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American Literature Readings in the
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Editors
José R. Ibá ñ ez and Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan

Retrospective Poe
The Master, His Readership, His Legacy
Editors
José R. Ibá ñ ez
Department of Philology/English Studies Division, University of
Almería, Almería, Spain

Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan

Department of English Philology, University of Valladolid, Valladolid,
Spain

ISSN 2634-579X e-ISSN 2634-5803

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
ISBN 978-3-031-09985-4 e-ISBN 978-3-031-09986-1
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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
development 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 comment that Lois D. Vines considered both an
exaggeration and an understatement (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 discovery 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
figure—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 “slipshod writing” (1949, 327). He even made the point
that only a mind that was still adolescent could be attracted to Poe’s
style, which he disparaged as “puerile thinking” (327). What puzzled
Eliot above all was the passionate 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
perhaps 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 Alarcó n, 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 literary 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
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
translations and of the critical appreciation of the American writer, plus
a thorough 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
appropriation 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 geographical 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 globalized, 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
collected essays on Poe’s ascendancy in Poe’s Seductive Influence on
Great Writers. The volume contains twelve essays plus seven reviews
about notable 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 understanding 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
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 examines the works of anthologizers, editors, and
translators of Poe’s texts worldwide. This study reveals why some tales
and poems were anthologized—including some beautifully illustrated
editions—which ultimately meant that they would enjoy broad critical
attention, while others, considered less important texts, were relegated
to the fringes of academic discourse. Indeed, anthologizers and editors
have shaped our understanding and our appreciation of Poe’s work
since the final decades of the nineteenth 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
cinema 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 painters 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 previous 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-
Aragó n and Fernando Gonzá lez-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 readings of how Poe has been
interpreted by painters. They go beyond the 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-Aragó n and Gonzá lez-
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’ interpretations 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 editors, J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, have sought to compile
a compendium 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 Cortá zar, 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.
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
general 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, respectively. 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 justice, 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,
particularly 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 Piñ ero Gil discusses
Poe’s awareness of the impact of these social realities, which he also
experienced 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 characters, 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 “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 influence 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, intertextuality, or even class, in order to evaluate how
these function in each poet’s work. The distinction Sommerfeld makes
between doctus and ludens illuminates 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 resorting 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 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
fiction, and their changing fortunes. She analyzes “William Wilson” and
“A Short Trip Home” and seeks points of connection between the two
stories, looking particularly at concrete similarities. She analyzes the
architecture 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
examples 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 illustrations were carefully selected by the editors.
 Chapter 8 is an approach to Poe’s literary criticism and aesthetic
reception 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 Ferná ndez Cuenca and Josep Farrá n 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 milestones “within the Hispanic
intellectual panorama” (139) and a reference point for national and
international scholarship.
In Chap. 9, Fernando Gonzá lez-Moreno and Margarita Rigal-Aragó n
analyze how Poe’s texts were introduced to Spanish readers and how
they 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 popular culture. In their study, Ana Gonzá lez-Rivas Ferná ndez
and María Isabel Jiménez Gonzá lez first examine the work of two well-
known Spanish illustrators 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 Ibá ñ ez 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 Televisió n
Españ ola, 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 secularization 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 legacy in the popular imagination, and this chapter analyzes
in detail the national sense of this sentiment and how Poe’s image
benefited from it.
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 investigates 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
psychoanalytic 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 discussion 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 Llà cer-Llorca analyzes Roger Corman’s famous
adaptation of “The Masque of the Red Death.” Llà cer-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
established with other works of literature. He also examines
architectural elements and the use of colors, time, and characters. By
discussing these narrative elements, Llà cer-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 tale which inspired writers such as Edogawa Rampo, who
created narratives 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 culture 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.

References
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1999. Un ensayo autobiográfico. Barcelona:
Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores.
Cantalupo, Barbara. 2014a. Poe and the Visual Arts. University Park:
Pennsylvania State UP.
Cantalupo, Barbara, ed. 2014b. Poe’s Pervasive Influence. Bethlehem,
PA: Lehigh UP.
Eliot, T.S. 1949. “From Poe to Valéry.” The Hudson Review 2, no. 3
(Autumn): 327–342.
Englekirk, John Eugene. 1934. Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature.
New York: Instituto de las Españ as en los Estados Unidos.
Esplin, Emron. 2018. Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of
Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America. Athens: University of Georgia
Press.
Esplin, Emron. 2019. “Poe and his Global Advocates.” In The Oxford
Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott
Peeples, 597–617. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Esplin, Emron and Margarida Vale de Gato. 2014a. “Introduction: Poe
in/and Translation.” In Translated Poe, edited by Emron Esplin and
Margarida Vale de Gato, xi–xxi. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP.
Esplin, Emron and Margarida Vale de Gato, eds. 2014b. Translated
Poe. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP.
Esplin, Emron and Margarida Vale de Gato, eds. 2020. Anthologizing
Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons. Bethlehem,
PA: Lehigh UP.
French, John C. 1941. Poe in Foreign Lands and Tongues. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP.
Gonzá lez-Moreno, Fernando and Margarita Rigal-Aragó n. 2017. The
Portrayal of the Grotesque in Stoddard’s and Quantin’s Illustrated
Editions of Edgar Allan Poe (1884). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Hayes, Kevin J. 2002. “One-Man Modernist.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, 225–240.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Irwin, John T. 1994. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the
Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Kennedy, J. Gerald and Scott Peeples. 2019a. “The Unfolding
Investigation of Edgar Poe.” In The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan
Poe, edited by J. Gerald 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.
José R. Ibáñez
Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan
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 wholehearted support, both during the Conference and with this
volume. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the University of
Almería, in particular 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.”
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
Part I Poe’s Echoes of the Classical World and his Current Legacy
1 “The Glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was Rome”:​
Edgar Allan Poe and the Classical World
Harry Lee Poe
2 Poe’s Arrival in Europe and the Case of Greece
Dimitrios Tsokanos
3 “Darkness There and Nothing More”:​Edgar Allan Poe and the
Popular Culture of Necrolatry and Thanatography
Eulalia Piñ ero Gil
Part II Poe and Modernism
4 Poe Among the Modernists:​A (Ghostly) Reappraisal
Viorica Patea
5 Poe:​Poeta Ludens
Stephanie Sommerfeld
6 “Poe’s Poetics and Eliot’s Poetry:​A Denial of Influence?​”
Sławomir Studniarz
7 Echoes of Poe in the Jazz Age:​The Haunting of F.​Scott Fitzgerald
Bonnie Shannon McMullen
Part III Poe’s Readership in Spain
8 Beyond Baudelaire’s Views of Poe:​Carlos Fernández Cuenca and
Josep Farrán i Mayoral, Literary Criticism, and Aesthetic Reception
in 1930s and 1940s Spain
Alejandro Jaquero-Esparcia and José Manuel Correoso-Rodenas
9 Reading, Understanding, and Praising Poe’s Illustrated Oeuvre:​
From Childhood to Old Age
Fernando Gonzá lez-Moreno and Margarita Rigal-Aragó n
10 Poe’s “Berenice” in Popular Culture:​Contemporary
(Audio)visual Representations in Spain
Ana Gonzá lez-Rivas Ferná ndez and María Isabel Jiménez Gonzá lez
Part IV Poe’s Long and Far-Reaching Legacy
11 Death, Doubt, and Poe’s Global Ascendancy
J. Gerald Kennedy
12 Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder:​Nostalgia and Poe’s
American Readership
Jeffrey A. Savoye
13 Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” Reading, and Race
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”
Marta Miquel-Baldellou
15 “The Masque of the Red Death” in Literature and Cinema:​Poe’s
Short Story and Corman’s Film Adaptation
Eusebio V. Llà cer-Llorca
16 The Man of the Crowd and His Descendants:​Poe, Rampo, and
Sakate
Takayuki Tatsumi
Index
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)

