Text: William Mentzel Forrest, “Mysticism,” Biblical Allusions in Poe, 1928, pp. 33-54 (This material may be protected by copyright)


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[page 33:]

III

MYSTICISM

Poe's mysticism is but indirectly related to religion. An exhaustive study of it would carry us too fax afield. It is a quality often denied him. His clearness of vision, his mathematical precision, his powers of analysis and expression, have been said to proclaim him out of sympathy with mysticism.(1) In order to test the truth of the claim it is necessary to define the sense in which the word mysticism is used, and then see whether Poe is fairly within its limits. That and a consideration of some of Poe's biblical resemblances therein is the task of the present chapter.

Being a somewhat vague word, mysticism has been defined in a great variety of ways. But underlying nearly all the definitions and all the popular conceptions of its meaning will be found the idea of a dreamer concerning himself with remote and hidden things. Makers of allegories touching life and the Scriptures are called mystics. Dealers in the occult and spiritualistic are called mystics. Revelers in [page 34:] ecstatic fervors and fantastic fancies are called mystics. Worshipers of the beautiful as a manifestation of some supernal loveliness which the eye hath not yet seen are called mystics. Believers in inspiration and the soul's union with the Absolute and the Divine are called mystics. This is a wide range not confined to Christianity or to religion. It rises high; it sinks low. But whatever its manifestation it always is in quest of somewhat lying back of the phenomenal; always its pursuit of that somewhat is by means of meditation, and feeling, and intuition, rather than by dialectic modes of thought.(2)

In such sense everyone who is not a crude rationalist and mechanist is something of a mystic. By such a test every worthy artist, and every real poet, and every true prophet is a mystic, and his works will partake of the mystic quality. Whether those works will be unamibiguous [[unambiguous]] and clear, or confusing and obscure, will depend upon the degree of genius and inspiration, upon the powers of reason and expression possessed by the worker. No mystic of the highest order ever confuses mysticism with obscurity. Nor does he claim that its products are above or beyond reason, no matter what part intuition or emotion or vision may play in their apprehension.(3) The mystic indeed enjoys them with an aesthetic delight that may [page 35:] depend little upon reason, but when asked by others or by his own intellect to give a reason for the hope that is in him he will do so with all the perspicuity and logic at his command. Success in that endeavor will depend upon the degree in which he possesses the true artistic temperament — such balance of the perceptive and creative powers as alone makes possible any work of high merit in any department of art. It is therefore an ill-founded criticism to declare Poe no mystic and a hater of mystics because his writings are clear, his analyses sure, and his methods carefully reasoned.

By almost every test that might be applied Poe would be found a mystic. It is true he railed at transcendentalists, contemned allegorists, and boasted of his power to put into clearly intelligible English all that he thought and dreamed.(4) Yet he proclaimed himself a dreamer whose happiness it was to dream, and to whom his visions were the sole realities:

I am come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence — whether much that is glorious — whether all that is profound — does not spring from disease of thought — from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awaking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they [page 36:] learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the “light ineffable,” and again, like the adventurers of the Nubian geographer, “aggressi suet mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi.”(5)

Again to like effect:

The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn — not the material of my every-day existence — but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.(6)

And yet again:

It is a happiness to wonder; — it is a happiness to dream.(7)

He created tales that were fraught with hidden meanings, and some which he frankly called allegories, fables, parables, and the like.(8) He acknowledged his inability to put into words the deepest feelings of his heart:

Not long ago, the writer of these lines,

In the mad pride of intellectuality,

Maintained “the power of words” — denied that ever

A thought arose within the human brain

Beyond the utterance of the human tongue: [page 37:]

And now, as if in mockery of that boast,

. ... . ... . ...

My spells are broken.

The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand.(9)

Of the same tenor is the confession in an early letter:

I am young — not yet twenty — am a poet — if deep worship of all beauty can make me one — and wish to be so in the more common meaning of the word. I would give the world to embody one half the ideas afloat in my imagination.(10)

It also will be seen a little later how much that he wrote yields no meaning to his most painstaking students, and that he had to confess himself unable to explain what meaning it had to him. His clearness and analytical power were not therefore of the kind to prove what Lowell claimed.

