Edgar Allan Poe as a Classicist: An Architect’s Reading of “To Helen”

I have been enchanted with Poe since childhood. As a boy I loved the scary stories, of course, like “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Something about the narrative rhythm as well as the spookiness intrigued me. As I approached puberty, I became increasingly interested in the poems of pallid, young, beautiful women. By high school, I dreamed of Lenore and Annabel Lee and all the rest of his doomed and tender maidens, imagining that this, indeed, was what true love was all about. A little later on I read Poe’s essays on “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle,” and by then I had completely bought into both his worldview and his eloquent idea of the means by which it can be expressed, his evangelism, so to speak.

Many, many years later when I began to teach architectural composition, I found myself reciting Poe-esque ideas, as they seemed to resonate well with the ideas of Aristotle and even Pythagoras with which I was, by then, familiar. Now, having taught hundreds of classes over twenty-five years on the Orders of Classical Architecture, I see Poe as quintessentially “classical,” although, I believe, the historians of literature would take issue with that label since most consider him a romantic (as if there were a fundamental difference; I certainly regard myself as both).

With this biographical confession, I present herewith an alternative reading of “To Helen,” incorporating some fundamentals in the language of classical architecture. In studying that language we learn and teach that all the surfaces of a traditional building can be defined in terms of a very small number of profiles: straight or curved, raised or recessed, simple or compound, and so forth. When we come to the cornices or base moldings or complex capitals, for instance, we can call out the sequence of moldings as a dance that can be defined in the classical ballet by a small number of foot, leg, and arm positions. As in the dance where each position and each movement has a specific name, so, too, in architecture (and in music and poetry); an entire façade can be analyzed and described—in other words “read”—as a specific sequence of elements rhythmically arranged so as to impart coherence and meaning to achieve a particular effect. In this essay I will demonstrate how “To Helen” may be analyzed formally in architectural terms (such as cyma recta, cyma reversa, etc.), bringing another level of formal imagery to the poem. The exercise has greatly enhanced my own understanding of the poem, and I trust it will illuminate the poem for others as well.

The two most important curving profiles in the vocabulary of classical architecture are the cyma recta and the cyma reversa, also known as the “crown molding” and “the ogee.” The word cyma means “wave,” and “the crown” and “the ogee,” both “S” curves, are portions of a wave form from valley to crest, developed respectively on a horizontal axis (the cyma recta) and the vertical axis (the cyma reversa). Hang in there with me please and forgive the alien terms so unlikely to be used in examination of poetry; my meaning will shortly become clear. In general, the vertical axis of the cyma reversa may be seen to signify rising movement from earth to heaven, while the cyma recta, the crown, is reserved for use at (1) the base of a building and therefore the earth or (2) the very top of the building (or of the room) and therefore the heavens, because it resolves to the horizontal. Horizon is the clear stillness where earth and heaven meet.

Now see how Poe describes his beloved Helen:

Helen, thy beauty is to me.As those Nicaean barks of yore,That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,The weary, wayworn wanderer bore,To his own native shore.

Fig 1.

These are languid rhythmic lines that sound (and look) like what the words describe. The long vowels...