Revisionism: Edgar Allan Poe’s “extraordinary nonsense” inspires an ingenious modern art exhibition

One of the great enigmas of American literature unexpectedly rejoins the cultural conversation this summer with the opening of Eureka, a group exhibition at the Pace Gallery in New York City that takes its name and inspiration from an all-but-unclassifiable book-length work Edgar Allan Poe published in 1848, slightly more than a year before his untimely death at the age of 40.

Title page of
Eureka first edition
(Putnam, 1848)

Eureka: A Prose Poem is frequently described as a kind of treatise in which Poe expounds his theories of the nature of the universe, from its origins to its overriding laws. But this sketch of the cosmos relies less on any scientific validation than on its author’s intuitive “ratiocination”—the same process, readers will recall, that allowed Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin to solve the murders in the Rue Morgue. As a representative passage attests, Eureka is primarily concerned with collapsing the distance between inner and outer space:

Discarding now the two equivocal terms, “gravitation” and “electricity,” let us adopt the more definite expressions, “Attraction” and “Repulsion.” The former is the body; the latter the soul: the one is the material; the other the spiritual, principle of the Universe. No other principles exist. All phænomena are referable to one, or to the other, or to both combined. So rigorously is this the case—so thoroughly demonstrable is it that Attraction and Repulsion are the sole properties through which we perceive the Universe—in other words, by which Matter is manifested to Mind—that, for all merely argumentative purposes, we are fully justified in assuming that Matter exists only as Attraction and Repulsion—that Attraction and Repulsion are matter. . . .

Eureka has vexed readers and critics alike since its first publication. A contemporary review in the Literary World panned it as “arrant fudge” and “extraordinary nonsense, if not blasphemy,” and exactly 100 years later T. S. Eliot harrumphed that it “makes no deep impression . . . because we are aware of Poe’s lack of qualifications in philosophy, theology or natural science.”

Partisans of the work, however, have included poets Paul Valéry and W. H. Auden; it’s also worth noting that Charles Baudelaire translated it into French and Julio Cortázar into Spanish. More surprisingly, a consensus opinion has formed in recent decades around the notion that in its eccentric way Eureka anticipates key discoveries in astrophysics, such as the Big Bang theory and the concept of an expanding universe.

Installation view of Eureka
508 West 25th Street, New York / May 1 – August 14, 2015
Photography by: Tom Barratt / Pace Gallery

This is the side of Poe’s text that drives the ingeniously curated group exhibition at Pace, which is comprised of 23 works by 12 twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists. Successive artworks alternately portray objects in space—which may or may not be taken to represent planetary bodies—in two and three dimensions; a kind of visual echo or rhyme results from several of the show’s adroit juxtapositions. A 1934 mobile by Alexander Calder, for instance, bounces off an adjacent 1987 painting by Australian Aboriginal artist Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, whose geometric shapes pulsate with a Keith Haring–like energy. James Turrell’s hologram of a full moon confronts viewers with a disorienting trompe l’oeil, while a nearby recording of Edgar Varèse compositions evokes, one might say, the music of the spheres.

Installation view of Eureka
508 West 25th Street, New York / May 1 – August 14, 2015
Photography by: Tom Barratt / Pace Gallery

As an incisive essay by Max Nelson on the Paris Review website summarizes: “the show is a delightful cabinet of curiosities that riffs playfully, if a little abstrusely, on Eureka’s atmosphere and tone.”

According to his biographer Kenneth Silverman, Poe intimated to a friend that his “prose poem” wouldn’t be properly appreciated until 2,000 years after its appearance. But from the evidence on display at Pace, it’s tempting to conclude that his prediction was off by about 1,800 years.

Eureka is on view at Pace Gallery New York City through August 28, 2015. Visit the Pace website for complete details.

