research topics on edgar allan poe

Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper Topics

This page provides students with a rich tapestry of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics . From the haunting beauty of his poetry to the chilling narratives of his short stories, Poe’s works present a myriad of research opportunities. This comprehensive guide not only delves into a categorized list of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics but also offers insights into choosing the perfect Poe topic and crafting an impeccable research paper. Additionally, iResearchNet’s unparalleled writing services are showcased, promising meticulous research and tailored writing solutions. Dive deep into the Gothic allure of Poe, and embark on an academic journey with iResearchNet’s expert guidance.

Edgar Allan Poe’s enigmatic style and dark themes have continuously intrigued scholars and avid readers alike for generations. For those seeking to delve deep into the recesses of Poe’s mind, here is a comprehensive list of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics spanning across various facets of his work:

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Get 10% off with 24start discount code, 1. poe’s poetry.

An analysis of the rhythmic patterns in The Raven .
The exploration of love and loss in Annabel Lee .
Ulalume – A journey through grief and remembrance.
The dark romanticism of A Dream Within a Dream .
Symbolism in The Bells .
The personification of death in The Conqueror Worm .
Navigating the landscapes of Eldorado .
Themes of sorrow and yearning in Lenore .
Imagery and melancholy in The Sleeper .
To Helen and the ideals of beauty.

2. Tales of the Macabre

Psychological terror in The Tell-Tale Heart .
The thin line between sanity and insanity in The Black Cat .
The descent into madness in The Cask of Amontillado .
Death and disease in The Masque of the Red Death .
Exploration of guilt in William Wilson .
The Fall of the House of Usher and the Gothic tradition.
The pursuit of the unknown in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar .
The torment of the soul in Ligeia .
Themes of revenge in Hop-Frog .
The intricate narrative of The Pit and the Pendulum .

3. Detective Fiction

The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the birth of detective fiction.
The analytical prowess of C. Auguste Dupin.
The detective’s role in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt .
Deductive reasoning in The Purloined Letter .
Poe’s influence on the modern detective genre.
Examination of crime in Poe’s detective tales.
The development of sidekicks in detective fiction.
The detective’s moral compass in Poe’s works.
Female characters in Poe’s detective stories.
The evolution of clues and red herrings in Poe’s mysteries.

4. Poe and the Supernatural

Exploration of the afterlife in Morella .
Ghosts and hauntings in Poe’s tales.
The dichotomy of life and death in Berenice .
The metaphysical in Silence – A Fable .
Exploration of the soul in The Oval Portrait .
Visions and prophecies in Poe’s works.
The exploration of otherworldly realms.
Portrayal of apparitions and spirits.
The supernatural as a reflection of human psyche.
Dreams and omens in Poe’s tales.

5. Poe’s Personal Life and Works

The influence of Poe’s turbulent love life on his poetry.
Tragedies of Poe: The deaths that shaped his tales.
Poe’s relationship with alcohol and its reflection in his work.
The financial struggles of Poe and their impact on his writings.
Poe’s tumultuous relationship with the literary community.
The mystery of Poe’s death: Theories and narratives.
Poe’s years in Baltimore and their influence.
Poe and his foster parents: A complicated bond.
The influence of Poe’s academic life on his tales.
Poe’s critiques and their influence on American literature.

6. Poe’s Literary Techniques

Poe’s use of unreliable narrators.
The symbolism of the Gothic in Poe’s works.
The mastery of first-person narrative in Poe’s stories.
Poe’s pioneering use of psychological horror.
The recurring motif of the ‘eye’ in Poe’s tales.
Exploration of sound, from the beating heart to the ominous raven.
The role of nature in setting the mood in Poe’s works.
The juxtaposition of beauty and decay in Poe’s prose.
Poe’s portrayal of women: Idealization and objectification.
Themes of confinement and entrapment in Poe’s narratives.

7. Poe’s Influence on Modern Literature

Poe’s impact on 20th-century horror writers.
The continuation of C. Auguste Dupin in Sherlock Holmes.
Poe’s influence on contemporary gothic fiction.
Adaptations of Poe in cinema and theater.
Modern reimaginings of The Tell-Tale Heart .
The legacy of The Raven in modern pop culture and more.
The reinterpretation of Poe’s themes in graphic novels.
Poe’s legacy in the genre of psychological thrillers.
How contemporary poets have built upon Annabel Lee .
The Fall of the House of Usher in modern architectural narratives.

Poe’s Exploration of the Human Psyche

Exploration of obsession in tales like The Tell-Tale Heart .
Madness and sanity: The blurred lines in Poe’s narratives.
Delving into paranoia in The Black Cat .
Love, loss, and mourning in Poe’s poetic and prose works.
The subconscious fears in The Premature Burial .
The human psyche’s struggle with mortality.
Guilt, conscience, and human nature in Poe’s writings.
The role of memory in stories like Eleonora .
The fine line between reality and illusion in Poe’s tales.
Analyzing self-identity and duality in works like William Wilson .

9. Poe and the Victorian Era

The portrayal of Victorian society in Poe’s works.
Social conventions and restraints in Poe’s narratives.
The influence of the Victorian Gothic on Poe’s tales.
Victorian views on mortality and their reflections in Poe’s stories.
The role of women in Poe’s Victorian narratives.
Poe’s criticism of Victorian moral hypocrisy.
Poe’s interaction with other Victorian writers.
The role of science and reason in Poe’s Victorian tales.
The Victorians’ fascination with the macabre and the supernatural.
Poe’s view on Victorian advancements and industrialization.

10. Analysis of Selected Works

A deep dive into The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym .
The many layers of The Descent into the Maelstrom .
Isolation and despair in The Island of the Fay .
The metaphysical quandaries of Eureka: A Prose Poem .
Unraveling Tamerlane : Poe’s early hints at genius.
Delving into the drama of Politian .
Love and loss: An analysis of Bridal Ballad .
The journey of self-discovery in Al Aaraaf .
Dissecting the mysteries of MS. Found in a Bottle .
The symbolism and depth of The Man of the Crowd .

Delving into Edgar Allan Poe’s vast realm of literary contributions is akin to embarking on a journey through layers of the human psyche, societal reflections, and transcendent themes. His works, suffused with intricate symbolism and profound emotion, continue to resonate powerfully with readers across the globe, even after centuries. These Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics serve as a window, offering a glimpse into the multifaceted world of Poe, where every narrative, be it prose or poetry, reveals a new dimension of understanding. By exploring these subjects, students not only immerse themselves in the richness of Poe’s genius but also engage in critical thinking, analytical assessments, and a deeper appreciation of literary artistry. As one ventures deeper into his narratives and poems, it becomes clear why Poe stands as an immortal pillar in the pantheon of literary greats.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Range of Research Paper Topics

Edgar Allan Poe, a name that evokes a mosaic of emotions – from eerie suspense to profound melancholy. Often hailed as the master of the macabre, Poe’s contributions to American literature span much more than just tales of horror and the uncanny. His works are a rich tapestry woven with intricate themes, unparalleled symbolism, and a deep understanding of the human psyche. This literary genius’s stories and poems have continually fascinated scholars, readers, and writers alike, offering a plethora of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics for literature enthusiasts to dive into.

To understand the vast range of research avenues in Poe’s works, one must first grasp the breadth of his literary portfolio. Although primarily recognized for his gothic tales, Poe was also an astute critic, an innovative poet, and a pioneer of the short story genre. He adeptly merged both European romanticism and American originality, resulting in a unique literary style that still stands unmatched.

The Enigmatic Poe

One of the enduring fascinations with Poe is his own life – as mysterious and tragic as some of his tales. Orphaned at a young age, battling personal demons, and facing numerous adversities, Poe’s tumultuous life deeply influenced his writings. Exploring the parallels between his personal experiences and his fictional worlds is a research area that continues to captivate scholars. His enigmatic death, still a mystery, is a testament to the lingering intrigue surrounding his life.

Poe’s Exploration of the Human Psyche

Much ahead of his time, Poe delved deep into the complexities of the human mind. Stories like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat are not just tales of horror but profound psychological studies of guilt, paranoia, and mental descent. Analyzing the psychological undertones in his works provides a multi-dimensional approach to his stories, making them relevant even in modern psychoanalytical discussions.

Symbolism and the Supernatural

Poe’s tales are replete with symbols. Be it the hauntingly sentient House of Usher or the relentless Raven, Poe used symbols to enhance the atmospheric dread of his stories and to dive deep into abstract concepts. This prolific use of symbolism offers researchers a rich field to dissect, interpret, and reinterpret.

Poe and Science Fiction

Often overshadowed by his gothic tales, Poe’s foray into science fiction, exemplified by stories like The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall and Mellonta Tauta , is an area ripe for exploration. Here, he blends his narrative genius with speculative visions of science, creating stories that can be viewed as precursors to the modern science fiction genre.

Poetic Techniques and Innovations

Poe was not just a storyteller; he was a poet par excellence. His poems, such as Annabel Lee , The Bells , and Ulalume , are studies in rhythm, sound, and emotion. They oscillate between the melancholic and the macabre, making them enduring pieces of poetic art. Researching his poetic techniques, innovations, and influences can be a fulfilling journey for anyone interested in poetic forms and structures.

Literary Criticism and Theories

As a critic, Poe had strong opinions on art, literature, and the role of the critic. His reviews, essays, and theories on writing are illuminating, offering a peek into the mind of a literary genius. Exploring Poe’s literary criticism can provide insights into 19th-century literary standards, Poe’s influences, and his expectations from literature and fellow writers.

Poe’s cultural impact is another intriguing facet to consider. His influence is not limited to American literature but spans globally, impacting various art forms. From cinema adaptations to his influence on subsequent writers and even musicians, Poe’s legacy is extensive and multifaceted.

The very nature of Poe’s work – its depth, diversity, and enduring relevance – makes it a goldmine for research. Whether one is analyzing the structural aspects of his poems, dissecting the themes of his tales, or tracing the influences of his personal life on his works, the opportunities for scholarly exploration are virtually limitless.

In conclusion, Edgar Allan Poe’s literary contributions are not mere tales to be read and forgotten. They are intricate webs of narrative brilliance, emotional depth, and symbolic complexity. For literature students and scholars, every Poe story or poem presents a unique research challenge, beckoning them to delve deeper, question more, and embark on an endless journey of literary discovery.

How to Choose Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper Topics

Selecting a topic for a research paper on Edgar Allan Poe is like being a kid in a candy store. The options are vast, intriguing, and tempting. But with so many directions to pursue, how does one choose a topic that’s not only engaging but also academically rewarding? Let’s embark on this journey of selection with some structured steps and key considerations.

Identify Your Interest: Begin by determining which of Poe’s works or themes particularly captivate you. Is it the eerie atmosphere of “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the relentless psychological torment in “The Tell-Tale Heart”? Your genuine interest will make the research process more enjoyable and your paper more passionate.
Consider the Scope: While it’s tempting to pick a broad topic like “Poe’s contribution to American literature,” it might be too vast for a detailed study. Instead, opt for more narrow focuses, such as “Poe’s influence on the detective fiction genre.”
Historical Context: Poe’s writings did not emerge in a vacuum. Understanding the socio-political and cultural context of his time can offer a fresh lens to view his works. Topics like “Poe and the American Romantic Movement” or “Societal Reflections in Poe’s Gothic Tales” can be compelling.
Analytical versus Argumentative: Determine the nature of your paper. An analytical paper on “The Symbolism in The Raven ” differs from an argumentative paper asserting “Poe’s Representation of Women as Symbols of Death and Decay.”
Relevance to Modern Times: Exploring how Poe’s themes resonate with contemporary issues can be enlightening. For instance, examining the portrayal of mental health in his stories in light of current psychological understanding can be a rich research area.
Cross-disciplinary Approaches: Don’t restrict yourself to purely literary angles. Poe’s works can be explored from psychological, sociological, or even philosophical perspectives. A topic like “Freudian Analysis of Poe’s Protagonists” can be intriguing.
Comparative Studies: Comparing Poe with other contemporaries or authors from different eras can shed light on literary evolutions and contrasts. Topics such as “Poe and Hawthorne: A Study in Dark Romanticism” can offer dual insights.
Unexplored Angles: While much has been written about Poe’s famous works, venturing into his lesser-known stories, poems, or essays can be rewarding. Delving deep into these uncharted territories can present fresh perspectives.
Consider Available Resources: Ensure that there are enough primary and secondary sources available for your chosen topic. While original interpretations are valuable, building upon or contrasting with existing scholarship enriches your research.
Seek Feedback: Before finalizing your topic, discuss it with peers, professors, or literature enthusiasts. Fresh eyes can offer new perspectives, refine your focus, or even present angles you hadn’t considered.

In conclusion, choosing a research paper topic on Edgar Allan Poe requires a blend of personal interest, academic viability, and originality. Remember that the goal is not just to explore the enigmatic world Poe created but to add a unique voice to the ongoing discourse about his works. Armed with passion and a structured approach, you’re set to select a topic that will not only enlighten readers but also deepen your appreciation of Poe’s literary genius.

How to Write an Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper

Crafting a research paper on Edgar Allan Poe is a journey into the heart of 19th-century American Gothic literature. Known as the master of macabre, Poe’s works are rich in symbolism, psychological insights, and intricate narratives. To bring justice to such depth in a research paper, a systematic approach is necessary. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you navigate the hauntingly beautiful world of Poe and create a compelling paper.

Deep Reading: Before everything else, immerse yourself in the selected work(s) of Poe. Read it multiple times, noting the nuances, literary techniques, and recurrent themes. This isn’t just casual reading; it’s about diving deep into the text.
Thesis Statement: A research paper isn’t merely a summary. It needs a central argument or perspective. Craft a clear, concise thesis statement that conveys the essence of your paper. For instance, “Through The Fall of the House of Usher , Poe explores the thin boundary between sanity and madness.”
Outline Your Thoughts: Structure is vital when delving into Poe’s intricate narratives. Create an outline with clear sections, including introduction, literature review, methodology (if applicable), main arguments, counterarguments, and conclusion.
Historical and Biographical Context: To understand Poe, it’s imperative to understand his life and times. Infuse your paper with insights about Poe’s tumultuous life, his contemporaries, and the broader socio-cultural milieu of his era.
Literary Analysis: Delve into the literary aspects of the work. Explore Poe’s use of symbolism, metaphor, allegory, and other devices. Analyze his narrative structures, use of unreliable narrators, or the rhythm and meter in his poems.
Interdisciplinary Insights: Don’t limit your analysis to a purely literary perspective. Draw insights from psychology (especially when discussing tales like The Tell-Tale Heart ), philosophy, or even the sciences.
Engage with Scholars: Your interpretations should be in dialogue with established Poe scholars. Reference critical essays, research papers, and academic discourses that align or contradict your arguments. This lends credibility to your work.
Address Counterarguments: A well-rounded research paper acknowledges differing views. If there are prominent interpretations that contradict your thesis, address them. It shows academic integrity and a comprehensive understanding of the subject.
Effective Conclusion: Wrap up by reiterating your thesis and summarizing your main arguments. Also, hint at the broader implications of your findings or suggest areas for future research.
Proofreading and Citations: After pouring so much effort into your analysis, don’t let grammatical errors or incorrect citations mar your paper. Review your work multiple times, use citation tools, and adhere to the desired formatting style (MLA, APA, etc.).

In summary, writing a research paper on Edgar Allan Poe is an intricate dance between analysis and appreciation. While the process requires a meticulous approach, it’s also an opportunity to immerse oneself in the rich tapestry of Poe’s imagination. Remember, it’s not just about producing an academic paper, but also about connecting with one of the literary world’s most enigmatic figures. Embrace the challenge, and let Poe’s haunting allure guide your pen.

Custom Research Paper Writing Services

Navigating the mysterious and captivating world of Edgar Allan Poe is no simple endeavor. The depth, symbolism, and emotional charge in his writings require a unique blend of understanding, analysis, and passion. For students tasked with crafting a research paper on Poe, the weight of doing justice to such a literary giant can feel overwhelming. This is where iResearchNet steps in, bridging the gap between student ambition and academic excellence. Here’s what sets our services apart when it comes to delivering a custom Edgar Allan Poe research paper.

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Embrace the Dark Allure of Poe with iResearchNet

Dive into the shadowy realms of Edgar Allan Poe’s universe, a world filled with intricate tales of love, despair, horror, and the supernatural. As you traverse this intricate literary landscape, let the expertise of iResearchNet guide and support you. While the gothic beauty of Poe’s works is undeniably captivating, the task of analyzing and interpreting them can be daunting. Why wander alone in these literary labyrinths when you can have a seasoned guide by your side?

By choosing iResearchNet, you’re not just selecting a service; you’re opting for a partnership. A partnership that understands the nuances of Poe’s writings, recognizes the depths of his narratives, and captures the essence of his stories in every line written. Each tale, from the heart-wrenching Annabel Lee to the haunting Masque of the Red Death , demands more than just a surface-level reading. It calls for a deep dive into the very soul of the narrative, a task that our expert writers are perfectly poised to undertake.

