And forget this lost Lenore! - Autobiographical elements in Edgar Allan Poe s poem The Raven

Transcription

1 University of Bielefeld Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Sciences Semester: SS 2004 Course: American Poetry Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Josef Raab And forget this lost Lenore! - Autobiographical elements in Edgar Allan Poe s poem The Raven Jens Peter Fischer [email protected]

2 Table of contents: A) Introduction 3 B) Analysis 3 B.1) Searching for Lenore 3 B.1.1) The literary Lenores 3 B.1.2) The real Lenores 4 B.1.3) Merging the two Lenores 4 B.1.4) Lenore in The Raven 5 B.2) Other Elements in The Raven 7 B.2.1) The Pallid Bust Of Pallas 7 B.2.2) The bleak December 8 B.2.3) The raven 8 B.2.4) Poe s abuse of alcohol 9 B.2.5) Masochism 10 B.3) Poe s own explanation of The Raven 10 C) Conclusion 12 D) Works Cited 13 2

3 A) Introduction Ever since criticism on him began, it has been argued that many works by Edgar Allan Poe contain autobiographical elements. Indeed, the outlines of some of his short stories read like parts of his biography, and it seems that the main character in particular often shares characteristics or experiences with the author himself. Therefore, much of the criticism that looks at autobiographical elements has focused on his short stories. My thesis is that it is one of his poems, The Raven, published in 1845, rather than a short story, that has extraordinarily strong autobiographical elements. I will argue that the story presented in the poem does not only, like many of his stories, bear resemblances to his life in general, but that there were a number of concrete events and influences on him at the time when he wrote The Raven that can be found in the poem. The evidence that supports my thesis comes from various sources, ranging from an examination of the poem itself and of related works of Poe's and their comparison to the author s biography to various secondary sources of criticism on the poet and his writings. B) Analysis B.1) Searching for Lenore A central element of The Raven is Lenore, the narrator s lost love, for whom he mourns. In order to better understand the significance of that name, its occurrences in other writings of Poe s will be examined. Then, I will draw a connection to the author s biography by looking at the role women played in his life. Finally, correspondences between the evidence in literature and biography will be established. B.1.1) The literary Lenores Several of Poe s writings are relevant in this respect. One of his poems is in fact called Lenore. The name is a short form of Eleonora, which derives from Greek Helen, a fact of which Poe surely was aware because he studied classical languages. As Mabbott points out, Eleonora and The Raven also have parallel passages (p. 373). Thus two more works of his, the poem To Helen and the short story Eleonora, have to be considered. 3

4 In Lenore (1831), the theme of mourning for a lost love is even more dominant than in The Raven. Here again Lenore is his lover, and again she died young. This suggests that Poe was using the name consciously and not coincidentally. Unfortunately the poem gives us no more details about the woman or her character. Two versions of To Helen exist. The first one, written in 1831, is an ode to a classical statue of Helen from Greek mythology, a symbol of beauty. This might suggest that Helen, and thus also Lenore, is not a concrete person but rather a symbol of beautiful young women in general. The second To Helen, dating from 1848, takes up this image and describes the mythological Helen as a source of inspiration for the poet s work, and, once more, as representing beauty. The short story Eleonora, published in 1845, gives a clearer indication who the name might stand for: The narrator says: Eleonora is the name of my cousin (pp ). He lives together with my cousin and her mother (p. 244), and after fifteen years falls in love with Eleonora (p. 245). She then dies, without the reader knowing why. This story has striking similarities to elements of Poe s biography that will be explored in the next section. This brief examination of Poe s writing centering on various forms of "Lenore" leads to two theories of "Lenore 's" possible origins. The first one is that she is simply a symbol of beauty and beautiful young women in general. The second one, which we got out of the story Eleonora, establishes strong similarities to the circumstances Poe was living in when he wrote The Raven : From 1833 on, he lived with his cousin Virginia and her mother, thus in the same personal circumstances as the narrator of Eleonora does as well. Poe claimed that he married Virginia when she was fifteen (although she was only fourteen at that time), which corresponds to the narrator s statement that the couple fell in love after 15 years. In both cases the relationship is ended by the woman s death. 4