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)

Fig.​9.​3 Inside illustrated page by Alonso (Madrid:​Maisal, 1980).​

(Source:​“LyA” Collection/​UCLM.​Artwork in the public domain.​Photo
by authors)

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)

Fig.​9.​5 Illustration of “Morella” by Jaime Azpelicueta (Barcelona:​

Editorial Juventud, 1968).​(Source:​“LyA” Collection/​UCLM.​Courtesy of
Editorial Juventud.​Photo by authors)

Fig.​9.​6 Illustration of “Berenice” by Á ngel Bellido (Madrid:​Gisa

Ediciones 1976).​(Source:​“LyA” Collection/​UCLM.​Artwork in the public
domain.​Photo by authors)

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)
Fig.​13.​1 “This is a strange scarabæus, I must confess”

Fig.​13.​2 “The lanterns having been lit, we all fell to work”

Fig.​13.​3 “We found ourselves possessed of even vaster wealth than we

had at first supposed”

Fig.​13.​4 “Lor-a-marcy! what is dis here pon de tree?​”

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
colecció n 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 studied the illustrated
reception of, among other authors, Edgar Allan Poe, about whom he has
published several articles and book chapters, for example 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 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
literature, 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 Ferná ndez 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 editorial board of The Edgar Allan Poe Review. In February
2020, he organized 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 fiction 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 collections 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 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
traducción: 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 contemporary 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 Juá rez’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 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
literature, 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 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 Gonzá lez-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 fiction (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 literatura 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 Gö ttingen, 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.

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 published
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).
Part I
Poe’s Echoes of the Classical World and
his Current Legacy
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
J. R. I. Ibáñ ez, S. R. Guerrero-Strachan (eds.), Retrospective Poe, American Literature
Readings in the 21st Century
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09986-1_1

1. “The Glory that was Greece and the

Grandeur that was Rome”: Edgar Allan
Poe and the Classical World
Harry Lee Poe1
(1) Union University, Jackson, TN, USA

Harry Lee Poe

Email: hpoe@uu.edu

T. S. Eliot’s assertion that the works of Edgar Allan Poe belong to

adolescents 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 himself did not like, he also excluded science fiction
and detective fiction from legitimate literature, thus eliminating the
need to recognize Poe’s contribution to the development of two of the
most important kinds of stories told by modern culture.
Rather than discussing Poe’s contribution to the formation of
modern culture, however, this chapter will explore Poe’s continuity
with the classical 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 references 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
classical 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.

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
classical 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
paragraph 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 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
obvious 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 (elenē) may derive from ελανη
(elanē), meaning “torch,” or from Σελή νη (selēnē), meaning “moon.” In
either case, the stem is associated with the idea of light, and thus the
“radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” Because of the
prevalence of classical names in antebellum 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 simply 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
referencing 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).
“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
companions 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).

“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 eliminated 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, 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
wandered 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
eidolon (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
(θύ ελλα), however, relates to dreadful storms which the Greeks
probably encountered when they ventured so far away from
civilization.

“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 virtuous. 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).

“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 recognize 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
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
carping 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
misfortune 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 predatory 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.