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100 Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most influential and celebrated writers in American literature. Known for his dark and mysterious themes, Poe's work continues to captivate readers and inspire new generations of writers. If you're a student tasked with writing an essay on Edgar Allan Poe, you may be struggling to come up with a compelling topic. To help you get started, here are 100 Edgar Allan Poe essay topic ideas and examples:

Analyze the use of symbolism in Poe's "The Raven."
Discuss the theme of madness in Poe's short stories.
Explore the role of women in Poe's works.
Compare and contrast the different narrators in Poe's stories.
Investigate the influence of Poe's personal life on his writing.
Examine the use of Gothic elements in Poe's poems.
Discuss the significance of death in Poe's poetry.
Analyze the theme of isolation in Poe's works.
Explore the role of the supernatural in Poe's stories.
Compare Poe's poetry to his short stories.
Investigate the use of irony in Poe's writing.
Discuss the theme of revenge in Poe's works.
Analyze the role of fear in Poe's stories.
Explore the theme of love and loss in Poe's poetry.
Discuss the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on modern horror literature.
Analyze the use of setting in Poe's stories.
Explore the theme of guilt in Poe's works.
Discuss the significance of the title character in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Analyze the use of suspense in Poe's writing.
Explore the theme of obsession in Poe's works.
Discuss the role of the narrator in Poe's stories.
Analyze the theme of duality in Poe's works.
Explore the significance of the title character in "The Black Cat."
Discuss the use of unreliable narrators in Poe's stories.
Analyze the theme of addiction in Poe's works.
Explore the role of death in Poe's poetry.
Discuss the theme of betrayal in Poe's stories.
Analyze the use of repetition in Poe's writing.
Explore the theme of imprisonment in Poe's works.
Discuss the significance of the title character in "Ligeia."
Analyze the use of foreshadowing in Poe's stories.
Explore the theme of redemption in Poe's works.
Discuss the role of the supernatural in Poe's poetry.
Analyze the theme of decay in Poe's works.
Explore the significance of the title character in "Lenore."
Discuss the use of unreliable memory in Poe's stories.
Analyze the theme of madness in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Explore the role of guilt in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Discuss the significance of the setting in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
Analyze the theme of obsession in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Explore the role of revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado."
Discuss the use of irony in "The Masque of the Red Death."
Analyze the theme of addiction in "The Black Cat."
Explore the significance of the title character in "The Raven."
Discuss the use of symbolism in "The Pit and the Pendulum."
Analyze the theme of duality in "William Wilson."
Explore the role of fear in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Discuss the significance of the setting in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
Analyze the theme of isolation in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
Explore the role of the supernatural in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Discuss the use of unreliable narration in "The Black Cat."
Analyze the theme of love and loss in "Annabel Lee."
Explore the significance of the title character in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Discuss the role of the narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
Analyze the theme of revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado."
Explore the use of repetition in "The Raven."
Analyze the theme of madness in "The Black Cat."
Discuss the use of symbolism in "The Masque of the Red Death."
Analyze the theme of addiction in "The Pit and the Pendulum."
Explore the significance of the title character in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
Discuss the role of fear in

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Poe, edgar allan.

Thomas Wright
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.612
Published online: 26 September 2017

At the beginning of the twenty-first century , Edgar Allan Poe was more popular than ever. The Raven and a number of his Gothic and detective tales were among the most famous writings in the English language, and they were often some of the first works of literature that young adults read. They had also entered the popular imagination—football teams and beers were named after them, and they had inspired episodes of the animated television show The Simpsons and a number of rock songs. Poe also continued to exercise a profound influence over writers and artists. Two of the most popular authors of the second half of the twentieth century , Stephen King and Isaac Asimov , acknowledged Poe as an important precursor. Countless novels published at the end of the twentieth century , such as Peter Ackroyd 's The Plato Papers: A Prophesy ( 1999 ) and Mark Z. Danielewski 's House of Leaves ( 2000 ), also bear definite traces of his influence. The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges , whose own works are greatly indebted to Poe, once called him the unacknowledged father of twentieth-century literature, and Poe's influence shows no signs of diminishing. Despite his enormous popularity and influence, Poe's canonical status is still challenged by certain commentators. Harold Bloom , for instance, regards Poe's writings as vulgar and stylistically flawed. Bloom follows in a long line of Poe detractors, many of whom have been amazed by the fact that what T. S. Eliot called his “puerile” and “haphazard” productions could have influenced “great” writers such as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé .

Poe criticism was, however, far more favorable (and far more plentiful) over the last half of the twentieth century than previously. Poe is indeed something of a boom industry in academia. New Critics, New Historicists, psychoanalysts, and poststructuralists all find his works suggestive. Few of these critics are interested in making aesthetic judgements, however, and those who concern themselves with such things continue to express doubts about Poe's achievement.

As a result, Poe remains something of an enigma. To many he is a formative influence, a genius, and an inspiration; to others he is a shoddy stylist and a charlatan. It would be more reasonable, perhaps, to regard Poe as all of these things and to accept James Russell Lowell 's famous judgment that he was “Three fifths…genius, and two fifths sheer fudge.” Few of Poe's readers are reasonable, however, as he is one of those writers who is either loved or hated.

Poe's Persona

One of the reasons Poe has been far more popular and influential than writers who, according to some, have produced works of greater literary value is that he created, with a little help from others, a fascinating literary persona. That persona was of an author at once bohemian and extremely intellectual. The bohemian aspect was largely the creation of his “friend” Rufus Wilmot Griswold , who in his obituary of Poe described him as a depraved and demonic writer. Poe himself was responsible for the intellectual element: he presented himself to the public in his writings as an erudite and bookish scholar.

Poe's persona captured the imagination of the world; like Byron before him, he became a kind of mythical or archetypal figure. Nineteenth-century poets such as Ernest Dowson and Baudelaire (who prayed to Poe and dressed up as him) regarded Poe as the original bohemian poète maudit (a tradition in which the poet explores extremes of experience and emotional depth) and as the first self-conscious literary artist. As such, he seemed to be a prefiguring type of themselves. This legendary persona may be at odds with Poe's real personality and the actual facts of his biography, but that is beside the point. What matters is that it fascinated and continues to fascinate people.

Poe's legendary personality and life have also provided people with a context in which his writings can be read (and it is worth noting here that an account of Poe's life has traditionally appeared as a preface to anthologies of his works). As is the case with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde , we tend to read Poe's works as expressions of his (real or mythical) character and as dramatizations of his personality. This confers a degree of homogeneity on his writings; although he experimented in a variety of forms and wrote on numberless topics, we think of all of his productions as “Poe performances.”

Early Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 , the son of the itinerant actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold , both of whom died when he was still an infant. He was brought up by the Richmond tobacco merchant John Allan , with whom he had a difficult relationship. Educated in London and then, for a brief period, at the University of Virginia, Poe entered the U.S. Army in 1827 . It was always Poe's ambition to be recognized as a great poet, and in 1827 he published his first volume of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems , under the name “a Bostonian.”

The title poem of the slim collection is a monologue by Tamerlane, the Renaissance Turkish warrior. The other poems are conventional romantic meditations on death, solitude, nature, dreams, and vanished youth in which Poe comes before us, as it were, in the theatrical garb of the romantic poet. The poems display Poe's considerable gift for imitation (which he later used to great effect in his prose parodies) and his habit of half quoting from his favorite authors. They contain countless echoes from romantic poets (especially Lord Byron). It is not, however, so much a question of plagiarism as it is of Poe serving a literary apprenticeship and placing himself within a poetic tradition.

In 1829 Poe published, under his own name, his second verse collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems . It contained revised versions of some of the poems that had been published in Tamerlane (Poe was a zealous reviser) and seven new poems. Sonnet—To Science , Poe's famous poem on the antagonistic relationship between science and poetry, opens the book. It is followed by the title poem, Al Aaraaf , which has been variously interpreted as a lament for the demise of the creative imagination in a materialistic world and as an allegorical representation of Poe's aesthetic theories. The poem is characterized by its variety of meter, its heavy baroque effects, and its extreme obscurity. The volume has its lighter moments, however. Fairyland , with its “Dim vales,” “Huge moons,” and yellow albatrosses is one of Poe's first exercises in burlesque and self-parody. It was typical of Poe to include, within the same volume, serious poems and comic pieces that seem to parody those compositions.

In 1831 , wishing to leave the army, Poe got himself expelled from the West Point military academy. In that year he also brought out a third volume of poetry, Poems by Edgar A. Poe . This collection represents a considerable advance on his earlier efforts and contains famous poems such as To Helen and The Doomed City (later called The City in the Sea ). The former, which is perhaps the most beautiful of all Poe's lyrics, is a stately hymn to Helen of Troy, which in its later, revised form, contained the celebrated lines:

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the Glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.

The Doomed City is a wonderful evocation of a silent city beneath the sea.

Both poems create a haunting atmosphere through the use of alliteration, assonance, measured rhythms, and gentle rhymes; they also contain words with long open vowel sounds such as “loom,” “gloom,” “yore,” and “bore” that were to become a Poe trademark. Because of Poe's fondness for such techniques, it is hardly surprising that his poems have been compared to music. Poe believed that music was the art that most effectively excited, elevated, and intoxicated the soul and thus gave human beings access to the ethereal realm of supernal beauty, a realm in which Poe passionately believed and for which he seems to have pined throughout his life. As Poe aimed to create similar effects with his verse, he attempted to marry poetry and music. This is why the rhythm of his verse is perfectly measured and often incantatory; it is also why he frequently chose words for their sounds rather than for their sense. In To Helen , for example, he writes of “those Nicéan barks of yore,” a rather confused classical allusion but a word that produces wonderfully musical vibrations.

Poe offers us what he called “a suggestive indefiniteness of meaning with a view of bringing about vague and therefore spiritual effects .” Decadent and symbolist poets of the nineteenth century , including Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine , were heavily influenced by Poe's method, and they consciously imitated his “word-music.” They also regarded Poe as their most important precursor because of his theoretical statements about poetry. Indeed, Poe was (and perhaps remains) as famous a critic and theoretician of verse as he was a poet. He is particularly remembered for his powerful denunciation of didactic poetry and for his emphasis on the self-consciousness and deliberateness of the poet's art.

Most of Poe's important theoretical pronouncements were made in the essays and lectures he wrote toward the end of his life. In Poems he wrote a prefatory “Letter to Mr —,” which represents his first theoretical statement about verse. Here he defined poetry as a pleasurable idea set to music. He also argued, with more than a slight nod to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge , that poetry “is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.” At its best, Poe's poetry embodies such ideas by creating vague yet powerful atmospheric effects and by giving the reader intense aesthetic pleasure.

Poe's early poetry received mixed reviews and failed to establish him as either a popular or a critically acclaimed author. Later commentators, such as T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman , criticized its limited range and extent; they also bemoaned its lack of intellectual and moral content. Others dismissed Poe as a mere verse technician; Emerson famously referred to him as “the jingle man.” Poe's verse was, however, revered by later nineteenth-century poets such as Mallarmé and Dowson, and considering his influence on such Decadent and symbolist writers, he can perhaps be regarded as the most influential American poet of that century after Whitman.

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

Numerous connections exist between Poe's early verse and the short stories he started to write for magazines and newspapers around 1830 . (Poe's decision to turn his hand to prose was partly because of the lack of commercial and critical success achieved by his poetry.) In some of his stories Poe included poems; he also returned to forms, such as the dramatic monologue and the dialogue between disembodied spirits, that he had used in poems such as Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf . And yet Poe's tales are clearly distinguished from his early verse, most obviously by their variety of mood, content, and theme. Poe seems to have been liberated as a writer when he turned from romantic verse to the more flexible, capacious, and traditionally heterogeneous genre of the short story. He now had at his disposal a multitude of tones and devices, and in the twenty-five stories that he wrote in the 1830s and that were collected in the anthology Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 1840 ), he exploited these to great effect.

In fact, such is the diversity of the style and mood of Poe's early stories that the division of the contents of Tales into the two categories of grotesque and arabesque seems simplistic and inadequate. Poe's grotesques are comic and burlesque stories that usually involve exaggeration and caricature. In this group we can include the tales Lionizing and The Scythe of Time (earlier called A Predicament ), which are satires of the contemporary literary scene. Another characteristic of Poe's grotesque stories is the introduction of elements of the ludicrous and the absurd. In the tale Loss of Breath , the protagonist literally loses his breath and goes out in search of it. It is a shame that Poe's early grotesques are generally neglected, because not only do they testify to his range and resourcefulness as a writer, but some of them are compelling and funny. The neglect results partly from the fact that, in order to be appreciated, they require extensive knowledge of the literary and political state of antebellum America and partly because they have been overshadowed by his arabesque tales.

Poe's arabesque tales are intricately and elaborately constructed prose poems. The word “arabesque” can also be applied to those stories in which Poe employed Gothic techniques. Gothic literature, which typically aimed to produce effects of mystery and horror, was established in the latter half of the eighteenth century by writers such as the English novelist Anne Radcliffe and the German story writer E. T. A. Hoffmann . By the beginning of the nineteenth century , the Gothic short story had become one of the most popular forms of magazine literature in England and America.

It is generally agreed that Poe's particular contribution to Gothic literature was his use of the genre to explore and describe the psychology of humans under extreme and abnormal conditions. Typically, his characters are at the mercy of powers over which they have no control and which their reason cannot fully comprehend. These powers may take the form of sudden, irrational impulses (“the imp of the perverse” that inspires the protagonist of Berenice to extract the teeth of his buried wife, for example), or as is the case with the eponymous hero of William Wilson , a hereditary disease. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque contains some of Poe's most famous Gothic productions, including Morella , Ligeia , and Berenice (the stories of the so-called “marriage group,” which concern the deaths of beautiful young women), along with perhaps the most popular of all his tales, The Fall of the House of Usher .

“Usher” is a characteristic arabesque production. It exhibits many of the trappings of Gothic fiction: a decaying mansion located in a gloomy setting, a protagonist (Roderick Usher) who suffers from madness and a peculiar sensitivity of temperament inherited from his ancient family, and a woman (his sister) who is prematurely buried and who rises from her tomb. Yet from Gothic clichés such as these, Poe produced a tale of extraordinary power. Indeed, perhaps only Stephen King in The Shining ( 1977 ) has succeeded in investing a building with such horror and in conveying the impression that it is alive.

Apart from the grotesque and arabesque stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque includes other varieties of writing. Hans Phaall has been classed as science fiction, and King Pest is a surreal historical adventure. Several stories contain elements of all of these genres; Metzengerstein , for example, is at once a work of historical fiction, a powerful Gothic tale, and a witty and grotesque parody of the latter genre. The diversity of the contents of the tales, and the variety of theme and style within individual stories, must be seen in the context of the original form in which they appeared. All of the tales were first published in popular newspapers and magazines from 1832 to 1839 . The audience for such publications was extremely heterogeneous, and Poe was clearly trying to appeal to as large a cross-section as possible. We should also remember that, unlike subscribers to weightier publications, the magazine- and newspaper-reading public had a very limited attention span. Readers craved novelty, sensation, and diversity.

Poe was profoundly influenced by the tastes of this public. In a letter to Thomas Willis White , a newspaper editor, he remarked that the public loves “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful colored into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” In Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque this is precisely what he gave them. The most obvious characteristic of his stories is their sensationalism: they include accounts of balloon journeys to the moon, premature burials, encounters with the devil, and a number of gruesome deaths.

From the early 1830s Poe planned to gather together his short stories and publish them in book form. In the mid-1830s he unsuccessfully offered for publication a collection of stories under the title Tales of the Folio Club . Poe devised an elaborate plan for the “Folio Club” volume. The tales were to be read out, over the course of a single evening, by various members of a literary club, and each story was to be followed by the critical remarks of the rest of the company. The book was evidently intended as a satire of popular contemporary modes of fiction and criticism; as such it can be compared to the work of Poe's English contemporary, Thomas Love Peacock . The satirical intent is clearly indicated by the names and descriptions of the various club members, which include “Mr Snap, the President, who is a very lank man with a hawk nose.” Many of the figures were based on real people.

When considering Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , it is important to remember the dramatic nature of its forerunner. Our knowledge of the Folio Club gathering encourages us to read Poe's stories as the compositions of various personae and to regard Poe as author of the authors of the tales. W. H. Auden described Poe's writing as operatic, and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque does indeed resemble an opera in which Poe's narrators walk on and off the stage. Thus, the narrator of Morella mutters, melodramatically, “Years—years, may pass away, but the memory of that epoch—never!” as he leaves the stage to make way for the narrator of Lionizing . “I am,” the latter remarks to the reader-audience by way of introduction, “that is to say, I was —a great man.”

Poe's gift for impersonating his narrators is remarkable, and like a great dramatist, he seemed to contain multitudes of characters. The comparison with the playwright is appropriate because the world of Poe's writing is a thoroughly theatrical one. In it the laws of “real life” (of psychological accuracy and consistency, for instance) do not apply, and in this context we can recall Poe's famous distinction between “Hamlet the dramatis persona” and “Hamlet the man.” In the Poe universe, bizarre and absurd incidents occur on a regular basis, the dialogue and the settings are distinctly stagy, and everything is hyperbolic. As the above quotations from Morella and Lionizing suggest, it is also a world in which tragedy can be quickly followed by comedy.

