oe's preoccupation with honor and dread of shame placed him well within the Southern literary framework, even though he lived most of his adult life apart from the slave South. Despite the self-imposed exile, he remained always conscious of his Southern and allegedly noble roots. To cousin William Poe of Augusta, Georgia, Poe explained in 1840 that he relied chiefly upon "the South" to promote his career. "If I fully succeed in my purpose, I will not fail to produce some lasting effect upon the growing literature of the country [the South], while I shall establish for myself individually a name which that country ‘will not willingly let die.’" Such sentiments were not uncommon in that Romantic era, but they reveal a rather juvenile naïveté in Poe. Eventually the prediction did come true but scarcely in Poe’s lifetime as he anticipated.

Despite that childlike quality in his writing, Edgar Allan Poe was sufficiently alienated as a gifted intellectual to see the destructive aspects of honor and humiliation, so long the governing principles of a master-slave society. Yet he scarcely hoped to overthrow Southern conventions and habits. After all, however much he rebelled in life and in art against the rubric of honor, he knew no other ethical system. A third story, "William Wilson," even more autobiographical than the others, helps to illuminate. "Men usually grow base by degrees," Poe has his narrator say, but "I passed with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah Gabalus." The story concerns the doubleness of human identity and the intertwining of power and helplessness. The narrator is driven to kill his double who never leaves him alone and imitates his every action. Eventually, he plunges a sword into his nemesis. In his dying voice, the second Wilson whispers, "You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."

His most famous and favorite poem, "The Raven" revealed much more about the author’s wrestling with despair than he ever intended. In fact, in his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," he threw his readers off the scent with a technical and objective analysis that theatrically exposes his artifices. His approach resembled a magician’s in revealing how he performs his tricks. By that means, Poe created a distance from himself as creator from the inner feelings that the poem actually describes. Who, not what, is the raven—whom does it symbolize with its parrot-like repetition of "Nevermore"? Poe offered the answer, as his essay observed, in the poem’s last lines:

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a
        demon’s that is
        dreaming,
And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow
On the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore.

The Raven is the representation of the poet/narrator’s own melancholy. The poem is only ostensibly about Leonore, the student’s mistress mentioned in the middle stanzas. Her death is the occasion for his despondency, but the source of that sorrow lies not simply in grief over a dead lover. The raven’s permanent installation at the end of the poem signifies a sorrow beyond any healing. Mourning over the loss of a loved one is psychologically a temporary condition. Under ordinary circumstances, the period of lamentation loses its intensity over time. The location of the scene drives home that difference. The room where the student is seated is, of course, really the poet’s own body. Poe argues that theatrically it was best for the intended effect of horror to place the setting in "a close circumspection of space"—like a body, a tomb, and, in the poetic idiom, a chamber. But there are other reasons for employing that locale. Often writers have chosen a cramped, confined space because melancholia feels to them as constricting, suffocating as if they were in some kind of lockup. For instance, William Styron in his essay "Darkness Visible" describes why he has the black rebel in The Confessions of Nat Turner tell his story while incarcerated in a prison cell. In fact, Styron thought he was "impelled" to borrow this setting from the suicidal Albert Camus’s The Stranger. In that novel, the hero, Meurseult, is awaiting his execution in a cell. Walker Percy’s insane protagonist Lance Lamar in Lancelot is also similarly imprisoned. In so many of the works of Poe, the caged figures—some of them literally walled-in—are victims of the demonic nature of the illness that afflicted their creator. It is despair itself that imprisons.

ose artists who have suffered from severe mental collapse have often imagined their illness not only as a particular location but also a specific creature of dread. "I have a black melancholia tearing at my roots or eating like the Spartan fox at my vitals," John Gould Fletcher, an early twentieth-century Southern poet wrote a friend. Greatly afflicted by the malady, Winston Churchill called the mood his "black dog." Sylvia Plath referred to it as "the groveling image of the fearful beast in myself" and the "demon of negation." The latter term also appears in the stanza from "The Raven" quoted above. Percy entitled his family’s mental distress "the sweet beast of catastrophe." For all of them as well as many others so afflicted, depression had to be fought minute by minute with a "stoic face" and "a position of irony," as Plath reminded herself in her journal.

