Text: Eric W. Carlson, “Poe's Vision of Man,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 7-20

[page 7, unnumbered:]

Eric W. Carlson

UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT

 

Poe's Vision of Man

 

IN MUCH criticism of Poe's writings there is a recurrent and, I think, an essentially unsound emphasis on death and destruction as his major themes. This tendency is especially evident in the essays by D. H. Lawrence and Allen Tate, who find annihilation and self. disintegration at the center of Poe's view of human experience. This dead-end interpretation is also at the heart of Richard Wilbur's reading of Poe's imagery as essentially hypnagogic, culminating in sleep as the death of dream consciousness.(1) My contention is that a close reading of Eureka, the colloquies, and a few other statements of Poe's philosophic perspective will reveal quite another central unifying theme: the quest for rebirth of mind and soul and thereby the realization of a new unity of being. To see this main thread running through the whole fabric of the writings from 1827 to 1849 is to see Poe not as a low jack-of-all-trades, which in some ways he sometimes was, but as a high Romantic, more transcendental even than Emerson.

I propose, in short, that Poe may best be appreciated in the con text of his three perspectives or “visions,” especially his final major one — that of his “psychal” transcendentalism. On 10 July 1844 Poe wrote to Dr. Chivers: “You mistake me in supposing I dislike the transcendentalists — it is only the pretenders and sophists among them,” adding the recommendation that his “Mesmeric Revelation,” published that year, be taken as a “somewhat detailed” article of his [page 8:] own “faith.” Similarly, the following year, in his 17 March 1845 letter to J. Hunt, Jr., Poe refers to “the burlesque philosophy, which the Bostonians have adopted, supposing it to be Transcendentalism. ...” If we smile at the characteristic prejudice of these digs at the New England Transcendentalists, we should not overlook ‘”Mesmeric Rev elation” as a major clue to Poe's ideas about “the spirit's other world,” that “ultimate life” of heightened perception and creative power which is symbolically, potentially, or actually the destiny of man. Poe's seriousness in this tale can be measured by the care with which in it he has summarized his notions of matter and spirit as these were more fully spelled out in Eureka, and as they were concisely stated, in exactly the same language, in his letters to James Russell Lowell of 2 July 1844 and to Thomas Holley Chivers of 10 July 1845.(2)

If I am right in my view, which I am glad to find corroborated by the implications of Robert Jacobs’ Poe: Journalist and Critic (Baton Rouge, 1969), some favorite opinions of Poe will be subject to change.

To simplify matters, I shall describe Poe's vision of man from three perspectives: the Neoplatonic or Paradisaical, the Existential, and the Psycho-Transcendental, which see life in terms of the Past, the Present, and the Present-Future, respectively.

Poe's earliest vista, a retrospective Platonism and Pastoralism, takes the form of his “holy dream” of a Paradise forever lost but not forgotten. It is a kind of race “Memory” of Beauty and Love, of innocence and joy that once was and never again can be, since history is not reversible. An acute sense of the loss of this immemorial ideal is reflected in the haunting melancholy or demonic despair of certain early poems, notably “The Lake: To,” “Tamerlane,” “Alone,” and “A Dream Within a Dream.” In “Al Aaraaf”’ the dream is the Eden of Platonic Beauty from which man has fallen in failing to live by Beauty alone. It is symbolized by the flower-perfumed isle of Zante and by the Valley of Many-Coloured Grass, where Eleonora and her cousin dwelt. This “evergreen and radiant Paradise ... the circumscribed Eden of his dreams” is known only to the true poet, for it is only he who has the power of such dream-insight into the Past.(3) In the language of Romantic myth, Monos in his colloquy with Una describes this Golden Age as a time “when mirth was a word unknown, so solemnly deeptoned was happiness — holy, august, and blissful days, when blue rivers ran undammed, between hills unhewn, into far forest solitudes, primaeval, odorous, and unexplored.” Although this passage may carry suggestions of an American Paradise, in contrast to the “blighted [page 9:] landscape” of Europe, as Charles Sanford maintains,(4) it is essentially unspecific as to time and place, and contains no Southern or other historical content. It is comparable to the ineffable “Light” or “Gleam” of Edwin Arlington Robinson, a late-blooming Platonist, who caught “a glimpse of the real light through the clouds of time.” But the motive behind Poe's poems is less didactic than Robinson's, whose poems were “written with a conscious hope that they might make some despairing devil a little stronger and a little better satisfied with things — not as they are, but as they are to be.” Poe's dream is not directly inspirational; its influence is more indirect and unconscious, as indeed is also true of many of Robinson's ironic and satiric poems.