And here we might recall that Poe was the son of two itinerant actors. It is particularly interesting to note that Poe's beloved mother, Eliza, was renowned for her ability to play an enormous range of tragic and comic roles, often in the same theatrical season. Her son seems to have inherited this gift as, in his writings, he effortlessly swaps a suit of sables for motley attire. At times, as in The Visionary (later called The Assignation ), which contains elements of tragedy, parody, and self-parody, Poe wore both costumes at the same time. And this in turn may help us understand the appeal of Gothic literature for Poe, because it is a form of writing in which comedy intensifies the horror by setting it in relief. Those who have adapted Poe's tales for the cinema have appreciated the humorous elements of the Gothic, as their films are at once terrifying and hilarious.

Drama and theatricality are in fact everywhere in Poe's writing. As a young poet, he effortlessly mimicked the styles of writers such as Byron; as a reviewer he convincingly adopted the tone of the authoritative critic. Throughout his works he seems to entertain and juggle ideas rather than to offer them as articles of faith, and the idea of literary performance is central to his authorship. Poe is a writer-performer whose productions can be compared to virtuoso literary displays. As readers we are like members of a theater audience who are by turns enthralled, horrified, and dazzled, and when the performance is over we applaud Poe's artistry.

An appreciation of the theatrical nature of Poe's work has important consequences for criticism. If we view Poe's writing as fundamentally dramatic, it becomes impossible to discover Poe's individual voice in the universe of voices that is his work or to analyze it from the point of view of his authorial intentions. It also becomes essential to judge the work's style and content in terms of its dramatic appropriateness: when Poe's writing is weak and verbose, for example, this may be the appropriate style for a particular narrator.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The only full-length novel that Poe would write, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ( 1838 ), was begun on the suggestion of a publisher to whom he had unsuccessfully offered Tales of the Folio Club . Its first two installments appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger , and it came out in book form in 1838 . In choosing to write a sensational sea adventure—the plot includes, among other things, a mutiny, a shipwreck, a famine, and a massacre—Poe once again selected an extremely popular subject and form.

As a realistic chronicle of an utterly fantastic journey, the novel is similar to some of the stories Poe had written in the 1830s, such as MS. Found in a Bottle . Cast in the form of a first-person account of a real sea voyage and including journal entries, “factual” information, and scholarly footnotes, Pym is written with a sharp attention to significant detail that recalls the novels of the eighteenth-century author Daniel Defoe . This attention to detail, which can be found throughout Poe's fiction, confers a degree of verisimilitude on narrations that lack psychological realism. Poe's fictional works are not, in other words, realistic, but they have a reality of their own. Pym is also similar to a Defoe novel in that it is digressive and loosely structured. In contrast to Poe's short stories, it lacks a definite architecture and fails to create a unified impression or effect. Curiously enough, this is precisely what makes it such a hypnotic book. Pym's journey, like that of Karl Rossman in Franz Kafka 's Amerika ( 1927 ), is imbued with a vague sense of horror.

Pym also contains a preface, reminiscent of Defoe, in which the narrator claims that the book is a real account of a voyage although its first installments in the Southern Literary Messenger had appeared under the name of the short-story writer, “Mr Poe.” Few reviewers were taken in by this typical Poe hoax, and the novel was generally reviewed with varying degrees of enthusiasm, as a work of fiction. Until around the 1960s, critics tended to agree with Poe's own dismissive estimation of his “very silly” novel. Since then, however, it has received much better press and has inspired a variety of readings that range from the autobiographical to the allegorical. Like many of Poe's works, it is Pym 's ambiguity and indefiniteness that make it so suggestive. These qualities are perfectly embodied in the novel's famous last line. As the eponymous hero's boat heads toward a cataract, a shrouded human figure suddenly appears, “And the hue of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” At about the same time Poe also wrote two other works, both unfinished, that can be briefly mentioned here. The Journal of Julius Rodman , a Pym -like account of an expedition across the Rocky Mountains, appeared in Gentleman's Magazine in 1840 . Five years previously the Southern Literary Messenger had published scenes from Politian , a blank verse tragedy set in Renaissance Italy that would later be included in The Raven and Other Poems ( 1845 ).

Poe's Criticism

Throughout his life Poe wrote a great deal of literary journalism and worked in an editorial capacity for a variety of newspapers. It was also one of his great ambitions to edit his own magazine. As a critic he was outspoken, vitriolic, and fearless. He highlighted the technical limitations of the books he reviewed, accused several authors (most famously Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ) of plagiarism, and took great delight in attacking the New England literary establishment.

Poe was not simply motivated by a disinterested concern for the health of letters; he was also desperately trying to carve his way to literary fame. That is why his criticism tended to be as sensational as his short-story writing: controversy was the equivalent of the Gothic and grotesque effects of his fiction. Without money or regular employment, Poe had to achieve celebrity status in order to survive in the literary marketplace, and if he could not be famous then he would be notorious. He did everything he could to keep his name before the public, even going to the extent of anonymously reviewing his own works.

Poe also used the pages of the popular press to fashion and present an image of himself as a man of immense erudition. In his articles, as in his short stories, he included countless quotations and phrases from various languages; he also made a great exhibition of his learning. Poe's “Marginalia,” published in newspapers during the 1840s, consists of comments and meditations that he claimed to have scribbled in the margins of the books in his library. “I sought relief,” he commented, like a latter-day Renaissance connoisseur of fine literature, “from ennui in dipping here and there at random among the volumes of my library.” The reality was quite different, however. Poe wrote the pieces as fillers for newspapers when they were short of copy, and the sad fact of the matter was that he could never afford to assemble an extensive library of his own.

Poe's most important contributions to literary criticism were his theories concerning the short story and poetry. It has been suggested that his comments on the short story, which were scattered throughout reviews of books such as Nathaniel Hawthorne 's Twice-Told Tales ( 1837 ), helped establish the genre in its modern form. Poe's theory can be briefly summarized. He was concerned above all with the effect of his tale on the reader. This effect should, he thought, be single and unified. When readers finished the story they ought be left with a totality of impression, and every element of the story—character, style, tone, plot, and so on—should contribute to that impression. Stories too long to be read at a single sitting could not, in Poe's view, achieve such powerful and unified effects—hence the brevity of his own productions. Poe also advocated the Aristotelian unities of place, time, and action and put special emphasis on the opening and conclusion of his tales. In addition, he encouraged authors to concentrate exclusively on powerful emotional and aesthetic effects—the aim of fiction, he suggested, was not a didactic one. Finally, instead of providing the reader with a transparent upper current of meaning, he thought that the meaning of a tale should be indefinite and ambiguous.

Obviously, such ideas help us understand Poe's own short stories. The Tell-Tale Heart and The Masque of the Red Death , for example, exhibit most of the above-mentioned characteristics. The theories of poetry that Poe adumbrated in book reviews and in lectures such as The Poetic Principle ( 1849 ) also help us understand his verse. In Poe's criticism there is a sense in which he was justifying his own practice as a creative writer and also attempting to create the kind of critical atmosphere in which his work would be favorably judged. Other writers, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound , have also found this to be an effective strategy for achieving literary success. More broadly, it can be suggested that writing such as Poe's that lacks a definite content and an unambiguous message requires a theory in order to, as it were, support it and make it intelligible to the reader.

Poe's statements about poetry are similar to his pronouncements on the short story. Thus, in a review of Longfellow's Hyperion, A Romance ( 1839 ), he criticized its lack of a definite design and unified effect. Later, when commenting on the same author's Ballads and Other Poems ( 1841 ), he complained of Longfellow's didacticism and his failure to appreciate that the aim of poetry was not to instruct readers but to give them access to the world of supernal beauty. These ideas were expressed in a more theoretical form in The Poetic Principle , in which Poe criticized what he referred to as “the heresy of the didactic” and famously defined poetry as “the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” These ideas proved to be extremely influential and were later adapted by “art-for-art's-sake” aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and by symbolists such as Paul Valéry . It has also been suggested that Poe's emphasis on the words on the page, rather than on external considerations such as the writer's biography, make him an important precursor of the New Critics.

The Raven and Other Poems

Poe's most influential theoretical essay was probably “The Philosophy of Composition,” published in Graham's Magazine in 1846 . Before we turn to it, however, it is necessary to consider The Raven , the inception and writing of which the essay describes. The Raven , first published in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845 , was an instant hit with the reading public. This allusion to pop music is apt because the immediate and enormous success of the poem has been accurately compared to that of a present-day song. On its publication, Poe became an overnight sensation, and thereafter he would always be associated with the poem. In a sense this association is unfortunate, because it obscures the fact that the poem, like many of Poe's short stories, is a dramatic production. The narrator, a young man mourning the death of his love Lenore, sits in his study musing “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”—a character and a setting typical of Poe. As well as being a dramatic poem, it is also an intensely theatrical one: the gloomy weather, the speaking bird, and props such as the purple curtain and the bust of Pallas could have been filched from the set of a Gothic drama. The young man's language, too, is distinctly stagy; at one point he remarks to the Raven: “ ‘Sir…or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore.’ ” The effect of such distinctly camp lines is complicated; you are not sure whether to laugh or scream. In the theater, and in the theatrical world of the poem, it is of course possible to do both.

Given the theatricality of the poem, it is fitting that Poe performed it, just as Dickens performed his novels, in public and private readings. During his recitations Poe once again proved that the theater was in his blood: he would dress in black, turn the lamps down low, and chant the poem in a melodious voice. The content of the poem is of course unrealistic; like a great drama, however, it creates its own vivid and convincing reality through its solemn rhymes and its stately rhythm.

Poe's raven has become as famous as those other birds of romanticism, Keats 's nightingale, Shelley 's skylark, and Coleridge's albatross. This is ironic because, in The Philosophy of Composition , he insisted that the poem was not a romantic one. The essay was written to demonstrate that, far from being a work of inspiration, the composition of The Raven proceeded with what he called “the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” Along with metaphors drawn from mathematics, Poe typically (and revealingly) used images of acting to convey his detachment and self-consciousness during the writing of the poem.

Desiring to create a powerful effect of melancholy beauty that would appeal to both “the popular and the critical taste,” Poe tells us that he hit upon the saddest of all subjects: the death of a beautiful woman. This had, of course, been the subject of several of his earlier writings, such as the “marriage group” of stories in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . In order to make the effect of the poem intense and unified, he decided that it should be limited to around one hundred lines and that it would include a refrain composed of the single, sonorous word, Nevermore . In the remainder of the essay Poe, who might be compared here to a magician who enjoys explaining away his tricks, goes on to make numerous comments of a similar nature.

It has been suggested that The Philosophy of Composition was a typical Poe hoax, and it is highly unlikely that it is a veracious account of the actual writing of The Raven . This, however, is largely irrelevant since the essay's importance lies in the fact that it offered a novel theory of composition and a new conception of the poet. Poe was attempting to replace the idea of the inspired poet that had been established by the ancients and by contemporaries such as Coleridge with his notion of the cold and calculating author. Once again, Poe's idea proved to be extremely influential in the history of literature. It informs Valéry's conception of the poet as an extremely self-conscious artist and T. S. Eliot's idea of the impersonal author.

It is doubtful that Poe's theories would have exercised such a powerful influence had he not also embodied and dramatized them in his writings. Perhaps even more important, he also offered himself as an archetype of the kind of author he was describing. Poe presented himself, in other words, as the exemplar of the self-conscious poet, an original that poets such as Baudelaire copied.

The Raven was republished in Poe's most substantial and famous collection of verse, The Raven and Other Poems , in 1845 . The book, which was prefaced by a statement that typically succeeded in being at once self-effacing and arrogant, contained revised versions of earlier compositions such as Israfel and poems that had never previously appeared in book form. Also included in the collection were several poems that had appeared, or would later appear, in Poe's short stories. (This is a striking demonstration of the homogeneous nature of Poe's oeuvre.) The most famous of these poems are The Haunted Palace , a powerful atmospheric poem improvised by Roderick Usher, and The Conqueror Worm , written by the eponymous hero of Ligeia . In the latter, angels are in a theater watching humankind play out its meaningless “motley drama” in which there is “much of Madness and more of Sin / And horror the soul of the plot.” Suddenly, “a blood-red thing” comes onto the stage. The lights go out, the curtain comes down, and death (for it is he) holds illimitable dominion over all. In its Gothic style, its dark vision of the world, and its theatricality, the poem is characteristic of its author and indeed reads like a microcosm of his oeuvre. One obvious point that can be made in connection with the poems that appeared in Poe's short stories is that they are dramatic works (a comparison here might be made with Robert Browning's monologues). Yet again, Poe displays his great gifts as a mimic or actor, and once more we are alerted to the difficulties of reading his work in an autobiographical light.

Many of Poe's finest poems were written after the publication of The Raven and were collected in volume form posthumously. These include the onomatopoeic The Bells , the beautiful ballad Annabel Lee , and the musical masterpiece Ulalume . This last poem is perhaps the most perfect example of Poe's ability to create a mysterious and unearthly atmosphere through repetition, assonance, and the use of languorous, usually trisyllabic, words. While discussing the poem, Poe is reported to have remarked that he deliberately wrote verse that would be unintelligible to the many. Ulalume is certainly hard to understand, but like the rest of Poe's verse, its ambiguity heightens rather than diminishes its power.

Poe, the Detective Story, and Science Fiction

Between the publication of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 and his death in 1849 , Poe wrote numerous short stories. Among them are some of the most famous of all his writings, such as The Black Cat , The Tell-Tale Heart , The Cask of Amontillado , The Pit and the Pendulum , Hop-Frog , and The Masque of the Red Death . These stories have achieved the status of myths in the Western world; even those who have not read them know their plots. Because of the exigencies of space, and also because some of Poe's arabesque and grotesque productions have already been discussed, the focus here is on the stories that appeared in Tales ( 1845 ) and, in particular, on Poe's detective tales and science fiction. Although reviewers of Tales were, as usual, divided between those who described Poe as a great original and those who dismissed him as a showy and stylistically incompetent writer, the volume sold better than any of Poe's other publications.

Four detective stories (or “Tales of ratiocination,” as Poe called them) appeared in Tales : the prize-winning The Gold-Bug and three tales that featured the detective C. Auguste Dupin: The Purloined Letter , The Mystery of Marie Roget , and The Murders in the Rue Morgue . Although writers such as Voltaire, William Godwin , and Tobias Smollet had produced examples of what might be loosely termed crime fiction in the eighteenth century , it was these tales that established the modern short detective story as a definite and distinct form.

In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the most famous and entertaining of Poe's detective stories, we immediately recognize the structure of the modern detective tale. A hideous and inexplicable crime is committed (the brutal murder of two women in a locked room in Paris), and all the evidence is placed before us. The police, who rely on cunning and instinct rather than rational method and imagination, are utterly baffled. Fortunately for them, an amateur genius, Dupin, is on hand to unravel the mystery. The tale (which in terms of its action is written backward) thus includes two stories: that of the crime and that of its solution and explanation by Dupin.

In creating Dupin, Poe invented the archetype of the modern detective. Among Dupin's descendents are Agatha Christie 's Hercule Poirot, G. K. Chesterton 's Father Brown, and of course Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes, who in one of Conan Doyle's stories actually discusses Dupin's merits. An eccentric and reclusive genius, Dupin is both a poetic visionary and a detached man of reason; he combines the attributes of the poet with those of the mathematician. In The Purloined Letter , where he unravels a mystery by identifying with the criminal, Dupin also displays an actor's power of empathy. He is, in other words, a glorified and aristocratic version of Poe. Poe also created the original of the detective's companion: a friend of average intelligence who narrates the tale and who acts, as it were, as the reader's representative within it. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the character is nameless; in later works by other authors he will be called Doctor Watson and Captain Hastings.

Poe is thus in large part responsible for one of the most popular and dominant forms of modern literature. After reading Poe, the French writers the Goncourt brothers believed that they had discovered “the literature of the twentieth century —love giving place to deductions…the interest of the story moved from the heart to the head…from the drama to the solution.” This prediction proved correct. Twentieth-century writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (who believed that Poe's ghost dictated detective stories to him) consciously imitated Poe, and the popularity and influence of the detective story has been, and still is, enormous. The broader point made by the Goncourt brothers concerning a literature of “the head” is also interesting. The detective story is essentially an intellectual exercise or game, and much of Poe's writing can be described in these terms. Perhaps it is this quality in his work that made it so popular and influential in the twentieth century .

The invention, or at the very least the foundation, of the modern detective story is surely Poe's greatest contribution to world literature. He has also been hailed as the father of modern science fiction. The extent to which Poe established the genre is, however, a matter of controversy. Those who have argued for his formative influence point to the futuristic, technological, and rationalistic elements of his work. It is perhaps better to approach the question through a consideration of Poe's influence, which was enormous. Poe's science fiction stories profoundly influenced later masters of the genre such as Jules Verne , H. G. Wells , and Isaac Asimov (who conflated the science fiction tale and the detective story). Among the Poe stories that have been classed as science fiction are Hans Phaall , the eponymous hero's account of his nineteen-day balloon journey to the moon, and the futuristic Mellonta Tauta . Two stories in Tales , The Colloquy of Monos and Una and The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion , have also been classified as science fiction tales.

