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Reviewed by:
  • Poe and the Visual Arts by Barbara Cantalupo
  • Jonathan W. Murphy (bio)
Barbara Cantalupo. Poe and the Visual Arts. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. 184 pp. $24.95.

Barbara Cantalupo’s Poe and the Visual Arts is an elegant contribution to the Poe scholarship that addresses a relatively undocumented aspect of the author: his aesthetic interest in the fine arts. The book consists of five chapters that range from Poe’s exposure to art in Philadelphia (1838–45) to his stint in 1846 as the editor of the Broadway Journal while he was a resident of New York, a city that was fast becoming the epicenter of the American art scene. The chapters in between examine Poe’s references to artists and artworks in his creative writing, his interest in homely interiors and beautiful exteriors in his later works, and his penchant for optical illusions and visual tricks throughout his career, and in particular his fascination with the perspectival device of anamorphosis in painting and in fiction.

Cantalupo’s examination of “Ligeia” (1838) and “William Wilson” (1839) are especially revelatory in this last regard, as she is able to demonstrate that Poe intended both tales to be read according to their anamorphic structures. The narrator of “Ligeia” purposively constructs a bridal chamber that would contribute to creating the anamorphic illusion that Rowena, whom he callously murders, has been transformed into his phantasmagoric departed lover. Cantalupo likewise solves the riddle of “William Wilson” that, as anyone who has ever taught the tale knows, has perplexed many undergraduate students and their professors alike. As opposed to stabbing himself at the end of the tale, a common misunderstanding of Poe’s story, Cantalupo convincingly argues that the narrator murders an innocent stranger upon whom he has delusively projected the image of his sworn antagonist and doppelganger. The critic’s attention to Poe’s graphical interests enables her to substantiate a number of novel claims throughout her study.

There have been numerous studies of Poe’s aesthetic principles, as expressed in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and “The Poetic Principle” (1850), for instance, to name just two of his major essays. Of course, Poe’s aesthetic observations are scattered throughout his critical reviews (see G. R. Thompson’s excellent collection). However, to date, besides the occasional article and a few notable studies (Cantalupo draws on the pioneering work of critics like Burton Pollin, Michael Deas, and Kent Ljungquist in her book), Poe’s appreciation of the fine arts has largely been left in the dark. This should come as no surprise given the disciplinary background of most Poe acolytes. While [End Page 227] Poe’s of-texpressed aesthetic views have provided ample material for critical conversation, Cantalupo’s book is refreshing in that it reorients his readers toward his love of fine art and how it informed the self-described “graphicality” of his own compositional style. We thus come to discover how landscape painting and portraiture influenced Poe’s descriptions of external nature and domestic spaces, and how visual tricks and optical illusions were part and parcel of his penchant for the cryptic and the allusive in his writing. As a result, readers of Cantalupo’s book are as likely to learn as much about their celebrated author as they are about the fascinating world of the American art scene in the mid-nineteenth century, at the time when Poe was penning many of his most enduring fables of mind.

Cantalupo’s chapters, which describe the art world Poe inhabited, document his artistic acquaintances and detail the various art works he was exposed to during the last decade of his life, are beautifully accompanied by over two dozen color prints. Cantalupo revisits Poe’s writings during this time and stresses how much he borrowed from painting in his fictive work. The overall impression the reader gets from reading her book is of vicariously viewing a host of paintings that distinctly influenced the author’s aesthetic sensibility. We are, as it were, positioned beside the author as he visits various art collections and exhibits in Philadelphia and New York City, and Cantalupo provides intelligent assessments of the predominant features of each...

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