Poe’s utilization of the specific image of a bird to signify the agony of melancholy had analogs in both contemporary and modern artistic work. Vincent van Gogh’s painting of crows flying over a field of yellow stalks has been so interpreted. Baudelaire touched on the theme when he wrote, "I have felt the wind of the wing of madness." As if there was something specifically menacing about the presence of birds, William Styron describes his own descent into utter despondency. Vacationing at Martha’s Vineyard, he was emotionally struck down while watching "a flock of Canadian geese honking above the trees ablaze with foliage." Usually, such "a sight and sound … would have exhilarated me." On this occasion, though, Styron "stood stranded there, helpless, shivering," knowing that his mind was racing out of control and unable to regather himself. In Lie Down in Darkness, Styron has his young suicidal heroine, Peyton Loftus, react in terror to imaginings of birds: "they followed me, prissing along with their stiff-legged gait and their noiseless, speckled wings." In Poe’s explication of "The Raven" in "The Philosophy of Composition," he mentions that the student-narrator was not only troubled by notions of "self-torture" but also by superstition. Although he fails to specify the superstition, he was probably referring to the old Southern folk warning that a bird that flew into a house meant that a sudden death was about to occur—in this case, perhaps the student-narrator’s.

So grim an interpretation of the raven’s poetic meaning is further supported by its location in the room. The bird sits, appropriately, on the bust of Pallas Athena, the goddess of the intellect. The statue resides on a shelf above the student-narrator’s own head. In his customary fashion, Poe throws dust in the reader’s eyes by claiming that he chose that place simply because "Pallas" was a mellifluous term (which is a reminder of "pallid," a fittingly morbid adjective). Pallas Athena, of course, sprang from the head of Zeus, seat of learning and wisdom, according to the understanding of the ancient Greeks. They believed that emotions resided in the heart, not head, but in Poe’s time and ours the brain carries all mood and thought, rational and otherwise.

According to Poe’s further distancing in his essay, this mindless, loveless, carrion beast at first amuses the student. Actually, however, the poem by no means offers so lighthearted a moment even at the start. Instead, the raven has invaded the soul of the poet and shows no intention ever to leave. At first, though, the occupant of the room expects that he can shoo it out the window from whence it had entered. As Poe does admit in his later explication, the student gradually realizes that he is "impelled … by the human thirst for self-torture" to keep probing the motives of the bird. But what is this yearning to inflict injury—"self-torture"—upon one’s own self? In "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe makes it seem a natural motivation. Surely it is not—at least as a constant force in the psyche. The raven torments the figure in the poem with his repetitive taunt—echoes that remind us of Poe’s own compulsively repetitive behavior—his bouts of drunkenness, repeated quarrels with others, and other signs of fragile self-control. The black creature is not at all separable from the narrator himself. Rather, the representation of the poet’s despair is an indwelling part of his identity that only seems invasive. Yet it is there, lying in wait all the time.

In addition to the theme of morbid dejection that the Raven symbolized, Poe experimented with the ambiguities of honor. That Manichean construction of ethics posed glory against disgrace. The polarities were in a sense parallel with the dichotomy between mania and depression, between a sense of omnipotence and a feeling of complete self-worthlessness. From the Spanish Golden Age and Shakespeare to the late nineteenth century, most theatrical works dealt in one way or another with principles of honor and the perils of dishonor, whether for heroes in battle or heroines under threat of rape or seduction. In an essay on poetry, Poe, always the romanticist, closed his search for sublimity with an elegiac poem by Motherwell, in which an old cavalier croaks, "Deathe's couriers, Fame and Honour call / Us to the field againe." In December 1846 his child-wife—and cousin—Virginia Clemm lay dying of consumption and malnutrition in an unheated cottage near New York City. Yet Poe was reluctant to accept the help of friends to escape the dishonor of being a ward of "public charity." His honor mattered more than her well-being.