Both are dialogues between disembodied spirits set sometime in the distant future. The dialogue form, which derives from ancients such as Lucian and Plato , was very popular in Poe's time among satirical writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, Giacomo Leopardi , and William Blake . Poe also used it for satirical purposes; in these dialogues he criticizes his age for, among other things, its exclusive belief in science. Poe's argument with science was in some respects a typically romantic one. Science and industrialization, it is suggested in The Colloquy , have given humans the false idea that they have dominion over nature and have devalued the poetic intellect.

Yet Poe went further than this conventional romantic position and challenged science's claims to objectivity and its emphasis on empiricism. So far as objectivity is concerned, reading hoax stories such as Hans Phaall leaves the impression that scientific explanations of the world are not unlike stories and that science itself may be a kind of fiction. Regarding the limitations of empiricism, Poe believed that the discovery of facts was not enough and that it is what is done with them that is important. It requires, Poe suggests, a visionary rather than a scientist to sort, connect, and shape them into theories. This visionary figure, who is both poet and mathematician, appears throughout Poe's writings. Sometimes he is Dupin, the great detective; at other times he is Poe, the theorist of poetic composition and the author of the scientific prose poem Eureka .

Poe evidently believed that Eureka , published in 1848 , was his greatest achievement: “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka,’ ” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “I could accomplish nothing more.” Indeed, he appears to have regarded it as nothing less than the solution to the secret of the universe. It is most unfortunate for humanity, therefore, that Eureka makes extremely dull reading and is very difficult to understand. One of the best attempts at a summary is contained in Kenneth Silverman 's ( 1991 ) excellent biography of Poe. Suffice it to say here that Eureka , subtitled as “Essay on the material and the spiritual universe” predicted, among other things, the annihilation and the rebirth of the universe.

Although Eureka has traditionally been regarded as a distinct work within the Poe canon, there are many connections between it and the rest of his oeuvre. Passages in short stories such as Mellonta Tauta prefigure some of its contents. In his preface to the book Poe described it as a poem rather than a “scientific” work. “I offer this Book of Truths,” he wrote, adapting Keats's famous line, “not in the character of a Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it True.”

The rather confused critical reception that Eureka received also made it a typical Poe production. Some reviewers read it as an elaborate hoax in the manner of Hans Phaall ; others considered it to be a prolix and labored satire of scientific discourse. Certain critics regarded it as a brilliant and sincere work of genius, yet it was also dismissed as arrant fudge. Such diverse and extreme reactions to Poe's work have already been noted; they testify to the fact that, whatever else his writing is, it is impossible to ignore.

Poe's Influence

When Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849 from causes that are still the subject of debate, some commentators predicted that his works would be forgotten. They could not have been more wrong, as his books are currently read throughout the world and his influence on world literature has been extraordinary. With their consummate artistry, their self-consciousness, and their heavy atmosphere of decay, Poe's poems and tales (along with his literary persona and his theories) inspired Decadent and symbolist writers of the nineteenth century . Baudelaire, among whose earliest works were translations of Poe's stories, famously died with a copy of Poe's tales beside his bed. Mallarmé, Verlaine, Dowson, and Wilde also worshipped at the Poe shrine.

At the end of the nineteenth century , science fiction writers such as Verne and Wells and authors of detective stories such as Conan Doyle acknowledged their profound debt to Poe. It was Conan Doyle who remarked that Poe's tales “have been so pregnant with suggestion…that each is a root from which a whole literature has developed.” In the twentieth century Poe's influence was no less profound. His short stories were of immense importance to authors as diverse as Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft (who referred to his tales of horror as “Poe stories”), Vladimir Nabokov , and Stephen King. He has also had a powerful effect on every other branch of the arts. Painters such as René Magritte and Edmund Dulac were fascinated by him, and film directors such as Roger Corman and Alfred Hitchcock also took inspiration from his writings.

Poe continues to inspire and enchant people today. In the future he will no doubt attract as much hostile criticism as he has in the past, but he will survive because he will continue to be read. And despite all of the faults and all of the fudge in his writings, it is hard, in conclusion, to think of another American writer who has so drastically altered the landscape of the popular imagination or who has had such a powerful effect on his fellow artists.

Selected Works

Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831)
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
Tales (1845)
Eureka (1848)
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1969–1978)
The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976)
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (1986)
Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (1996)

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

Westminster Hall

Halloween at the Poe Grave

October 31, 2019 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

(An annual fundraiser for Westminster Preservation Trust)

October 31, 2018 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Poe Birthday Celebration

Birthday Celebration at Westminster Hall

Gofundme page

January 19, 2018

January 18, 2020

Poe Birthday Celebrations

at the Poe House and Museum

and at Westminster Hall

January 19, 2019

George Peabody Library

Poe Exhibit

October 4, 2016 - February 5, 2017

Online exhibit of selected items

101st Annual Commemorative Program

“The Island of Doctor Moran: A Fresh Examination of Poe's Attending Physician”

October 1, 2023 2:00 pm

Baltimore Poe House and Museum

International Poe Festival

Two days of books, music and art, commemorating the 174th anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe

October 7 & 8, 2023

October 31, 2023 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

The Writings of Edgar Allan Poe:

The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (A comprehensive collection of e-texts of all of Poe’s prose and poetical writings, from the original sources and with multiple versions as revised during his lifetime — includes poems, tales, sketches, essays, literary criticism, letters and miscellanea. Along with individual items, several important and scholarly collections are also provided, including the Harrison and Mabbott/Pollin editions.)

Information about Edgar Allan Poe:

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (by Arthur Hobson Quinn — still the standard biography, perhaps slightly dated but sympathetic, and an impressive accumulation of what we know about Poe, done with great care and skill by someone with superb academic credentials, training and experience). (For a more condensed biography, see the “ Annals ” by Thomas Ollive Mabbott.)
The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe (by Dwight R. Thomas and David K. Jackson — a chronologically sequenced collection of statements and extracts that provides an invaluable overview of Poe’s life, rooted in historical documents)
The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe (by Michael J. Deas — the definitive book on Poe’s appearance and iconography, with many images now provided in full color)
Poe Studies / Dark Romanticism (Full issues, 1968-1987)
A Poe Bookshelf (A large selection of books, articles and lectures about Poe, all presented as e-text, with a few general lists of errata for more current books still under copy-right.)
General Topics about Edgar Allan Poe (Standard Reference Works, Poe’s Death, etc.)
Subject Index (to pages at this site) (in preparation)
Searching this site (via Google)

Information about Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore:

Poe in Baltimore (with a chronology)
The Baltimore Poe House and Museum
The Poe Grave and Memorial (Westminster Burying Ground)
The Site of Poe’s Death (formerly the Washington University Hospital, the Baltimore City Marine Hospital, and the Church Home and Hospital)
The Moses Ezekiel Statue of Poe (University of Baltimore, Law School Plaza)

Information About the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore:

A Brief History of the Poe Society
Poe Society Contact Information
Poe Society Membership Information
Poe Society Archives (University of Baltimore, Langsdale Library, Special Collections)

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42 Poe and the Sciences of the Brain

Honors College, Rutgers University

Published: 10 July 2018
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This chapter examines Poe’s exploration of how the human brain functions in his critical essays and tales. It locates his ideas concerning the brain’s functions within mid-nineteenth-century theories about the mind and the brain, specifically phrenology, and alongside his description of intuition as an alternative or supplement to a scientific epistemology based purely in induction and deduction. After doing so, it theorizes how his views might intersect with recent developments in neuroscience and the cognitive sciences, especially as applied to aesthetics. Like many other Romantic authors, Poe approached scientific pursuits and methods, especially those regarding human mental faculties and functions, with both skepticism and a great deal of interest. Ranging over a number of Poe’s works, from Eureka to “The Imp of the Perverse,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue” to “Philosophy of Composition,” the chapter argues that Poe’s celebration and critique of human rationality and the limits of scientific methods, especially in regards to the human brain, provide a valuable template for thinking through the application of developments in brain science to literary-aesthetic questions in the twenty-first century.

To read Poe from a scientific framework is to confront literary culture’s differences and similarities from scientific method and knowledge. Famously, in Eureka , Poe attempts to occupy the ground of science, colonizing its reputation for himself a year or so before his death, trying to resurrect some sense of his importance even as he, and other writers, recognized that the empirical sciences were moving to the center stage of intellectual life in the West. 1 While “Sonnet: To Science,” from the beginning of his career, can be seen as epitomizing a Romantic rejection of scientific objectivity—a “Vulture, whose wings are dull realities” that “preyest . . . upon the poet’s heart”—Poe’s oeuvre—and Romanticism as a whole—offers a far different picture of the relationship between science and literature (M 1: 91). In keeping with a range of Romantics from Coleridge to Emerson and Thoreau to Melville, but in his own distinct ways, Poe found the critical apparatus of science to be insufficiently self-critical, and, in response, explored the boundaries of the areas that science, in his time and ours, attempted to explain. In particular, I am interested in what has often been described as one of the most complex networks science has ever encountered: our own brains. In the past two decades, literary scholars have increasingly embraced the modern brain sciences in trying to account for the attraction, pleasures, and features of literature. This exploration is, in many ways, parallel to Poe’s own interest in the leading developments of his time, developments that, in the 1830s and 1840s, easily crossed the disciplinary lines that C. P. Snow described as the two cultures in 1959. In what follows, I will describe how Poe both readily embraced and criticized one of the most prominent brain sciences of his age, phrenology, and how that critical engagement might provide a model for literary scholars’ relationship to the biological sciences’ insights into literary aesthetics now.

Many of Poe’s tales and essays regularly consider the workings of the human mind, whether it is “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” or “Murders in the Rue Morgue” or “Instinct v. Reason.” What is striking about Poe’s accounts of the mind’s processes is that they are at once predictable and yet irrational, reliable and yet deeply flawed. In “Rue Morgue,” for example, Dupin is able to interrupt the narrator’s stream of thought because of his ability to predict the circuitous route of his thinking. “The apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal” (M 2: 535) of someone’s thinking can be overcome through a combination of close observation, empathic projection, and rational deduction. But in “The Man of the Crowd,” no amount of close observation allows the narrator to read the man he has stalked. Despite being in one of those “moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs” (M 2: 507) and his ability to “frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (M 2: 511) in the faces and bodies of passersby, the narrator can only conclude that the man cannot be read ( er lasst sich nicht lesen [M 2: 515]). In “Rue Morgue,” the narrator suggests that what lies beyond analysis is analysis itself—“The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis” (M 2: 527)—yet in the Dupin stories and at most length in Eureka , Poe does offer descriptions of analytical processes. Poe, I contend, does not retract the brain from scientific study through a kind of idealism or spiritualism. Rather, in keeping with recent accounts of his radical materialism, Poe explores the material basis of the brain, particularly through his interest in and critique of phrenology. 2 While Edward Reed, among others, has described how the conservative reconstitution after the Congress of Vienna led to a concurrent, politically charged rejection of materialist versions of human consciousness on the continent, in England, and in the United States, phrenology, emerging in the early decades of the nineteenth century, provided an early foundation to modern considerations of brain localization and the now readily accepted version of the self as embrained. 3 Bringing together his comments on phrenology, on the brain, and on scientific method, I will argue that Poe suggests that aesthetic experience emerges from the unpredictable and irrational operations of the brain that science, then and now, has failed to fully comprehend.

Phrenology: “The Most Important” Science

In his review of Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology by Mrs. L. Miles in the Southern Literary Messenger of March 1836, Poe opined that phrenology “has assumed the majesty of a science; and, as a science, ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings,” both theoretically and practically (ER: 329). 4 Founded by Franz Joseph Gall at the end of the eighteenth century, phrenology—or organologie as Gall called it—came to the forefront in Britain (and then the United States) with the first English version of Gall’s Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux in 1815 and the subsequent speaking tours by his aide and partner, J. S. Spurzheim. In Britain, George Combe took the lead among those promoting phrenology against more establishment philosophers and physicians, and his works, especially Essay on the Constitution of Man and Its Relation to External Objects , first published in 1828, broadcast phrenological ideas and ideals throughout the English-speaking world. By 1836, when Poe reviewed Miles’s book, phrenology was gaining more and more ground in the United States, with the Fowler family—Orson, Lorenzo, and Lydia—at the lead. From the mid-1830s through the 1850s, the Fowlers, through their publication house in New York, published journals and books on topics such as marriage, temperance, memory, and religion, all grounded in and disseminating their version of phrenology. 5

Phrenology had three central tenets: (1) the brain is the organ of the mind; (2) the brain is, in fact, not one organ, but multiple organs, each devoted to a specific faculty; and (3) the strength of those organs is determined by their relative size, which, in turn, is reflected in the skull overlying that region of the brain. While often ridiculed as merely the feeling of heads for bumps to determine moral character and mental strengths and weaknesses (the second and third tenets), phrenology’s emphasis on brain structure as determining mental functions and, more specifically, on brain localization—the idea that certain regions of the brain are the sites of distinct mental functions—was groundbreaking and became the basis of its lasting influence. The idea that the brain is the organ of the mind may seem undeniable—and was, to some extent, widely accepted in the early nineteenth century—but it was rejected by critics on two grounds: for reducing the soul to a material entity or effect and, less often, for neglecting the dispersal of mental and emotional life throughout the nervous system. By emphasizing the physiological nature of the mind, phrenology moved toward overcoming the mind–body dualism enshrined by Cartesian thought, perhaps reducing the spiritual to the physical, even as most phrenologists worked to mitigate that logical tendency. In this way, as Robert Young contends, phrenology laid the groundwork for the move from investigating psychology primarily through a metaphysical framework to exploring human psychology as founded in biology. 6

Gall made important contributions to the understanding of brain anatomy, and he grounded much of his thinking in comparative anatomy, examining a wide variety of skulls from different people and animals. He eventually identified twenty-seven mental organs but left open whether that fully described the brain’s capacities. His version of phrenology was largely deterministic (as the relative size of different brain organs was fixed at birth) and defined some faculties in altogether negative terms, such as one he sometimes denominated “murder.” With Spurzheim, however, phrenologists began to develop the argument that all faculties had their use in human growth (“murder,” for example, became “combativeness” or self-defense) and that through exercising or restraining specific faculties one could enhance or retard their development appropriately. 7 Combe and the Fowlers pushed phrenology’s use for self-development and regulation even further, most often through a kind of natural theology that posited a benevolent deity had designed a logical world that, if explored and handled rationally, could lead to human freedom and happiness. As Combe insisted, “God must have arranged the inherent constitution of man, and that of the world, in such a manner as to admit of their being obeyed,—and not only so, but to render men happy in proportion as they should practise, and miserable as they should neglect them.” 8 For Combe and most phrenologists of the 1830s and 1840s, their science was essential due to its ability to determine the inherent constitution of man so that humankind could properly behave along the lines dictated by God and reason. Thus, according to Combe, “it is obvious that, if the science of Mind, were in the same state of forwardness as Chemistry or Natural Philosophy, society would now be reaping these fruits of its cultivation.” 9

As much as Combe and others emphasized the practical impact of their work, they repeatedly attempted to define their endeavors as an empirical science. Yet after Gall, phrenologists, as a whole, showed little to no interest in actual experimentation or in anatomical studies. As John van Wyhe has recently argued, “Phrenology was not generally a research programme. Phrenologists did not conduct experiments to determine if the phrenological organs were accurately identified. A search for new cerebral organs was not a significant part of phrenology.” 10 Combe and others contended that observations and experiments on the brain could potentially determine how it works but not what it does, just as dissecting the tongue might give us insight into how it works as a muscle but would do nothing to reveal its functions in human life. 11 In the preface to the fifth edition of A System of Phrenology (1843) , Combe defined science as “a correct statement, methodically arranged, of facts in nature accurately observed, and of the inference from them logically deduced.” He goes on, however, to distinguish “ exact ” sciences, such as mathematics and chemistry, from “ estimative ” ones like phrenology, which “being a branch of physiology . . . like medical science rests on evidence which can be observed and estimated only.” 12 Such sciences could provide accurate but not exact descriptions and inferences about the world by drawing on observations even if they could not conduct direct experiments.