Related posts:

• Bill Marx on the influence of “slice-and-dice” Edgar Allan Poe on “acid-in-your-face” Ambrose Bierce
• Ellen Ullman on her “dark kinship” with Edgar Allan Poe
• Mat Johnson’s Pym twists anew a controversial Edgar Allan Poe adventure tale

Bill Marx on the influence of “slice-and-dice” Edgar Allan Poe on “acid-in-your-face” Ambrose Bierce

Reviewing the life and work of Ambrose Bierce in the July-August issue of The Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Marx wonders: “Is journalist, short-story writer, and poet Ambrose Bierce one of the biggest SOBs in American literature?”

A spirit of aggressive disdain runs through his four decades of prose, from his furious assaults in his weekly columns for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Chronicle to the acid-in-your-face definitions of The Devil’s Dictionary, the startling violence of his Civil War stories, his Grand Guignol horror yarns, ghost tales, and sci-fi fables.

Marx locates one of Bierce’s animating influences in the “slice-and-dice reviewing style of Edgar Allan Poe.” Much like Poe, Bierce was fond of ridicule:

“Ridicule, as I venture to use it myself,” wrote [Bierce] in the Chronicle in 1890, “seems to me to be the most excellent of offensive weapons because it hurts without damaging. No man’s good reputation is permanently impaired by ridicule, yet most men would rather be slandered rather than ridiculed. It is monstrous hard to bear; it lacerates the sensibilities horribly—if artfully done.”

Yet, Marx writes, the energy that fueled Bierce’s venomous journalistic efforts generates a different result when he turns to fiction:

His bedeviling ferocity, born of an excess of satiric disdain, is also the key to Bierce’s continuing appeal as a writer. The author’s reputation as a misanthrope obscures how the gauche energy of his allegories are actually their strength: His heavy hand penned wholly original stories that avoid staid moral messages or conventional intimations of the supernatural. The Civil War stories, for instance, are admired for more than just their documentary value: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” with its death’s head japes and narrative somersaults, is considered by critics to be one of the finest “experimental” American stories of the period. . . .

Told in a lean, tongue-in-cheek style, Bierce’s wised-up supernatural and horror stories are head-scratching hybrids, twisted bridges between Poe’s Gothic scarefests and the overripe monster mashes of H. P. Lovecraft.

Being called an “imitator of Poe” rankled Bierce. As he wrote a friend in 1909: “If I had left the tragic and supernatural out of my stories I would still have been an 'imitator of Poe,' for they would still have been stories; so what’s the use?” Yet he clearly revered Poe, writing in the essay “Who Are the Great?”: “I should say that the greatest American that we know about, if not George Sterling, was Edgar Allan Poe.” As Arthur M. Miller has written “Having accepted Poe as the leading arbiter and expert in the field of the short story, he wrote after his leadership, and tried to excel him. . . . To Bierce there was only one ‘right’ kind of fiction form, and Poe had invented it.”

In his essay Marx finds the contrast between Bierce and Poe best exemplified in the opening paragraphs of Bierce’s “compact masterpiece, ‘One Summer Night’”:

The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince. That he really was buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to admit. His posture—flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon his stomach and tied with something that he easily broke without profitably altering the situation—the strict confinement of his entire person, the black darkness and profound silence, made a body of evidence impossible to controvert and he accepted it without cavil. 

But dead—no, he was only very, very ill. He had, withal, the invalid's apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the uncommon fate that had been allotted to him. No philosopher was he—just a plain, commonplace person gifted, for the time being, with a pathological indifference: the organ that he feared consequences with was torpid. So with no particular apprehension for this immediate future, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry Armstrong.

Premature burial fascinated both writers. Poe famously explored it in “Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “The Premature Burial.” Bierce used it in no less than six of his tales.Yet their approaches to the subject couldn’t be more different, as Marx details:

For Poe, premature burial is a fixation that generates psychological panic once nightmare becomes reality. For Bierce, it is a relaxing experience, an invitation to take a nap. How or why did Henry Armstrong end up in a casket under the ground? Bierce offers no explanation, just proffers a tongue-in-cheek gibe at the threat of oblivion. Henry’s “pathological indifference” to ultimate reality burlesques our fear of death as well as American pragmatism: When six-feet-under, you might as well be reasonable, face facts, and not make a fuss. The best thing is to mark time before the end comes, somewhat behind schedule.

