Text: aaaaa, “Poe and Romantic Irony,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 28-41

[page 28, unnumbered:]

G. R. Thompson

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

 

Poe and “Romantic Irony”

 

 

POE'S CONSCIOUS tradition has been the subject of a good deal of research, speculation, and puzzlement. Although T. S. Eliot considered Poe in his verse to be a minor follower of the English Romantic poets Byron and Shelley and in his fiction to follow the Gothic novelists, he thought that Poe's tradition was actually neither English nor American but instead a kind of “displaced” Europeanism.(1) The assumption of historical scholarship is that we see a writer correctly only when we see him in his context, in his milieu. But often, once we have established the categories of a tradition, we tend to force writers into those categories, and historically influenced studies of Poe have been directed by the preconception of Poe as Gothicist. Critics and scholars have simply not known what to do with the disturbing fact that half of Poe's tales are comic and satiric — indeed, are almost arithmetically balanced off, not only in total numbers (thirty-five to thirty-three), but also alternating in nearly symmetrical patterns of twos and threes throughout Poe's twenty-year career.(2) [page 29:]

Thus, we read of the influence of Coleridge, Byron, and Moore, and of Hood, Cowper, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, De Quincey. We read of the impact of the occult and the pseudo-sciences, of mesmerism, spiritualism, metempsychosis, cosmic revelation, and phrenology. We read of the Gothicism of Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Godwin, Beckford, Brown, and even of Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Disraeli. We read also of Poe's “Germanism,” of his gloomy version of the “idealism” that began with Kant and ran through Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, and others to manifest itself in England in Coleridge and Carlyle; and we read in general of his debt to dark German novelists like E. T. A. Hoffmann.(3)

But we less often read how Poe used these materials. In a series of recent explications, I have argued that we need a new way of reading Poe, that we must see him not simply as a Gothicist but as an Ironist — indeed, as a special kind of Ironist. I have, for example, discussed the satiric parallels between Poe's purposefully flawed Gothic technique in his first “Gothic” tale ‘”Metzengerstein” and his earliest satires in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier.(4) I have attempted detailed readings of several of the Gothic stories, in the context of a synthesis of the views of a small number of perceptive critics, in an effort to show the ironic double and triple perspectives to the tales: how they are Gothic on a surface level, psychological on a second level, and burlesque on yet a third level. “Ligeia,” for instance, can be read simultaneously as a supernaturalistic tale of metempsychosis and as a psychological study of the delusions of a madman, since we perceive everything through the narrator's eyes.(5) In addition, there are ironic reversals and absurdities that suggest that Poe is satirizing the very genre to which the tale belongs.(6) “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be read similarly, as the dual hallucination of the narrator and of Usher; although the presence of the narrator would seem to provide objective verification of the reality of the strange events, it becomes clear on a careful rereading that the hysteria of Roderick Usher has “infected” and “terrified” the narrator so that at the end he is no reliable witness.” “The Cask of Amontillado,” too, has its dramatic irony: Montresor, rather than having gotten away with his revenge on Fortunato, has actually failed, on both terms he himself sets up, to wreak his revenge. First, the drunken Fortunato never quite understands precisely what is happening to him or why; and then, Montresor, far from escaping with “impunity” suffers a fifty years’ ravage of conscience over his murder of his enemy.(8) “The Man of the Crowd,” rather than being merely the [page 30:] tale of a sinister Romantic Wanderer, possibly the demoniac emissary from another world, who haunts the populated areas of a large city during the whole course of a night and into dawn, may be also read as the deluded romanticizing of the tipsy narrator, who attributes dark significance to the wanderings of an old drunk. “The Oval Portrait,” on the surface a Gothic tale about the transfer of life from a living per son to a painting, can also be read as the delusion of the narrator who is delirious from pain and lack of sleep.(9) “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” also ostensibly a story of metempsychosis, is, more subtly, a murder story in which all the characters are duped regarding the reality of events.(10)

Such examples can be multiplied tenfold. In fact, each and every Gothic tale written by Poe can be demonstrated to have at least three simultaneous levels of meaning: supernaturalistic, psychological, and absurdist. Even Eureka, Poe's booklength essay on the universe, which seems to affirm some harmonious “design” to the flux of the cosmos, is actually an elaborate conceit on “Nothingness,” and, as well, contains some of Poe's most subtle, complex, and trenchant satire.(11) The world view and habit of mind that emerge from these works are ones which see the human mind trying vainly to perceive order in a universe that constantly shifts its aspect. Reality is a flux variously interpreted or even created by the individual mind. But the human mind in Poe's cosmology is “perverse,” that is, capable of self-vexation and instant irrationality and delusion. From this trap of subjectivity there is only one avenue of escape — that of artistic “irony.”