These questions, about how exact science had to be in order to be reliably predictive and how one moved from observations to “logically deduced” laws, energized the discussions about scientific method during this period and, I will argue, are essential to understanding Poe’s engagement with phrenology and science more broadly in articulating his aesthetic project. Most prominently, William Whewell and John Stuart Mill debated these questions over two decades through the different editions of Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (first published in 1840) and Mill’s System of Logic (first published in 1843). Where Whewell attempted to establish a foundation for linking induction and deduction, Mill addressed what he saw as Whewell’s apriorism, his abandonment of induction for a kind of intuitionism. Best known now for coining the term “scientist,” Whewell placed what he called the “fundamental antithesis” at the center of his philosophy of science. He articulates this antithesis with a multiplicity of pairs—things and thoughts, induction and deduction, facts and theories, sensations and ideas, objective and subjective, matter and form. One of his main ideas, which has led to readings of him as a Kantian, is that “Our Sensations require Ideas to bind them together, namely, Ideas of space, time, number, and the like.” 13

Mill saw this acknowledgment of the mind’s more active role in discovering truth as undermining Whewell’s inductive philosophy and in turn attempted to show how even the most fundamental ideas, such as the notion of causation or the uniformity of nature, derived from experience. He defined causation as simply the invariability of one phenomenon following another, rejecting the idea of some “mysterious and most powerful tie” that would allow or compel us to “ascend higher, into the essences and inherent constitution of things, to find the true cause, the cause which is not only followed by, but actually produces, the effect.” 14 Whewell’s acknowledgment of the active role theory and preconceptions play in scientific discovery can be seen as a precursor to critiques of naïve scientific empiricism. But as Laura Snyder has fully described, his philosophy of science was grounded in his natural theology and his faith that through the progressive nature of the scientific mind’s engagement with the world we could discover the fundamental laws set in place by God that governed the universe. For Whewell, then, science held the possibility of revealing the truth about “the causal structure of the physical world,” while for Mill our empirical research allows us to generalize about phenomena, producing scientific laws, but it does not grant us final access to the underlying structure of the physical world or to reasonable hypotheses concerning unobserved phenomena. 15

Speculative Deductions and Intuitive Leaps

It is within this context of epistemological debates over the nature of true science that I want to return to Poe’s engagement with phrenology and his broader consideration of epistemology in Eureka and in his literary criticism. 16 In Eureka , Poe offers some of his most explicit commentary on epistemology through a letter from the year 2848 in which the writer describes the backward thinking of Poe’s present (this letter appears almost verbatim in “Mellonta Tauta”). The writer specifically alludes to Mill’s Logic , criticizing his notion of axiomatic truth. While Mill rejects the idea that an axiom can be founded in our inability to imagine things otherwise, Poe’s writer insists that this is actually the basis of Mill’s axiom that “ ‘Contradictions cannot both be true—that is, cannot coexist in nature,’ ” so that “a tree must be either a tree or not a tree—that it cannot be at the same time a tree and not a tree” (L1: 13). Poe’s writer from the future concludes that, in fact, Mill offers no defense of this axiom other than that we cannot conceive things otherwise (although he notes that “Bedlamite[s]” and “Transcendentalist[s]” do [L1: 14]).

Poe’s main objection to the state of epistemology in the nineteenth century, though, is that the route to knowledge has been limited to induction and deduction and that all other sources of knowledge have been delegitimized. Poe is correct to cite Mill on this point, as Mill singularly emphasized induction while Whewell, as noted, envisioned a more active role of the mind in arriving at truth about the world. Poe, in particular, challenges accounts of Kepler’s and Newton’s discoveries (a site of debate between Mill and Whewell) as evolving merely from the conscious synthesis of inductive observation and deductive reasoning. Instead, his writer from the future contends that science “makes its most important advances—as all History will show—by seemingly intuitive leaps ” (L1: 10). Significantly, though, Poe emphasizes that intuition is not some magical or mystical insight provided from beyond the knowing subject, but rather is “ the conviction arising from those inductions or deductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason, or defy our capacity of expression ” (L1: 22). 17 Poe does not state that this intuition is a truth; rather it is a “conviction,” a belief. It is not, however, a belief without foundation, for the processes by which we reach this intuition are based in a kind of unconscious induction and deduction. Yet while based in rational processes, we have no ability to consciously, rationally, grasp how we arrive at them.

With that in mind, I want to return to Poe’s broader comments on phrenology—and the potential to understand the brain and its workings—in his criticism and tales. A month after the Miles review, Poe sets up his famous critique of literary nationalism in the Drake-Halleck review with an account of the phrenological bases of poetry. Poe begins by contending that “the most direct, and the most unerring method” of deciphering the true nature of something is by examining its “ design .” In terms of our mental faculties, we first “find certain faculties implanted within us, and arrive at a more plausible conception of the character and attributes of those faculties, by considering, with what finite judgment we possess, the intention of the Deity in so implanting them within us, than by any actual investigation of their powers, or any speculative deductions from their visible and material effects” (ER: 509). The route to clearly conceiving how the mind works lies less in direct observation than in deductions from the intentions of God. As we will see, in “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Black Cat,” Poe’s narrators almost directly contradict this view in stressing the “finite” nature of our “judgment,” but in the Drake-Halleck review he educes an “instinct given to man by God” that phrenologists call “Veneration,” by remarking that “we discover in all men a disposition to look with reverence upon superiority” (ER: 509). Poe begins with a more inductive point—we discover this faculty in all men through observation—before moving to a more deductive account of its design or purpose—it is “given to man by God as security for his own worship” (ER: 509). While not exactly the same, parallel to Veneration, Poe contends, is “the Faculty of Ideality—which is the sentiment of Poesy,” “the sense of the beautiful, of the sublime, and of the mystical.” This “love of the gleaming stars and other burning glories of Heaven” and the beauties of Earth is “mingled up inextricably with . . . the unconquerable desire— to know ” (ER: 510). Veneration and Ideality, Poe suggests, are located in specific brain structures, as identified by phrenology, and similarly partake in an admiration of something greater than the self, an admiration that combines a kind of “Intellectual Happiness” with the “Imagination.”

As reiterated in “Philosophy of Composition,” however, Poe insists that a strong faculty of Ideality does not make one a poet, but rather that “a poem is not the Poetic faculty, but the means of exciting it in mankind” (ER: 511). Citing Coleridge as the man who has “been most successful in writing the purest of all poems,” Poe turns to phrenological analysis to make his point: Coleridge’s “head, if we mistake not its character, gave no great phrenological tokens of Ideality, while the organs of Causality and Comparison were most singularly developed” (ER: 512). In terms of phrenology, he articulates this idea that the poet uses a kind of scientific method, combining induction and deduction, in the original opening paragraph of “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” There his narrator suggests that “a few farther steps in phrenological science” may lead to discovering a faculty of analysis. For the narrator, analysis may be “a constituent of ideality,” an idea directly “in opposition to the vulgar dictum . . . that the calculating and discriminating powers (causality and comparison) are at variance with the imaginative.” Instead, observation reveals that “the processes of invention or creation are strictly akin with the processes of resolution—the former being nearly, if not absolutely, the latter conversed” (M 2: 527). For Poe, imagination parallels or draws on our ability to discern causal relations, to compare cases, to resolve relations. Those abilities, then, enable the poet to create the “effect” of Beauty, the “pure and intense elevation of soul ” (ER: 16). 18

If, through a combination of imagination and conscious, as well as unconscious, reasoning, we can, like Dupin, discern the plots of orangutans or human murderers and, like the poet in “Philosophy of Composition,” determine the best way to create aesthetic experiences, what happens when we turn such a method to ontological questions? This, in part, is what occurs in Eureka . Poe’s cosmological prose poem offers what he calls the Truth about the universe, and it delineates a metaphysical basis for his ability to discern that Truth, while also limning our final inability to know that Truth. In fact, Poe opens Eureka by qualifying his own claims in terms of the limitations of demonstrable truth: “let me as distinctly as possible announce—not the theorem which I hope to demonstrate—for, whatever the mathematicians may assert, there is, in this world at least, no such thing as demonstration—but the ruling idea which, throughout this volume, I shall be continually endeavoring to suggest” (L1: 7). While Poe builds an argument based in evidence and both induction and deduction, he emphasizes that such an argument cannot prove or demonstrate anything beyond doubt. Such an effort amounts not so much to a matter of belief, Poe contends, as an attempt “to direct his mental vision toward some given point, in the intellectual firmament, where lies a nebula never to be resolved” (L1: 20).

In Eureka and elsewhere, Poe implicitly and explicitly distinguishes his approach from that found in the Bridgewater Treatises, a series of eight highly influential volumes by leading British scientists covering a range of topics, all devoted to explaining “The Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation.” Whewell’s Bridgewater volume on astronomy may have influenced Eureka , and the offering on Animal and Vegetable Physiology by Peter Mark Roget, an influential critic of phrenology, was reviewed (probably by Poe) in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836. It is in his “Marginalia” from 1844 (first published in the Democratic Review ), however, that Poe begins to articulate the critique of the Bridgewater writers that he later expands in Eureka . “All the Bridgewater treatises,” according to Poe, “have failed” to recognize “the great idiosyncrasy in the Divine system of adaptation,” namely “the complete mutuality of adaptation” (ER: 1315). Whereas “in human constructions, a particular cause has a particular effect—a particular purpose brings about a particulate object; but we see not reciprocity,” the Divine is defined by reciprocity: “In Divine constructions, the object is either object or purpose, as we choose to regard it . . . so that we can never (abstractedly, without concretion—without reference to facts of the moment) decide which is which” (ER: 1315; also see L1: 88–89). Poe hypothesizes that the Bridgewater writers “may have avoided this point, on account of its apparent tendency to overthrow the idea of cause in general—consequently of a First Cause—of God,” which, it follows, would undermine the purpose of the treatises altogether (ER: 1316). Poe suggests, instead, that we should question causality in general.

In Eureka , of course, Poe offers us his own version of how the divine and the material world interact, producing a transcendent plot that consists of the movement from unity to diversity and back to unity through the forces of gravity (attraction) and electricity (repulsion). But in place of the Bridgewater treatises’ emphasis on discerning material causes that can then be scaffolded to build an argument for the benevolent design of God, Poe emphasizes our inability to fully know. Our thoughts about “infinity,” in fact, refer to “ thoughts of thoughts ,” “the possible attempt at an impossible conception,” which “lies out of the brain of man” (L1: 20). With its emphasis on this thought being beyond the human brain, this conception leads Poe to align his thinking on the human brain, cosmology, and aesthetics: “The human brain has obviously a leaning to the ‘ Infinite ’ and fondles the phantom of the idea. It seems to long with a passionate fervor for this impossible conception, with the hope of intellectually believing it when conceived” (L1: 77). With the “obviously,” Poe suggests that his account of the human brain’s tendency derives from observation. At the same time, he offers an ontological account of this tendency, the longing that all of creation has to be reunified into one whole, but, as just noted, that claim is founded not as truth but as emerging from the very desire it attempts to explain, the human desire for consistency. Science and art thus share a common project of attempting to replicate or approach what he refers to as the “ perfect consistency ” (L1: 15) only fully found in the “Plot of God” (L1: 89). Poe theorizes that this longing is written into the very make-up of the universe: “the poetical instinct of humanity—its instinct of the symmetrical, if the symmetry be but a symmetry of surface:—this instinct , which the Soul, not only of Man but of all created beings, took up, in the beginning, from the geometrical basis of the Universal radiation” (L1: 89). It is this “final, universal conglomeration” that “the analogical, symmetrical or poetical instinct of Man” grasps before his reason does (L1: 97), thus giving the aesthetic sense its priority. All art, whether music, poetry, or prose, derives from our sense of this final union and our realization of our inability to grasp that truth fully on Earth.

The human inability to fully grasp or to create similar structures underlies both Poe’s aesthetics and his critique of the dominant scientific empiricism of his time. Unlike Mill, he emphasizes the active work of the mind (in fact, the brain) in constructing our knowledge of the world, specifically through his emphasis on intuition unconsciously combining induction and deduction. Like Whewell, then, he elaborates a more robust role for human consciousness in delineating truths, but unlike Whewell he does not base that role in a benevolent divine plan but rather in a human desire to discern such plans. Those differences from Mill and Whewell, I will argue, link Poe’s critique of phrenology and his aesthetics.

Deducing and Establishing Every Thing

In his review of Miles’s volume and in the Drake-Halleck review, Poe does not qualify his praise of the scientific pursuit of the brain through phrenology. As his comments in Eureka might suggest, however, he elsewhere begins to delineate limits to the sciences of the brain in ways that mirror his broader critique of science. Most directly, in both “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Black Cat,” Poe’s murderous narrators argue that phrenologists have been blind to the “radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment” of the Perverse (M 3: 1219). By the 1840s, phrenologists had largely settled into a set account of thirty-five or thirty-six faculties or mental organs which were divinely designed to lead, with the proper guidance, to human happiness. In this way, Combe and his followers shared much ground with leading scientists such as Whewell and those involved in the Bridgewater project, while it was their emphasis on the moral design or reason behind natural laws that Mill found most problematic about phrenology’s claims. 19 In “Imp,” the narrator directly attacks phrenological investigations for their a priori assumption of such a divinely orchestrated world. He challenges the “metaphysicianism” of the “intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man,” who has assumed to discern the “intentions of Jehovah,” almost directly reversing Poe’s position in the Drake-Halleck review (M 3: 1219). Based on their assumptions, such thinkers have “built . . . innumerable systems of mind. In the matter of phrenology, for example, we first determined, naturally enough, that it was the design of the Deity that man should eat. We then assigned to man an organ of alimentiveness” (M 3: 1219). In this way, “Spurzheimites” have gone about “deducing and establishing every thing from the preconceived destiny of man.” The narrator proposes that “It would have been wiser . . . to classify (if classify we must,) upon the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing, rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do” (M 3: 1220). It would have been wiser, in other words, to observe that humans have an appetite to eat rather than to begin with an assumption about God’s design. It follows, he contends, that “Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action” what he calls Perverseness , a desire to “act without comprehensible object,” an “overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake” (M 3: 1220–1221). The problem with the phrenologists’ approach is that “in the pure arrogance of reason” they “could not perceive [the] necessity” of perverseness or “in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity” (M 3: 1219).

Here, Poe’s narrator seems to strike out on a more inductive path, beginning with observations of actual human conduct, in attacking phrenologists and other brain scientists and theorists of the mind for deducing the structures and functions of the mind from what they perceive to be God’s divine plan. Using their reason, such thinkers have found it impossible to acknowledge a brain function that seems to have no use, that does not directly “further the objects of humanity.” Unlike Combe, Poe’s narrator returns to Gall’s more observation-driven and pessimistic view of the brain. At the same time, though, with the aside “if classify we must,” the narrator suggests that observation and inductive reasoning are also limited. Classification, it seems, as Mill would argue against Whewell, is not based in the order of nature so much as it is based in the human desire or necessity of ordering things. This demotion of reasoning—and with it the potential of conscious knowing—appears in the very structure of “Imp.” Poe’s narrator critiques Spurzheimites for their assumptions about a benevolent design, but the story also calls into question our ability to know much about the brain or the underlying reasons for its structures at all. Having a murderous madman articulate this critique through self-reflection calls the entire analysis into question: what true self-knowledge—and thus knowledge about his mental and emotional workings—does the narrator actually have, given his own instability? 20

This point about the limits of inductive and deductive reasoning recurs, as we have seen, throughout Poe’s oeuvre, and often appears in terms of understanding aesthetic effects or experience. Thus, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator comments that while “beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth” (M 2: 398). Or in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the narrator similarly reflects that “a feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul—a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key” (M 2: 141). Poe links this failure of analysis to phrenology in “Imp” when the narrator states that perverseness will not “admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements” (M 3: 1221). With “The Black Cat,” as in “Imp,” Poe’s narrator refers to perverseness as “one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man,” but then defines it as an “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature” (M 3: 852). This primitive impulse, this instinct, both without object and directed toward self-destruction and frustration, exactly parallels Poe’s account in Eureka of the desire that gives rise to aesthetics: “The pleasure which we derive from any exertion of human ingenuity [whether it is scientific, artistic, or mechanical], is in direct ratio of the approach to this species of reciprocity” found in God’s plot (L1: 89). As he phrases it in “The Poetic Principle,” echoing the aesthetic desire he frames in terms of phrenology in the Drake-Halleck review, that pleasure (and pain) “is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us—but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above,” “an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave” that leads to our “petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now , wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys” (ER: 77). Where in the Drake-Halleck review Poe partly attempts to explain this desire in terms of phrenological faculties, with “Imp,” “Black Cat,” and Eureka , he suggests that our very limited knowledge of the brain parallels this existential condition and similarly gives rise to a kind of aesthetic desire for the unfathomable. And where in “Philosophy of Composition,” he articulates the mechanical, predictive route to creating the effect of Beauty, in “Usher” and elsewhere he places such effects beyond full analysis.

“Ligeia” perhaps best incorporates these lines of thought. While Brett Zimmerman has suggested some of the ways that “Ligeia” picks up on phrenological thought, the story less directly engages with phrenology than Poe does elsewhere. 21 Instead, in attempting to convey his attraction to Ligeia, the narrator refers to “the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind.” Specifically he alludes to the “thrillingly exciting . . . fact . . . that, in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember” (M 2: 313–314). In the context of the story, the narrator refers to the power of Ligeia’s eyes and the mystery of her beauty, but his “approaching the full knowledge of their expression” (M 2: 314) parallels her “guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation,” which leads the narrator toward “that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!” (M 2: 316). The closest that the narrator can get to grasping the source of, the truth behind, Ligeia’s attraction is recognizing that he “derived, from many existences in the material world, a sentiment” similar to that he experienced in his interactions with Ligeia: “I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression . . . . in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine—in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water” (M 2: 314). These analogies allow the narrator a glimpse at some deeper, potentially metaphysical reality without providing him any true access to that truth, leaving him bereft of the ability to “define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it” (M 2: 314). Ligeia’s possible return from death links this sentiment with our desire for the “glories beyond the grave” that define Beauty in “Poetic Principle.” With his comment on the “anomalies of the science of the mind,” Poe, through his narrator, indicates how that longing derives from or mirrors the gaps in our knowledge about the brain.

