Poe and the Visual Arts

Introduction

Although Edgar Allan Poe’s name is most often identified with stories of horror and fear, Poe and the Visual Arts stakes a claim for the less familiar Poe—the one who often goes unrecognized or forgotten—the Poe whose early love of beauty was a strong and enduring draw, who “from childhood’s hour . . . [had] not seen / As others saw—.” The evidence in this book demonstrates that Poe’s “deep worship of all beauty,” expressed in an 1829 letter to John Neal when Poe was just twenty, never entirely faded, despite the demands of his commercial writing and editorial career. In that letter, Poe appealed to Neal “as a man that loves the same beauty which I adore—the beauty of the natural blue sky and the sunshiny earth.” Poe and the Visual Arts looks at Poe’s connection to such visual beauty, his commitment to “graphicality” (a word he coined), and his knowledge of the visual arts, noting what he saw, how he used what he saw, and how he criticized those who would not see. Poe valued the artist’s vision as well as the ability of a writer to create in words what can be seen by “an artistical eye.” His regard for the artist’s ability to see how various, seemingly arbitrary combinations can create a composition of beauty is clearly articulated in “The Landscape Garden”: “No such combinations of scenery exist in Nature as the painter of genius has in his power to produce . No such Paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed upon the canvass of Claude. In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess. . . . [The artist] positively knows, that such and such apparently arbitrary arrangements of matter, or form, constitute, and alone constitute, the true Beauty” (Tales, 1:707–8). The explicit references to paintings and painters, such as Claude, in many of Poe’s stories and sketches introduction poe and the visual arts {  } enhance thematic concerns or help produce a preconceived effect. In other works, such as “Landor’s Cottage” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” Poe obliquely refers to the Hudson River school painters by evoking their paintings in his own descriptive prose rather than directly naming the paintings he has in mind. In this way, the tales signal a turn in Poe’s visual aesthetics from the sublime to the beautiful. In addition, Poe’s concern with literary process—as evidenced in “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle,” for example, as well as in many of his (often harsh) reviews of poetry and fiction—reflects his astute awareness of the similarity between the writing and painting processes. He was keenly aware of how a painter uses his medium to produce a “startling effect,” a concept essential to Poe’s storytelling. This affinity is evidenced in his February 1838 Southern Literary Messenger review of Alexander Slidell’s The American in England. Poe applauds Slidell’s book as being wise by virtue of being superficial and justifies this seeming contradiction by arguing that the “depth of an argument is not, necessarily, its wisdom—this depth lying where Truth is sought more often than where she is found.” Poe then compares Slidell’s literary effort with the painterly process by observing, “The touches of a painting which, to minute inspection, are ‘confusion worse confounded ’ will not fail to start boldly out to the cursory glance of a connoisseur.” In noting that the overall effect of a painting (as seen by a “connoisseur”) overrides the minute, seemingly “confused” strokes that produce that effect, Poe once again affirms his belief that truth often lies on the surface. He states this quite clearly in his “Letter to B–––”: “As regards the greater truths, men oftener err by seeking them at the bottom than at the top.” In his review of Slidell’s work, Poe also foregrounds his understanding of how a painter creates illusion and how that process applies to literary technique. For example, he compares Slidell’s literary finesse with painterly technique as follows: “[Mr. Slidell] has felt that the apparent, not the real, is the province of a painter—and that to give (speaking technically) the idea of any desired object, the toning down, or the utter neglect of certain portions of that object is absolutely necessary to the proper bringing out of other portions—portions by...