Edgar Allan Poe Part 3

Welcome! To see this essay in one piece or to read other stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers that I have translated please go to Hanns Heinz Ewers.
Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923.

Poe’s Cottage at Fordham

If only Edgar Allen Poe could have sat here in the Alhambra. How he would have dreamed! How the colorful stories would have flown lightly around his head before landing! With a few quick words he could have built an Alhambra whose thick towers would have withstood the rain and endured for centuries.

Here he might have found another way to reach ecstasy. He might not have needed to drink. But the poor poet's soul was stuck over there in New England strongly penning realistic prose while at the same time Washington Irving, the English model of morality, was allowed to dream in the moonlight magic of Alhambra..His Tales of Alhambra have become world famous.

Day by day I see strangers enter this sacred place, in their hand reviews and in their jacket pockets Edgar Allan Poe's book. This is how they read The Fall of the House of Usher or the Dionysian Last Days of Pompeii!

Can't you perceive the influence of Lord Lytton or Irving's spirit within this pair of beautiful stories? No, a whisper from a Catholic cemetery flows through the haunted Moorish palace in his soul. Although he was no famous poet, although he was only a common journalist, not Bulwar, not Irving created these beauties. He created Pompeii and the Alhambra in spite of them.

Poe's ability was not enough for his burning desire. The only method that worked was to gather up everything he had inside using it to awaken and carry him into ecstasy. The entire amount of stimulation he surrounded himself with was barely able to lead him to this condition.

If this unhappy poet only once in his life received a kiss from the Muse it was through his beautiful wife, Virginia Clem. The moralists want to call this intoxication holy and divine while forcefully rebuking the poet's other ecstasies, those from alcohol and from Opium, as unholy and devilish. They are equal! The valuable art that came forth from them was no less glorious.

The agony from the divinely consecrated ecstasy was scarcely inferior to the devilish! Where another was in paradise he was in hell, a passionate blissful hell whose flames were no less scorching. The hand of the poet was rich and Morella, Ligeia, Berenice and Lenore are all owed to the dying eyes of Virginia before her death was certain. He knew the gleaming red of her cheeks lied, knew it was a deception and that within the depths of her moist, shimmering eyes an unrelenting illness grinned out at him.

In the evening when he stroked her beloved locks he could sense, "She won't live many more days" and in the morning, "Another day less".

It was a dying person that his lips kissed, a dying person whose beautiful head lay next to him nights when he rested. When he was awakened by the rattle and laborious wheezing of her hard working lungs he would see the white linen shroud, see the cold drops of death sweat on her brow. The visible long drawn out death of his beloved took years. That was the only "fortune" this luckless poet ever had.

Oh yes, the coronation of his dead spouse gave him fame, but it was the fame of fear, of silent grief, the despair behind the smiling mask: A paradise of torments. Virginia sank deeply into his soul and came out in his finest stories. Who can perceive which nameless agonies gave birth to her whisper?

Before the last thread of life snapped and the still wife was laid in the tomb Edgar Poe wrote his masterpiece The Raven. Nothing like that poem or like him had ever been seen before in world literature. I would like to scream in the faces of the English hypocrites.

"His ecstasy came out of the divine intoxication of a lost bleeding heart as well as the common intoxication that comes out of a wine bottle."

Any psychiatrist that works with alcoholism can prove with ease that The Raven originated from a delirium. It's just as easy for a psychologist to prove Lenore is owed to the poet's other intoxication, Virginia.

Then compare the origins of these poems to the candid, wonderfully clear essay that Poe wrote. Every apostrophe, every line, every single syllable is founded in amazingly simple logic. It is almost as if he were solving a binomial equation! The theme certainly gives no mention of ecstasy and its origins out of his divine and not so divine intoxications.

He wrote his essay for New England magazine readers that wanted to know how to become poets and learn the speech of ecstasy. The massive hard work, the pure technique, the ability to edit, that is what art amounts to. It has never been more clearly stated than in this essay, American Poetry. It is a master example. Really.

Admittedly Godfather Schneider and others like him would never use the guide but for the artist it is the most valuable information there is. What he shows is that the divine ecstasy alone is not enough to create a perfect work of art. Hard work, despised technique, deliberation, the weight and tone of words are all indispensable.

The magnificent Alhambra was not created by the great ideas of Arab architects alone. Masons, donkey drivers, gardeners and painters each played their part.

Edgar Allen Poe was the first poet to speak with such candor and moderation of the pure craft of writing. Yes, and I will also say that even though he was an American, he was the first on the threshold of modern thinking. The shining proof of the full value of this artist is that he only speaks of technique and with no word mentions the intuition always mouthed by amateurs. Perhaps if he could have written more in the magazine for others to read, he might have been happy to tell about the intoxication technique. Never had anyone before him so analyzed their peculiar craft in such anatomical detail until each fiber was taken apart.

This is an alternative to the faith of the masses in the inspirational fables that persist in our days. Of the divine voice that dictated the Bible and the Master Artist's inspiration made possible through God's grace. When the Holy Spirit came upon them, they painted, they wrote poems and more or less composed an immaculate spirit child that was placed into this world. That was so nice, so comfortable, that certainly some great artists themselves believed in this mysterious consecration.

The Thracian singer was called "Drunk with God" even though he was sober as Socrates. This idea in its original Dionysian form nearly coincides with our modern view of intoxication and ecstasy which became in the later Apollonistic view, "The Divine Anointing" of the Christian belief that has been in a position to take over and with great enthusiasm cloud clear thinking.

All the beautiful phrases from the square in Mount Olympus, the kiss of the Muse, the divine intoxication, the Artist's "Grace of God", and so on. Thank God we no longer in the slightest think of these and where they have originated.

It took courage to scatter such a luminous fog. Few, very few poems in world literature could tolerate such relentless scrutiny. Poe could dare take this step because he had created in The Raven a poem that was so pure, so complete. All others not as perfect, the small, the ridiculous, the sublime, are ripped to pieces.

My glance falls to the plaster on the walls of the hall. The eye can not follow all these arabesque and Kufic proverbs. It gets swallowed up and lost in the fantastic harmonies of the Moorish style.

Now this Arabic miracle of art is created out of gypsum, common gypsum. How ridiculous, how small, how absurd! But although created out of gypsum it loses nothing from its composition and is a complete work of art.

The common materials have been given life by the breath of the Spirit.

Art triumphs over nature, and this art is so great that recognition of the ridiculous common materials of its creation mean nothing.