Other evidences are abundant. Poe steeped his soul in occultism, which is the bathos of mysticism. His interest in mesmerism, spiritism, and the mysterious, uncanny powers at work in many of his tales, all prove how he dwelt in a world, and sought to reveal a world eluding sense perception.(11) He believed in a power of the soul to be described only as a kind of sixth sense whereby the beauty beyond all visible beauty was to be apprehended.(12) Though he brought his work to perfection “with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem,” with nothing [page 38:] “referable either to accident or intuition,”(13) he was none the less a profound believer in intuition:

There are few thinkers who will not be surprised to find, upon retrospect of the world of thought, how very frequently the first, or intuitive, impressions have been the true ones. ... Some of the most profound knowledge — perhaps all very profound knowledge — has originated from a highly stimulated imagination. Great intellects guess well. ... That intuitive and seemingly casual perception by which we often attain knowledge, when reason herself falters and abandons the effort. ... (14)

Like all true mystics, ancient or modern, heathen or Christian, Poe knew of a state between waking and sleeping where knowledge and joy could be found. And like most mystics he sought means to produce and prolong that state. Such means he described in a passage quoted in another connection.(15) His faith and practice he more clearly revealed in the following:

There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language. I use the word fancies at random, and merely because I must use some word; but the idea commonly attached to the term is not even remotely applicable to the shadows of shadows in question. They seem to me rather psychal than intellectual. They arise in the soul (alas, how rarely!) only at its epochs of intense tranquillity — when the bodily and mental health are in perfection — and at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams. I [page 39:] am aware of these fancies only when I am upon the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so. I have satisfied myself that this condition exists but for an inappreciable point of time — yet it is crowded with these shadows of shadows; and for absolute thought there is demanded time's endurance.

These fancies have in them a pleasurable ecstasy as far beyond the most pleasurable of the world of wakefulness, or of dreams, as the Heaven of the Northman theology is beyond its Hell. I regard the visions, even as they arise, with an awe which, in some measure, moderates or tranquillizes the ecstasy — I so regard them, through a conviction (which seems a portion of the ecstasy itself) that this ecstasy, in itself, is of a character supernal to the Human Nature — is a glimpse of the spirit's outer world; and I arrive at this conclusion — if this term is at all applicable to instantaneous intuition — by a perception that the delight experienced has, as its element, but the absoluteness of novelty. I say the absoluteness — for in these fancies — let me now term them psychal impressions — there is really nothing even approximate in character to impressions ordinarily received. It is as if the five senses were supplanted by five myriad others alien to mortality.

Now, so entire is my faith in the power of words, that, at times, I have believed it possible to embody even the evanescence of fancies such as I have attempted to describe. In experiments with this end in view, I have proceeded so far as, first, to control (when the bodily and mental health are good) the existence of the condition: — that is to say, I can now (unless when ill) be sure that the condition will supervene, if I so wish it, at the point of time already described: of its supervention, until lately, I could never be certain, even under the most favorable circumstances. I mean to say, merely, that now I can be sure, when all circumstances are favorable, of the supervention of the condition, and feel even the capacity of inducing or compelling it: — the favorable [page 40:] circumstances are not the less rare — else had I compelled, already, the Heaven into the Earth.

I have proceeded so far, secondly, as to prevent the lapse from the point of which I speak — the point of blending between wakefulness and sleep — as to prevent at will, I say, the lapse from this border-ground into the dominion of sleep. Not that I can continue the condition — not that I can render the point more than a point — but that I can startle myself from the point into wakefulness — and thus transfer the point Itself into the realm of Memory — convey its impressions, or more properly their recollections, to a situation where (although still for a very brief period) I can survey them with the eye of analysis.