Only through his ideal sense of Beauty and Love can man hope to recover his lost Eden. As the Spirit works through Man, Poe noted years later in Eureka, youth is “peculiarly haunted by such dreams; yet never mistaking them for dreams.” In the early “To Helen,” the most representative of all his poems, the vision is momentarily recaptured by the lost soul returned home to the “native shore” of his own ideal convictions and to a classical Helen of such ideal beauty as to symbolize the beauty of the soul — *Psyche, from the regions which/ Are Holy-Land!”

Such soul-warming Hellenism, however, is not typical of the early poems. The dominant theme is one of disenchantment and despair over the impossibility of recapturing the dream-reality. In “Tamerlane” the young poet-idealist, tormented by the loss of both love and creative power, sinks into demonic brooding over his fate. Although “Fairy-Land” symbolized the beauty in the very quest for Beauty, more often the poet, as a haunted mind, suffers from a loneliness so black as to be suicidal (as in “The Lake: To — ” and “Alone”), from a vision of life marked by unrest and a sense of irredeemable loss.

 

Seen from the second perspective, the Poe hero, having lost his dream-vision, experiences the existential realities of the Present on two levels, the cosmic and the cultural. In several, more or less cosmic, allegories between 1831 and 1841, Poe sees Man as the contemplator or the victim of a dark destiny. Among the early 1831 poems are “The Valley of Unrest” and “The City in the Sea,” the latter a muted apocalyptic vision of annihilation as the ultimate fate of man and civilization. That such themes appeared so early suggests that [page 10:] Poe's preoccupation with human destiny was deep-seated and organic to his whole perspective on life. Death as annihilation posed the greatest test of man's courage to be, as in the prose-poems “Shadow” (1835) and “Silence” (1837) and in “Sonnet — Silence” (1840). In the sonnet it is not the “corporate Silence” that terrifies but “the shadow neither of man, nor of God, nor of any familiar thing,” the shadow, ‘vague, and formless, and indefinite” that speaks in the dusky tones of “many thousand departed friends.” Similarly in “Silence,” which depicts the heroic Roman figure of Man as unafraid of his own loneliness and of the desolation and stormy hostility of nature. When confronted by a silent universe empty of life, however, the spirit of Man shudders and flees in terror, to the amused laughter of the Demon. Is this the laughter, at man's expense, of the demon ism of the universe? “And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out therefrom, and lay down at the feet of the Demon, and looked at him steadily in the face.” Does this conclusion mean that only the nonhuman can live with the demonism of the universe? that man cannot? that the silence of the universe of God is too much for thinking, aspiring Man to contemplate?

