Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (107 page)

Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe’s “morbid” tales need have been written. They need to be written because old things need to die and disintegrate, because the old white psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass.

Man must be stripped even of himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly process.

—from
Studies in Classic American Literature
(1923)

 

I myself cannot remember hearing any poetry before hearing “The Raven” and “The Bells”; and
“The Pit and the Pendulum”
was one of the first short stories I ever read.

—from his introduction to
Edgar Allan Poe:
Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka
(1950)

1. Do the sound effects in “The Raven” enhance or impede or perhaps even constitute the meaning of the poem?

2. Detective stories often have a providential aspect: One feels some outside force working to separate the sheep from the goats. But in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” there is no such force operating. We need Dupin to save Mr. Le Bon (“the Good”) and to banish the monster. Has God taken a break?

3. Why do you think Poe made his detective such an odd-ball? Why do you think his orangutan is so unrealistic? It commits its crimes while trying to imitate human behavior. Dupin brags that “most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms.” Could it be argued that the orangutan is what Dupin sees—a primitive part of us—when he looks through the window to our bosoms?

4. Poe wrote that the “most poetic of all themes is the death of a beautiful woman.” Is this statement true? Does it prove that Poe is disturbed? Mean-spirited? Does other literature support Poe’s claim?

5. One way of understanding supernatural horror fiction is to see the various horrors as metaphors for psychological traits or events: The orangutan, for example, can be interpreted as something in humanity that is murderous and monstrous and primitive. Using this method, how would you read “Ligeia” or “William Wilson”?

6. A fellow poet, James Russell Lowell, once said that Poe was “three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” What do you think?

Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed.
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe.
3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969-1978. The “Annals of Poe,” in volume 1, are especially illuminating about Poe’s life and career.

Pollin, Burton R., ed.
Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe.
Vol. 1:
The Imaginary Voyages.
Boston: Twayne, 1981. Contains texts of
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,
“The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” and
The Journal of Julius Rodman.

Allen, Michael L.
Poe and the British Magazine Tradition.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Budd, Louis J., and Edwin H. Cady, eds.
On Poe: The Best from American Literature.
Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993.

Eddings, Dennis W., ed.
The Naiad Voice: Essays on Poe’s Satiric Hoaxing.
Port Washington, NY: Associated Faculty Press, 1983.

Fisher, Benjamin F. “Poe and the Gothic Tradition.” In
The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe,
edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 72-91.

.
The Gothic’s Gothic.
New York and London: Garland, 1988.

Jacobs, Robert D.
Poe, Journalist and Critic.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

Ljungquist, Kent.
The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques.
Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984.

Peeples, Scott.
Edgar Allan Poe Revisited.
New York and London: Twayne Publishers and Prentice Hall, 1998.

Ramakrishna, D., ed.
Perspectives on Poe.
New Delhi: APC Publications, 1996.

Silverman, Kenneth, ed.
New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Thompson, G. Richard.
Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson.
Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography.
1941. Reprint: New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1969. Reprint, with a new foreword by Shawn Rosenheim: Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Silverman, Kenneth.
Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.
New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson.
The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809—1849.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

Poe, Edgar Allan.
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840.