After quoting from Roger Asselineau's pamphlet "Edgar Allan Poe" in a previous post, I now have a copy and can report on it in full.
It was published 1970 by the University of Minnesota; my copy gives it as No. 89 in the Univ. of Minn. Pamphlets on American Writers. It has some of the usual defects of works on Poe. There is the gratuitous, groundless and childish psychologizing. A biographer has not committed his art, after all, if he has not made something of his subject that cannot be made on the basis of facts. And a man is no intellectual without a periodic frenzy of wild speculation. In short, he trots out the Freudianisms of Marie Bonaparte.
His aesthetic judgments are also errant. He insists on the emotionalism of Poe's writing--that he was carried away by poetic fits (not unlike the biographical frenzy)--that he was subject to precisely the gaseous and unstudied overinspiration that he denied the value of. In keeping with this errancy, he cites Poe's most prominent detractors without making much of the fact that Poe's reputation has outlasted the best of them: there are but a few who will read Eliot or Henry James without being put up to it by a teacher.
But Asselineau performs some useful services. As mentioned in the earlier post, he points out the importance of humor, of satirical imagination, even in Poe's darkest stories. And in the space of 48 pages, he manages to cram in a fair measure of biography and aesthetic overview, besides the bibliography at the end.
Most useful of all are his extracts from Poe's reviews, essays and letters that touch on his aesthetic ideas and methods. Some of these quotations will not be found even in major biographies and they are worth copying to this review.
Concerning his mysteries: "Where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unraveling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story."
Concerning imagination: "There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine."
Concerning imagination and knowledge: "That the imagination has not been unjustly ranked as supreme among the mental faculties, appears from the intense consciousness on the part of the imaginative man, that the faculty in question brings his soul often to a glimpse of things supernal and eternal--to the very verge of the great secrets . . . Some of the most profound knowledge--perhaps all very profound knowledge--has originated from a highly stimulated imagination. Great intellects guess well."
Concerning the voice of the narrator: "The commenting force can never be safely disregarded. It is far better to have a dearth of incident, with skillful observations upon it, than the utmost variety of event, without."
Concerning his calibration of realistic and imaginative elements: "It consists . . . in writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he relates, and for which, professedly, he neither claims nor anticipates credence--in minuteness of detail, especially upon points which have no immediate bearing upon the general story--this minuteness not being at variance with indirectness of expression--in short, by making use of the infinity of arts which give verisimilitude to a narration."
Concerning plot and atmosphere: "Two things are invariably required . . . first some amount of complexity, or more properly adaptation; and secondly, some amount of suggestiveness--some undercurrent, however indefinite, of meaning . . . It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness. . . ."
It was published 1970 by the University of Minnesota; my copy gives it as No. 89 in the Univ. of Minn. Pamphlets on American Writers. It has some of the usual defects of works on Poe. There is the gratuitous, groundless and childish psychologizing. A biographer has not committed his art, after all, if he has not made something of his subject that cannot be made on the basis of facts. And a man is no intellectual without a periodic frenzy of wild speculation. In short, he trots out the Freudianisms of Marie Bonaparte.
His aesthetic judgments are also errant. He insists on the emotionalism of Poe's writing--that he was carried away by poetic fits (not unlike the biographical frenzy)--that he was subject to precisely the gaseous and unstudied overinspiration that he denied the value of. In keeping with this errancy, he cites Poe's most prominent detractors without making much of the fact that Poe's reputation has outlasted the best of them: there are but a few who will read Eliot or Henry James without being put up to it by a teacher.
But Asselineau performs some useful services. As mentioned in the earlier post, he points out the importance of humor, of satirical imagination, even in Poe's darkest stories. And in the space of 48 pages, he manages to cram in a fair measure of biography and aesthetic overview, besides the bibliography at the end.
Most useful of all are his extracts from Poe's reviews, essays and letters that touch on his aesthetic ideas and methods. Some of these quotations will not be found even in major biographies and they are worth copying to this review.
Concerning his mysteries: "Where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unraveling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story."
Concerning imagination: "There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine."
Concerning imagination and knowledge: "That the imagination has not been unjustly ranked as supreme among the mental faculties, appears from the intense consciousness on the part of the imaginative man, that the faculty in question brings his soul often to a glimpse of things supernal and eternal--to the very verge of the great secrets . . . Some of the most profound knowledge--perhaps all very profound knowledge--has originated from a highly stimulated imagination. Great intellects guess well."
Concerning the voice of the narrator: "The commenting force can never be safely disregarded. It is far better to have a dearth of incident, with skillful observations upon it, than the utmost variety of event, without."
Concerning his calibration of realistic and imaginative elements: "It consists . . . in writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he relates, and for which, professedly, he neither claims nor anticipates credence--in minuteness of detail, especially upon points which have no immediate bearing upon the general story--this minuteness not being at variance with indirectness of expression--in short, by making use of the infinity of arts which give verisimilitude to a narration."
Concerning plot and atmosphere: "Two things are invariably required . . . first some amount of complexity, or more properly adaptation; and secondly, some amount of suggestiveness--some undercurrent, however indefinite, of meaning . . . It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness. . . ."
