Edgar Allan Poe (6 page)

Tamerlane and Other Poems
, as Poe titled his first published book, preserved his anonymity but did not prevent him from later claiming its authorship. If the book proved successful, he could throw off the mantle of anonymity. For the time being, he identified himself on the title page solely as ‘A Bostonian’. Though Poe would express condescension toward the Boston literary establishment in the coming years, this pseudonym verifies his desire to remake himself and suggests his early identification with his birthplace.

Barely forty pages long,
Tamerlane and Other Poems
consists of one long poem and several short ones. In ‘Tamerlane’, the thoroughly Byronic poem that opens the volume, the title character relates how he recognized his genius for leadership but fell in love, leaving his lover in order to pursue conquest but intending to return to make her queen. After conquering much of the world, he came back to find her dead. The price he paid for his kingdom was a broken heart. Reduced to plot summary ‘Tamerlane’ seems hackneyed. What makes it memorable is the nostalgia for lost youth Tamerlane articulates:

In childhood our imaginations are alive. As adults we enter the rational world. We gain knowledge yet lose our sense of wonder. This clash between the rational and the imaginative would pervade Poe’s writings.

‘The Lake’ forms a fitting conclusion to the volume. Similarly nostalgic, its speaker recalls a lake he used to visit in his youth. After describing how it looked in daylight, he explains how its appearance changed at night. The night would throw a pall over the lake:

The speaker attempts to define the terror he had experienced. It was not fright, he asserts, ‘But a tremulous delight, / And a feeling undefin’d, / Springing from a darken’d mind’ (ll. 14–16). He can take delight in such terror because of his ‘darken’d mind’, a phrase indicating the speaker’s lack of knowledge and experience. Poe borrowed the phrase from Byron’s ‘Stanzas’. ‘The Lake’ shifts its point of view from first to third person toward the end. Provocatively, the speaker’s youthful self becomes someone else, someone ‘Whose wild’ring thought could even make / An Eden of that dim lake’ (ll. 20–21).

After arranging the publication of
Tamerlane and Other Poems
, Poe, now desperate, enlisted in the us Army on 26 May 1827. He was assigned to Battery
H
of the First Artillery in Fort Independence, Boston Harbor. His enlistment provided another reason for keeping his identity secret. John Allan had raised his foster son as a gentleman: the enlisted service consisted almost exclusively of the lower class.
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Poe enlisted as Edgar A. Perry, a pseudonym reflecting his desire for military glory. He named himself after Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who bravely defeated the British in the Battle of Lake Erie and turned the tide of the War of 1812. Reporting the victory, Perry uttered his famous words: ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours.’ Vivid expressions of triumph always appealed to Poe.

A. Vizitelly,
Fort Moultrie, Charleston Harbor
, 1861.

Artillery work was gruelling and tedious. Poe was not averse to hard work, but his superiors recognized his education and abilities and in July appointed him clerk, a position which brought him close to the officers. From Boston Poe went to Fort Moultrie, off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, arriving in mid-November. On 1 May 1828 he was promoted to artificer, a highly skilled position which put him in charge of making bombs at the fort. The position involved meticulous precision, much mathematical ability and considerable danger. Artificers calculated distance and trajectory and prepared gunpowder charges to suit.
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Initially, the army offered an outlet for Poe’s ambition. Once he was promoted to sergeant major, the highest enlisted rank, on 1 January 1829, he grew restless. The term of his enlistment – five years – now seemed interminable. He sought his foster father’s help. Allan coldly suggested he stay in the army for the entire enlistment. Poe took the suggestion as a challenge. How could he prove himself to Allan yet fulfil his ambition? Poe’s solution was ingenious: he could attend the us Military Academy at West Point. That way, he could get out of his enlistment while showing Allan that he was not a quitter. He would be escaping his enlistment not to stifle but to advance his military career. An appointment to the Academy offered him many advantages. He would receive the college education Allan had denied him at university. As an officer, Poe would have a much greater opportunity for military glory. He also foresaw himself in retirement. Still assuming he would be heir to Allan’s fortune, Poe imagined himself as a paragon of Southern gentility, the kind of man who goes by ‘Colonel’ the rest of his life, writes poetry, ages gracefully and enjoys the finer things wealth can bring.

Charles Balthazar Julien Fevret de Saint-Mémin,
William Wirt
, 1807/8.

Amenable to Poe’s new plan, Allan helped extricate him from his enlistment and arranged letters of recommendation. Officially discharged on 15 April 1829, Poe moved to Baltimore, where he assembled a new collection of poetry featuring ‘Al Aaraaf’, his longest and most challenging poem. In ‘Al Aaraaf’, Poe imagined an ideal world inhabited by angels and enlightened human souls who mediate between Heaven and the rest of the universe, conveying an awareness of beauty to the others and thus bringing them closer to God. To improve the poem, Poe sought the advice of William Wirt, Baltimore’s grand old man of letters. Happy to help, Wirt nevertheless had trouble making sense of ‘Al Aaraaf’. Diplomatically, he told Poe that he had not kept abreast of current literary trends.