Rather than presenting a detailed explication of the ironies of any individual work, I wish here to assume as demonstrable the exegetical validity of such an approach and instead sketch in a theoretical and historical context for such an ironic reading of Poe's works by exploring an aspect of “German” Romanticism never mentioned in connection with Poe. Indeed, almost never mentioned in connection of any American Romanticist, despite the pervasiveness of these ideas in the Romantic age.(12)

One of the distinctive features of German Romanticism was the development of a comic perspective, eventually reflected in Coleridge, Carlyle, and Hazlitt, whom Poe read, along with the latest translations of German works. This apprehension of the comic, the ironic, and the absurd in an otherwise melancholy and even sinister world has come to be called, rather loosely, “Romantic Irony.” And what is striking about German Romanticism in relation to Poe, I submit, is not Gothic [page 31:] gloom and horror, but the theories of the Romantic Ironists about the subconscious mind, about “objective subjectivity,” about the ultimate “annihilation” of contradictions through an ironic art, and about the idealistic “transcendence” of earthly limitations through the Godlike immanence and detachment of the artistic mind.(13) These ideas can be found in two of Poe's favorite German writers, the dramatist and novelist Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845), the two figures most clearly associated (outside of Germany) with the theories and practices of Romantic Irony.

The simplest meaning of Romantic Irony is found in the technique of mocking or destroying illusion in the fiction and drama of certain German writers at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The technique is allied to satire and parody, and Ludwig Tieck's youthful plays, in which the main interest is satire aimed at eighteenth-century rationalism and sentiment, contain some of the clearest examples of this technique. In Tieck's hands, it reveals a development toward an “objective” philosophy of irony through an increasingly “subjective” treatment of reality.(14) In Puss in Boots (1797), for example, Tieck begins the deliberate breaking of the illusion immediately with a prologue in which members of a make-believe “audience” express fears that the play they have come to see may lack “good taste.” The “author” then appears on stage to reassure them. When Puss begins to speak, the “audience” objects that a talking cat destroys dramatic illusion; and throughout the play the “audience” thus interrupts the action, so destroying illusion. The same effect is achieved as the characters in the play as well as the audience break into the action to discuss the merits of the piece. The audience expresses views the opposite of Tieck's (which the real audience must infer); the “good taste” it wants in the play is for Tieck bad taste: the moralizing sentimentalities of popular dramatists like A. F. von Kotzebue (1761-1819). A similar ironic structure is seen again when the cat talks with a burlesque grandiloquence that causes his master to call him “sublime friend” just before the cat climbs up to the roof to stalk pigeons. “As in a series of mirrors, there is endless romantic-ironic reflection and re reflection.”(15) The work achieves its meaning as a flickering structure of formal as well as situational ironies.

Poe has often been praised for his recognition of Hawthorne's pre-eminence as a writer of tales, but he seems to have thought Tieck an even better writer than Hawthorne. In his second, cooler, but still commendatory review of Hawthorne in 1847, Poe wrote that Hawthorne's [page 31:] “originality” is more apparent than actual since he does what has already been done by “the German Tieck:”

Poe's italics here reflect his belief in a variety of effect; Tieck is not only the more original of the two even in Hawthorne's own special province, he is also capable of greater variety.

