Poe’s concern with literary process—as evidenced in “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle,” for example, as well as in many of his (often harsh) reviews of poetry and fiction—reflects his astute awareness of the similarity between the writing and painting processes. He was keenly aware of how a painter uses his medium to produce a “startling effect,” a concept essential to Poe’s storytelling.
This affinity is evidenced in his February 1838 Southern Literary Messenger review of Alexander Slidell’s The American in England. Poe applauds Slidell’s book as being wise by virtue of being superficial and justifies this seeming contradiction by arguing that the “depth of an argument is not, necessarily, its wisdom—this depth lying where Truth is sought more often than where she is found.” Poe then compares Slidell’s literary effort with the painterly process by observing, “The touches of a painting which, to minute inspection, are ‘confusion worse confounded’ will not fail to start boldly out to the cursory glance of a connoisseur.”5 In noting that the overall effect of a painting (as seen by a “connoisseur”) overrides the minute, seemingly “confused” strokes that produce that effect, Poe once again affirms his belief that truth often lies on the surface. He states this quite clearly in his “Letter to B–––”: “As regards the greater truths, men oftener err by seeking them at the bottom than at the top.”6 In his review of Slidell’s work, Poe also foregrounds his understanding of how a painter creates illusion and how that process applies to literary technique. For example, he compares Slidell’s literary finesse with painterly technique as follows: “[Mr. Slidell] has felt that the apparent, not the real, is the province of a painter—and that to give (speaking technically) the idea of any desired object, the toning down, or the utter neglect of certain portions of that object is absolutely necessary to the proper bringing out of other portions—portions by whose sole instrumentality the idea of the object is afforded.”7
Three years later, Poe reiterated this understanding in a May 1841 Graham’s Magazine review of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, and Other Tales. Here Poe points out that a painter, rather than attempting to create a direct duplicate of the subject to be depicted, uses his medium to communicate its truth to the viewer through the manipulation of brush stroke, light, composition, line, and shadow—exaggerating elements when necessary and diminishing others to create the desired effect. As he explains, “No critical principle is more firmly based in reason than that a certain amount of exaggeration is essential in the proper depicting of truth itself. We do not paint an object to be true, but to appear true to the beholder. Were we to copy nature with accuracy the object copied would seem unnatural.”8
In 1845, in Marginalia 243, Poe once again returned to his long-standing idea that the “mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’” As noted in “The Landscape Garden” and “The Domain of Arnheim,” Poe strongly believed that transformation, combination, and composition create beauty beyond what nature can produce, and this belief is evident in the marginalia entry: “We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little—but then always they see too much.” In this short piece, Poe also provides a definition of “Art”: “Were I called upon to define, very briefly, the term ‘Art,’ I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’”9
Often, too, Poe used visual metaphors as high praise. For example, in his September 1839 Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine review of Friedrich Fouqué’s Undine, Poe overwhelmingly praises his writing: “‘Undine’ is a model of models, in regard to the high artistical talent which it evinces. We could write volumes in a detailed commentary upon its various beauties in this respect. Its unity is absolute—its keeping unbroken. Yet every minute point of the picture fills and satisfies the eye” (Works, 10:37). Furthermore, in his February 1836 “Autography,” Poe applauds John P. Kennedy’s handwriting: “This is our beau ideal of penmanship. Its prevailing character is picturesque. . . . We should suppose Mr. Kennedy to have the eye of a painter, more especially in regard to the picturesque” (Tales, 1:273). Poe’s praise for the painterly process and for visual art was consistent throughout his literary career.
Chapter 1 of this book, “Poe’s Exposure to Art Exhibited in Philadelphia and Manhattan, 1838–1845,” suggests that Poe’s keen sense of visual aesthetics was nurtured by his exposure to the paintings and sculptures in art venues in Philadelphia and New York, where he lived from 1838 to his death in 1849. The “graphicality” of Poe’s own work is enhanced by allusions to painters and paintings, as demonstrated in chapter 2, “Artists and Artwork in Poe’s Short Stories and Sketches.” This chapter provides a chronological overview of the references to visual artists, paintings, and sculptures in the stories written or revised during Poe’s most productive period, from 1838 to 1849. I show how these allusions build on Poe’s valuing the artist’s vision as well as the ability of the writer to create in words what can be seen by “an artistical eye.” The chapter also provides evidence that supports Kent Ljungquist’s claim in The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques that “[Poe’s] later fiction and criticism mark a general turn away from the sublime.” Ljungquist explains, “Beauty becomes Poe’s guiding principle, and imagination is the predominant faculty, all other faculties subordinated to it with the sublime added almost as a rather unimportant sub-category.”10
Chapter 3, “Poe’s Homely Interiors,” examines the ways Poe’s well-known strategy of manipulating the merest detail can reveal undercurrent meanings, thematic resonances, nuanced complications of plot, and/or satirical responses to cultural norms. Specifically, this chapter examines the homely items of interior decoration that function in this way in “The Devil in the Belfry,” “William Wilson,” “The Philosophy of Furniture,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” and “Landor’s Cottage.” Poe also used visual cues in an entirely different way in his tales to confront the propensity to see what is desired and not what is actually there. This phenomenon, studied in chapter 4, “Poe’s Visual Tricks,” reveals how the act of seeing plays a pivotal role in short stories such as “Ligeia,” “The Sphinx,” and “The Spectacles.” Finally, chapter 5, “Poe’s Art Criticism,” details the critical responses to visual art that Poe published throughout his career but focuses especially on his responses to the art on display in New York during the time he lived in Manhattan and wrote for the Columbia Spy and the Broadway Journal.
Poe’s attentive response to the visual arts manifests itself in his writing style as well. The “graphicality” of his prose and poetry has influenced visual artists throughout the centuries, including Robert Motherwell, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and René Magritte.11 For example, Kevin Hayes notes that Magritte painted images entitled The Domain of Arnheim in 1938, 1949, 1950, and 1962, but “rather than images of Poe’s tales, Magritte’s works represent images inspired by Poe.”12 Burton Pollin’s Images of Poe’s Works: A Comprehensive Descriptive Catalogue of Illustrations details the remarkable extent of this influence, making it undeniable that Poe’s stories and poems are visually provocative. As Pollin notes at the beginning of his introduction, “Edgar Allan Poe has become one of the most widely and most diversely illustrated of authors by virtue of the sketches by Manet, Redon, Doré, Ensor, Gauguin, Beardsley, Whistler, Kubin, and more than seven hundred other artists.”13 In an interview published in the Edgar Allan Poe Review in 2001, I asked Dr. Pollin why he believed the residual effect of Poe’s work often provokes creative responses from people of all disciplines in the arts—dance, music, and especially the visual arts. He pointedly responded,
We have to remember, one of Poe’s creations . . . : the word