For these reasons — that is to say because I have been enabled to accomplish thus much — I do not altogether despair of embodying in words at least enough of the fancies in question to convey, to certain classes of intellect, a shadowy conception of their character. ... Nothing can be more certain than that even a partial record of the impressions would startle the universal intellect of mankind, by the supremeness of the novelty of the material employed, and of its consequent suggestions.(16)

If there remains any doubt as to the right name for all this, let Poe himself give judgment:

The truth is that the just distinction between the fancy and the imagination (and which is still but a [page 41:] distinction of degree) is involved in the consideration of the mystic. We give this as an idea of our own, altogether. We have no authority for our opinion — but do not the less firmly hold it. The term mystic is here employed in the sense of Augustus William Schlegel, and most other German critics. It is applied by them to that class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one. What we vaguely term the moral of any sentiment is its mystic or secondary expression. It has the vast force of an accompaniment in music. This vivifies the air; that spiritualizes the fanciful conception, and lifts it into the idea. ... If we carefully examine those poems, or those portions of poems, or those prose romances, which mankind have been accustomed to designate as imaginative ... it will be seen that all so designated are remarkable for the suggestive character which we have discussed. They are strongly mystic in the proper sense of the word.(17)

What of all Poe's most characteristic creations lack the quality here discussed? According to his own standard he was a mystic. His early American critic was wrong; his later Austrian critic was right; Poe was “a mystagogue full of intoxicating rhymes.”(18)

The resemblance between much of this and the biblical writings is obvious. The most superficial acquaintance with the Bible suffices to bring to mind the visions and trances and ecstasies of Isaiah and Ezekiel and all the prophets, of St. John and St. Paul and all the apostles. It is of more interest here to note [page 42:] the difficulties that both ancient and modern mystics had in giving to others clear conceptions of their revelations. For, with all his lucidity, to get Poe's meaning is often no easier than to understand the purport of the most mystical passages of Scripture. Both collections of writings labor under the difficulty of expressing new experiences and intuitions in old words. When the seer beheld things not possible for man to utter,(19) he had to content himself with vague intimations of their nature. If they were as clear to his thought as to his feeling they might flow from his pen with the smooth limpidity of the writings of St. John. His Gospel is read with an ease that often deceives the reader into the belief that the meaning has been grasped, when really all that has happened is that he has been charmed with a melody that is perfectly satisfying without any meaning. No matter how pellucidly any mystic may write, only the key of the mystic temperament can fully unlock his mysteries.

It is wrong, however, to conclude that the writers designed to express no meaning, or did not clearly perceive the undercurrent of meaning accompanying the simply told tale or the melodiously sung poem. The lack of understanding which leads us to term a writing mystical is the reader's, not the writer's. What to us is the cloud of darkness is to them the pillar of light. And even our darkness is lessened by their light without our being able to explain how. As the [page 43:] souls of the greatest seers behold things they cannot express, so we see in what they have expressed much that we cannot explain. It would be folly to claim that Wagner's music, with its effort to voice the deep things of the soul, has no music in it because the unmusical can make nothing out of it. Also it would be foolish to maintain that nobody gets any part of its meaning who listens to that music with enjoyment, but without ability to explain it. Such reasoning is certainly applicable to much of Poe's poetry. Presumably it all had a clear meaning to him.(20) Many of the poems are profound mysteries to us. To say that they are music written in words instead of notes is to beg the question, for music has its meaning too. The meaning, clear to him, haunts us as the sounds and perfumes of his visions which he could not put into words haunted him. That is why some of his least understood poems are most beautiful to us. Their music and smoothly flowing words work upon us magical effects in spite of our inability to understand. So it is with many passages of the Bible and many hymns whose music uplifts and inspires, we know not how. Here, for instance, is a hymn which, however, valueless when coldly analyzed, has had its power, and was said by a mystic in affinity with the mystic who wrote it to have “a ringing repetition that chimes [page 44:] right pleasantly, and makes amends for some lack of meaning in the words”:

Oh be glad thou Zion's daughter,

Joyous news to thee is sent;

Thou shalt sing a strain of sweetness,

Sing it to thy heart's content.

Now the friend of God thou art,

Therefore shalt thou joy at heart,

Therefore know no sorrow's smart.