Ten years earlier, in the tale “Von Jung, the Mystic” (1837), a tale that begins more or less seriously and ends comically, Poe had made the hero a cousin of Tieck, commenting (in the person of the narrator) that Tieck has given us ‘vivid exemplifications” in the genre of “grotesquerie” (Works, IV, 103). Poe's narrator also says that Tieck's works are not quite the “most vivid” exemplifications of the Grotesque (there is little doubt who Poe thought was more vivid in “grotesquerie” than Tieck), but such comments suggest that Poe had read Tieck well (cf. also Works, XVI, 42). Indeed, it is hard not to wish that Poe might have reviewed each of the translations of Tieck as they appeared in America. The World Turned Topsy-Turvy (1799), for example, is an allegorical burlesque, structured around a number of form-breaking ironies, that Poe would have found attractive. The play is indeed topsy-turvy: an epilogue opens it; a prologue closes it; a spectator becomes an actor and yet remains a spectator; and the stage represents a stage. Moreover, in all this, we find a development toward the psychological, or what the Romanticists called the “Nightside” of nature, eerie because of its non-rational aspects — aspects which suggest gloomy subconscious delusion.(17) In Topsy-Turvy, which is still principally satire, we find the speculation:

This interest in the human mind, both conscious and subconscious, and the problem of subjectivity and reality soon led to a concept of “objectivity” as ironic detachment. [page 33:]

It is this other more philosophical development of Romantic Irony, coming off the openly mocking irony we have just examined, that is Poe's tradition in his Gothic tales. It found its initial literary form in the subtly ambivalent presentation of the weird in the distinctively German genre of the “Grotesque,” a genre which slyly insinuated double and triple perspectives in a vision closely associated with Gothic horror. Romantic Irony became intricately involved with metaphysical speculation on the objective and the subjective, on imagination, delusion, reality, and on a transcendental mastery of the world and oneself through a clearsighted, ambivalent detachment.

The principal German literary theorist for Poe was A. W. Schlegel; Schlegel was in fact the most influential of the German critics outside of Germany. The principal influence Schlegel is supposed to have had on Poe, however, was the doctrine of “unity” or “totality” of effect.(19) Indeed, Poe gives Schlegel credit for this influence several times in his reviews.(20) What is less obvious and far more important is Schlegel's conception of irony — derived from the work of his brother Friedrich — but articulated at length in the famous Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, which were first translated into English in 1815.

The evidence that Poe read A. W. Schlegel's Lectures carefully is conclusive. In September 1835 (at the age of twenty-four), Poe re viewed the “Classical Family Library” translation of Euripides for the Southern Literary Messenger, and nearly everything he has to say about Greek drama is a clear echo of A. W. Schlegel, often closely parallel in phrasing to John Black's 1815 translation. Moreover, Poe seems to have tried very hard to conceal his indebtedness, for he carefully avoids mentioning Schlegel directly until the end of the review, so that the reference seems to be brought in casually for the sake of another critic's reinforcing view rather than to acknowledge the derived ideas of the whole essay.(21) But elsewhere, Poe admits his indebtedness, usually with extravagant praise, though sometimes with ambivalent criticisms similar to his comments on Coleridge.

Even if Poe had read nothing else of German criticism, A. W. Schlegel's Lectures would have introduced him to the concept of “transcendental irony.” A general survey of the contents of the Lectures reveals discussion in Lecture III of the essence of the comic, in X of satirical drama, in XI of mixed comedy and parody, the ideality of the comic, mirthful caprice, and the perception of the absurd in the serious, in XIII of the varieties of comedy, self-consciousness and arbitrariness in comedy, and the morality of comedy, in XXIII of far-fetched metaphor, [page 34:] puns, word-play, objective irony, and mixtures of the tragic and the comic, and in XXVIII a discussion of English comic writers, as well as briefer commentary on the comic and ironic throughout.(22)

But perhaps the most striking quality of Schlegel's Lectures is Romantic melancholy yoked together with admiration for ironic and comic “objectivity.” Writing of the intimate (even metaphysical) connection between the tragic and the comic, Schlegel suggested that man's “reason” and “consciousness” are the bases of both the tragic and the comic sense of life. Whereas animals have no self-consciousness, man's reason forces him to try to account for things, especially his own actions. But a “longing for the infinite which is inherent in our being is baffled by the limits of finite existence.” In a remark that is highly suggestive of Poe, Schlegel added, “All that we do, all that we effect, is vain and perishable; death stands everywhere in the background ...” (III, 45). When we think of our dependence on a “chain of causes and effects, stretching beyond our ken,” of our helplessness against the power of nature, of our conflicting appetites, we see that “we are cast on the shores of an unknown world, as it were, shipwrecked at our very birth ... we are subject to all kinds of errors and deceptions, any one of which may be our ruin.” Although “poetry cannot remove these internal dissonances, she must at least endeavour to effect an ideal reconciliation of them” (III, 46).

