Poe and the idea of music : failure, transcendence, and dark romanticism
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Poe and the idea of music : failure, transcendence, and dark romanticism
（Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe / series editor, Barbara Cantalupo）
Lehigh University Press, c2017
- : cloth
Available at 1 libraries
Note
Bibliography: p. 141-147
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Is 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!
2 Another Kind of Musician Altogether
"The Fall of the House of Usher": The Guitar and the Ballad
The Case of the Ballad
"Ulalume": Faery Ballet
Indefinitiveness: The True Musical Expression
"Annabel Lee": The Sounding Sea
"The Haunted Palace": Spirits Moving Musically
3 An Almost Magical Melody
"Ligeia": Siren Who Never Sings
4 The 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
5 The 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
6 But 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 Paean": 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
by "Nielsen BookData"