THE POEM AS FELONY
Dreams bore me, even those of genius. My own, I tend to forget the moment I awaken. Yet sometimes a hypnogogic state will produce a dream that offers an exception to my wakeful un-interest in dreams. I once had such a dream about the multiple genius of Edgar Poe.
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem, per se, the circumstances-or say the necessity-,” writes Poe of “The Raven,” “which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.” Poe can summarily dismiss this matter of necessity in the composition of his poem, as well as in the writing of “The Philosophy of Composition,” but I cannot. Indeed, it is Poe’s necessity in both instances that is my very subject. But first should I not investigate the circumstances-the necessity-that gave rise to my own intention of composing an essay on this subject?
Unfortunately, my dreams episode did not deal with the circumstances of that necessity. It dealt with solutions to the mystery of the necessity behind the writing of Poe’s poem and the writing of his explanation of how he constructed his poem. I did not write down the details of my dream at the time, consciously because I both saw no point in the dream and knew that if it did become useful to me at any future time I would recall enough of it to put it to use. I did not set it down because, semiconsciously I know, I’m unduly skeptical about the meaningfulness of dreams and the utility of interpreting them.
I recall vividly, however, that the dream culminated in a phrase, two words, capitalized perhaps, a name changed but not beyond understanding. And those ultimate words emerged suddenly from a rather uneasy consideration and reconsideration of Poesque themes revolving over and over again hypnogogically that morning just before-or was it just after? -daybreak. It was Poe, the many Poes, who plagued my sleep: the Poe who theorized, who practiced, who composed, who criticized, who attacked, who hoaxed, who sneaked around. It was the Poe who rationalized about poetry but who undercut his own fictional rationalizing, the Poe who bruited theories of the musicality of verse, the Poe, the succubus, who attached himself to notions of the beauty and the melancholy in the death of young women, the Poe who lifted and borrowed at will for his art and his commodity even as he lashed out with reckless abandon at supposed and real plagiarists, the Poe whose darkly monastic attraction to sometimes prematurely buried beautiful women resulted in tales like “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”-the Poe, in short, who was priest, musician, and thief. I no longer remember the phrases and quotations that swirled toward culmination that morning and would not, I suspect, repeat them here even if I did. I put that stuff out of my head almost immediately. But I was curious as to what precisely had brought me to such a pass, to such an encoded solution (which was no solution of course) to the daylight matter of writing an essay entitled “The Poem as Felony.”
I had been reading toward this essay for a few days, I recalled. What had I been reading? Well, there was S. Foster Damon’s 1930 book on Thomas Holly Chivers, in which Damon had, with sweet reason, answered Chivers’s charge that Poe had plagiarized “The Raven” from him by looking at the matter from the vantage of a twentieth-century historian. It was only a matter of creative usage and literary influencing. There was no crime involved. “Stung by neglect, urged on by his friends,” wrote Damon:
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem, per se, the circumstances-or say the necessity-,” writes Poe of “The Raven,” “which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.” Poe can summarily dismiss this matter of necessity in the composition of his poem, as well as in the writing of “The Philosophy of Composition,” but I cannot. Indeed, it is Poe’s necessity in both instances that is my very subject. But first should I not investigate the circumstances-the necessity-that gave rise to my own intention of composing an essay on this subject?
Unfortunately, my dreams episode did not deal with the circumstances of that necessity. It dealt with solutions to the mystery of the necessity behind the writing of Poe’s poem and the writing of his explanation of how he constructed his poem. I did not write down the details of my dream at the time, consciously because I both saw no point in the dream and knew that if it did become useful to me at any future time I would recall enough of it to put it to use. I did not set it down because, semiconsciously I know, I’m unduly skeptical about the meaningfulness of dreams and the utility of interpreting them.