This appreciation for Bierce’s somewhat relaxed attitude toward death leads Marx to speculate on whether Bierce’s mysterious death may have been a form of “performance art”:

Even the mystery of the author’s death may have been the capstone of a life dedicated to ridicule. According to biographer [Roy Morris Jr.], a reasonable case can be made that Bierce’s publicized intention to go down to Mexico to cover Pancho Villa (“To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!”) was nothing but an exercise in fatalistic performance art, a dodge concocted to cover up the writer’s plan to commit suicide in a place where his body would never be found: Death Valley. Bierce may have plotted his demise as his final grisly farce, driving the credulous fools to distraction one last time.

Also of interest:

• Previous Reader’s Almanac posts on Ambrose Bierce: S. T. Joshi on Ambrose Bierce and the Civil War;  Celebrate the centennial year of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary;  Silence as a weapon: the two most embarrassing speeches Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce ever gave 
• Story of the Week selections by Ambrose Bierce: “The Eyes of the Panther,” “A Horesman in the Sky,” “The Moonlit Road”
• Read the exclusive LOA interview with S. T. Joshi on Ambrose Bierce

Related LOA works: Ambrose Bierc: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs; Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Works

Ellen Ullman on her “dark kinship” with Edgar Allan Poe

By Blood
by Ellen Ullman
(Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2012)

Asking Ellen Ullman to join our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, poetry, history, and essays led her to make some uncanny discoveries about the American author who has most influenced her just published second novel, By Blood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Edgar Poe was orphaned before he was three years old. He was taken into the household of a tobacco merchant, John Allan; and although Poe would take Allan as his middle name, he remained a ward, never formally adopted. Poe and his guardian could hardly have been more mismatched. Allan gave Poe a classical education but then withheld sufficient financial support, evidently expecting his foster son to become a man of commerce, to make his own way in the world. Poe, however, was Byronic in temperament, rebellious, determined to be a poet and a writer; a gambler who was wholly unsuited to the making of money.

I did not know much about Poe's biography until I began writing this blog post about the American writers who have influenced me. I thought it might be enough to say that my attraction to Poe could be explained by my love of Poe’s “dark tales,” which I read over and over as a child; by the seven times in one week I watched the movie The Pit and the Pendulum; the same for The Fall of the House of Usher. In high school, I was forced to memorize “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells” and “The Raven.” My classmates groaned; I was happy for this coercion. It gave me lifelong memories of the kingdom by the sea; the bells’ horrid and relentless descent from silver twinkling to iron moaning; the devastation of the line in “The Raven”: “Darkness there and nothing more.” 

Poe’s life, however, may be the deeper explanation for his influence upon me, I can see now. I was born an illegitimate child. I was adopted as a baby into a loving family but one in which my mother and I were like corundum abrading each other. My father, a wonderful man, was dedicated to business. Meanwhile I spent hours locked in my bedroom with my “dark tales”; sat in a dim living room enjoying terrifying movies; lay on a sofa with my eyes closed, gladly suffering the exquisite torture of Beethoven’s late quartets. 

Unbelievable as it might seem, I was not conscious of Poe’s profound effect upon my latest novel, By Blood, until I was some way into its composition. The crows that play such an important role in the book, as the representation of the narrator’s “nervous condition,” were based upon actual crows. After the demolition of a bridge anchorage next to my apartment building, the surrounding bird neighborhood changed abruptly: The mourning doves and tiny wrens suddenly disappeared, and legions of crows took their places. To this day, they land on an electrical pole not a foot from my window, cawing, flapping their slick black wings, hunting with those pinpoint eyes, intelligent creatures watching me too closely.