In a manner that psychoanalyst Karen Horney would identify as the problem of grandiosity, Poe's sense of honor culminated in a worship of his ancestors. General David Poe, his grandfather, had been a Revolutionary War hero and a quartermaster general in Washington's army. From his slender resources, he had supplied $500 to clothe the troops of General Lafayette. The sacrifice won him high posthumous praise when the general visited the United States in 1824. In September 1814, General Poe had further distinguished himself in the defense of Baltimore from the British invaders in the War of 1812. From such glories, Edgar Allan Poe derived as much sense of self-importance as William Faulkner later did with regard to his great-grandfather, the swashbuckling Confederate hero, Colonel William Clarke Falkner.

In 1843, a Philadelphia journal published a highly inaccurate biography of Poe. Gullibly drawing on Poe’s misrepresentations, the article stated that he had come from "one of the oldest and most respectable families in Baltimore." The dynasty included naval heroes and connections with "the most illustrious of Great Britain." As Poe’s biographer Kenneth Silverman observes, however, the reality was less impressive. The old general was a dry-goods storekeeper whose speculations forced him to insolvency in 1805. Other distortions of Poe's imagining had his tubercular parents die under the same roof, when, in fact, they had been long separated. (We do not know exactly when his father David, died but it could have been soon after his mother’s death.) The wealthy John Allan, his adoptive father, had named Poe "his sole heir," the article announced. Actually young Poe had been stricken from the will. Further, Poe pretended a matriculation at Charlottesville that lasted three years instead of the actuality—a mere eight months. Inspired by his brother Henry's travels, he claimed to have joined the Greek cause against the Turks and to have escaped perils in Russia, thanks to the help of Henry Middleton, the American minister to the court at St. Petersburg. At least when William Faulkner boasted of war wounds, daring dogfights over France, and other fantasies, he did not have them advertised in the papers. Both of these sufferers from what appears to have been chronic depression adopted fictions in their self-presentations. Horney called this impulse a substitution of "grandiose ideas for attainable goals." The purpose, she surmised, was to cover "unendurable feelings of nothingness." The lies become "the pillar" upon which "self-esteem rests."

o less important than his adherence to the honor code, as well as alienation from it, was Poe's preoccupation with art itself—but with a purpose different from that of other contemporary Southern writers. His fixation with madness raked him down until his death. Yet dread of going mad was itself a prominent feature in his artistic scheme. Almost as if he anticipated the coming of Sigmund Freud, he probed the interior depths of the mind and entered a world of irrationality, shame, remorse, rage, and vulnerability. "Were I called on to define the term ‘Art,’" Poe once wrote, "I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the Soul.’" Later in the century Baudelaire hailed Poe for exposing "the primordial perversity of man."

Thus, Poe was the first Southerner to recognize in himself and his art what Edward Engelberg calls "the Unlived life." As Tate later observed, Poe "represents that part of our experience which we are least able to face up to: the Dark Night of Sense." Indeed, as Robert Jacobs notes, Poe's outlook on life was very Southern, very conservative. Slavery and slaveholding bothered him not at all. He sensed the transiency of life, the puniness of human creatures in the natural order, the improbability of progress, the limits of human rationality, and even the dangers of democracy—a world without the necessary gradations of status. These convictions should have alerted later Southern writers—in particular the members of the Agrarian school such as Robert Penn Warren and Donald Davidson—of the next century to an affiliation with Poe. But instead, most of them deplored his influence and his aesthetics. Poe argued that "in efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it." The words revealed both the antiprogressive ethos of Southern intellectuals and the experience of the manic-depressive. Jacobs does not realize this conjoining of poetic temperament with poetic aesthetics, yet he notes that Poe's theory of poetry for its own sake and not for moral improvement or political agitation "leaves him in mortal discontent, ever yearning for a divinity" unattainable. As a result, in Poe's literary world the poet, despairing over the limitations of art, "finds himself in a state of everlasting grief concerning the human predicament, at his ‘inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem,’" the reader catches "indeterminate glimpses" of intellectual and emotional pleasure. Emphatically Poe argued that melancholy was "the most legitimate of all the poetical tones."

