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AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Retrospective Poe
The Master, His Readership,
His Legacy

Edited by José R. Ibáñez

Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

Series Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC, USA
American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century publishes
works by contemporary authors that help shape critical opinion regarding
American literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-­
first centuries. The books treat fiction, poetry, memoir, drama and criti-
cism itself—ranging from William Dow’s Narrating Class in American
Fiction and Amy Strong’s Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction, to
Maisha L. Wester’s African American Gothic and Guy Davidson’s Queer
Commodities: Contemporary U. S. Fiction, Consumer Culture, and Lesbian
Subcultures.
Beginning in 2004, the series is now well established and continues to
welcome new book proposals. Manuscripts run between 80,000 and
90,000 words, while the Pivot format accommodates shorter books of
25,000 to 50,000 words. This series also accepts essay collections; among
our bestsellers have been collections on David Foster Wallace, Norman
Mailer, Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Literary Criticism, Kurt Vonnegut,
Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, George Saunders, and Arthur Miller
(written by members of the Miller Society).
All texts are designed to create valuable interactions globally as well as
within English-speaking countries.

Editorial Board:
Professor Derek Maus, SUNY Potsdam, USA
Professor Thomas Fahy, Long Island University, USA
Professor Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia and Director of
the Carter G. Woodson Institute, USA
Professor Laura Rattray, University of Glasgow, UK
 José R. Ibáñez
Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan
Editors

Retrospective Poe
The Master, His Readership, His Legacy
Editors
José R. Ibáñez Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan
Department of Philology/English Department of English Philology
Studies Division University of Valladolid
University of Almería Valladolid, Spain
Almería, Spain

ISSN 2634-579X     ISSN 2634-5803 (electronic)

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
ISBN 978-3-031-09985-4    ISBN 978-3-031-09986-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09986-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
­institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Photography by SRGS

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

This book is partly a result of the selection of papers delivered at the

Second International EAPSA Conference, “Beyond Childhood and
Adolescence…Growing with Edgar Allan Poe,” organized by the Edgar
Allan Poe Spanish Association in Almería, February 2020, just a few weeks
before the outbreak of the global Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to the
initial screening of conference papers, the editors extended invitations to
other Poe scholars, who kindly agreed to submit contributions for this
volume. As editors, we hope that Retrospective Poe will find its place as a
landmark in the ongoing discussion of Edgar Allan Poe and his profound
influence on global literatures.
We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all contributors, who
kindly welcomed the idea of participating in this venture. We also wish to
thank the Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association (EAPSA) for their whole-
hearted support, both during the Conference and with this volume. In
addition, we would like to acknowledge the University of Almería, in par-
ticular CEI Patrimonio, for their much valued help. Special thanks are also
due to the Faculty of Humanities (University of Almería) and the
Lindisfarne Research Group for their financial assistance. José would like
to thank his family, in particular his father, brothers, and sister, for their
constant encouragement. Santiago would also like to thank his family for
their much valued support, and to dedicate the book to his late father:
“Only through time time is conquered.”

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Finally, we would like to extend our sincere thanks to Molly Beck and
Mary Amala Divya Suresh, of Palgrave Macmillan, for their patience and
the invaluable help they have extended to us in all issues related to
publication.
 Contents

Introduction: Re-assessing Poe’s Seductive Art  xxi

Part I Poe’s Echoes of the Classical World and his Current

Legacy   1

1 “The
 Glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was
Rome”: Edgar Allan Poe and the Classical World  3
Harry Lee Poe

2 Poe’s
 Arrival in Europe and the Case of Greece 23
Dimitrios Tsokanos

3 “Darkness
 There and Nothing More”: Edgar Allan Poe
and the Popular Culture of Necrolatry and Thanatography 39
Eulalia Piñero Gil

Part II Poe and Modernism  57

4 Poe
 Among the Modernists: A (Ghostly) Reappraisal 59
Viorica Patea

vii
viii Contents

5 Poe: Poeta Ludens 83

Stephanie Sommerfeld

6 “Poe’s
 Poetics and Eliot’s Poetry: A Denial of Influence?” 99
Sławomir Studniarz

7 Echoes
 of Poe in the Jazz Age: The Haunting of F. Scott
Fitzgerald117
Bonnie Shannon McMullen

Part III Poe’s Readership in Spain 135

8 Beyond
 Baudelaire’s Views of Poe: Carlos Fernández
Cuenca and Josep Farrán i Mayoral, Literary Criticism,
and Aesthetic Reception in 1930s and 1940s Spain137
Alejandro Jaquero-Esparcia and José Manuel
Correoso-Rodenas

9 Reading,
 Understanding, and Praising Poe’s Illustrated
Oeuvre: From Childhood to Old Age155
Fernando González-Moreno and Margarita Rigal-Aragón

10 Poe’s
 “Berenice” in Popular Culture: Contemporary
(Audio)visual Representations in Spain177
Ana González-Rivas Fernández and María Isabel Jiménez
González

Part IV Poe’s Long and Far-Reaching Legacy 195

11 Death,
 Doubt, and Poe’s Global Ascendancy197
J. Gerald Kennedy

12 Distance
 Makes the Heart Grow Fonder: Nostalgia and
Poe’s American Readership215
Jeffrey A. Savoye
 Contents  ix

13 Poe’s
 “The Gold-Bug,” Reading, and Race237
John Gruesser

14 Growing
 up in Poe’s Shadow: Intertextuality, Jungian
Projections, and the Anxiety of Influence in Edgar Allan
Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Stephen
King’s “The Monkey”257
Marta Miquel-Baldellou

15 “The
 Masque of the Red Death” in Literature and
Cinema: Poe’s Short Story and Corman’s Film
Adaptation277
Eusebio V. Llàcer-Llorca

16 The
 Man of the Crowd and His Descendants: Poe,
Rampo, and Sakate293
Takayuki Tatsumi

Index311
 Notes on Contributors

José Manuel Correoso-Rodenas holds a PhD in English (Universidad de

Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) and is an Assistant Professor of English at the
Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). His areas of interest and
research are mainly Gothic literature and Native American studies, in which
he has presented several papers at national and international conferences.
He has also published on all the above-mentioned subjects. Among his
recent publications, some of the most outstanding examples are: “Pintar lo
que no se ve. Ediciones ilustradas de ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846) en
la colección LyA” (2021) and “Poe in the Age of Spanish Populism:
Conversations between the Word and Image in the Spanish Editions from
the 1930s and 1940s” (The Edgar Allan Poe Review). He has also edited
the volume Teaching Language and Literature On and Off-Canon (2020).
Fernando González-Moreno is a Tenured Professor at the University of
Castilla-La Mancha in Spain, where he teaches Art History. His research
interests focus on iconography and illustrated book history. He has stud-
ied the illustrated reception of, among other authors, Edgar Allan Poe,
about whom he has published several articles and book chapters, for exam-
ple The Portrayal of the Grotesque in Stoddard’s and Quantin’s Illustrated
Editions of Edgar Allan Poe (1884): An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the
Relations Between the Visual and the Verbal (2017). He co-directs the
interdisciplinary research group “LyA,” which explores the relations
among the different arts, and also co-directs the research project “Edgar
A. Poe on-line. Text and Image” funded by the Spanish Ministry of

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Economy and Competitiveness. One of the main results of this project is

the digital catalogue-library “Poe Online” (http://www.poeonline.es/).
Ana González-Rivas Fernández is an Assistant Professor of English
Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Her main interests lie in
Anglo-American Gothic and fantastic literature, comparative literature,
myth criticism, classical reception studies, intermediality, and popular
culture. She is the secretary of the SELGyC (Spanish Association of
Comparative Literature), the secretary of Asteria (International Association
of Myth Criticism), and a member of the Governing Board of the EAPSA
(Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association). As regards Poe, she has published
several articles on his work and its connection with Greek and Latin litera-
ture, and the reception of his tales and poems in contemporary popular
culture. Moreover, she teaches the course “Edgar Allan Poe and the Tales
of the Fantastic” within the Master’s Degree in Literary and Cultural
Studies in Great Britain and Anglophone Countries (Autonomous
University of Madrid).
John Gruesser is a Senior Research Scholar at Sam Houston State
University in Huntsville, Texas. His book Edgar Allan Poe and His
Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts (2019) won the Patrick
F. Quinn Award for the best monograph on Poe, conferred by the Poe
Studies Association, which named him an Honorary Lifetime Member in
2020. He is the author of Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective
Fiction (2013) and A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing
Line (2022). He edited the essay collection Animals in the American
Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction (2022) and, with
Alisha Knight, Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice, by
Pauline E. Hopkins (2021).
José R. Ibáñez holds a PhD in Modern Languages from Wayne State
University, Detroit, and works as an Assistant Professor in the English
Studies Division of the Department of Philology at the University of
Almería, Spain. He co-edited, with José Francisco Fernández and Carmen
Mª Bretones, the volume Contemporary Debates on the Short Story (2007).
He translated and edited with Blasina Cantizano Una llegada inesperada y
otros relatos (2015), a volume of short stories by Chinese-­American author
Ha Jin, which won the 29th translation award of the Spanish Association
for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN). He has been vice-president of
the Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association and currently serves on the edi-
torial board of The Edgar Allan Poe Review. In February 2020, he orga-
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

nized the 2nd International Conference of the Edgar Allan Poe Spanish
Association (EAPSA), held in Almería.
Alejandro Jaquero-Esparcia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). His research fields are the
theory of Arts during the Early Modern Period (with a special focus on the
relationship between Art and Poetry) and the interrelation of images and
texts. In this sense, he has studied the relations of theory and visual arts in
the narrative and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, resulting in publications like
the collaboration in the catalogue 100 Illustrated Milestones of Edgar
A. Poe’s Work: Reasoned Catalogue of the “LyA” Collection (2020) and
“Edgar A. Poe and the Arts: the Artistic Ideology Suggested through ‘The
Assignation’” (Revista de Humanidades—UNED, 42 [2021] pp. 33–58).
María Isabel Jiménez González holds a BA in English Studies from the
University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), where she is working as an
Assistant Professor. She has over twenty years of experience at different
teaching levels and institutions (UCLM, UCAM, CUD, etc.), including
high school education. She also holds a PhD in nineteenth-century
American Literature and her research focuses on the writer Edgar Allan
Poe. María Isabel has attended many conferences, in Spain and abroad,
and has published several articles and book chapters on Poe’s science fic-
tion short stories and poems. She is also interested in children’s literature,
steampunk literature, and English teaching and learning through ICT,
among other topics.
J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State
University and former president of the Poe Studies Association. His books
include: Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (1987), “The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym” and the Abyss of Interpretation (1994), a new edition
of the Portable Edgar Allan Poe (2006), and three edited or co-edited col-
lections of essays, The Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (2001);
Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (2001), co-edited with Liliane
Weissberg; and Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture
(2012), co-edited with Jerome McGann. With Scott Peeples, he co-­edited
the massive Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (2019). His principal
contribution to American studies is his book Strange Nation: Literary
Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (2016).
Eusebio V. Llàcer-Llorca is Full Professor of English Philology at the
Universitat de València. He has taught Spanish and English, and lectured
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