“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)

Another random document with
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stationed, and three regiments held the fortresses of the Algarves.
There remained in reserve, twelve regiments of the fifty composing
the whole militia force, and these were distributed in Estremadura on
both sides of the Tagus, but principally about Setuval. The regular
Portuguese troops, deducting those in garrison at Almeida Elvas and
Cadiz, were at Thomar and Abrantes.
But the British, organized in five divisions of infantry and one of
cavalry, were distributed as follows:—

Men.
1st Division General Spencer, about 6000 Viseu.
2d Division, including
General Hill, ” 5000 Abrantes.
the 13th Dragoons
3d Division General Picton, ” 3000 Celerico.
4th Division General Cole, ” 4000 Guarda.
Light Division Robert Crawfurd, ” 2400 Pinhel.
The Cavalry General Cotton, ” 3000 Valley of Mondego.
———
Total 23,400 under arms.
———
Thus the wings of the defence were composed solely of militia and
ordenança, and the whole of the regular force was in the centre. The
Portuguese at Thomar, and the four British divisions of infantry
posted at Viseu, Guarda, Pinhel, and Celerico, formed a body of
thirty-eight thousand men, the greater part of which could, in two
marches, be united either at Guarda or between that position and the
Douro. On the other side Beresford and Hill could, in as short a
period, unite by the boat-bridge of Abrantes, and thus thirty-two
thousand men would be concentrated on that line. If the enemy
should attempt the passage of the Elga either direct from Coria, or
by a flank movement of the second corps from Estremadura, across
the Tagus, Beresford could succour the militia by moving over the
Sobreira Formosa to Castello Branco, while Hill could reach that
place much quicker than general Reynier, in consequence of an
arrangement which merits particular attention.
 It has been already said that the march from Abrantes to Castello
Branco is over difficult mountains; to have repaired the roads
between these places would have been more useful to the enemy
than to the allies, as facilitating a passage for superior numbers to
penetrate by the shortest line to Lisbon. But lord Wellington, after
throwing boat-bridges over the Tagus and the Zezere, and fortifying
Abrantes, established between the latter and Castello Branco a line
of communication by the left bank of the Tagus, through Niza, to the
pass of Vilha Velha, where, by a flying bridge, the river was
recrossed, and from thence a good road led to Castello Branco. Now
the pass of Vilha Velha is prodigiously strong for defence, and the
distance from Abrantes to Castello Branco being nearly the same by
Niza as by the other bank of the river, the march of troops was yet
much accelerated, for the road near Vilha Velha being reconstructed
by the engineers, was excellent.
Thus all the obstacles to an enemy’s march by the north bank
were preserved, and the line by Vilha Velha, enabled not only Hill to
pass from Portalegre, or Abrantes, to Castello Branco by a flank
movement in less time than Reynier, but it also provided a lateral
communication for the whole army, which we shall hereafter find of
vital importance in the combinations of the English general,
supplying the loss of the road by Alcantara and the pass of Perales,
which otherwise would have been adopted.
The French, also, in default of a direct line of communication
between Estremadura and the Ciudad Rodrigo country, were finally
forced to adopt the circuitous road of Almaraz and the pass of
Baños, and it was in allusion to this inconvenience that I said both
parties sighed over the ruins of Alcantara.
But, notwithstanding this facility of movement and of
concentration, the allies could not deliver a decisive battle near the
frontier, because the enemy could unite an overwhelming force in the
Alemtejo, before the troops from the north could reach that province,
and a battle lost there, would, in the dry season, decide the fate of
Lisbon. To have concentrated the whole army in the south, would
have been to resign half the kingdom and all its resources to the
enemy; but to save those resources for himself, or to destroy them,
was the very basis of lord Wellington’s defence, and all his
dispositions were made to oblige the French to move in masses, and
to gain time himself, time to secure the harvests, time to complete
his lines, time to perfect the discipline of the native troops, and to
give full effect to the arming and organization of the ordenança, and,
above all things, time to consolidate that moral ascendancy over the
public mind which he was daily acquiring. A closer examination of his
combinations will shew, that they were well adapted to effect these
objects.
1º. The enemy durst not advance, except with concentrated
masses, because, on the weakest line of resistance, he was sure to
encounter above twenty thousand men.
2º. If, choosing the Alemtejo, he suddenly dispersed Romana’s
troops and even forced back Hill’s, the latter passing the Tagus at
Abrantes, and uniting with Beresford, could dispute the passage of
the Tagus until the arrival of the army from the north; and no regular
and sustained attempt could be made on that side without first
besieging Badajos or Elvas to form a place of arms.
3º. A principal attack on the central line could not be made without
sufficient notice being given by the collection of magazines at Coria,
and by the passage of the Elga and Ponçul, Beresford and Hill could
then occupy the Sobreira Formosa. But an invasion on this line, save
by a light corps in connexion with other attacks, was not to be
expected; for, although the enemy should force the Sobreira and
reach Abrantes, he could not besiege the latter, in default of heavy
artillery. The Zezere, a large and exceedingly rapid river, with rugged
banks, would be in his front, the Tagus on his left, the mountains of
Sobreira in his rear, and the troops from Guarda and the valley of the
Mondego would have time to fall back.
4º. An attack on Guarda could always be resisted long enough to
gain time for the orderly retreat of the troops near Almeida, to the
valley of the Mondego, and moreover the road from Belmonte
towards Thomar by the valley of the Zezere was purposely broken
and obstructed.
 Vol. 3, Plate 5.