5 B.1.2) The real Lenores There were four women that, at different times, played a dominant role in Poe s life. The first one was his mother Eliza Poe, who died in December 1811 when he was not even three years old, at the age of 24. After her death, relatives adopted his little sister and his older brother. Fanny Allan, one of a group of women who had tried to support his mother before she died, raised Poe. At the time he came to live with the Allans she was 26. She was also frequently sick and therefore seldom able to give much attention to Poe. She died at the age of 44, at a time when Poe had long left the Allan family. Still, in a letter Poe wrote that he "had a fearful warning & [had] hardly ever known before what distress was" (Nilsson, The Death of Fanny Allan). This shows that Fanny s death still affected him deeply. When he was 14 he often visited Jane Stanard, the mother of one of his classmates, who was thirty years old. Stanard died one year later, suffering from mental problems. At the same time Poe s behavior towards his family became much more harsh and unfriendly. In 1833 he went to live with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. Poe married Virginia in September The two were happily married for eight years, when, in 1842, it became clear that Virginia was suffering from tuberculosis. At that time there was no effective cure for the disease; this would only be developed in the 20 th century. B.1.3) Merging the two Lenores The two theories of whom the literary Lenores refer to seem to correspond: The two earlier works, Lenore and the first To Helen relate the name to beautiful women and their death in general, Eleonora, completed at about the same time as The Raven, directly points to Poe s cousin and wife Virginia. She was the final woman in his life, and she came to reincarnate, in the poet s unconscious, both his baby sister and the fragile, poetic, dying mother (Bonaparte, p. 19). To this list, Fanny Allan and Jane Stanard also have to be added because they had a similar influence on him. At the time Poe wrote The Raven it was clear to him that Virginia would die. This was not only due to the fact that tuberculosis at that time usually led to death, but also to his life experience. All the women that had played an important role in his life had died 5

6 young, so for him Virginia stood in that macabre tradition. As Marie Bonaparte points out, for Poe, it was inevitable that [ ] love [was] equated [ ] with Beauty touched by death (Bonaparte, p. 20). B.1.4) Lenore in The Raven Thus, while Poe was composing The Raven, the main tragedy of his life, the loss of beloved women, was repeating itself again. The narrator in the poem reflects this. He is in the same position as Poe was. He is suffering from the loss of a rare and radiant maiden (l. 11) and hoping for surcease of sorrow (l. 10). We never get a more detailed description of the woman, and indeed Virginia s inevitable death, for Poe, recalled a number of women that he had lost earlier, so Lenore cannot stand for just one woman, which accounts for the lack of description of any more specific features. Let us look in more detail at Virginia s failing health and Poe s reaction to it and see how they are reflected in the poem. In a letter to a friend in 1848, Poe reports: Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved before, broke a blood vessel in singing. Her life was despaired of. I took leave of her forever, and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially, and again I hoped. [ ] the vessel broke again [ ] and then again again [ ] Each time I felt all the agonies of her death. (Lindsay, p. 133) The narrator in The Raven has gone through the same process of hope flaring up and dying again many times. When he first meets the raven, despite the deep sorrow that he has expressed earlier in the poem, he starts smiling (l. 43, 66). However, he says that on the morrow [the raven] will leave [him], as [his] hopes have flown before (l. 59). At this point the bird is characterized as a symbol of hope, and the narrator recalls that hope usually flares up and then leaves him again. The narrator tries to investigate if the raven, which has intuitively brought a feeling of relief, is really what it seems, namely new hope. His passionate requests to the bird (ll , 85-89, 91-95), however, are answered by Nevermore. Hope has flown, as it has before. We can detect another parallel to the poem in Poe s letter: In the poem, Lenore is lost 6

7 (The Raven, l. 10), and indeed already dead. Virginia, the real-life Lenore, was lost not because she already was dead but in the sense that she was, in Poe s view, doomed to die. The narrator s desperation over the lover s dearth in The Raven, which was completed and published while she was still alive, may well have been motivated by Virginia s semi-deaths, in which Poe felt all the agonies of her death. B.2) Other Elements in The Raven Having established the connection between the central elements in the poem and their models in the author s life, we will now precede to other, specific influences on Poe that can be seen as having counterparts in The Raven. In 1849 Poe said that The Raven had lain for more that ten years in his desk unfinished, while he would at long intervals work on it (Mabbott, p ). However, most scholars agree that he borrowed the metrical form of the poem from Elizabeth Barret s poem Lady Gerladine s Courtship of 1844 (Mabbott, p. 356). This suggests that 1844 and early 1845 were the years when he wrote most of The Raven. Therefore the details in his biography the have to be considered were either factors that had a profound influence on him over a long period of time or that can be dated to 1844 or B.2.1) The Pallid Bust of Pallas In the poem the raven, that comes floating in in the seventh stanza, sits down upon a bust of Pallas Athena (l. 41), the goddess of wisdom in Greek mythology, that stands above the narrator s chamber door. In the time when Poe was composing various parts of The Raven, 1844, he was lodging in a cottage owned by Patrick Brennan close to the Hudson River. In the cottage Poe had his own study, of which we have two accounts. One speaks of a bust of Pallas (that) stood on a shelf above the doorway (Lumpkin), the second one is known to have come from General James O Beirne, the husband of one of the Brennans daughters, who reports a plaster cast of Pallas (Quinn, p. 415; Allen, p. 484). Mabbott adds that these busts were quite popular (Mabbott, p. 372). What happens in the poem is what Allen describes as the mind of the poet fus[ing] the actual scene [ ] with the furniture in the room (p. 488) where he wrote it. We can 7

