Poe And The Idea Of Music

Edgar Allan Poe often set the scenes of his stories and poems with music: angels have the heartstrings of lutes, spirits dance, and women speak with melodic voices. These musical ideas appear to mimic the ways other authors, particularly Romanticists, used music in their works to represent a spiritual ideal artistic realm. Music brought forth the otherworldly, and spoke to the possible transcendence of the human spirit. Yet, Poe's music differs from these Romantic notions in ways that, although not immediately perceptible in each individual instance, cohere to invert Romantic idealism. For Poe, artistic transcendence is impossible, the metaphysical realm is unreachable, and humans cannot perceive anything but their own failure of spirit. In this book, I show how we can look at Poe's poems and stories on the whole to discover this, and in doing so, unpack some of Poe's mysticism along the way.

This collection of specially-commissioned essays by experts in the field explores key dimensions of Edgar Allan Poe's work and life. Contributions provide a series of alternative perspectives on one of the most enigmatic and controversial American writers. The essays, specially tailored to the needs of undergraduates, examine all of Poe's major writings, his poetry, short stories and criticism, and place his work in a variety of literary, cultural and political contexts. They situate his imaginative writings in relation to different modes of writing: humor, Gothicism, anti-slavery tracts, science fiction, the detective story, and sentimental fiction. Three chapters examine specific works: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Raven', and 'Ulalume'. The volume features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading, and will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

Edgar Allan Poe’s reputation as an enduring and influential American literary critic rests mainly upon the pieces in this edition. Editors Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine provide reading texts, detailed explanatory footnotes, variant readings, and introductions to show context. They also face frankly the contradictions in Poe’s critical dicta. Poetry is for pleasure, not truth, Poe says, but argues that poetic inspiration leads to truth. Great works, Poe says, result from studied calculation, but also from irrational, supernal sources. Both biting critic and doughty defender of American artistic achievement, Poe was contemptuous of democratic art, except when he manned the barricades in its defense. Critical Theory highlights such conflicting ideas and suggests why they are present. This edition shows that what is consistent in Poe is not any single theory. Rather, always present are wit, playfulness, concern for the strong effect, a bin of recyclable allusions, anecdotes and quotations, and a writer’s discipline. His writing on theory is of a piece with his fiction, poetry, and journalism. The Levines explain how these pieces also tie in tightly to the social, political, economic, and technological history of the world in which Poe lived.

Poe in propria persona -- Poetics and echopoetics -- Poetry: or, Masks for a read death -- The politics for a poetry without politics.

Since before the Declaration of Independence, poets have shaped a collective imagination of nationhood at critical points in American history. In The Patriot Poets Stephen Adams considers major odes and "progress poems" that address America's destiny in the face of slavery, the Civil War, imperialist expansion, immigration, repeated financial boom and bust, gross social inequality, racial and gendered oppression, and the rise of the present-day corporate oligarchy. Adams elucidates how poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addressed political crises from a position of patriotic idealism and how military interventions overseas in Cuba and in the Philippines increasingly caused poets to question the actions of those in power. He traces competing loyalties through major works of writers at both extremes of the political spectrum, from the radical Republican versus Confederate voices of the Civil War, through New Deal liberalism versus the lost-cause propaganda of the defeated South and the conservative isolationism of the 1930s, and after the Second World War, the renewed hope of Black leaders and the existential alienation of Allen Ginsberg's counter-culture. Blazing a new path of critical discourse, Adams questions why America, of all nations, has appeared to rule out politics as a subject fit for poetry. His answer draws connections between familiar touchstones of American poetry and significant yet neglected writing by Philip Freneau, Sidney Lanier, Archibald MacLeish, William Vaughn Moody, Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, Allen Tate, Henry Timrod, Melvin B. Tolson, and others. An illuminating and pioneering work, The Patriot Poets provides a rich understanding of the ambivalent relationship American poets and poems have had with nation, genre, and the public.