Defence of Portugal
1810.
Published by T. & W. Boone 1830.
 The space between Guarda and the Douro, an opening of about
thirty miles leading into the valley of the Mondego, remains to be
examined. Across this line of invasion, the Agueda, the Coa, and the
Pinel, run, in almost parallel directions from the Sierra de Francia
and Sierra de Estrella, into the Douro, all having this peculiarity, that
as they approach the Douro their channels invariably deepen into
profound and gloomy chasms, and there are few bridges. But the
principal obstacles were the fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and
Almeida, both of which it was necessary to take before an invading
army could establish a solid base of invasion. After this the lines of
the Douro and of the Mondego would be open; if the French adopted
the second, they could reach it by Guarda, by Alverca, and by
Trancoso, concentrating at Celerico, when they would have to
choose between the right and the left bank. If the latter, they must
march between the Mondego and the Estrella mountains, until they
reached the Alva, a river falling at right angles into the Mondego, and
behind which they would find the allied army in a position of
surprising strength. If, to avoid that, they marched by the right of the
Mondego upon Coimbra, there were other obstacles to be hereafter
noticed; but, in either case, the allied forces, having interior lines of
communication, could, as long as the Belmonte road was sealed,
concentrate in time behind the Alva, or in front of Coimbra. Hence it
was on the side of the Alemtejo that danger was most to be
apprehended; and it behoved general Hill to watch vigilantly and act
decisively in opposition to general Reynier; for the latter having
necessarily the lead in the movements, might, by skilful evolutions
and rapid marches, either join the sixth and eighth corps before Hill
was aware of his design, and thus overwhelm the allied divisions on
the Mondego, or drawing Hill across the Tagus, furnish an
opportunity for a corps from Andalusia to penetrate by the southern
bank of that river.
In these dispositions the English general had regard only to the
enemy’s actual situation, and expecting the invasion in summer; but
in the winter season the rivers and torrents being full, and the roads
deteriorated, the defence would be different; fewer troops would then
suffice to guard the Tagus, and the Zezere, the Sobreira Formosa
would be nearly impassable, a greater number of the allied troops,
could be collected about Guarda, and a more stubborn resistance
made on the northern line.
Every probable movement being thus previously well considered,
lord Wellington trusted that his own military quickness, and the
valour of the British soldiers, could baffle any unforeseen strokes
during the retreat, and once within the Lines, (the Portuguese people
and the government doing their part) he looked confidently to the
final result. He judged that, in a wasted country, and with thirty
regiments of militia, in the mountains on the flank and rear of the
enemy, the latter could not long remain before the Lines, and his
retreat would be equivalent to a victory for the allies. There were
however many hazards. The English commander, sanguine and
confident as he was, knew well how many counter-combinations
were to be expected; in fine, how much fortune was to be dreaded in
a contest with eighty thousand French veterans having a competent
general at their head. Hence, to secure embarkation in the event of
disaster, a third line of entrenchments was prepared, and twenty-four
thousand tons of shipping were constantly kept in the river to receive
the British forces; measures were also taken to Lord Wellington’s
procure a like quantity for the reception of the Correspondence.
MSS.
Portuguese troops, and such of the citizens as might
wish to emigrate. It only remained to feed the army.
In the Peninsula generally, the supplies were at all times a source
of infinite trouble on both sides, and this, not as some have
supposed, because Spain is incapable of supplying large armies;
there was throughout the war an abundance of food in that country
but it was unevenly distributed; some places were exhausted, others
overflowing, the difficulty was to transport provisions, and in this the
allies enjoyed a great advantage; their convoys could pass
unmolested, whereas the French always required strong guards first
to collect food and then to bring it up to their armies. In Portugal
there was however a real deficiency, even for the consumption of the
people, and after a time scarcely any food for man or beast, (some
cattle and straw from the northern provinces excepted,) was to be
obtained in that country: nay, the whole nation was at last in a
manner fed by England. Every part of the world accessible to ships
and money was rendered subservient to the cravings of this
insatiable war, and even thus, it was often a doubtful and a painful
struggle against famine, while near the sea, but at a distance from
that nurse of British armies, the means of transport necessarily
regulated the extent of the supply. Now wheel-carriage was scarce
and bad in Portugal, and for the most part the roads forbade its use;
hence the only resource, for the conveyance of stores, was water-
carriage, to a certain distance, and afterwards beasts of burthen.
Lisbon, Abrantes, and Belem Castle, on the Tagus; Figueras and
Raiva de Pena Cova, on the Mondego; and, finally, Oporto and
Lamego, on the Douro, were the principal depôts formed by lord
Wellington, and his magazines of consumption were established at
Viseu, Celerico, Condeixa, Leiria, Thomar, and Almeida. From those
points four hundred miserable bullock-cars and about twelve
thousand hired mules, organized in brigades of sixty each, conveyed
the necessary warlike stores and provisions to the armies; when
additional succours could be obtained, it was eagerly seized, but this
was the ordinary amount of transport.
With such means and with such preparations was the defence of
Portugal undertaken, and it must be evident to the most superficial
observer, that, amidst so many difficulties, and with such a number
of intricate combinations, lord Wellington’s situation was not one in
which a general could sleep, and that, due allowance being made for
fortune, it is puerile to attribute the success to aught but his talents
and steel-hardened resolution.
In the foregoing exposition of the political and military force of the
powers brought into hostile contact, I have only touched, and lightly,
upon the points of most importance, designing no more than to
indicate the sound and the diseased parts of each. The unfavourable
circumstances for France would appear to be the absence of the
emperor,—the erroneous views of the king,—the rivalry of the
marshals,—the impediments to correspondence,—the necessity of
frequently dispersing from the want of magazines,—the iniquity of
the cause, and the disgust of the French officers, who, for the most
part, spoiled by a rapid course of victories on the continent, could not
patiently endure a service replete with personal dangers, over and
above the ordinary mishaps of war, yet promising little ultimate
reward.
