Poe’s Shadow

 Poe’s Shadow

A look at the laureate of self-destructiveness

 

Mar 9, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 25 •

 

 

 

By Dominic Green

 

 

 

The Weekly Standard

 

 

 

There he is on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, tottering between Carl Jung and Fred Astaire, breathing fumes over Marilyn Monroe’s bare back and William Burroughs’s bald pate. Edgar Allan Poe, the original Man in Black—before Johnny Cash, before the Beatles in Hamburg, before the bohemians in Paris. The first American rocker, the steampunk wild man, bound for death or glory, and getting both.

Edgar Allen Poe

The Sgt. Pepper cover is a pantheon, a countercultural sibling of the Valhalla Memorial at Regensburg. The Beatles and designer Peter Blake placed Poe in the center of the back row. If this were a genealogy, he would be the founding father, the unquiet ghost of the pop unheimlich. This is the Poe whose “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” Bob Dylan included in the pop pantheon of Highway 61 Revisited, along with the names of those other moody entertainers, Ma Rainey and Beethoven; the Poe that Lou Reed set to music in The Raven; the Robert Johnson of the Romantic blues, martyred at the crossroads of art and commerce.

 

Sgt. Pepper confirmed Poe’s victory in the popular vote. He remains a winner, one of the few 19th-century names known to most, and one of the fewer read by many. No other American writer has an NFL team named for one of his poems. The republic of letters has honored his memory, too, with praise from aristocratic poets and prose entertainers alike. Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry saw Poe as an homme sérieux, an aesthetic pioneer who heard “supernal ecstasies” in verse, the swish of modern horror in the raven’s wing. Arthur Conan Doyle admitted that Poe invented the detective story. H. G. Wells admired his science fiction. Guy de Maupassant adopted Poe’s translation of the Gothic supernatural into the modern psychological. William Carlos Williams credited him with a greater translation: Poe created a “New World” of American verse. 

 

There were carpers, however. Emerson dismissed Poe as “the jingle man,” and T. S. Eliot, in his essay “From Poe to Valéry,” accused Poe of “slipshod writing .  .  . puerile thinking .  .  . haphazard experiments.” But Eliot also called him the “directest, the least pedantic, the least pedagogical” critic of his age. Poe, he said, was “both the reductio ad absurdum and the artistic perfection” of Romanticism, a founder of modern “poetic consciousness.”

 

Jerome McGann believes that Poe has been underrated as a poet. McGann teaches at the University of Virginia, where Poe briefly studied, and his appeal is not to the mob, the reading public, or the circus performers, the practitioners of verse. His jury is the clergy, not the laity, the imperial souls for whom reading is a “textual event.” It is as difficult a brief as defending Bob Dylan as a novelist, or John Lennon as a nice person. 

 

Poe is an acquired taste, like whiskey or opium. He was a poet in the way that William Blake was an artist: idiosyncratic and obscure, a commercial adventurer who lacked business sense, a marginal antagonist who became a national treasure, an etcher of sharp and violent lines with a dazzled eye for overdone color. His hero was Byron: a first-rate celebrity but a second-rate poet; really, a debauched Augustan. No less conventionally, Poe called Tennyson the greatest living poet. If Poe’s biography is Byron’s catastrophe on a budget, his poetry is Tennyson unhinged by Thomas de Quincey. As heroic Romanticism slides into boggling horror, meter becomes an avalanche.

 

Poe was a peerless self-destructor: He was a liar and a plagiarist, a drunk in the office and a beggar in the street, who pandered to a public he despised and married his 13-year-old cousin. McGann skirts the biographical disaster and concentrates on Poe’s writing. But without the tragic setting, Poe’s verse wilts into melodrama, and as McGann forgoes context, he takes Poe at his own assessment, which Poe, a chronic self-publicist, supplied in his marginalia and essays. 

 

It is true that in “The Poetic Principle,” posthumously published in 1850, Poe describes a Modernist theory of poetry as purely subjective—a refined private music, an art for its own sake. It is also true that, like the Pre-Raphaelite painters of the same period, Poe’s 1846 essay on “The Philosophy of Composition” replaces the Romantic pose of “inspiration” with the Modern virtue of technical expertise. Poe, the child of two actors, denies that poetry is the “spontaneous creation” of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” The aesthetic sublime is a matter of craft and special effects, of levers and pulleys. Poe, says McGann, was an actor in the “theater of post-Romantic artifice,” named for Edgar in King Lear. 

