Study Guide to the Major Works by Edgar Allan Poe

By Intelligent Education

<!--td {border: 1px solid #ccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}-->

• Language: English
• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645424154

Intelligent Education

Intelligent Education is a learning company with a mission to publish accessible resources and digital tools to educate the world. Their mission drives every project, from publishing books to designing software and online courses, film projects, mobile apps, VR/AR learning tools and more. IE builds tools to empower people who love to learn. Intelligent Education offers courses in science, mathematics, the arts, humanities, history and language arts taught by leading university professors from Wake Forest University, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, and other great schools. The learning platform features 3D models and 360 media paired with instructional videos for on-screen and Mixed Reality interaction that increases student engagement and improves retention. The IE team is geographically located across the United States and is a division of Academic Influence. Learn more at http://intelligent.education.

Book preview

THE POEMS: INTRODUCTION

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

BASIC PROPOSITIONS OF HIS AESTHETIC THEORY

The foundation of Poe’s attitude toward poetry can be stated in the form of a few simple propositions. In literature or any art pleasure is superior to truth and morality. This pleasure comes through glimpses of supernal beauty. We can only experience this ideal beauty in periods of short duration. Poetry in particular must be condensed so it can be appreciated as a whole within a short period of time. Art must be concentrated by emphasis on unity which is governed by necessity. The primary value of poetry is an indefinite elevation of the soul through beauty.

THE GRADES OF BEAUTY

Poe recognized and was affected by three grades of beauty. On the lowest level is the beauty of material objects. The second plane is that of noble thoughts and actions, characteristically thoughts or actions of self sacrifice. The third and most important level is that of beauty of sentiment. In The Philosophy of Composition he wrote:

That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When indeed, men speak of beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul -not of intellect, or of heart, upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating the beautiful.

All three of these levels of beauty are qualified by the idea of the bizarre in the beautiful.

STRANGENESS AND BEAUTY

Running throughout the English and American romantic periods is the assumption that strangeness adds to or heightens beauty. Poe thought physical landscapes most beautiful when they suggest the bizarre. It was in his heroines, however, that he most emphasized strangeness in beauty. Lady Madeline Usher and Ligeia both have a strangeness in the proportion of their faces that mars the perfection of classic beauty, but renders them more beautiful in Poe’s eyes. Poe even insisted that deformity and horror have their place in the beautiful. He wrote in Fifty Suggestions: An artist is only an artist by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty - a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity or disproportion.

UNITY AND PROPORTION

A principle that Poe states with great insistence is that the work of art must communicate a totality of effect. A long poem is a contradiction in terms because if a literary work takes more than one sitting to read everything like totality is destroyed. The essence of totality is proportion. Without proportion there could be no satisfactory unity. In The Rationale of Verse he wrote: Verse originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness. Its idea embraces those of similarity, proportion, identity, repetition and adaptation. For Poe, poetry must be formal. Free verse is an