Bookmark A: "Knowing Poe, The Literature, Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe…In Baltimore and Beyond". Maryland Public Television © 2002. http://knowingpoe.thinkport.org/about/.A dramatic raven with sound effects welcomes viewers and acts as a motif to connect web elements. With creative interactives, readers explore Poe’s literature through academically researched resources and articles. An added novelty is a realplayer video with John Astin as Edgar Allen Poe.
I obtained this bookmark from
http://www.diigo.com/user/chrmoosejaw, post on 2007-01-05. "Knowing Poe, The Literature, Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe…In Baltimore and Beyond" was funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education Ready To Teach program. It was especially created for Maryland students in middle and high school to understand Poe the person, the writer, and the library.
A team of educational specialists and researchers developed the site’s content. Maryland Public Television spearheaded the project and provided the site’s professional appeal, copyrighting it in 2002. Bean Creative, Inc. delivered website design and programming. The advisory board were professionals from Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library (Charlottesville, VA), The Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences, Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum (Baltimore, MD), Maryland Historical Society, and Booker T. Washington Middle School (Baltimore, MD).
For Poe research, this site is rich with primary source documents and research links. It can be used by academia, students, and families as a launching pad for Poe studies.
Bookmark B: Giordano, Robert. Home page. "PoeStories.com An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe". 01 July 2005. 04 March 2007 http://www.poestories.com/.Robert Giordano’s love for Edgar Allan Poe, as a literary artist, is evident throughout his site, PoeStories.com An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe. The site provides a wealth of resources--academic and personal. Giordano seeks to develop more discussion about Poe by providing discussion forums and links to other places for comments. I obtained this bookmark from
http://del.icio.us/pepeprofessor.
Giordiano created the site simply because he has a personal interest in Poe’s works. The site’s main resources are: E. A. Poe Society of Baltimore, an eclectic collection of links, and an EServer for Poe’s complete works. At least one link is included with each story in this extensive collection.
Other features of the site are summaries, quotes, biography, timeline, and annotations to Poe’s works for educational reading. For links, the site rivals any other academic one. But what makes the site unusual is the compilation of all things relative to Poe. To exhaust the eclectic mix of fascinating links would take several long days or possibly a week.
The author’s view is that Poe’s literary greatness was not recognized in his day because people were not ready for his writing—“original, imaginative, and ingenious.” He believes that many modern books and movies have ‘borrowed” Poe's ideas.
Giordiano’s site is useful for Poe research, because it has an eclectic variety.
Bookmark C: "The Work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)". 05 March 2007. http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/."The Work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)" is a database, maintained by the moderator
stefan@gmoser.net. It is a catalog of more than 120 of Poe’s short stories and poems and include collections of his articles and criticism. The creators of the site dedicate it to Poe’s work, who they assert is “one of the most gifted writers of American literature.” I obtained this bookmark through del.icio.us:
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/.
The database classifies links through these major headings: Who was E. A. Poe; A short biography, including bibliographical references and links to other biographical projects on the net; The Work of E. A. Poe, and the collection contains all on-line-accessible works of Poe; and Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
The online resource also contains The Ingram Collection. John Henry Ingram (1842-1916), a Poe biographer, assembled this comprehensive, ever-growing collection of Poe material. It is now stored at the University of Virginia and can be accessed on line.
Novel features of the site include: The Alan Parsons Project that began in 1976 with an album inspired by Poe’s work (song texts and sleeve notes are available). With a Q & A forum, many questions and answers appear about the life and work of Poe. In the forum, people can ask questions or write responses.
Since the database can be searched, it is a convenient place to mine for Poe research.
