Poets' Corner

Number Twenty Three: 18^th July 2014

Edgar Allan Poe⁽¹⁾

Jung's term for what others called 'folk memory' was The Collective Unconscious . Deep and invisible to the individual powers of recall , it supposedly harbours many 'archetypes' dating back to our earliest human ancestors and one of these he called The Shadow , composed of many repressed ideas , dark desires and primal instincts. These may appear in dreams or folk-tales as sinister or exotic figures such as snakes , dragons , or ravens. The scholar and folklorist Francis Child collected traditional folk ballads from England and Scotland (along with their American variants). Here were tales of incest , murder , love and magic .... and talking birds. Evidentially harking back to the fifteenth century , The Three Ravens begins :

There were three ravens sat on a tree
They were as black as they might be.
The one of them said to his mate ,
Where shall we our breakfast take ?

Poe's biography and works are well-enough known. We'll spend our time looking specifically at connections suggested by his poem The Raven :

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly ,
Though its answer little meaning , little relevancy bore ;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door
With such name as 'Never more.'

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling ,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door ;
Then upon the velvet sinking , I betook myself to linking
Fancy into fancy , thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim , ungainly , ghastly , gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking 'Never more.'

In the 1960s , the American director Roger Corman made a sequence of films loosely based on works by Poe. Many were scripted by Richard Matheson , cult author of The Incredible Shrinking Man and I Am Legend. One such film was titled The Raven (1963) , with a cast including Vincent Price , Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre as three rival wizards. There was also a young Jack Nicholson and a trained raven that defecated on all and sundry throughout. In the King James Bible version of the Flood , Noah eventually sends out a raven along with a dove to “see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground.” We hear no more of that raven but in Hebrew folklore , then-white ravens were punished by the tyrannical deity for not having reported back to Noah immediately. Thenceforth their feathers became black and their diet would be carrion.

⁽¹⁾ Poe is nowadays best known for being the originator of detective fiction and writing tales of the macabre. He was a contemporary (and reader) of Dickens and some have suggested that his poem here was inspired by Grip the talking raven in Barnaby Rudge. Poe's great champion was the French poet Baudelaire , another narcotics user who was drawn to the darker aspects behind consciousness. Poe also set the template for Jerry Lee Lewis a century later in marrying his thirteen year-old cousin. The mysterious circumstances of Poe's own death at the age of 40 seem to mirror the abrupt and inconclusive way most of his tales end.

Archive

Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13^th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10^th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12^th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14^th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25^th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19^th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20^th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21^st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20^th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19^th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21^st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts , 20^th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20^th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20^th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20^th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia & Emily, 20^th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of Icarus, 16^th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone Before, 20^th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard Kipling, 20^th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell, 20^th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest Proposal, 20^th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray and The Eighteenth Century, 20^th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan Poe, 18^th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly, 19^th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be Saved, 24^th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants, 20^th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel Johnson, 15^th February 2016
Poets' Corner #28 – T.S.Eliot, 10^th March 2016
Poets' Corner #29 – Alfred Lord Tennyson, 18^th April 2016
Poets' Corner #30 – Leonard Cohen, 12^th November 2016