Edgar Allan Poe: Dark Visionary of the American Gothic

"The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse." — Edgar Allan Poe, "The Poetic Principle"

Poe's Dark Vision of Human Nature and Literary Antecedents. "Man is a rational animal; Man is a political animal." These are tenets of the Aristotelian conception of humanity. But the American author Edgar Allan Poe subscribed to a different, darker vision of human nature, a concession to the irrational in humanity. Poe conceived the "imp of the perverse" as his idea of irrational "Man," the being who succumbs to unconscious and even hateful impulses. He thereby anticipated the odysseys into the abyss of human thought by such writers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King.

When few authors, other than Shakespeare, had ventured to identify humanity as "the stuff dreams are made on," Poe explored dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and compulsive impulses in a way to make Freud shudder. He courted the abstruse and sought to embrace an arcane medievalism, when most of his contemporaries were copying European myths and legends or trying to attach American folklore to a Puritan past. T. S. Eliot denounced Poe's adolescent advocacy of a superior realm of perfect beauty and intuitive understanding. On the other hand, Steven Spielberg admits that his best movies would have been inconceivable without Poe's Icarus idealism, his eccentric search for transcendence.

Poe eludes easy categorization, since he resists being an "American" writer. His personal feelings of disinheritance appear to have permeated his tales, and he refuses to locate his narratives in an American setting. He courts the bizarre, the fantastic, the grotesque, the dangerously morbid. He indulges in necromancy, in Eastern and gothic texts, in antiquarianism for its own sake. He wants to be Merlin or Nostradamus, an alchemist after Goethe's Faust. Yet everywhere we find references to the two seminal works that ground American literature, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

In his own time, Poe borrowed from Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. He liked the fictional style offered in Blackwood's Journal. Popular culture lured him with its incursions into mesmerism and archaeology, especially Egyptology. He read minor poets and purveyors of the macabre.

Drawing from the many writers in his canon, Poe added an immediacy of effect, a nervous energy that struck a new chord, decidedly musical, in his reading public. The French loved him in his own time and beyond, hence Poe's great influence on symbolism and surrealist poets and painters, including Franz Kafka and Edvard Burne-Jones, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Egon Schiele. Poe espoused a theory of the superior, aesthetic personality, and so we can see connections to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The art of the detective story and his delving into criminal psychology deeply affected Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. And few can compete with his virtuoso vocabulary, singular erudition, hard work, and mastery of the English language.

Biographical Context: Orphanhood, Education, and Early Career. Edgar Poe was born in Boston in 1809. Two years later his actor father, David Poe, Jr., abandoned Edgar; his older brother, William Henry Leonard, age four; and his sister, Rosalie, less than a year old, in the sole care of their mother, Elizabeth Arnold, who continued to act professionally on the stage. Soon orphaned in late 1811, after the December death of his mother, Edgar received protection, but never formal adoption, by John Allan of his family and Richmond, Virginia. The Allans gave Edgar a good education, including five years abroad, in England, 1815–20. In 1826 Poe entered the University of Virginia, but he left after one year, since Mr. Allan refused to underwrite a second year of study. Allan had no patience with Poe's literary aspirations, nor with Poe's character, which Allan thought dissolute. Poe considered Allan miserly and abusive. Allan died when Poe was in his early twenties, not caring to mention Poe in his will.

Resigned to faring on his own, Poe became associated with eastern cities: Boston, Richmond, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In Boston Poe enlisted in the army under a pseudonym, Edgar A. Perry. At the same time, a Boston publisher brought out Poe's first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, an indication of Poe's future development. Poe attended West Point (an apocryphal story of Poe's West Point fiasco has him appearing on parade wearing only his shoes and sword!), but after his expulsion for gross neglect of duty and general disobedience in 1831 he moved to Baltimore to live with the remaining members of the Poe family, his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia.

Despite what may or may not be the stuff of lore, Poe embarked in writing gothic fiction, some of which satirized German and British models. Whatever his approach may have been at the beginning, Poe soon found himself published and the winner of a prestigious prize; in 1833 the Baltimore Saturday Visitor awarded Poe $50 for "MS Found in a Bottle." This national recognition ultimately enabled Poe to secure an editorial post in 1834 on a Richmond, Virginia, magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger. Meanwhile, Poe's brother, William Henry, had died of alcoholism in August 1831, and once in Richmond Poe sent for Mrs. Clemm and her daughter, Virginia (aged 13), whom he eventually married in order to regularize his familial circumstances.

Editorial Career, Major Works, and Critical Reception. Poe's work on the Southern Literary Messenger increased its circulation 10-fold, solidifying his reputation and providing some financial security, but his ambitions began to expand beyond Richmond, even while his alcoholism had begun to intrude on his professional life. Poe fell into an unfortunate pattern, especially so far as the publishing world was concerned, for unreliability. During this period in May 1836, Poe married his cousin, Virginia Clemm. Virginia's mother, Maria Poe Clemm, entirely approved, and the three lived together as a family. In 1837 Poe either quit or was forced off the staff of the Messenger, and he moved to New York in a fruitless quest to find permanent employment.

He published his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, an epic adventure-romance, in an attempt to expand his literary horizons and legitimize the American novel in a larger structural context, akin to Virgil's Aeneid. Pym inspired such writers as Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville, and possibly Joseph Conrad, to exploit the South Seas narrative as a vehicle for their own use. Pym also established Poe as the philosophical antithesis to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau's naive optimism in nature's innate goodness. Nature, for both Poe and Hawthorne, would always be a mix of mother and destroyer, nurturer and fatal temptress.

The year 1839 found Poe in Philadelphia, an assistant editor at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. There Poe composed several of his most famous tales, "Ligeia," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," but his drinking provoked his dismissal. When Burton's, under new management, became Graham's Magazine, Poe was rehired.

The period 1839–44 had Poe at the top of his form, and, along with "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Pit and the Pendulum." Poe wrote "The Gold-Bug," which won a $1,000 award from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. Poe also embarked on literary criticism, a role that would win him friends and rivals. In 1844 he moved to New York, settling in a country house in the Bronx.

He composed several more tales and critical essays and one treatise in philosophy, Eureka. His major achievement was the publication in 1844 of "The Raven," a poem of anguished loss and bereavement. "The Raven" generated fame, if not wealth, and it would quickly become a standard poem in America's literary canon, a prime example of poetic "music" at a period when America had no actual composer to compete with romantic artists such as Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt.

Around 1845 Poe realized his dearest wish, to become the sole editor of an influential literary magazine, the Broadway Journal. Unfortunately mismanagement and improper investment led to the magazine's demise. This melancholy period reached a tragic peak in January 1847, with the early death of Poe's young wife, Virginia, after she had suffered repeated bouts with tuberculosis. Her alternate lapses and recoveries may have contributed to the poet's equally fitful bouts of drinking; certainly her image as a frail, almost supernaturally delicate presence found its way into many of his tales and poems, such as "Annabel Lee" and "The Oval Portrait."

In 1846–47 Poe tried to rekindle his romantic life by courting a number of literary ladies; on one occasion Poe offered marriage to Sarah Helen Whitman but was rebuffed at the last minute. He decided to return to Richmond, thinking the South offered future success. The people of Richmond actually lionized Poe, acknowledging him as a major literary persona.

Nearing the end of his intense but truncated career, Poe enjoyed something close to celebrity, in that he was wined and dined, quoted, and perpetually sought out for his opinions. A much-photographed portrait of the time (1849) reveals a handsome, secure, confident, and healthy man, a definite contrast to other images of him, which support his reputation as sickly and dissolute. His prospects looked good; he took a pledge to abstain from drink; he became engaged to a childhood sweetheart, Elmira Royster; and he again formulated plans to initiate another literary magazine on his own.

None of these happy possibilities, unfortunately, was to be. While Poe was returning to New York from Richmond in 1849, a series of still unexplained mishaps occurred. Poe failed to reach New York and was instead found in Baltimore, lying in a coma in the street.