Lo! ’tis ju-ju-jubilation

Contemplation;

Ju-ju-ju-jubilation

Ju-ju-ju-jubilation;

Speculation;

Ju-ju-ju-jubilation,

Conciliation!(21)

Some of Poe's writings may convey even less meaning than that to ordinary readers, though constructed with far greater art. He knew that to be the case, and with his boast in his mastery of words as revealers and not obscurers of thought it must have vexed him to have it so. Yet he recognized and confessed his inability to make such pieces any plainer, either by rewriting or by commentaries. When in Richmond just before his death it is said he recited Ulalume, that most weirdly, bafflingly beautiful of all his poems. A young lady in the company was deeply moved by it, but being unable to understand it she requested a copy for study. Poe sent the copy next morning accompanied by this graceful note:

I have transcribed Ulalume with much pleasure, dear Miss Ingram, as I am sure I would do anything [page 45:] at your bidding, but I fear you will find the verses scarcely more intelligible today in my manuscript than last night in my recitation. I would endeavor to explain to you what I really meant by the poem if it were not that I remember Dr. Johnson's bitter and rather just remarks about the folly of explaining what, if worth explaining, would explain itself. He has a happy witticism, too, about some book which he calls “as obscure as an explanatory foot-note.” Leaving Ulalume to its fate, therefore, and in good hands, I am,

Yours truly,

E. A. POE.(22)

This is the lot of every mystical genius. Scorned and rejected by the rationalistic, they are admired and studied by the spiritual. But since spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and few readers ever attain to the degree of discernment possessed by such writers, the meaning is seen through a glass darkly, and known only in part.

There is another aspect of Poe's mysticism which brings him into fellowship with a peculiar class of biblical writers. The Apocalypses, most familiar through the books of Daniel and Revelation, are akin to certain passages in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel, Zechariah, and briefer passages in the Gospels and Epistles. But their chief affinities are with a great body of Jewish and Christian writings that arose just before and during the first centuries of our era, and are grouped with other books as apocryphal. In them all the mystical element is supreme. They abound in trances and visions, symbols and voices, music and odors. In [page 46:] their noblest examples, and the book of Revelation is easily queen of them all, their epic grandeur is such that the words seem to swoon under the stress of the glory and the power poured into them. They are all surcharged with emotion, they all seek to convey to us by elaborate symbolism conceptions of things lying beyond the circle of our experience.

Like many of Poe's most notable pieces, these writings have an influence but little dependent upon a clear understanding of them. Gifted artists, in times and places where art concerned itself with such subjects, vainly tried to put upon canvas the christophany of the first chapter, and the theophany of the fourth chapter of Revelation. Even more futile have been all efforts to paint the terrific composite creatures that fill its other chapters. Attempts to give consistent accounts of these things in words, or to form pictures of them in the mind, are no more successful. Not only is this true of the mystic beasts and dragons; it is equally true of the visions of the city whose beauty and majesty and light, whose freedom from sin and sorrow, and disease and death, at times fill the heart with a heavenly nostalgia. It is as impossible to paint with brush or pen the last chapters of the book as the first, or the eleventh and twelfth. Yet they will continue to hold dominion over the hearts of men as long as spiritual conflicts are waged and bereaved souls seek balm for the assuaging of their hurt. Possibly it was clear to the seer of Patmos. Many of his first readers whose spirits were steeped in general apocalyptic literature may have seen it all much as did the composer. [page 47:] The failure of modern readers may be due to lack of like-mindedness. Be that as it may, certainly with Revelation and its kind, as with Poe, a dictionary and an atlas and a set of builder's plans and specifications can help us little. If the Raven, For Annie, and Ulalume do not speak a language we can understand without knowing who was the lost Lenore, how one can be bathed in dreams of the truth and drowned in waves of beautiful tresses, or where is situated the dim lake of Auber in the misty mid-region of Weir, the master mystic has no message for us.(23)

