By Ron Charles
Once upon a midnight dreary, while with toil and care quite weary,
I was pondering on man’s proneness to deceitfulness and guile,
Soon I fell into a seeming state ’twixt wakefulness and dreaming,
When my mind’s eye saw a scheming fellow counterfeiting Soap —
Yes! counterfeiting GOURAUD’s matchless Medicated Soap;
Twisting sand into a rope!
“The Raven” has been equally loved and scorned from the start. Emerson scoffed at it, but pre-Civil War audiences adored it, and the poem propelled Poe to national popularity. He even wrote an essay about how he wrote “The Raven”: “The Philosophy of Composition” — a precursor to VH1’s “Behind the Music.” (Work with me here; I’m trying to reach a younger audience.)
Just in time for Halloween — peak “Raven” season — Jerome McGann has released “The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel.” (Love that title.) McGann, an English professor at the University of Virginia, opens by acknowledging, “The fact that Poe’s poetry has always kept its popular audience has been a persistent academic annoyance.” What’s even more offensive to the pointy-headed academics who sneer at Poe’s macabre subject matter and jingling meter is that he drew such “serious admiration from the innovative poetic masters of the next generation.” How could Whitman and Baudelaire and Rossetti and even T.S. Eliot have been so impressed with this ghoulish hack?
McGann is fascinated by that tension. “Where do we take our bearings,” he asks, “from High Culture, where Poe remains a scandal, or from Popular Culture, where his influence has scarcely diminished?”
His book explains “certain dazzling verbal transformations” in Poe’s poetry, such as the simple fact that the title “The Raven” sounds awfully close to “the raving,” a fair appraisal of the narrator’s mental health. And he playfully points out that “raven is virtually never spelled backwards.” That beguiled my sad fancy into smiling.
But this is not a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. It’s an acutely scholarly monograph of grave and stern decorum, a book in which you’ll meet such grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous passages as: “Poe’s hoaxing rhetoric is fundamental in this move to objectivity. It implicitly — performatively — argues that the reader has a significant part to play in the work of poises. The parody establishes a rhetorical frame around ‘The Raven,’ its aesthophilosophical commentary, and finally around ‘Poe’ himself, the author of both. All get objectively marked with the sign of unsurmounted contradiction. Reception history then comes to reify the contradiction.”
There was a time — back in graduate school, in a previous century — when I could follow arguments like that, but nevermore.
Still, there are insights here for the determined lay reader. McGann appreciates that “an angel of the odd hovers over Poe’s work,” and he provides an especially astute summary of the psychological plot of “The Raven.” “It presents a person traumatized in loss: at first cherishing a blithe unawareness of his pain until it gradually imposes itself and forces a direct confrontation,” he writes. “The poem is doubly inexorable: it winds out its tale of a catatonic condition and does nothing to mitigate, much less to resist and least of all to cure or purge, the affective hell into which we are drawn.”
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask McGann more. Corresponding with him earlier this week, I wondered why “The Raven” retains such power to unnerve us.
“The poem is like a lively dance on a grave,” he answered. “Its darkness is darkened because it is treated so lightly. Its protagonist comes to us at first as if he could manage his sense of depthless loss with sophistication. And so the poem raises up a little drama in which we can see ourselves, for we all have fears and losses that are so terrible we can only try to handle them as if they weren’t serious or pervasive.”
In other words, it’s an act of poetic genius. Merely this and nothing more.