on various subjects, mainly American Literature and Translation, in the

United States and Spain. He also has broad experience as translator of
texts in the literary, scientific, commercial, and technical fields, and is the
author of two books on translation theory: Introducción a los estudios sobre
traducción: historia, teoría y análisis descriptivos (1997) and Sobre la tra-
ducción: ideas tradicionales y teorías contemporáneas (2004). His main
areas of research are translation theory, discourse analysis, and American
literature, especially about the horror tales by Edgar Allan Poe, and is co-
editor of A 21st-Century Retrospective View about Edgar Allan Poe/Una
mirada retrospectiva sobre Edgar Allan Poe desde el siglo XIX (2011).
Bonnie Shannon McMullen is an Independent Scholar. She has taught
tutorially at the University of Oxford and lectured at other universities in
Britain, the United States, Canada, and Japan. Her scholarly publications
include articles on George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
She has explored the influence of Blackwood’s Magazine on Poe’s fiction and
critical writing. In addition, she has investigated Poe’s formative role in the
shaping of a recognizable American idiom. Her work on Poe has appeared
in The Edgar Allan Poe Review and Studies in American Fiction and she has
contributed a chapter, “Poe in Britain: 1852–1914” to Anthologizing Poe:
Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons (2020).
Marta Miquel-Baldellou is a Research Fellow and Lecturer at the
University of Lleida, Spain. She holds an International PhD in English
Philology with a dissertation that addresses the fiction of Poe and Bulwer-­
Lytton through a comparative and biographical approach. Her research in
Poe studies focuses on the influence that Poe has exerted on contempo-
rary popular writers, mainly Stephen King. In 2016, she was granted an
AEDEAN postdoctoral scholarship to approach King’s fiction from the
perspective of mythcriticism and comparative studies. She is also a member
of the PSA (Poe Studies Association) and the EAPSA (Edgar Allan Poe
Spanish Association). Her articles on Poe’s fiction have been published in
international journals, like The Edgar Allan Poe Review, and monograph
collections, such as Luisa Juárez’s Poe Alive in the Century of Anxiety
(2011) and Nadia D’Amelio’s Les traductions extraordinaires d’Edgar
Allan Poe (2010), among others.
Viorica Patea is Full Professor of American and English Literature at the
University of Salamanca, Spain. She is the author of various studies on
Dickinson, Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Poe, T.S. Eliot, Pound,
Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell. Her published books include Entre el
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (1989)

and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (2005). She has edited various collections
of essays such as Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam (2001)
and Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (2012), which
received the Javier Coy Research Award for the best edited book (2013)
from the Spanish Association of American Studies. Together with Paul
Scott Derrick, she has edited Modernism Revisited: Transgressing
Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (2007).
Eulalia Piñero Gil is Full Professor of American Literature and Gender
Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She is the President of
the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS). She has also been a
member of the Board of the European Association for American Studies.
She has published extensively on the American Renaissance, women’s lit-
erature, gender studies, music and literature, American and Canadian
poetry, and comparative literature. She has published many book chapters
on Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction and edited a critical edition of his short stories
in Spanish, Narraciones Extraordinarias de Edgar Allan Poe (1999). She
has translated and edited works by American writers such as Herman
Melville, Kate Chopin, and John Dos Passos. In 2020, she co-edited Live
Deep and Suck all the Marrow of Life: H. D. Thoreau’s Literary Legacy.
Harry Lee Poe is Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at
Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He is the author of twenty books.
His work on Edgar Allan Poe includes two books, Edgar Allan Poe: An
Illustrated Companion to his Tell-Tale Stories (2008), for which he won an
Edgar Award in 2009, and Evermore: Edgar Allan Poe and the Mystery of
the Universe (2012). He contributed chapters to Edgar Allan Poe in 20
Objects (2016) Poe and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and
Anthologizing Poe (2020), and has written a number of articles. He served
for ten years as President of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond
and is descended from Edgar Allan Poe’s cousin William Poe.
Margarita Rigal-Aragón is a Senior Lecturer at the University of
Castilla-La Mancha. Her research focuses on the life and works of Edgar
A. Poe. She edited Los legados de Poe (2011) and Poe’s Narrativa Completa
(2013), with updated information about Poe’s life and works. She co-­
directs the Research Group of Interdisciplinary Studies between Literature
and Art (“LyA”). Among other results of this group, we can find The
Portrayal of the Grotesque in Stoddard’s and Quantin’s Illustrated Editions
of Edgar Allan Poe (1884) (2017), “Poe and the Art of Painting” in The
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Edgar Allan Poe Review (2018), “Under the Spanish Eye” in Anthologizing
Poe: (2020, edited by Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale do Gato), and “A
man must laugh or die: Visual Interpretations of Poe’s Comical and
parodical Tales” in The Edgar Allan Poe Review (2021), all of them
together with Fernando González-Moreno. She is the President of the
Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association.
Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan is a Senior Lecturer at the
University of Valladolid (Spain) where he teaches American Literature.
His research focuses on the reception of literature written in English in
Spain (Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, P.B. Shelley) and American short fic-
tion (E.A. Poe, N. Hawthorne, H. Melville, R. Carver, R. Ford, S. Dybek,
among others). He has published Presencia de Edgar Allan Poe en la lit-
eratura española (1999) and En torno a los márgenes. Ensayos de literatura
poscolonial (2008) and has edited Pioneros. Cuentos norteamericanos del
siglo XIX (2011). He has also translated and edited some of Henry James’
short fiction (2005) and Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (2019).
Jeffrey A. Savoye is an Independent Scholar. He is Secretary/Treasurer
and Webmaster for The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. He is also
an Honorary Member of the Poe Studies Association. He co-edited with
John W. Ostrom and Burton R. Pollin The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan
Poe (2 vols., 2008, third edition, revised), the standard edition of Poe’s
correspondence. He is also the author of dozens of articles on Edgar Allan
Poe which appeared in The Edgar Allan Poe Review and Poe Studies/ Dark
Romanticism.
Stephanie Sommerfeld is an Assistant Professor of North American
Studies at Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Germany. Her recent
publications include a chapter on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in the volume The American Novel of the
Nineteenth Century, which is part of De Gruyter’s series Handbooks of
English and American Studies, and “The Posthumanist Technological
Sublime as Cultural Technique: Poe’s ‘The Man That Was Used Up,’”
published in a special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik.
She is the author of “From the Romantic to the Textual Sublime: Poesque
Sublimities, Romantic Irony, and Deconstruction” in Deciphering Poe
(2015) and “Post-Kantian Sublimity and Mediacy in Poe’s Blackwood
Tales,” which appeared in a special issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review
edited by Sean Moreland, Devin Zane Shaw, and Jonathan Murphy.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Sławomir Studniarz is an Associate Professor at the University of Warmia

and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland. His field of research is nineteenth-­century
and twentieth-century American Literature, although he has also pub-
lished articles on the poetry of Samuel Beckett. He has published three
monographs on Edgar Allan Poe, two in Polish and one in English. He
has edited a volume of essays titled Edgar Allan Poe—artysta i wizjoner
(2013). His two articles on Poe’s poetry have appeared in the Edgar Allan
Poe Review, and one, on his short fiction, in Revista de Estudios
Norteamericanos. His latest book publications are the monograph on
Poe’s poetry The Time-­Transcending Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (2016)
and Narrative Framing in Contemporary American Novels (2017).
Takayuki Tatsumi is Professor Emeritus at Keio University, Tokyo,
Japan. He has served as president of the American Literature Society of
Japan (2014–2017), president the Poe Society of Japan (2009–2020), and
vice president of the Melville Society of Japan (2012–). He has also served
on the editorial boards of multiple journals: The Edgar Allan Poe Review,
Mark Twain Studies, and Journal of Transnational American Studies, to
name a few. His major works include: Disfiguration of Genres: a Reading
in the Rhetoric of Edgar Allan Poe (1995); Full Metal Apache: Transactions
between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (2006, the winner of
the 2010 IAFA [International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts]
Distinguished Scholarship Award); and Young Americans in Literature:
The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville (2018).
Dimitrios Tsokanos is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough College,
UK. His PhD dissertation, “Intertextual Hellenic Motifs in Edgar Allan
Poe’s Tales and Poems,” traces back the Hellenic influence in the works of
Poe. He has published book chapters and articles on Poe: “Hellenic
References in Edgar Allan Poe’s Critique on Contemporary Society”
(2016), “‘If doubt yet Cannot, then play unto its riddle the Oedipus:’
Philhellenic Patterns in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales” (2016), and “‘The Black
Cat’ Revisited: A Prolegomenon to Poe’s Greek Imitators” (The Edgar
Allan Poe Review, 2017), as well as “‘The Black Cat’ and Emmanuel
Rhoides: A Note” (The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2021).
 List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 Front cover for El gato negro by Vicente Buil de la Torre
(Barcelona: Rovira y Chiqués, 1907). (Source: “LyA”
Collection/UCLM. Artwork in the public domain. Photo
by authors) 158
Fig. 9.2 Front cover for “King Pest” by Manuel Prieto (Madrid:
Revista Literaria, 1953). (Source: “LyA” Collection/
UCLM. Artwork in the public domain. Photo by authors) 161
Fig. 9.3 Inside illustrated page by Alonso (Madrid: Maisal, 1980).
(Source: “LyA” Collection/UCLM. Artwork in the public
domain. Photo by authors) 162
Fig. 9.4 Color illustration for “The Gold-Bug” by José Segrelles
(Barcelona: Araluce, 1914). (Source: “LyA” Collection/
UCLM. Artwork in the public domain. Photo by authors) 163
Fig. 9.5 Illustration of “Morella” by Jaime Azpelicueta (Barcelona:
Editorial Juventud, 1968). (Source: “LyA” Collection/
UCLM. Courtesy of Editorial Juventud. Photo by authors) 169
Fig. 9.6 Illustration of “Berenice” by Ángel Bellido (Madrid: Gisa
Ediciones 1976). (Source: “LyA” Collection/
UCLM. Artwork in the public domain. Photo by authors) 173
Fig. 10.1 Illustration “Los dientes de Berenice” (Berenice’s teeth), by
María Espejo, included in the volume Diez cuentos de terror,
by Edgar Allan Poe (2017b), page 35. (Courtesy of María
Espejo)183
Fig. 13.1 “This is a strange scarabæus, I must confess” 247

xix
xx List of Figures

Fig. 13.2 “The lanterns having been lit, we all fell to work” 248
Fig. 13.3 “We found ourselves possessed of even vaster wealth than we
had at first supposed” 249
Fig. 13.4 “Lor-a-­marcy! what is dis here pon de tree?” 250
 Introduction: Re-assessing Poe’s
Seductive Art