These features that Poe had in common with the apocalyptists we have already seen mystics in general possess. A matter of more especial interest is an inquiry into the spirit and background of such writings. An examination of the apocalyptists as a class shows at once that they were attracted by the mysterious and the terrific in nature as well as in religion. The biblical writers of this type manifest the deepest interest in the course of history. Far beyond that the non-canonical books endeavor to go, probing the secrets of nature and seeking to unriddle certain occult aspects of supernature. Enoch gives much space to questions of geography, meteorology, and astronomy. Jubilees is full of legendary lore concerning the creation, the patriarchs, and the angels. The Ascension of Isaiah recounts the wonders of the six lower heavens. Pestilence, cataclysms of nature, spirits, [page 48:] angels, and things to come are objects of curiosity•in nearly all. How much Poe was fascinated by such themes is known to all who read him. There is scarcely one of his notable tales that does not depend upon these things for its compelling and shuddering interest. Terrible aspects of nature, as in Gordon Pym and the Descent into the Maelström; devastating pestilence, as in King Pest and the Masque of the Red Death; uncanny manifestations of diseased minds and prankish natural forces, as in the Fall of the House of Usher and the Black Cat; curious speculations concerning the heavenly bodies, as in the Moon Hoax and the Power of Words; dreams of conquering death, as in the Case of M. Valdemar and Mesmeric Revelation; visions of the end of the world, as in Eiros and Charmion, and Monos and Una — almost all his serious creative work in prose and poetry will fit into this classification somewhere. Truly the spirit of the ancient apocalyptists was upon him because he was anointed to preach the mystery of the weird and the grotesque.

The background upon which all the apocalypses were projected was discontent. However high they rose, whatever radiant tints colored their visions, everything began in the blackness of a sordid and anguish-stricken age. Sometimes a study of the era reveals conditions so direful that the tone of the writings is easily understood — their longing for change and wild revenge, their despair of betterment till the universe is destroyed and made anew, their wrestling, not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and [page 49:] powers of spiritual wickedness. Much of Poe's gloom and asperity and bitterness can, in like manner, be accounted for by his condition — his poverty and obscurity, or his unrewarded fame while groundlings and pygmies in his world were acclaimed and enriched. That wrung from his soul a protest against the order of things in the literary world which, if put into the language of the religious world, would read, “Wherefore lookest Thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest Thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?” — “How long, O Lord, how long?”(24)

Quite as often, though, it is impossible to account for the note of dole and moan in these writers from their surroundings, in themselves considered. From long before the Exile to the final downfall of their nation the Jews were subject to a succession of foreign conquerors, with the single exception of the heroic Maccabean period. But so were many other petty peoples who did not find it an intolerable calamity. Poe, too, was always poor, sometimes in want, some-ties bereaved. But so were multitudes of his fellowmen, and many authors, in even greater degree, without voicing it in suchwise. Something more than the actual condition of these writers must be known to account for them. In the case of both the Jewish writers and Poe the explanation is found in the contrast between what was and what ought to be according to their ideal. With Israel the wailing arose from measuring their condition by the glorious rhapsodies [page 50:] concerning national triumphs and splendors which the early prophets sang to them in times of calamity. They had re-established their state after the Exile with such hopes luring them on. Then weary centuries wore away and their enemies continued to rule them instead of coming to lick the dust at their feet. Prophetic voices no longer spoke to them. Eyes grew dim with watching for promised glories; hearts broke with longing. It was intolerable to their men of feeling and imagination — others could content themselves with the past, and with legalism, and with priestcraft. Then arose the new order of seers. In new fashion the hope of Israel found voice; in strange guise the mysteries of life were expounded. The prophecies were not to fail. God would yet avenge. Upon those who sat in darkness the glories of a new heaven an a new earth dawned. Apocalyptic literature was born. It reflects the action and reaction of the ideal and the real upon the souls of the seers.(25)

With his usual keenness of insight and clearness of expression Poe explained this with reference to poets:

That poets, using the word comprehensively of artists in general, are a genus irritabile, is well understood; but the why, seems not to be commonly seen. An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite [page 51:] sense of Beauty — a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity or disproportion. Thus wrong — an injustice done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice — never where it does not exist — but very often where Ole un-poetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to “temper” in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to wrong: — this clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perception of Right — of justice — of proportion — in a word, of [[Greek text]]. But one thing is clear — that the man who is not “irritable,” to the ordinary apprehension, is no poet.(26)

