Eleonora
1
Under care of a certain sort the soul is safe.
2
Poe cites the same ancient geographer, Al Idrisi, in “A Descent into the Maelström.” The quotation may be translated, They went upon the Sea of Darkness so that it might be explored.
Antagonisms
Metzengerstein
1
Living I was your plague, dying I will be your death. Luther addressed these lines to the Pope.
2
Comes from the inability to be alone.
3
The quotation, probably devised by Poe, does not make complete sense in French but suggests that although the soul inhabits a human body only once, it may, as an intangible likeness, take an animal form.
William Wilson
1
Poe apparently invented this passage, which does not appear in Chamberlayne’s verse narrative,
Pharonnida
(1659).
2
Punishment strong and severe, which traditionally meant being pressed or crushed to death.
3
The quotation from Voltaire may be translated, Oh, what a good time it was, that age of iron.
The Tell-Tale Heart
1
A species of beetle that produces a clicking or ticking sound as it burrows into walls.
The Imp of the Perverse
1
In this discussion of the first causes (
prima mobile
) of human behavior, Poe includes among those explanations constructed upon theory and empirically unverifiable (hence
à priori
), the nineteenth-century “science” of phrenology, developed by Gall and Spurzheim, which analyzed human character based on the shape of the cranium.
The Cask of Amontillado
1
No one injures me with impunity.
Hop-Frog
Mysteries
The Man of the Crowd
1
This great misfortune, to be unable to be alone.
2
It does not permit itself to be read.
3
The darkness that was once upon them.
4
Poe alludes to an obscure devotional text from 1500 (“The Spirit of the Garden”) said by Isaac D’Israeli to contain unseemly illustrations.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
1
And all that sort of thing.
2
The first letter has lost its original sound.
3
Poe evokes a character in Molière’s
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
who absurdly calls for his dressing gown so that he can better hear the music.
4
A former criminal who became the head of Napoleon’s security forces, François Eugène Vidocq later published a memoir, which in translation was adapted and serialized in
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine
.
5
A plausible equivalent would be, I tended to them.
6
After the fact, from effect to cause.
7
Of denying that which is, and explaining that which is not.
The Gold-Bug
1
Swammerdamm was a seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist and collector of entomological specimens; the title of his major work might be translated
The Bible of Nature; or The History of Insects
.
2
Poe presumably identified Jupiter as a freed slave to avoid criticism from Northern readers that he meant to idealize slavery. Jupiter’s devotion and simplicity fit a common racial stereotype; yet he later manifests his independence by threatening playfully to beat Legrand.
5
When the tale first appeared in the
Dollar Magazine
, the cipher was correctly represented; in subsequent versions (including the one followed here) Poe inadvertently introduced minor inconsistencies.
The Oblong Box
1
The ship
Independence
sinks on or about July 4 near the site of the first English settlement in the New World.
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
1
Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-1815) developed a therapeutic treatment for nervous disorders that relied upon “animal magnetism” to place patients in a trance. The “magnetic control” of the mesmerist over the subject anticipated techniques of modern hypnosis.
2
Bedloe seems to refer here to Indian tribes that once inhabited Virginia but which had (by the 1840s) disappeared as a result of conflicts with white settlers.
3
No such venomous leech exists.
The Purloined Letter
1
There is nothing more inimical to wisdom than too much acuteness.
2
An undistributed middle term, which in formal logic produces fallacious reasoning.
3
You can bet that every public idea, every received convention, is nonsense, for it has suited the majority.
4
Ambitus
denotes circularity;
religio
denotes superstition or (in another sense) scrupulousness;
homines honesti
was a Ciceronian epithet for partisans.
6
The descent into Hades is easy.
8
A scheme so deadly, if unworthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes.
Gotesqueries
The Man That Was Used Up
1
In the magazine world of Poe’s day, to “use up” someone meant to annihilate them with criticism.
2
Written during the second Seminole war, as General Zachary Taylor led the U.S. Army against combined Indian forces in Florida that included some Kickapoos, Poe injects a skeptical note by equating Bugaboo and Kickapoo: In Poe’s usage, a bugaboo (or bugbear) referred to an imaginary, needless object of dread.
3
Weep, weep, my eyes, and dissolve into water! The first half of my life has put the other half in the tomb.
4
Poe here satirizes the national self-adulation that helped to justify Indian removal.
5
In which matters he figured greatly.
6
Poe cites
Othello
, III, iii, 330-33. Iago, plotting to excite in Othello doubts about Desdemona’s fidelity, remarks that the hero will never again know restful sleep.
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
1
Poe’s reference to the odd eccentricities of the “southern provincialists” alludes to prejudices about the America South, inspired in part by abolitionists whose ideas of reform Poe satirizes by reversing master-slave relations.
2
Numbers 13:33 refers to a race of giants, the sons of Anak, who rule a land that devours its inhabitants.
3
A horrible monster, enormous, deformed, and sightless. In shorter form, the same phrase from Virgil also appears in “The Purloined Letter.”
4
Phalaris, the tyrant who ruled Agrigentum, Sicily, in the fifth century B.C., placed prisoners in a hollow brass bull that amplified their screams.
