Poetry and Tales by Edgar Allen Poe

27 December 2006



The book I’m reading now is Poetry and Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, published by the Library of America, and annotated by Patrick F Quinn. In dimension and color it resembles a brick— the best little detail is the burgundy ribbon attached to the spine and to be used as a bookmark. It gives the reader a feeling of participating in some ancient ritual of scholarship, a feeling of which Poe himself must have been enamored, for not only does he evidence it in his wide-ranging acquaintance with all manner of thought and study (languages ancient and modern, maritime lore, interior design, middle eastern geography, &c, &c) but he also frequently conjures up such erudition for literary effect. He at once created and embodied the image of a man yearning constantly for a different world, alternating between throwing himself into literature for escape, and bouts of being acutely attuned to the actual details of his senses, aware of every subtle gradation and dissonance of emotional effect, and, while not quite loathing the mortal world, wishing it could simply be rearranged to conform with his own vision of what beauty is.
I note this especially in the “sketch” called The Philosophy of Furniture. It’s a strange little piece where Poe first lists his complaints against the contemporary state of interior design in America, and then draws up his own plan for the unique apartment, one devoid of floral patterns and rich in tones of deep red and gold. As someone who doesn’t think much about the details of interior design, I couldn’t help but be carried along by Poe’s own sense of deep purpose here. This brief, focused essay came almost four-hundred pages into the collection of poems and short stories and—far from seeming out of place among the various fantastical exegeses and romps—it seemed to be the purest representation of what it is Poe was doing in all his works: he was arranging, composing, taking the decidedly finite confines of a short story and trying to fill it in just such a way to produce some sort of extreme effect, often the effect of the infinite.
At its worst, this yearning for the infinite can be seen in some of Poe’s dialogues, such as The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion or The Colloquy of Monos and Una. Both of these are conversations held in the afterlife between souls of the dead. While Eiros has at its heart an interesting apocalyptic vision, Monos devolves into a tedious mysticism as a deceased aesthete describes in excruciating detail the alterations of the senses during the process of death.
At its best, the infinite is externalized, as in the story A Descent into the Maelström, where a prematurely aged Norwegian mariner describes getting caught in a massive Arctic cataract: “The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.”