It was election time in Baltimore, a city rather notorious for political skullduggery, including falsifying voters' registrations, carousing, brawling, and sexual blackmail. On October 6, Poe passed away in a Baltimore hospital. Speculation has it that Poe was either the victim of foul play or the victim of his own propensity to drunkenness. His condition had apparently devolved into pneumonia, whose signs accord with contemporary descriptions of Poe's states.

Legacy, Reputation, and Literary Influence. It has taken the better part of 150 years to undo a reputation built up by certain critics seeking to discredit Poe's personal and literary repute in America. More than once, Poe's complete mastery of the first-person narrator caused readers to confuse Poe with the social psychopaths and murderers he portrays in his writing. Many of his tales depict a protagonist who takes a sadistic delight in tormenting perceived oppressors. The vividness of Poe's detail has encouraged some readers to identify him with the lunatics, drug addicts, and multifarious fringe or marginal social types of his tales. But the richness of allusion and the apparent cosmopolitanism of his style reveal an urbane, cultivated individual, whose range of motifs and imagistic strategies shows him well versed in the lively arts of his day.

The persistent themes in Poe—such as the odyssey of descent, often into nightmare—ally him to the continental influence of Dante and epic journeys to the underworld in Homer. As does Hawthorne, Poe explores the tenuous relationship between art and life, the often-fatal attraction of aestheticism, which would influence Walter Pater and his acolyte, Oscar Wilde. As a literary critic, Poe is well aware of his debts to Aristotle, Wyatt, Shelley, and Wordsworth, whose efforts to codify art through a deliberate approach to poetics influenced Poe's own structured manner of thinking about the aims of poetic creation.

In many respects, Poe is a Roman writer in the manner of Petronius, cataloging spiritual hubris and excess in palatial settings, invoking the divine vengeance of death itself. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) offered us A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but Poe takes us further back in history, into the primal, archaic night of primitive, destructive energies.

Poe's "Israfel": Angelic Song, Erotic Music, and Poetic Rivalry

“Israfel” (1831). “Israfel” exhibits Poe’s interest in Eastern or exotic subject matter, a typical feature of Romanticism, which saw the publication, in 1859, of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The “long ago and the far away” likewise pervades the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Poe’s own Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Pym is set in the distant land of Antarctica. Several lines of the poem, as well as its musicality, point to “The Blessed Damozel” of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The Quranic Angel and the Orphic Heart-String. The title is taken from a line of the Islamic holy book, the Quran, which describes Israfel as an angel “whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures” (Poe’s note to the poem). We see this same conceit applied to the French preface to the short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In both instances, Poe takes up the idea that one’s heart is a stringed instrument consistently associated with Orpheus of Greek myth.

In eight stanzas, the poem celebrates the spirit who sings unabashedly of erotic love and inflamed passions: “the skies that angel trod, / Where deep thoughts are a duty— / Where Love’s a grown-up God— / . . . / Therefore thou art not wrong / Israfel, who despiseth / An unimpassioned song” (ll. 24–32). We might speculate that Poe’s Israfel embodies that same erotic force that Mozart’s Don Giovanni projects in the famous opera. When Israfel sings, the very heavens become mute, beguiled by “Israfel’s fire” (l. 19) and his “burning measures” (l. 37) that touch the full range of human emotions: “They grief, they joy, they hate, they love” (l. 38).

Poe’s use of fire imagery to describe a musical figure invokes lines in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” in which we are admonished that the inspired bard possesses Promethean powers: “Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” (ll. 49–50). No less evident is Israfel’s power to intoxicate: “None sings so wildly well / As the angel Israfel, / And the giddy stars (so legends tell), / Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell / Of his voice” (ll. 3–7). Even the moon totters in drunken ecstasy (l. 9), and Artemis, traditionally averse to men and human love, “Blushes with love” (l. 12). Poe appeals to more Eastern spirits when he invokes “the Houri glances” (l. 27), the virgins of paradise promised to the most faithful Muslims.