The crows in By Blood are therefore “real.” And they are also Poe’s creatures: “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt.” And mine. The crows are my inheritance from Poe, passed on to me through what I might call our dark kinship.

Before beginning this piece, I took down my old Penguin paperback of Poe’s writings. The pages are browned; you can tell how old the book is by the price: $2.95. I read one of the few tales I had missed during the many years the book had sat on my shelf. In “The Man of the Crowd,” an unnamed narrator looks out the window of a cafe, noting the many types of people he distinguishes among the throng. Suddenly, he finds himself drawn to a strange man. He follows the man from district to district for a day and a night, trying to understand his attraction to this “incarnation of the fiend.”

I was so startled to see how closely Poe’s storyteller resembled the unnamed narrator of By Blood that I thought I must have already read “The Man of the Crowd.” Both watchers are alone, and hidden, stalking life at a distance, as Poe put it: like “a certain German book that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read.” But I am sure that, before today, I had never read this Poe tale; that I must have inherited his “Man” as I had inherited his Raven, who came down to me as my narrator and my crows.

Laura Miller has called Ellen Ullman “a rarity, a computer programmer with a poet’s feeling for language.” Constance Hale concurred in her Wired review of Ullman’s 1997 memoir Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, “We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind.” Computer programmers become characters in Ullman’s first novel The Bug (2003) which Geraldine Brooks found “by turns love story, tense psychological drama, and comedy of (very bad) manners. The Bug is an edgy and irresistible journey into lives all too rarely visited by literary types.” Her new novel By Blood departs the tech world: a psychological thriller set in San Francisco in the pre-tech 1970s. Writing about it in The New York Times Book Review, Parul Sehgal marveled at “How beautifully this book restores to us the uses, the sensuality of sound—our awareness of how much information we are passively gleaning and unconsciously filing away.” Ullman lives in San Francisco and frequently writes about technology for Harper’s, Salon, and The New York Times Magazine.

Also of interest:

• “A Professor, a Thriller, not a Microchip in Sight,” a recent profile of Ellen Ullman in The New York Times
• Mat Johnson’s Pym twists anew a controversial Edgar Allan Poe adventure tale, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• “The Domain of Arnheim” by Edgar Allan Poe, a previous Story of the Week
• Other “Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lev Grossman, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, J. Courtney Sullivan, and Emma Straub 

Related LOA works: The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (2 volumes)

The “Best” Short Stories? Two lists—one recent and one from 1914—show their strengths and limitations

“Best of” lists often make us wonder if they exist solely to goad us into generating new and better lists. Many of us love lists, and indeed in only two months we’ll be announcing here the sure-to-be-controversial “Fifty Funniest American Writers” selected by Andy Borowitz for an upcoming Library of America volume.

Along these lines, we noticed the “Best Short Stories of All Time,” a recent list bravely compiled by the fifteen staff members of One Story, who posted a “long list” on their blog and featured the top ten, plus a few runners-up, on Flavorwire. Among the excellent stories on the long list were entries by three Library of America authors: Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Flannery O’Connor. Still, it’s notable that a mere two stories (by Kafka and Garcia Marquez) were originally written in a language other than English—and only two others (by Joyce and Gallant) were written by non-Americans. And, except for the selections by Kafka and Joyce, all the stories were published since World War II.

While pondering whether every “best of” list inevitably reflects the prejudices of the time, we stumbled upon “What is the Best Short Story in English?,” a survey The New York Times conducted in 1914. The Times sought out the opinions of “a score of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic . . . who are writing or have written the short stories of this generation.” And, sure enough, we found that even a century ago the distinguished jurors did not reach much beyond their contemporaries or the previous generation for their favorites.

Among those who participated in the survey were writers who are still familiar to readers today: Richard Harding Davis, Edna Ferber, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Jack London, Booth Tarkington, Owen Wister. We are also gratified to see among the jurors several less well-known authors whose works have been revisited in recent Library of America anthologies: Robert W. Chambers (author of the chilling “The Repairer of Reputations”), Irvin S. Cobb (“Cobb Fights It Over Again”), Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (“Luella Miller,”), and Owen Johnson (“The Great Pancake Record”).