Savoye, Jeffrey. “Two Biographical Digressions: Poe's Wandering Trunk and Dr. Carter's Mysterious Sword Cane.” Edgar Allan Poe Review: 5:15-42. Fall 2004. http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1990/JS200402.htm. After more than 150 years, debate continues regarding Edgar Allan Poe’s cause of death. Although the purpose of Jeffrey A. Savoye’s essay, “Two Biographical Digressions: Poe’s Wandering Trunk and Dr. Carter’s Mysterious Sword Cane,” is not to examine the evidence surrounding the cause of Poe’s death, Savoye, nevertheless, threads the controversy throughout his paper. His thesis examines the relevance of two of Poe’s possessions—his trunk and Dr. Carter’s cane—to shed light on the facts or fiction surrounding Poe.
Poe’s trunk is significant, asserts Savoye, because it contained, in Poe’s words, “papers and some manscripts.” When Poe died, the trunk was missing. Before it was located, “a kind of tug of war ensued” between Poe’s sister, Rosalie, and Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who had agreed to edit some of Poe’s works in order to financially benefit Maria Clemm, Poe’s mother-in-law.
Savoye tracks the “wandering” trunk and those who possessed it by using primary sources, Poe’s and others’ letters and papers. His examination illuminates Poe’s literary habits and behavior. Savoye methodically unfolds the literary contents of the trunk, and as each document is revealed, the author argues whether the item contributes to myth or fact based on evidence.
Dr. Carter’s cane that Poe held on his last day of life, asserts Savoye, has been used to “debunk the possibility that he [Poe] was physically attacked or robbed.” Savoye tracks the cane’s journey through primary sources and concludes that the cane was left behind in Richmond—end of story. Other references to the cane are embellishment and “myth-making” states the essayist.
the salient aspects of Savyoe’s essay are his accounts of Poe’s behavior, based on primary sources. Other unique facets of the essay are detailed descriptions by first-hand witnesses that found Poe on a street in Baltimore. These aspects of Savyoe’s essay support scientific studies of habits and actions of mentally ill people. These primary sources will support the argument that some of Poe’s work reflects a person who knows well the tempo of depression.
Reilly, John E. “The Lesser Death-Watch and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’”. The American Transcendental Quarterly II (2nd Quarter): pp. 3-9. 1969. http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1990/jer19691.htm. In the 1969 essay, “The Lesser Death-Watch and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’,” John Reilly argues regarding the ongoing debate in Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Tell-Tale Heart”: the source of the sound that drove Poe’s mentally ill narrator to murder an old man and later confess the crime to the police. In the story, while the narrator believes the sound originates from the old man’s heart after he has died, most commentators identify the sound as either a hallucination or the narrator’s misconception of his own heart beat.
The mystery about the source of the sound that provokes Poe’s narrator, says Reilly, raises larger questions about the “artistry of the tale itself.” If the narrator heard the sound outside of him before he murdered the old man, as the text states, “came to my ears,” and the sound was other than his own heart, what was it? Reilly debunks the hallucination argument by stating that Poe advocated economy in the short story. If the sound was only a hallucination, why did Poe detail the narrator’s acuteness of hearing throughout the text?
Reilly identifies the source of the sound in the “The Tell-Tale Heart”:
Death-watches are insects that produce rapping sounds, sounds that superstition
has held to presage the death of someone in the house where they are heard.
The essayist explains that the scientific literature described “death-watches” as beetles that made audible noises within wood houses. Poe was not the first to use “death-watches” in literary works. Many other writers used “death-watches” to refer to the beetles’ sounds and to infer the superstition that their noises heralded Death. Joseph Addison, John Day, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, John Keats, and Henry David Thoreau are writers that Reilly cites to support his assertions.
Further, Reilly believes that the evidence in the story “points to the likelihood that the narrator is a victim of paranoid schizophrenia.” By using the modern day term, “paranoid schizophrenia,” Reilly’s conclusions support my research that the psychological musings of some of Poe’s characters reflect mental illness from the inside/out. Thus, Poe was able to use his bouts with mental illness to psychologically process his suffering through his writing. Reilly’s findings will support arguments for Poe’s mental wanderings.
