by Larry WithamTHE MASTER OF TERROR HAD A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF AESTHETICS
THIS WEEK CELEBRATED Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday, conjuring
images of the founder of modern mystery and horror, dark as dark can be. He was
born on January 19, 1809, and died destitute at age forty-one in Baltimore, where
there’s been a long tradition of leaving cognac and three roses on his grave—in
the dead of night, by a mysterious visitor.
It is
therefore a surprise to learn that Poe loved traditional beauty, even
“loveliness,” in art.
Poe was not
a novelist, though he did write one. And the topic of art is virtually absent from his many short stories. The
exception is a quick reference in “Landor’s Cottage” (1849), where Poe
describes a building as being like the paintings of Salvator Rosa, the
seventeenth century Neapolitan painter. (Rosa’s images of stormy skies and
ruins were a guide to American landscape artists in the literary age of
Romanticism, the age of Poe’s writing).
Poe’s views
on art came out in his articles. It is a side of him that many would not
expect, given the way he pioneered a genre that culminated in noir detective
fiction and the celebration of the macabre, typified by Stephen King.
Poe was
born in Boston. He came of age in an adoptive family in Virginia. He spent his
adult life between New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. Poe wanted to
be a poet. But in need of a livelihood, he catered to the new sensational
writing of the 1830s and 1840s. During a three-year stint in New York, he achieved
success with his 1845 narrative poem “The Raven.,” It appeared in a newspaper
and then his first book, The Raven and
Other Poems.
We might
think that from here Poe descended into his terror mania, but quite the
opposite, it seems. He lived two lives, one in his horror stories and the other
in his truer self, a rather traditional aesthetic thinker.
In New York
he was exposed to a revival in visual arts. Those decades saw a flourishing of
the National Academy of Design. It was the arbiter of taste in painting, what
it called “contemporary American art,” painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederic
Church, Asher Durand and others. Thousands attended the exhibitions. Poe lived
among the Manhattan painters and art organizers. He wrote on the visual arts
for periodicals.
His
writings disparaged what today we call kitsch, and he urged ordinary people to
elevate their tastes. Such is the tone of his 1845 magazine article, “The
Philosophy of Furniture,” a guide to home decoration. Good design required an overall
effect. Unfortunately, he wrote, most domiciles were “blindly subservient to
the caprices of fashion,” cluttered with glass bobbles and mismatched colors.
All this
was offensive to the eye. As an alternative, he argued, the designing of a room
is “amenable to those undeviating principles which regulate all varieties of
art; and very nearly the same laws by which we decide on the higher merits of a
painting.” Paintings have a focal point, a mood, and a harmony of color. Such a
room would give even “the veriest bumpkin” pleasure.
Poe also
wrote on landscape gardening. In his essay “The Domain of Arnheim,” he reveals his
thoughts on painting, art, and art criticism. The best landscape paintings
present nature as “exalted and idealized.” A painter must arrange elements in a
quest for “true beauty.” In later years, as Poe drifted inexorably into his
reputation as a literary purveyor of dread, he nevertheless said his sentiment in “The Domain of Arnheim” still “contains more of myself and of my inherent
tastes and habits of thought than anything I have written.”
Some have
said that both Poe’s Gothic stories, and the Gothic spirit of many paintings of
this period, with their dark ruins, for instance, reveal the cultural elite’s terror
at America’s rampant democracy. Just as likely, though, this darkness was all
about visual and literary entertainment. It was the so-called Romantic Age, and
it needed a look and feel that was commercially interesting.
As the bard
of the macabre, Poe dropped that mask often enough. He spoke of “physical
loveliness” in nature. Great painters created “paradises.” He admired Titian
and the French neoclassical landscape artist Claude Lorraine. Good art produces
pleasure: “The only test . . . by which we should try a work of art is the
delight it gives us.” And he extolled craftsmanship, not only in the art of writing
(see his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” 1846), but in all artistic
endeavor.
At the end
of Poe’s short life, his short stories and poems were translated into French.
Thereafter, the modernist poet Charles Baudelaire championed Poe as the man who
made beauty out of what was horrible, even evil. In his first book of poems, Flowers of Evil (1857), Baudelaire hoped
to give modernity a new definition of beauty, one that justified every man’s dark
and hedonistic impulses. As he famously said, “all pleasure lies in evil.”
Many of the
fin de siècle painters of England,
Spain, Germany, and France took the spirit of Baudelaire to heart on the eve of the twentieth century. Death,
insanity, decadence, and melancholy were all the rage in painting. These
artists not only created radical new visual forms—from Expressionism to Cubism—they
adopted a licentious lifestyle, the new and dark bohemianism.
And yet,
here is Edgar Allen Poe, a muse to Baudelaire, addressing his American magazine
articles to “all lovers of the true and beautiful in art.”
Beauty has
always been a tough definition for art. Today it tends to go by the wayside as being
old-fashioned, bourgeois, or elitist. Poe wouldn’t agree with that fate. And
when we consider the dark world of literature he invented, it’s just the more
surprising to think about his light-filled visual aesthetics of “loveliness.”
Poe seemed
to know beauty when he saw it—a very traditional form. Even if the black raven
is saying, “Never more!”
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