To adorn
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems
, Poe included a number of literary quotations. The initial epigraph reads:

Poe’s source has escaped his editors, but these lines come from a sonnet by Lope de Vega he found in a magazine article by Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza, which also quoted the next line: ‘Que yo soi quien lo digo, y no lo entiendo’ (For even I, who am telling it to you, do not understand it myself).
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Anyone familiar with the sonnet could remember the line and recognize Poe’s self-reflexive joke about the comprehensibility of ‘Al Aaraaf’.

‘Sonnet: To Science’, as yet untitled, forms a verse preface to ‘Al Aaraaf’. ‘Tamerlane’ follows ‘Al Aaraaf’, and the minor poems, some new, others revised from the earlier volume, come last. ‘The Lake – to – ’, for example, is a revised version of ‘The Lake’. Poe’s revisions show his increasing mastery of language and his shift toward vivid, concrete imagery. In the earlier version, the wind passes by ‘in its stilly melody’. Poe deleted ‘stilly’ in revision to minimize his poetic language but also to eliminate a contradiction: how can the sound of the passing wind be characterized by stillness? Poe’s revisions enhance the visual and aural imagery. The wind now looks and sounds more sinister, more foreboding: ‘the black wind murmur’d by / In a dirge of melody’ (ll. 9–10).

The feeling he described earlier as ‘undefin’d, / Springing from a darken’d mind’ he made more specific. Now it is a ‘feeling not the jewell’d mine / Should ever bribe me to define / Nor Love – altho’ the Love be thine’ (ll. 15–17). Besides eliminating an obvious Byronism, he also emphasized the importance of the irrational delight he took in a terrifying experience. If the speaker of the poem considered the experience further, he could describe it rationally, but this he refused to do. For neither love nor money would he destroy his imagination by rationalizing it. Poe’s careful revisions were lost on contemporary readers. He gave away some copies of the book but sold few.
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Poe reached West Point in the third week of June 1830 for the obligatory summer encampment, which even Ulysses S. Grant, who attended West Point the following decade, found ‘very wearisome and uninteresting’.
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When classes began in September, Poe took the same courses every first-year student took: French and Mathematics. Fellow cadet David Emerson Hale said Poe was ‘too mad a poet to like Mathematics’, but Poe himself would eventually recognize the importance of mathematics to poetry.
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Speaking with fellow cadets, Poe romanticized his past. He said he had been to South America and England and had graduated from an English college. Later, he romanticized his reason for leaving West Point. ‘It was about this period that Poland made the desperate and unfortunate struggle for independence, against the combined powers of Russia, Austria and Prussia, which terminated in the capitulation of Warsaw, and the annihilation of the kingdom’, Henry Hirst wrote. ‘All our cadet’s former chivalric ardor had now returned and with tenfold vigor. He burned to be a participant in the affray.’ Poe’s real reason for leaving West Point was less romantic. Frances Allan had passed away on 28 February 1829, and John Allan married Louisa Patterson on 5 October 1830. By the year’s end the new Mrs Allan was pregnant. Realizing ‘his heirship was at an end’, Poe considered the army ‘no place for a poor man’.
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He quit attending classes, quit going to drill, quit doing pretty much everything the army ordered him to do. He was brought up on charges, courtmartialled and dismissed.

During his time at West Point, Poe endeared himself to his fellow cadets by writing satirical verse about their instructors. When he proposed a published collection of poems, the cadets readily subscribed.
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Leaving West Point, he went to New York to oversee the volume’s publication. By chance Peter Pease was there, too. Poe boisterously claimed he had made his fortune, acting the part of a prosperous gentleman and telling Pease he was living near Madison Square, where he ‘loved to walk beneath the elm trees’.
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Poems
(1831) begins with ‘Letter to Mr—’. To make this collection less intimidating than his earlier ones, he moved ‘Al Aaraaf’ and ‘Tamerlane’ to the back. He added some fine new lyric poems, including ‘To Helen’, ‘Irene’, ‘Israfel’ and ‘The City in the Sea’.
Poems
omits some minor works from the previous collections. In ‘Letter to Mr —’ Poe explains how he took some passages from the minor poems and integrated them with either ‘Al Aaraaf’ or ‘Tamerlane’, hoping to give them ‘some chance of being seen by posterity’.
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Preparing
Poems
for the publication, he saw his work as a matter of consolidation, taking the best lines from his minor poems and integrating them with his lengthier works.

‘The Lake’, for instance, disappears as a separate poem but reappears embedded within the text of ‘Tamerlane’. After the revision, Tamerlane is the one remembering a lake he used to haunt in his youth. A significant revision concerns the last four lines of the embedded poem. Whereas the speaker of ‘The Lake’ shifts to the third person to lament his lost youth, Tamerlane continues to speak in the first person, wondering: