Many readers are put off from Poe by
the décor of his writings – the
setting of his tales and poems, the often grotesque style of his prose, what
Aldous Huxley object to as the vulgarity of his verse. His excrescent Gothic conventions which are
often on the verge, if not over the verge, of self-parody, seem willfully remote
from any possible reality. It is, however,
a function of Poe’s theories of both poetry and fiction that so many mannerisms
be interposed between reality and the reader.
It is my hope, in writing sometimes personally about one reader’s
relationship to Poe’s work, to suggest how Poe’s artifices – the images and
patters in his Arabesques, the strange diction of his poems and tales – are
intensifications of the realities they seem to avoid. Poe has exerted a force upon later readers
and writers quite disproportionate to the weight of his slender stock of verses
and the brevity of his tales. Although
the characters in his tales are without exception fantastic personages, they
must touch some deep, responsive nerve hidden in ourselves. Whose image do we see in Poe’s insane criminals,
in his detectives with their superhuman intelligence, in his protagonists
driven by mysterious obsessions or passively suffering equally mysterious
adventures? As Thoreau replies to a
correspondent who complained about Whitman’s animality, of whose experiences
has he the power to remind us?
Quite excellent, and taken from one of the most idiosyncratic –
if not the most idiosyncratic – book
on Poe, poet Daniel Hoffman’s odd Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe,
first published in 1972.
If the French believe it’s essential to send a thief to catch a
thief, it is probably fitting that we send a poet to root out another one. Hoffman (1923-2013) was a poet, essayist and
academic, serving a term as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress (1973).
Born in New York, Hoffman was a World War II veteran, and a
graduate of Columbia (B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.).
He wrote several volumes of poetry and criticism, and despite holding
many public positions (he was Poet in Resident at the Cathedral of St. John the Devine, for example), he is perhaps best
known for his study of Poe.
To be sure, Poe7 is a very strange book. Hoffman set out to write a book about Poe in
much the same manner Poe would have written it.
This leads to a sometimes labyrinthine syntax, a love for emphasis, and a heavily-applied layer of
subtext (and sub-subtext). It is not to
everyone’s taste, but if you are interested in Poe, Hoffman’s book is
essential.
Hoffman makes the point throughout that we never quite get our
hands around the totality of Poe;
that once we think we have wrung him dry of layers of meaning and importance,
more come to light. I first came to Poe
thought my keen interest in the Gothic, then found that – despite the gloom –
that he had much in common with the aesthetes.
What is his figure of Roderick Usher, for example, other than that of an
aesthete who finds his highest artistic fulfillment in decadent art? All artists speak in the language that means
the most to them, and Poe’s taste for Gothic tropes and wildly Romantic
characters does not mean his art is any the less subtle, layered or
significant.
I had revisited Hoffman’s book recently when reading about Poe
in the news. Hoffman goes into great
detail on Poe’s inductive reasoning regarding the origin of the cosmos and our
place within them, as outlined in the prose-poem Eureka. Hoffman wrote his
book in 1972, yet here is author Marilynne
Robinson writing about Poe and Eureka in the New York Review of Books this past February:
Poe’s mind was by no means
commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which
would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of
intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations,
at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very
brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and
delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are
not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the
universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all
matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these
atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter,
forming the physical universe.
This by itself would be a startling anticipation
of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it,
for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars
that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree
counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes
with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to
its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have
become, that our present universe may be one in a series.
All this is perfectly sound as
observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the
twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for
any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic
reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the
truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for
his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the
seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates
his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.
Writing on the Scientific
American blog, writer scientist John
Horgan responds to Robinson with: Now
that is a theory of everything. But
it isn't "sound," it's batshit crazy—in a good way.
Like Hoffman, I don’t think we will ever be through with Poe,
nor will we completely understand him.
His mind was too subtle (the melodrama of his plots and prose notwithstanding),
his science too colored by aesthetics, his aesthetics too colored by his
deductive and inductive reasoning, his true sense of beauty too tinged with melancholy
and sadness. Poe remains one of the few
great writers who was, at heart, a fairly miserable man – a walking anomaly, a
personality divided. A man who saw
horrors and sorrow everywhere, and yet dreamed of beauty.
