Review by Edward Tanguay October 23, 1995

As far as background music for the reading of Poe goes, I suggest Bach's "Toccata and Fugue" and other fugues by Bach to provide the Gothic sense of atmosphere given to us by Poe in tales such as "The Fall of the House of Usher." To compliment Poe's descriptions of his psychologically unstable characters and their lunacies mad deeds as in "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," I suggest something more modern, shrilly, and atonal: Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" provides all this and with its chanted lyrics, adds a sense of demented genius behind the madness.

After reading half the book, my favorite stories are by far those in which Poe puts us in the mind of a demented character committing his evil deeds. One cannot read the classic "The Tell-Tale Heart" without getting goose bumps of fright as the madman communicates his maniacal nuances of motion and thought:

And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel--although he neither saw nor heard--to feel the presence of my head within the room. (Imagine: lying awake on your bed and FEELING the head of someone moving into the dark room! That is fine perception!)

I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening;--just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall. The image of two men (one a madman murderer) in a dark room listening for the sounds of each other for one hour, absolutely still, absolutely dark.

And what is Poe's obsession with eyes? It was the "eye" of the old man that bothered him and this "damned eye" comes back in "The Black Cat." Can we liken this eye-fetish with Sartre's "look" of others, i.e. that one does not like to be looked at and defined by others and, hence, feels uncomfortable under other people's eyes? In any case, "The Black Cat" is my favorite Poe story so far. Can anyone read this and not cringe:

One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight would upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.

Poe hits upon a range of emotions that we know so well: that burning rage when a (damn) cat bites you or you bang your head on the sharp corner of the shelf or you bite your tongue and perhaps "nurtured by rum" you feel "the fury of a demon" for a few seconds until you regain your senses. Not only is the rage identifiable but also the regret and remorse of the act. We also see the frenzy of a mad yet conscious act when the madman "deliberately" cuts the eye from the socket. (Anybody who has tripped over a bucket and then got up to deliberately kick and dent the sh** out of the thing knows this emotion all to well!)

I see Poe as an author who "plays for us the evil keys of human emotion," so to say. Thinking of the range of human emotions and levels of experience as a piano keyboard, not too many authors can really identify evil (Stephan King maybe?) like Poe can. For instance, the act of doing something evil solely and purely for the sheer evil pleasure of the deed, giving yourself fully to the dark force of the soul. Just as when you were a kid and realized that you liked to burn ants with an magnifying glass not only to see the puff of smoke, but because you knew deep down it was terribly wrong. I think all humans are capable of these extremely evil deeds (many cases evidenced to the extreme 50 years ago and evidenced in all wars where humans have the power to torture) and Poe enables the reader to feel this through his literature, here when he kills the black cat:

One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;--hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;--hung it BECAUSE I knew that it had loved me, and BECAUSE I felt it had given me no reason of offence;--hung it BECAUSE I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin--a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it--if such a thing were possible--even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. I thought "Hop-Frog" was a neat little story of revenge with a demented Poe twist. The various colors of the rooms in "The Masque of the Red Death" made this one-- colorful, for lack of a better word. In "The Cask of Amontillado" my predominant reaction was that it seemed darkly psychological (Freudian?) in that the two men went deeper and deeper and deeper into the earth until they reach the place at which the madman surprises his companion and walls him in. They were so deep in the cave that the madman could act freely and commit his evil deed of walling in his victim, yelling with him as he walled him in:

I reapproached the wall. I replied to the yells of him who clamored. I re-echoed--I aided--I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this, and the clamorer grew still.

This was a really sick tale. Classic Poe.

Even though "Ligeia" had its dark side as well, the part about the deep and longing love, so strong that the loved one came back from the dead, made it a powerful tale.

"The Assignation" and "The Oval Portrait" were nice little stories in themselves, the former having an unexpected and mysterious ending which I liked.

The best thing about "The Fall of the House of Usher" were the descriptions. Here the cold feeling one gets when one looks at the house:

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. and here how sensitive the man's senses are:

He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror. The three detective stories ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and "The Purloined Letter") accompanied with their talk about various thought processes when working on detective cases were enjoyable but not interesting enough to keep me reading without making myself read. (My "Encyclopedia Brown" stories as a kid, for example, were more fun to follow that these detective stories.) At times I felt as though I were reading the minutes of a lawyers' meeting. A bit dry. And on one point, I think that Poe is simply wrong regarding a mathematical fact, if, indeed, he believes as does his character who spoke the following:

Nothing, for example, is more difficult than to convince the merely general reader that the fact of sixes having been thrown twice in succession by a player at dice, is sufficient cause for betting the largest odds that sixes will not be thrown in the third attempt. I have learned that the opposite is true. The odds of throwing two sixes is the same for every throw: 1 in 36; previous throws should not be figured into the odds.

I have also started "The Golden Bug" and just got to the point were they found the treasure! I like this story: even though the story is believable, it has that demented flavor which makes Poe so stimulating to read.

Edward Tanguay

*** Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
*** Notes on the second half, by Edward Tanguay
*** October 28, 1995

While reading The Golden Bug, I was waiting for a grotesque Poe turn- of-events to take place, but it turned out to be a nice, little Robinson-Crusoe-like story. I'm glad the narrator asked why Mr. Legrand insisted on having Jupiter drop the golden bug through the skull's eye socket, as at the end of the story, that the last unexplained issue. The story suddenly became an innocent one when Dr. Legrand simply stated that he had done this just to lead the narrator on; basically, he was just making a joke. This story was refreshing after after a row of tales about death, doom, and horror.