The Poetic Rivalry and the Orphic Will. Recall that the Romantic composer Robert Schumann composed an Eastern drama of love and redemption entitled Paradise and the Peri (1843). The turn in “Israfel” occurs in stanza 7, where it becomes clear that the earthly poet covets Israfel’s heavenly powers for his own use; the world of metaphor is not the world of reality: “this / Is a world of sweets and sours; / Our flowers are merely—flowers” (ll. 41–43). And the entire last stanza inverts the musical relation, so that Israfel “might not sing so wildly well / A mortal melody, / While a bolder note than this might swell / From my lyre within the sky” (ll. 49–52).

The parallels between Poe’s persona’s desire to assume Israfel’s power and Coleridge’s narrator’s desire to appropriate the musical effect of the “damsel with a dulcimer” (“Kubla Khan” l. 37) are quite striking: “Could I revive within me / Her symphony and song, / . . . / I would build that dome in air” (“Kubla Khan” ll. 42–46). The Orphic, erotic power of music to compel the heavens, “the ecstasies above” (l. 36), even the Pleiades (l. 14), to obedience and subservience permeates both visions. The poetic ego, as does Faust in Goethe’s epic parable, seeks absolute authority over the passions of men.

For Discussion or Writing.
1. How does the image of “the trembling living wire” (l. 21) contribute to the “elemental” power of Israfel’s music? What does the image tell you about the role of thought and reason in Israfel’s creative process?
2. At one point, the poet calls Israfel “Best bard, because the wisest!” (l. 34). What evidence is there to support this claim?
3. Compare Poe’s lyric to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “On Hearing a Symphony by Beethoven” and find correlations in the poets’ reactions relative to the power of music.

Poe's "The City in the Sea": Death, Babylon, and the Abyss

Composition, Dantean Influence, and Apocalyptic Imagery. Poe wrote “The City in the Sea” in 1831, revising it in 1845. In four large stanzas, Poe seems to take his cue from Dante and describes the realm of Death, using specific images from both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. The subject of Death’s dominion arises again in Poe’s fascinating story “The Masque of the Red Death,” wherein Death penetrates the otherwise hermetically sealed castle of Prince Prospero.

Poe may have known a famous fresco, The Triumph of Death, by the 14th-century Italian painter Orcagna, upon which the romantic composer Franz Liszt based his series of brilliant variations called Totentanz, the dance of death. The last stanza, in which “Down, down that town shall settle hence” (l. 51), hints at the legend of Ys, the fabled city in Brittany that sank beneath the waves. That city was the subject of an opera by Édouard Lalo and of Claude Debussy’s haunting piano prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie.

Freudian Depths, Babylon, and the Unholy Music of the Accursed. Poe’s morbid obsession with dark water reads to us as typical of his equation of tombs with wombs, the waters of amniotic fluid and protected life with the Freudian depths of the unconscious mind. Does Poe love Death or fear Death? The opening, “Lo! Death has reared himself a throne” (l. 1), has the tone of pride born of radical individualism: “There shrines and palaces and towers / . . . Resemble nothing that is ours” (ll. 6, 8). Death himself “from a proud tower in the town / . . . looks gigantically down” (ll. 28–29).

Poe claims that the city of the dead lies in darkness, yes, but “light from out the lurid sea” (l. 14) still casts an eerie illumination upon the “Babylon-like walls” (l. 18). The wicked city of Babylon invites destruction by the Lord in both Isaiah 14 and 21 and Revelation 16–18. Poe seems to invoke the unholy music of such an accursed place when he tells us the unnatural light streams “Up many and many a marvellous shrine / Whose wreathed friezes intertwine / The viol, the violet, and the vine” (ll. 21–23). We are caught in the throes of what Joseph Conrad called, in Heart of Darkness, “the fascination of the abomination.”

Stanzas 3 and 4 well invoke a scene from the Apocalypse: “There open fanes and gaping graves / Yawn level with the luminous waves” (ll. 30–31). We are transfixed by “seas . . . hideously serene” (l. 41). The turn in the poem occurs in the last stanza, which immediately echoes the first: “But lo, a stir is in the air!” (l. 42). The towers of the ghastly city appear to sink, moving “As if their tops had feebly given / A void within the filmy Heaven” (ll. 46–47).