Precisely this is the secret of much in Poe that is inconsistent and melodramatic to the ordinary reader and critic of his life and writings. His life was a warfare, not primarily because his lot was so much worse than that of the average man, but because he was not the average man. The busy, material, matter-of-fact, self-satisfied life about him in the second quarter of nineteenth-century America was so out of harmony with his beauty-loving, ideal-worshiping soul that he was haunted by inexplicable longings and fears. When he seemed to himself to have reason to feel happiest he often found himself saddest. So it was early in his life just after he was auspiciously launched upon his editorial career in Richmond:

I am suffering under a depression of spirits such as I never felt before. I have struggled in vain against [page 52:] the influence of this melancholy. You will believe me when I say that I am still miserable in spite of the great improvement in my circumstances. ... I am wretched and know not why.(27)

So it was, late in his life, when he had won Helen Whitman's consent to marry him:

I am calm and tranquil, and but for a strange shadow of coming evil which haunts me, I should be happy. That I am not supremely happy, even when I feel your dear love at my heart terrifies me. What can this mean?(28)

After writing Mrs. Richmond of certain financial disappointments and losses, he said:

No doubt, Annie, you attribute my gloom to these events — but you would be wrong. It is not in the power of any mere worldly considerations, such as these, to depress me. No, my sadness is unaccountable, and this makes me the more sad. I am full of dark forebodings. Nothing cheers or comforts me.(29)

Even when he thought the realization of his long dream of conducting an independent magazine was to be realized he told Mrs. Lewis of dark presentiments that he could not shake off.(30)

True, by that time he was but a wreck of a man with death near at hand. But every man would not have felt it then, and he had felt it always. Demonic [page 53:] forces contended with him. His music, like Morella's voice, was tainted with terror.(31) Titanic evils of disease, madness, and death laid hold upon him. The darkness was peopled with malignant spirits about him.(32) At times he dwelt in a present hell:

There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell. ... Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful. ... They must sleep, or they will devour us — they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.(33)

This phase of his life seems as uncanny as his wildest tales when it is recalled that he lived but yesterday in Richmond and Baltimore, in Philadelphia and New York — cities as matter of fact then as now. But that was the trouble. To the idealist the times were out of joint. He could not set them right. He could only cry out against them, and bewail his lot, and then betake himself to his own country of visions and dreams. So did the apocalyptists which were before him. Like them, therefore, he wrote his visions of darkness beneath whose beauty and terror hidden meanings lie. Like them, too, he turned his face toward the light beyond the darkness, and in such union with the ideals of his genius as mystics have [page 54:] ever sought with the objects of their worship, he sang his deathless songs. With them he came to see where rest is to be found. In triumph over the fever called living he sang:

And I lie so composedly,

Now, in my bed,

(Knowing her love)

That you fancy me dead —

And I rest so contentedly

Now, in my bed,

(With her love at my breast)

That you fancy me dead —

That you shudder to look at me,

Thinking me dead: —

But my heart it is brighter

Than all of the many

Stars of the sky,

For it sparkles with Annie —

It glows with the light

Of the love of my Annie —

With the thought of the light

Of the eyes of my Annie.(34)

Said a master mystic: “The soul, thus dead to the world and to itself, sleeps in bliss, and yields itself utterly to the kisses of the Spouse, in absolute repose of the senses.”(35)


[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 33:]

1 “Poe has no sympathy with Mysticism. The mystic dwells in the mystery; is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially. and the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe on the other hand is a spectator ab extra. He analyzes, he dissects, he watches

— with an eye serene,

The very pulse of the machine,

for such it practically is to him, with wheels and cogs and piston-rods all working to produce a certain end” (Jas. Russell Lowell, Biography, I. 378) .

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 34:]

2 Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and per- haps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings. ... Mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realize in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal” (Inge, Christian Mysticism, p. 5) .