The “comic” tone of mind, on the other hand, said Schlegel, is merely a “disposition” to forget “all gloomy considerations in the pleasant feeling of present happiness.” The “imperfections and the irregularities of men ... serve, by their strange inconsistencies, to entertain the understanding. ...”

But the mind that truly transcends the contradictions of life is one like that of the old “‘ironist,” Socrates. To illustrate the quality of mind that understands the “inmost essence of things,” Schlegel used an incident from the Symposium (one of Poe's favorite works). Having drunk all but Aristophanes and Agathon under the table, Socrates claimed that (in Schlegel's words) “it is the business of one and the same man to be equally the master of tragic and comic composition, and that the tragic poet is, in virtue of his art, comic poet also” (XI, 146). Since, according to Schlegel, no Greek tragic poet had ever attempted to “shine in comedy,” Socrates’

Schlegel then suggested that the comic poet forms “an ideal of human nature the direct opposite of that of the tragedians” but that this “converse ideality” is not an aggregation of “moral enormities” but instead is a representation of ‘the animal part of human nature ... that want of freedom and independence, that want of coherence, those inconsistencies of the inward man, in which all folly and infatuation originate” (XI, 148).

Schlegel next, in a passage that should give us some insight into Poe's “flawed” Gothic (one need only recall “The Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning” in “Usher”), took up the matter of interruptions and “inter mixtures” in comic and tragic writing. In tragedy they destroy the effect; but “to the comic tone these intentional interruptions or inter mezzos are welcome, even though they be in themselves serious” (XI, 151). The mixture of the two genres as in classical “New Comedy” results in a merging of “earnestness and mirth” in which “the ridiculous must no longer come forward as the pure creation of his [the poet's] fancy, but must be verisimilar, that is, seem to be real” (XIII, 176-177). New Comedy was “a mixed species, formed out of comic and tragic, poetic and prosaic elements” that aimed at the illusion of reality and therefore sought sources of comic amusement not in arbitrary exaggeration but in the “province of earnestness”; and these sources “it found in a more accurate and thorough delineation of character” (XIII, 183). Comparing the ancient writers and the modern, Schlegel concluded that the modern Romantic mind “delights in indissoluable mixtures; all contrarieties’:

This combination of contrasts, this continual crossing of opposites, is modern man's attempt to regain the immediacy of perception that ancient man once possessed. Thus metaphor can never be too fantastic; wordplay, puns, contradictions in the works of a poet show a sensitivity to distant relationships that may mirror the whole universe. The “feeling of moderns is, upon the whole, more inward ... incorporeal, and ... contemplative.” Instead of the Greek ideal of “natural” harmony,

In the natural genius of the modern age, then, we find a union of apparently antagonistical elements held together by a cool indifference best characterized as irony. Shakespeare, for example, ‘unites in his soul the utmost elevation and the utmost depth; and the most opposite and even apparently irreconcilable subsist in him peaceably together” (XXIII, 368).

This technique of multiple perspectives or points-of-view Schlegel called a “secret irony of characterization” commanding high admiration; it is “the profound abyss of acuteness and sagacity; but it is the grave of enthusiasm.” We arrive at this ironic detachment

Most writers take a point-of-view and “exact from their readers a blind approbation or condemnation of whatever side they choose to support or oppose.” The irony of Shakespeare's writing, however, “has not merely a reference to the separate characters, but frequently to the whole of the action.” Shakespeare makes

Thus the ironist, in Schlegel's terms, is much like the great artist in Poe's review of Elizabeth Barrett in 1845; he follows extremes, comes back upon himself, and holds within himself a “fortuitous ... combination of antagonisms” (Works, XII, 34).

