Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) by Paul Collins Page B
Authors: Paul Collins
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had posts of honor on the stand.” When writing, Poe had a table between two windows that he would repair to, and his cat, Catterina, would leap up onto his shoulders and watch.
Poe had not lost all touch with the outside world; with Tales and The Raven and Other Poems promptly pirated in London, he saw reviews filtering back from abroad. But his most notable appreciation that spring was a Graham’s essay by Poe himself, “The Philosophy of Composition.” In it, Poe claimed to have written “The Raven” through a doggedly logical process that appeared to demonstrate how anyone seeking to write a great poem was fated to write “The Raven.”
While obviously rooted in Poe’s literary criticism, the more subtle origin of “Philosophy” lay in Poe’s cryptogram columns and his detective stories, and their great show made of logical elimination and deduction leading to an inevitable result. Of course a poem’s topic must be beauty and death intermixed (“the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”); indubitably about one hundred lines is an ideal length (“It is, in fact, 108”); surely only “Nevermore” could work as the poem’s refrain (“In fact, it was the very first which presented itself”). If Poe’s poker-faced claim of a logical formula for poetry was about as believable as his balloon hoaxes, the essay still admirably summarized his notion of working backwards from a story’s conclusion for a “unity of effect,” as well as his concept that the fleeting, ineffable state ofpoetry dictates working within “a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—the limit of a single sitting.”
“The Philosophy of Composition” occasioned little comment that spring, but his absence from downtown did. Newspaper rumors began that he was committed to the Insane Retreat at Utica. He wasn’t, but it only fueled curiosity over the announcement by Godey’s Magazine days later that Poe was to write a series of profiles on “The Literati of New York City.” Featuring bewilderingly frank descriptions of New York editors and authors, its May 1846 issue quickly sold out. Amid Poe’s usual mingled praise and stabbing criticism, startling personal descriptions revealed his old business partner Charles Briggs as “not a person to be disliked, though very apt to irritate and annoy” while he “pretends to a knowledge of French”; the travel writer William Gillespie “walks irregularly, mutters to himself”; of N. P. Willis, Poe judged: “His face is somewhat too full, or rather heavy . . . neither his nose nor his forehead can be defended.”
Willis, mind you, was a friend of his.
Poe had been led terribly astray—for while he was not averse to settling old scores, many of the most tactless descriptions in his profiles originated in a belief in phrenology. Clinical descriptions of weak faces and eccentric mannerisms seem to have been just that to him: descriptions falling within the scientific realm. To anyone else, they were monumental insults. It was, one sympathetic newspaper editor warned, “the maddest kind of honesty.” Before the summer was out, Poe’s series had goaded his old sparring partner Thomas Dunn English into revealing their fight and Poe’s alcoholism to New York newspapers, with Dunn claiming that “a merchant of this city had accused [Poe] of committing forgery.” Infuriated by the charge, Poe sued for libel.
Clearly, matters had gotten out of hand. Fellow Southern writer William Gilmore Simms pleaded with Poe: “Suffer meto tell you frankly, taking the privilege of a true friend, that you are now perhaps in the most perilous period of your career.” The series was cut short in October, but the damage was done. Thomas Dunn English published a satire of Poe as “Marmaduke Hammerhead,” the drunk and impoverished critic and author of “The Black Crow”:
“Did—did—did you ever read my review
Poe had not lost all touch with the outside world; with Tales and The Raven and Other Poems promptly pirated in London, he saw reviews filtering back from abroad. But his most notable appreciation that spring was a Graham’s essay by Poe himself, “The Philosophy of Composition.” In it, Poe claimed to have written “The Raven” through a doggedly logical process that appeared to demonstrate how anyone seeking to write a great poem was fated to write “The Raven.”
While obviously rooted in Poe’s literary criticism, the more subtle origin of “Philosophy” lay in Poe’s cryptogram columns and his detective stories, and their great show made of logical elimination and deduction leading to an inevitable result. Of course a poem’s topic must be beauty and death intermixed (“the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”); indubitably about one hundred lines is an ideal length (“It is, in fact, 108”); surely only “Nevermore” could work as the poem’s refrain (“In fact, it was the very first which presented itself”). If Poe’s poker-faced claim of a logical formula for poetry was about as believable as his balloon hoaxes, the essay still admirably summarized his notion of working backwards from a story’s conclusion for a “unity of effect,” as well as his concept that the fleeting, ineffable state ofpoetry dictates working within “a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—the limit of a single sitting.”
“The Philosophy of Composition” occasioned little comment that spring, but his absence from downtown did. Newspaper rumors began that he was committed to the Insane Retreat at Utica. He wasn’t, but it only fueled curiosity over the announcement by Godey’s Magazine days later that Poe was to write a series of profiles on “The Literati of New York City.” Featuring bewilderingly frank descriptions of New York editors and authors, its May 1846 issue quickly sold out. Amid Poe’s usual mingled praise and stabbing criticism, startling personal descriptions revealed his old business partner Charles Briggs as “not a person to be disliked, though very apt to irritate and annoy” while he “pretends to a knowledge of French”; the travel writer William Gillespie “walks irregularly, mutters to himself”; of N. P. Willis, Poe judged: “His face is somewhat too full, or rather heavy . . . neither his nose nor his forehead can be defended.”
Willis, mind you, was a friend of his.
Poe had been led terribly astray—for while he was not averse to settling old scores, many of the most tactless descriptions in his profiles originated in a belief in phrenology. Clinical descriptions of weak faces and eccentric mannerisms seem to have been just that to him: descriptions falling within the scientific realm. To anyone else, they were monumental insults. It was, one sympathetic newspaper editor warned, “the maddest kind of honesty.” Before the summer was out, Poe’s series had goaded his old sparring partner Thomas Dunn English into revealing their fight and Poe’s alcoholism to New York newspapers, with Dunn claiming that “a merchant of this city had accused [Poe] of committing forgery.” Infuriated by the charge, Poe sued for libel.
Clearly, matters had gotten out of hand. Fellow Southern writer William Gilmore Simms pleaded with Poe: “Suffer meto tell you frankly, taking the privilege of a true friend, that you are now perhaps in the most perilous period of your career.” The series was cut short in October, but the damage was done. Thomas Dunn English published a satire of Poe as “Marmaduke Hammerhead,” the drunk and impoverished critic and author of “The Black Crow”:
“Did—did—did you ever read my review
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