Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Edgar Allan Poe Read Free Book Online

on the rock, plus a demon storyteller—could be a drunkard’s verbal expression and his equivalent of “seeing pink elephants.”
    Yet another aspect resides in these tales: Both would have appealed to Poe’s contemporaries because the language recalls that in the King James Bible. In “Silence—A Fable” the language notably resembles excited, fulsome “preacher rhetoric” that would have touched sympathetic chords among the more evangelical among them and that might be compared with similar rhetorical strategies in popular nineteenth-century comic takeoffs on sermons—for example, “The Harp of a Thousand Strings” and “Where the Lion Roareth and the Wang doodle Mourneth,” both attributed to William Penn Brannan, and both more overtly good-humored than “Silence—A Fable.” The account of Satan’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness may also have influenced the demon’s profane catechizing of the narrator in the tale. “Shadow—A Parable” recalls Psalm 23, with its valley of the shadow (death), thus adumbrating “Eldorado,” wherein a shadow (perhaps the protagonist’s ambiguous “other”) tells the questing knight that he must descend into the valley of death before his ambitions are fulfilled.
    Poe’s oft neglected “King Pest” was during his lifetime never mentioned as a Folio Club tale, but its blended horror and mirth suggest potential kinship with the project. A bizarre group attempts to evade a plague terrorizing their city by sequestering themselves in an undertaker’s parlors, raiding his liquors, and attempting to retain health amidst the squalor of the contagion. Although the group pretends to royal status, such pretense fails to cow the two sailors who stumble into their midst, possibly because the sailors, already intoxicated, recognize like symptoms in those they meet. Collectively, the revolting physical features and stilted, pompous verbalizings of King Pest and his retinue keep readers alert to ambiguities coupling horror (from plague as actual disease and from equally revolting settings) with humor (comic names, “plague” as merely nuisance, wordplay) until the sailors seize Queen Pest and the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest, then bolt, evidently anticipating sexual conquest. As in the Folio Club, in “King Pest” emotions explode into grotesque speeches and actions, and conclude in the high jinks of the abduction of the females, one with decided alcoholism, the other with a give-away literary name. Add the implicit exposure of farce in the “pest-iferous” traits of the characters and the links with literary elements, and we can surmise that this tale might have concluded Poe’s contemplated book, where public revelation of bombast and bogus “quality” would have ensued. The subtitle for “King Pest,” “A Tale Containing an Allegory,” may have indeed glossed potential for the Folio Club, whatever other readings may ob tai 5
    Here, then, we see Poe creating fiction that might be “popular” in several senses. That these early tales employ situation and language structures involving drunken narrators is no great wonder. Drunken narrators often framed stories that quickly plummeted the protagonist into events of dreadful import, only to close with disclosures that exposed the lurid events as originating in imbibing. Many such yarns came from authors usually designated as “frontier” or “Southwest” humorists. In his blendings of humor and horror emanating from alcohol or other intoxicant origins, Poe resembles many other American authors in his era and many in our own. For example, novels by the British writer Thomas Love Peacock often centered upon dinner-table scenes in which generous amounts of food and drink contributed to entertaining arguments concerning philosophical and literary topics. In Blackwood’s serialized “Noctes Ambrosianae,” characters loosely based on the editors and several prominent contributors offer gossip-column commentary