Kennedy, Gerald J. “The Violence of Melancholy: Poe against Himself.” American Literary History Vol. 8, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996): pp. 533-551. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0896-7148%28199623%298%3A3%3C533%3ATVOMPA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A.Gerald Kennedy’s essay, “The Violence of Melancholy: Poe against Himself,” provides background into the origins of Edgar Allan Poe’s banishment to the periphery of American literature. His exile, Kennedy analyzes, was because Poe “assailed” those in the literary community through his hostile personality and because Rufus Wilmot Griswold wrote an “acidic memoir” that portrayed Poe as an “amoral lunatic.”
Poe’s writing, says Kennedy, cannot be neatly categorized within the American tradition. In F. O. Matthiessen’s 1941 classic,
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, Kennedy notes that Poe is barely mentioned, while Matthiessen extols his preferred authors: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville. In addition, Poe’s fiction is not mentioned in R. W. B. Lewis’s 1955 classic,
The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century.
Kennedy cites several other books that support his argument that on a “subliminal level” Poe denied death and rejection. Poe’s mother, his boyhood friend’s mother, his foster mother, and his wife died, and Poe was rejected by his foster father. “As if Poe [was] pondering his own tenuous self-control, what his characters deny or repress or project uncontrollably erupts,” is a quote from Kenneth Silverman’s book,
Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. Kennedy refers to Silverman’s book often to argue that psychoanalytic inferences clarify themes in Poe’s works—“the idea that what has been buried in the past or hidden within the self must return.” In other words, psychological repression and denial within Poe’s characters return to the surface of their conscious awareness and behavior.
When analyzed through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s observation that “melancholia sharpens the ambivalence of the love relationship as it disposes the mourner to self-punishment,” Poe’s fiction can be understood in a new way, says Kennedy—within the mind’s “twisted relations.”
Kennedy’s essay supports my research that Poe, “the bad boy of the antebellum literary world” is an author whose rhetoric has not been examined significantly for its psychoanalytic, literary interpretations and its benefits to human understanding. Moreover, my research echoes the essayist’s claim that Poe draws readers “into the abyss of the unconscious.” Thus, my assertions--that the mental awareness of the unconscious mind is more acute with those that suffer mental illness, such as melancholy (depression), and that these individuals have extraordinary abilities to depict mental landscapes--are supported by Kennedy.
Building on this essay, one can illuminate how Poe’s rhetoric expunges mental anguish from sufferers today. By arguing for the psychological context that Poe imparts to his characters, research can assert the relevance of his words—people still struggle to escape the grief-maze of depression.
Shulman, Robert. “Poe and the Powers of the Mind.” ELH Vol. 7, No. 2 (June 1970): pp. 245-262. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-8304%28197006%2937%3A2%3C245%3APATPOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-ZIn his June 1970 essay, “Poe and the Powers of the Mind,” Robert Schulman states that Edgar Allan Poe’s best fiction exemplifies “acute insights” into the mysteries of the human personality. Criticism of Poe has centered on his cosmology and aesthetics, missing the psychological revelations of his works. Poe is a living force, and his concern is with the powers of the mind, says Schulman.
While a psychological study of Poe examines his fiction as an “unconscious” projection of Poe’s problems or as an “unconscious confirmation of orthodox Freudian categories,” Schulman believes that Poe’s best stories illustrate his “genuine understanding of unconscious processes and imaginative powers.”Although Schulman affirms Poe’s imaginative prowess, the essayist argues that Poe’s models of the mind in his critical essays do not mesh with the “dark, hidden chambers” that his fiction suggests. The split occurs in Poe’s theory versus his practice of his creative art.
Schulman illustrates his arguments through textual analyses of excerpts of Poe’s fiction: “the mind attempts to preserve itself from its own forces and by assuming that the threat is external when in fact it is internal.” Poe succeeds in his fiction when he illuminates the interior of the self—the destructive and irrational powers—and his quality declines when he consciously matches his story to his theory.
The conclusions in this essay resonate with critical approaches to Poe’s works that emphasize his “precise, profound, and disturbing revelations of our shared mental powers.”