By connecting Poe’s comments on science, scientific method, and scientific truth in general (mainly in the Dupin tales, Eureka , and his criticism) and his reflections on phrenology, I have attempted to show how Poe’s aesthetics, his epistemological critique of scientific method, and his relationship to phrenology intersect through (1) his sense of a human need to understand, to explain the world, that defines the human brain and human existence and (2) his recognition of our inability to finally, fully, understand the world, to explain that very need, and to fathom completely what the limits of knowledge are. Importantly, Poe does not wrap all of knowledge in some sort of gnostic mysticism but rather carefully limns some of the limitations of deductive and inductive reasoning for reaching fundamental truths—about final causes in the universe, the exact reasons the human brain functions as it does, and why specific phenomena create the aesthetic experience they do. What emerges is a picture of Poe readily accepting some of the insights of science, but offering a skeptical reading of scientific method as limited in its emphasis on a rational, somewhat formulaic deduction and induction. 22 In this light, “The many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of the mind” lie in our desire to comprehend and reproduce the unity of God’s plot, thus providing the basis of aesthetic experience, the stimulus to our necessarily unsatisfactory attempts to fully understand the workings of both the brain and the universe. What phrenology and science can offer us is, like art, an attempt at reaching, at grasping, the universe’s unity. What art, unlike science, emphasizes is the mirage-like nature of that unity, the fact that such unity is as much (or more) a product of our desire for unity, as it is based in the foundation of the universe.

The Many Incomprehensible Anomalies of the Science of Mind, Now

What, then, can Poe say to us in the twentieth-first century, in an era of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cognitive, behavioral studies that have provided significant revelations about how the human brain works? Poe, I believe, asks questions about methodology, epistemology, and ontology that contemporary biological and brain sciences, from neo-Darwinism to modular cognitive science to neuroaesthetics, have not fully answered. Poe, as we have seen, readily acknowledges and embraces some of the potential insights of brain science, as exemplified by phrenology. Yet he also delimits their insights. Specifically, Poe offers us a corrective to those who would too readily embrace a scientific reductionism (or consilience) in emphasizing, like Poe’s “Spurzheimites,” the discovery of rational, well-adapted mental structures over or in place of more inductive explorations of the brain’s gaps, frailties, and inconsistencies.

In the past few decades, literary studies has engaged with the cognitive and biological sciences in a wide array of ways, so anything I say here will necessarily be reductive, but I will attempt to trace quickly how I see Poe’s work intervening in these developments. On one end of the spectrum are literary scholars who accept E. O. Wilson’s call for a kind of consilience that would reduce all knowledge to a “common groundwork of explanation,” based in “a belief in the unity of the sciences—a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws.” 23 For example, in his manifesto “Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism,” Joseph Carroll argues for a future “in which the evolutionary human sciences transform and subsume all literary study,” as “there are no real ontological or epistemological barriers separating the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences” for “it is all the same world, intelligible by the same instruments.” 24 This work, broadly speaking, builds upon that of evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. 25 In their very influential account, the human mind has evolved to incorporate a number of specific, identifiable functions, which, like the instruments of a Swiss army knife, can be used for other ends, but are fundamentally engineered for designated purposes. 26 This view of the human mind as a precisely wrought tool with multiple specific functions has some grounding in neuroscience—we know, for example, that the initial processing of visual information happens in a few specific brain regions. But it tends to draw on the more deductive processes of cognitive science rather than the more inductive ones of neuroscience. In particular, it closely parallels theories about the modularity of the human mind. As developed by Jerry Fodor and elaborated (beyond Fodor’s comfort) by evolutionary psychologists such as Cosmides and Tooby, this theory argues that the mind can be best understood as modular, as consisting of free-standing, separately working processes for dealing with particular biological, cognitive needs, such as seeing, speaking, and so on. 27 These modules, then, can be defined along functionalist lines; that is, these modules serve specific evolutionarily adaptive functions. As Steven Pinker phrases it in The Blank Slate , what emerges from the “cognitive revolution” is a view of the mind as “a system of universal, generative computational modules” such that “reasoning, intelligence, imagination, and creativity” are reducible to “forms of information processing.” 28

While they most often articulate a somewhat more flexible model of the human mind, scholars such as Denis Dutton and Brian Boyd have drawn on this line of thinking to argue that humans evolved specific aesthetic faculties. Boyd, for example, contends that “art, too, is a specifically human adaptation, biologically part of our species. It offers tangible advantages for human survival and reproduction, and it derives from play, itself an adaptation widespread among animals with flexible behaviors.” 29 In recent years, this kind of strict modularity has come more and more into question from a variety of sources, including neuroscientific accounts, and has been rejected as simply “the new phrenology.” 30 Like phrenology, but with more scientific ground, it has emphasized brain localization and the different functions of particular brain regions. While Poe, I have argued, suggests that phrenology was overly dependent on positing a benevolent divine order underlying human mental structures, the new phrenology has tended, at times, to embrace something akin to Wilson’s consilience in insisting that all mental structures and functions can be explained by some advantage they provided within evolutionary adaptation. As Boyd puts it, “Had every part of our brain’s design not served an adaptive function, evolution would have reduced our surplus brain mass.” 31 In embracing a neo-Darwinian position, Boyd and others tend to posit a rather tight fit between human consciousness and the world, as opposed to a view that reads that connection as simply good enough to ensure survival, the idea that evolutionarily speaking, the mind must correspond to the world enough to allow individuals and species to live, succeed, and reproduce, but that such success does not mean that humans (or any other species for that matter) represent the world fully or correctly in some mental realm. In this way, such thinkers are at odds, again, broadly speaking, with biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould, who contend that much of what survives through evolution is less than necessary to survival, that much of it may be atavistic, in fact. 32 Poe’s skepticism toward phrenology’s apriorism in “Imp” suggests taking a similarly skeptical position toward this line of thinking. Where Poe indicts his brain science contemporaries for assuming that the divine has designed the human brain to function rationally, so neo-Darwinian consilience-minded humanists have posited that everything in the human mind must have a purpose that we can rationally understand in terms of adaptation. Poe’s idea of perverseness—with its emphasis on self-destruction—would seem to directly counter such a view, a view that has led, at times, to scholars rejecting works of art as not truly art because they cannot explain its attraction in evolutionary terms.

Unlike evolutionary literary theory, most literary scholars who draw more specifically on the cognitive sciences have attempted to define their enterprise as informed but not subsumed by the biological sciences. So, Lisa Zunshine, in her introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015) , defines the practice as consisting of “work not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms.” 33 Cognitive literary critics have offered numerous insights into how literary texts engage with the human ability to read or infer the mental states of other human beings, how aesthetic works more broadly might work through the neurocircuitry underlying visualization, reading, and meaning making, and how underlying structures that allow us to create narratives and make sense of the world provide a foundation not just for literary works but for mental functions in general. 34

Much cognitivist literary criticism has at times questioned or even rejected both the modular, computational model of the mind that Pinker and others associate with the cognitive revolution and the work of evolution-focused scholars such as Carroll and Boyd. Yet like the approaches of Carroll and Boyd, many cognitivist literary critics focus on describing how literature strengthens the human capacity to accurately process data about the world. This may be one of the reasons that much cognitive literary criticism has focused on the traditional psychological realist novel, which, as has long been noted, fundamentally works through its creation and mapping of a world and its relationships. When cognitivist literary critics have attended to Poe, they have tended to read him in terms similar to how they have read more realist writers, as providing accounts of the mind as an information processor, finely attuned through evolutionary processes to accurately understand the world (including, perhaps most important, other humans). Most notably, Blakey Vermeule, one of the most prominent cognitivist critics, draws on “Murders in the Rue Morgue” in elaborating how Dupin’s ability to “run a chain of inferences” through a basic “algorithm” reflects a human mind-reading ability. 35

As I have argued, however, we can best situate Dupin’s skills at one end of a pole within Poe’s thought on the power and limitations of humans to use a nearly unconscious intuition to create plausible, if finally never fully complete and unified, plots of explanation. This emphasis on the limits of human rationality and on the gaps between our mental renderings of the world and the world itself subtends the Gothic and, in some versions, the sublime, traditions at the core of much of Poe’s work. Recently, Alan Richardson, another leading cognitivist critic, has outlined how work within cognitive science has tended problematically to envision imagination as “rule bound and quotidian,” as presenting “regularities . . . [such as] orderliness and predictability.” 36 From Richardson’s position (perhaps, importantly, he is a romanticist), this reductive picture of the imagination derives from attempts to offer an adaptationist or utilitarian explanation of its function. The limited scholarship using contemporary brain sciences to analyze the Gothic similarly draws on insights into the brain’s quirks and shortcomings—and the pleasure we derive from manipulating them—rather than the human brain’s rationalistic abilities. So, Natalie Phillips has argued that Gothic fiction explores the problems of unifocal mental fixation (focused attention) while activating our ability to maintain multifocal perspectives, and James Dawes has described how the pleasure of the Gothic comes from “the unreasonableness of human emotional lives, the irrational slack and mismatch between our emotions and beliefs.” 37 As I have suggested, Poe anticipates these critiques of viewing the imagination—and the functions of the brain as a whole—in utilitarian or rational terms. Where Poe’s account of Dupin and of the human mind in general is ripe for fruitful exploration along the lines some cognitivist has mapped, his emphasis on the gaps in our ability to know and the fundamental role those limitations play in creating aesthetic experience should push cognitive critics to focus less on the rational uses of literature, whether in evolutionary terms or not, and more on how art draws on, elaborates, and plays with the perverse anomalies of the mind.

In “Imp,” Poe’s narrator corrects this tendency of the brain sciences to reduce the brain to rational functions instrumental to human development by calling on us to focus on actual behavior. With the improvement of brain imaging techniques and experimental processes, neuroscientific exploration of aesthetics (or neuroaesthetics) has worked, to some extent, as a similar corrective. So, for example, Anjan Chatterjee, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of Pennsylvania, concludes that “The richly textured meaning of individual pieces of art that gives art its power is inherently variable and open to many interpretations and thus closed to neuroscience.” 38 Somewhat similarly, V. S. Ramachandran, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, eschews the kind of hyperadaptationist explanations I have noted earlier, in arguing that “the opportunistic, ‘happenstantial’ nature of evolution . . . . applies with even greater force to the evolution of the human brain.” 39 However, despite titling his book The Tell-Tale Brain and gesturing to Poe’s “phantasmagorical short stories” in reference to the strange symptoms exhibited by patients with brain lesions and other damage, Ramachandran offers a much more functionalist—and it seems to me, reductive—account when he turns to art. 40 His approach is to separate questions of aesthetics, whose “neural bases” we have grounds for hypothesizing, from art. 41 This distinction, which mirrors, to some extent, Chatterjee’s, makes a great deal of sense, but it misses the curious workings of the brain that Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” like its companion tales “The Black Cat” and “The Imp of the Perverse,” emphasizes. As Poe’s interest in and reliance on phrenology and its insights into a normative vision of brain function suggests, his point in these stories is not to reject the scientific project of rendering the human brain and its functions in general terms, but, as I have argued, is part of a larger project of delimiting our ability to know ourselves and our world. The brain sciences and art can help us to push those limits, but what Poe suggests is that the real power of art, its true attraction, comes from its indicating those limits while hinting at the pleasure we would have by overcoming them. The question we, as literary scholars, face in the twenty-first century is not that different from that which Poe faced in the antebellum period, when he attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to promote himself into a role of cultural arbiter at a time of shifting market relations connected to cultural production and the increasing importance of science. Taken alongside Eureka , Poe’s writing on phrenology can be read as a model for our own engagement, as humanists, with science, specifically the biological and brain sciences as a map for accepting their potential insights into the origins and processes behind aesthetic experience while accentuating the difficulties of reducing that experience to rationalistic, normative terms.

1. This is one of the core arguments of John Limon , “Poe’s Methodology,” in The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 70–120.

2. For the best recent accounts of Poe’s materialism, see Matthew A. Taylor , “Edgar Allan Poe’s Meta/Physics,” in Universes Without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 27–56 , and John Tresch , “ ‘Matter No More’: Edgar Allan Poe and the Paradoxes of Materialism,” Critical Inquiry 42 (2016): 865–898.

3. See Edward S. Reed , From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). There has been a very healthy volume of work in recent years criticizing an emphasis on locating consciousness in the brain, sometimes under the umbrella of either embodied cognition or extended cognition. For three prominent examples working within cognitive neuroscience, see Andy Clark , Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) ; Shaun Gallagher , How the Body Shapes the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) ; and Alva Noë , Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). See Fernando Vidal , “Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity,” History of the Human Sciences 22 (2009): 5–36 , for an account of how the modern self is defined in terms of the “cerebral subject.”

4. For overviews of Poe’s engagement with phrenology and more comprehensive accounts of his references and uses of phrenology, see Edward Hungerford , “Poe and Phrenology,” American Literature 2 (1931): 209–231 , and Brett Zimmerman , “Phrenology,” in Edgar Allan Poe in Context , ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 301–312.

5. I have drawn most heavily from the following scholarly works in this short sketch of the history of phrenology: Robert M. Young , Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (1970; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) ; Stephen Tomlinson , Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005) ; and John van Wyhe , Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2014). I will note more specific works and arguments concerning phrenology later. Of canonical US authors, Walt Whitman was perhaps most deeply influenced by phrenology. He had his head read by the Fowlers, they published the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856, and he regularly drew on phrenological terms for human faculties in his verse and prose.

Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century , 4.

As Tomlinson puts it, phrenology “was effectively transformed into a progressive moral philosophy by John Gasper Spurzheim, who normalized the mind around middle-class values by defining human nature in terms of the balanced operation of faculties such as time, order, consciousness, adhesiveness, and love of approbation” ( Head Masters , xii ).

8. George Combe , The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects , 8th ed. (New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1851), 451.

9. Quoted in Shapin , “Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh,” Annals of Science 32 (1975): 235. Phrenological writings often stressed that evidence for the science was available to anyone, a move that revisionist historians in the 1970s and 1980s such as Steven Shapin and Roger Cooter read as an antielitist move that connected it to the ascendant middle class in Britain. See Roger Cooter , The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) , and Steven Shapin , “Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh,” 219–243 , and “The Politics of Observation: Cerebral Anatomy and Social Interests in the Edinburgh Phrenology Disputes,” in On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge , ed. Roy Wallis , special issue, Sociological Review Monograph 27 (1979): 139–178. In the United States, phrenology, if anything, cast itself even more in terms of its democratizing impulse, particularly in terms of enabling any individual access to self-knowledge and, thus, potentially self-reform. For the best consideration of phrenology along these lines within US literary studies, see Christopher Castiglia , “Anxiety, Desire, and the Nervous States,” in Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 168–215. Poe attacks the progressive yet deterministic notions of phrenology in “Some Words with a Mummy,” where he satirizes his contemporaries and their arrogance through the failure of their phrenological method in attempting to read the Egyptian mummy’s character and mental powers. See Dana Nelson , “The Haunting of White Manhood: Poe, Fraternal Ritual, and Polygenesis,” American Literature 69 (1997): 515–546. Elsewhere, though, Poe seems to have drawn on popularized versions of craniometry or phrenology in some of his descriptions and characterizations of black and Indian characters, from Dirk Peters and the Tsalalians in Arthur Gordon Pym to Jupiter in “The Gold Bug.” See Brett Zimmerman, “Phrenology,” on this matter. In those works, we can see Poe draw on these sciences as part of what Terence Whalen has described as his “average racism.” See Whalen , Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Phrenology’s relationship to racial science, especially craniometry, has received a fair amount of attention in the past few decades. Samuel George Morton’s widely read works on craniometry from the late 1830s and early 1840s implicitly and cautiously drew on phrenology, but, in turn, were converted into further evidence by the phrenologists. It is incorrect, however, to reduce phrenology to a racist or proslavery science. Even craniometry, which placed racial difference at its foundation, found many antislavery adherents and drew many denunciations from defenders of slavery (often due to its breaking from the biblical narrative of man’s creation and its implicit materialization of the mind and, perhaps, the soul). In fact, with their tendency to embrace liberal reform, many phrenologists, including Combe, were antagonistic toward slavery. For the classic accounts of craniometry (including its relationship to phrenology) and racism, see William Stanton , The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) and Stephen Jay Gould , The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).

10. John van Wyhe , “Was Phrenology a Reform Science? Towards a New Generalization for Phrenology,” History of Science 42 (2004): 319.

11. “ Dissection alone does not reveal the vital functions of any organ: no person, by dissecting the optic nerve, could find out that its office is to minister to vision; or, by dissecting the tongue, could ascertain that it is the organ of taste. Anatomists, therefore, could not, by the mere practice of their art, discover the functions of the different portions of the brain.” See George Combe , A System of Phrenology , 5th ed. (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1843), 97.

Combe, System of Phrenology , vi, vii.

13. William Whewell , The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History , 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: John W. Parker, 1847), 2:653.

14. Quoted in Laura Snyder , Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 113.

Snyder, Reforming Philosophy , 27.

16. For a fuller account of Poe’s engagement with the scientific debates of his era, see Susan Welsh , “The Value of Analogical Evidence: Poe’s ‘Eureka’ in the Context of a Scientific Debate,” Modern Language Studies 21 (1991): 3–15. Welsh does not examine the Mill-Whewell debate about induction.

17. A popular account grounded in recent brain science that makes a similar point is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2005).