During the same period the three sea tales appeared, each an ultimate-quest journey in which Man is pitted against the Universe. In them the protagonist passes beyond his fear and terror to a characteristic and significant “curiosity” and feeling of awe when drawn into the whirlpool. In “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833), when the ship is caught in a current that carries it past towers of ice looking “like the walls of the universe,” the narrator feels less despair than curiosity, as if hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge — some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.” But when the quivering ship is sucked down into the vast whirlpool “amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest,” there is no time for him to ponder his fate — sudden death. At the end of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) the climax is even stranger. As the canoe rushes along through the milky, warm water and a shower of fine, white, ashy powder, Pym sees a luminous glare “from out the milky depths of the ocean,” and then as “a chasm threw itself open to receive us ... there arose in our path way a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” [page 11:] Three years later, in “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841), the crisis is elaborated and intensified, the narrator rising to such a pitch of curiosity that he considers his own life a paltry price to pay “in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God's power.” The grand revelation is described thus: “the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.” Though the moon's rays “seemed to search the very bottom of the profound gulf,” nothing was to be seen but a thick mist and a magnificent rainbow, “but the yell that went up to the Heavens from out of that mist I dare not attempt to describe.” If this shriek is the agonizing cry of Earth or Earth-beings to Heaven, there is no sign of response. God seems to be silent, indeed. In “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), the outcry comes from God Himself: “a shouting and pervading sound, as if from the mouth itself of HIM; while the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name. Thus ended all.” Does the ironic comment added by Eiros — ”let us bow down, Charmion, before the excessive majesty of the great God” — suggest that God's capacity for destroying his own creation is unlimited to the point of injustice and absurdity? Indeed, in these three cosmic fantasies is not Man an alien, fatefully in but not of the Universe?

In these existential fables the indifference of the Universe or of God to Man is met by something other than terror and resignation and hopelessness. Even when driven to despair and the certainty of death, the Poe hero marvels at the grand display of God's power — an esthetic-moral response — and is possessed with the keenest curiosity about the maelström itself, feeling positively “a wish to explore its depths” even at the risk of his life — a satisfaction of what Poe else where called “the unconquerable desire — to know.” This urge, this “sentiment of Intellectual Happiness,” Poe considered to be one form of “the sense of the beautiful, of the sublime, and of the mystical.”(5) Man's sense of “Discovery” or of illumination transforms terror and death into a great vision of cosmic reality, a vision of the Unconditioned as ultimate truth.

Ten or more years before Melville's Moby Dick, these epic narratives dramatized the cosmic destiny of Man. In “The Masque of the [page 12:] Red Death” (1842) Poe further depicted the theme of mortality as inevitable, as Death becomes one with the “ebony clock” of Time, no matter how gay and colorful the masquerade of life. “The Conqueror Worm” (1843) allegorizes the tragic nature of life. In “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) though the hero-victim is rescued in the nick of time, he has already suffered the horror of the man condemned to the pit and the pendulum, to the fear and dread of Time and the Abyss.

Because the name “Poe” conjures up ravens and black cats, we have seldom asked if Poe had any ideas about social and cultural man. On investigation it turns out that he had strong and definite convictions about his times. In general, he saw his society plagued by a number of ills and evils which cause man to become alienated from society, from himself, and from nature. Though present partially in the “fallen man” theme of “Al Aaraaf” the sick-society crisis is diagnosed rather inclusively in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841). Through the voice of Monos, Poe describes “man's general condition at this epoch” (c. 1840) as a period marked by the “evil days” of “general misrule,” of ugly industrialization, of the tyranny of the mechanical arts, which have chained the poetic intellect; of attempts at “omni prevalent Democracy,” with its idea of “universal equality” (as distinguished from the law of gradation); of the “leading evil, Knowledge” — that is, rational thinking “infected with system, and with abstraction”; of “the blind neglect” of Taste in the schools, and the substitution for it of “harsh mathematical reason.” During this time of “diseased commotion, moral and physical,” the pollution problem of “huge smoking cities” posed a lesser danger, in Poe's view, than the fact that the poets were scorned by the “utilitarians” and “rough pedants” of the day. The excesses of a misapplied rationalism in such a society not only exploited nature and corrupted cultural values but also upset the normal functioning of the basic faculties — intellect, taste, and moral sense — until the individual lost his taste for beauty and eventually his very integrity and wholeness. Acute psychic fragmentation and conflict resulted.

Man's only hope lay in achieving a reintegration of the self through a revitalization of taste or the poetic intellect, the faculty that unifies as well as creates. Because “we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools,” in that crisis “taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature and to Life. But alas for the pure contemplative spirit and the majestic intuition of Plato!” Lacking the [page 13:] creative and unifying sense of beauty and harmony, “the world of the mind” (Poe's later term for consciousness) suffered a psychic split. Man lost the “sentiment of the natural’; or as Emerson phrased it, he was “a god in ruins.”