Napier, Wilt. “Poe’s Attitude toward His Tales: A New Document.” Modern Philology Vol. 25, No. 1 (Aug.): pp. 101-105. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-8232%28192708%2925%3A1%3C101%3APATHTA%3E2.0CO%3B2-M.In the essay, “Poe’s Attitude toward His Tales: A New Document,” Wilt Napier’s criticizes those that “lean too heavily on the now fashionable ‘psychological’ method of biography” to analyze Edgar Allan Poe’s literary works.
One of Napier’s arguments is that Poe’s desperate financial straits stimulated him to “reduce to a formula” writing that would sell in popular magazines. Second, a letter written by Poe reveals his attitude: “To be appreciated you must be read.” By citing this letter, Napier attempts to establish that Poe’s main writing objective was to have popular fiction that would be widely read.
Since my research argues for the relevance of Poe’s writing today in understanding human emotions, Napier’s essay counters with “the greatest care should be used in reading into Poe’s…details a reflection of the horror and morbidness of his own mind.”
In critically reading and writing about Poe’s works, I do not aim to “read into” Poe’s details; however, although Poe wrote with financial considerations in mind, my research will examine his musings of mental wandering. Napier’s essay is narrow-minded but, nevertheless, asserts another point of view.
Pounds, Wayne. “Paul Bowles and Edgar Allan Poe: The Disintegration of the Personality.” Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 32, No. 3/4 (Autumn – Winter 1986): pp. 424-439. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0041-462X%28198623%2F24%2932%3A3%2F4%3C424%3APBAEAP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-EWayne Pounds asserts in his 1986 essay, “Paul Bowles and Edgar Allan Poe: The Disintegration of the Personality” that Bowles’ early fiction reflects Poe’s influence. Pounds illustrates his thesis by citing examples of both authors’ works that include a protagonist that “confronts a violent destiny” and “becomes the prey of the primitive forces.”
These struggles, in addition to the external forces, are “internal, aroused from the repressed areas of…psyche.” Pounds highlights similarities between their stories, but especially noteworthy are the obsessive themes and “concern with the registration of extreme states of consciousness.”
Although Pound examines views of Poe criticism, the essayist states that the thesis of the divided self in Poe’s work “has not lost its critical acceptance.” Pound’s position is that the divided self is an image of Poe that is “part of the literary tradition whose heirs…make it new.”
Pound depicts Poe as a precursor of the modern understanding of the “disintegration of the personality” that many of Poe’s characters undergo. The essayist’s view is that the artist that can separate his thinking from his feeling can replicate those “sundered faculties to distinct characters.”
Pound quotes W. H. Auden's assessment of Poe’s “Pym”:
The typical Poe story occurs within the mind of a poet; and its characters are
not independent personalities, but allegorical figures representing the warring
principles of the poet’s divided nature.
Pounds explains a few of the allegorical meanings that weave into some of Poe’s stories, and the essayist’s interpretations are new to me, as I have not read, thus far, similar stances from others.
Although much of the essay is devoted to Bowles fiction, the analysis of Poe’s story “Pym,” the allegorical interpretations, and some of the comments by literary scholars supports my research.
Nealon, Jean. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond.” LiteraryTraveler.com. 28 Feb. 2007 http://www.literarytraveler.com/literary_articles/edgar_allan_poe_richmond.aspx.
Jean Nealon’s article, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond,” summarizes Poe’s life in Richmond and the city’s establishment of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum.
Nealon comprehensively narrates the main events in Poe’s life that occurred in Richmond and includes the poignant details of his death. However, there is a major, glaring error in the article: “A few of his literary descendants are Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and Stephen King.” Hawthorne and Melville were not Poe’s “literary descendants” but fellow writers of the time. Hawthorne and Melville both hold their respective places within the American literary tradition, as does Poe.
Although this article summarizes well Poe’s life in Richmond, I will not use it for my research. Since the author has made an egregious error, her article is not one that I want to cite in my research. I wonder what other facts are erroneous?
I saw thee once— once only— years ago:
