Dunlap’s friend Charles Brockden Brown turned to Gothicism in American locales for four of his six novels published in the late 1790s and early 1800s, and he is often credited with founding American literary Gothicism. American writers generally tended to emphasize psychological issues and to offer rational explanations for what might have seemed supernatural. Poe was to carry Gothicism to greater psychological heights than the majority of his predecessors.2

II

Poe wished above all else for recognition as a poet, an understandable desire in one whose literary tastes were shaped by the Romanticism bonding Anglo-American cultural worlds in his era. What is still remembered as the mainstream form of Romantic imaginative writing is the lyric poem, and in creating lyric poetry Poe excelled. Taking Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Thomas Moore as his obvious literary models (though he was also inspired by others both in the Romantic movement proper and on the periphery of that movement), Poe wrote verse featuring intense passions, sometimes concerning fame, more often concerned with blighted love, which affected the speaker-protagonists, who desired successes in both areas. Gothic fiction also had a great impact on his imaginative writings.

Poe was also influenced by Romantic landscape poetry and travel books, which were popular among contemporary readers. He repeatedly created natural and architectural backdrops that were diffuse and misty, perfect surroundings for characters’ emotional uncertainties and fears. In the wake of contemporary discoveries of the ruins of ancient civilizations and the fascination exerted by such artifacts, tangible evidence of once flourishing but long decayed cultures provided fitting literary symbols for his characters’ disintegrating minds. Biblical and classical themes are evident in such early Poe poems as “The Lake,” “The Coliseum,” “The Sleeper,” “To Helen” (published in 1831, the first of two poems with this title), “The City in the Sea,” and “Dream-Land.” Poe reworked such materials, usually with greater psychological sophistication, in later poems like “The Raven,” “Ulalume: A Ballad,” “Eldorado,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee.” All of Poe’s poems might aptly be called “visionary,” because the setting or the protagonist’s emotions and consequent outlook are expressed in a rhetoric using primarily visual symbolism or vivid imagery. Such vi sionariness often contributes to dream or (in most of Poe’s creative works) nightmare effects.

Poe’s theoretical pronouncements on poetry make this visionary intent explicit. For him, poetry was “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” a definition that balances theme and form. He also thought that poetry should elevate or excite the soul, which, in his estimation, much American poetry did not do, tending instead toward the “heresy of the didactic” (that is, it was too preachy and moralizing). If poetry is beauty expressed as “music,” then the pronounced rhythms and rhymes in Poe’s poems exist to excite emotional responses in readers. In keeping with the time-honored concept of the poet as a wonderfully free (and, as a creature of nature, amoral) songbird, Poe’s poems are calculated to “sing” readers into the world of the poem at hand. In other words, poetry should enchant (the word means “to sing into”) a reader into the world or the magic interior of a poem by means of hypnotic outreach. Poe expected his poems and tales to appeal to readers’ ears as well as their eyes. To Poe the idea of music involved inherent brevity, and his championing of brief poems is wholly consistent with such thinking.

Jane Austen’s likening her literary practices to polishing a tiny bit of ivory for refinement might be related to Poe’s composing verse in small quantity. Within such limits Poe created some remarkable poems. For poetic art in which sound and sense coalesce, we may turn to the earliest poem included here, “The Lake—To—,” the concluding piece in Poe’s first book of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). The poem’s eerie setting deftly stimulates the protagonist’s feelings of isolation, lost love, and a death wish. The opening unfolds ordinary youthful tendencies: first desiring solitude, at the lake, then attaching emotional significance to the terrain, which becomes increasingly grim and terrifying.

The situation in Poe’s poem resembles Henry Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond; Thoreau’s imagination was stirred by the presence of water—the ultimate origin of all life—to celebrate uplifting excitement. Thoreau’s favorite images, the rising sun and moving water, are inverted in Poe’s landscape, which might be thought of as similar to what Thoreau himself (jocularly) called Walden Pond—a “walled-in” pond. Poe’s eerie lake casts a literal and figurative “pall” (the cloth covering a coffin and within this poem an obstacle to psychological ease) over the protagonist. Thus “The Lake—To—” stands as the most symbolic of Poe’s earliest poems. Confinement in the natural scene promotes fears in the speaker, who fixates on the lake and its “poisonous wave,” closed in with unyielding rock and overshadowing pines redolent of death. The “you” addressed remains vague. Is there a literal dead love, or is the one addressed “dead” to the protagonist solely from unalterable separation? Or does the “other” exist as part of the speaker’s own psyche, and is “you” some repressed but signal emotion that, locked in as it may be, can not be quelled but continues to torment?

We might take as a paradigm for considering Poe’s verse (and, for that matter, much of his fiction) the title of a poem by twentieth-century poet Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Poe’s creative works—and not only that about his own blackbird, “The Raven”—yield multiple, equally valid interpretations. “The Lake—To—” constitutes sophisticated literary art, particularly from one as young as Poe. Some other selections in the Tamerlane volume are not so artistic, and it may be worth noting that Poe, likely deeming it inferior poetry, never again included in volume form the Tamerlane poem “The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour.”

Many misunderstandings concerning Poe’s poems need correcting. Among them is the notion that “The Sleeper” (titled “Irene” when it originally appeared in the 1831 Poems) is grotesque, and that it may betray a necrophiliac strain in Poe himself.