8 imagine Poe sitting in his chamber, trying to distract himself from Virginia s poor state of health but failing, and sorrow fills his mind again. In the poem, the raven, which symbolizes first hope and later desperation, covers the bust up with its shadows. This shows not only Poe losing all his learning and art, as Allen suggests, (p. 489), but him losing his ability to think rationally because he is caught up in emotional turmoil. B.2.2) The bleak December Poe-biographer William Fearing Gill, in his essay The Rationale of the Raven, quotes an account of Poe s stay in New York from Graham May, whom he said to have a near and friendly intimacy with the poet (Gill, p. 396): While at this place, and previous to the appearance of The Raven, his child-wife, Virginia, for whom he had come to feel a deeper affection than that of fraternal love, was prostrated by a serious illness, which had previously affected her, and for weeks her life hung by a thread. Animation was at times, indeed, seemingly suspended, and on one dreary December night the poet was agonized to find her cold and breathless, apparently dead. (Gill, p. 396) The line Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December (l. 7) can be seen as referring to this event: Virginia had had a very serious breakdown, which shocked the poet, and afterwards he sits in his study and tries to gain surcease of sorrow sorrow for the lost Lenore (l. 10), as he (again) realizes that soon she will be dead. The mentioning of the bleak December might also refer to another death: that of Poe s mother, on December 8 th, As explained in B.1), her death was a key experience in his life. Virginia s poor health has triggered his memories of the earlier loss. If we adopt this theory, the narrator s statement that distinctly I remember (l. 7) shows what a strong impression the death of his mother has made on Poe, who was then a threeyear-old child: We do not know how much of his early childhood he remembers, but he distinctly recalls her death. B.2.3) The raven One inspiration for the raven in the poem is surely Charles Dickens Barnaby Rudge. 8

9 As Mabbot notes, he had a good reason to make a reference to Dickens at the beginning of his Philosophy of Composition, which deals with the composition of The Raven (p. 356). There are also some facts that suggest that ravens also had a profound influence on Poe himself. It is known that his friend Henry B. Hirst owned a bird store in which he had a raven, so Poe had good opportunity to study the bird (Mabbot, p. 354). Mabbott proposes that a part of Poe s childhood spent in London gave him opportunity to see the ravens stalking about the Tower of London (p. 354). Poe s actual encounters with ravens may be hard to trace, but we can see their effect in a statement that he made to an acquaintance: That bird [a raven], that imp bird pursues me, mentally, perpetually; I cannot rid myself of its presence; I hear its croak as I used to hear it at Stoke Newington, the flap of its wings in my ear. (Mabbott, pp ) Knowing of this experience of Poe s, we can imagine that, like the bust of Pallas, it had a similar effect on his writing of The Raven. While going through the experience of fearing to lose a beloved woman again, this time his wife, his remembrances of a raven, which is, as Poe himself notes, traditionally the bird of ill omen (Philosophy of Composition, p. 486), must have had a haunting effect on him. His description of his memories of ravens also bears a resemblance to the description the narrator gives in The Raven : the bird comes to both of them, and they want to free themselves of the bird s depressive presence. The two elements that haunted Poe most, the flapping of the bird s wings and the croaking, are also its only active behavior in the poem: It comes flying in with flirt and flutter (l. 37) and lands on a stature, and from there on only croaks Nevermore (l. 72). The horror actually happens in the mind of the narrator, who speculates about the meaning of the bird s visit, and also in Poe s. B.2.4) Poe s abuse of alcohol The narrator in The Raven desires respite and nepenthe (l. 83) from his state of sorrow, (in Greek mythology, nepenthe is a potion which can banish sorrow) and declares his readiness to quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore! (l. 84). The phrase to quaff nepenthe indicates that his relief is to come through drinking. At various points in his life, Poe drank vast quantities of alcohol. He already started to 9

10 drink a lot at the age of nineteen at the university and kept this habit. While married to Virginia, he was able to control his addiction to alcohol most of the time, out of respect for her and because she gave him the strength for it. This changed when Virginia s health got worse. As Philip Lindsay notes, His sprees usually coincided with Virginia s relapses (Lindsay, p. 133). Poe later said that During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank-god only knows how often and how much. He specifies the reason for his behaviour: [ ] my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity. (Lindsay, pp ). Lindsay agrees to this interpretation: He drank to forget Mrs. Allan, Mrs. Shelton and Elmira; he drank to forget that Virginia was choking blood (Lindsay, p. 148). Poe and the narrator in The Raven thus have the same motives for desiring nepenthe and also the same indifferent readiness to do it. It becomes very clear that the abuse was a way of avoiding having to think about Poe s dying wife, this lost Lenore. B.2.5) Masochism On of the most striking peculiarities in the plot of the The Raven is that the narrator, after finding out that the bird always replies nevermore to all his questions, continues asking if there is a chance to meet Lenore again, knowing the answer will be negative. In the essay-like first part of his short story The Imp of the Perverse Poe explains such behaviour: And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. (Poe, The Imp of the Perverse, p. 364) Here Poe passionately discusses the principles of self-torture. In his essay on the writing of The Raven, the Philosophy of Composition, he speaks of a general human thirst for self-torture (p. 491) that in this case controls the narrator. He seems to have believed in a common human masochistic drive that he observed in people around him, and surely in himself too. Indeed, in that light Poe s numerous writings that deal with beautiful women s deaths are expressions of his mental masochism, as he could not stop thinking about and working with the topic that was most painful to him. 10