3 For a discussion of such matters see Recejac. Bases of the Mystic Knowledge, 1-5; 53-61.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 35:]

4 Marginalia, XVI. 87. 88; XV. 69; XIII. 9; VII. 106.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 36:]

5 Eleanora [[Eleonora]], IV. 236.

6 Berenice, II. 17.

7 Morella, II. 27. This and the two preceding quotations are commonly regarded as autobiographic.

8 E.g.. Shadow, King Pest, Silence.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 37:]

9 To — — VII. 106; see also to the same effect. Letters to Mrs. Whitman, 5.

10 Letter quoted by Neal. VII. 259.

11 Cf. Recejac, Bases of Mystic Knowledge, 176-178.

12 Criticism, XI. 256.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 38:]

13 Philosophy of Composition, XIV. 195.

14 A Chapter of Suggestions, XIV. 187-189.

15 See above, pp. 35. 36.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 40:]

16 Marginalia, XVI. 88-90. Wordsworth also knew and sought this state; see Tintern Abbey. Tennyson, too, tells of superinducing trances that brought just such knowledge and joy, see Life of Tennyson, by his son, Vol. I, p. 320. “There are few highly sensitive or imaginative intellects for which the vortex of mysticism, in any shape, has not an almost irresistible influence” (Poe, Criticism. XI. 253) . When all the world stood aghast at the horrors of the European war, an alleged prophecy of Tolstors. said to have foretold the war and some of its details, and approximately its date. attracted attention. It is said to have come to him in just such manner as Poe describes. In such state Tolstoi could not recall his vision, nor could he recall it after coming out of the trance, but while in it could so speak that a friend wrote down the prophecy.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 41:]

17 Criticism, X. 65, 66; cf. XIV. 207.

18 Kassner, Mysticism, Artists, and Life, quoted by Eduard, Book of the Poe Centenary, 88.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 42:]

19 2 Cor. 13:1.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 43?:]

20 He was joking when after reading Al Araaf [[Al Aaraaf]] to the Bostonians he said, “they evinced characteristic discrimination in understanding and especially applauding. all those knotty passages which we ourselves have not yet been able to understand” (Criticism, XIII. 12) .

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21 Vaughn. Hours With the Mystics, Book VI. p. 199.

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22 Didier. The Poe Cult. 69, 70.

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23 How little clear understanding has to do with the power of an image over the mind is well illustrated by Milton's inexplicable but haunting figure of the two-handed engine at the door, ready to smite once and smite no more (Lycidas, lines 130. 131) .

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24 Heb. 1:13: Rev. 6:10.

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25 “In this respect the pseudepigraphical writings may be in some degree compared to the marvelous burst of sorrow and wailing which marked so large a part of the population of Scotland on the fall of the Stuart dynasty. In vain should we attempt to explain the flood of grief which then swept over both Lowlands and Highlands by any search into the historical records of the times. Yet the wail remains, and will remain forever, one of the most striking pictures in the history of the world of the enthusiastic devotion with which a brave, impulsive, and warm-hearted people can be influenced by the power of an idea” (Milligan, Discussions of the Apocalypse, 4) .

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26 Fifty Suggestions, Essays, etc., XIV. 175, 176,

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27 Letters, XVII. 17.

28 Last Letters to Sarah Helen Whitman, 32.

29 Letters, XVII. 345. 346.

30 Biography, I. 306.

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31 Morella, II. 28.

32 Wrote W. F. Gill, “The same haunting dread which we have ventured to ascribe to him at the time of his writing The Raven possessed him now, and to such a degree that be found it impossible to sleep without the presence of some friend by his bedside” (Biography, I. 266) . “He disliked the dark, and was rarely out at night when I knew him” (Letter of Geo. R. Graham, XVII. 437) .

33 Marginalia, XVI. 167.

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34 For Annie.

35 Hugo de Saint-Victor as quoted by Recejac. Bases of the Mystic Knowledge, from Œuvres de Saint-Victor, 57.


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Notes:

None.

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[S:0 - WMF28, 1928] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Biblical Allusions in Poe (Forrest)