Edgar Allan Poe Part 4
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 did not need this ancient fabrication any more. He saw how threadbare and tattered it was and boldly threw it aside. In Eureka he defined the concept of intuition in a few words as a "realization of truth" grounded in inductive and deductive reasoning so hidden in shadows that consciousness retreats from getting a grip on it or understanding of it and mocks our inability to put it into words.
Here lies a clearer understanding of the way art is created than that of his contemporaries. Those Poet-philosophers that claimed so-called "Intuition" was the opposite of philosophy. This is true in the limited narrow untheological and thoroughly modern sense and a special place has been made for the opposites, Aristotle and Bacon, placing them side by side together at the same time.
He was the greatest of these first men of modern spirit. He was a romantic, a dreamer, and a worshipper of reason who never let his feet leave solid earth.
Edgar Allan Poe was also first to openly speak on the technique of thinking a decade before Zolas's "Genius is diligence".
Edgar Allan Poe wrote of this in his forward to Eureka.
"To the few who love me and whom I love; to those who feel rather than to those who think. To the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities-I offer this book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth: Constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone; let us say as a romance, or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a poem.
What I propound here is true: --Therefore it can not die; --or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the Life Everlasting!"
Poe stood completely independent from Th. Gautier and his "L'art pour l'art" principle. His claim was more than Gautier's, who only saw beauty with the eye of the painter and also lower than Gautier's in that the external form alone revealed the beauty. First beauty, then truth. To truth, that was his correction without negating beauty. That is the highest claim of any art that has ever been framed. He spoke in waking life of the longing for true value and reality, the simple reality that only the dream could fulfill.
Also here is Poe-the Romantic- Pathfinder; revealed here as the first of the modern spirits. His claim was so ultra modern that even today only a small portion of the many great writers can understand this radical spirit that sprang out independently fifty years before Zola coined his technique of creation principle and more widely than Parnassier's principle of art.
Among civilized people the fertilization of literature through Poe's spirit is now in full bloom in this century. The past saw him only as an outsider like the ridiculous pair, Puke and Snot. Certainly as someone fortune has turned her back on unlike Jules Verne and Conan Doyle who made fortunes.
It is entirely certain Poe wrote these things for his daily bread. The travels of Gordon Pym and Hanns Pfaall...etc. It was only through the need for a hot noon meal that the criminal novels (for example: Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, The Gold Bug) originated. Poe knew what it was like to starve! So he wrote these things, made translations and scientific collaborations whenever possible.
Really, every single story, even his weakest, make all the adventures of Sherlock Holmes fade in comparison. Why does the large public, especially the English speaking, devour Doyle's ridiculous Detective stories with enthusiasm and lay Poe's aside? It doesn't make sense!
Poe's characters like Dostojewskys are so genuine, his composition so complete that the reader's imagination is held captive in his net. That's when the reader is helpless against the painful murderous horror and seized in cruel suspense. They are continuously white with tension.
In his popular imitators this is merely pleasant titillation. The reader always knows that it is all stupid nonsense. They stand apart from the story and prefer it that way!
But Poe takes the poor drip by the hair, drags them to the abyss and catapults them into hell! They lose hearing and vision and don't know where they are anymore. That is why the average person that likes to sleep avoids Poe's horrific nightmares and is attracted to the scenic heroes of Baker Street.
He wanted to write for the large masses and set his goal way too high. He wrote way over their heads and thought they would like to read him! Then he went from publisher to publisher trying to market intelligent works to people that only wanted to buy straw!
There will come a time when the world is ready for this poet's gifts. There have already been many promising starts and we recognize the singular ways that Jean Paul, Th. Hoffman, Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe have contributed to the culture of art.
Such art can no longer be dressed in nationalistic colors. First of all we need to realize that Poe's art was not for the people of America, but for the thin cultural layer whether it be German, Japanese, Latin or Jewish. We all wish and believe that no artist creates just for his people but for the entire world.
Velazquez and Cervantes are as completely unknown to the large masses in Spain as the English writers, Shakespeare and Byron, the French Rabelais and Moliere or the Dutch Rembrandt and Ruben are.
The German people don't have the slightest idea who Goethe and Schiller were and have never even heard of Heine. We hear the small blunt questions of soldiers in the regiments, "Who was Bismark? Who was Goethe?" When will blissful blind trust finally open its eyes?
Entire worlds separate the people of culture in Germany from their fellow countrymen, which they see daily on the street. There is only water that separates them from the people of culture in America.
Heine perceived that Edgar Allan Poe was great and threw it in the faces of the German experts. Even in our day most artists, scholars and experts of national culture have such little understanding that they misinterpret Horaz' refined "Odi Profanum".
The artist that tries to create for his people strives for the impossible neglecting something much more accessible and higher, to create for the entire world. Over the Germans, over the British, over the French stands a higher nation to create for, the Nation of Culture. It alone is worthy of the artist. The awareness of Poe is as solidly grounded there as Goethe but in a different, not as modern sense.
posted by alligator | 5:32 PM
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