Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe’s affinity with classical values has not been properly noted by critics and other readers who have interpreted the romantic and Gothic elements in his fiction and poetry as proof of Poe's predilection for the subjective, macabre, and fantastic, as well as the transcendental. A careful examination of Poe's use of seemingly romantic materials, however, reveals that he measured the romantic stance detrimentally against the objectivity and rationality of the classical. Poe drew allusion and structure from his reading of classical literature to inform his own works with a classical worldview he sought in both life and art.
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See, e.g., Edmund Wilson, “Poe at Home and Abroad”,New Republic 49 (8 December 1926): 77–80; Laura Riding,contemporaries and Snobs (Garden City, N. J.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928), 201–255; Constance Rourke,American Humor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931), 179–186; George Snell, “The First of the New Critics,”Quarterly Review of Literature 2 (1945): 333–340; Allen Tate, “The Angelic Imagination”,Kenyon Review 14 (Summer 1952): 455–475; Clark Griffith, “Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,”University of Toronto Quarterly 14 (October 1954): 8–25; Jay B. Hubbell, “Poe and the Southern Literary Tradition”,Texas Studies in Language and Literature 2 (Summer 1960): 151–175; Stephen L. Mooney, “Poe's Gothic Waste Land”,Sewanee Review 70 (January–March 1962): 261–283; David Hirsch, “The Pit and the Apocalypse”,Sewanee Review 76 (October–December 1968): 632–652; Robert Kiely, “The Comic Masks of Edgar Allan Poe”,Unamesimo 1 (1967): 31–41; and Stuart Levine,Edgar Poe: Seer and Craftsman (Deland: Everett/Edwards, 1972), 158, 167–168, 263.
See Eric W. Carlson, “Frames of Reference for Poe's Symbolic Language”, inCritical Essays on Edgar Allen Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 215–216.
See Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida”,Psychology and the Question of the Text: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1976–77, New Series, no. 2, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 149–171; and Roland Barthes, “Textual Analysis of a Tale by Edgar Poe” trans. Donald G. Marshall,Poe Studies 10 (June 1977): 1–12.
Review of the 1850 Griswold edition of Poe'sWorks, Literary World 6 (26 Jan 1850): 8.
“Introduction”,Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose and Poetry (New York: Rinehart, 1950), xi.
“Edgar Allan Poe”,The Nation [London] (16 January 1909); rpt.Pen Portraits and Reviews, by Bernard Shaw (London: Constable and Co., 1932), 231–238; and Carlson, ed.,Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, 86–90 [p. 90, quote].
See “Poe as a Literary Critic”,The Nation 155 (1942): 452–453.
See Daniel Hoffman,Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972; New York: Random House, 1985), pp. 84, 101; Killis Campbell,The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 151–155; and Edward H. Davidson,Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 47–48.
See Ottavio M. Casale, “Poe on Transcendentalism”,Emerson Society Quarterly 50 (First Quarter 1968): 85–97.
Quoted by Campbell,, pp. 32; and Edward H. Davidson,Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge,
“Marginalia”,Southern Literary Messenger 15 (May 1849), 292–96; inEdgar Allan Poe: Marginalia, ed. John Carl Miller (Charlottsville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 181.
See Kenneth Silverman,Edgar A. Poe: A Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 111–114; Stephen L. Mooney, “Comic Intent”,Modern Language Notes 76 (May 1961): 432–434; and leslie Fiedler, “The Blackness of Darkness”Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960; rev. 1966), 391–400.
See Silverman, ——, 153–154
See Silverman, ——, 531–533
See Silverman, ——, pp. 265
“Marginalia”,Graham's Magazine 29 (December 1846): 311–313; inEdgar Allan Poe: Marginalia, 143–144.
See Silverman, ——, pp. 17–25, 29–30; and Killis Campbell,The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), 7–15.
See Silverman, ——, pp. 12, 29
See, e. g., Maria Bonaparte,The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (London: Imago, 1949).
Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, “A Note on Poe's ‘Berenice’: A Classical Source for the Narrator's Fantasy”,The University of Mississippi Studies in English 3 (1982): 64–67.
See Silverman, ——, pp. 165
See D. H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe”, inThe Symbolic Meaning: The Uncollected Versions of Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Armin Arnold (Fontwell, Arundel, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1962), 116–130; and J. Schroeter, “A Misreading of Poe's ‘Ligeia’”PMLA 76 pt. 1 (1961): 397–406.
See Joy Rea, “Classicism and Romanticism in Poe's ‘Ligeia’”,Ball State University Forum 8 (Winter 1967): 25–39.
See Silverman, ——, pp. 69–74
See Darrel Abel, “A Key to the House of Usher”,The University of Toronto Quarterly 18 (1949): 176–185.
For a good overview of the genre, see Robin W. Winks, “Introduction”,Detective Fiction (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980). See also Dorothy L. Sayers, “Introduction”,The Omnibus of Crime (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929), 9–44.
SeeThe Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. A. Harrison, 17 vols., The Virginia Edition (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902; rpt. AMS Press, 1965), vol. 14, pp. 193–208; 266–292.
Only a few have been pointed out, however. In addition to Blythe/Sweet and Rea, see V. Rendell, “Poe: A Classical Reference”,Notes and Queries 9 (May 30, 1914): 426–427; Thomas Ollive Mabbott, “Some Classical Allusions in Poe”,Classical Weekly 12 (January 20, 1919), 94; and Herbert Mierow, “A Classical Allusion in Poe”,Modern Language Notes 31 (March 1916): 184–185. A representative selection of epigraphs to Poe's tales includes quotations from Plato (“Morella”), Lucan (“A Tale of Jerusalem”), Alcmman (“Silence—A Fable”), Euripides (“Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”), Servius (“The Island of the Fay”), Sophocles (“Eleonora”), and Seneca (“The Purloined Letter”).
A number of scholars have commented upon Poe's social realism and social criticism, particularly in the tales. See, e.g. Donald Barlow Stauffer, “Style and Meaning in ‘Ligeia’ and ‘William Wilson’”Studies in Short Fiction 2 (Summer 1965): 113–127.
Mabbott points out a debt to Sappho that Poe acknowledged.
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Unrue, D.H. Edgar Allan Poe: The romantic as classicist. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 1, 112–119 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02677053
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02677053