Over 200 years after his birth, Poe’s reputation is firmly established in
world literature. Despite changes to the American canon, he remains a
central figure in American literature and a seminal voice in the develop-
ment of the modern short story globally. There is a broad consensus that
Poe’s legacy relies to a great extent on the translations and essays of
Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, so great was the importance of Baudelaire in
the worldwide recognition of Poe that Paul Valéry remarked that the
American author would have been almost forgotten if Baudelaire “had not
taken up the task of introducing him into European literatures,” a com-
ment that Lois D. Vines considered both an exaggeration and an under-
statement (Vines 1999, 1). Had Baudelaire not regarded Poe as a model,
the latter’s fame might well have faded, and he might now be regarded
simply as one among many American writers of his age. Baudelaire’s dis-
covery was consequential if one takes a cursory glance at the number of
writers who have claimed to be under Poe’s influence in one way or
another.
If, for the French poet and those he influenced, Poe became a cult fig-
ure—we might recall here Mallarmé’s claim that he moved to London to
improve his English in an attempt to better understand Poe—in England
things were radically different. T.S. Eliot’s contentious essay “From Poe to
Valéry,” based on his Library of Congress lecture delivered in 1948 and
published a year later in The Hudson Review, stands out as one of the most
damning pieces of criticism on Poe. Eliot openly criticized Poe and
declared that anyone examining his work would find nothing but “slip-
shod writing” (1949, 327). He even made the point that only a mind that

xxi
xxii INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART

was still adolescent could be attracted to Poe’s style, which he disparaged

as “puerile thinking” (327). What puzzled Eliot above all was the passion-
ate enthusiasm that Poe’s work aroused in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and
Valéry, three French poets who each offered an individual understanding
of poetry and who became advocates for Poe, all playing significant roles
in establishing Poe’s literary reputation.
Despite the harsh comments on Poe and his art, Eliot’s article is per-
haps an interesting case of how writers, critics, artists, and the general
readership have read and understood Poe. The audience for Poe is indeed
a strange one: whereas there have been numerous anthologies of Poe’s
fiction addressed to a young readership, adaptations of Poe’s work for the
screen have largely been aimed at an adult audience. There is also the fact
that Poe has been held in awe by a large number of adult readers, among
them some very notable writers: Baudelaire, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón,
Stéphane Mallarmé, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Valéry, and Stephen
King, to name just a few. All of them have claimed to have been influenced
by Poe’s work, and none can be characterized as adolescent, though some
of them are or were writers catering to a young readership in their
own work.
Some of the contributors to Retrospective Poe have taken Eliot’s essay as
a starting point, thus indicating the importance of Eliot as a critic even
now, with the days of Modernism long gone. Taking that essay as a point
of departure might lead contributors to downplay the importance of Poe
or the extent of his influence on literature. Yet quite the contrary is true;
the chapters herein attest to the vitality of such reception studies in terms
of their subjects and approaches. This may be because, as Studniarz argues,
“Eliot’s response to Poe’s literary legacy is puzzling and complicated”
(99). Eliot may have felt that Poe posed a threat to the poetry he himself
wrote, and thus preferred to criticize him harshly if only to avoid any liter-
ary relationship. To the names mentioned above we should add another
great Modernist author, Jorge Luis Borges—the precursor of literary
Postmodernism—who also acknowledged the influence of Poe on his
work, to the point of claiming that the American writer was the originator
of the modern short story (Esplin 2018). Borges was an avid reader who
repeatedly pointed out his indebtedness to Poe, whom he had read in his
childhood (16).
In any case, prior to Eliot’s controversial essay, some comparativist
studies had already appeared. In his exhaustive study of the influence of
Poe in Hispanic literature, John E. Englekirk analyzed the influence of
 INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART xxiii

Poe on Spanish-speaking writers on both sides of the Atlantic, singling out

the work of some outstanding representatives of Spanish American letters,
such as Rubén Darío. Englekirk offered an extensive catalogue of transla-
tions and of the critical appreciation of the American writer, plus a thor-
ough analysis of Poe’s influence on a number of Spanish and Spanish
American authors. This was not the only study of the reception of Poe
abroad. John C. French collected the lectures delivered at the Edgar Allan
Poe Society in Baltimore in 1941 examining Poe’s reception in Spain,
Russia, France, and Germany.
In 1957, Patrick Quinn’s seminal book on the reception of Poe in
France, The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe, addressed Baudelaire’s appro-
priation of Poe in the creation of his own literary persona. Quinn explores
the extent of Poe’s influence on writers of fiction and criticism, such as
Marie Bonaparte, in an attempt to identify other appropriations of Poe.
In 1999, Louis Davis Vines edited Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation,
Affinities, a work that aimed to be “the first attempt to bring together in
one volume an account of Poe’s effect on literatures around the world and
to present analyses of his influence on major writers” (1). This collective
volume not only explored Poe’s impact on over twenty countries and geo-
graphical regions worldwide, as well as his influence on major writers—
Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, Kafka, and Pessoa, to name just a few—but
also became a landmark in Poe studies in that it set in motion the global-
ized, transnational projection of Poe as a literary figure in the first decades
of the twenty-first century.
Also in the early years of the twenty-first century, Burton R. Pollin col-
lected essays on Poe’s ascendancy in Poe’s Seductive Influence on Great
Writers. The volume contains twelve essays plus seven reviews about nota-
ble authors, mostly Anglo-Americans, who had been influenced by Poe.
John T. Irwin explored the relationship between Poe and Borges in The
Mystery to a Solution (1994), an act of interpretation and reading of their
respective works. In 2018, Emron Esplin would continue the exploration
of Poe’s seductive influence on Borges, looking at the latter’s understand-
ing and interpretation of Poe, in The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar
Allan Poe in Spanish America, with fresh readings of Poe’s and Borges’
stories that explain how Borges created Poe the story writer firstly for the
Spanish readership, and then for the rest of the world.
As the methodological approaches changed, scholars came to favor
reception theory, the study of intertextuality, and even more materialist
studies, such as the history of Poe’s publications in magazines and
xxiv INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART

anthologies, including translations. In 2014, an ambitious project, led by

Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato, was initiated. Translated Poe
picked up the baton of Poe Abroad, acknowledging Vines’ collection as a
source of inspiration. The editors commissioned a select group of Poe
experts who examined translations of Poe’s works from around the world,
while also assessing how Poe’s advocates interpreted his texts following
national traditions in the reading of Poe in each language. Esplin and Vale
de Gato are also editors of Anthologizing Poe (2020), a volume that exam-
ines the works of anthologizers, editors, and translators of Poe’s texts
worldwide. This study reveals why some tales and poems were antholo-
gized—including some beautifully illustrated editions—which ultimately
meant that they would enjoy broad critical attention, while others, consid-
ered less important texts, were relegated to the fringes of academic dis-
course. Indeed, anthologizers and editors have shaped our understanding
and our appreciation of Poe’s work since the final decades of the nine-
teenth century.
Esplin and Vale de Gato’s two great contributions are accompanied by
others that may not be so comprehensive but offer detailed analyses of the
reception of Poe’s work from a wide variety of approaches. Among the
books that deserve mention here is Barbara Cantalupo’s Poe’s Pervasive
Influence (2013), a volume that collects some noteworthy studies on the
influence of the writer in Japan, namely in Edogawa Rampo’s fiction,
together with Portugal, Russia, and China. As Cantalupo acknowledges in
the introduction, the book extends Lois D. Vines’ Poe Abroad, just as
Pollin’s Poe’s Seductive Influence did.
Poe’s influence is not limited to literature. The visual arts and the cin-
ema also show the marks of Poe’s legacy. We are tempted to claim that it
could hardly be otherwise, given the interest that Poe himself had in the
visual arts, as attested by the numerous mentions of painters in his writing,
and this is brilliantly researched by Barbara Cantalupo in Poe and the Visual
Arts (2014a). Poe’s legacy in this field is represented by the host of paint-
ers who illustrated the large number of editions of his work. This is an
exciting field of research in Poe studies, one in which Pollin made a previ-
ous contribution with his Images of Poe’s Works: A Comprehensive Catalogue
of Illustrations (1995), and which has recently led to other interesting
work, such as Margarita Rigal-Aragón and Fernando González-Moreno’s
The Portrayal of the Grotesque in Stoddard’s and Quantin’s Illustrated
Editions of Edgar Allan Poe (1884) (2017), a book that presents new read-
ings of how Poe has been interpreted by painters. They go beyond the
 INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART xxv

analysis of illustrations to reassess Poe’s life and work, discussing some of

his portraits. Intermedial studies offer new perspectives by exploring the
ways in which a literary text is transposed into another discourse. In this
sense, studies on ekphrasis, such as that by Rigal-Aragón and González-­
Moreno, may help us to understand Poe’s legacy in fresh ways, as studies
of filmic adaptations have also done.
Such film adaptations are linked to an interest in Poe as a popular icon.
Without doubt, his morbid and bizarre stories have attracted a number of
artists from the realm of popular culture. Roger Corman’s movies are a
good example. There are others, such as Jean Epstein, whose 1928 film La
Chute de la Maison Usher was possibly influenced by the Surrealists’ inter-
pretations of Poe’s stories. Much more intriguing are the connections to
Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, and Roger Vadim, as
Scott Peeples explores in The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (2007). In any
case, beyond the comparison of motifs, adaptations of plots, and other
traditional studies, intermedial analyses will open up new avenues for
understanding why we are still seduced by Poe in such a variety of ways.
One of the most recent achievements in the study of Poe’s life and work
is the monumental Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (2019a). Its edi-
tors, J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, have sought to compile a com-
pendium of new developments in Poe criticism, including examinations of
his legacy. For instance, Jeffrey Weinstock reflects on Poe’s influence in
postmodern culture and suggests that the postmodern elements in Poe’s
writing certainly anticipated, and influenced, what other authors began
doing 100 years later (719). Poe’s well-known influence on Latin American
Modernismo is also dealt with in a contribution by Margarida Vale de Gato,
who observes that Fernando Pessoa’s translations of Poe’s poems into
Portuguese feature “a preference for verbal rhythm,” which, according to
Vale de Gato, might explain why Poe’s poetic reputation in the United
States “pales in comparison to Europe and Latin America” (619). Poe’s
visual legacy is assessed by Barbara Cantalupo, who also develops and
extends the discussion of the influence of Poe in the visual arts. Finally, of
special interest is the advocacy for Poe by three giants of Latin American
letters, Horacio Quiroga, Jorge L. Borges, and Julio Cortázar, a trinity of
authors who, according to Emron Esplin, can be equated to Baudelaire,
Mallarmé, and Valéry (605). These three South American writers not only
advocated for Poe’s oeuvre, but also recreated, imitated, or translated Poe
for a Spanish reading audience.
xxvi INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART

Retrospective Poe is divided into four parts. Part I, “Poe’s Echoes of the
Classical World and his Current Legacy,” provides the reader with a gen-
eral overview of Poe, while offering an invitation to look at classical and
(post)modern readings of Poe’s work, particularly in Greece. Chapters 1
and 2 offer insights into the presence of the Hellenic world in Poe, and
examine traces of Poe’s literature in nineteenth-century Greece, respec-
tively. Greek interest in Poe might have been triggered by his comparison
with Lord Byron. In the opening chapter, Harry L. Poe criticizes T.S. Eliot
for having understood Poe’s horror fiction as representing the whole body
of his work. Indeed, part of the extraordinary breadth of Poe’s writing is
the focus on the universal themes of life and death, love, beauty, and jus-
tice, which for Harry L. Poe evoke two great cultural strands in the
Western world: Hellenist and biblical. This chapter offers a comprehensive
assessment of the classical strand of Poe by analyzing the presence of
Hellenic elements in his poetry and fiction.
In Chap. 2, Dimitrios Tsokanos considers the impact of Charles
Baudelaire’s renditions of Poe’s work on a European readership, particu-
larly in terms of the presence of the American author in Greece and the
reasons for his late arrival there compared to neighboring countries.
Tsokanos pays special attention to the translations by Emmanuel Rhoides
(1836–1904), a Greek writer, journalist, and translator who produced the
first Poe renditions in Greek in 1877, offering a less embellished kind of
translation, one which would later come to constitute the Greek face of
Edgar Allan Poe.
Chapter 3 looks at the social fascination that death and mourning—
usually the demise of children, infants, and young women—produced in
nineteenth-century popular culture. In it, Eulalia Piñero Gil discusses
Poe’s awareness of the impact of these social realities, which he also expe-
rienced in his own life. This chapter analyzes the influence of the deaths of
young women on the deranged personality of many of Poe’s male charac-
ters, who, traumatized by the illness and death of their loved ones, end up
committing transgressive acts in search of a fetishistic desire for
consolation.
Part II, “Poe and Modernism,” offers readings of Poe with a Modernist
perspective. While the break of Modernism with Romanticism is a truism
in the critical response to both literary movements, the chapters in this
section explore and qualify the extent of that break in particular cases that
relate Eliot’s work, both poetry and criticism, to Poe’s oeuvre. Kevin
J. Hayes discussed the influence Poe had on avant-garde painters in
 INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART xxvii

“One-Man Modernist” (2002). Strangely enough, little research has been

done on the influence that he may have had on Modernist writers despite
the Modernist assertions of the distance that separated Romanticism and
Modernism. In this section, contributors explore the connections, quite
frequently silent and denied, that linked Eliot and Poe.
The first two chapters, Chaps. 4 and 5, present new readings of the
troubling literary relationship that Eliot had with Poe (as indeed he had
with other predecessors such as Samuel T. Coleridge and William
Wordsworth). Viorica Patea contributes a judicious chapter that explores
the influence of Poe on both Eliot and Ezra Pound. For this purpose she
goes back to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry to analyze the type of influ-
ence that Poe exerted over them and then moves on to examine Poe’s
influence on the American Modernists, following the traditional notion of
Poe’s voyage from America to Europe and then back to America in his
development as a cultural icon. Patea analyzes the Romantic poetics
underlying those of Eliot, linking them to the poetics of Poe to identify a
ghostly influence that the latter exercised over Eliot. The chapter may be
read as an exploration of Eliot’s debt to Poe as well as to the British
Romantics, despite all efforts by Eliot to deny such an influence in his
essays on Poe and on the Romantics, and even in “Tradition and the
Individual Talent.”
In Chap. 5, Stephanie Sommerfeld distinguishes between poeta ludens,
Poe, and poeta doctus, Eliot. Based on this distinction, she explores their
approaches to literature by examining some of the literary strategies used
by both authors, for example the importance of skill, bathos, intertextual-
ity, or even class, in order to evaluate how these function in each poet’s
work. The distinction Sommerfeld makes between doctus and ludens illu-
minates both Poe’s and Eliot’s approaches to poetry, the main difference
being that of the degree of seriousness with which each writer observed
life. Sommerfeld argues that Poe demythologized transcendence by resort-
ing to satire in his tales, while Eliot favored transcendence as a way to
overcome the existential crisis of society in the wake of the horrors of the
twentieth century. She concludes that Eliot’s “maturity,” seen through the
lens of a poet writing in the twenty-first century, is less mature than Poe’s
“puerile” writing.
In Chap. 6, Sławomir Studniarz argues that Poe’s literary legacy is
“puzzling and complicated.” He advances the idea that Eliot’s criticism of
Poe was hindered by the influence that Poe exercised over the French
poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He studies sonority
xxviii INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART

in “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” following Roman Jakobson’s theory

of the poetic text, in an attempt to show that Eliot’s criticism of Poe was
not really criticism, but rather a pretext to write about himself and the
Modernist poetics he defended. Studniarz goes a step further and gives
examples of poets such as William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, and Edith
Sitwell, to name just a few, who loved Poe beyond their adolescence, thus
rebuking Eliot’s dictum, and suggesting that Eliot’s essay is a misreading
guided by critical prejudice.
In Chap. 7, Bonnie McMullen focuses on the seduction Poe exercised
over Francis Scott Fitzgerald. McMullen considers Poe and Fitzgerald in
terms of their familiarity with the theatrical life, their writing of short fic-
tion, and their changing fortunes. She analyzes “William Wilson” and “A
Short Trip Home” and seeks points of connection between the two sto-
ries, looking particularly at concrete similarities. She analyzes the architec-
ture and the townscape, the university lives of the characters, and, most
importantly, the characters themselves, as she makes a detailed argument
that Fitzgerald uses doubles of Poe’s characters in his own story. In this
way, McMullen concludes, Poe becomes the presiding ghost in
Fitzgerald’s story.
Part III, entitled “Poe’s Readership in Spain,” offers a handful of exam-
ples of the ways in which Poe’s fiction has been marketed to young or
adult Spanish-reading audiences. In Hispanic contexts, Poe’s texts were
read and understood differently depending on the readers’ ages. Editions
of Poe’s tales catered to the interests of these specific audiences, and illus-
trations were carefully selected by the editors.
Chapter 8 is an approach to Poe’s literary criticism and aesthetic recep-
tion in Spain in the 1930s and 1940s. Prior to those decades, authors and
artists from the previous half century had made extensive use of Charles
Baudelaire’s translations of and commentaries on Poe published in Spain.
In their chapter, Alejandro Jaquero-Esparcia and José Manuel Correoso-­
Rodenas explain that during one of the most convoluted periods of
twentieth-­century Spain, a group of critics, among them Carlos Fernández
Cuenca and Josep Farrán i Mayoral, managed to subvert the image of Poe
created by Baudelaire. These authors began to offer more academic and
historical readings of Poe, and their critical editions soon became mile-
stones “within the Hispanic intellectual panorama” (139) and a reference
point for national and international scholarship.
In Chap. 9, Fernando González-Moreno and Margarita Rigal-Aragón
analyze how Poe’s texts were introduced to Spanish readers and how they
 INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART xxix

were made available to a select audience following a reading based on

“maturity.” In this regard, the inexpensive, abridged editions for children
of Poe’s lesser known stories, published in booklet format during the first
decades of the twentieth century and during the Francoist dictatorship,
contrast with hardcover editions from the 1950s to the 1990s, which were
for adolescents and highbrow audiences, many of them characterized by
evocative illustrations aimed at suggesting what reflections on the tales
readers might have.
Chapter 10 focuses on the Spanish reception of “Berenice,” particularly
on the different (audio)visual representations of this tale in Spanish popu-
lar culture. In their study, Ana González-Rivas Fernández and María Isabel
Jiménez González first examine the work of two well-known Spanish illus-
trators and then explore the impact that “Berenice” had on the Spanish
comic genre. Their chapter concludes with a close study of “El trapero”
(“The Ragman”), a loose adaptation of “Berenice” by Narciso Ibáñez
Serrador, a Spanish director, screenwriter, and Poe lover, who produced
one of the all-time favorite TV series in the 1980s, Historias para no
dormir [Stories to Keep You Awake], for Televisión Española, Spanish
public television.
Part IV, “Poe’s Long and Far-Reaching Legacy,” is a reflection on the
deep impact that Edgar Allan Poe had on the American readership and on
overseas audiences. This section opens with Chap. 11 in which J. Gerald
Kennedy argues that Poe foresaw the collective anxiety and the “culture of
fear” of contemporary society that began to emerge as a result of the secu-
larization of Western civilization, when scientific skepticism undermined
religious belief. Kennedy sets out to explore some of Poe’s “troubling
texts,” that is, a handful of poems and tales that show Poe’s theological
qualms and illustrate how he anticipated our culture of fear, foreseeing as
he did the proliferation of false narratives (today’s “fake news”) and the
threat of atomic annihilation and weapons of mass destruction, and even
anticipating the threat of environmental destruction.
In Chap. 12, Jeffrey A. Savoye seeks traces of sentiments of nostalgia in
history up to the time of Poe. In his view, the American author lived in a
cultural environment awash with nostalgia, a longing for the reinvention
of a romanticized Southern past. Nostalgia is a concept that has gone
largely unobserved by Poe scholars in their discussion of his enduring leg-
acy in the popular imagination, and this chapter analyzes in detail the
national sense of this sentiment and how Poe’s image benefited from it.
xxx INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART

In Chap. 13, John Gruesser offers a comprehensive study of how “The

Gold-Bug” was reproduced in books and journals during the time of the
Jim Crow laws in the United States. Though Jupiter was an emancipated
African American, the caricatural nature of his description pointed to the
veiled racism present in antebellum American society. Gruesser investi-
gates how Poe’s work has been seen as suitable for diverse educational
purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries despite some of his
texts having been seen as including elements of racism. He analyzes the
shift from a readership who would accept racism before the Civil War to
one that would look with suspicion on that same racism. To make texts
more palatable to such readers, editors would use a range of strategies to
conceal the explicit racism of “The Gold-Bug,” but would continue to
reinforce the racial hierarchy of the period.
In Chap. 14, Marta Miquel-Baldellou analyzes the fascination that
Stephen King has felt for Poe. She reads King’s indebtedness to Poe as a
metaphorical Jungian shadow, linking this concept to Harold Bloom’s
theory of anxiety. She emphasizes intertextual references and the psycho-
analytic content of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Monkey,”
one of King’s early stories. Some of those references do not come from
Poe but from Marie Bonaparte’s analysis of Poe’s fiction, leading to a dis-
cussion of the similarities of the childhood experiences of both Poe and
King. The doubling of fictive elements, as well as specularity and sexual
drive, become dominant elements in the analysis. Miquel-Baldellou’s
chapter is interesting in itself and also because it points to the way in which
one particular author needed the ghostly presence of Poe to develop his
career as a writer of terror fiction.
In Chap. 15, Eusebio Llàcer-Llorca analyzes Roger Corman’s famous
adaptation of “The Masque of the Red Death.” Llàcer-Llorca focuses on
strategies of amplification, such as the blending of the plot of “The
Masque” with that of “Hop-Frog,” the addition of characters that do not
appear in the literary text, and the intertextual links that Corman estab-
lished with other works of literature. He also examines architectural ele-
ments and the use of colors, time, and characters. By discussing these
narrative elements, Llàcer-Llorca assesses the ways in which Corman made
use of a literary text to create a filmic discourse that went beyond a simple
adaptation of a single story.
The final chapter in the volume is a thought-provoking analysis of the
influence of Poe on Japanese writers. Takayuki Tatsumi explores twentieth-­
century readings and interpretations of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” a
 INTRODUCTION: RE-ASSESSING POE’S SEDUCTIVE ART xxxi

tale which inspired writers such as Edogawa Rampo, who created narra-
tives of city strollers, and Sakate Yoji, whose play The Attic permits readers
to retrace the history of voyeurism, which began with Poe’s “The Man of
the Crowd” and continued with the Dupin trilogy, stories which Tatsumi
interprets as narratives of city strollers which redefine “eccentric voyeurs as
possible detectives” (299).
The chapters collected in Retrospective Poe attest to the multi-layered
influence that Poe has exerted for close to two centuries, and the responses
to his works by other writers, be they of praise and emulation or, much
more rarely, of harsh criticism. Eliot’s essay, despite its insensitivity, reveals
his reticent attraction to Poe’s work, thus creating a ghostly figure that will
resurface in other authors. The influence is not limited to the literary
sphere. Both in the visual arts and in the cinema, Poe has been a point of
reference, in the process turning into something close to an icon of pop
culture. This shift from the domain of high culture to that of popular cul-
ture might have been foreseen by Eliot, and indeed might serve to help
explain his essay.
Although this book has a structured approach, the editors invite readers
to focus their initial attention on those sections or chapters that best reflect
their interests. As editors, we hope that the volume and its content will
trigger further enriching debates on how Poe’s texts have been read and
understood by his global readership over the course of almost two
centuries.

