
William Wilson
The Masque of the Red Death
Metzengerstein
Tales of Pseudo-Science
The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall
The Balloon Hoax
The Ms. Found in a Bottle
A Descent into the Maelstrom
The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade
Some Words With a Mummy
Mesmeric Revelation
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
The Pit and the Pendulum
Mellonta Tauta
[S:0 - SEAP, 1936, draft]