In “Silence—A Fable” the language notably resembles excited, fulsome “preacher rhetoric” that would have touched sympathetic chords among the more evangelical among them and that might be compared with similar rhetorical strategies in popular nineteenth-century comic takeoffs on sermons—for example, “The Harp of a Thousand Strings” and “Where the Lion Roareth and the Wang doodle Mourneth,” both attributed to William Penn Brannan, and both more overtly good-humored than “Silence—A Fable.” The account of Satan’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness may also have influenced the demon’s profane catechizing of the narrator in the tale. “Shadow—A Parable” recalls Psalm 23, with its valley of the shadow (death), thus adumbrating “Eldorado,” wherein a shadow (perhaps the protagonist’s ambiguous “other”) tells the questing knight that he must descend into the valley of death before his ambitions are fulfilled.

Poe’s oft neglected “King Pest” was during his lifetime never mentioned as a Folio Club tale, but its blended horror and mirth suggest potential kinship with the project. A bizarre group attempts to evade a plague terrorizing their city by sequestering themselves in an undertaker’s parlors, raiding his liquors, and attempting to retain health amidst the squalor of the contagion. Although the group pretends to royal status, such pretense fails to cow the two sailors who stumble into their midst, possibly because the sailors, already intoxicated, recognize like symptoms in those they meet. Collectively, the revolting physical features and stilted, pompous verbalizings of King Pest and his retinue keep readers alert to ambiguities coupling horror (from plague as actual disease and from equally revolting settings) with humor (comic names, “plague” as merely nuisance, wordplay) until the sailors seize Queen Pest and the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest, then bolt, evidently anticipating sexual conquest. As in the Folio Club, in “King Pest” emotions explode into grotesque speeches and actions, and conclude in the high jinks of the abduction of the females, one with decided alcoholism, the other with a give-away literary name. Add the implicit exposure of farce in the “pest-iferous” traits of the characters and the links with literary elements, and we can surmise that this tale might have concluded Poe’s contemplated book, where public revelation of bombast and bogus “quality” would have ensued. The subtitle for “King Pest,” “A Tale Containing an Allegory,” may have indeed glossed potential for the Folio Club, whatever other readings may ob tai5

Here, then, we see Poe creating fiction that might be “popular” in several senses. That these early tales employ situation and language structures involving drunken narrators is no great wonder. Drunken narrators often framed stories that quickly plummeted the protagonist into events of dreadful import, only to close with disclosures that exposed the lurid events as originating in imbibing. Many such yarns came from authors usually designated as “frontier” or “Southwest” humorists. In his blendings of humor and horror emanating from alcohol or other intoxicant origins, Poe resembles many other American authors in his era and many in our own. For example, novels by the British writer Thomas Love Peacock often centered upon dinner-table scenes in which generous amounts of food and drink contributed to entertaining arguments concerning philosophical and literary topics. In Blackwood’s serialized “Noctes Ambrosianae,” characters loosely based on the editors and several prominent contributors offer gossip-column commentary ranging from politics and social issues to literary concerns; intermittently, the voices in the “Noctes” seemed to be inspired by alcohol.

Poe eventually tended to remove, or certainly to diminish the effects of, these and other specifics, the better to locate disturbing and frightening circumstances nearer their real source, the human mind. In tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” particularities of place or intoxication are not as central as irregularities or irrationalities in the characters’ emotional makeup. Similar psychological focus informs “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Purloined Letter,” “‘Thou Art the Man’,” “The Sphinx,” and “Hop-Frog.” In all, geography of the imagination—internal geography—rather than physical, external geography is emphasized. Several Poe narrators also tend to liken their bewilderment to that of opium users instead of claiming opium use as the cause of their own unsettled mind-set-for example, the protagonists in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia.”

Poe realized, first, that he could bend Gothic conventions toward a greater psychological plausibility; and, second, that the erratic perspectives of drunkards could be used in the pursuit of what we might deem more “sober,” subtle ends. He stated in the preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (see “For Further Reading”), written not long after he had abandoned the Folio Club venture, that the basis for his tales was psychological realism and not the “Germanism” with which critics had charged him: If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul,—that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results (vol. 1, p. 5). Those “legitimate sources” were, of course, for the most part located in disturbed human minds, with allowances made for physical torments that intensified emotional tortures in tales like “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Causes for the turmoil in the minds of Poe’s characters are easy to fathom. Poe’s cultural world was coming to grips with the human mind and the hidden self—it was an exciting topic for both clinical and lay observers, especially in the context of the developing cultural nationalism of a self-consciously American civilization.

To another American writer in Poe’s era, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose ideas won widespread acceptance, the human mind harbored much good. Emerson expounded on a notion of self-reliance that teamed the individuality suggested by “self” with ways to excite and to connect (the root meanings of “reliance”). This outlook was optimistic about the possibilities of exploring the human mind, an optimism that seemed to mirror advancing pioneering and settlement in the nation.

In Poe’s writings, conversely, the human mind was fascinating, but a source of more danger than pleasure. Poe’s self was certainly not a metaphor for pleasing light and flowing waters, symbolizing ongoing life, as in Emerson’s imaginative vision. Poe’s waters were usually troubled and dangerous (witness those in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Silence—A Fable,” “A Descent into the Maelström,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym); and his lighting typically creates obscuring or frightening effects. Poe’s lighting inverts the pleasing effects of lighting that may be found in other authors’ writings and is instead glaring or obscuring, even blinding—as, for example, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Hop-Frog,” and Pym, or in “The Lake—To—,”“The Raven,” “Ulalume,” “Dream-Land,” and “The City in the Sea.” Even in a more cheerful poem like “To Helen,” dazzling light obscures the onlooker’s visual abilities. Such tropes in Poe’s works form perfect metaphors for rapidly shifting sensations in unstable minds, or strange actions and speeches that often represent those emotional traumas. The convoluted prose that typifies Poe’s tales, and that some readers have found objectionable, may be a subtly realized expression of mental distortions and the attempts of Poe’s characters to express such feelings.