If we understand that this social criticism was launched from deep convictions essentially cultural and religious in nature, we can better understand the tales and poems that dramatize psychic conflicts and compulsions. Later, in Eureka, Poe also attributed the feeling of confusion and lostness to the experience of growing up, for with “the epoch of Manhood” “comes the period at which a conventional World Reason awakens us from the truth of our dream. Doubt, Surprise, and Incomprehensibility arrive at the same moment,” especially the inability to believe in or naturally to feel “an identity with the Divine Being ... an identity with God,” along with the belief “that no one soul is inferior to another” and “that each soul is, in part, its own God — its own Creator.”

The psychic conflict, then, may have deeper roots than the loss of man's “proper identity,” to borrow a Lockean phrase from the final paragraph of Eureka. At any rate, at this time, 1839-1846, Poe had published “William Wilson,” “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” in that order. More than murder stories or tales of horror, these are tales of psychic and moral conflict, of moral alienation and self-destruction. The horror, like that of Conrad's Kurtz, is inward and spiritual. Each of the protagonists sooner or later encounters his conscience, embodied in the double of William Wilson, in the second black cat, and more subtly in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” As the conflict becomes pathological to the point of psychosis, the “imp” of conscience asserts itself as a compulsion to confess. In the most depraved of murderers, Poe seems to say, the moral sense cannot finally be denied. Indeed, without the urge to such self-confessional honesty, man has no moral identity; he is doomed to a life of restless hiding among the faceless mass of men, as in “The Man of the Crowd.” In “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845) Poe sets forth his theory of Irrational Man. Yet, though he attributes irrational behavior, especially violence against self or others, to “the spirit of the Perverse,” he does not assign to it any “intelligible principle.” He holds that perverseness might seem “a direct instigation of the arch-fiend, were it not occasionally known to operate in furtherance of good,” presumably illustrated by the [page 14:] narrator's dramatic confession that brings the discussion to a climax. From one standpoint, the speaker's impending execution seems the result of an ironically perverse confession. From another view his ad mission has perhaps saved his soul.

But then there is “The Cask of Amontillado,” surely a story coldly told. The calm tone of the narrator, his cool cunning in trapping his victim, his unruffled response at the moment of triumph — are not these the marks of total absence of any operative moral sense? Montresor has his revenge on the vain, boasting, affluent Fortunato. But the horrible murder itself remains excessive and a sadistic crime rather than a just revenge. Only in the final paragraph is Montresor's revulsion at his crime indicated: “My heart grew sick on account of the dampness of the catacombs. I hastened to make an end to my labor.” It is much more than the dampness that sickened Montresor, for the final three words, In pace requiescat! constitute a prayerful outcry for the narrator as well as his victim, as the former completes his compulsive account of a crime fifty years after the deed itself. Moreover, if Montresor envies Fortunato as the truly fortunate man — “rich, respected, admired, beloved,” and noble — then he has killed his own subconscious ideal. Deprived by his own hand and mind of the unified self, Montresor remains a divided, tormented soul. In recounting the murder in all its vivid, unforgotten detail, he testifies to the need to unburden his soul. Otherwise, he would be inhuman, diabolical; and, as Poe once observed, “Pure Diabolism is but Absolute Insanity.”(6)

 