In this one book then — by a critic from whom Poe borrowed theoretical principles of beauty, melancholy ideality, “mystical” in direction, and unity or totality of interest or effect, and from whom Poe stole practical criticism — is a rationale of the comic and ironic blended with Romantic idealism that quite clearly fits Poe into that “vortex” of “German” ideas at which he ambivalently gibed in Marginalia (Works, XVI, 304). In A. W. Schlegel's Lectures alone, Poe found Romantic-Ironic principles of melancholy idealism, and a yearning for sublime beauty even in discord and deformity; a fascination with death as the ultimate fact of existence; a belief in the illusiveness of truth, in human alienation from actuality, and in the “one-sidedness” of all “serious” statements. He found a doctrine of unrestrained fancy in the genre of pure comedy and of “verisimilitude” in the mixed genre of the serio-comic. He found an emphasis on a literary technique of indirection involving a deceptive and even ‘”'secret” irony clear only to the reader of superior perceptions; concern for character portrayal within a meaningful plot and with emphasis on “internal discord,” “self-deception,” and multiple reflections and perspectives. He found a belief in the explorations of novelty through contrasts of incident, through fanciful and even fantastic metaphor, symbol, punning, and [page 38:] general wordplay. And he found, finally, a concept of a superior mind transcending the gloomy chaos of the world through artistic ironic detachment.

Slightly earlier, about 1800, August Wilhelm's brother Friedrich had conjoined the terms “irony” and “transcendentalism.” “Irony” was the process of “transcending” both the illusions of the world and the delusions of one's own limited mind. Such “transcendence” of the visible world and of the self was, for Schlegel, achieved through a sense of the comic and the absurd in the serious. By comparing successive phases of our own stupidity and shrewdness, Schlegel suggested, we evolve successively superior versions of the self, a true sense of “Irony.” Such a true sense of irony is the perception or creation of a succession of contrasts between the ideal and the real, the serious and the comic, the sinister and the absurd, through which the “transcendental ego” can ambivalently mock its own convictions and productions from the height of the ‘ideal.” As Poe remarked in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1845), one wants in dark and fantastic composition to approach “as nearly to the ludicrous as [is] admissible” (Works, XIV, 205); and to such ironic interplay of contradictions Schlegel gave the name “Arabesque.”(23)

Poe's 1840 title, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, takes on new meaning when seen in this context. Poe's idea of the “Arabesque” was the same as the Schlegels’ and derived from them; the formal structures and the metaphysical vision implied are fundamental to an understanding of Poe's tales. And thus we should come to that suspiciously “flawed” effect characteristic of Poe's “Gothic” tales with a sense of purpose, not of censure. For what we find in Poe, coming out of this distinctively European context, is a habit of mind basically “skeptical,” despite its immersion in the Gothic and the Nightside. In trying somehow to locate Poe in the Romantic era we must have reference to the theories and practice of Romantic Irony. As Wimsatt and Brooks have occasion to note in Literary Criticism: A Short History, the “transcendental ego” of the Dark Romantics remains “aloof from fixation or satisfaction at any level of insight,” and their examples of “dark irony” are perhaps more accurate than they may have realized: “... this irony might be very dark, sardonic, misanthropic; the hero stood with cloak pulled round his shoulder thrust out into the cold blast — a Byronic and Poesque figure” (p. 380). Perhaps an ultimate irony is that while in such works as “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” “Loss of [page 39:] Breath,” and in his reviews, Poe mercilessly satirized the American transcendentalists, Poe also — though in a very different way, as I have tried to suggest here — was an American “transcendentalist.”

[page 39, continued:]

NOTES

1 “From Poe to Valéry,” To Criticize the Critic (New York, 1965), p. 29.

2 See my discussion in the “Introduction” to Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Poems, Tales, Criticism (New York, 1970), pp. 3-5.

