Read Online Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Edgar Allan Poe - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Edgar Allan Poe
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timeless, existential anxieties common to people everywhere. His works therefore are seldom set in a specific historical time. Poe’s renown for literary succinctness of course validates his intent; he wrote best with brevity. That “best” emanated, however, from his awareness that intensity cannot be long sustained in much related to human nature, and that human emotions are kaleidoscopic. Therefore he repeatedly used lyric poetry and short stories as his most comfortable media for unfolding the interior of the human mind, whether employing weird landscapes (“Ulalume”) or drawing on the haunted-castle theme from earlier Gothics to enhance the emotional turmoil in his characters. To press this point home, Poe often shaped his material to suggest the reader’s entry into the human head, which frames the mind. Thus the dark windings of interiors, with movements spiraling up or down, create rich textures and dizzying effects, encompassing issues of gender, sexuality, marriage—all of which concern human identity. Whatever form he uses, Poe aims for a vivid, intense impression, and such intensity cannot be lengthened into extended form without diminishing the effect. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is also a short novel, for its time, albeit the prose expression within that book displays an unmistakable repetitiveness, perhaps to reinforce the pervasive aura of a hypnotic dream-world into which Pym journeys.
Brevity in Poe’s creative writings overall is analogous to brevity in a dream: The dreamer moves from recognizable reality further into nonrational realms, the climax arrives, and the dream, or nightmare, ceases. Poe’s nightmare vision, to define his principal literary vision more precisely, anticipates those in the works of numerous later writers, and for such outreach he should be remembered as having contributed significantly to as many major currents as to eddies in literary waters. 11 What has sometimes been mischaracterized as mere hack-work, created out of an inadequacy and inability to rise to greater heights, may today reveal more about some readers’ limitations than about any liabilities in Poe’s artistic vision and achievement.
Benjamin F. Fisher, Professor of English at the University of Missis sippi, has published extensively on Poe and many other subjects in American, Victorian, and Gothic studies. He is currently at work on two books and a monograph about Poe. Fisher is on the editorial boards of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe Review, Victorian Poetry, Frank Norris Studies, Gothic Studies, Simms Review, and English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, and he is past president of the Poe Studies Association and chairman of the Speakers Series of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. He was awarded a Governor’s Citation in the state of Maryland for outstanding contributions to Poe studies and has won several awards for outstanding teaching.
POEMS
The Lake—To
In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less—
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.
But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody—
Then—ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.
Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight—
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define—
Nor Love—although the Love were thine.
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.
Sonnet—To Science
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst
Brevity in Poe’s creative writings overall is analogous to brevity in a dream: The dreamer moves from recognizable reality further into nonrational realms, the climax arrives, and the dream, or nightmare, ceases. Poe’s nightmare vision, to define his principal literary vision more precisely, anticipates those in the works of numerous later writers, and for such outreach he should be remembered as having contributed significantly to as many major currents as to eddies in literary waters. 11 What has sometimes been mischaracterized as mere hack-work, created out of an inadequacy and inability to rise to greater heights, may today reveal more about some readers’ limitations than about any liabilities in Poe’s artistic vision and achievement.
Benjamin F. Fisher, Professor of English at the University of Missis sippi, has published extensively on Poe and many other subjects in American, Victorian, and Gothic studies. He is currently at work on two books and a monograph about Poe. Fisher is on the editorial boards of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe Review, Victorian Poetry, Frank Norris Studies, Gothic Studies, Simms Review, and English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, and he is past president of the Poe Studies Association and chairman of the Speakers Series of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. He was awarded a Governor’s Citation in the state of Maryland for outstanding contributions to Poe studies and has won several awards for outstanding teaching.
POEMS
The Lake—To
In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less—
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.
But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody—
Then—ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.
Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight—
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define—
Nor Love—although the Love were thine.
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.
Sonnet—To Science
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst
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