Poe's use of vague abstractions and Gothic forms, which the Agrarians found unconvincing and imprecise, had larger, more universally applicable purposes than they realized. He was dealing with the inner workings of the mind and its perversities and passions, a reflection of his own psychic needs and conflicts. He did not, however, wish to reveal himself to the reader any more than Faulkner did. Poe argued strenuously that "literary criticism" had to "comment" solely "upon Art" and nothing else. By no means would Poe approve of this chapter, nor would Warren, Tate, and Brooks, even if they thought his poetry lacking in the concrete particulars that ought to have given it strength and resonance.

Some critics, however, have claimed that Poe was preoccupied with a different agenda. Edmund Wilson thought that the story entitled "The Descent into the Maelström" embodied "a metaphor for the horror of the moral whirlpool into which, with some justification, Poe had, as we know from more explicit stories, "a giddy apprehension of going down." But the story symbolizes the descent into the depths of despair and madness, not moral degeneracy in a slaveholding American republic. Likewise, "The Pit and the Pendulum" has a larger meaning that conforms with the depressive's own impression of unremitting despair. Andrew Solomon, a novelist who describes his own descents into hell, cites the feelings of a fellow sufferer, Ted Instead. Hospitalized thirty times in seven years, Instead describes his sensations when in the throes of dejection: "It's like my head is in a vise, squeezing together. All I can do is obsess on the negative, and the pain is petrifying and physical. It's like I'm in a locked room and I can't get out and the walls are closing in and I'm being compressed and destroyed under the pressure." Instead's account lends credence to this interpretation of Poe's short story about the moving sides of the pit. "I shrank back—but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward. … I struggled no more, but the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair," Poe writes. At the last moment, he rescues his narrator in "The Pit and the Pendulum" from the final terror of death.

Curiously, the insanity about which Poe wrote so frequently escapes the notice of literary critics. Recently Lewis Simpson, for instance, has called "The Fall of the House of Usher," published in 1839, an exploration of "an enclosed plantation world—the ‘garden of the chattel.’" According to this view, Poe was allegorizing the coming sectional conflict. Other critics have more plausibly argued that it was a study in "remembered dream." Actually, D. H. Lawrence came closer to the truth when remarking that the story centered on the individual personality "in a great continuous convulsion of disintegration." In his recent study of the Gothic tradition, Matthew Brennan persuasively suggests that Poe anticipated Carl Jung in his depiction of "the narrator as the dream ego, Roderick Usher as his shadow and Madeleine as his anima" or female side. Throughout the story, the mood of utter depression is sustained. The stress upon Roderick’s emaciation, the appearance of the mansion itself as a human skull, with its "vacant eye-like windows," underline the starved nature of the narrator’s own depleted soul.

With the menace of insanity as its basic theme, the dreamlike quality and abstraction are deliberate evocations. The tale of Usher’s fall takes place in the realm of the imagination—but with a remarkable inner reality. The reader is not meant to contemplate matters of public policy but rather the perils of lost rationality. It was represented by the fear of premature burial. The notion had a popular resonance. The idea of suspended animation and burial arose in that twilight time of Victorian medicine when scientific knowledge was advancing. Nonetheless, death remained the all-too-frequent outcome of medical intervention. In the story, Usher’s thoughts are confused. There is no certainty, no security anywhere: the center of being will not hold, and madness or death is pending. In a life of sorrow and storm, the author Poe stands terrified as he witnesses a cloud become "a demon in my view." He once told a publishing colleague, who must have been perplexed, "I believe that demons take advantage of the night to mislead the unwary—although you know, I don't believe in them." Intellectually he may have been telling the truth as he perceived it. On an emotional plane, however, he knew those impish creatures well.

In the hands of another writer such a link between fiction and real experience might seem far-fetched. Yet nearly every Poe interpreter illustrates similar interconnections in Poe's life and art. For instance, John Irwin observes that Poe's narrator, particularly the detective-criminal C. Auguste Dupin, is often estranged from his "illustrious family." Like Poe himself, he lives in semimad isolation. He is so completely divorced from the world that life seems confined to womblike security. The dying of Poe's Virginia, only thirteen when he married her, figures in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Poe's love for his little family—the mother Maria Clemm and her daughter—was always ambivalent. He had managed at last to create a secure domestic group able to fill his emotional needs. Yet the women thrust upon him financial responsibilities that in the poorly paid profession of writing he could not meet. "One can well imagine," writes critic John Irwin, "that at moments Poe thought the price he had paid for domestic stability was too high and resented" anyone who stifled "his independence." Yet he felt ashamed of his own disloyalty to a mother and daughter who loved him.

