Edgar Allan Poe Part 6

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. What Was Edgar Allan Poe Like There are people that give out a strange magic. Under their spell you have to believe in their personality. There is something that pushes back and makes you notice. No one knows what but it is there. They are marked with the sign of the artist. Oscar Wilde was one and so was Edgar Allan Poe. His manner was high; his gait was light and his demeanor always harmonious. He was always refined despite his poverty and had a romantic chivalrous manner. His proud features were regular, yes, he was handsome. The pure dark gray eyes held a strange violet glint. The high confident brow had marvelous symmetry. His complexion was always pale and shadowed by his dark locks. Edgar Allan Poe was beautiful in body and in soul. His gentle voice was musical. He was a strong supple athlete, a persevering swimmer that once swam over seven English miles upstream against the current from Richmond to Warwick without getting tired. He was an experienced jumper, elegant rider and excellent fencer that more than once demanded a duel from a hot-blooded opponent. He was a gentleman from top to bottom; his social manner was cool and though entangled was charming. He was sensitive and tender, earnest and solid. He was a scholar with an almost universal education. It was an equally great pleasure to see him or to listen to him. He was always sharing and his curse was that so few, so few to whom he gave his great riches were worthy enough to understand. Did a few beautiful women understand him? No, but they could sense the nobility of his soul, instinctively the way all women do. Only three people lived in his time that were capable of grasping him completely. Baudelaire and the two Brownings, but they lived over in old Europe and he never saw them. The poet was alone in his exaggerated dreams. He was beautiful, loved beautiful things and needed to surround himself with beauty. He created glorious beauty in his dreams that were real to him. The expensive country house in Landors or the marvelous estate at Arnheim. But in his poor modest life the penny mattered. He knew how to create things around him that excited the admiration of the rich. His small cottage at Fordham where he endured a paradise of agony with his death marked spouse had a precious harmony flowing through it that charmed every visitor. Stuff and clutter filled it. But it was attractive and beautiful. It was a miserable cottage on the top of a small hill but blooming cherry blossoms stood out of the green meadow. In the early dawn small songbirds enticed the poet out into the nearby pine forest. There he walked through his colorful Georginian bushes breathing the sweet perfume of wild Mignonettes and Heliotrope. The light morning air kissed his moist temples and stroked the weary eyes that had kept watch through the long night over his beloved. He visited the high bridge over the river Harlem and the rocky cliffs in the wilderness where he dreamed under the shade of ancient cedar trees. Now he rests somewhere. On the day after his death he was buried in the Westminster Church Cemetery in Baltimore. You have read of the poet dying like a vagabond and buried in a hurry like a dog found on the street. His grave will be near that of his grandfather, General David Poe, who made a name for himself in the Civil war. It should be there somewhere, there is no cross or gravestone to mark the site. No one bothered. His countrymen had other cares. Why should they worry about one dead poet! For one week they were employed with various miserable ways to soil and vilify his memory. All the false stories that have been invented since are still in circulation, a whole flood of poisonous ink sprayed over the dead lion. The mediocre fell upon him, the jealous torrents of small writers which he had so relentlessly pulled to pieces. Voiced the battle cry of the lying moralist Griswold, "He went mad in a drunken fog! He drank too much! He drank too much!" Then he was forgotten and that is all right. His countrymen are not yet mature enough to recognize the genius of their great poet. After another century they will gather his decayed bones together, erect a mighty monument and inscribe on it: "The Greatest Poet of the United States". Allow them to keep his bones over there. What we want is to listen to the poet's soul in the call of the nightingales that live here in the Alhambra. 1 The best English edition is by J.B. Lippincott Company in Philadelphia. A complete German edition (only the critical studies, humorous short stories and a few poems are not included) appeared by J.C.C. Bruns in Minden. Individual novels are in the Reclam and Meyer's public library. 2 Poe's biographer, the moralist Griswold does not hesitate to say; "In the entire literature we find only shadows and no example of Poe's missing conscience." 3 It is completely mistaken for van Vleuten to state as fact that excessive alcohol consumption will lead to Bachus being the enemy of Venus. His remark, "Every doctor knows that alcohol is the enemy of physical love, it seems that in Poe it has also destroyed its psychological equivalent." (Tomorrow"1903 page 189) For me to hear this from the mouth of a serious psychiatrist like van Vleuten is simply inconceivable. I have often had the opposite experience and several psychiatrists have confirmed to me that chronic alcoholics during intoxication often enough, sometimes even regularly, show an extraordinary increase in sex drive. This is not the place to question this detail. At the least every police officer will confirm and van Vleuten will certainly not deny that three quarters of the nightly patrons of Bordellos spend much of their time one way or the other in a highly intoxicated condition. Van Vleuten's hypothesis is wrong and his conclusion completely absurd. "Alcohol seems to have destroyed in Poe the psychic equivalent to have and the feminine was banished from his deliriums." "That is why the entire sphere of the feminine and human sexuality finds no root in the deliriums of this poet." The sphere of the feminine is not missing and Poe has of course in the purest and most noble form related it often. By the way, van Vleuten contradicts himself when he notes that the "Raven" seems to come from a delirium." (Ibid. page 189) Well, woman plays the main role in this poem how can he claim the feminine has been banished from Poe's deliriums? The sentence that "Alcohol is the enemy of physical love and even of its psychic equivalent" is certainly inaccurate; the effect is individual and entirely different in this case. Baudelaire, in writing of the sexuality in Poe's work, noted van Vleuten's comment in his own remark, "I can find no real explanation for this finding." Baudelaire, the artist of intoxication par excellence, did not avoid this well known remark and responded intentionally because he recognized its hollowness. Unfortunately not one word of the sociality as well as the sexuality that leaps to the eye of Poe's readers seems to touch van Vleuten. Does he claim these psychic equivalents did exist before they were destroyed by alcohol? Logically he must because there is no other way to explain his negation of something that is so obviously there in the internal context of Poe's work. It is also outrageous for van Vleuten in his otherwise intelligent work to take the poet and attempt to force him into a time deposited Procrustean bed with its pre-established template. He claimed, "Poe's landscapes are schematic and uniform, they show no illness and are not liable to remind one of amnesia." This psychiatrist, who himself is a gifted poet, takes these songs of a high landscape, the fifty pages from Poe's "Landor's Cottage" and "The Domain of Arnhiem" and calls them nothing more than scenic beauties of speech! I can only conclude that van Vleuten has only a fragmentary knowledge of Poe and has never read the two aforementioned cabinet pieces, or the majority of his poems with their scenic images. I can do this safely without making false allegations but I can not save him from another more serious allegation. That he has prefixed a work for an elite audience without sufficient knowledge. While it is largely in the whole certainly laudable, it contains serious errors in detail that reduce the all-encompassing image of a great genius for future readers.