Poe's most penetrating and comprehensive Vision of Man, the psychotranscendental, is dramatized in a group of stories published between 1835 and 1839. Whereas the murder stories originate in the breakdown of the self that is alienated from the moral sense or from its fellow man, these tales are transcendental dramas of cognition and precognition. Though they preceded the tales of murder and self destruction I have been discussing, they anticipate the vision which was to become fully conscious, explicit, and even obsessive during the last five years of Poe's career, when he wrote ‘”Mesmeric Revelation” (1844), the ‘”Marginalia” passage on “psychal fancies” (1846), “The Domain of Arnheim” (1847), Eureka (1848), “The [page 15:] Poetic Principle” (published in 1850), and a number of visionary poems. In effect, those works reaffirm the centrality of the vision that inspired “Berenice” and “Morella” (1835), “Ligeia” (1838) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). In these stories the essential conflict or experience is less psychological and moral than truly psychic, possibly even psychedelic, certainly hallucinatory in a mind expanding or “soul’-deepening way. To speak of any of them in terms of “female vampirism” (as do D. H. Lawrence and Allen Tate) or “black magic” (T. O. Mabbott) is to miss their real import. And to regard them as deliberately or unwittingly obscure, or to dismiss them as period examples of the Gothic or the Platonic or the Freudian is to overlook the meaningful pattern of images and motifs within a different structure of symbolism. When fully developed, the hero or heroine in these tales is typically an intense or poetic or philosophical intellect endowed with a special “psychal” insight or energy. If a poet or visionary, the protagonist is under what in “The Poetic Principle” Poe called “a wild effort to reach the Beauty above” through “brief and indeterminate glimpses.” Elsewhere, in another essay, the poet is said to seek “through long and wild vistas, dim bewildering visions of a far more ethereal beauty beyond” (the word “wild” here meaning deeply intuitive or imaginative).(7) Thus it is through the psychal intuitions that the poetic intellect may glimpse the transcendental and thereby achieve an attunement with the Spirit Divine.

What is hinted at in these passages and tales may better be under stood after reading ‘’Mesmeric Revelation” (1844), Poe's own recommended and, as he said, “somewhat detailed’ statement of “faith.” To judge by letters of the same year to Lowell and Chivers, the patient Vankirk in the story speaks for Poe himself, explaining that through the “painful metamorphosis” of death man passes from the “rudimental” or “ordinary” life into the “ultimate” life of “nearly unlimited perception” and “unlimited comprehension.” It is this transformation that Monos experiences in being “born again” into a new consciousness and unity of being. Two years later, in a “Marginalia” essay, Poe described his own “sleep-waking” intuitions as “psychal impressions,” which seemed to him “as if the five senses were supplanted by five myriad others alien to mortality.” Even if rare and precious, however, they might be “common to all mankind,” he added. In a May 1969 PMLA article on Poe's three “mesmeric tales,” of which “Mesmeric Revelation” is one, Doris V. Falk describes the power of animal magnetism as “ ‘psychedelic’ rather than psychological or [page 16:] moral,” operating “within the mind as a unifying and illuminating force.” In the “sleep-waking” state, Poe's term for deep hypnosis, consciousness may expand beyond ordinary limits. Poe's work, she notes, is filled with trance states variously induced by disease, pain, hunger, sensory deprivation, and drugs, as well as by mesmerism, leaving the patient (or the persona) on the margin of consciousness, and inducing heightened analytical power, poetic inspiration, or madness.

As early as the 1842 review of Longfellow's Ballads, Poe stressed the inevitable frustration of man's deep-seated hunger for Supernal Beauty, of which (he specified later, in “The Poetic Principle”) “through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.” And in Eureka, he stated that all men are conscious of having a “proper identity” and intelligence; they may also be aware “by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being ... of an identity with God.” When a man has a visionary “glimpse” of reality “beyond,” he becomes part of the “Divine Will” or Spirit that is God. Since “The Universe is a plot of God,” an “infinite individualization of Himself,” the unmediated cognition of the artist may achieve intuitions and visions of his identity with God-as-Life-Force and World Spirit. In Ligeia's words, “Are we not part and parcel of Thee?”