As a depressive and alcoholic Poe faced problems complicated perhaps by sexual impotence. The artist in Poe found expression for these difficulties in the gruesomely vivid descriptions of violence against both daughter and mother in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." That failure in the marital bed was perhaps represented in "Morella," "Berenice," and "Eleanora," in which the hero has either not engaged in lovemaking or has done so with too little blessing from the god "Eros." Poe's women are never happy for very long. Yet they scarcely articulate any frustration about the sexual inadequacies of their partners. That subject would have violated the code of reticence that would not be broken for another half century or longer. Even Roderick Usher's infatuation with his sister was presented without reference to carnal longings by either party, dead or alive. To break into autobiography on such a subject would scarcely do for any nineteenth-century American writer, most particularly a Southern one, where the posture of manliness was intensely prized and protected.

Conventional about sex, Poe had no desire to deal with the subject, yet he grasped a different truth of the human condition: the possibility that madness was inheritable. That speculation has since become scientifically verifiable. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," for instance, Poe has Roderick Usher appear to the narrator as one subject to "an incoherence—an inconsistency . . . an excessive nervous agitation" such as Poe himself so often experienced. "His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision . . . to that species of energetic concision . . . which may be observed in the lost drunkard. . . . It was, [Roderick] said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy." Usher is subject to "a host of unnatural sensations" and "a morbid acuteness of the senses."

At some level Poe surmised that his own condition may have been familial in nature. He was most curious about his own genealogy and loved to think he had such powerful medieval ancestors as some of the figures in his Gothic tales. These concerns would have added a special cachet, a romantic coloring to a genetic predisposition for the madness that he knew. Neurological and genetic work over the last twenty years, particularly with studies of twins separated early from each other, confirms the transmission of such an ailment through the genes. We do not know with certainty that Poe's father was a depressive, but the indications are that he was. If so, the chances of the son being also afflicted, according to recent research, were almost one in three.

A combination of parental losses and a genetic predisposition rendered Poe a victim of emotional collapse. For him it was most perplexing to account for his episodes of alcoholic abuse and madness. He wrote a poem to express the sentiment, entitled "Alone." "From Childhood's hour I have not been / As others were—I have not seen / As others saw." He could not find joy; he could not express love. The poet traces the origin of his sorrow to his childhood—at "the dawn of a most stormy life" from whence began "the mystery that binds me still." Throughout all the seasons and from all the places he had been, he was haunted by "a demon in my view." Besides being a common signifier of depression in literature, that demon also represented anger against others as well as the self. Poe’s preoccupation with retaliation against enemies in both his life and in his fictional representations was itself an indication of a deep level of fury that he could neither master nor understand. He was viciously savage in his criticism of literary mediocrity wherever he found it, but also craved notice and praise no matter how slight. A few months before Poe's death, a writer retaliated with some doggerel: "With tomahawk upraised for deadly blow, / Behold our literary Mohawk Poe! / Sworn tyrant he o'er all who sin in verse— / His own standard, damns he all that's worse." His battle against the literary establishment of New York and Boston three years before his death was itself a form of suicide. Although he never was as solitary and friendless as popular opinion guessed, the fracas cost him friends and induced him to live for a time in relative exile, thirteen miles out of New York at the village of Fordham. It was there that Virginia expired in 1847. Surrounding her death was the turmoil of anonymous, poisonous letters delivered to Poe's doorstep. In retaliation Poe published gossip that he had no license whatsoever to air. The New York columns were filled with insults back and forth. Still worse, after Virginia’s death, his mental health deteriorated with increasing speed. Manic depression grows steadily more serious as the years pass, particularly if it is accompanied by alcoholism.