Almeria, Spain José R. Ibáñez

Valladolid, Spain Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan

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Eliot, T.S. 1949. “From Poe to Valéry.” The Hudson Review 2, no. 3 (Autumn):
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Kennedy and Scott Peeples, 1–17. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Kennedy, J. Gerald and Scott Peeples, eds. 2019b. The Oxford Handbook of Edgar
Allan Poe. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Peeples, Scott. 2007. The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe. Rochester, NY: Camden House.
Pollin, Burton R. 1995. Images of Poe’s Works: A Comprehensive Catalogue of
Illustrations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Pollin, Burton R. 2004. Poe’s Seductive Influence on Great Writers. New York:
iUniverse.
Quinn, Patrick F. 1957. The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP.
Vale de Gato, Margarida. 2019. “Poe and Modern(ist) Poetry: An Impure Legacy.”
In The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and
Scott Peeples, 618–640. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Vines, Lois Davis, ed. 1999. Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press.
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2019. “Postmodern Poe.” In The Oxford Handbook of
Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, 718–734.
Oxford: Oxford UP.
 PART I

Poe’s Echoes of the Classical World

and his Current Legacy
 CHAPTER 1

“The Glory that was Greece

and the Grandeur that was Rome”: Edgar
Allan Poe and the Classical World

Harry Lee Poe

T. S. Eliot’s assertion that the works of Edgar Allan Poe belong to adoles-
cents and have no appeal for adults suggests that Eliot had not read much
Poe (1970, 212). Eliot probably made the mistake, as is often the case
with Poe critics, of projecting Poe’s few horror stories upon the whole
body of his work when he dismissed Poe’s significance in “From Poe to
Valéry.” Poe had a fear that he might be typecast as writing just one kind
of story when his own preference and critical judgment insisted on variety.
While Eliot’s remarks tended to focus on the horror stories that Poe him-
self did not like, he also excluded science fiction and detective fiction from
legitimate literature, thus eliminating the need to recognize Poe’s contri-
bution to the development of two of the most important kinds of stories
told by modern culture.

H. L. Poe (*)
Union University, Jackson, TN, USA
e-mail: hpoe@uu.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3

Switzerland AG 2023
J. R. Ibáñez, S. Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan (eds.), Retrospective
Poe, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09986-1_1
4 H. L. POE

Rather than discussing Poe’s contribution to the formation of modern

culture, however, this chapter will explore Poe’s continuity with the clas-
sical culture of antiquity. While Eliot made broad generalizations about
the adolescent appeal of Poe’s writing, he did so without reference to the
breadth of what Poe actually wrote and how he wrote. The three great
tasks of adolescence are self-esteem, independence, and identity. Poe did
not deal with these adolescent issues, except when they might come into
play in the psychological disorder of a character. Instead, Poe dealt with
the great universal themes of life and death, love, beauty, and justice. In so
doing, he relied upon the evocative qualities of the two great strands of
Western culture: the classical culture inherited from the Greeks and the
biblical culture inherited from the Hebrews.1 This chapter will focus on
the classical strand in Poe.
In Poe’s long struggle to establish a monthly journal, he made clear to
his potential financial backers and subscribers that he intended to produce
a more expensive journal that appealed to a core of educated readers.
Poe’s incorporation of the classical world into his prose and poetry reflects
the demands he made upon his readers. He did not write for children. Poe
expected his readers to be familiar with Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, and the
great body of classical literature. A reader who did not know the classics
would miss much of Poe’s poetry and tales. Poe did not use classical refer-
ences simply as symbols or allegory so much as he used them to evoke and
inform in his effort to create an effect on his readers. Perhaps recognizing
the classical in Poe, George Bernard Shaw wrote of Poe in his centennial
year, “He wrote as if his native Boston was Athens, his Charlottesville
University Plato’s Academy…” (1970, 98).
A cursory glance at Poe’s writings illustrates the part played by the clas-
sical world in his writing. He spoke of Diana, Helen, Pallas Athena, Monos
and Una, Berenice, Eiros and Charmion, and Psyche. He referenced
naiads, hamadryads, Anacreon, Hymen, and Delos. He left titles in Greek:
Zante, Pæan, Eureka, Mellonta Tauta. This chapter will explore how Poe
made use of the classical world in stories and poems.

1
Poe scholars have largely neglected Poe’s reliance on the Bible, but an important mono-
graph on Poe and scripture was published almost 100 years ago. See William Mentzel Forest,
Biblical Allusions in Poe (1928). Forest found 684 biblical quotations or allusions in Poe’s
works. A forty-five-page table in the appendix lists the texts.
 1 “THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE AND THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME”… 5

A Classical Education
In the summer of 1815, young Edgar Poe left Richmond with his foster
parents to spend five years in London while Mr Allan rebuilt his trading
business between England and America. The experience would expose
Poe to many people and places that would percolate into his stories many
years later. In London, Poe began his formal education with the Dubourg
sisters who ran a school in Chelsea around the corner from Jane Austen’s
brother.
Beyond the everyday experience of London, however, Poe could lose
himself in the fabulous collection of the British Museum just around the
corner from the Allan house in Russell Square, a collection augmented in
1816 by the addition of the Elgin Marbles, which would stoke Poe’s clas-
sical imagination. The recently acquired Rosetta Stone may have sparked
Poe’s lifelong interest in cryptography, which played a central role in “The
Gold-Bug.” The collection of mummies may have been the origin of his
comic tale “A Few Words with a Mummy.”
In 1817, young Poe left the tutelage of the Dubourg sisters to study at
the Manor House School in Stoke Newington, a village a few miles just
north of London. The Reverend John Bransby, a classical scholar with an
MA from Cambridge, presided over the little school. Poe could not have
received a comparable education in Richmond in 1817. This grounding in
the literature of the classical world provided Poe with a rich vocabulary
and cast of characters to draw upon in his poetry and prose in later years.
Benjamin Fisher deserves to be quoted in full from an important para-
graph on this subject in which he concisely explained the extent of Poe’s
incorporation of the classical world in his work even while creating the
modern world of literature:

Poe’s poems and tales often ‘speak to’ conditions in his day much more than
what I have called the Poe legend seems to recognize. Poe’s verse may
devolve from Classical forms adapted to poetry in the English language; as
do many of his themes. ‘To Helen’ (1831) may epitomize Poe’s use of
Classical legendry. His education would have familiarized him with lore
concerning Helen of Troy. Poe’s observations about prosody are scattered
throughout his criticism, especially in ‘The Rationale of Verse’ (1848),
Classical or Neo-classical underpinnings are strong in ‘Sonnet—To Science,’
his concept of plot and unified effect devolves from Aristotle, and many of
the tales resemble the Classical dialogue in theme and form. ‘The Colloquy
of Monos and Una,’ ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’ or ‘The
6 H. L. POE

Cask of Amontillado’ might be categorized as Poe’s revivals of that ancient

form. Even when there are not the two-person interchanges of speech neatly
patterned as in these works, the methodology hovers over many of Poe’s
writings. Although the dialogue is usually thought of as a prose form, the
verbal exchanges in ‘The Raven,’ ‘Lenore,’ ‘Ulalume’ and ‘Eldorado’ show
likenesses to the dialogue, whatever may seem atypical. In Poe’s writings the
unusual does not mean the unrealistic, as readers of ‘Silence—A Fable,’ ‘The
Raven’ or ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ know. (2008, 15)

Though “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” does not contain the obvi-
ous classical artifacts like a bust of Pallas, it represents Poe’s adoption of an
important feature of Greek drama which figures prominently in almost all
of Poe’s horror. The action takes place off stage or before the beginning
of the telling of the tale. The reader must imagine the blood and gore, for
Poe will only allude to it. Rarely does anyone actually die in a Poe story—
before or after, but rarely during.
Much has been written about Poe’s contemporary setting in the United
States and the relationship between his writing and the social context. One
might think that Poe’s attention to the classical world would be out of step
with the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, except that the still young
republic intentionally created images and a mythos that invoked and
evoked the ancient republics of Athens and Rome. My great-great-great
grandfather was named Caius Marcellus Swift. Henry Clay’s abolitionist
cousin was Cassius Marcellus Clay. Associations with the classical world
were fashionable. With its Neo-classical architecture, the federal city was
an intentional effort to present itself to the world as the embodiment of
the classical ideal. To be an educated person was to have one foot in the
classical world. This trend continued long after Poe’s death, and we hear
Abraham Lincoln borrowing phrases and themes from the funeral oration
by Pericles when he gave his own Gettysburg Address to honor the
fallen dead.
The primary way Poe made use of the classical tradition involved names.
Classical names conjure up associations for those who know them. They
do not symbolize so much as they suggest and evoke older stories, ideas,
attitudes, personality traits, and behaviors. Benjamin Fisher has drawn
attention to the way Poe used the same Greek stem for the names of some
of his heroines: Helen, Lenore, Eleonore (Fisher 2008, 41, 75, 83). The
name ελένη (elene ̄) may derive from ελανη (elane ̄), meaning “torch,” or
from Σελήνη (sele ̄ne ̄), meaning “moon.” In either case, the stem is
 1 “THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE AND THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME”… 7

associated with the idea of light, and thus the “radiant maiden whom the
angels name Lenore.” Because of the prevalence of classical names in ante-
bellum America, however, not all classical names found in Poe’s work need
have an intended classical association. Pym’s companion when he set sail
was named Augustus, and the protagonist of Poe’s second novel was Julius.
This brief chapter cannot explore in any depth the ways that Poe used
the classical world in his writing, but some of the more obvious instances
will serve to illustrate the extent to which the classical world formed part
of the fabric of thought and common understanding in antebellum
America.

Poetry
Not surprisingly, Poe’s reliance on the classical world appears in his earliest
poetry, written while he was still studying ancient languages and literature.
This reliance, however, was not the artificial dependence of youth in aping
a fashion for the culture’s most ancient and revered literature. It was sim-
ply the common language and idiom of his modern world. His familiarity
with the classical world continued to be part of his poetry until the end.

“Tamerlane” (1827)2
Though “Tamerlane” is set in Central Asia, Poe could not help referenc-
ing the classical world. Tamerlane, the military leader, has an affinity with
Caesar of Rome. Tamerlane also referred to his beloved as Ada, whom
Alexander the Great made the Queen of Caria in Asia Minor.

“Romance” (1827)
Anacreon, the lyric poet of the sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, makes
an appearance in “Romance.” Poe also mentioned him in a catalogue of
Greek authors in “Some Ancient Greek Authors, Chronologically
Arranged” in the April 1836 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger (Poe
1836, 301).

2
The dates for Poe’s poetry refer to the year of first printing. Dates are provided
from Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume I: Poems (1969).
8 H. L. POE

“Sonnet—To Science” (1829)

Diana and her car, naiads, and hamadryads all ornament the landscape of
“Sonnet—To Science.” The naiads; the water nymphs found in rivers,
lakes, and springs; the hamadryads, the spirits who inhabited the trees; and
Diana, the goddess who protected all animal life of the forests, made
nature a place filled with vitality that evoked awe and wonder.

“To-- --” (1829)

In “To-- --” Poe references the Stoic philosophers and Zeno, the pre-­
Socratic philosopher famous for his paradoxes, whom Aristotle credited
with developing dialectic.