3 For a general survey see the bibliographies, notes, and discussions in Vincent Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1961), Chapters II-III; Edward Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man behind the Legend (New York, 1963), Chapters III-IV; Haldeen Braddy, Glorious Incense: The Fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe (Washington, D.C., 1953), Chapters I-II, pp. 30 ff.; Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe (1933; rpt. New York, 1962), pp. 99-125, 147-186. I have in mind the historical studies of Darrel Abel, Margaret Alterton, Roy P. Basler, Boyd Carter, Palmer Cobb, Clark Griffith, Gustav Gruener, Ruth L. Hudson, Edward Hungerford, Hoover H. Jordan, Lucille King, George Kummer, Marvin Laser, Ernest E. Leisy, Sidney E. Lind, Albert J. Lubell, T. O. Mabbott, Percy Matenko, R. L. Rhea, James Routh, Floyd Stovall, Celia Whitt, and others.

4 “Poe's ‘Flawed’ Gothic: Absurdist Techniques in ‘Metzengerstein’ and the Courier Satires,” ESQ, No. 60 (Fall Supplement 1970), 38-58. Reprinted New Approaches to Poe: A Symposium, ed. Richard P. Benton (Hartford, Conn., 1970).

5 See, notably, Roy P. Basler, “The Interpretation of ‘Ligeia,” College English, V (April 1944), 363-372; James Schroeter in his aptly titled “A Misreading of Poe's ‘Ligeia, “ PMLA, (Sept. 1961), 397-406, misreads the story point by point, unintentionally confirming Basler's argument. See also my discussion in “Introduction” to Great Short Works of Poe, pp. 22-26.

6 See Clark Griffith, “Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XXIV (Oct. 1954), 8-25.

7 See Darrel Abel, “A Key to the House of Usher,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XVIII (Jan. 1949), 176-185; and also John S. Hill, “The Dual Hallucination in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,” Southwestern Review, XLVIII (Autumn 1963), 396-402, who briefly presents the logical extension of Abel's brilliant analysis of the hysteria of the narrator. Also see I. M. Walker, “The ‘Legitimate Sources’ of Terror in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,” Modern Language Review, LXI (Oct. 1966), 585-592, who extends the psychological reading by noting what were then believed to be the hallucinatory properties of “miasma” or “marsh gas”; the House of Usher, of course, is enveloped in such miasma. Also see “Introduction,” Great Short Works of Poe, pp. 34-36. For an overview of Poe's use of the first-person perspective, see James W. Gargano, “The Question of Poe's Narrators,” College English, XXV (Dec. 1963), 177-181.

8 See Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie L. Lewis, “The Nature of Fiction,” Introduction to Literature: Stories (New York, 1963), pp. 2-9, and “Introduction,” Great Short Works of Poe, pp. 19-20.

9 See my article “Dramatic Irony in ‘The Oval Portrait’ A Reconsideration of Poe's Revisions,” English Language Notes, VI (Dec. 1968), 107-114. [page 40:]

10 See my article “Is Poe's ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ a Hoax?” Studies in Short Fiction, VI (Summer 1969), 454-460.

11 See my article “Unity, Death, and Nothingness — Poe's ‘Romantic Skepticism,” PMLA, LXXXV (March 1970), 297-300; and Harriet Holman, “Hog, Bacon, Ram, and Other ‘Savans’ in Eureka: Notes toward Decoding Poe's Encyclopedic Satire,” Poe Newsletter, II (Oct. 1969), 49-55.

12 John Seelye in Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston, Illinois, 1970) mentions Melville's “sympathy with the forms and attitudes of romantic irony” (p. 2), derived from his reading of Coleridge and the Schlegels on Shakespeare; but he drops the idea after this hint. Alfred A. Marks in “German Romantic Irony in Hawthorne's Tales,” Symposium, VII (Nov. 1953), 274-304, is the only other critic I am aware of who has seen the significance of Romantic Irony for American Romanticists.