“Ligeia” (1838) dramatizes the struggle to attain to such a transcendental awareness as will result in this “identity with Divine Being ... an identity with God.” Like the husband of Morella, the narrator here clings to his sense of “proper identity” only, unable without constant guidance and inspiration from Ligeia to fathom what he calls “the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed.” When his brain reels from “the wild meaning of the quietly uttered words” of Ligeia, words expressive of “assumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known,” what is probably implied is the heretical idea of being “born again” by knowledge gained from trance states and other occult means rather than by orthodox faith. In his colloquy Monos remarks of the words ‘born again” that they are “the words upon whose mystical meaning I had so long pondered, rejecting the explanation of the priesthood, until Death himself resolved for me the secret.” In the phrase “forbidden fruit, death-producing” and the earlier reference to “a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden,” the word “forbidden” must allude to the mystical and occult writings proscribed by the Church [page 17:] and perhaps also to the psychic literature (on mesmerism, for instance) too dangerous to be played with by amateurs. Thus the message of Vankirk's revelation becomes the reality of Monos's and Ligeia's experience.

Not until after Ligeia's death does the narrator become a vision ary, first with the help of opium, and then — when “my soul was awakened within me” — when he gives himself up to “passionate waking visions of Ligeia.” In his climactic “shriek” of realization, he recognizes “the full, and the black, and the wild eyes” of the risen figure to be the eyes of Ligeia, the same deep and luminous eyes that, combined with her low voice, formerly put him under a spell. Now her “luminous” eyes not only re-establish their power over him but also prove the efficacy of his own psychic response. With his new psychal insight, he is reunited with the Ligeia depths in himself. Through this spiritual attunement, he has achieved “an identity with God” as the immanent “Spirit Divine” described in Eureka and “Mesmeric Revelation,” and according to the principle that “each soul is, in part, its own God — its own Creator.” Thus Ligeia's will, “part and parcel” of the Divine Will, demonstrates the truth of the Glanvill text for this story: “Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), a year after “Ligeia,” is undoubtedly Poe's greatest story, the last and the most complex of the tales of vision. It is the only one of these tales in which three instead of two major characters appear and function symbolically; and of course the house itself, with its cracked outer wall, stands for both the split Self and for the Usher family line or “House.” Being twins, as well as brother and sister, Roderick and Madeline seem in tended as complementary components of the Self. Madeline's illness and entombment, comparable to the illness and death of Ligeia, symbolize the suppression of the deeper self by the amoral and over refined sensibility of her brother. Roderick's lack of vital, moral energy has left him introverted, weak, and decadent, unable to realize his great psychal potential. This potential is suggested by “an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple,” by “an eye, large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison,” and by certain other features symbolic of the artist. The latent power of Roderick's imagination is also hinted at in “the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar” and by the awe-inspiring abstractions of his fanciful paintings. His library and his intense conviction of the sentience of all organic and inorganic [page 18:] matter further imply a belief in animism and pantheism — unknown spiritual powers in nature that can affect man.

Shortly after Madeline's entombment, there is a marked change in Roderick: he becomes restless, his eye no longer luminous, his voice no longer “husky” (i.e., deep, controlled, and strong). Anxiety and dread culminate in his guilty outburst, “Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste?” When “the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher” appears in her blood-stained white robes, trembling and reeling on the threshold, and “with a low moaning cry” collapses in death upon her brother, the key words “lofty,” “enshrouded,” “Lady,” “white,” “trembling,” “reeling” do not suggest black magic, or a female vampire, or an incestuous embrace, as often claimed or assumed. Her entombment directly below the sleeping rooms of Roderick and his guest suggests that Madeline personifies Roderick's neglected and suppressed psychal and moral energy. Organically interdependent in spirit Roderick and Madeline are like Siamese twins in soul if not in body. The death of Madeline of necessity means the death of Roderick, paralleling “William Wilson,” where the death of the conscience-psyche results in the death of the whole being. This fatal consequence is further symbolized by the splitting apart and the sinking of the fragments of the House itself.