For the English, the quicksands were—the memory of former
failures on the continent,—the financial drain,—a powerful and
eloquent opposition pressing a cabinet so timid and selfish that the
general dared not risk a single brigade, lest an accident should lead
to a panic amongst the ministers which all lord Wellesley’s vigour
would be unable to stem,—the intrigues of the Souza party,—and the
necessity of persuading the Portuguese to devastate their country for
the sake of defending a European cause. Finally, the babbling of the
English newspapers, from whose columns the enemy constantly
drew the most certain information of the strength and situation of the
army.
On the other side, France had possession of nearly all the fortified
towns of the Peninsula, and, while her enormous army threatened to
crush every opponent, she offered a constitution, and recalled to the
recollection of the people that it was but a change of one French
dynasty for another. The church started from her touch, but the
educated classes did not shrink less from the British government’s
known hostility to all free institutions. What, then, remained for
England to calculate upon? The extreme hatred of the people to the
invaders, arising from the excesses and oppressions of the armies,
—the chances of another continental war,—the complete dominion
of the ocean with all its attendant advantages,—the recruiting
through the militia, which was, in fact, a conscription with two links in
the chain instead of one; and, not least, the ardour of the troops to
measure themselves with the conquerors of Europe, and to raise a
rival to the French emperor. And here, as general Foy has been at
some pains to misrepresent the character of the British soldiers, I will
set down what many years’ experience gives me the right to say is
nearer the truth than his dreams.
That the British infantry soldier is more robust than the soldier of
any other nation, can scarcely be doubted by those who, in 1815,
observed his powerful frame, distinguished amidst the united armies
of Europe, and, notwithstanding his habitual excess in drinking, he
sustains fatigue, and wet, and the extremes of cold and heat with
incredible vigour. When completely disciplined, and three years are
required to accomplish this, his port is lofty, and his movements free;
the whole world cannot produce a nobler specimen of military
bearing, nor is the mind unworthy of the outward man. He does not,
indeed, possess that presumptuous vivacity which would lead him to
dictate to his commanders, or even to censure real errors, although
he may perceive them; but he is observant, and quick to
comprehend his orders, full of resources under difficulties, calm and
resolute in danger, and more than usually obedient and careful of his
officers in moments of imminent peril.
It has been asserted that his undeniable firmness in battle, is the
result of a phlegmatic constitution uninspired by moral feeling. Never
was a more stupid calumny uttered! Napoleon’s troops fought in
bright fields, where every helmet caught some beams of glory, but
the British soldier conquered under the cold shade of aristocracy; no
honours awaited his daring, no despatch gave his name to the
applauses of his countrymen, his life of danger and hardship was
uncheered by hope, his death unnoticed. Did his heart sink
therefore! Did he not endure with surpassing fortitude the sorest of
ills, sustain the most terrible assaults in battle unmoved, and, with
incredible energy overthrow every opponent, at all times proving
that, while no physical military qualification was wanting, the fount of
honour was also full and fresh within him!
The result of a hundred battles and the united testimony of
impartial writers of different nations have given the first place,
amongst the European infantry, to the British; but, in a comparison
between the troops of France and England, it would be unjust not to
admit that the cavalry of the former stands higher in the estimation of
the world.
 C H A P T E R I V.
In resuming the thread of military events, it is necessary to refer
back to the commencement of the year, because the British
operations on the frontier of Beira were connected, although not
conducted, in actual concert with those of the Spaniards; and here I
deem it right to notice the conduct of Miguel Alava, that brave,
generous, and disinterested Spaniard, through whom this connexion
was kept up. Attached to the British head-quarters, as the military
correspondent of the Junta, he was too sagacious not to perceive
the necessity of zealously seconding the English general; yet, in the
manner of doing it, he never forgot the dignity of his own country,
and, as he was too frank and honest for intrigues, his intercourse
was always honourable to himself and advantageous to both
nations.
It will be remembered that, in February, Ney threatened Ciudad
Rodrigo at the same time that Mortier menaced Badajos and that Hill
advanced from Abrantes to Portalegre; lord Wellington immediately
reinforced the line between Pinhel and Guarda, and sent the light
division across the Coa, to observe the enemy’s proceedings. The
Portuguese Regency were alarmed, and demanded more British
troops; but lord Wellington replying that the numbers Appendix, No. V.
already fixed would be as great as he could feed, took Section 1.
occasion to point out, that the measures agreed upon, with respect
to the native forces, were neither executed with vigour nor
impartiality, and that the carriages and other assistance, required for
the support of the British soldiers then in the country were not
supplied. These matters he urgently advised them to amend before
they asked for more troops; and, at the same time, as the Regency
in the hope of rendering him unpopular with the natives, intimated a
wish that he should take the punishment of offenders into his own
hands; he informed them that, although he advised the adoption of
severe measures, he would not be made the despotic punisher of
the people, while the actual laws were sufficient for the purpose.
When the siege of Astorga was commenced by the French, the
Portuguese army was brought up to Cea and Viseu, and the militia in
the northern provinces, were ordered to concentrate at Braganza to
guard the Tras os Montes. Ciudad Rodrigo, being soon afterwards
seriously menaced, lord Wellington sent a brigade of heavy cavalry
to Belmonte, and transferred his own quarters to Celerico, intending
to succour Ciudad if occasion offered; but the conduct of the
Portuguese Regency cramped his operations. The resources of the
country were not brought forward, and the English general could
scarcely maintain his actual position, much less advance; yet the
Regency treated his remonstrances lightly, exactly following the
system of the Spanish Central Junta during the campaign of
Talavera: lord Wellington was, however, in a different situation.
Writing sharply, he told them that “their conduct was Appendix, No. V.
evasive and frivolous; that the army could neither Section 1.
move forward nor remain without food; that the time was one which
would not admit of idle or hollow proceedings, or partiality, or neglect
of public for private interests; that the resources were in the country,