11 B.3) Poe s own explanation of The Raven In his essay The Philosophy of Composition, written in 1846, he gives his own explanation for why he wrote the poem, which is quite different from the one developed here: while I argue here that many things that had a strong emotional impact on him were included in the poem in a process that may be called intuitive, he, in the essay, claims that no one point in [the poem s] composition is referable either to accident or intuition (p. 482) and that he completed the work with the precision and rigid consequence that he would use for a mathematical problem (p. 482). In the following sentence from the Philosophy of Composition he deals with his intentions in writing the poem: Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem, per se, the circumstance or say the necessity which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste. (p. 482) It seems strange to dismiss this question as irrelevant, as it surely should be one of the topics of a philosophy of composition. The sentence is ambiguous. The fact that the a in a poem is written in italics suggests an emphasis on the word, which would mean that that he wants to say Let us dismiss the reason why I wanted to write a poem. However, the rest of the sentence suggests that he wants to say Let us dismiss the reason why I wanted to write a poem that suits the public taste. The first reading openly denies his intentions in writing the poem, the second reading ignores his personal intentions altogether. The fact that the paragraph just quoted is ambiguous, in contrast to the others before and after it, which are written in clear, sharp language, indicates that the author may have been especially concerned about it. The ambiguity may be intended, which would mean that the author wants to keep the question from arising in his readers' minds, or unintended, which would mean that he himself does not want to deal with the question. Indeed, the circumstance or necessity, which gave rise to the intention of writing the poem can be seen as being an intuitive process, as has been argued in the preceding sections of this paper. 11

12 To explain Poe's intentions in writing an account of the composition of The Raven that leaves out on this very important point I would like to use the psychological idea of "rationalization". If we apply the idea of rationalization to the Philosophy of Composition we can form the hypothesis that one of his intentions in writing it was to downplay the impact that the intuitive flow of his own experiences into The Raven had, to himself and to his audience. Through the passage quoted above, he avoids dealing with the part of the composition that took part intuitively, and then puts a strong emphasis on the parts that he carried out on a logical basis, like the choice of length, meter and dramatic effect (with some of the biographical influences that have been identified in this paper he also deals with as completely rational choices in that essay, like the raven and the narrator s masochistic tendencies). C) Conclusion In the preceding sections of the paper it has been shown that many influences on the poet Poe have found their way into The Raven. It seems important to clarify that these by no means deny the literary genius of Poe. While the intention in writing the poem and its central themes have been explained in terms of intuitive influences, for him these were only inspirations that he turned into poetry with mathematical precision, just as he claims. There are also a number of literary sources for the poem that he chose consciously and that have not been looked at at this point. The author hopes the point of view developed here can contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the man Edgar Allan Poe and his poem The Raven. Similar analyses could very probably be carried out in the same manner on many of his other works. 12

13 D) Works Cited Allen, Hervey: Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., Bonaparte, Marie: Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Psychoanalysis and Literature. Ed. Ruitenbeek, Hendrik M. New York: E.P.Dutton & Co., Inc., Gill, William Fearing: The Rationale of The Raven. Papyrus Leaves. New York: R. Worthington, Lindsay, Philip: The Haunted Man A Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, Lumpkin, Tony: The First American Poem: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven". URL: (Visited on March 30, 2004.) Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed.: Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume 1: Poems. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Nilsson, Christoffer: The Death of Fanny Allan. Qrisse s Edgar Allan Poe Pages. URL : (Visited on March 29, 2004.) Poe, Edgar Allan: The Imp of the Perverse. Tales of Mystery and Imagination. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Poe, Edgar Allan: The Philosophy of Composition. The Fall Of The House Of Usher And Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, Poe, Edgar Allan: Eleonora. The Fall Of The House Of Usher And Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, Quinn, Arthur Hobson: Edgar Allan Poe: a critical biography. New York: Cooper Square, Sinclair, David: Edgar Allan Poe. London: J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia: Rationalization. URL: (Visited on 2 nd November 2004.) 13