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We certainly also find, even in so small a number of poems, a myriad of references to death. Thoughts of extinction seemed always to be with you, Edgar. A tortured fellow, you were. You lost your love and could not forget her. Half of you wanted to follow in her footsteps. Perhaps rather more than half of you. Your untidy ending in Baltimore might say as much. And how I wish you could tell us the truth of that night’s events. But, no, I will not ask. Perfumes have a major presence in your poems. The scent of cinnamon is one for which you cared greatly. You would agree that the olfactory sense is very capable of stirring the faculty of memory – and you, Poe, were always, always remembering a better time and place than that in which you existed. And who could blame you, really, for that? Who, knowing even so little as we do, would trade places with you? In your poems we frequently find odd and curious words; antique words, strange-sounding words. Eidolon is one of those. You will even invent words for their sound qualities: Al Aaraaf is in this category of ingenuity. You employed unusual terms or used terms in unusual ways. Much of your vocabulary was built from words no longer in common usage even in your own day. You did not apologize for this for it too was useful to your ends. You meant -- didn’t you? -- to crack us out of our shells, to pull us into strangeness, into other worlds which you did your best to suggest by sound, image, music and blurred sense. You more than half-believed in those worlds, stumped mightily for their existence in your literary essays. And you hoped all of us might go there so that you might believe entirely and without question. You may have thought that such a journey into ‘otherness’ was part of our human destiny. We should undergo a metamorphosis, leave our mortal flesh behind and become spirit alone. No mistake should be made. This spirit thing of yours, this belief in a spirit world was not the stuff of religion, nor was it spiritualism in its usual hackneyed meaning. It was a thing you made up from bits of this and that. I mean: heck knows how you came to it. Yet, it works. You kept it vague enough, shadowy enough, that if the cerebrum is lulled to sleep by your use of sound, the spirit of the reader can suspend disbelief and float forward like one of those phantoms you continually extolled. Quite an experience, Edgar. And, I should know.
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Epistle to Poe 5 |