could be drawn forth, and must be so if the assistance of England
was desired; finally, that punishment should follow disobedience,
and, to be effectual, must begin with the higher classes.” Then,
issuing a proclamation, he pointed out the duties and the omission of
both magistrates and people, and by this vigourous conduct
procured some immediate relief for his troops.
Meanwhile, Crawfurd commenced a series of remarkable
operations. His three regiments of infantry were singularly fitted for
any difficult service; they had been for several years under sir John
Moore, and, being carefully disciplined in the peculiar school of that
great man, came to the field with such a knowledge of arms that, in
six years of real warfare, no weakness could be detected in their
system. But the enemy’s posts on the Agueda rendered it impossible
for the light division to remain, without cavalry, beyond the Coa,
unless some support was at hand nearer than Guarda or Celerico.
Crawfurd proposed that, while he advanced to the Agueda, Cole,
with the fourth division, should take up the line of the Coa. But that
general would not quit his own position at Guarda; and lord
Wellington approving, and yet desirous to secure the line of the Coa
with a view to succour Ciudad Rodrigo, brought up the third division
to Pinhel, and reinforcing Crawfurd with the first German hussars,
(consisting of four hundred excellent and experienced soldiers,) and
with a superb troop of horse-artillery, commanded by captain Ross,
gave him the command of all the outposts, ordering Picton and Cole
to support him, if called upon.
In the middle of March, Crawfurd lined the bank of the Agueda
with his hussars, from Escalhon on the left, to Navas Frias on the
right, a distance of twenty-five miles, following the course of the river.
The infantry were disposed in small parties in the villages between
Almeida and the Lower Agueda; the artillery was at Fort Conception,
and two battalions of Portuguese caçadores soon afterwards arrived,
making a total of four thousand men, and six guns. The French at
this period were extended in divisions from San Felices to Ledesma
and Salamanca, but they did not occupy the pass of Perales; and
Carrera’s Spanish division being at Coria, was in communication
with Crawfurd, whose line, although extended, was very
advantageous. From Navas Frias to the Douro, the Agueda was
rendered unfordable by heavy rain, and only four bridges crossed it
on that whole extent, namely, one at Navas Frias; one at Villar, about
a league below the first; one at Ciudad Rodrigo; and one at San
Felices, called the bridge of Barba del Puerco. While therefore, the
hussars kept a good watch at the two first bridges which were
distant, the troops could always concentrate under Almeida before
the enemy could reach them from that side; and on the side of Barba
del Puerco, the ravine was so profound that a few companies of the
ninety-fifth were considered capable of opposing any numbers.
This arrangement sufficed while the Agueda was swollen; but that
river was capricious, often falling many feet in a night without
apparent reason: when it was fordable, Crawfurd always withdrew
his outposts, and concentrated his division; and his situation
demanded a quickness and intelligence in the troops, the like of
which has never been surpassed. Seven minutes sufficed for the
division to get under arms in the middle of the night; and a quarter of
an hour, night or day, to bring it in order of battle to the alarm-posts,
with the baggage loaded and assembled at a convenient distance in
the rear. And this not upon a concerted signal, or as a trial, but at all
times and certain.
The 19th of March, general Ferey, a bold officer, either to create a
fear of French enterprise at the commencement of the campaign, or
to surprise the division, collected six hundred grenadiers close to the
bridge of San Felices, and, just as the moon, rising behind him, cast
long shadows from the rocks, and rendered the bottom of the chasm
dark, he silently passed the bridge, and, with incredible speed,
ascending the opposite side, bayonetted the sentries, and fell upon
the piquet so fiercely that friends and enemies went fighting into the
village of Barba del Puerco while the first shout was still echoing in
the gulf below. So sudden was the attack, and so great the
confusion, that the British companies could not form, but each
soldier encountering the nearest enemy, fought hand to hand; and
their colonel, Sydney Beckwith, conspicuous by his lofty stature and
daring actions, a man capable of rallying a whole army in flight,
urged the contest with such vigour that, in a quarter of an hour, the
French column was borne back, and pushed over the edge of the
descent.
This skirmish proved that, while the Agueda was swollen, the
enemy could gain nothing by slight operations; but it was difficult to
keep in advance of the Coa: the want of money had reduced the
whole army to straits, and Crawfurd, notwithstanding his prodigious
activity, being unable to feed his division, gave the reins to his fiery
temper, and seized some church-plate, with a view to the purchasing
of corn. For this impolitic act he was immediately rebuked, and such
redress granted that no mischief followed; and the proceeding itself
had some effect in procuring supplies, as it convinced the priests
that the distress was not feigned.
When the sixth corps again approached Ciudad Rodrigo in the
latter end of April, lord Wellington, as I have before said, moved his
head-quarters to Celerico, and Carrera took post at St. Martin
Trebeja, occupying the pass of Perales; being, however, menaced
there by Kellerman’s troops, he came down, in May, from the hills to
Ituero on the Azava river, and connected his left with the light
division, which was then posted at Gallegos Espeja and Barba del
Puerco. Crawfurd and he then agreed that, if attacked, the British
should concentrate in the wood behind Espeja, and, if unable to
maintain themselves there, unite with the Spaniards at Nava d’Aver,
and finally retire to Villa Mayor, a village covering the passage of the
Coa by the bridge of Seceira, from whence there was a sure retreat
to Guarda.
It was at this period that Massena’s arrival in Spain became known
to the allies; the deserters, for the first time, ceased to speak of the
emperor’s commanding in person; yet all agreed that serious
operations would soon commence. Howbeit, as the river continued
unfordable, Crawfurd maintained his position; but, towards the end of
May, certain advice of the march of the French battering-train was
received through Andreas Herrasti: and, the 1st of June, Ney,
descending upon Ciudad Rodrigo, threw a bridge, on trestles, over
the Agueda at the convent of Caridad, two miles above; and, a few
days afterwards, a second at Carboneras, four miles below the
fortress. As this concentration of the French relieved the northern
provinces of Portugal from danger, sixteen regiments of militia were
brought down from Braganza to the Lower Douro; provisions came
by water to Lamego, and the army was enabled to subsist.
The 8th of June four thousand French cavalry crossed the
Agueda, Crawfurd concentrated his forces at Gallegos and Espeja,
