[Roger Slater]

Wilbur has written at least one longish essay on Poe -- and if I'm not misremembering, he hugely admires Poe's fiction. I need to find that essay again.

[Brian Watson]

^ I think the one you're referring to is collected in The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces, 1963-1995.

Added in: Just checked. There are two of them in that volume, 'Poe and the Art of Suggestion', and 'Edgar Allan Poe's Eleonora'.

[Lance Levens]

Roger

I think Wilbur dislikes Poe's aesthetic. He says in one of his essays that he has spent a lifetime arguing against it. The early sonnet in which he decries the abuse of metaphor for surrealistic purposes is an example. Here's an excerpt from a Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER That was one of your criticisms of Poe’s poetry, wasn’t it, that it wasn’t grounded enough in the concrete.

WILBUR Yes. He is hurrying away from it as fast as he can go. He has to mention it in order to destroy it! Otherwise, you’d see nothing but the smoke. He will say “seas,” and then will add, “without a shore,” and make it impossible for you to think of any sea that you ever heard of.

[G. M. Palmer]

In another (likely now dead) literary forum there was a fellow who was a champion of Poe. He would rail about (with evidence, which was nice) how Emerson and then Eliot went about destroying Poe's reputation.

Poe gets hate for the same reason Longfellow does: what he's doing looks easy but is nearly impossible to replicate (except in parody).

I think if we are going to seriously embrace not just form in poetry but poetry as a thriving art and not a boutique or bespoke one, we need to have a serious re-evaluation of both Longfellow and Poe.

[Richard Meyer]

It's a good thing that poetry wars are fought with the pen and not the sword.

[Roger Slater]

Wilbur's "Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976," contains three separate essays about Poe. One of them ends:

A number of Poe's poems are enchanting in much the way they mean to be, but I reserve my respect for the major tales, which, for all the secretiveness of their allegory, are great and trail-blazing realizations of inner experience.

The three essays in this volume, by the way, are apparently not the same as the two in Wilbur's "Catbird" book of essays, so that would make five major essays on Poe written by Wilbur. Whatever his judgments may otherwise be, it's obvious that he found Poe important enough to study quite closely and reflect upon in depth and at length.

[Richard Meyer]

Roger:

Thanks for the information. Those essays should be well worth looking into.

Richard

[Gregory Dowling]

Wilbur's essays contain some of the best criticism there is on Poe. He has many reservations about the poetry. Here are the concluding remarks from his longest essay on Poe, entitled simply "Edgar Allan Poe":

... he thought of the poem as casting a spell, and accordingly endowed it with the brevity, repetitiveness, sonority, and the impressive rhythmic monotony of a charm or incantation. In a charm we are far less concerned with the sense than with the effect—nonsense will do, if it only works—and therefore Poe's incantatory techniques further the general effort of his poetry to nullify—in a logical and denotative sense—the words with which it is made.

Poe's poetry is pure negation; it does not and cannot acquaint us with supernal beauty, and the reader may well question whether there is anything very spiritual about a program of estranging us from the known by subverting the words through which we know it. A number of Poe's poems are enchanting much the way they mean to be, but I reserve my respect for the major tales, which, for all the secretiveness of their allegory, are great and trail-blazing realizations of inner experience.

Editing in to say that I've just realised that Roger quotes the same conclusion; don't know how I came to miss that other than through sheer carelessness. Well, as I've provided the previous three sentences as well, I'll leave it.

[Jan D. Hodge]

Greg noted that it is easy to parody Poe, largely because of his distinctive style. I too am guilty; a couple of years ago I posted as an anagram challenge "Lanora: A Pledge," a Poetic (or is it Poesque?) dream:

. . . .. . . In seas of steaming flora--oh! what lushly teeming flora!--
. . . .A bright and golden aura did enshroud my darling Nora
. . . .And floating o'er a border of the fatal hellabore
. . . .I saw a choir of angels singing--singing dirges for
. . . .My dying darling Nora, lost to me forevermore. . . .

Though not a parody, I also used the form of "The Bells" to write an ode on the changing tempers of poetry from the Romantics to the Beats. And on challenges from a friend, I did a double-dactyl rendering of "Ligeia" (which Poe considered his best), and explored in unrhymed hexameter the problems of revision Poe encountered in "The Mystery of Marie Roget." [Daniel Stashower wrote an analysis of Poe's not particularly successful attempt to resurrect Dupin to solve the real murder of Mary Rogers in The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder.]

But my favorite experience with Poe's writing happened decades ago, when I was satirizing a colleague's thesis on the American monomyth, using various poems as models. I characterized him:

. . . .It was many and many a month ago
. . . . . . .When he first conceived the dream
. . . .Of defining the force that determines the course
. . . . . . .Of America's cultural stream.
. . . .Since then he has lived with no other thought
. . . . . . .Than he and his monomyth theme. . . .

My daughter, then nine, loved those lines, and went around for weeks chanting them, evidence of the hypnotic power of Poe's rhythms. Later that year I gave her a copy of Stevenson's A Children's Garden of Verses for her birthday, and one night, reading it in bed, she suddenly ran downstairs practically screaming: "Daddy, daddy! Somebody copied your poem!!" She had of course discovered "Annabel Lee."

Jan

[Bill Carpenter]

Mallarmé thought negation could lead us to supernal beauty and loved Poe's negations in that spirit. But he did not emulate Poe's poetic rhetoric. A few times he narrated obsession in a Poe-esque vein, such as in L'Azur and in Le Demon de l'analogie, a prose poem in which images running through his mind mysteriously appear in shop windows. Here is his very un-Poe-like Tombeau d'Edgar Poe:

Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change,
Le Poète suscite avec un glaive nu
Son siècle épouvanté de n’avoir pas connu
Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange !

Eux, comme un vil sursaut d’hydre oyant jadis l’ange
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu
Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.

Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief !
Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief
Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s’orne

Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur,
Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne
Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.

[As to Himself at last eternity changes him
The Poet reawakens with a naked sword
His century appalled at never having heard
That in this voice triumphant death had sung its hymn.

They, like a writhing hydra, hearing seraphim
Bestow a purer sense on the language of the horde,
Loudly proclaimed that the magic potion had been poured
From the dregs of some dishonoured mixture of foul slime.

From the war between earth and heaven, what grief!
If understanding cannot sculpt a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe:

Calm block here fallen from obscure disaster,
Let this granite at least mark the boundaries evermore
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hurled to the future.

--unattributed translation from ArtMagick.com at http://www.artmagick.com/poetry/poet...hane-mallarme]