Perverse Birth, Blakean Paradox, and Miltonic Apotheosis. The ensuing red glow that engulfs the town as it sinks heralds a perverse birth: “The hours are breathing faint and low— / And when, amid no earthly moans, / . . . Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, / Shall do it reverence” (ll. 49–53). We are witness to something uncanny and paradoxical, like William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The prophet in Isaiah utters, “Hell . . . stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations” (Isaiah 14:9). Has Death achieved some similar but unholy apotheosis? Is it indeed better, to cite Milton’s Satan, to reign in hell than to serve in heaven?

For Discussion or Writing.
1. Explain Poe’s use of the pronoun ours in line 8. In what ways might this poem be designed to tell us something important about our present age?
2. Consider the repeated line “A terrible beauty is born” from “Easter 1916” by William Butler Yeats. How can “The City in the Sea” and the Yeats poem be said to celebrate the same event? Look particularly at Poe’s second stanza and lines like “Up domes—up spires—up Kingly halls—” (l. 17).

Poe's Classical and Lunar Visions: "To Helen" and "The Sleeper"

“To Helen” (1831, revised 1845). Poe wrote that “To Helen” was inspired by the mother of one of his schoolmates, Mrs. Jane Stanard, and is composed of “lines written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul” (qtd. in McMichael 541). The Helen of the poem becomes Helen of Troy, daughter of Zeus and a mortal woman, Leda, to whom he appeared as a swan. When Paris stole Helen, he caused the Trojan War, which later inspired Homer’s epic The Iliad.

Poe’s vision of Helen is set entirely in classical conceits within a (Spenserian) sonnet of 15 lines. Poe’s strategy is to link his speaker’s ardent affection to an enlightened past, extending his love over epochs. His spirit is likened to that of Odysseus, “The weary, way-worn wanderer” (l. 4) seeking “his own native shore” (l. 5). Those “Nicene” (l. 2) banks of yore musically connect the persona to a home of Dionysus, a wanderer in myth.

The narrator has traversed “desperate seas” (l. 6) in search of a time to which he can belong. Always spiritually anachronistic, Poe moves restlessly in search of the stasis and repose Helen—“statue-like”—offers (l. 12). The attraction to Helen’s “Naiad” (l. 8) confirms her association with placid, steady waters, as opposed to the rough seas of the narrator’s long experience. She provides clarity to his mind, bearing “the agate lamp within thy hand” (l. 13), now assuming the character of the mythical Psyche, the soul and lover of Cupid. That Psyche could no longer love Eros when exposed to the light does not seem to daunt our narrator. When Poe invokes the “Holy Land” (l. 15) as the region of her influence, it would appear that Poe has fused classical and Christian time.

What makes the poem endure is the youthful sincerity of its images, many of which depend on sensory qualities, such as the “perfumed sea” (l. 3) and its direct relation to the “Naiad” (l. 8) that Helen emanates. Poe is ever the aesthete, the votary of beauty, which Helen embodies, who takes him to his true home, “the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” (ll. 9–10). The legend of The Flying Dutchman must have appealed to Poe, the eternally disfranchised spirit seeking a “gentle” female figure (Senta in the German legend and Wagner’s opera) to offer him solace and spiritual roots.

For Discussion or Writing.
1. Compare Poe’s need for a woman to guide (or lure) him home to Franz Kafka’s persistent search for a female intermediary in The Trial or to Ralph Ellison’s nameless narrator’s relation to a woman (Sybil) in his novel Invisible Man. Do you see this dependence on a woman as an expression of strength or weakness?

2. To what extent does the poem present an idealized vision of male and female roles? Explain what you see as the social and personal implications of these roles.