18. On the relationship between Eureka , aesthetics, and mind, see especially Joan Dayan , Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) ; Limon , “Poe’s Methodology,” in The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science , 70–120 ; and Charles O’Donnell , “From Earth to Ether: Poe’s Flight into Space,” PMLA 77 (1962): 85–91.

19. Mill most directly criticized phrenologists in his essay on “Nature” (1854) for their tendency to appeal to the laws of “Nature,” specifically human nature, in advocating moral behavior or reform. For Mill, this was both, as George Levine has characterized it, “an argument against the extension of scientific method to the study of human morals and society” and a rejection of the kind of natural theology that underlay Combe’s faith in a rational human nature ( Levine , Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 27 ). Without our being able to observe the workings of the human brain and without material evidence of a specific design behind the mental functions we can observe, there can be no foundation for the phrenologists’ conclusions. While we know Whewell subscribed to the Phrenological Journal , he seems to have remained largely silent on it (see van Wyhe’s Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism ). His silence, however, may indicate his unwillingness to engage with phrenology in fear that doing so would in itself elevate it as a worthy topic of debate.

This raises the broader question of how much we should trust Poe’s narrators or take them as voicing his opinions. I think the consistency among his different narrative voices and some of his critical statements make the case for accepting these moments as revealing his narrators as being in sync with Poe’s own thoughts.

See Zimmerman, “Phrenology,” 303–305, 310.

22. In this respect my argument most closely parallels recent readings of Poe as a type of proto-pragmatist by Maurice Lee and Paul Grimstad. See Maurice S. Lee , “Probably Poe,” in Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 20–54 , and Paul Grimstad , “Nonreasoning Creatures,” in Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 42–64.

23. E. O. Wilson , Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 8, 4. William Whewell coined the term “consilience.” For Whewell, consilience refers to a process of generalization that leads to the conforming of the different poles of the fundamental antitheses—induction and deduction, subjective and objective, and so on. In Whewell’s view, consilience derived from an underlying divine order that humans were able, potentially at least, to discern. Consilience now is associated with the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson’s argument about the reduction of all knowledge to a scientific framework. Wilson eschews Whewell’s faith in a divine hand behind the ordered universe that he believes the human mind can fully fathom, but referring to his childhood in the Southern Baptist tradition, he reads his consilience project as “a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end” of explaining the universe ( Consilience , 6).

24. Joseph Carroll , “Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 53, 62.

25. For the best critique of literary Darwinism, see Jonathan Kramnick , “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 315–347. But also see the response from Brian Boyd , “For Evocriticism: Minds Shaped to Be Reshaped,” Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 394–404.

26. See John Tooby and Leda Cosmides , “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture , ed. Jerome H. Barkow , Leda Cosmides , and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–136.

27. See Jerry A. Fodor , Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).

28. Stephen Pinker , The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002), 40, 34.

29. Brian Boyd , On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1.

30. For example, in an article aptly titled “The Neural Foundations of Aesthetic Appreciation” ( Progress in Neurobiology 94 [2011]: 39–48 ), Camilo J. Cela Conde and his colleagues point out that “With very rare exceptions . . . the same brain region may be involved in several diverse processes” (43), so that they reject “a linear scheme of stimulus—activation—appreciation, akin to a bottom-up perceptive ‘module’ postulated by Fodor’s (1983) architecture of the mind” (46), in attempting to describe the “general relations between cognitive processes and neural mechanisms” (47). As Van Wyhe puts it in his history of phrenology, “Similarly to phrenologists, evolutionary psychologists assert a more naturalistic, some say a reductionist, approach to human behaviour and psychology, with a particular emphasis on inborn tendencies and abilities, and with inherent fits between human brain capacities and Nature” ( Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism , 207).

Boyd, On the Origin of Stories , 38.

32. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories , 42. While Gould’s work on evolution is most important here, see also his article on Poe’s work on The Conchologist’s First Book (1839), the best-selling book published under Poe’s name during his lifetime; Stephen Jay Gould , “Poe’s Greatest Hit,” Natural History 102, no. 7 (1993): 10–19.

33. Lisa Zunshine , “Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies , ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1.

34. Along these lines the best work to date, to my mind, is Paul Armstrong’s How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

35. Blakey Vermeule , Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 87. For the fullest critique of Vermeule’s reading of Poe, see Paul Grimstad , Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses , 150n50.

36. Alan Richardson , “Defaulting to Fiction: Neuroscience Rediscovers the Romantic Imagination,” Poetics Today 32, no. 4 (2011): 665, 666. I find Richardson’s account here more satisfying than his description of what he calls the neural sublime in the work of John Keats, Percy Shelley, and other British Romantics: “in the Romantic version [of the sublime], the subject is left not marveling at the power of Reason, but rather stunned by the capacity and complexity of the human brain.” See Richardson , The Neural Sublime Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 29. Although Richardson is less celebratory of reason’s power than Kant is usually read to be, his neural sublime, like Kant’s, finally derives from the power of the human mind or brain, not, as with Burke, its inability to apperceive some external object.

37. James Dawes , “Fictional Feeling: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the American Gothic,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (2004): 452. See Natalie M. Phillips , Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) , specifically chapter 4 , “Fixated Attention: The Gothic Pathology of Single-Minded Focus,” 132–173. As Anne Stiles puts it, “the labyrinthine contours of the Gothic novel proved an ideal medium for exploring the brain’s convolutions.” See Stiles , Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 21. Phillips and Stiles both allude to recent developments in the brain sciences, but much of their focus is historical. The ability to move between current insights and the influence of contemporaneous brain science has proven, to my mind, to be the greatest source of insights and the greatest challenge to cognitivist literary criticism.

38. Anjan Chatterjee , The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 148.

39. V. S. Ramachandran , The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (New York: Norton, 2011), xv.

Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain , 8.

Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain , 193.

Armstrong, Paul. How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013 .

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Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 .

Carroll, Joseph. “ Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism. ” New Literary History 41, no. 1 ( 2010 ): 53–67.

Chatterjee, Anjan. The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art . New York: Oxford University Press, 2014 .

Dayan, Joan. Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction . New York: Oxford University Press, 1987 .

Kramnick, Jonathan. “ Against Literary Darwinism. ” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 ( 2011 ): 315–347.

Lee, Maurice S. “Probably Poe.” In Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature , 20–54. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 .

Limon, John. “Poe’s Methodology.” In The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science , 70–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 .

Ramachandran, V. S. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human . New York: Norton, 2011 .

Taylor, Matthew A. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Meta/Physics.” In Universes Without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature , 27–56. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 .

Tresch, John. “ ‘ Matter No More’: Edgar Allan Poe and the Paradoxes of Materialism. ” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 4 ( 2016 ): 865–898.

van Wyhe, John. Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism . Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2014 .

Welsh, Susan. “ The Value of Analogical Evidence: Poe’s ‘Eureka’ in the Context of a Scientific Debate. ” Modern Language Studies 21, no. 4 ( 1991 ): 3–15.

Zimmerman, Brett. “Phrenology.” In Edgar Allan Poe in Context , edited by Kevin J. Hayes , 301–312. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 .

Zunshine, Lisa. “Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies , edited by Lisa Zunshine , 1–15. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 .

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Poe Studies

In this issue.

Volume 53, 2020

Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation provides a forum for dialogue about Edgar Allan Poe's life and writings, and about the cultural and material contexts that shaped the production and reception of his work. The editors wish to define "Poe studies" broadly--to include articles that engage the period in which Poe wrote, writers with whom he was affiliated or whom he inspired, theoretical and philosophical issues raised by his work, and artistic movements associated with him, such as gothicism, detective fiction, symbolism, and metafiction. The journal invites submissions of original articles and notes, welcomes work grounded in a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives, and encourages inquiries proposing submissions and projects.

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From the Editor: Reading Poe (and Poe Studies ) Now
Emron Esplin
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770684

Introduction: Beyond Orientalism—Edgar Allan Poe and the Middle East
Karen Grumberg
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770694
How to Make the East Interesting: Poe and the Holy-Land Vogue
Milette Shamir
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770682
"As Moslemin their Shrouds at Mecca": The Arabic Repressions and Resurrections of Poe's Corpus
Jeffrey Einboden
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770688
"Dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before": Poe, Degeneration, and Revolution in the Hebrew Imagination
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770695
The Haunting Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe in Ottoman-Turkish Literature
Hande Tekdemir
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770683
The Disappearing Body: Poe and the Logics of Iranian Horror Films
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770685
The Discontinuity of American Poetry
Edward S. Cutler
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770763
Reviewing Reviews
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770765
"X-ing a Paragrab": Guess what that is about if you can!
Henri Justin
pp. 107-133
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770693
Newly Translated Poe Scholarship—A Running Feature
pp. 137-138
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770686
Editor's Note: Borges as Poe Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770687
The Genesis of Poe's "The Raven"
Jorge Luis Borges, Sergio Waisman
pp. 140-143
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770691
Edgar Allan Poe
pp. 144-145
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770692
Notes on Contributors
pp. 146-147
Plantation Visions: Reproducing White Ignorance
Marina Trninic
pp. E12-E15
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/poe.2020.a770764

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The Poe Museum

Richmond, VA

Research, Images and Library

As the international center for Poe studies, the Poe Museum has the world’s largest collection of Poe memorabilia, ephemera, and artifacts. The Poe Museum holds more of Edgar Allan Poe’s possessions than any other institution. Researchers can access the museum’s renowned collection of first editions, manuscripts, letters, images, and more.

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If you are researching Edgar Allan Poe or Poe-related topics, contact the Poe Museum Curator at [email protected] for all inquiries.

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The Poe Museum library hosts a vast collection of rare manuscripts, letters, pictures, and more. If you would like to use our library for research purposes, contact the Poe Museum Curator at [email protected] for an appointment.

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The Poe Museum’s image collection includes hundreds of photographs, paintings, engravings, and drawings of Edgar Allan Poe and Poe-related people, places, and illustrations. If you are interested in using any of these images for your project, contact the Poe Museum Curator at [email protected]

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American Literature: The Romantic Period: Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1949) was an American poet known for inventing the literary Gothic. His most famous works include "The Raven", "The Tell-Tale Heart", and "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry Foundation Edgar Allan Poe’s stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction.
Edgar Allan Poe: Poets.org Biography of Edgar Allan Poe.
The Poe Museum Official website of the Poe Museum.

Research & Reference

Edgar Allan Poe: Credo Reference A Credo Reference landing page on Edgar Allan Poe. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
Poe, Edgar Allan: American National Biography An American National Biography on Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe: A Concise Biography

In this introduction to Edgar Allan Poe's life and work from the Famous Authors series, viewers follow Poe's early life and fortunate adoption by the Allans. Poe's relationship with Frances Allan was tender, but he and John Allan did not get along. His stepfather sent him away to university and then cut him off completely. In response, Poe went to Boston and joined the army, but persisted writing. Eventually being dismissed from West Point, he went to live with Poe relatives in Baltimore and continue his writing and publishing. There he fell in love with his young cousin Virginia and brought her to Richmond, Virginia and later to New York and Philadelphia, to live with him throughout his literary ups and downs. (36 minutes)

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Author's Works & Perspectives

Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (LOA #19)

In this complete and uniquely authoritative Library of America collection, Edgar Allan Poe's well-known tales of "mystery and imagination" and his best-known verse are collected with early poems, rarely published stories and humorous sketches, and the ecstatic prose poem Eureka. Poe's poetry is famous both for the musicality of "To Helen" and "The City in the Sea" and for the hypnotic, incantatory rhythms of "The Raven" and "Ulalume." "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask of Amontillado" show his mastery of Gothic horr∨ "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a classic of terror and suspense. Poe invented the modern detective story in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and developed the form of science fiction that was to influence, among others, Jules Verne and Thomas Pynchon. Poe was also adept at the humorous sketch of playful jeu d'esprit, such as "X-ing a Paragraph" or "Never Bet the Devil Your Head." All his stories reveal his high regard for technical proficiency and for what he called "rationation." Poe's fugitive early poems, stories rarely collected (such as "Bon-Bon," "King Pest," "Mystification," and "The Duc De L'Omelette), his only attempt at drama, "Politian"--these and much more are included in this comprehensive collection, presented chronologically to show Poe's development toward Eureka: A Prose Poem, his culminating vision of an indeterminate universe, printed here for the first time as Poe revised it and intended it should stand. A special feature of this volume is the care taken to select an authoritative text of each work. The printing and publishing history of every item has been investigated in order to choose a version that incorporates all of Poe's own revisions without reproducing the errors or changes introduced by later editors. Here, then, is one of America's and the world's most disturbing, powerful, and inventive writers published in "the first truly dependable collection of Poe's poetry and tales." LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Selected Writings of Edgar Allen Poe

In this Norton Critical Edition, G. R. Thompson has fully introduced, annotated, and edited each text. "Backgrounds and Contexts" includes fifty-seven carefully chosen documents that illuminate Poe's prolific but short career, among them reviews, prefaces, and correspondence by Poe as well as thematic pieces dealing with Transcendentalism and alternative romanticism, sciences of the mind, sensation fiction, and the South and slavery. Fourteen judiciously selected critical essays address Poe's poetry, fiction, politics, and psychology. Contributors include Floyd Stovall, Robert C. McLean, Richard Wilbur, James W. Gargano, Joseph J. Moldenhauer, Paul John Eakin, Grace Farrell, Liahna Klenman Babener, Barton Levi St. Armand, Joseph N. Riddel, J. Gerald Kennedy, John Carlos Rowe, Terence Whalen, and John T. Irwin. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe

"The problem of Poe's place in American culture cannot be settled canonically, since, unlike the works of Melville or Hawthorne, Poe's texts have not been primarily transmitted through the schools. Indeed, at its most radical level, the failure of criticism to account for the remarkable diversity of Poe's influence leads one to question the utility of the canon itself as an instrument for the study of American culture."--from the Introduction The contributors to this volume share the conviction that Poe is central to current work on American culture--and that strictly theoretical approaches to Poe have become increasingly irrelevant. Aiming to transform his place in the American canon, they bring sophisticated theoretical awareness to bear on the particular historical, social, political, and economic circumstances of his literary career. Their essays offer new insights into the complex and unavoidable relations between traditionally literary issues and the broader aspects of a democratic mass culture. The contributors are Gillian Brown, Stanley Cavell, Eva Cherniavsky, Joan Dayan, Jonathan Elmer, John T. Irwin, Barbara Johnson, David Leverenz, Meredith L. McGill, Stephen Rachman, Louis A. Renza, Shawn Rosenheim, and Laura Saltz.

Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe

The full range of literary traditions comes to life in the Twayne Critical Essays Series. Volume editors have carefully selected critical essays that represent the full spectrum of controversies, trends and methodologies relating to each author's work. Essays include writings from the author's native country and abroad, with interpretations from the time they were writing, through the present day. Each volume includes: -- An introduction providing the reader with a lucid overview of criticism from its beginnings -- illuminating controversies, evaluating approaches and sorting out the schools of thought -- The most influential reviews and the best reprinted scholarly essays -- A section devoted exclusively to reviews and reactions by the subject's contemporaries -- Original essays, new translations and revisions commissioned especially for the series -- Previously unpublished materials such as interviews, lost letters and manuscript fragments -- A bibliography of the subject's writings and interviews -- A name and subject index

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94 Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on edgar allan poe, ✍️ edgar allan poe essay topics for college, 👍 good edgar allan poe research topics & essay examples, 💡 simple edgar allan poe essay ideas, ❓ edgar allan poe research questions.

