The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is also a short novel, for its time, albeit the prose expression within that book displays an unmistakable repetitiveness, perhaps to reinforce the pervasive aura of a hypnotic dream-world into which Pym journeys.

Brevity in Poe’s creative writings overall is analogous to brevity in a dream: The dreamer moves from recognizable reality further into nonrational realms, the climax arrives, and the dream, or nightmare, ceases. Poe’s nightmare vision, to define his principal literary vision more precisely, anticipates those in the works of numerous later writers, and for such outreach he should be remembered as having contributed significantly to as many major currents as to eddies in literary waters.11 What has sometimes been mischaracterized as mere hack-work, created out of an inadequacy and inability to rise to greater heights, may today reveal more about some readers’ limitations than about any liabilities in Poe’s artistic vision and achievement.

Benjamin F. Fisher, Professor of English at the University of Missis sippi, has published extensively on Poe and many other subjects in American, Victorian, and Gothic studies. He is currently at work on two books and a monograph about Poe. Fisher is on the editorial boards of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe Review, Victorian Poetry, Frank Norris Studies, Gothic Studies, Simms Review, and English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, and he is past president of the Poe Studies Association and chairman of the Speakers Series of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. He was awarded a Governor’s Citation in the state of Maryland for outstanding contributions to Poe studies and has won several awards for outstanding teaching.

Notes

1 Palmer C. Holt, “Poe and H. N. Coleridge’s Greek Classic Poets: ‘Pinakidia,’ ‘Politian,’ and ‘Morella’ Sources,” American Literature 34 (1962), pp. 8-30. I add here my grateful acknowledgment of the scholarship in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969-1978. Although I have not used the text, I have also often found helpful the annotations by Burton R. Pollin, ed., in Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Boston: Twayne, 1981; vol. 1: Imaginary Voyages.

2 A fine overview of Gothicism is Devendra Prasad Varma’s The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences, London: Arthur Barker, 1957. I assess Dunlap’s imitating of American literary Gothicism in my “William Dunlap, American Gothic Dramatist,” in Transactions of the Samuel Johnson Society of the Northwest 17 (1988), pp. 167-190. See also Clark Griffith’s “Poe and the Gothic,” in Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 127-133; and my “Poe and the Gothic Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 72-91. Especially good on many points concerning Poe is editor Richard P. Benton’s The Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: A Symposium in Two Parts, a special double number of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 18:1 & 2 (1972). Benton’s introductory overview, “The Problems of Literary Gothicism,” sets forth excellent perceptions on American Gothicism from its early manifestations to the later twentieth century.

3 Dennis W. Eddings, “Theme and Parody in ‘The Raven’,” in Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990, pp. 209-217.

4 The best overview of this project is Alexander Hammond’s “A Reconstruction of Poe’s 1833 Tales of the Folio Club,” in Poe Studies 5 (December 1972), pp. 25-32; and his “Further Notes on Poe’s Folio Club Tales,” Poe Studies 8 (December 1975), pp. 38-42.