 

It is no less true that Poe exaggerated his originality. He wrote “The Philosophy of Composition” to capitalize on the success of “The Raven.” Like Eliot’s footnotes to The Waste Land, it is a kind of rarefied press release. The polarities of true poetry and the market, true love and society, were already Romantic commonplaces. In 1781, before Madame de Staël named Romanticism, the machines and moving sets of the stage designer and artist Philip James de Loutherbourg’s Eidophysikon demonstrated that the Romantic sublime was a technical illusion, a “conscious artifice.”  

 

As Mallarmé saw, Poe could not be taken at his own word. Poe did not take himself at it. Poe the critic warns that showing the audience the “wheels and pinions” of the “machine” will weaken the “legitimate effect” of the performance. Poe the poet does exactly this: His ostentatious rhymes and repeated puns are a Centre Pompidou in verse. Technical excess is part of Poe’s originality. It is also part of the problem with Poe. 

 

“Do you know why I have translated Poe so patiently?” Baudelaire asked. “Because he resembled me.” In Poe’s stories, Baudelaire found “not only subjects dreamed of by me, but phrases thought by me and imitated by him, twenty years’ earlier.” The urban detective in Poe’s 1840 story “The Man in the Crowd” predates Baudelaire’s flâneur, the free-associating “artist of modern life” who drifts in the paysage opiacée, the “opiated landscape,” of the modern city. Poe called for a confession of the “heart laid bare.” Baudelaire wrote its fragments in Mon Coeur Mis à Nu. 

 

Baudelaire’s translations elevated Poe to a higher key; he became the first American artist to be more esteemed abroad than at home. For Baudelaire, Poe was the model poète maudit, the artist-rebel. For Mallarmé, Poe’s rhythms were a way out of French traditions. For Valéry, Poe’s idea of the self-sufficient poem underpinned the ideal of la poésie pure. The French connection, McGann says, is “an academic surprise, at least to many American academics.” 

 

Why did the French embrace Poe while the Americans recognized him slowly, and with reservations? McGann does not say. But Aldous Huxley explained it in “Vulgarity in Literature” in 1949, the year that Eliot assayed Poe’s French influence. As Baudelaire’s Poe translations show, the Frenchman was not fluent in English. He was so soaked in French classicism that even his prose ran in Alexandrines—notably, in the preface to Spleen de Paris. The stresses in French verse are equal, the stresses in English and Latin verse are not. Huxley says that Baudelaire’s imitations of medieval Latin hymns make Bernard of Cluny sound like “he had learned his art from Racine.” Baudelaire read Poe with regular stresses, too. A splendid error: Poe joined les immortels in a case of mistaken identity.

 

When the Alexandrine corset is loosened, Roberto Calasso says, the result is an endless “wave” of rhythm. Huxley used the same word—but with a commercial sneer: Like a hairdresser, he said, Poe excelled at the “permanent wave.” Poe was a detective of dark emotion, but he lacked what Verlaine called la Pointe assassine, the fatal stiletto. He belays with a Byronic hammer, jauntily outrageous. Musicians, especially musicians who deal in heavy rhythms and short stories, love Poe for the same reason that poets doubt him. Poe’s verse, like most rock ’n’ roll, aspires to the condition of music. The most literate of sixties rockers, Dylan and Reed, made brilliant use of Poe’s tricks and gore. 

 

Poe died at age 40, after being found in a gutter on Election Day in another man’s clothes, too intoxicated to explain what had happened. The theories are gothic and elaborate (no other writer is suspected of dying from rabies). Plied with drink and drugs, Poe was abducted, marched around to polling booths and forced to vote under assumed identities. Having starved as an artist in the marketplace, he died from a surfeit of democracy. He lives on by the popular vote, too. 

 

Dominic Green is the author of The Double Life of Dr. Lopez and Three Empires on the Nile.