Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

In America, Gothic Romanticism was received in a spirit which reflected both the distance that separated the consciousness of the New World from the cultural history of Europe, and the fascination which that half-possessed inheritance exerted upon the American soul. Harry Levin has argued, in The Power of Blackness, that the overt ideals of nineteenth-century American society, the belief in material progress and human perfectibility, the ‘bland perfection’ of Americans’ daylight selves, were offset by a compensating visitation of darkness and insecurity in the night-side of the nation’s collective psyche. Creative minds were drawn to this neglected or repressed dark component: ‘Where the voice of the majority is by definition affirmative, the spirit of independence is likeliest to manifest itself by employing the negative’¹ That negative is most memorably voiced in the melancholy reiteration of Edgar Allan Poe’s hauntingly insistent Raven: ‘Nevermore.’