Poe, Edgar Allan (EN)

Poe [pou] Edgar Allan, *19 January 1809 Boston, †7 October  1849 Baltimore, American poet, short-story writer, literary critic. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by a wealthy merchant J. Allan and his wife, and took the surname of his guardians in addition to his family name. As a child, he lived in England for five years, attending private schools. In 1826 he entered Virginia University in Charlottesville. Looking for sources of income, he fell into card debt, started drinking excessively and eventually dropped out of school. In 1827 he published a volume of poetry Tamerlane and Other Poems, which went unnoticed. Desperate, he joined the army and after a two-year service, he transferred to West Point, where he was expelled after a few months. As a proponent of national liberation struggle, he tried to join the Polish insurgent army in 1831. In the same year, he published another volume of poetry, writing short stories for literary magazines at the same time. Then he created, among others: Ligeja, Berenice, and The Fall of the House of Usher. While looking for a job, he changed his place of residence often. He lived successively in Richmon, where he published his stories in “Southern Literary Messenger” and developed his critical activity; in New York; in Philadelphia, where he wrote numerous “detective” short stories for “Graham’s Magazine”, including The Mask of the Red Death. In 1845 he published The Raven and Other Poems the last volume of poems released in his lifetime. From 1846 Poe’s poetry and short stories began to give way to a rich critical activity. After his wife’s death in 1847, Poe published the poem Ulalume, considered by many to be the crowning achievement of his poetry.

In numerous articles, reviews and writings, Poe tried to formulate his aesthetic views (among others, The American Drama, 1845, The Philosophy of Composition, 1846, The National of Verse, 1848, The Poetic Principle, posthumous edition 1850). He strived to create a unified system of thinking, encompassing the material world, metaphysics and the sphere of human mental health. He preached the autonomy of art; a key concept in Poe’s aesthetic is beauty, which is “pure elevation of soul.” He credited other forms of art – like painting, architecture, dance, and especially music – with the ability to arouse sensitivity to beauty. He identified poetry with man’s striving for heavenly, divine beauty.

One of the main features of Poe’s poetry was the “suggestive indeterminacy of the poem’s meaning” in connection with other features of Romantic poetics, such as musicality and melancholic mood. “Indeterminacy” reflected the author’s mental obsessions: death, suffering, and weariness, but at the same time it was related to his view on the function of a word in a lyrical work; he claimed that a poet uses words for their evocative qualities or for their sound properties (“syllabic instrumentation”), not for their semantic value. He believed that the “soul of poetry and intuition” is imagination.

In his short stories, Poe used the conventions of gothic prose (shock horror), science fiction (e.g. visions of space) and short story genre. The motif of death (usually the death of a beloved woman) served as a means to achieve a mood of melancholy. Poe claimed that the most interesting states are those that separate life from death, dark and indefinite: sleep, fainting, lethargy, catalepsy, hypnosis, and madness. Poe’s stories are characterised by uncanniness, unusualness, gloominess and mystery, but at the same time irony and reference to the grotesque (a parody of horror literature).

Poe is considered the first great critic in the history of American literature (e.g. he reviewed 94 books for the “Southern Literary Messenger,” 1835–36). He became known in Europe thanks to French poets; C.P. Baudelaire, S. Mallarmé and symbolists were fascinated with his works. In Poland first translations of Poe’s poetry were published in 1861 (F. Faleński); Poe’s poetry was later translated, among others, by Z. Przesmycki (Miriam), S. Przybyszewski, B. Leśmian.

Poe assigned a purely expressive and evocative function to music, because of all types of human aesthetic activity, music reflects the realities of life to the least extent. He believed that “music combined with a pleasant thought is poetry; music without this idea is simply music, and thought without music is prose”.

No other American poet has captured the imagination of composers as strongly as Poe. Most of the works were written to poetic text (approximately 220 until 1939), and more than half of them were based on five poems: Annabel Lee, Eldorado, Bells, The Raven, To Helen. Among the short stories, The Fall of the House of Usher was the most common inspiration. Many European composers were impressed by Poe’s work (e.g. S. Prokofiev and M. Ravel, although these interests were not reflected in their music), and in the 20^th century American and English composers: J. Holbrooke, L. Bernstein, C. Sanford, G. Crumb, P. Glass and others. Polish composers, like E. Morawski, W. Kilar and K. Knittel, also used Poe’s text and themes.

Literature: M. Bonaparte Edgar Poe. Etude psychoanalytique, Paris 1933; M.G. Evans Music and Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore 1939; E. Lockspeiser Debussy et Edgar Poe, Monaco 1962; F. Lyra Edgar Allan Poe, Warsaw 1973; C. Debussy The Fall of the House of Usher. Devil in the Belfry, translation and comments by S. Jarociński, „Res Facta” 7, 1973; J.L. Idol and S.K. Eisiminger Performances of Operas Based on Poe’s Fiction, in: «Poe Studies» XV, 1982; J. Sullivan New Worlds of Terror. The Legacy of Poe, w: New World Symphonies, New Haven (Connecticut) 1999.