Poe: Rituals of Life and Death

Abstract

Poe’s art is rightly celebrated for its obsession with horror and with death, and may justly be ranked very high in ‘Gothic’ literature, yet there are some important qualities which set it apart and make it uniquely the art of Edgar Allan Poe. By all means let us regard Poe as one of the most distinguished heirs of the Gothic movement, which clearly began with the work of the Graveyard School in the early eighteenth century, following the rediscovery of Longinus, but let us also see the peculiar qualities of Poe’s treatment of horrific subjects. The most important striking thing is that at moments of supreme horror, such as that in ‘Ligeia’ quoted above, the dead live and the living are struck dead. Writers of Gothic horror before Poe had made death the culminating horror, but had concentrated on making the moment of death itself the ultimate horror. For Poe the horror lies in the animation of death itself. In his imagination, and in his hands as a writer, the terror lies in the vitality of death.

I trembled not — I stirred not — for a crowd of unutterable fancies connected with the air, the stature, the demeanor of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralysed — had chilled me into stone. I stirred not — but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in my thoughts — a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all?

(Poe, ‘Ligeia’¹)