“Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’ ”; “the pallid bust of Pallas”; “ ’Twas many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea”; “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”—these passages and dozens of others can be found in the great collective warehouse of tags where nursery rhymes, lines from Shakespeare, ballads, scraps from the Bible, and lullabies are also stored. If it seems that Poe’s poems are just a little over-the-top, and that to love them as I do may be an embarrassing lapse in taste, the central fact of their tenacity rebukes any easy dismissal—as does the sheer enjoyment many of us experience on reading them, aloud, again and again. “Lenore,” “Ulalume,” and “The Bells” unfailingly fill the mouth and ears with pleasure; the early poem “Sonnet—To Science” has that unforgettable final line: “The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree”; and even some of the less familiar ones, such as “Bridal Ballad,” or the heart-wrenching “Alone,” have the miraculous quality of seeming to be known before they are read, so that they are simultaneously mysterious and familiar, like the old friend who suddenly astonishes you with his strangeness or the new acquaintance whom you are convinced you must have known since childhood.

How is it that Poe’s words have this power to inhabit our psyches? One answer has to do with the peculiar charms of his prosody, about which more later. But additionally, if we can somehow scrape away the legends and clichés—that famous photograph that makes him look so sinister; the B-horror-movie versions of his tales; our gloomy knowledge of his strange marriage, poverty, and early death—if we can try to see Poe as a writer afresh, we may be struck by some unexpected qualities. First, that he is very funny—even in his serious stories and poems, a sense of buffoonery and self-mockery is never far from the surface. (In his famous essay about the composition of “The Raven,” he admits that he “approach[ed] as nearly to the ludicrous as was admissible.”) Humor, mixed as it is in Poe’s imagination with so many somber and melancholy themes, brings an added flavor, like salt in a sugary treat that makes the whole irresistible. At least as compelling is that in his stories and to a certain extent in his poems, he created a particular American hero—the naïf led astray, often by the dark and sophisticated charms of the Old World.

Take “The Pit and the Pendulum,” one of his most famous stories. The narrator finds himself undergoing the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition—and although a trial is alluded to, there is no suggestion as to the nature of the supposed crimes for which he was condemned; and indeed, the innocence of the narrator and the arbitrariness of his fate is a given of the tale. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” an unsuspecting fellow falls into a world of decayed English aristocracy and fetid sexuality. Nearly all the tales are set in the cities and country houses of the Old World: Paris is a city of terror in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and Rome’s catacombs swallow up the narrator of “The Cask of Amontillado.” In the poems, as well, although the locales are rarely given precisely, there is an overwhelming feel of the Old World—in multiple allusions to classical literature, in the evocation of fairy-tale kingdoms, in the German, Norman, and Mediterranean place-names. In his Eurocentricity, Poe’s inclinations accorded with those of many others in early-nineteenth-century America. But in the way in which he emphasized the alien quality of the Old World, even as he focused his attention upon it—by having a sort of Ordinary Joe, or Ordinary Edgar, seduced and beset by its archaic strangeness—he created a new type that many subsequent writers explored. Think of the “innocent” Twain who went abroad, think of Hawthorne’s Italian stories, and think perhaps especially of Henry James’s American men and women plunged, in all their ignorant glory, into the mires of European intrigue.

Poe’s imaginative use of Europe had some of its origins in his own biography. Born to a pair of traveling actors and deposited at an early age with wealthy Virginia relatives, he was while still a boy taken to England and enrolled in a boarding school. While there is every evidence that he valued his education, his recurrence to the theme of the young man in strange Old World circumstances, reimagined as tales of horror, surely began with the strong impressions made on a lonely boy. In England he was also infused with the lifelong certainty that English tastes and education were superior, as were European architecture, furnishings, art, and literature. The high-handed snobbery that characterized his later criticism, and his disdain for most things American, reveal the gnawing fear of inferiority that such an attitude inevitably engendered.

A profound uneasiness reveals itself, in Poe’s essays especially—a sense of his trying too hard. Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Furniture,” while certainly amusing in its attack on American middle-class bad taste, can also be painful in its implicit self-disgust. “There could be nothing more directly offensive to the eye of an artist than the interior of what is termed in the United States ... a well-furnished apartment.” He complains of American taste as “preposterous” in its penchant for “straight lines” and “glare,” and disapproves of the use of gas for indoor lighting. Poe reaches for classical—especially Greek—models for alternatives. In this, Poe was actually no maverick; most of American high-cultural taste for the first half of the nineteenth century was already exhibiting this predilection, in its columns, Empire couches, parquet floors, and curvy klismos chairs. When, at the conclusion of the sketch, Poe conjures up a perfect room—with “two large low sofas of rose-wood and crimson-silk,” “four large and gorgeous Sevres vases, in which bloom a profusion of sweet and vivid flowers,” and “a tall candelabrum, bearing a small antique lamp with a highly perfumed oil”—I am struck as much by the enchantments of wealth as with the particulars of style. What a contrast to Poe’s adult life of grinding poverty, devoid of such luxuries, his imagination offered.

The urge for things classical was not confined to public buildings or the homes of the very rich, however. All across the country in the early nineteenth century, young ladies were being trained to copy classical art; young men wore togas to deliver Latin orations at school; and the Athenaeums of cities and small towns were regularly visited by traveling exhibits of Greek and Roman sculptures, with plaster fig leaves strategically attached. One area of domestic life that also absorbed classical tendencies was the funereal. “Mourning pictures” of the period typically depict an urn, a weeping willow, and a female figure bent over with sorrow. Often an inscription is written on the urn; one example in the Baltimore Museum of Art reads:

 

A slight memorial of real merit
Solomon Moulton
Died 26 May 1827
Aged 19
HE
was the writer of several poems
in the Lynn Mirror, signed LILLIE

 

Thy genius gave the wound that laid thee low And virtue mourns the loss that bids our sorrows flow

 

The inscription follows the form of the urn, with the rhymed lines as a kind of table beneath the pedestal. The leaves of the willow branches that droop over the lip of the urn are manifold, and fill every comer of the page.

I am arrested by this mourning drawing, for several reasons. First, the mourned young man was a contemporary of Poe’s in place and time—and that he seems to have killed himself adds immeasurably to the pathos of their connection.