If, as Poe claims, Beauty is the province of the poem and appeals to the soul, while Truth and Passion, appealing to the intellect and the heart respectively, are far better rendered in prose (and are viewed as “antagonistic” to Beauty), then the insertion of the poems into the prose narrative could be viewed either as a possible threat to the coherence of the structural edifice of the story or as an introduction of that antagonism in the story which is thus reorganized by giving it a structure of two poles. This addition of a structural element which takes a major significance in the tales contrasts with Poe’s strict technique of composition, as he himself described it in his “Philosophy of Composition,” and according to which the achievement of a specific desired effect calls for specific narrative devices forming the structure of the composition. In fact, despite their seeming obscurity, the poems can be viewed as the key for interpreting the mysterious poetic characters who utter them. At the same time, they are giving the prose narrative solemnity, a sort of seal of inevitability, as if the poetic words spoken by the characters hold a bigger truth than their regular speech. One of these instances was “The Haunted Palace,” published in April 1839 and incorporated a few months later into his famous short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” the second, “The Conqueror Worm,” was first published in 1843 and integrated a few years later, in 1845, in a second revised reprint of his short story “Ligeia” (first published in 1838).īoth poems are invested with a crucial function within the narrative, figuring as an omen of the bad fortune ahead, foreshadowing the death of a maiden, “the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe, “Philosophy of Composition, 1846). Twice in his reediting of his works he included a poem of his own in one of his short stories. Edgar Allan Poe constantly revised everything he wrote.
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