Poe

358 Pages·1998·19.25 MB·English

by  Daniel Hoffman

OTHER BOOKS BY DANIEL HOFFMAN
Poetry
An Armada of Thirty Whales
A Little Geste
The City of Satisfactions
Striking the Stones
Broken Laws
The Center ofA ttention
Brotherly Love
Hang-Gliding from Helicon: New and Selected Poems, 1948-1988
Middens of the Tribe
Criticism
Paul Bunyan, Last of the Frontier Demigods
The Poetry of Stephen Crane
Form and Fable in American Fiction
Barbarous Knowledge: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves, and Muir
Faulkner's Country Matters
Words to Create a World: Essays, interviews, and
Reviews of Contemporary Poetry
As Editor
"The Red Badge of Courage" and Other Tales
American Poetry and Poetics
Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing
Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams
POE POE POE POE POE POE POE
Poe Poe Poe Poe
' ... much of Madness, and more of Sin And
Horror the soul of the plot!'
-LIGEIA
'Poor Hoffman, this going mad of a friend comes
straight home to every man who feels his soul
within him. For in all of us lodges the same fuel
to light the same fire. And he who has never felt,
momentarily, what madness is, has but a
mouthful of brains.'
-HERMAN MELVILLE
'Keep the imagination sane. '
-NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
TO HIS WIFE, SOPHIA
DANIEL HOFFMAN
Poe Poe Poe
Louisiana State University Press Baton Rouge
Copyright © 1972 by Daniel Hoffman
Originally published by Doubleday
LSU Press edition published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Louisiana Paperback Edition, 1998
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2
Acknowledgment is made for the use of the following material:
The London Magazine for "Send-Ups," from the January 1970 issue.
The Southern Review for "The Remarriage of Ligeia's Husband,"
from the January 1972 issue.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoffman, Daniel, 1923-
Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe I Daniel Hoffman. -Louisiana
paperback ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8071-2321-8 (paper: alk. paper)
I. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849-Criticism and interpretation.
2. Fantastic literature, American-History and criticism.
I. Title.
PS2638.H57 1998
818'.309-dc21 98-24405
CIP
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and dura
bility of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council on Library Resources. (§)
Contents
PREFACE ix
I. POE POE POE POE POE POE POE
l
II. '01 NOTHING EARTHLY .
THE POEMS 19
III. THE RATIONALE OF VERSE
THE CRITICAL THEORY 79
IV. DISENTANGLEMENTS
TALES OF RATIOCINATION & DETECTION 103
V. VOYAGES 135
Going Down MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE; DE-
SCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM
Sent Up THE BALLOON HOAX; BANS PFAALL
Counterclockwise TALE OF THE RAGGED
MOUNTAINS; MONSIEUR VALDEMAR; MES
MERIC REVELATIONS
Beyond Apoccilypse MONOS AND UNA; EIROS
AND CHARMION; THE POWER OF WORDS
VI. DULL REALITIES 179
Money DIDDLING; VON KEMPELEN's DISCOV-
ERY; THE DOMAIN OF ARNHEIM
viii CONTENTS
Politics MELLONTA TAUTA; SOME WORDS
WITH A MUMMY; THE MAN THAT WAS
USED UP
The Social. Order THE SYSTEM OF DR. TARR
AND PROFESSOR FETHER
VII. GROTESQUES AND ARABESQUES
POE'S THEORY OF FICTION 201
Seeing Double
THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE;
THE ANGEL OF THE ODD; WILLIAM WILSON
Murder! THE PREMATURE BURIAL; THE CASK
OF AMONTILLADO
Madness! THE TELL-TALE HEART
VIII. THE MARRIAGE GROUP 229
'A Series of Mere Household Events' THE
BLACK CAT; BERENICE
Aversions
THE SPECTACLES; LACK OF BREATH
'I Have Been Faithful to You in My Fashion'
LIGEIA
IX. BODY OF THE WORLD:
NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM 259
X. THE MIND OF GOD:
'WHAT I HERE PROPOUND IS TRUE'
XI. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER:
4MY HEART LAID BARE' 295
XII. THE HAUNTED PALACE
INDEX
Preface
What, another book on Poe!
Who needs it? Don't we already have a book called Poe:
A Critical Study? And another titled Edgar Allan Poe as
Literary Critic? Yes, and Poe the Detective, and The French
Face of Edgar Poe, and Poe's Literary Battles, and Poe and
the British Magazine Tradition, and Edgar Poe the Poet, and
The Mind of Poe, not to mention a shelf of monographs on
Poe and Baudelaire, Poe and E.T. A. Hoffmann, Poe and the
Bible, Poe in Spanish literature, The Origins of Poe's Criti
cal Theory, and the like; plus several biographies-some
factual, others psychiatric, in which Poe as analysand is
diagnosed, and his work treated, as cases of psychic impo
tence or compensatory aggression or prenatal consciousness
of parental sexuality-as well as a couple of anthologies of
chapters from most of the foregoing plus contemporaneous
reviews of Poe and cullings from recent issues of the scholarly
journals. Why, you may well wonder, would anyone offer
yet another book on so well-documented a subject as the
poetry, the tales, the critical theory, the life, the works, and
the spell of Edgar Allan Poe?
Many books, many Poes. Edgar Allan Poe was always com
plex, inspired, limited, pretentious, uncompromising, banal.
This was acknowledged as long ago as in his own time. James
Russell Lowell, in A Fable for Critics, said it first:
Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three fifths of him genius, two fifths sheer fudge.