Edgar Allan Poe: The Domain of Artifice

Abstract

This interpretation of Poe is based on some of his most important critical principles and emphasizes his appeal for artifice and for imagination.¹ His essays, poems and short stories are strikingly coherent with his aesthetic beliefs and judgements. Sometimes his tales, so often connected with fear and terror, are fictions constructed on a deep rejection of his contemporaries, and their ethical and aesthetic myths. Although Poe did not often mention Ralph Waldo Emerson, he relentlessly attacked his ideas and American Transcendentalism in general. His praise of artifice was meant to jeopardize the ideal of nature so overwhelming all through the nineteenth century, and in the United States in particular. I will identify key oppositions confirming the main opposition between nature and artifice, such as a type of symbolism which understands nature as a sign of God, as opposed to a type of symbolism which is completely formal. In order to highlight the struggle that Poe fought against the Transcendentalists, I lay great stress on two very different ways of treating the term ‘eye’. While for the Transcendentalists the eye is a powerful symbol of the spirit, for Poe it is either a concrete object — a part of the body which can be separated from the whole — or an isolated word — oral and written.