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Edgar Allan Poe
The name Edgar Allan Poe is supposed to
invoke shivers. As a child I read his tales with exquisite
trepidation and fear. Later, because one’s imagination is usually
so much stronger than any movie magic, the films based on Poe’s
tales of the 1840s were a great disappointment to youngsters like me.
Moving pictures, even without the distractions of digital
manipulation, did not provide the delicious terror which young
imaginations produce.
Later still, in adulthood, fascination
with Poe changes from the horror hinted at in his plots, to the awful
contemplation of the author’s mind. You are made aware of the
mental depression which drove Poe out of a world of stimulating
beauty, through a period of “pleasurable sadness” and into a
twilight of dark madness.
Well, that is how I read him.
It is the thought of an evil, black
depression invading and encompassing his mind which is more horrible
than any horror he wrote about.
In Volume 28, the extract the
editors have chosen is from a lighter, brighter period, at a time
when Poe wrote as a critic. His criticisms illustrate his verve, his
insight and his enthusiasm.
He divides the mind into three realms:
‘Pure Intellect’ (as opposed to passion which he dismisses as
physical), ‘Taste’ and ‘the Moral Sense’. He invents these
distinctions, of course, half a century before Freud and Jung.
“Just as the intellect concerns
itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful, while the
Moral Sense is regardful of Duty,” he says. Of this latter, while
Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste
contents herself with displaying the charms:- waging war upon Vice
solely on the ground of her deformity – her disproportion – her
animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious –
in a word, to Beauty”.
Thirst for beauty belongs to the
immortality of man, he believes. Man struggles for glimpses of the
‘supernal Loveliness’, as a moth struggles for the stars. It is
through poetry – and even more, through music – that the soul
most nearly attains the rapturous beauty for which it struggles.
He supports a prejudice I had, once
long ago, about the indiscipline – the looseness and lack of effort
- of blank verse in relation to the various modes of metre, rhythm
and rhyme. The latter is “so vast in moment in Poetry as never to
be wisely rejected – so vitally important an adjunct, that he is
simply silly who declines its assistance”.
Yet, I have to confess, I found a small
personal disillusionment here too in Poe’s rightly celebrated work,
for the examples he quotes do not, to modern eyes, justify his claim
that metre, rhythm and rhyme are absolutely essential. His examples,
to modern ears, are mediocre, and do not reach the level of some
poetical concepts today.
However, I suppose my comparisons
concern quality, not principle, and that poetry does reach up to
great music when it follows the same disciplines of metre and rhythm.
On a different tack, Poe’s essay on
the Poetic Principle offers an example which he describes as leaving
an impression of “pleasurable sadness”. He goes on to praise
more familiar English poets such as Thomas Hood (who ironically wrote
“Haunted House”), Lord Byron and “the noblest poet that ever
lived”, Alfred Tennyson.
Again, on a personal note, I was
delighted at the 19th century critic’s unequivocal
admiration of Tennyson - a poet who, to my anachronistic taste, has
been not only neglected but sadly and ignorantly hammered in modern
times. Fortunately, Tennyson’s less sentimental stuff seems to be
rising again in the 21st century.
Poe, in his essay, seems more
preoccupied than he knows with themes of sadness and death. They are
the only themes in his final samples of great poetry. Sadness comes
in the shape of deprivation of love, but often the themes of sadness
and death are co-joined.
A quote that seems to sum up this
essay, is a line from Tennyson: “Dear as remembered kisses after
death.”
* * *
Henry Thoreau by contrast had a
remarkably happy perspective of life.
He had no profession, no wife, no
political or social aspirations. “He lived alone,” according to
his friend Emerson. “He never went to church; he never voted; he
refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine;
he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used
neither trap nor gun.”
A happy life might be lived without
meat, I suppose, but I hope Emerson’s description did not disbar
whusky and women and good conversation. But these are details of
taste. The important thing is that Thoreau was a genuinely
independent soul, not a recluse at Waldon Pond nor a hermit in other
woods where he wandered. He did as little as possible and lived
without as many material things as he could in order to spend most of
his life appreciating nature, thinking and writing.
His essay on Walking begins:
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and
wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil –
to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature,
rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme
statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough
champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and
every one of you will take care of that.”
(note the capital N for nature
and the small c for Civilisation).
Like a good walk, his essay on the
subject rambles a great deal. I distort it greatly by highlighting a
few of his practical thoughts on what walking is about:
He contends that the ideal walk is one
from which one never returns. “Half the walk is but retracing our
steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the
spirit of undying adventure…”
A walk is not just exercise.
One should walk like a camel. . .ruminate. On the other hand, one’s
spirit must be on the walk, not just the body being there while the
mind stays home with good works and grand projects. “What business
have I in the woods if I am thinking out of the woods?”
Thoreau does not tell us the obvious:
that the best walk is a walk alone, so that one is able to commune
with Nature, in peace and deep appreciation. Clearly the thought
never occurred to him that it should be otherwise.
While Thoreau had no recognised
profession, he did have a career. Two in fact. One was writing, but
the main one was walking. He devoted much of each day of his life to
it.
Which makes his next point more
profound. He claimed that, at his home near Concord (where he was
born and where I assume he died) he was able to explore the
countryside on walks within a 10 mile radius – and yet never get
to know all of it.
The point is so significant in
appreciating any walk, that I must quote all he says on it.:
“My vicinity affords many good walks: and though for so many
years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days
together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect
is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or
three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I
expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before
is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There
is in fact a sort of harmony discovcerable between the capabilities
of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the
limits of an afternoon’s walk, and the threescore years and ten of
human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.”
Whither to walk?
Thoreau felt that each walk should be
approached like life itself. One has to work on instinct, follow the
way which opens ahead, decide on which fork in the path to take when
one comes to it and can weight up the options. In other words, one
should set out without a predestined route; allowing time and space
and events to determine how it goes. To change the scene and
pronoun: you might stop for hours to watch the movements of some
dassies on the cliff at Hermanus; pause to see the whales gallumping
all over the bay; examine some insects busy in a bush. . . who knows
what to expect? Events become more important than directions or
destinations. (Nonetheless, Thoreau admitted, he found himself
setting out most often in a south-westerly direction, for that area
was the wildest).
“. . .if it were proposed to me
to dwell in the neighbourhood of the most beautiful garden that ever
human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly
decide for the swamp. . .Give me the ocean, the desert, or the
wilderness!
“. . .I do not know of any poetry. . .any literature. . .any
culture. . . which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild.
Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. . . .Mythology
comes closer to it than anything.”
Thoreau decided that “man
cannot fathom Nature”. While this might make every scientist and
preacher restless, it left Thoreau a happy man.
Oh how I should enjoy in some
other life listening to Thoreau. Not on a walk of course. But
afterwards, beside the campfire, hearing his account of the day’s
adventure, while he munches his corn and sips his water. I would
dine frugally on a pheasant and only half a bottle of Vive
Cloque.
Cheers dear Henry. |