and the Spaniards occupied the wood behind the last-named village.
It was at this moment, when Spain was overwhelmed, and when the
eye could scarcely command the interminable lines of French in his
immediate front, that Martin Carrera thought fit to invite marshal Ney
to desert!
Nothing could be more critical than Crawfurd’s position. From the
Agueda to the Coa the whole country, although studded with woods
and scooped into hollows, was free for cavalry and artillery, and
there were at least six thousand horsemen and fifty guns within an
hour’s march of his position. His right was at Espeja, where thick
woods in front rendered it impossible to discover an enemy until
close upon the village; while wide plains behind, almost precluded
hope, in a retreat before the multitude of French cavalry and artillery.
The confluence of the Azava with the Agueda offered more security
on his left, because the channel of the former river there became a
chasm, and the ground rose high and rugged at each side of the
bridge of Marialva, two miles in front of Gallegos. Nevertheless, the
bank on the enemy’s side was highest, and, to obtain a good
prospect, it was necessary to keep posts beyond the Azava;
moreover the bridge of Marialva could be turned by a ford, below the
confluence of the streams. The 10th, the Agueda became fordable in
all parts, but, as the enemy occupied himself raising redoubts, to
secure his bridge at Carboneras, and making preparations for the
siege of Rodrigo, Crawfurd, trusting to his own admirable
arrangements, and to the surprising discipline of his troops, still
maintained his dangerous position: thus encouraging the garrison of
Ciudad Rodrigo, and protecting the villages in the plain between the
Azava and the Coa from the enemy’s foraging parties.
On the 18th, the eighth corps was seen to take post at San
Felices, and other points; and all the villages, from the Sierra de
Francia to the Douro, were occupied by the French army. The 23d,
Julian Sanchez, breaking out of Ciudad, came into Gallegos. On the
25th, the French batteries opened against the fortress, their cavalry
closed upon the Azava, and Crawfurd withdrew his outposts to the
left bank. The 26th, it was known that Herrasti had lost one hundred
and fifty killed, and five hundred wounded; and, the 29th, a Spaniard,
passing the French posts, brought Carrera a note, containing these
words: “O venir luego! luego! luego! a socorrer esta plaza.” (“Oh!
come, now! now! now! to the succour of this place.”) And, on the 1st
of July, the gallant old man repeated his “Luego, luego, luego, por
ultimo vez.”
Meanwhile, lord Wellington (hoping that the enemy, by detaching
troops, would furnish an opportunity of relieving Ciudad Rodrigo)
transferred his quarters to Alverca, a village half-way between
Almeida and Celerico. The Spaniards supposed he would attack;
and Romana, quitting Badajos, came to propose a combined
movement for carrying off the garrison. This was a trying moment!
The English general had come from the Guadiana with the avowed
purpose of securing Rodrigo; he had, in a manner, pledged himself
to make it a point in his operations; his army was close at hand; the
garrison brave and distressed; the governor honourably fulfilling his
part. To permit such a place to fall without a stroke struck, would be
a grievous disaster, and a more grievous dishonour to the British
arms; the troops desired the enterprise; the Spaniards demanded it,
as a proof of good faith; the Portuguese to keep the war away from
their own country: finally, policy seemed to call for an effort, lest the
world might deem the promised defence of Portugal a heartless and
a hollow boast. Nevertheless, Romana returned without his object.
Lord Wellington absolutely refused to venture even a brigade; and
thus proved himself a truly great commander, and of a steadfast
mind.
It was not a single campaign but a terrible war that he had
undertaken. If he lost but five thousand men, his own government
would abandon the contest; if he lost fifteen, he must abandon it
himself. His whole disposable force did not exceed fifty-six thousand
men: of these, twelve thousand were with Hill, and one-half of the
remainder were untried and raw. But this included all, even to the
Portuguese cavalry and garrisons. All could not, however, be brought
into line, because Reynier, acting in concert with Massena, had, at
this period, collected boats, and made demonstrations to pass the
Tagus and move upon Coria; French troops were also crossing the
Morena, in march towards Estremadura, which obliged lord
Wellington to detach eight thousand Portuguese to Thomar, as a
reserve, and these and Hill’s corps being deducted, not quite twenty-
five thousand men were available to carry off the garrison in the face
of sixty thousand French veterans. This enterprise would also take
the army two marches from Guarda, and Coria was scarcely more
distant from that place, hence, a division must have been left at
Guarda, lest Reynier, deceiving Hill, should reach it first.
Twenty thousand men of all arms remained, and there were two
modes of using them. 1º. In an open advance and battle. 2º. In a
secret movement and surprise. To effect the last, the army might
have assembled in the night upon the Azava, and filed over the
single bridge of Ciudad Rodrigo, with a view of capturing the
battering train, by a sally, or of bringing off the garrison. But, without
dwelling on the fact that Massena’s information was so Appendix, No. VII.
good that he knew, in two days after it occurred, the Section I.
object of Romana’s visit, such a movement could scarcely have
been made unobserved, even in the early part of the siege, and,
certainly, not towards the end, when the enemy were on the Azava.
An open battle a madman only would have ventured. The army,
passing over a plain, in the face of nearly three times its own
numbers, must have exposed its flanks to the enemy’s bridges on
the Agueda, because the fortress was situated in the bottom of a
deep bend of the river, and the French were on the convex side.
What hope then for twenty thousand mixed soldiers cooped up
between two rivers, when eight thousand cavalry and eighty guns
should come pouring over the bridges on their flanks, and fifty
thousand infantry followed to the attack? What would even a
momentary success avail? Five thousand undisciplined men brought
off from Ciudad Rodrigo, would have ill supplied the ten or twelve
thousand good troops lost in the battle, and the temporary relief of
the fortress would have been a poor compensation for the loss of
Portugal. For what was the actual state of affairs in that country?—
The militia deserting in crowds to the harvest, the Regency in full
opposition to the general, the measures for laying waste the country
not perfected, and the public mind desponding! The enemy would
soon have united his whole force and advanced to retrieve his
honour, and who was to have withstood him?
Massena, sagacious and well understanding his business, only
desired that the attempt should be made. He held back his troops,
appeared careless, and in his proclamations taunted the English
general, that he was afraid!—that the sails were flapping on the
ships prepared to carry him away—that he was a man, who,
insensible to military honour, permitted his ally’s towns to fall without
risking a shot to save them, or to redeem his plighted word! But all
this subtlety failed; lord Wellington was unmoved, and abided his
own time. “If thou art a great general, Marius, come down and fight!
If thou art a great general, Silo, make me come down and fight!”
 Ciudad Rodrigo left to its fate, held out yet a little longer, and
meanwhile the enemy pushing infantry on to the Azava; Carrera
retired to the Dos Casas river, and Crawfurd, reinforced with the
sixteenth and fourteenth light dragoons, placed his cavalry at
Gallegos, and concentrated his infantry in the wood of Alameda, two
miles in rear. From thence he could fall back, either to the bridge of
Almeida by San Pedro or to the bridge of Castello Bom by Villa
Formosa. Obstinate however not to relinquish a foot of ground that
he could keep either by art or force, he disposed his troops in single
ranks on the rising grounds, in the evening of the 2d of July, and
then sending some horsemen to the rear to raise the dust, marched
the ranks of infantry in succession, and slowly, within sight of the
enemy, hoping that the latter would imagine the whole army was
come up to succour Ciudad Rodrigo. He thus gained two days; but,
on the 4th of July, a strong body of the enemy assembled at
Marialva, and a squadron of horse, crossing the ford below that
bridge, pushed at full speed towards Gallegos driving back the
picquets. The enemy then passed the river, and the British retired
skirmishing upon Alameda, leaving two guns, a troop of British and a
troop of German hussars to cover the movement. This rear-guard
drew up on a hill half-cannon shot from a streamlet with marshy
banks, which crossed the road to Alameda; in a few moments a
column of French horsemen was observed coming on at a charging
pace, diminishing its front as it approached the bridge, but resolute
to pass, and preserving the most perfect order, notwithstanding
some well-directed shots from the guns. Captain Kraüchenberg, of
the hussars, proposed to charge. The English officer did not
conceive his orders warranted it; and the gallant German rode full
speed against the head of the advancing columns with his single
troop, and with such a shock, that he killed the leading officers,
overthrew the front ranks, and drove the whole back. Meanwhile the
enemy crossed the stream at other points, and a squadron coming
close up to Alameda was driven off by a volley from the third
caçadores.
This skirmish not being followed up by the enemy, Crawfurd took a
fresh post with his infantry and guns in a wood near Fort Conception.
His cavalry, reinforced by Julian Sanchez and Carrera’s divisions,
were disposed higher up on the Duas Casas, and the French
withdrew behind the Azava, leaving only a piquet at Gallegos. Their
marauding parties however entered the villages of Barquillo and Villa
de Puerco for three nights successively; and Crawfurd, thinking to
cut them off, formed an ambuscade in a wood near Villa de Puerco
with six squadrons, another of three squadrons near Barquillo, and
disposed his artillery, five companies of the ninety-fifth and the third
caçadores in reserve, for the enemy were again in force at Gallegos
and even in advance of it.
A little after day-break, on the 11th, two French parties were
observed, the one of infantry near Villa de Puerco, the other of
cavalry at Barquillo. An open country on the right would have
enabled the six squadrons to get between the infantry in Villa de
Puerco and their point of retreat. This was circuitous, and Crawfurd
preferred pushing straight through a stone enclosure as the shortest
road: the enclosure proved difficult, the squadrons were separated,
and the French, two hundred strong, had time to draw up in square
on a rather steep rise of land; yet so far from the edge, as not to be
seen until the ascent was gained. The two squadrons which first
arrived, galloped in upon them, and the charge was rough and
pushed home, but failed. The troopers received the fire of the square
in front and on both sides, and in passing saw and heard the French
captain Guache and his serjeant-major exhorting the men to shoot
carefully.
Scarcely was this charge over when the enemy’s cavalry came out
of Barquillos, and the two squadrons riding against it, made twenty-
nine men and two officers prisoners, a few being also wounded.
Meanwhile colonel Talbot mounting the hill with four squadrons of the
fourteenth dragoons, bore gallantly in upon captain Guache; but the
latter again opened such a fire, that Talbot himself and fourteen men
went down close to the bayonets, and the stout Frenchman made
good his retreat; after which Crawfurd returned to the camp, having
had thirty-two troopers, besides the colonel, killed or wounded in this
unfortunate affair. That day Ciudad Rodrigo surrendered, and the
Spanish troops, grieved and irritated, separated from the light
division, and marching by the pass of Perales, rejoined Romana; but
Crawfurd assumed a fresh position, a mile and a half from Almeida,
and demanded a reinforcement of two battalions. Lord Wellington
replied that he would give him two divisions, if he could hold his
ground; but that he could not do so; yet, knowing the temper of the
man, he repeated his former orders not to fight beyond the Coa.
On the 21st, the enemy’s cavalry again advanced, Fort
Conception was blown up, and Crawfurd fell back to Almeida,
apparently disposed to cross the Coa. Yet nothing was further from
his thoughts. Braving the whole French army, he had kept with a
weak division, for three months, within two hours march, of sixty
thousand men, appropriating the resources of the plains entirely to
himself; but this exploit, only to be appreciated by military men, did
not satisfy his feverish thirst of distinction. Hitherto he had safely
affronted a superior power, and forgetting that his stay beyond the
Coa was a matter of sufferance, not real strength, with headstrong
ambition, he resolved, in defiance of reason and of the reiterated
orders of his general, to fight on the right bank.

C O M B AT O F T H E C O A .

Crawfurd’s whole force under arms consisted of four thousand

infantry, eleven hundred cavalry, and six guns, and his position, one
mile and a half in length, extended in an oblique line towards the
Coa. The cavalry piquets were upon the plain in his front, his right on
some broken ground, and his left resting on an unfinished tower,
eight hundred yards from Almeida, was defended by the guns of that
fortress; but his back was on the edge of the ravine forming the
channel of the Coa, and the bridge was more than a mile distant, in
the bottom of the chasm.
A stormy night ushered in the 24th of July. The troops, drenched
with rain, were under arms before day-light, expecting to retire, when
a few pistol shots in front, followed by an order for the cavalry
reserves and the guns to advance, gave notice of the enemy’s
approach; and as the morning cleared, twenty-four thousand French
infantry, five thousand cavalry, and thirty pieces of artillery were
observed marching beyond the Turones. The British line was