“The Sleeper” (1831). Walter Pater, the British critic and aesthetician, wrote that “all art aspires to the condition of music.” Poe’s poetry subscribes to this maxim, especially “The Sleeper,” the youthful Poe composed in 1831. In four stanzas of unequal length, Poe describes another of his lunar visions (as in “To Science”) that will prove most ambiguous in meaning: At first, the narrator claims to espy “the lake” (l. 13) where “All beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies / Irene, with her Destinies!” (ll. 16–17). Irene, one of the keepers of the seasons in Greek myth, is also the goddess of peace and wealth.

While she sleeps in her chamber, a threatening of “wanton airs . . . Laughingly through the lattice drop— / The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, / Flit through thy chamber in and out” (ll. 20–23). Sleeping Beauty lies in danger of violation. The poem is rife with invisible powers: The mystic moon emanates “An opiate vapor, dewy, dim” (l. 3), and “bodiless airs . . . flit . . . softly—so fearfully— / Above the closed and fringed lid / ‘Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid” (ll. 22, 25–27). That the narrator recognizes the lunar scent as “opiate” suggests a drug-induced dream, akin to the vision given to Sir Thomas De Quincey in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, to Coleridge (prior to his writing “Kubla Khan”), and to Hector Berlioz (composer of the Fantastic Symphony).

The narrator is somewhat in awe of the lady’s ability to sleep amid such danger: “Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear? / Why and what art thou dreaming here?” (ll. 30–31). The narrator would seem the protector of the lady’s peace and security: “The lady sleeps! . . . I pray to God that she may lie / Forever with unopened eye, / While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!” (ll. 37, 42–44). But in the last stanza, the narrator addresses the lady as “My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep, / As it is lasting, so be deep!” (ll. 45–46).

Many of the images are idyllic in character, and they might incline the reader—given their passing references to “the month of June” (l. 1), “the quiet mountain top” (l. 6), and “the ruin” that “moulders into rest” (l. 12)—to think of the relatively gentle, melancholy musings on mortality in Thomas Gray’s “Ode in a Country Churchyard.” Even the lake in the woods recalls Lethe (l. 13), the river of forgetfulness in Hades. Readers of romance will merge the lake with the sleeping Irene and form the composite image, “The Lady of the Lake.”

But more sinister thoughts plague this poem. While the lady sleeps, “Soft may the worms about her creep!” (l. 47). Recall that wanton spirits and crawling worms “try the virginity” of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (ll. 27–28). The “black / And winged panels” (ll. 50–51) of the tomb suggest Nemesis with an awful power, “Triumphant, o’er the crested palls / Of her grand family funerals—” (ll. 52–53).

The triumph of death also dominates Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red Death” and provides the subject of Orcagna’s fresco The Triumph of Death (located in the Campo Santo in Pisa). Then, with what may be a particular spite in Poe, he turns his attention to the lady’s fallen childhood: “Some sepulcher, remote, alone, / Against whose portal she hath thrown, / In childhood, many an idle stone— / . . . Thrilling to think, poor child of sin! / It was the dead who groaned within” (ll. 54–60). Has the lady, in her childish irreverence, violated some sacred precinct?

The declaration “She ne’er shall force an echo more” (l. 58) carries an implication of rape, of wanton violence. Has the lady been condemned to death by the dead? “Strange is thy pallor! Strange thy dress! / Strange, above all, thy length of tress, / And this all solemn silentness!” (ll. 34–36). Is even the goddess of peace and harmony the fruit of man’s fallen nature? Combining possible images from the fairy tale “Rapunzel” (Grimm 1812) with his own gothic machinery, Poe creates a disturbing tapestry of sight and sound that, Sphinx-like, poses more riddles than it answers.

For Discussion or Writing.
1. Consider the way that Poe’s concentration on the atmosphere generated by sleep allows the narrator to express inner fears and desires. What might the narrator be disclosing about his own subconscious or the inner desires of others?

2. Compare the narrative style of Poe’s “The Sleeper” to Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1833). Do both poets envision the tensions surrounding their respective ladies in the same way? Walt Whitman composed an extended poem titled “The Sleepers.” In what ways are his musings as “ghoulish” as those of Poe’s narrator?