Sounding Poe’s Poetry

Sławomir Studniarz’s The Time-Transcending Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, winner of the Adèle Mellen Prize, appears in the wake of Jerome McGann’s recently published book on Poe, and like McGann, Studniarz takes issue with critics who dismiss the poems of Poe as sonic soufflés without thematic substance. For Studniarz, sense and sound function interdependently in these texts, and to appreciate the marriage of content and form, readers must observe Poe’s artful deployment of sounds. Drawing on his deep knowledge of prosody and the work of theorists Roman Jakobson, Yuri Lotman, and Reuven Tsur, Studniarz offers detailed analyses of numerous poems, including such familiar works as “To Helen,” “The Raven,” and “Ulalume” along with such lesser known lyrics as “The Coliseum,” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “For Annie”—to name only six of the twenty-four pieces scrutinized.

Each poem receives a close reading in which Studniarz identifies not only metrical characteristics and familiar rhymic elements—especially irregularities in these features—but also sonic qualities outside the realm of conventional prosody. Of special interest are what Studniarz calls “paronomastic chains.” According to Jakobson, these chains consist of proximate “phonemic sequences” through which “words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning” [quoted in Studniarz, 26]. Studniarz points out several such sound patterns, repeatedly demonstrating that these groupings have purpose. In particular, they intensify meaning, for such sensory “phenomena as a rule play a significant role in poetic texts, enhancing their semantic potential” [19]. Studniarz also examines “the mapping of sense onto the material shape of a poem,” a feature termed “iconicity” [24]. All of these devices are, as he argues, vital to Poe’s creative response to “the tragic dimension of the human condition” and “the sought-for cancellation of the confines of mortality and temporality” [302, 303], themes that figure prominently in such essays as “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle.” Linking manner and matter in several Poe poems, Studniarz makes a compelling case for deeming them “artistically designed texts,” the works of a master poet [301].

The formalist approach employed in The Time-Transcending Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe has its merits. Convinced that one should, for analytic purposes, “approach the poems as autonomous creations” [40], Studniarz adopts a useful critical methodology, isolating sonic elements in poem after poem and identifying aural relationships between words within each text. Previous commentators simply have not investigated this incredible array of sounds as comprehensively as Studniarz does. An example of his painstaking analysis is the “Ulalume” chapter, which fills more than thirty pages. Such close reading helps readers appreciate the textual complexities of Poe’s poetry, a body of work in which surface simplicities often mask the poet’s virtuosity. Furthermore, Studniarz reveals this technical brilliance without falling into the trap of neglecting content: he insists that a “fundamental interrelatedness” binds most of Poe’s poems, and to illustrate that connection, he groups them into thematic clusters marking different stages in “the spiritual quest” to escape death and decay [7, 305]. Readers wary of reductions of Poe’s expressive diversity might dispute Studniarz’s claim that interpreting the poetry requires “a systematic approach” [7]. Furthermore, his approach involves some peculiar omissions. For example, Studniarz declares “the main body of [Poe’s] poetic creation” the object of his study [7], yet this group of texts includes “Al Aaraaf” but not “Tamer-lane,” a poem that Poe revisited throughout his career. Despite that and other exclusions, reading Poe with Studniarz is rewarding, even revelatory, for those interested in Poe’s verse-making and its aural effects.

For all its virtues, Studniarz’s approach imposes some unnecessary interpretive limits, supererogatory checks that prevent the author from shoring up his argument with extratextual support. Operating within a formalist vacuum, a critic ignores the contexts, literary and social, from which texts emerge, and Studniarz leaves virtually unexamined the ways in which Poe embraces and/or reacts to nineteenth...