I recall vividly, however, that the dream culminated in a phrase, two words, capitalized perhaps, a name changed but not beyond understanding. And those ultimate words emerged suddenly from a rather uneasy consideration and reconsideration of Poesque themes revolving over and over again hypnogogically that morning just before-or was it just after? -daybreak. It was Poe, the many Poes, who plagued my sleep: the Poe who theorized, who practiced, who composed, who criticized, who attacked, who hoaxed, who sneaked around. It was the Poe who rationalized about poetry but who undercut his own fictional rationalizing, the Poe who bruited theories of the musicality of verse, the Poe, the succubus, who attached himself to notions of the beauty and the melancholy in the death of young women, the Poe who lifted and borrowed at will for his art and his commodity even as he lashed out with reckless abandon at supposed and real plagiarists, the Poe whose darkly monastic attraction to sometimes prematurely buried beautiful women resulted in tales like “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”-the Poe, in short, who was priest, musician, and thief. I no longer remember the phrases and quotations that swirled toward culmination that morning and would not, I suspect, repeat them here even if I did. I put that stuff out of my head almost immediately. But I was curious as to what precisely had brought me to such a pass, to such an encoded solution (which was no solution of course) to the daylight matter of writing an essay entitled “The Poem as Felony.”
I had been reading toward this essay for a few days, I recalled. What had I been reading? Well, there was S. Foster Damon’s 1930 book on Thomas Holly Chivers, in which Damon had, with sweet reason, answered Chivers’s charge that Poe had plagiarized “The Raven” from him by looking at the matter from the vantage of a twentieth-century historian. It was only a matter of creative usage and literary influencing. There was no crime involved. “Stung by neglect, urged on by his friends,” wrote Damon:
Chivers shouted out his claims. His complete lack of humor betrayed him into his enemies’ hands; for as an example of the prototype of “The Raven” he quoted what may well be the vilest, the most excruciating stanza he ever penned:
As an egg, when broken, never
Can be mended, but must ever
Be the same crushed egg forever-
So shall this dark heart of mine!
Which, though broken, is still breaking,
And shall never more cease aching
For the sleep which has no waking-
For the sleep which now is thine!
As an egg, when broken, never
Can be mended, but must ever
Be the same crushed egg forever-
So shall this dark heart of mine!
Which, though broken, is still breaking,
And shall never more cease aching
For the sleep which has no waking-
For the sleep which now is thine!
Of course we cannot blame a father prostrated with grief over his dead first-born for lacking a sense of humor. But it was the end of Chivers’s literary reputation. This Humpty-Dumpty conceit has bid fair to outlive all his other works. Critics had but to quote his own defense, and his case was laughed out of court.
I recalled that when I read Damon, I nodded with full assent. But that was when I was awake. Oneirically, however, I had insisted on Poe the felon. No genteel explaining away of such criminal charges, not at daybreak. I had also been reading, as I recalled, Daniel Hoffman’s 1972 book-Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe-an essay much about various Poes, including the priest, the poet, the necrophilic lover of love, the master thief of the words of others.
When Hoffman’s book first appeared I had dipped into it with skepticism. I put it down-for over a decade, as it turned out. But now I had returned to it; and when I did, I discovered that my copy contained a small card signifying that the book had been presented to me by the author; and I noticed further that the imprint of a paper clip on the dust jacket where the card had been affixed originally still showed clearly. I had clean forgotten that the author of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe had undoubtedly included my name on his list of those to whom complimentary copies were to be sent on publication. My old teacher-at Columbia University in the not yet dim reaches of nearly a generation ago he had supervised my master’s thesis-had had remembered me. And I had forgotten my manners, for I’m certain that I never acknowledged receipt of the gift and, as I’ve already confessed, I did not read it, at least not much of it. Why had he sent it to me, when he had never sent any of his earlier books on Stephen Crane, on Yeats, Graves, and Edwin Muir, on folklore and myth in nineteenth-century American fiction, not to mention the several volumes of his own accomplished poetry? It’s true that just after (or was it just before?) his book on Poe appeared, at the Modern Language Association meeting in 1971 held in Chicago, I had run into the author, who was there, he told me, solely to see if his publisher had fulfilled his promise to publicize the book. Maybe I had already received my complimentary copy, for I recall asking him whether the black-and-white author’s photograph reproduced on the back of the dust jacket was intended to add an eighth Poe to the seven Poes reproduced on the front of the dust jacket. It was his wife’s idea, he said, to use that photograph in just that way. What I did not realize then but soon noticed was that the photographer was Elizabeth McFarland, the long-haired woman who haunted the mail box in the downstairs hall in the building on West 116th Street in which I lived for a while when I was a student beginning my graduate work in English and American Literature, including participation in a proseminar conducted by one who, as the most recent nominee in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, had just had a poem printed in the New York Times Book Review. Need I tell you that the author of the fine poems in An Armada of Thirty Whales turned out to be the husband of Elizabeth McFarland, that haunter of locked mailboxes, that a waiter of the mailman, that protector (I now see) against the purloining of letters?