I enjoyed the "Shadow--A Parable" tale as much as I didn't understand it. It was short and sweet, but quickly created an eerie atmosphere of conjuring up the dead, ending with the unexpected arrival of a "multitude of beings":

And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskly upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.

I liked reading Poe because of the frequent crystal-clear descriptions he gives of emotions and states of mind. In "MS Found in a Bottle" the description of why he took the trip describes restlessness well:

I went as passenger--having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend. The idea behind this story makes it an instense tale: the description of someone in a hopeless situation (a ship sinking in a storm), with increasing consciousness of his impending death. It provides a background for Poe to describe various gradations of hopelessness and doom:

. . . but I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself, and prepared myself gloomily for that death which I thought nothing could defer beyond an hour, as, with every knot of way the ship made, the swelling black stupendous seas became more dismally appalling. and finally, his last thoughts before the ship sinks:

But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small--we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool--and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and tempest, the ship is quivering--oh God! and--going down!

The tale "Descent into the Maelstroem" was similar and similarly powerful. The fact that the story is told from the giddy height of a Norwegian cliff prepares the reader for the giddy feeling which comes in the explanation of the ship being swooshed around violently in the whirpool shortly before its decent into the watery abyss. It is an unique but appropriate frame for the story:

In truth so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward at the sky . . .

I liked how Poe gives power to the name of the storm that ultimately destroys the ship:

. . . I felt somebody grasp my arm. It was my elder brother, and my heart leaped for joy, for I had made sure that he was overboard--but the next moment all this joy was turned into horror--for he put his mouth close to my ear, and screamed out the word 'Moskoestroem!'

Poe describes convincingly how the ship is spinning around and around in the giant whirlpool:

She was quite upon an even keel--that is to say, her deck lay in a plane parallel with that of the water--but this latter sloped at an angle of more than forty-five degrees, so that we seemed to be lying upon our beam-ends. I could not help observing, nevertheless, that I had scarcely more difficulty in maintaining my hold and footing in this situation, than if we had been upon a dead level; and this, I suppose, was owing to the speed at which we revolved. The reader gets a dizzying three-dimensional (so unique and new as to almost be humorous) view as Poe describes the other objects spinning around in the giant whirlpool:

Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat as not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building-timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a strnage interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. This story was the most visual for me and the one that I remember the most vividly. The fact that the whole experience turned the survivor's hair white and turned his body into that of an old man, coupled with the description of the whirlpool itself, gives an awesome picture of the mightiness of nature.

"The Pit and the Pendulum" was repulsive to read. I believe that any story which centers on a man's thoughts while being tortured would be repulsive to read. That you never know what is in the pit makes it even more repulsive because your mind keeps trying to imagine it, continually prodded by Poe's shocking descriptions:

Neither could I forget what I had read of these pits--that the sudden extinction of life formed no part of their most horrible plan.

One must flinch when one reads of the massive razor/pendulum slowly descending from the ceiling:

I now observed--with what horror it is needless to say--that its nether extremity was formed of a crecent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor. Like a razor also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and the whole hissed as it swung through the air.

And the depiction of the rats has to send shivers down your back:

In their voracity, the vermin frequently fastened their sharp fangs in my fingers. They writhed upon my throat; their cold lips sought my own; I was half stifled by their thronging pressure; disgust, for which the world has no name, swelled my bosom, and chilled, with a heavy clamminess, my heart. "The Sphinx" had me fooled until the end, "The Man of the Crowd" was a bit hard to follow, but "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether" was interesting psychologically, as well as thrilling in the sense of a mystery. Until the end of the story, I didn't know who was crazy and who wasn't, the repeated yells adding to and confusing my suspicions.

"William Wilson" is quite obviously symbolic of killing a part of yourself. The symbolic warning of the second self at the end say it clearly:

It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said: "You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead--dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist--and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."

Of the poems, "The Raven," "The Bells," and "Alone" were my favorites. "The Raven" would be an excellent poem to memorize by heart and to perform dramatically, especially if you have or can affect a deep voice. It has the best rhythm and rhyming scheme of any poem I know. The rhythm in "The Bells" is such that, if read properly, can make the poem sound like bells. There were many lines out of the poems that I liked, even some in Poe's love poems. Like in his prose, some lines where packed full of description intensity, as in "To----":

That years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute:--

or as in "The Conqueror Worm":

But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!

The opening image of "The Sleeper" is very clear, reminds me of moonlit nights:

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,

Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.

That's nice! I like it. The whole poem is pleasant and beautiful but is crassly interrupted by the description of his deceased lover:

Soft may the worms about her creep!

Somehow that strikes an ill chord with the two lines preceding it:

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!

For the next line, I was expecting something like "My heart does for her leap" or "Into her soul I long to peep," but certainly nothing referring to her decomposing, worm-eaten corpse!

The poem "A Dream Within a Dream" is also a favorite. I had heard these lines before; now I know their origin:

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

The "Sonnet--To Science" creates a brief plea against science as an unimaginative institution:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with they peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

I also enjoyed this part of the poem about the evening star,
particularly the feeling it gives of longing for something far away:

There passed, as a shroud,
A fleecy cloud,
And I turned away to thee,
Proud Evening Star,

In thy glory afar
And dearer thy beam shall be;
For joy to my heart
Is the proud part

Thou bearest in Heaven at night,
And more I admire
Thy distant fire,
Than that colder, lowly light.

The last poem in my collection was very well placed, for it sums up the unique person that Poe was, his inner pain and struggles and torment, and his strange beauty and genius:

Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were--I have not seen
As others saw--I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov'd, I lov'd alone.
then--in my childhood--in the dawn
Of a most stormy life--was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that 'round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold--
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by--
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Edward Tanguay

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