5
The sheer incongruity of an orchestra of French lunatics playing “Yankee Doodle” in the midst of a revolt hints at American implications.
Some Words with a Mummy
1.
Poe capitalized on the fascination with Egypt launched by Napoleon’s plundering of the pyramids and the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799. Champollion’s deciphering of the Rosetta stone launched the field of modern Egyptology, and by the 1830s and 1840s, museums in Europe and America were acquiring major collections of mummies and Egyptian artifacts.
2.
George Robins Gliddon, a noted lecturer on Egyptology, decried the ransacking of tombs and monuments in
An Appeal to the Antiquaries of Europe
(1841).
3.
James Silk Buckingham, an English traveler, had published several volumes about his excursions through the Near East.
4.
Contemporary antebellum debates about the origins of the five principal races hinged on the competing theories of monogenesis (the progressive evolution of different races from a single people) and polygenesis (the simultaneous development of racially distinct peoples). Proponents of monogenesis tended to see the Anglo-Saxon race as the culmination of all evolutionary progress.
5.
Emerging theories of eugenics typically focused on skull shapes.
6.
See note 1 for “The Imp of the Perverse.”
7.
Poe ridiculed the bad taste of this monument in
Doings of Gotham
.
8.
The Dial
was the journal of the Emersonian Transcendentalists, often a target of Poe’s satire.
9.
Poe alludes transparently to the founding of the United States and the establishment of popular suffrage. His skepticism about Jacksonian democracy is apparent in this passage.
10.
Poe wrote this tale, apparently, during the election of 1844, which hinged on territorial expansion and American destiny, issues successfully exploited by James K. Polk. The narrator’s sense that “everything is going wrong” seems to allude to U.S. jingoism on the eve of the Mexican War.
POEMS
The Lake—To——
1
The place described here, Lake Drummond, is situated in the Great Dismal Swamp between Virginia and North Carolina. It was in Poe’s day a site associated with mysterious disappearances by melancholy lovers—and also by fugitive slaves.
Sonnet—To Science
1
Poe identifies several mythic figures demystified by empirical science: Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, associated with the moon; the Hamadryad, a Greek wood nymph associated with trees; the Naiad, a Greek water nymph, associated with springs and fountains; the Elfin, elves or fairies, associated (here) with lawns and fields. The tamarind is a tropical fruit tree from India.
Fairy-Land
Introduction
1
This poem incorporates lines later published as “Romance” and appeared in this form only once, as a verse introduction to
Poems
(1831).
2
Poe probably knew the Greek poet both through his early studies in the classical languages and by way of Thomas Moore’s popular translations and adaptations.
Alone
1
This poem did not appear in print during Poe’s lifetime. It was preserved in the album of a Baltimore woman and first published, with a title added by Eugene L. Didier, in
Scribner’s Monthly
in 1875.
To Helen
1
Famously inspired by Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of a Richmond boyhood friend, the poem obviously evokes the legendary beauty of Helen of Troy. Poe’s “Nicéan barks” may allude to ships either dedicated to the goddess Nike or originating from Nicea, an ancient city of Asia Minor. Psyche was the lover of the Greek god Eros and became a personification of the soul. For Naiad, see the note to “Sonnet—To Science.”
The Sleeper
1
In Greek mythology, the river of forgetfulness.
Israfel
1
Lightning (archaic). The Pleiades are a cluster of seven stars, formed, according to Greek mythology, by the daughters of Atlas.
2
The Houris are the beautiful virgins said in the Koran to inhabit paradise.
The City in the Sea
1
Poe’s subject was probably suggested by Sodom and Gomorrah, the biblical sunken cities of the Dead Sea. The poem complements “The Valley of Unrest.”
Lenore
Dream-Land
1
An eidolon is a phantom; Poe’s subsequent allusion to “Thule” derives from Virgil’s reference to an “ultima Thule,” a remote island in the North Atlantic, perhaps Greenland.
The Raven
1
That is, her name must hereafter remain unspoken.
2
Pallas Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom.
3
Legendary drug that relieved sorrow.
4
An eccentric spelling of Eden. Poe’s narrator wishes to confirm the existence of a spiritual afterlife, where he may again embrace Lenore. Yet the question is perverse: He inevitably anticipates the bird’s response.
Ulalume—A Ballad
1
Arguably Poe’s most difficult poem, a verse narrative complicated by esoteric astrological imagery, “Ulalume” presumably fictionalizes Poe’s own visits to the grave of Virginia in 1847. The name of the dead beloved here likely derives from the Latin verb
ululare
, to wail or howl.
2
Poe’s Mount Yaanek may refer to an Antarctic volcano, Mt. Erebus, discovered in 1840. The “scoriac” rivers refer to lava flows.
3
Presumably Halloween. Virginia Poe died, however, in January.
4
Astarte was the Phoenician goddess of love and hence the counterpart of Venus. The moon here seems to be in a crescent phase, perhaps “bediamonded” in juxtaposition with the planet Venus.
5
The constellation Leo. The juxtaposition of Venus and Leo would have been astrologically ominous. Psyche (the soul) expresses “mistrust” about the passion of Venus.