I recalled that when I read Damon, I nodded with full assent. But that was when I was awake. Oneirically, however, I had insisted on Poe the felon. No genteel explaining away of such criminal charges, not at daybreak. I had also been reading, as I recalled, Daniel Hoffman’s 1972 book-Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe-an essay much about various Poes, including the priest, the poet, the necrophilic lover of love, the master thief of the words of others.
When Hoffman’s book first appeared I had dipped into it with skepticism. I put it down-for over a decade, as it turned out. But now I had returned to it; and when I did, I discovered that my copy contained a small card signifying that the book had been presented to me by the author; and I noticed further that the imprint of a paper clip on the dust jacket where the card had been affixed originally still showed clearly. I had clean forgotten that the author of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe had undoubtedly included my name on his list of those to whom complimentary copies were to be sent on publication. My old teacher-at Columbia University in the not yet dim reaches of nearly a generation ago he had supervised my master’s thesis-had had remembered me. And I had forgotten my manners, for I’m certain that I never acknowledged receipt of the gift and, as I’ve already confessed, I did not read it, at least not much of it. Why had he sent it to me, when he had never sent any of his earlier books on Stephen Crane, on Yeats, Graves, and Edwin Muir, on folklore and myth in nineteenth-century American fiction, not to mention the several volumes of his own accomplished poetry? It’s true that just after (or was it just before?) his book on Poe appeared, at the Modern Language Association meeting in 1971 held in Chicago, I had run into the author, who was there, he told me, solely to see if his publisher had fulfilled his promise to publicize the book. Maybe I had already received my complimentary copy, for I recall asking him whether the black-and-white author’s photograph reproduced on the back of the dust jacket was intended to add an eighth Poe to the seven Poes reproduced on the front of the dust jacket. It was his wife’s idea, he said, to use that photograph in just that way. What I did not realize then but soon noticed was that the photographer was Elizabeth McFarland, the long-haired woman who haunted the mail box in the downstairs hall in the building on West 116th Street in which I lived for a while when I was a student beginning my graduate work in English and American Literature, including participation in a proseminar conducted by one who, as the most recent nominee in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, had just had a poem printed in the New York Times Book Review. Need I tell you that the author of the fine poems in An Armada of Thirty Whales turned out to be the husband of Elizabeth McFarland, that haunter of locked mailboxes, that a waiter of the mailman, that protector (I now see) against the purloining of letters?
In the proseminar at Columbia, the young instructor, chain-smoking through reports and discussions of Nathaniel Hawthorne (I still can’t stand to read Hawthorne in the Modern Library Giant I was advised to buy for the class—no vade mecum that tome!) mentioned Edgar Poe only to disparage: tales, poems, criticism-nothing escaped his waspish dismissal. I remember the teacher’s quoting James Russell Lowell’s characterization: “There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” And when I encountered the American literature portion of my writtens for the masters there it was, its author unidentified and the key word missing: “_______, three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge”-“fill in the blank and give the author” read the instructions. And then, too, in Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, the same mot about Poe, and more than once. Small wonder that in Chicago in 1971 Daniel Hoffman said to me, “I have a lot of fun in that book but in the second half I’m serious. I’m dead serious.” “Two parts fudge, and two parts sheer genius”? All to be expected from the author of Poe to the seventh power. Here is Hoffman on “Ms. Found in a Bottle”:
I have nearly catalogued the curiosa of this Ms., am nearly done. I’ve yet to give the
description of the captain of the ship, and him we must inspect if we’re to know whose ship
this is, and what her itinerary: “… a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe mingled
with the sensation of wonder with which I regarded him.
description of the captain of the ship, and him we must inspect if we’re to know whose ship
this is, and what her itinerary: “… a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe mingled
with the sensation of wonder with which I regarded him.
