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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
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”: Faëry 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 o
Product details
| Published | Mar 04 2020 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 170 |
| ISBN | 9781611462067 |
| Imprint | Lehigh University Press |
| Dimensions | 223 x 152 mm |
| Series | Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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