“To Helen” (1831)

Helen of Troy with her classic face, Nicean barks, naiads, Greece, Rome,
and Psyche all manage to squeeze into the three short stanzas of “To
Helen.” Mabbott summed up the poem aptly when he wrote, “Beauty is
the lasting legacy of Greece and Rome, and its supreme symbol is the most
beautiful of women, Helen, daughter of Zeus, who brings the wanderer
home and inspires the poet” (Mabbott 1969, 1: 164). Poe, never one to
refrain from inventing a new word, may have done so when referring to
Nicean barks. That he capitalized Nicean implies the place name of Nicea,
the coastal town where the early church formulated the Creed, but the
word can also have a double meaning derived from nike, the Greek word
for the means of victory (1:167). Poe indicated that he wrote the poem in
honor of Jane Stanard, the mother of his childhood friend Bob Stanard,
who had first encouraged him to write poetry (Quinn 1942, 177).

“Israfel” (1831)
The seven Pleiads or Pleiades, the nymph daughters of Atlas and the com-
panions of Artemis, stop in their tracks in “Israfel.” Poe did not add the
Pleiades to this poem until his revision of 1841 (Mabbott 1969, 1:178).
 1 “THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE AND THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME”… 9

“Irenë” or “The Sleeper” (1831)

The three Destinies, or the Fates (Greek Moirai, Latin Parcae), with
Irene, goddess of peace, close by the River Lethe of Hades all sleep
through “The Sleeper” (Graves 1957, 33–34, 48–49). The poem includes
the Greek expression “Ai! ai!” (ΑΙ) which Poe accurately translated as the
woeful “alas!—alas!” It refers to the myth of the accidental slaying of
Hyacinthus by Apollo who caused the hyacinth to grow from the blood of
the dead hero whose petals were said to bear the inscription “ai, ai”
(78–79).3

“The Valley of Nis” or “The Valley of Unrest” (1831)

Nis, or Naissus, supposed birthplace of Constantine, has its own poem in
“The Valley of Nis” in which Helen of Troy flits by again. Poe published
the poem in Poems (1831), but revised it substantially in 1836 when he
published it in The Southern Literary Messenger. In 1845, he published it
three times, eliminating half the poem and making minor revisions with
each new publication in The American Review, The Broadway Journal, and
The Raven and Other Poems. With these revisions, he completely elimi-
nated the classical references, and he changed the name to “The Valley of
Unrest” (Mabbott 1969, 1:190).

“A Pæan” (1831)
Poe gives this poem the title of a Greek verse form. A paean (παιαν) was a
solemn song of praise or of victory. In this case, the song is a funeral hymn,
not of sorrow but of victory for one who has overcome death to enjoy
heavenly bliss. Poe addresses his paean to Helen, probably Mrs Stanard
who had recently died.

“Enigma” (1833)
Mabbott assigned “Enigma” to Poe. The poetic puzzle appeared in the
Baltimore Saturday Visiter in 1833, signed only with the initial P. Based
on the initial and the classical content, and views later expressed by Poe,

3
Ovid told this story in Metamorphoses, X, 162–219. See Mabbott 1969, 1:186.
10 H. L. POE

Mabbott made the attribution. While praising Shakespeare, the answers to

the puzzle include Homer, Aristotle, Kallimachus, and Euripides twice.

“Serenade” (1833)
In this short poem, Poe includes references to Elysium, the realm of the
blessed dead; the seven Pleiades, whom he also mentioned in “Israfel”;
and Endymion, who was given the gift of eternal slumber and was visited
each night by the moon goddess Selene (Graves 1957, 210). The poem is
addressed to Adeline, a name of French origin whose root is derivative of
Ada, the Carian queen alluded to in “Tamerlane.”

“The Coliseum” (1833)

“The Coliseum” requires no explanation for it has outlasted the days of
the classical education. It remains a seemingly timeless monument to the
classical age, although a skeleton. It was built by Vespasian and Titus, the
father-son duo who defeated the Jews in the Jewish War of 66 CE,
destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and seized imperial power after the
forced suicide of Nero.

“Sonnet to Zante” (1836)

Zante, or Zakynthos, an island in the Ionian Sea where Artemis once wan-
dered and which Odysseus ruled, was singled out by Poe in “Sonnet to
Zante.” Poe attempted to link Zante etymologically with the name of the
fallen hero Hyacinthus, but it is a difficult connection to make.

“Dream-Land” (1844)
In “Dream-Land,” Poe collects the Eidolon of Night and other Ghouls,
the woods of the Titans, and the ultimate distant place of Thule. An eido-
lon (εἴδωλειον) was thought to be the phantom of someone dead, but it
also had the idea of an idol. Thule was the northernmost place in the
known world in antiquity, which has been associated with the islands north
of Scotland (Mabbott 1969, 1:345). The Greek word (θύελλα), however,
relates to dreadful storms which the Greeks probably encountered when
they ventured so far away from civilization.
 1 “THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE AND THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME”… 11

“The Raven” (1845)

“The Raven” has a cold, unyielding bust of Pallas Athena and a Plutonian
midnight for company. We assume that Poe meant Pallas Athena when he
mentioned a bust of Pallas, for antiquity had many who bore the name of
Pallas. Athena took the name when she accidentally killed her playmate,
Pallas, whom some stories call a girl and others call a boy (Graves 1957,
44–45). Athena was a goddess of war, but not the goddess of war. She
preferred to settle disputes and to extol mercy in legal proceedings. When
forced to combat, however, she always won, even against Ares, the god of
war. The crow is associated with Athena for bringing her bad news about
the tragic death of three women of Athens. Poe’s raven may have an
intended association with Athena’s black bird (96–99). Pluto (meaning
“the rich one” because grain was the source of wealth, and it came from
beneath the earth) is a name for Hades, the god of the realm of the dead
(94, 122).

“Eulalie” (1845)
In this love poem for his wife, Poe invokes Astarte, the Canaanite goddess
whom the Greeks identified as Aphrodite. Astarte regards Eulalie as her
true child and worthy of the devotion of the narrator.

“Ulalume” (1847)
The difficult and strange “Ulalume” includes Diana, Psyche, the splendor
of Sibyl, a row of cypress trees Titanic, and Lethean peace. The Lethean
fields were found in Hades, but they were separated from the place of
punishment by the River Lethe and provided a place of rest for the virtu-
ous. The Lethean realm belongs to a much later classical tradition than
Homer. The name Ulalume is one of Poe’s many constructions, but it is
based on Latin roots. Mabbott suggested a connection with the Latin verb
ululare, to wail, and the Latin noun lumen, light (Mabbott 1969, 1:419).
Astarte is the Hellenization of the Middle Eastern fertility goddess Ishtar
or Ashtoret and was associated with Venus, as seen in her depiction in this
poem (White 2006, 7, 11–12).
12 H. L. POE

“To Helen (Whitman)” (1848)

Diana makes another brief appearance in “To Helen (Whitman),” as does
an allusion to the Elysian Fields.
Poe’s poetry receives scant attention from modern scholars. There are
many reasons for this, but one might involve the many classical references.
While classical studies formed the core of an education for Poe and his
world for the preceding 2000 years, few well-educated people today rec-
ognize the sources that he drew upon to paint his images. Poe expected
his audience to know the references which would allow the reader’s own
imaginative interaction with the classical stories. While reference works are
readily available online to identify classical references, the act of stopping
to search breaks the spell.

Prose Works

“The Assignation” (1834)4

Poe named the female character in “The Assignation” the Marchesa
Aphrodite (Fisher 2008, 75). In his earlier version, published as “The
Visionary,” she was the Marchesa Bianca. Aphrodite, known to the
Romans as Venus, was the goddess of sexual desire (Graves 1957, 49). In
creating the atmosphere for this story, Poe packs the conversation of the
narrator and Mentoni with classical references and images. Mentoni is
satyr-like. The stranger has Herculean strength. The stranger references
the remains of an inscription in Sparta, ΛΑΣΜ (LASM), which he takes to
be part of ΤΕΛΑΣΜΑ (TELASMA, a word not found in a classical Greek or
koine Greek dictionary). They discuss a painting of Venus and of Apollo.
The stranger quotes Socrates and indicates Ionian embellishments. Thus,
he sets the stage for a classic Greek tragedy.

“Berenice” (1835)
“Berenice” first appeared in The Southern Literary Messenger in March
1835. Berenice was the troublesome sister and rival of Cleopatra whom
the last queen of Hellenistic Egypt managed to dispatch from this world
4
The dates for the prose works refer to their first printing. Dates are provided by Lee
Bondi, October 1998, 41–51. See also Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe
Log (1987).
 1 “THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE AND THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME”… 13

like her other siblings. Egaeus, or Aegeus, was the father of Theseus and
King of Athens, for whom the Aegean Sea was named (Tsokanos 2017,
217). The paternity, however, was ambiguous, for Poseidon had also lain
with the mother of Theseus, and Aegeus had failed to produce an heir
through two previous wives (Graves 1957, 323–324). Another Berenice
was the sister and lover of Herod Agrippa II of Judea whose behavior
played a part in prompting the Jewish rebellion of 66 A.D..

“Shadow—A Parable” (1835)

Oinos narrates the events surrounding the funeral wake for Zoilus, a carp-
ing critic of Homer in ancient Greece (Fisher 2008, 64). The wake takes
place under a sinister conjunction of Ares (Mars), Jupiter, and Saturn. The
story is set in the early Hellenistic city of Ptolemais. The mourners sang
the songs of Anacreon whom Poe had also mentioned in “Romance.” The
name Oinos means wine in Greek (οἶνος). Since Oinos narrates the tale,
one might say that the fantastic story is the result of the wine speaking.

“Ligeia” (1838)
In comparing Ligeia’s beauty with that of the daughters of Delos, Poe
drew upon the classical tradition that the island of Delos was sacred to
Apollo and Artemis, deities of the sun and the moon (Fisher 2008, 75).
The narrator reveals that his marriage was so ill omened that it might have
been presided over by Ashtophet, a non-existent Egyptian deity of misfor-
tune Poe created probably by joining Ashtoreth and Tophet. Tophet was
the place during the apostasy of Judah where child sacrifice was made to
the god Moloch (Is. 30:33; Jer. 7:31–32, 19:6, 11–14). Ashtoreth, in
turn, is associated with Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, and Venus (Graves
1957, 244; Morford and Lenardon 2003, 635). Thus, Poe created a pred-
atory goddess of love. In Ligeia, her husband found the classic Greek chin
which Apollo had only revealed to Cleomenes in a dream. Her eyes were
more profound than the “well” of Democritus who first propounded the
idea that matter is composed of atoms that cannot be destroyed and that
space is an infinite void.
14 H. L. POE

“Siope” (1838)
Also known as “Silence—A Fable,” this story first appeared in the Baltimore
Book, a gift book for 1838. The central figure of interest appears draped in
a Roman toga. The narrator also remarks on the lore of the sybils, the
most famous example being the Oracle of Delphi in service to Apollo.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)

In his only completed novel, Poe used the plot of one of the oldest and
greatest stories of Western civilization, Homer’s Odyssey. Homer’s story
involves a simple voyage that turns into a series of disasters played out
across many locations and misadventures. Like Odysseus, Pym finds his
ship destroyed and most lives lost before his rescue that only leads to new
deadly adventures.

“The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839)

Poe first published “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” in the
December 1839 issue of Burton’s Magazine. Charmion and Eiros were
the two handmaids of Cleopatra who attended her when she committed
suicide in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which he based on
Plutarch. Eiros is the Greek word for wool (εἶρος). Shakespeare gave her
name as Iras, as did Plutarch. Never one to flinch from re-forming words
to suit his purpose, Poe may have intended to associate the name of Eiros
with Eros, the goddess of love.