In stature, he is nearly my own height; that is, about five feet eight inches. He is of a
well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust, nor remarkably otherwise…”- that
actually was Edgar Allan Poe’s height. It is also my own stature exactly-.
After my days at Columbia University and several years before my Chicago encounter with Hoffman as the reincarnated Poe, I too had to face up to Poe. If I had not written across his photograph “I hate Poe,” as Hoffman confesses he once did, I had nevertheless learned to devalue Poe as Emerson’s jingle man, as the new critics’ author of stories of effect-”only” effect. My encounter of true record came when I had to lecture on Poe to two hundred fifty students of American fiction. Mindful of the omission of Poe from American Renaissance by Saint Francis of the Order of Matthiessen and the quirky special pleading on behalf of Allan Poe by his cousin Allen Tate, I felt compelled to pay obeisance to the prevailing views, along with nods to Krutch, Princess Marie Bonaparte, and Poe’s latest defender then, Edward Davidson. In fact, it was Davidson’s Riverside reader that I asked my students to buy.
My own imp of the perverse did not bring me to disparage Poe’s achievement to a group of Poephilians as Hoffman’s did in France in 1956, where he ran down Poe in a lecture hall filled with not only his students but “scores of teachers of la littérature Américaine in lycées from as far out in the hinterland as Besançon.” “Here, in Dijon,” continues Hoffman, “they have walked through narrow alleys and crooked streets bordered by Roman walls and overhung by swollen Renaissance balconies, walked beneath roofs upheld by flamboyant caryatids, and entered the gloomy gateway of the Faculté.” Halfway through his litany of Poe’s poetic excrescences and lyrical deficiencies, Hoffman tells us, he “recognized it (his lecture) as a piece of Poesque arrogance, a catastrophe inspired by some perverse imp of my own.” He does not tell us whether anyone in his audience walked out on him. When my imp perversely moved me to feature my rehearsal of Poe’s critics with a healthy chunk of Princess Bonaparte’s viscous psychoanalysis of Poe’s tales, one seated at the back of the upward sloping amphitheatre in which I lectured to sleepy students who had fallen out of their dorms and fraternities to see whether the new teacher would follow the old teacher’s notes, copies of which some of the fraternity boys were carrying around, walked out in clear protest over, as I suspected immediately, both the Princess’s zany analysis and my superior, perhaps supercilious, presentation of it. His walk from the back of the hall, down the aisle, across the floor in front of me, and out the door to my right did not take forever. But it did cause me to change my tone and, therefore, my tune.
In my week of lecturing, I now see in my old notes, I focused on … but first, some more memories of Columbia. The young scholar with a book under his belt, another well under way, and a doctoral dissertation just about completed, not to mention his Yale Younger Poets volume, walks the campus, wearing a beret (before going to Fulbright France) and carrying under his left arm a copy-just off the press-of the Hudson Review, a cover of black lettering against a green and white background. How assured, how promising, how fulfilled. Another scene: the poet-scholar en famille, in Riverside Park on a barely sunny March day thanking a stranger for having allowed her child to play with his two children. Who was this man who had signed an early piece in Explicator “Dan Hoffman” (in a gesture of genial populism?) but who was now “Daniel G. Hoffman”? And who (though I did not know it then) would later drop the G. (standing for what? I don’t remember) to emerge in books of poetry and now in his book on Edgar Poe as Daniel Hoffman.
(cont…)
Image from http://www.musingsbystarlight.com/2010/12/raven-by-edgar-allen-poe.html
