Poe and the Idea of Music: Failure, Transcendence, and Dark Romanticism

by Charity McAdams

Overview

Edgar Allan Poe often set the scenes of his stories and poems with music: angels have the heartstrings of lutes, spirits dance, and women speak with melodic voices. These musical ideas appear to mimic the ways other authors, particularly Romanticists, used music in their works to represent a spiritual ideal artistic realm. Music brought forth the otherworldly, and spoke to the possible transcendence of the human spirit. Yet, Poe's music differs from these Romantic notions in ways that, although not immediately perceptible in each individual instance, cohere to invert Romantic idealism. For Poe, artistic transcendence is impossible, the metaphysical realm is unreachable, and humans cannot perceive anything but their own failure of spirit. In this book, I show how we can look at Poe's poems and stories on the whole to discover this, and in doing so, unpack some of Poe's mysticism along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611462050
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	10/24/2017
Series:	Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	170
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Charity McAdams is professor in the Honors department at Arizona State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1Is This Divine? No, This is the Voice of a Woman.
Madame Malibran: The Very Genius of Music
“The Spectacles”: In Imitation of Malibran
The Alchemy of Unreason: Well and Strenuously Sung!
2Another Kind of Musician Altogether
“The Fall of the House of Usher”: The Guitar and the Ballad
The Case of the Ballad
“Ulalume”: Faëry Ballet
Indefinitiveness: The True Musical Expression
“Annabel Lee”: The Sounding Sea
“The Haunted Palace”: Spirits Moving Musically
3An Almost Magical Melody
“Ligeia”: Siren Who Never Sings
4The Wantonest Singing Birds
Poems as Songs in Language, Aim, and Purpose
Ventum Textilem: The Veil of the Soul
Mere Words: Birdsong
“Fanny”: Wild Death Song, Sweet and Clear
“Romance”: Unless It Trembled with the Strings
“Nameless Here For Evermore”: To Sing Well is to Avoid Naming
5The Starry Choir (And Other Listening Things)
Music of the Spheres: Music, in Our Own More Limited Sense of the Word
“Al Aaraaf”: Music of the Passion-Hearted
“Israfel”: Sweetest Voice of All God’s Creatures
Power of Words: The Naiad Voice that Addresses Them From Below
6But Gradually my Songs They Ceased
“The Cask of Amontillado”: The Conical Cap and Bells
“The Bells”: What a World of Solemn Thought Their Monody Compels
“A Pæan”: The Requiem for the Loveliest Dead
“The Masque of the Red Death”: The Music Swells, and the Dreams Live, and Writhe
Conclusion
Appendix
An Inherited Musical Talent
The Idea without Music: Decontextualizing Poe
‘The Rational Agent of Enchantment Itself’: Absolute Music and the Music of the Spheres
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Charity McAdams' fascinating, thorough, and luminous book is the key to understanding Poe's poetic idealism. That idealism conceives of itself as fundamentally musical. So we need to understand what music meant to Poe. This book gives us that understanding, by carefully mapping, for the first time, the relationship between Poe's words, the music he might have heard, and the music he imagined beyond the reach of our ears. It is a unique contribution both to Poe scholarship, and to the study of the relationship between poetry and music in the 19th century.

Peter Dayan