13 The present essay is an expansion of the paper I presented, under the same title, to Seminar 60 (Poe and Dark Romanticism) of the Modern Language Association National Meeting, Denver, December 1969; and a condensation of a chapter in a forthcoming mono graph, Poe's Romantic Irony. The following works contain discussions of “Romantic Irony”: Morton L. Gurewitch, “European Romantic Irony” (Unpub. Ph. D. Diss., Columbia University, 1957); Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung (Tübingen, 1960); Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919; rpt. New York, 1955); M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1958); Douglas C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (New York, 1969); G. G. Sedgwick, Of Irony (Toronto, 1948); A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1948); Oskar Walzel, German Romanticism, trans. Alma Elise Lussky (New York, 1932); René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950 (New Haven, 1955- ), Vol. II, “The Romantic Age”; Robert M. Wernaer, Romanticism and the Romantic School in Germany (New York, 1910); William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York and London, 1957/64); and several studies of Ludwig Tieck, in whom, by stages, almost all the ideas of German Romanticism are reflected — A. E. Lussky, Tieck's Romantic Irony (Chapel Hill, 1932); Percy Matenko, Tieck and Solger: The Complete Correspondence (New York and Berlin, 1933) and Ludwig Tieck and America (Chapel Hill, 1954); E. H. Seydel, Ludwig Tieck and England (Princeton, 1931) and Ludwig Tieck, the German Romanticist: A Critical Study (Princeton, 1935). To judge by the number of translations available at the time, Tieck seems to have been one of the most popular of the German Romanticists both in England and America; see Percy Matenko, Ludwig Tieck and America, pp. 38-47; Seydel, pp. 182-220; and V. Stockley, German Literature as Known in England 1750-1830 (London, 1929), p. 321. A. W. Schlegel, though less known as a Romantic Ironist in Germany, was the major purveyor of German Romanticism to the non-German world, including the theories of irony, though he was less a theorist on the matter than his brother Friedrich Schlegel. The matter of translation is important since Poe's ability to read German, despite his frequent quotations, has been seriously questioned. See Palmer Cobb's third chapter, “Poe's Knowledge of the German Language and German Literature,” in The Influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (Chapel Hill, 1908), pp. 20-30, for a consideration of Poe's ability to read German. Cobb thinks that Poe could read German, but he points out the rather amazing number of translations from German literature and criticism in Poe's day, as has Albert J. Lubell in “Poe and A. W. Schlegel,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LII (Jan. 1953), 1-12, German culture, they both have concluded, was at its highest point in America during and just after Poe's lifetime; but see Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America (Madison, Wis., 1957).

14 A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock, pp. 51 ff., uses Tieck's plays to illustrate the simple Romantic Irony, and I follow him, for the most part, in this brief discussion of the plays. Translated passages from Tieck's plays, unless otherwise cited, are his. [page 41:]

15 Oskar Walzel, German Romanticism, p. 226; an interesting metaphor that parallels Allen Tate's depiction of Poe's recurrent persona as a “forlorn demon” endlessly repeated in a series of mirrors.

16 The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (1902; rpt. New York, 1965), XIII, 144. Hereafter cited as Works in parenthesis in the text. Also see my note “Poe's Readings of Pelham,” American Literature, XLI (May 1969), 251-255, for another speculation on Poe's awareness of Tieck, especially his admiration for Tieck's ability to misquote comically.

17 Walzel, pp. 245-254; Abrams, pp. 211 ff.

18 Translated Thompson, 58-59. Topsy-Turvy and Puss were translated during Poe's time.

19 See Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel,” 1-12; and Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (1925; rpt. New York, 1965), passim, esp. pp. 30-35 ff., 68-78 ff.

20 See Works, VIII, 46-47, 126; IX, 202; X, 65, 116; XI,5, 79,5250 8X48 XIV, 62, 180; XVI, 117, 144; and XI, 5 and XVI, 117, for Poe's main references to the Schlegels.

21 See A. J. Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel,” p. 11. Lubell, careful at first about charging Poe with plagiarism, is not quite as clear as he might be. He writes that Poe must have known Schlegel's work because he praises R. H. Horne's introduction to a translation published in 1840 (Works, XI, 249 ff.). But Lubell finally concludes, after presenting parallel passages, that “it is quite obvious” that Poe stole from Schlegel (probably from the British translation of 1815 or the American edition printed in 1833). The review of Euripides is in Works, VIII, 43-47; ref. to Schlegel, 47.

22 Schlegel's Lectures was translated repeatedly from 1815 on. My copy is A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, “by Augustus William Schlegel,” trans. John Black, rev. A. J. W. Morrison (London, 1846). References are by chapter and page number in parentheses in the text.

23 See Wimsatt and Brooks, p. 379; Wellek, II, 16-17 ff.