John Adams High School - Clipper Yearbook (Ozone Park, NY)

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:sa af' Nfl 1 A yi tier 1 tff A .,g,,- IU-ag-',', lH. 7.1 D' ' X f ,- li , ' f V 'L' .'L ' '- W ' ' If rt J' 1 '-1--LL' P ' 2 ' i 'YT X ' ,'-' V, ,I ' ix - -1 -i 5 f Alai' f R V f, . , , A , ,, Many-Colored Grass , she was Lenore in The Raven , she was Annabel Lee. With me,'l he declared, poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion. In the Let- ter to B, he thus defines poetry: A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immedi- ate object, pleasure, not truth, to a romance, by having for its object an indehnite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only as far as this object is attained .... tMusic, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry, music without the idea is simply music, the idea without the music is proseji' Tamberlane and Other Poems was the first volume of his poems to be published. Between forty and fifty copies were issued by a job printer and it is doubtful that they were ever circulated. Only four copies are known to be in existence today. In this vol- ume, the poem, A Dream Within a Dream, is found. It is an example of his work with revision. Two lines originally appeared: I am standing 'mid the roar Of a weather-beaten shore. Two years later the lines were changed to: I was standing 'mid the roar Of a wind-beaten shore. Poe was not satisfied until he had rephrased the lines so that they read: I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore. That was the final version. The poet had put his personal stamp upon it, surf- tormentedu is the very essence of Poe. james Russell Lowell's much-quoted cou- plet is not wholly a gibe: There comes Poe with his raven like Barnaby Rudge, Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge. The sheer fudge is apparent, the florid tone, the gaudy names, and the sense of Hswooning into nonsense. Yet, against this there has to be measured a poetry whose power is hypnotic. Poe knew exactly what he was doing when he blurred the meaning of a stanza. Two lines from Ulalume are examples of this: I0 It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year. Here, says Saintsbury, It would puzzle the most adroit student of words to attach a distinct usual sense to 'immemorialf And yet no one with an ear can fail to see that it is the right word and supplies the neces- sary note of suggestion. That is Poe's chief contribution to Amer- ican poetry: the necessary note of sug- gestionf' Poe's volume entitled Poems was pub- lished in 1813. Besides a further revision of Tamberlane and other earlier pieces, the 1813 volume contained new poems, among which are the very best of Poe: the unforgettable lyric To Helen, every line of which combines pure music and powerful suggestion, Israfel,l' in which the angel who has the sweetest voice of all Gods creatures is the uplifted spirit of Poe, whose heart-strings were a lute. Also included are the Valley of Unrest, with its personal evocation of mystery and brooding sorrow, and The City in the Sea, a conception of grandeur and mag- nificent sound. It is true that he limited his poetry by binding it to a theory. The insistence that a certain taint of sadness is inseparably connected with the higher manifestations of beauty' causes a morbid monotone. Poe was obsessed with death-with death and beauty, with death and cheated desire, with death and cruelty, with death and the hor- ror of dissolution. He once said, The death of a beautiful woman, is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. The thing that made him was the same psychic tension which kept him from ever once heartily laughing. One laugh. and we might not have had our Poe, but .1 Poe fullilled as the universal mind he sought to be. l-le tould not laugh, and that was his tragedy- if a world-wide reputation for beauty wrested from the macabre and an excluisiteness of rhythm such as poetry has rarely shown, can be called a tragedy.

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, 1 NOONE can read a true account of Edgar Allan Poe's life and not feel that he was one of the world's ill-fated ones-born under a troubled star and an evil aspett. Fortune smiled upon him but was always eluding him. Poe's laik of the eternal mo- ralitiesu may be traced to a childs earliest sense of insecurity. His mother, a frail danc- er rather than an accomplished actress, sut- eumbed to pneumonia in Richmond, Vir- ginia, a year after the birth of her third child. Although the boy was only three years old, the shock of death and the feeling of separateness must have shaken him pro- foundly. As Hervey Allen wrote in the monumental I,riz1fe!: The Life mm' Timer nf Edgar Aflfm Poe, Even a child of three may be conscious at the time that his own little familiar world has gone to pieies about him , . .He must have experienced for the first time the extreme sense of fear and utter loneliness whith was to follow him to the grave. l believe this sense ol lear and growing insecurity was grave enough to the rhildg it int reased with the knowledge that he was dependent upon a foster father who sup- ported but never legally adopted him. As a result, l think he turned desperately to the childless Mrs. Allan, just as later in life the man turned to other women for love - not so much for love itself, but for love as a protection against a world that seemed not only melancholy but malign. lt was in England that he began to writeg a poem written at the age of twelve, reveals how early he was beginning to feel, and use, the abiding sense of loneliness and ter- ror. The unhappy tone of The Lake does not differ greatly from the normal morbid- ity of adolescence, but its heavy with his peculiar and languorous music: Elf! zebwz Nigbf had Ibrozwz flie ju!! I.-10012 tba! Jpal, at upon all, Azzzz' Ike myrljr wind uiezzz by Mznwzlzriizg in melody- Tbezz-afy, 168117, I would JULIE? To Ifae furor of Ibe lone late, Full of lone imagining Poe returned to America. Poe had extremely warm friends and admirers, and exceedingly bitter he Trage y of Israfel NINA C lAllNll rv w '0 jf: . 4ii' 'f enemies. llis Iiriimls Imttl him lin' his simple and ihihlhke tliaratler, lor. as tai' as he iuuhl lu, Pot was giiiemus and gralt ful. lhey also admired him tm' the genius they fell in all his work, little as they sometimes understood it. His enemies were of a more or less pubht tharatter, that is, those whom he reviewed unfavorably, whose literary pretensions he exposed, and whose weaknesses he laid bare and lashed with his peculiarly cutting ridicule. As these enemies were for the most part literary men and women, while his friends were mostly drawn to him by ties of per- sonal character and were not often remark- able for literary ability. I can see why the slanders regarding his character spread, while appreciation has been allowed to be- come forgotten. I feel that this, in some way, accounts for Poe's misfortunes. At the age of twenty-seven, Poe married his cousin, Virginia, who was thirteen, When Virginia died, at the age of twenty- four. he kept himself alive with work and morphine. There is little doubt that she was the inspiration of his most poetic work. She was Eleonora in the Valley of the tCoiz1ffz11ed on new piggy 9

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