At this same time, under the Gothic climax to the story, there lurks a countertheme, the gradual but rapidly intensified psychic awakening of Roderick. When he cries out, more to himself than to his guest, “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” Madeline, as if by supernatural means, appears upon the “threshold,” the threshold of Roderick's consciousness. At which point Roderick “shrieks out” his revelation (as do also the narrators in “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” and “The Raven”) when he recognizes the revenant to be “the lady Madeline of Usher,” his vital complementary psycho-moral “soul.” This seemingly mad shriek conveys the excitement that is actually “the elevating excitement of the soul” undergoing a psychal vision. This countertheme is reinforced and extended by the final paragraph, in which the narrator's “brain reeled” from the cumulative effect of the widening crack in the House, of the whirlwind, and of the bursting forth of the blood-red moon. In the “wild light” of the receding storm, the narrator, too, undergoes a final vision: the symbolic splitting asunder and sinking of the House of Usher into the “deep and dank tarn” at his feet. As the fragments of the House disappear, “there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice [page 19:] of a thousand waters,” echoing the “shouting” sound in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” and the two whirlpool stories dis cussed earlier, as if here Poe wished to relate the psychic and the cosmic levels of realization. Is this apocalyptic scene merely gratuitous Gothicism or does it hint that the psychic and the transcendent are finally related?

If in the trance state, cause and effect become one, it should not be surprising that these tales of vision look inward, into the psyche or subconscious as means, and also beyond, to the transcendental as end. In view of the central significance of these tales, it is regrettable that Poe composed no more such fiction after 1839. “Eleonora” (1841), “The Island of the Fay” (1841), “William Wilson” (1845), and “The Domain of Arnheim” (1847) seem to be partial, lesser realizations of the full psycho-transcendental vision. And though Eureka (1848) is addressed “to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities,” and is presented as “a Romance” and ‘”’a Poem,” it is hardly a dream-vision of the same sort as these tales. In Poe: Journalist and Critic (Baton Rouge, 1969) Robert Jacobs remarks that “the ideal, as Poe interpreted it in his later years, was to be found only in music or in lyric poetry. It was something that happened in the mind and could only be recognized as a psychic response ... participation in the experience of such a poem required highly developed sensibility” (pp. 442-443). Jacobs considers “The Raven” as open to such a response by the sophisticated reader. Of the late poems I would regard “Ulalume,” “For Annie,” and “Eldorado” also as vision poems. “For Annie,” for instance, should be read as a companion piece or a sequel to the early “To Helen” in that the same lost soul has returned to his native shore, to his Helen-Ligeia, and his heart now “glows with the light/Of the love of my Annie — / With the thought of the light/ Of the eyes of my Annie,” concluding lines which, in the context of the foregoing discussion, surely do not suggest death as a comfort, as one noted Poe critic maintains.

Without insisting on mutually exclusive stages in this survey, one might conclude that Poe's vision changed from the Platonism and the retrospective Pastoralism of the early poems to a vision of Man as an existential suffering hero at both the cosmic and the cultural-moral levels. Meanwhile, in the years 1835 to 1839 and again in 1844 to 1849, the psychal drive developed into his major “transcendental” theme. According to that vision, Man may again become whole by tapping the powers of his spiritual preconscious or psyche, thereby [page 20:] finding harmony within himself, with his world, and with the Divine Will or Life Force, the “great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness,” words more Poe's than Glanvill's, I suspect. To the extent that the artist-self is capable of such a deep, psychic response, “each soul is, in part, its own God — its own creator” and thus potentially able to achieve a transcendental “identity with God.” The central theme in Poe's work, then, is not so much death and annihilation, as the spiritual rebirth or rediscovery of the lost psychal power essential to every man and artist seeking his fullest self-realization.

[page 20, continued:]

NOTES

The first version of this paper was delivered as a Convocation Day address for the Poe Festival held at Nassau Community College, Long Island, New York, in late March 1969. This present essay is, in turn, an amplification of a paper on the same topic given at the Modern Language Association meetings on 27 December 1969. None of the earlier versions has been published.

1 See D. H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe”; Allen Tate, “The Angelic Imagination”; and Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,” rpt. in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor, 1966).

2 The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 1, 257, 260.

3 From a review of Drake-Halleck, 1836.

4 See “Edgar Allan Poe,” The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe.

5 From a review of Drake-Halleck, 1836.

6 “Marginalia,” 1849.

7 From a review of Thomas Moore's Alciphron, 1840.