106 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.” According to this prescription, the poet’s task
is to weave a tapestry of talismanic signs and sounds in order to draw, or rather
subdue, the reader into sharing the world beyond phenomenal experience. Poems
make nothing happen in any practical, immediate sense, Poe suggests. On the
contrary, the ideal poem becomes one in which the words efface themselves,
disappear as they are read, leaving only a feeling of significant absence, of no-thing.
Just how Poe turned these poetic ideas into practice is briefly suggested in one of
his poems, “Dreamland,” where the narrator tells us that he has reached a strange
new land “out of SPACE – out of TIME.” That is the land that all Poe’s art occupies
or longs for: a fundamentally elusive reality, the reverse of all that our senses can
receive or our reason can encompass – something that lies beyond life that we can
discover only in sleep, madness, or trance, in death especially, and, if we are lucky, in
a poem or story. Certain poetic scenes and subjects are favorites with Poe precisely
because they reinforce his ultimately visionary aims. Unsurprisingly, life after death
is a favorite topic, in poems like “Annabel Lee” and “The Sleeper.” So, too, is the
theme of a strange, shadowy region beyond the borders of normal consciousness:
places such as those described in “The City in the Sea” or “Eldorado” which are, in
effect, elaborate figures for death. As Poe himself explains in “The Philosophy of
Composition,” an account of how he wrote “The Raven,” “the death ... of a beautiful
woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” because it enhances
the seductive nature of death, transforming annihilation into erotic fulfillment.
“O! nothing earthly,” begins “Al Aaraaf,” one of Poe’s earliest poems, and that
captures his poetic thrust: whatever the apparent subject, the movement is always
away from the ordinary, phenomenal world in and down to some other, subterra-
nean level of consciousness and experience. The sights and sounds of a realizable
reality may be there in a poem like “To Helen,” but their presence is only fleeting,
ephemeral. Poe’s scenes are always shadowy and insubstantial, the colors dim, the
lighting dusky. In the final instance, the things of the real world are there only to be
discarded – as signposts to another country that is, strictly speaking, imperceptible,
unrealizable by the waking consciousness.
“Helen, thy beauty is to me, /” “To Helen” begins, “Like those Nicean barks of
yore, / That gently o’er a perfumed sea, / The weary, way-worn wanderer bore / To
his own native shore.” This is poetry as incantation. Poe uses hypnotic rhythm and
recurring, verbal melody and words like “Nicean” that suggest more than they state:
all to create a sense of mystery, or what a later poet, and disciple of Poe, Arthur
Rimbaud, was to call “a prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.” The
narrator is transported, by the end of this poem, to “the regions which / Are Holy-
Land!” So, ideally, is the reader. The motion here is remorselessly centripetal, away
not just from the world of use, getting and spending, but from the entire world
outside the self. In dreams, trance, death, Poe intimates, the self fashions its own
reality, inviolable and intangible; it draws inward to a world that, to quote “Al Aaraaf ”
again, has “nothing of the dross” outside it, on the material plane. And, if the poet is
capable of it, the poem makes a supreme version of that world: self-contained, fixed,
perfect, it is a pure or closed field, as autonomous and impalpable as the reality itGGray_c02.indd 106ray_c 02 .indd 106 8 8/1/2011 7:54:38 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 38 AM