he life of Edgar Allan Poe provides one of the earliest, most salient, and most famous examples of the interconnection of creativity and melancholy in the literary culture of the South. It also demonstrates how Poe's agony reached, through fiction, the same wellsprings of depression and art that other writers knew from their own, similar sufferings. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, linked Poe with Byron, Baudelaire, and Musset as poets with "souls in which they usually try to conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all faithful memory; often lost in the mud, and almost in love with it." Nietzsche’s own battles with mental demons permitted him so poignant an insight.

Throughout his life, Poe faced problems of failed honor and insanity—issues that paradoxically help to account for a literary authority that established precedents and patterns of literature in his home region—and even beyond the South itself. Whether fully conscious of his aims, Poe found ways to deal imaginatively with the inexpressible, the horrors that the mind can conjure, and the dark side of experience—without revealing any more of the inner torture than he wished to convey to his readership.

"Ultima Thule." Edgar Allan Poe, November 9, 1848. (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.)

His stories often exhibit a preoccupation with pride. A Poe narrator belligerently asserts the self-concern of who-I-am but encounters a senior or peer who mockingly challenges his pretensions to authenticity. Out of dread that the accusing tongue may speak the truth, the protagonist seeks vengeance. That purpose, no matter how cruel, seems honorable to him. Yet, after he commits the murderous act, remorse and self-condemnation immediately bring home a shame that validates the accuser's charge. The narrator confesses to the reader his own degradation. Such a sequence punctuated Poe's literary career. He translated his maddened cycle of triumph and pain in his art. Poe used his creative impulse as the means to expose the enormity of his own offenses, as he often exaggerated them to be. He did so without actually facing up to the "debaucheries," a vague term often utilized. Poe felt the full blast of humiliation that usually strikes down his narrators and renders them helpless, impotent, forlorn. He wanted that kind of resolution, as if he gained an affirming gratification from wretchedness.

To understand his impact on Southern letters, three factors—literary influence, personal loss, and artistic transformation of the anguished and morbid self into fiction and poetry—were involved. They are mutually complementary. All three help to explain Poe’s embodiment of the melancholy features of Southern culture—its fatalism, violence, mistrust of reform and change, ancestor worship, and dread of dishonor.

Turning first to the issue of Poe’s influence upon later writers, we find that he reached a greater number than one might have suspected. To the modern ear his poetry and tales seem artificial, lugubrious, and brief to the point of incompleteness. Imitators have worn his originality down to clichés. Indeed, even to some critics of Poe's day, his poems and tales resembled the work of a journalistic hack. Yet, the "madman Poe," by adopting a secular approach to art that would later be called modern offered a fresh way to approach art itself. Poe did not treat the writing of poems as a means to animate a higher popular morality. So many Victorians considered that inspiration to be poetry’s holy mission. Instead, he proposed the replacement of God with artistic intention. The modern trope permitted explorations of all sorts, even matters of sexuality. Allen Tate, the leading Southern literary critic of the mid-twentieth century, hailed Poe as a forerunner of literary modernity even if nothing he wrote ever "could bring a blush to the cheek of the purest maiden."

o be sure, the modernistic sensibility—secular, symbolist, and questioning of orthodoxies—had its origins in the European Romantic movement. It was natural therefore that Poe's contribution to that style was first noticed abroad. Drawn by the abstract, classically philosophical manner of Poe's Gothicism, such French poets as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Valéry acclaimed Poe's rapport with their own sense of alienation. Baudelaire felt a special affinity for Poe, whose reputation in nineteenth-century France accordingly outgrew the respect of his own countrymen. In fact, Poe's more serious purposes escaped the notice of contemporary Victorian Americans. With regard to Poe's prose fiction, such English novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and Rudyard Kipling shamelessly borrowed Poe's devices and plots—from doubled selves, including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the barely disguised homosexual story, The Portrait of Dorian Grey. D. H. Lawrence also found him useful in writing the short story "The Border-Line." In addition, readers might guess that Poe had some influence in his story, "The Rocking-Horse Winner." Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature was perhaps somewhat condescending about Poe, as the English novelist seemed to be about American authors in general, yet he showed a remarkable sensitivity to Poe’s methods and purpose. Feodor Dostoevsky's plot in Crime and Punishment (1866) was prefigured in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843). The latter story concerns an obsessive murderer of an old man. He groans in terror, but his cries for mercy only inflame the criminal to do the motiveless deed. Even when three policemen arrive, the protagonist complacently shows them around the house, proudly convinced the crime was flawless. But before their departure, the narrator-killer can no longer pretend innocence and blurts out a self-defeating confession in an agony of guilt-ridden terror.

In Dostoevsky's novel, Raskolnikov's murder of an old woman in St. Petersburg follows along similar lines. Long Poe's admirer, the Russian novelist once declared that the American writer "almost always takes the most exceptional reality" and endows it with such details that the reader is convinced "of its possibility, of its reality" when objectively the event or situation is impossible. Likewise, James Joyce praised Poe's invention of the "poetic short story," which aimed not for concentration on action but on "‘unity of effects,’" or, as critic Walton Litz explains, the "poetic exploitation of atmosphere and setting." Seldom has any writer furnished the professional discipline so many innovations: the solitary mind as the instrument for resolving a mystery; structures—houses, towers, tunnels, maelstroms, and so on—as representations of human emotions and gendered identities; and, most important, the probing of repressed emotions. Is it possible that Dostoevsky’s astonishing creations of character, echoing and re-echoing each other, were inspired by Poe’s doubling of figures? The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin points to the dialogic character of Dostoevsky’s work—the multiplicity of voices that react or anticipate what another character is thinking but fails to put into printed words. Poe anticipated that technique.

Poe, of course, did not invent the Gothic mode, but the tradition established by Anne Radcliffe and Horace Walpole became much richer for his use of it. Most important, the mood of alienation Poe conveyed became a dominant theme for a host of European writers in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Impressed from childhood by Poe's tales, Thomas Mann imitated the theme of brother-sister incest and other aspects of "The Fall of the House of Usher" in an early short story, "The Blood of the Walsungs," published in 1905. Joseph Conrad shared Poe's mistrust of the notion of progress and also his sense of isolation. Conrad's mad but charismatic character Kurtz in Heart of Darkness could well have traced his ancestry to one of Poe's obsessive characters. Marlow, the Poe-like narrator, records Kurtz's dying in the African wilderness: "(I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair.… He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: 'The horror! The horror!')" In Heart of Darkness, Marlow is both repelled and fascinated by Kurtz with whom he cannot help but identify some dark aspects of himself.

Despite Poe's widespread reputation abroad, only after the Freudian revolution and the ending of the First World War did Southern writers discover a deeper aspect to Poe's work. Ironically, the references to Poe in European works like those of Mann and Joyce, whom the members of the Southern Renaissance were just discovering, brought them once again in touch with their American compatriot. (Of course, they had read him in their youth, but simply for the Gothic thrills.) "Poe as God," Tate later wrote, "sits silent in darkness. Here the movement of tragedy is reversed: there is no action. Man as angel becomes a demon who cannot initiate the first motion of love, and we can feel only compassion with his suffering, for it is potentially ours." Therein lies Poe's universal appeal. No one entirely escapes the feelings of deprivation, loss, and guilt that he so often evoked in his stories.

ith regard to Poe's direct impact on major Southern writers, scarcely any of them escaped. From age ten well into his maturity, for instance, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, John Gould Fletcher, read and reread Poe's poetry. Just as aspiring young writers of the 1950s tried to imitate Faulkner, prior generations adopted the manner of Poe. Young Walker Percy, who, like Poe, had lost both his parents under traumatic circumstances, also followed the Poe tradition. He composed a poem that he later confessed was dreadful. He called it "In Somnium in the Manner of Poe." "I thought it was very high class and literary," Percy laughed. "It sounded like Poe, all about death, with a lot of dark, gloomy things in it." Flannery O'Connor admitted that as a child she read "Slop with a capital S" followed by "the Edgar Allan Poe period which lasted for years." She admired particularly Poe's humorous stories.

Some Southern modernists, however, later repudiated their early esteem. Truman Capote at age eight loved Poe's stories and missed school trying to match them with stories of his own creation. In middle age, Capote declared, however, that Poe was among the writers about whom his "youthful flames have guttered." Likewise, novelist Shelby Foote, once a teenage Poe enthusiast, later denied him a seat in the American literary pantheon. Excepting The Narrative of Gordon Pym, "as a writer of fiction, Poe was no damn good," Foote wrote his friend Walker Percy.

These latter-day rejections arouse some skepticism. Tate recognized that early influences should not be so quickly dismissed. He pointed out that, for his generation at least, "the forlorn demon" that was Poe remained a dejected cousin. This remained so even after the young aspiring writer returned the gloomy author's works to their accustomed place on the parlor shelf next to "the family Shakespeare and the early novels of Ellen Glasgow." In sum, Poe "was in our lives and we cannot pretend he was not." The influence could begin early and continue. Like so many other aspiring young Southern writers, for instance, Conrad Aiken in 1913 adopted the style of Poe when first experimenting with verse. He has a poetic heroine expire on her wedding day, and the narrator falls into romantic despair: "A loneliness, a loneliness, / An absence of loveliness, / Came down upon his heart like rain." Such lines, like Walker Percy's, reflected immature ardor. In his best realized, mature short stories, Aiken developed Poe-like situations but not as mere imitations of the master. In "Strange Moonlight," Aiken's narrator has "filched a volume of Poe's tales from his mother's book case and has had in consequence a delirious night in inferno." The reference to Poe establishes the mood of the story. On his nightmarish journey into hell the boy has a companion who is only "a voice and a wing—an enormous jagged black wing, soft and drooping like a bat's," and a gentle voice. Shades of "The Raven" arise. It should be recalled that Aiken also lost both parents. When Conrad was nine years old, his father, a Savannah, Georgia, physician who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, had killed his wife and then himself. In "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," Aiken's prepubescent boy Paul is more sexual than any of Poe's characters ever were, but the lad's preoccupation with death and its link to parents, whom he hated and loved, bears striking resemblance to the Gothic imagination of the antebellum writer. Likewise, in his role as a mature novelist, Tate constructed one of the characters in The Fathers as a replication of Poe's eccentric Roderick Usher. Like the mad owner of the famous house, George Posey's reclusive uncle rattled about in a colossal antebellum plantation mansion.

Not surprisingly, the South's most renowned novelist was not immune from Poe's impact. Faulkner and Poe will forever be linked. Critic Kay Boyle once remarked that both writers relished "their immunity from literary fashion." They were alike, she continued, "in their fanatical obsession with the unutterable depths of mankind's vice and even more with his divinity." The two great symbolists in Southern writing dealt with these common phenomena: narcissistic doubling; vengeance in the name of a spurious perception of honor; violence, sometimes planned, sometimes random, as an inextricable part of man's nature; and what the late Alfred Kazin has called "the dignity of loneliness." Maud Faulkner had read Poe's stories and poems aloud to her son in his early years. In maturity, however, he seldom referred to this literary progenitor. Nonetheless, Poe's scene of the Mme. Camille L'Espanaye's decapitation in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" has a connection with the throat-slitting of Joanna Burden in William Faulkner's Light in August. Poe had married his first cousin, his father's teenage niece, and the theme of incest and young maidens is one of his frequent tropes. That literary device would also be developed in Quentin and Caddy Compson's relationship in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. The role of doubling and its connection with incest led John Irwin to draw parallels between Poe's tale of Roderick Usher and Roderick’s sister Madeleine and Faulkner's story in Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner narrates the tale of Charles Bon, "the black shadow self," and Henry Sutpen, his murderer, his half-brother—and, as in Poe, his double. Upon first meeting Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley even saw a physical resemblance between his new, romantic friend and the Bohemian poet of the previous century: "His face has an expression like Poe's in photographs, crooked and melancholy." Clearly, for an understanding of Southern literary continuities, Poe is a figure to be reckoned with.

(More, to Part 2 of 3)

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