Symbols in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis
“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe Through a Psychological Lens
Writing Style of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe
Symbol of the Cat in the Story “Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe
“Eleonora” by Edgar Allan Poe: A Short Story Analysis
Literary Elements in “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe
Literary Devices in The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe This paper analyzes the poem by Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven” and pays specific attention to repetition as well as syntactic and morphological features.
The Detective and the Criminal: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe The depiction of the detective and the criminal in the short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” presents readers with a number of concepts both well-known and unique to the genre.
Evil and Vengeance in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most astonishing short stories that has been interpreted in numerous ways.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Alan Poe The analysis includes the background of the author and the short story, as well as the detailed examination of the nature of the society Poe’s characters, and the author himself.
Death Within Edgar Allan Poe’s Works Edgar Allan Poe was one of the authors who turned to the notion of death in his works: the most emotively it is expressed in Poe’s poems “The Raven”, “Lenore”, and “Annabel Lee”.
Imagery in “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe This paper argues that the imagery of Annabel Lee describes the eternity of love and its independence from death and higher powers.
Love and Loss in Poem “Annabelle Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe The poem celebrates the invincible love between the lyrical hero and his little childhood friend. The main idea of the poem is that love is stronger than death.
The Cask of Amontillado Summary and Analysis In the current paper, the setting, characterization, narration, and plot of The Cask of Amontillado are analyzed to understand true intentions of the author.
“The Cask of Amontillado” Story by Edgar Allan Poe “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe is a mystical story about a cold-blooded murder that raises numerous questions for every reader.
Literary Analysis: “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe Elements of jealousy are evident in the poem. Overcoming this jealousy, even after Annabelle’s death, allowed the speaker to stay in touch with his significant other.
Contrasts and Details of “The Cask of Amontillado“ by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” was first published in 1846, and it is widely recognized today as the best or one of the best short stories written by the author.
Transformation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Style The paper states that Allan Poe’s life and writings reflect hope despite painful hardships. The characters were representative of lower-class citizens.
Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe’s Detective Stories The works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe are separated by nearly half a century, but they are united by the genre.
Deceit in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Poe “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Poe is an example of a strait plot based on revenge. It touches upon different aspects of life: friendship, trust, deceit, and envy.
Poem Analysis: “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” teaches people to accept their terrible situations to protect themselves from emotional and psychological torture.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe This paper will focus on the comparison of styles and themes in two of Poe’s short stories: “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”.
Strong Moral Principles in “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe is written too immorally, with cruelty to animals and people, and there are many similar examples in the world.
Edgar Allan Poe’s Works and Their Characteristics Edgar Allan Poe is one of the greatest American writers. Numerous poems and short stories are still being studied, and new facets and hidden meanings are being discovered.
Edgar Allan Poe’s Literature Analysis Edgar Allan Poe represented American romanticism, the forerunner of symbolism and decadence. The paper analyzes several short stories and poems written by Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado In The Cask of Amontillado, Po pursues the goal of analyzing the character’s motives but does not provide the necessary information.
The Tell-Tale Heart Story by Edgar Allan Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. While reading it, I did not see any signs of difficult language or complex structure.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s scary stories. The story is told on behalf of an unnamed narrator who killed an older man with whom he lived under the same roof.
Mental Health in “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman The stories The Tell-Tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper highlight how schizophrenia can arrive unnoticed in both men and women and only result in an episode after it is too late.
“The Mask of the Red Death”: Story by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe published several stories with gothic inspiration, but none more critically acclaimed than “The Mask of the Red Death.”
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” The paper discusses one macabre story, saturated with Gothic atmosphere, madness, and decay. The name of this story is “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe.
“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe: Review The raven stands for the narrator’s inner self, who is trying to come to terms with the loss he has to endure. The man lost the woman he loved, Leonore.
“Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Poe’s story is a monologue of a man who decided to kill his old neighbor. The narrative begins in medias res, and the reader cannot know for sure anything about the characters.
Analysis of Stories: The Gold-bug and Other by Edgar Allan Poe and In Our Time by Ernst Hemingway This paper aims to discuss how the two famous authors namely Edgar Allan Poe and Ernst Hemingway tries to use the concept of foreign and foreigner in their short stories.
The Short Story “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe: Reliability of the Narrator After finishing the story by Edgar Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the reader may be left wondering about the validity of the events that took place during the narration.
Edgar Allan Poe: The Concept of Punishment The concepts of punishment and alienation are familiar to the author and can be easily traced in Poe’s two works: “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
“The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe The story Red Death was written by Edgar Allan Poe. The story is about Fight of prince Prospero against red death, the plague which affected the country.
The Short Story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe In Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, universal and specific symbols prove the uniqueness of his writing style.
Edgar Alan Poe’s Stories Analysis The short stories written by Edgar Alan Poe contain masterfully indented elements of suspense using Gothicism in depicting death, mental madness, and supernatural elements.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “Wuthering Heights” The paper discusses Edgar Allan Poe’s “Wuthering Heights”. The narrator wanted to take revenge with impunity, also making sure that it would be recognized as revenge.
Alcoholism and Edgar Allan Poe’s Death Many arguments support alcoholism as the cause of Poe’s death, including his friends’ testimonials, newspapers’ reports about brain congestion, and social observations.
The Biography Narrative About Edgar Allan Poe The paper contains three of Edgar Allan Poe’s life episodes, which reveal the personality and creativity of the writer and may be informative about the Civil War and the Wild West.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the storyteller visits a mansion, which belongs to his sick friend, Roderick Usher.
Edgar Allan Poe’s Dark Tale: The Cask of Amontillado Explored The article is an overview of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: the author summarizes the essence, telling what the intrigue is.
Works by Edgar Poe as Examples of Good Essay Creating an outstanding piece of writing is highly dependent on Poe’ three main arguments: length, methodology, and writing.
The Use of Eerie and Bizarre of Edgar Alan Poe This article is an analysis of what tools the creepy and bizarre Edgar Alan Poe uses to develop the effect of horror in his works.
“Cask of the Amontillado” a Story by Edgar Allan Poe In his short story The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Poe uses foreshadowing and irony techniques in order to create a sense of suspense that engages the readers.
Edgar Allan Poe and Jean-Michel Basquiat Comparison This research paper explores the lives and artistic works of two outstanding creators – Edgar Allan Poe and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King: A Comparison and Contrast of Their Writing Careers
The Road Not Taken by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Frost
Edgar Allan Poe, the Personification of Death and a True American Genius
Overview of Gothic Literature and the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
The Setting and the Narrative Style in Four Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe’s Beliefs About the Afterlife
The Childhood, Achievements, and Literary Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and Literary Portrayals of Fear and Madness
Analysis of the Symbolism Used in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
Edgar Allan Poe and the American Romantic Revolution
How Edgar Allan Poe’s Work Is Affected by His Predecessors?
Edgar Allan Poe Virtually Created Detective Story and Perfected the Psychological Thriller
Symbolic Motifs and Gothic Imagery of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe and the Obsessed Characters of the Narrators of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado”
The Mourning for Lost Love in “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte and “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe’s Concentrated Emotional Effects
The Literary Elements Used by Edgar Allan Poe in the Story “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Edgar Allan Poe’s Life and the Effects It Had on His Writing
Revenge, Betrayal, and Premature Burial in Edgar Allan Poe’s Novel “The Cask of Amontillado”
Edgar Allan Poe’s Key Influence on the Zombie Fiction
How Did Edgar Allan Poe Influence Literature?
Does Imagination Overcome Fear in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe?
How Does Edgar Allan Poe Keep the Reader in Suspense?
What Influenced Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Style?
How Does Edgar Allan Poe Use Dreams to Portray Terror and Mirror the Narrator’s Sense of Reality?
What Makes Edgar Allan Poe So Great?
How Does Edgar Allan Poe Create Horror in “The Pit and the Pendulum”?
Does Edgar Allan Poe Favor Death and Terror Over Other Literary Genres?
What Makes Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Unique?
How Does Edgar Allan Poe Define American Literature?
What Were Edgar Allan Poe’s Writings About?
How Does Edgar Allan Poe Explore Similarities Between Love and Hate in His Work?
What Is the Most Interesting Fact or Facts About the Life of Edgar Allan Poe?
How Do Edgar Allan Poe’s Writings Illuminate His Upbringing?
What Was Edgar Allan Poe’s Greatest Influences?
How Was Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Influenced by His Life?
What Are the Four Major Themes of Edgar Allan Poe?
How Has Edgar Allan Poe’s Literature Influenced Today’s Culture?
What Were Edgar Allan Poe’s Two Main Rules of Writing?
Did Edgar Allan Poe Contribute to the Development of a New Literary Genre?
How Is Edgar Allan Poe Remembered Today?
What Is Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Important Legacy?
Do the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe Reflect the Characteristics of Gothic Literature?
How Did Edgar Allan Poe Influence America?
Why Did Edgar Allan Poe Write Such Dark Stories?

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These essay examples and topics on Edgar Allan Poe were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 8, 2024 .

May Garrettson Evans: "Hustle for News"

Edgar allan poe research.

Outside of her work in journalism and music education, May Garrettson Evans conducted valuable research on the work and legacy of Edgar Allan Poe. Before her fellow members of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore in the 1890s, Evans shared her studies of Poe's death and first grave, pointing out discrepancies between the burial place and the original marker. She would resume her work on this topic decades later, publishing a detailed account in the Baltimore Sun in 1920. The following year, the marker was moved to the location Evans had argued was the proper spot.

Evans became one of the founding members of the Edgar Allan Poe Society in 1924 and would go on to serve as president from 1935 to 1938. During that time, she helped lead research on the house on Amity Street where Poe had lived, once again correcting the historical record. Evans published her work in the Maryland Historical Magazine and the Poe Society successfully persuaded the city not to demolish the house. The Poe House is now a museum open to the public.

Other scholarship by Evans combined her interest in Poe with her knowledge of musical literature. In her 1939 book Music and Edgar Allan Poe: a Bibliographical Study , Evans discusses how composers such as Debussy, MacDowell, and Rachmaninoff incorporated Poe's texts in their works. The book contains an annotated list of musical settings of Poe's works.

Facts About Mistake In Marking Original Burial Place Of Poe

Article by Evans about her efforts to identify the proper location of Poe's remains.

Manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe Society on the death of May Garrettson Evans

Note by the Edgar Allan Poe Society in memory of Evans. Includes news clipping about the preservation of the Poe House on Amity Street.

Music and Edgar Allan Poe : a bibliographical study

Excerpt of book by Evans about musical settings of Edgar Allan Poe's texts.

The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

This essay is about the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7, 1849. It explores the circumstances leading up to his death, including his discovery in a delirious state on the streets of Baltimore, and his subsequent hospitalization. Various theories about the cause of his death are discussed, including cooping (a form of electoral fraud), rabies, alcoholism, and other possible factors like heart disease or murder. The essay highlights the lack of definitive evidence, noting that Poe’s medical records and death certificate were lost. Ultimately, Poe’s mysterious death adds to his legacy as a master of macabre literature.

How it works

Edgar Allan Poe, a figure shrouded in enigma within American literary circles, departed from this mortal coil under veils of uncertainty that persist to this very epoch. Born unto this world in the annum of 1809, Poe carved a niche for himself through the crafting of tales steeped in macabre and Gothic allure, such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” However, the lamentable cessation of his existence in 1849 remains ensconced within a labyrinth of theories and conjectures, rendering it one of the most beguiling unsolved enigmas in the annals of literary chronicles.

Upon the third day of October in the annum of 1849, Poe was discovered in a state of delirium upon the thoroughfares of Baltimore, Maryland. His discovery occurred proximate to a tavern and polling precinct recognized as Ryan’s Fourth Ward Polls, attired in garments ill-suited to his person. This peculiar circumstance has served as fertile ground for myriad speculations regarding the vicissitudes that befell him. Conveyed to the confines of Washington College Hospital, Poe languished in a state of bewilderment and anguish until his eventual demise on the seventh day of October in the same annum. Throughout his sojourn within the confines of the hospital, Poe failed to attain a semblance of coherence adequate for elucidating the circumstances leading to his dire condition, and the corpus of his medical records, inclusive of his death certificate, has regrettably been lost to the mists of time.

A plethora of theories has arisen over the passage of years concerning the precipitate of Poe’s demise. One prevailing conjecture posits that he fell prey to the machinations of “cooping,” a stratagem rife within the electoral milieu of the 19th century. In this practice, individuals were ensnared, rendered inebriate or stupefied, and compelled to engage in multiple instances of suffrage in favor of a specific candidate. This postulation finds support in the circumstance of Poe’s discovery on the day of Election, proximate to a locus of electoral activity, clad in garments foreign to his own visage. Adherents to this theory proffer that Poe’s state of delirium and ensuing demise may have resulted from the repeated administration of inebriating substances.

An alternate hypothesis posits that Poe succumbed to the scourge of rabies. In the year of 1996, Dr. R. Michael Benitez, a practitioner of cardiology, published an exposition within the annals of the Maryland Medical Journal detailing his appraisal of Poe’s symptoms. Benitez proffered the assertion that Poe’s manifestations were commensurate with those characteristic of rabies, noting the occurrence of interludes of serenity punctuated by paroxysms of agitation, a pattern frequently encountered among rabies-inflicted patients. Regrettably, no autopsy was performed, and Poe’s medical records remain replete with lacunae, rendering conclusive substantiation of this diagnosis an impossibility.

Alcoholism has also been mooted as a potential impetus for Poe’s demise. Poe grappled with alcoholism throughout the chronicle of his mortal existence, and certain biographers postulate that his demise was precipitated by a terminal bout of inebriation. This supposition garners support from the testimonies of contemporaries acquainted with Poe, inclusive of his confidant, Dr. John Moran, who attended to him during his final hours. Moran attested to Poe’s conveyance to the hospital in a state of semi-consciousness, and to his evincing manifestations consonant with withdrawal. Nevertheless, other contemporaneous observers, inclusive of Poe’s own physician, Dr. John Carter, demurred from attributing to Poe the status of habitual imbiber.

In addition to the aforementioned theories, others aver that Poe’s demise may have arisen from a confluence of factors, encompassing cardiac maladies, epilepsy, and even homicide. Certain theorists advance the conjecture that Poe may have incurred the enmity of adversaries or rivals who harbored designs for his detriment. The paucity of unequivocal evidence, coupled with the absence of extant medical records pertaining to Poe, consigns the veritable precipitate of his demise to the realm of conjecture.

The denouement of Poe’s mortal saga and the veil of mystery enshrouding his demise have only served to burnish the legend encompassing this maestro of the macabre. His oeuvre endures as a magnet for readers enthralled by its themes of lunacy, mortality, and the occult, while the saga of his mortal sojourn, punctuated by an end enigmatic, mirrors the somber and enigmatic tenor of his literary legacy. Consequently, Edgar Allan Poe remains a figure of inexhaustible fascination, not solely on account of his literary bequests, but also owing to the unresolved conundrums that haunt the precincts of his demise.

In summation, the cessation of Edgar Allan Poe’s mortal existence on the seventh day of October in the annum of 1849 persists as one of the most confounding enigmas in the annals of literary antiquity. Whether he succumbed to the throes of cooping, rabies, alcoholism, or another catalyst, the dearth of conclusive evidence portends that the veritable precipitate of his demise shall forever elude definitive explication. What endures as irrefutable, however, is that Poe’s premature and enigmatic cessation has secured his station as an iconic luminary in the firmament of American letters, his life and oeuvre continuing to beguile and galvanize.

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Cortázar’s and Poe’s Short Stories About Houses Essay

Introduction.

House Taken Over by Julio Cortázar is a short magical realism story that follows the story of a young couple gradually losing a familial house. Conversely, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe is a gothic supernatural horror novel about a haunted house. At first glance, these stories are alike, utilizing similar storytelling instruments and imagery. However, closer examination reveals stark differences in tone, message, and thematic content. Moreover, generic allegiances of both narratives largely determine their intended messages or lack thereof. Despite being seemingly close setting-wise, the two stories diverge more than they relate.

Both stories take place in spacious hereditary houses, haunted or mystically taken over. In House Taken Over, Julio Cortázar assumes the role of the narrator, who lives with his partner, Irene, in a massive empty residency. Likewise, the unnamed protagonist of Poe’s novel visits his old friend residing in an old, haunted mansion. Poe and Cortázar draw vivid pictures of the houses’ internal arrangement and furnishing. In both narratives, the house is enveloped in mystery. This is where the distinctions between the two start to emerge. The house of Usher is a dark, sullen, unfamiliar, quietly terrifying place. Poe is not shy of expressiveness when describing the house’s horrifying atmosphere. The hereditary residency in Cortázar’s story radiates nostalgia and warmth, as the author clearly expresses a longing for that place, evident from the very first sentence of the text: “We liked the house because, apart from its being old and spacious, it kept the memories of great-grandparents, our paternal grandfather, our parents and the whole of childhood” (Pearson Education Inc. 37). Although Cortázar incorporates mystery by never explicitly disclosing who took over the house, he does not emphasize horror as much as Poe.

Another difference between the two stories lies in their core thematic focus. Cortázar’s tale can be viewed as an allegory for the then-current political condition of Argentina. The author dwells significantly on the character of Irene. Through the narrator’s relationship with her, the story conveys its central message – silence before the aggression. If projected to the real-world events of its time, House Taken Over suddenly makes more sense. They who take over the narrator’s house are not mystical entities; rather, they are political oppressors nobody dares to challenge. Both the narrator and Irene choose to live quietly, never attempting to resist the takeover that is not even hostile. In this sense, Cortázar provides a mystical account of a real event. Conversely, Edgar Allan Poe’s story can be interpreted as either an allegory for one’s growing madness, an exploration of the twins’ bonds, or having no connotation. Sharpness and melancholy conveyed through the text justify the novel’s allegiance to the gothic genre. Even the Usher mansion is reminiscent of the respective architectural style with its pointy, tall structures.

In conclusion, Cortázar’s Home Taken Over and Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher employ similar settings yet differ starkly in tone and thematic content. The former, being a work of magic realism, tells a mystical, fictional story of an oppressed young couple that evades resistance at the cost of their wealth and nonchalant existence, illustrating the real-world political turmoil of that time. Conversely, Edgar Allan Poe’s short tale does not have a universally agreed-upon interpretation. The narrative of a haunted house that drives its inhabitants might just be a story for the story’s sake. Both stories have their generic allegiance, either referencing reality or serving no transcendent goal.

Pearson Education Inc. MyPerspectives . Pearson, 2017.

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Introduction. House Taken Over by Julio Cortázar is a short magical realism story that follows the story of a young couple gradually losing a familial house. Conversely, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe is a gothic supernatural horror novel about a haunted house. At first glance, these stories are alike, utilizing similar ...

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Article contents

Poe's Persona

Early Poetry

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Poe's Criticism

The Raven and Other Poems

Poe, the Detective Story, and Science Fiction

Poe's Influence

Selected Works

Further Reading

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Cortázar’s and Poe’s Short Stories About Houses Essay

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