Poe's attempted suicide with an overdose of laudanum, taken at a Providence, Rhode Island, hotel in November 1848, was the climax of his distraction. The widower had been courting Sarah Helen Whitman, a woman of intellect but older than himself. Although she was in love with him and was always a champion of his character, she had the good sense to refuse his proposal of marriage. He fell to heavy drinking and sent her a note so hysterical in character that she worried about his dangerous "state of mental perturbation" and feared how some calamity might erupt, as she later recalled. Poe had to be treated by a physician who found "symptoms of cerebral congestion." Her description of a scene shortly after the aborted suicide illustrated his frenzied mood. "A Mr. McFarlane, who had been very kind to Poe during the night" at the hotel, she recalled, "persuaded him" to sit for a daguerreotype that incidentally, gave visible evidence of his mental collapse. Afterward, he had arrived at the home of Mrs. Whitman's mother "in a state of wild & delirious excitement, calling on me to save him from some terrible impending doom. The tones of his voice were appalling & rang through the house." Her mother had to deal with him for two hours before Mrs. Whitman appeared, and "he hailed me as an angel sent to save him from perdition." When she went to prepare strong coffee for him, "he clung to me so frantically as to tear away a piece of muslin dress I wore." In the afternoon, Poe calmed down. His swings of mood, however, were clearly growing worse.

The circumstances of Poe's death on October 8, 1849, indicated almost suicidal determination to abuse his health. After leaving New York by steamer, Poe, who had not had a drop for some months, apparently ran into some old drinking associates in Baltimore. During the "terrible debauch" that ensued, he lost his trunk and clothing. An acquaintance discovered him in a tavern, disheveled, soiled, and completely incoherent from alcohol. He and others took Poe to the Washington Medical College, where he remained until his death some hours later. The causes were certainly related to his binge drinking—possibly alcohol poisoning. Or more indirectly, he might have died from exposure to the rain, cold, and damp of the streets while out of his mind from drinking and depression. (It has been lately suggested that he might have been bitten by a rabid vermin or dog.) In a deep stupor upon his arrival at the hospital, he had remained unconscious. When he awoke, shaking uncontrollably, he entered a phase of "constant talking." John J. Moran, the attending physician, reported that he held "vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects on the walls." When the doctor suggested that friends would soon contribute to his well-being, he cried that the best they could do for him "would be to blow out his brains with a pistol—that when he beheld his degradation he was ready to ‘sink in the earth.’" A violent delirium followed. Just before he died, he moaned, "Lord, help my poor Soul."

Poe's struggle with life, sexuality, death, and artistic representation of themes aided immeasurably to set the tradition of alienation and sense of loss with which Southern literature has been endowed ever since. Thanks in part to Poe, to recreate down-to-earth fact in an attempt at pure realism was not the Southern way. Instead, the psychological dimension was developed in the best of the Southern writers thereafter, even as it meant exploration of the grotesque, the aberrant, the perverse.

Literary critic Louis Rubin has declared that, except "for an occasional misfit," antebellum regional authors felt very much at home in the South. "The typical Southern author of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was not an exile, either spiritually or geographically from his community." That may have been true for the second-rate belletrists. As Rubin justly notes, they were "mostly genteel and respectable, dealing with surfaces." He sees a remarkable discontinuity, however, that swept away the old conventions. That moment arrived, Rubin proposes, when the guns fell silent, not at Appomattox but along the Western Front in November 1918. Writers of Faulkner's generation, Rubin and others have proclaimed, were the first to explore the realities of Southern life rather than perpetuate myths of former Southern glory, honor, and simple virtue. That interpretation is valid with regard to ordinary events and feelings but not necessarily with the inner realities of a tortured mind.

Among the best Southern intellects of the ante- and postbellum years, a deep sense of alienation was more often the rule than we have assumed. Most of the Southern writers to have plumbed the depths of despair may not have exercised much influence on Faulkner's more expressive and unhappy generation. Nonetheless, the early culture of the South nurtured memorialists, thinkers, poets, and fiction writers of a much more introspective nature than we have been accustomed to think. The culture of silence about the half-conscious world that mankind has always borne prevented its open exploration. Even so, that life of inner subjectivity still affected what Southern writers placed on paper. Thus, the foundations of Southern pessimism, preoccupation with death and violence, suicide and incest, and other tragic circumstances were there from the start. As Poe’s sad history discloses, the theme of elegy, exile, and threat of madness reaches back long before William Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury.