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

ranging from politics and social issues to literary concerns; intermittently, the voices in the “Noctes” seemed to be inspired by alcohol.
    Poe eventually tended to remove, or certainly to diminish the effects of, these and other specifics, the better to locate disturbing and frightening circumstances nearer their real source, the human mind. In tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” particularities of place or intoxication are not as central as irregularities or irrationalities in the characters’ emotional makeup. Similar psychological focus informs “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Purloined Letter,” “‘Thou Art the Man’,” “The Sphinx,” and “Hop-Frog.” In all, geography of the imagination—internal geography—rather than physical, external geography is emphasized. Several Poe narrators also tend to liken their bewilderment to that of opium users instead of claiming opium use as the cause of their own unsettled mind-set-for example, the protagonists in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia.”
    Poe realized, first, that he could bend Gothic conventions toward a greater psychological plausibility; and, second, that the erratic perspectives of drunkards could be used in the pursuit of what we might deem more “sober,” subtle ends. He stated in the preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (see “For Further Reading”), written not long after he had abandoned the Folio Club venture, that the basis for his tales was psychological realism and not the “Germanism” with which critics had charged him: If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul,—that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results (vol. 1, p. 5). Those “legitimate sources” were, of course, for the most part located in disturbed human minds, with allowances made for physical torments that intensified emotional tortures in tales like “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Causes for the turmoil in the minds of Poe’s characters are easy to fathom. Poe’s cultural world was coming to grips with the human mind and the hidden self—it was an exciting topic for both clinical and lay observers, especially in the context of the developing cultural nationalism of a self-consciously American civilization.
    To another American writer in Poe’s era, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose ideas won widespread acceptance, the human mind harbored much good. Emerson expounded on a notion of self-reliance that teamed the individuality suggested by “self” with ways to excite and to connect (the root meanings of “reliance”). This outlook was optimistic about the possibilities of exploring the human mind, an optimism that seemed to mirror advancing pioneering and settlement in the nation.
    In Poe’s writings, conversely, the human mind was fascinating, but a source of more danger than pleasure. Poe’s self was certainly not a metaphor for pleasing light and flowing waters, symbolizing ongoing life, as in Emerson’s imaginative vision. Poe’s waters were usually troubled and dangerous (witness those in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Silence—A Fable,” “A Descent into the Maelström,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym); and his lighting typically creates obscuring or frightening effects. Poe’s lighting inverts the pleasing effects of lighting that may be found in other authors’ writings and is instead glaring or obscuring, even blinding—as, for example, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Hop-Frog,” and Pym, or in “The Lake—To—,”“The Raven,” “Ulalume,” “Dream-Land,” and “The City in the Sea.” Even in a