“Eleonora” (1841)
The male character in “Eleonora” is named Pyrros. Pyrrho (fourth cen-
tury BCE) was the father of philosophical skepticism who traveled with
Alexander the Great in his conquest of the lands from Greece to India
(Fisher 2008, 83). In telling his story, Pyrros suggests that the listener
might regard it as a riddle of the Sphinx. By solving the riddle of the
Sphinx, Oedipus became King of Thebes. In the earlier version, Poe names
the Sphinx, but in the final form, he mentions Oedipus. The leaves of the
great trees in the valley dallied with the Zephyrs (Ζέφυρος), the West
Wind. Eros, the Greek god of love comparable to the Roman Cupid,
ignited their passion. They were lulled by the melodies of the harp of
 1 “THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE AND THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME”… 15

Aeolus, the Warden of the Winds who showed hospitality to Odysseus

(Graves 1957, 357). Eleonora had the chin of a Greek Venus, an odd
remark since Venus was Roman. After her death, she was a saint in Elysium.
With her death, all of the beauty of the valley passed away to the regions
of Hesper. Eos was the sister of Helius who rode with him in his chariot
across the sky. At the end of the night, she arose in the east as Hemera, the
day, until they arrived at the far west where she became Hespera, the eve-
ning. The regions of Hesper lie beyond the setting sun (1957, 149).

“The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841)

Monos, one of the most frequent Greek derivatives in English, means
“alone” or “forsaken.” Una, on the other hand, is one of the most fre-
quent Latin derivatives in English, and it means “together” or “along-
side.” For this story, Poe provides a Greek epigraph that he would later
use as the title of a tale: Μέλλοντα ταύτα (mellonta tauta), which means
“things to come.” In this case, the names and the epigraph capture the
substance of the tale which Poe would later develop as the point of
“Eureka.”

“Eureka” (1848)
Poe gave his cosmological essay a Greek name—eureka (first person singu-
lar, perfect active verb from εὑρίσκω, meaning “I have discovered”). It was
the word uttered by Archimedes when he realized how he could deter-
mine the genuineness of gold while reclining in his bath. Besides giving
the essay a Greek name with powerful scientific associations, Poe followed
the structure of the Timaeus, Plato’s cosmological essay. In the Timaeus,
Plato began with a story set in the distant past, the story of the destruction
of Atlantis. For his cosmological essay, Poe began with a story set in the
distant future. Not only is the essay a cosmological study (the present state
of the universe), it is also a cosmogony (the origins of the universe), which,
as Paul Valéry observed in his analysis of “Eureka,” is one of the oldest
literary forms (Valéry 1970, 110). Commentators have regularly observed
that the theology Poe describes in “Eureka” has many affinities with
Hinduism, but it would be more appropriate to say that it has affinities
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LETTER OF KEATS TO FANNY BRAWNE
 IV

SOME LITERARY FORGERIES

“I cast my bread upon the waters, and it came back to me after
many days!”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked the tall white-haired man who
sat opposite me in his luxurious library. The room was an enormous
one, and thousands of fine books lined the walls from floor to ceiling.
My friend seemed in a confidential mood, and I expected to hear
something startling. This Gothic room, with its early Spanish religious
sculptures, had the very atmosphere of a confessional. My
companion had had a somewhat weird career, and as I watched him
through the heavy smoke of our cigars I recalled many strange
stories of his youth. Once he had been a lawyer’s clerk, but now he
was a director in many banks, with financial interests all over the
world. The variegated stages by which he had risen to such
eminence, not only in business but as a collector of pictures and
books, were not always clear to the friends of his later years.
He told me that he had been so poor as a boy he had often known
hunger; that, as a scrivener in the lawyer’s office, he had eked out a
most pitiable existence copying deeds and other legal documents. In
1885 he happened to read in the newspapers of famous auction
sales of autographs in London, and of the first arrival in this country
of representatives of the English book houses. For instance, Bernard
Quaritch was holding his first exhibition in New York at the Hotel
Astor. General Brayton Ives, Robert Hoe, and other great collectors
of the glaring ‘80’s were beginning to form their libraries. My friend
was fascinated, and as he had no capital to invest in great rarities
himself, he thought he would make a few. He determined to try his
hand at imitation.
Just about that period there was an awakened interest in the ill-fated
Major André, who had suffered death as a British informer. In his
grimy boarding house on Grand Street my friend practiced imitating
André’s handwriting. He finally manufactured a splendid letter in
which Major André wrote to General Washington requesting that he
be shot as a soldier and not hanged as a spy. As he described his
youthful fabrication his mouth lighted with a smile of pleasure, and
he confessed that he had been very proud of this forgery; it had
been a work of art! He finally actually sold this pseudo-André letter
for $650! Those were the days when unpedigreed rarities were more
easily disposed of, as there were not so many autograph sharks
around as there are to-day.
Thirty years elapsed. My friend had grown in riches and in
reputation. Now he was a noted collector; forgotten were the
peccadillos of his youth. In 1915, during the Great War, he noticed
the advertisement of a sale in London containing an André letter. He
cabled an unlimited bid, as was now his custom. The letter was
bought for him for £280. A few weeks later, upon opening the
package which he received from the custom house, the inclosed
autograph letter looked familiar to him. A closer scrutiny revealed the
fact that he had bought back, at three times what he had received for
it, his own fabrication!
Several years ago I had the remarkable good fortune to secure for
my own library a letter written by Cervantes. It is the only one known
in a private collection to-day. Other letters of his—and they are few—
may be seen only in the Spanish National Library at Madrid.
Cervantes’s autographs are so rare that the British Museum
possesses no example of the handwriting of the author of Don
Quixote, nor is there one in the library of the Hispanic Society in New
York City, founded by that great collector, Mr. Archer M. Huntington.
From this you may realize to some extent the desirability and
scarcity of a letter of Cervantes. Written on two pages, and dated
February 4, 1593, it is extremely legible, in a bold Castilian hand,
and contains his signature in full: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
with a fanciful twirling flourish becoming to a great Spanish author.
Many an expert eye has passed upon it gloatingly in years gone by,
for it has been in the celebrated collections, first of Benjamin Fillon,
in Paris, and later of Alfred Morrison, of London.

LAST PAGE OF THE ONLY LETTER IN THIS COUNTRY WRITTEN

BY CERVANTES
Some time after acquiring this celebrated autograph I was startled
one day in New York, when an agent from a well-known English
autograph house telephoned me and said he had a wonderful letter
of Cervantes. He asked £3000 for it, which was certainly not too
high, when you stop to consider that Cervantes’s place in literature is
second only to that of Shakespeare. If a Shakespeare letter were
found to-day many collectors would not consider $500,000 too much
to pay for it. What, then, is a Cervantes letter worth? While I sat
mulling over these mathematical problems, the doorbell rang and the
dealer came in. His manner was important, almost condescending.
His precious letter was inclosed in a fine morocco case, elaborately
tooled. He removed it from its costly trappings, and after a moment
of suspense, which was really most effective, he handed the letter to
me. I could scarcely believe my eyes. I looked for the date—
February 4, 1593. It was an excellently forged copy of the one in my
possession.
“Where in the devil did you get this?”
His face turned the color of a carnation and his swanky manner of
assurance wilted away.
“Just what do you mean?” he asked me slowly. I motioned him to
follow, and took him into my book vault, where I laid his clever
forgery next to mine the original. For a moment I thought he would
crumple up and fall to the floor. I have never seen anyone so
completely nonplussed. He had really believed his Cervantes letter
to be the original, and had come in all good faith to sell it to me. I
proved to him how some forger, after securing the sheets of old
paper, had, through a process of photo-engraving, cleverly produced
the letter which he had so exultingly shown to me.
The beautiful thing about the book business is that you must be
constantly on your guard. It makes the game exciting to know that
there are beings who, like vultures, would pick your bones if you but
gave them the chance. Thank heaven for them. The chase is more
exhilarating on their account.
The atmosphere of Wall Street is that of a Quaker meetinghouse
beside it.
 ORIGINAL DRAWING BY DAUMIER OF DON QUIXOTE
Forgeries have been in existence as long as the collecting game
itself. During the Renaissance forgers were very active in every field
of creative art. Not only did they make imitations of great Greek and
Latin classics, which were just beginning their popular vogue in
Europe, but they very cleverly copied old medals, and fabricated old
gems too. Of course, the collector himself is in a sense morally
responsible for the forger. The collector’s overdeveloped sense of
acquisitiveness leads him to pay extravagant prices for his favorites;
he will search out and buy every available pen scratch of some great
writer.
A poor wretch in an attic reads in the newspapers that a capitalist
has just paid $2000 for an autograph letter of Robert Burns. He then
begins to “discover” other letters and documents by the same author.
This is the launching of a career that is usually full of excitement and
gives full scope to the imagination. The forger is a picturesque figure
until he, too, is discovered and publicly condemned. This class of
men—I know of no women forgers—is responsible for the literary
detective. There is real sport in tracking these fabrications. An ability
to tell the original from the false, the genuine from the spurious,
sometimes under the most trying circumstances, has developed
almost into a fine art.
There are men who make literary detecting their profession. Their
eyes are so well trained that they are seldom wrong when
pronouncing judgment. They are as fully aware of the thousand and
one tricks of the professional forger’s game as they are alert to the
peculiarities of each author’s handwriting.
These experts could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. When
you stop to consider that there are men even now in dark holes in
London, in obscure garrets in Paris, in flats in Harlem, and in
apartments in Atlantic City, making their livelihood forging
autographs, it puts you pleasantly on your guard. These fellows are
very often unsuccessful authors with a certain amount of erudition,
broken-down booksellers, or other bits of riffraff from the literary
world. I once knew a genial old college professor who turned from
unlucrative teaching to make an honest penny, as he termed it, by
forging.
My uncle Moses always told with a chuckle of his experience with an
Englishman by the name of Robert Spring. He called at my uncle’s
shop in Commerce Street one day in the 60’s and said he had an old
document signed by Washington. In fact, it was a military pass
issued to some Revolutionary worthy, permitting him to go through
the lines. My uncle naturally pricked up his ears at the mention of his
favorite character, General Washington, and immediately asked to
see this interesting relic. The Englishman then held it up
dramatically, and when Uncle Moses read it he felt like embracing
his visitor. For, lo and behold, the pass was made out in the name of
one of my uncle’s own ancestors!
It had every earmark of age, was written on old paper in faded ink,
the creases were almost worn through, and the edges were frayed.
To his covetous eyes the pass seemed much more desirable on
account of its connection with his forbears. He asked the Englishman
what he wanted for it and how it had come into his possession. He
glibly explained he had found it in an old-fashioned hair trunk in the
attic of a house in old Philadelphia. He wanted fifteen dollars for this
pass—a large sum in those days, when one could buy a full
autograph letter of Washington for that much money. Uncle Moses
rose to this thin story as a trout strikes at a fly.
Some years later Ferdinand J. Dreer, of Philadelphia, a connoisseur,
came to see him. Among other things, my uncle showed him the
faded pass. Mr. Dreer looked at it for a moment, and then, according
to Uncle Moses, turned to him and in that cheerfully disgusted tone
which one collector uses to a brother who has made a foolish deal,
said:—
“Mr. Polock, you, of all men, should know better! This thing is an
arrant forgery, and worth less than nothing.”
It later appeared that Robert Spring was the first great forger of
American documents. He had written many such military passes, all
of them with spurious signatures of General Washington. But he was
always foxy enough to look up the name of some ancestor of the
man on whom he planned to prey. Uncle Moses, nevertheless,
remained stoical, and said this outlay of fifteen dollars was one of the
most profitable investments he had ever made. It placed him on his
guard as nothing had before; was, in fact, an investment that would
in time be worth thousands of dollars to him.
 FROM A LETTER IN THE AUTOGRAPH OF GEORGE WASHINGTON,
SIGNED BY HIM FOR MARTHA WASHINGTON