Thomas Hardy echoed his fellow writers when he rejected the concept of “best”:

One may be the best tragic short story, the other may be the best tranquilly domestic short story, and so on, and unless you decide which is "best," tragedy, comedy, or tragi-comedy, the question is unanswerable. It seems as impossible to say which is the best of these forms of art as to define which is the best color, or the best taste in food.

Owen Wister adds, “You have asked a question to which there really is no answer, and you know as well as I do that if the replies you are going to receive coincide it would be amazing enough to become historic in a small way.”

Like One Story’s list, most of the 1914 selections were written during the previous half-century—and a good number were written by the jurors’ contemporaries. Half of the forty-five stories were written by just four authors: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe. Although the list includes many stories and authors still read and loved by readers today, there are notable omissions for a survey conducted in 1914: Scott, Hawthorne, Disraeli, Trollope, and Gissing (all of whom were featured in a best-selling story anthology published the same year by Oxford University Press). Missing, too, is “Désireé’s Baby,” by Kate Chopin, which was called “one of the most perfect stories” and “well nigh perfect” by anthologists in 1906 and 1915, respectively. And, of course, readers and critics wouldn’t rediscover poor, neglected Herman Melville until the 1920s.

Without further ado, then, here are the “Best Stories in English” from 1914:

Mat Johnson’s Pym twists anew a controversial Edgar Allan Poe adventure tale

It looks like another Edgar Allan Poe work is getting an update. Poe’s only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), relates the adventures of a young stowaway on a New England whaling ship as he endures shipwreck, mutiny, and even cannibalism among the islands of the South Seas. Pym shares his adventures with another sailor, Dirk Peters, “son of an Indian squaw . . . and a fur trader.”

Peters himself was one of the most ferocious-looking men I ever beheld. He was short in stature, not more than four feet eight inches high, but his limbs were of Herculean mould. His hands, especially, were so enormously thick and broad as hardly to retain a human shape. His arms, as well as legs, were bowed in the most singular manner, and appeared to possess no flexibility whatever. His head was equally deformed, being of immense size, with an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of most negroes), and entirely bald.

The novel occasioned charges of racism for passages like the one above and for Poe’s depiction of a tribe of black islanders who, after being initially friendly, turn savage and slaughter the crew of Pym’s boat. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison wrote that “no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe.”

How remarkable then that Mat Johnson, James Baldwin fellow and author of the acclaimed graphic novel Incognegro, should make Chris Jaynes, a literature professor who prefers teaching Poe to Ralph Ellison, the central character of his new novel Pym. Jaynes uncovers the lost manuscript of Pym’s companion, “The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself.” To authenticate the account Jaynes organizes an expedition to retrace Peters and Pym’s route to the Antarctic and, through a comical chain of events, encounters Pym himself.

Pym thus joins Death Looks Down (1945) by Amelia Reynolds Long, The Gold Bug Variations (1991) by Richard Powers, Nevermore (1994) by William Hjortsberg, Nevermore (1999) and four other Poe mysteries by Harold Schechter (editor of the LOA’s True Crime anthology), The Poe Shadow (2002) by Matthew Pearl, In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe (2003) by Jonathan Scott Fuqua, Entombed (2006) by Linda Fairstein, and The Pale Blue Eye (2006) by Louis Bayard, among countless other works by American writers, in reimagining Poe and his tales in new forms.

Related LOA works: The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (in two volumes)

The House of Walworth, American Gothic, and Gilded Age Literature

The Fall of the
House of Walworth
by Geoffrey O’Brien
(Henry Holt, 2010)

Geoffrey O’Brien, editor-in-chief of The Library of America, recently published his latest book, The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America (Henry Holt). As the book’s title itself makes clear, the literature available to him during his day job influenced his writing, and we asked him to list those works that were particularly on his mind while he wrote this slice of American history.

