Paltry commendations

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True -- excited -- very, very wonderfully excited I have been and am about starting this blog; but please do not say that I am mad!

The cause for my excitement is the opportunity to share my thoughts about the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and the hope to hear back from Poe enthusiasts around the world.

The focus of this blog will be the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.  My posts will attempt to analyze and reflect upon Poe’s verses to shed light on possible autobiographic and artistic interpretations of the poems.  In this sense, we will take Poe at his word, as he expressed it in the preface to The Raven and Other Poems in 1845:

Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not — they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

Poe tells us that poetry for him was not a “purpose”—i.e., not deliberately crafted for mass consumption (the way his short stories seemed to be)—but a “passion”—in other words, a labor of love that was left more raw and served as an outlet for expression which therefore may be regarded as more autobiographical and more likely to reflect Poe’s views and philosophy. In short, our thesis is that Poe resorted to poetry as a sort of sounding board for the passions that erupted in his heart, which he fashioned for his own purposes and did not have time to polish for external use.

Moreover, he tells us that, “under happier circumstances [poetry] would have been the field of my choice,” which provides an additional impetus for making Poe’s poetry almost exclusively the focus of this blog.  In that respect, I hope that this autobiographical reading of Poe’s verse will contribute to the reader’s appreciation of the poems.

So, thank you for reading and please do say hi.

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