Spring’s career as a forger lasted a surprisingly long time. He

reached a point where he made no effort to conceal from his
Philadelphia customers the almost made-to-order character of these
documents of his. He salved their feelings by saying he would never
think of offering them anything that was not genuine. Of course, he
was an excellent penman. Washington was his favorite model,
perhaps because he had greatest success in copying his
handwriting. He sold most of his productions to persons who lived
abroad, who were not regular collectors. He assumed various names
when he wrote to members of the English nobility, representing
himself sometimes as a widow in want, or as the needy daughter of
Stonewall Jackson, thus feeding most lucratively upon the kind-
heartedness of wealthy people thousands of miles away. He was
arrested several times, but finally reformed. Before dying he grew to
be a most proper and meticulously honest dealer in books and
engravings, and, I suppose, rests comfortably now in the bookmen’s
heaven.
I have collected letters and documents of Washington almost from
the beginning of my career. To-day I own an interesting, authentic
collection of more than two hundred, written between the years 1755
and 1799. He was a prolific correspondent. His handwriting is always
legible; the writing of a sensitive, clear-thinking person whose nerves
were under excellent control. Many of these letters are the charming
messages which any leisured gentleman of that period might write.
Others are on military matters of the utmost importance. Another
series deals entirely with agriculture, and shows how well the
masterly general could play the gentleman farmer.
The years which have passed since his death have seen the world
flooded with Washington autographs. But it took a measure of daring
and a fanatical spirit of patriotism to forge letters of his while he was
still alive and fulfilling with vigor the now historical duties of his
military career. It was in May or June of 1777 that a book appeared
in London purporting to contain certain letters of Washington written
in 1776 to friends and relatives of his in Virginia. These letters paint
him as a man whose motives were questionable. The false lines in
this book relate his pretended thoughts and feelings about the
Revolution in which he was then engaged. They make him say he is
tired of it all; that he wishes for peace at any price with the mother
country. They reveal him as a military scapegrace with the soul, but
not the courage, of a traitor! Despite the publisher’s preface
explaining his possession of these intimate documents, it was soon
proved that the letters were deliberate forgeries. Nevertheless, they
were of grave importance at the time, for they served as a powerful
propaganda against Washington, and therefore the colonies, and
made a strong appeal to the ignorant and easily biased mind.
Forgers must have, above all, a keen sense of chronology. This is
the first great requisite after their natural skill in imitating handwriting.
For instance, they cannot refer to the discovery of America in a letter
supposed to have been written before that event took place, or date
a letter of Dickens, 1872, two years after his death, and expect to get
away with it. Both these slips, strange to say, have occurred. In fact,
forgers frequently make similar crude errors, alluding to incidents
that hadn’t happened at the time the letter was dated.
It is plain, therefore, that the master forger must have his chronology
at his finger tips. He should know not only the dates of history, which
he can find in any textbook, but he must be familiar with the history
of costume, of furnishings, and decorations also. I remember reading
the invention of one gentleman’s brain and pen in which he alluded
to hoop skirts ten years before they put in their dreadful appearance.
The literary forger hoping for success should also acquire an almost
endless knowledge of the colloquial language of the period in which
he writes, and must be naturally a student of orthography and
spelling. In fact, he has taken up the one career where he has
literally to mind his P’s and Q’s!
It is fairly easy to imitate the writing of a distinguished character; the
most difficult part is to interpret, as well, the thoughts of the equally
distinguished mind. A forger of Thackeray wrote the name of the
author of Vanity Fair in many volumes, together with a short
comment about the text. He composed a pointed criticism of each
work, or invented what he believed to be some smart phrase about
the author. In this case the signature and the writing itself are so
excellent that they almost defy detection, but the thoughts are no
more those of the great Thackeray than are mine of Shakespeare.
 PAGE FROM A LETTER OF THACKERAY TO MRS. BROOKFIELD

Not many are privileged to see presentation copies actually in the

making. A friend of mine told me of an experience he had in London.
One day he strolled into a little bookshop near the British Museum.
He looked over some dusty volumes for a time, and finally found one
which he wanted to buy. There was no clerk in the front of the shop,
so he walked to the rear, where he discovered a little old man seated
at a large table. Before him was a row of books all opened at the title
pages. The busy old fellow was bent over another and so absorbed
in his work that he heard nothing. My friend looked over his shoulder.
He was committing a little quiet forgery! In other words he was
caught in “fragrant delectation.” On the title page he was
painstakingly forming Lewis Carroll’s autograph. Before my friend left
he had an opportunity to see what was written. He found, much to
his astonishment, that the old gentleman was inditing to long-
deceased friends of Lewis Carroll, copies of Alice in Wonderland,
each one with an appropriate inscription. When asked the reason for
all this industry, he replied, “I am making them for the American
market!”
Among the many bugaboos which the forger has to face are
watermarks woven into paper. These are the manufacturer’s trade-
marks, and often show the date the paper was made. You can see
them if you hold the paper to the light. Quite recently I was offered
three manuscripts supposed to be in the hand of Oscar Wilde. His
exquisite though affected Greek style of handwriting was well
enough imitated. But when I pointed out to the man who offered the
manuscripts to me that they were written upon paper which bore the
watermarks of a manufacturer who had made it during the Great
War, he suddenly remembered an appointment and hurriedly made
his departure.
About twenty years ago a celebrated French firm of book and
autograph dealers cabled my brother Philip that they were offering
for sale the original manuscript of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Wilde, who
was a literary exhibitionist if ever there was one, gave Salomé to the
world in French, and not such very good French at that. As I had an
extensive collection of Wilde autographs even then, I was extremely
eager to own the original of this famous work also. Before my reply
could reach the firm in France, some luckier collector who was on
the spot at the time bought it. I was very much annoyed, but
concealed my chagrin as best I could, not even inquiring who the
buyer was. I suspected it was some French author. The year before
last, when on my annual pilgrimage to England, a French journalist
came to see me one day at the Carlton Hotel in London, with the
news that he knew the man who owned the Salomé manuscript, and
was informed that he would part with it if paid a sufficiently high
price.

PAGE FROM ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF OSCAR WILDE’S

“SALOMÉ”
Now, I am never frightened at high prices. I asked my friend to return
to France and buy it for me. Two days passed. Then I received the
news that I was again too late. It was plain that Salomé was playing
hide and seek with me, and placing my head on a charger. After two
months in England I went to Paris. I had hardly arrived before the
collector who last purchased Salomé offered to sell it. I asked him to
bring it immediately to my hotel. With my nerves on edge, I kept
telling myself that this time she should not escape me. Now, the
collector in question was supposed to be a judge of autographs. He
arrived and took the manuscript from its case. I fairly grabbed it from
him, fearing that the evil Salomé would sprout wings and fly out of
the window. I opened the cover to the first page, looked at it, turned
the second, then the third. Quickly I closed it and gave it back to him.
A silence followed during which he regarded me in amazement.
“No, thank you,” I said; “I am looking for Salomé in the flesh, not a
will-o’-the-wisp. Your manuscript is a forgery!”
It was plain this poor fellow had been deceived. He walked up and
down my room, tearing at his hair in the best French manner, for he
had given a good sum for this clever fabrication. I, too, was deeply
disappointed, after tracking over Europe for it. Like the villain in the
play, Salomé still evaded me.
 DEDICATION OF OSCAR WILDE’S “THE SPHINX”
TO MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL

In Philadelphia a year later I received a cable from a firm of

auctioneers in Paris, offering me the original manuscript of Salomé
once more. I naturally paid no attention to the offer, thinking it
another forgery. I was tired of the wiles of this wicked woman. I had
come to the conclusion that this work was not, by some weaving of
the fates, for the house of Rosenbach. No more fool’s errands for
me.
A few weeks after, when dining with a well-known American collector
in New York, he said to me:
“Doctor, I have something which will open even your eyes. I have
Salomé!”
Naturally, I could not suppress a cynical laugh. “Another forgery?” I
smilingly inquired.
After dinner we went to his library, and he pointed very proudly to
two old copy books on the table. The moment I looked at the pages I
knew that at last I held the original in my hands. How envious I was!
But I now realized this manuscript could never be mine. I felt truly
heartbroken. My friend, seeing I was not exactly elated over his
treasure, but rather downcast, asked the reason. I related the whole
story of my chase.
With great generosity he replied, with the air of a sultan presenting a
favorite slave, “Doctor, I don’t want to stand in your way. If you want
her, she is yours.” He told me its history as far as he knew it; the
manuscript had been purchased by Pierre Louÿs, the eminent
French poet. It was he who had bought it directly from the shop in
Paris when I first tried to obtain it twenty years before. It is far more
precious to-day than it was then. Not only is it the greatest work from
the pen of Oscar Wilde but it is the one work of his that has been
translated into all languages. It has also been used as the libretto by
Richard Strauss for his startling and beautiful opera.
The up-to-date literary forger always keeps his eye upon the market.
Genuine letters of certain famous, or infamous, men and women will
always command high prices. Yet the styles in collecting change as
in everything else. One decade there may be a sudden craze for
Byron letters; the next, autograph letters or documents pertaining to
Keats or Shelley are frantically sought.
So it goes. One cycle begins as another cycle ends. Therefore,
forgers’ productions often swarm into the market when the popularity
of an autograph is on the crest of the wave. There are certain
historical characters whose autographs will always sell at top prices.
With this in mind, one of the greatest hoaxes ever planned was, for a
time, put over by a French forger a few years after the middle of the
nineteenth century. Vrain Lucas was his name, and his guileless
customer was a noted mathematician, Michel Chasles. I first knew of
Lucas’s wretched forgeries through hearing my uncle Moses tell of
them; in a way, it was rather humorous, for when he told me the
story he became as enraged as though Lucas had taken him in,
rather than Chasles.
Vrain Lucas was a middle-aged man of fair education and rather well
read. By his own confession he had manufactured more than twenty-
five thousand spurious autographs, many of which he sold to
Chasles over a period of eight years. During that time Chasles had
doubted his word only once. Lucas immediately offered to buy back
everything he had sold him, and thus Chasles’s faith was restored.
This charlatan, Lucas, must have had a certain hypnotic influence
over Chasles, plus the assurance and the courage of Old Nick
himself. Chasles’s belief in him, however, proved Lucas’s undoing.
For when he sold him two letters from Charles V to Rabelais,
Chasles, in his excitement and delight, presented them to the
Academy of Belgium. The letters for a time were believed to be
genuine. Then Lucas came again to Chasles, this time with letters
from Pascal to Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton, in which the writer
proved that he, and not Newton, had discovered the law of
gravitation.
You can imagine how deeply moved was Chasles, the naïve
mathematician. He rushed with them to the French Academy of
Science, and at once the scientific world was stirred into a
commotion. At the height of this agitation Sir David Brewster came
forward and announced that the letters must be from the pen of an
impostor, proving conclusively at the same time that Newton was a
mere child of ten when these pretended messages of Pascal were
written. Thus began the beginning of the end for the forger.
Certain testimony given by Chasles at Lucas’s trial before a tribunal
of the Seine, in 1870, is almost unbelievable. It seems ridiculous to