In my book The Fall of the House of Walworth, I sought to reconstruct the inner and outer worlds of a distinguished but remarkably ill-fated nineteenth-century family whose lives were caught up in various kinds of mania and one spectacular murder. Although the book is non-fiction, the literary antecedents I bore in mind as I worked tended to be fictional. These were six that helped particularly in setting my course:

Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of the Usher.” Poe was favorite reading matter for several of the Walworths, and the neurasthenic Roderick Usher might have served them as a perverse role model. My book’s title pays unavoidable homage to Poe’s long lingering influence.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables. The ancestral curse of the Pyncheons, symbolized by their elaborate dwelling-place, rhymed nicely with the 55-room Walworth Mansion and its gloomy heritage.

Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland. The ancestor of American Gothic, Brown sounded themes of trance, madness, and religiously inspired murder in this dreamlike concoction.

Herman Melville: Pierre, or The Ambiguities. The early chapters of this often grotesque successor to Moby-Dick powerfully evoke the world of upstate New York that Melville knew well.

James Fenimore Cooper: The Pioneers. Cooper’s fictionalized version of Cooperstown, founded by his father, informed my sense of the earlier period in which Chancellor Reuben Hyde Walworth established his family’s power and prosperity.

Dashiell Hammett: The Dain Curse. A more modern version of Gothic from the 1920s, Hammett’s thriller, tinged with opium and cultishness, was a model of storytelling.

On its Paper Cuts blog, The New York Times has posted a copy of its June 4, 1873, article about the murder at the center of O’Brien’s book.

Laura Miller notes in her Salon review that “O'Brien was fortunate: The Walworths were prodigious writers—of letters, journals, poetry, monographs and, yes, novels.” But, Thomas Mallon adds in his review for The New York Times, “however central the novelist Mansfield Tracy Walworth (1830–73) may be to O’Brien’s crackerjack new history of one family’s mayhem, it seems safe to say that he will not soon be joining Welty, Wharton and Whitman at the right-hand reaches of The Library of America’s long, august shelf.” Or, as Geoffrey himself writes in the book, Walworth’s fiction displayed a “staggering slovenliness.” In at least one of the novels, “once Mansfield became embroiled in cataloging women’s clothing, it was difficult for him to get back to the story.”

The strange death of Margaret Fuller

The American Literary Blog notes that July 19th marks 160 years since the bizarre turn of events that led to the death of critic/editor/reformer/feminist/poet/travel-writer Margaret Fuller. During her return voyage from a three-year sojourn in Italy, the captain of her ship died of smallpox. The inexperienced first mate who took charge ran the ship aground in a storm just 100 yards off Fire Island. Fuller, her husband Marchese Giovanni Angelo d'Osso, and their one-year-old son all drowned before they could be rescued. The bodies of Fuller and her husband were never recovered, nor was the manuscript on the Italian revolution she was carrying with her.

In his 1846 essay, “The Literati of New York,” Edgar Allan Poe offered a brief portrait of Margaret Fuller, “the personal woman”:

She is of the medium height; nothing remarkable about the figure; a profusion of lustrous light hair; eyes a bluish gray, full of fire; capacious forehead; the mouth when in repose indicates profound sensibility, capacity for affection, for love — when moved by a slight smile, it becomes even beautiful in the intensity of this expression; but the upper lip, as if impelled by the action of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the impression of a sneer. Imagine, now, a person of this description looking you at one moment earnestly in the face, at the next seeming to look only within her own spirit or at the wall; moving nervously every now and then in her chair; speaking in a high key, but musically, deliberately, (not hurriedly or loudly,) with a delicious distinctness of enunciation — speaking . . . and emphasizing the words . . . not by impulsion of the breath, (as is usual,) but by drawing them out as long as possible, nearly closing her eyes the while — imagine all this, and we have both the woman and the authoress before us.

This essay also appears in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews.

Other related LOA works: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals: 1829-1842; American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume one: Freneau to Whitman