British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was more known in Europe, than in America during his life-time. He introduced the new short story based on psychological analysis, invented the story of detection, science fiction and established a new symbolic poetry.

From a general point of view the creative work of this singular, original writer belongs to the romantic trend, but the exclusive artistic principles expressed in Poe's writing carried him far away from conventional Romanticism. Although we feel his romantic sadness for bygone days, still stronger is the feeling of pain and grief that the beautiful and poetical was hopelessly absent in everyday practice of the world around him. Poe's longing for ideal beauty is felt in all his works.

In poetry Edgar Рое never wrote long epic poems. He thought a poem should be read at one sitting, otherwise the unity of the effect would be destroyed. For Рое the famous epics were simply a collection of many different poems. He wrote in his essay The Poetic Principle:” In regard to the Illiad, we have, if not positive proof, at least very good reason for believing it intended as a series of lyrics…” Nor did he think a poem should be too short, because then it would end before the excitement had run its course, and undue brevity could degenerate into mere epigrammatism. Poe's best works are: The Raven, The Bells, Annabel Lee, and some of his lyrics and sonnets. In them he tries to follow the ancient tradition of using symbols, combining it with the art of composition and rhyming, typical for the works of such English Romantics, as Wordsworth and Coleridge. The poem The Raven is very pessimistic. It deals with a young man who grieves about his dead beloved Lenore. His grief takes the shape of a black, sinister raven that flies into the room. The atmosphere of superstitious fear is created by means of the repetition of the raven’s answer “Nevermore” to every question of the young man. Poe masterly uses the words, following the folklore traditions: to suggest the black colour, for example, he uses the words “ebony”, “night”, or “Plutonian”:

Get thee back into the tempest and the night’s Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul has spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! – quit the bust above my door!

Take the beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore”.

Death is Poe’s favourite theme. There is perhaps nothing in this statement to startle; love and death run close together in the world's literature, and the death of a beautiful woman is the theme of Henry James, in The Wings of the Dove. But Poe's deaths are of a special order. It is the no

161

man's land between death and life that obsesses him, and the strange, incestuous vampirism of the dead with the living. This is the desperation of Poe's poetic world: life ebbs away, swiftly and remorselessly, yet death does not bring peace. For him nothing is stable or sweet. Even his beautiful women are described as though they were corpses; they are like human beings with marble poured over them, smooth, white, monumental, and a little gruesome – like the academic sculpture of the period.

Some men-of-letters, for example, Emerson criticized Poe because he seemed more interested in what the poems sounded like, and not what they meant. However the European poets appreciated the harmony between idea and form achieved by Edgar Allan Рое. His sense of professional dedication to art and his love of beauty, particularly the beauty of melancholy, exercised a great influence over the French symbolists, for example Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), and the English writers such as Oscar Wilde, who were the adherents of the theory of “Art for Art’s sake”.

Poe’s tales of horror are a psychological study of anxiety and terror, of passion, anger, revenge and other emotions suffered by lonely men. But whatever happens in the story, the hero always remains rational. For example, in A Descent into the Maelstrøm Рое tells the story of a Norwegian fisherman whose ship had been caught in the whirlpool. The Maelstrøm was a channel in the sea flowing between dangerous crags about one mile off the north-west Norwegian coast. Its current of boiling and hissing waters \vas so swift that yachts and ships had been carried away by it into a whirlpool, which then absorbed them and nothing could save the ship from destruction.

The current symbolizes life full of dangers and privation. The effect of the story on the reader is one of profound terror as the fisherman is drawn into the Maelstrøm. But the fisherman saves his life by keen observation, reasoning and prompt action. He observes the nature of the current and notices that light objects after circling around are thrown upwards. One of the barrels washed away from the ship does not go down. He reasons that if he tied himself to a barrel, which was on board, he would not be sucked down to destruction. He does so, throws himself overboard and saves himself.

The detective stories are mathematical at their foundation. Рое had an analytical mind. He gives at the outset a proposition that has to be proved. Having invented a combination of events and circumstances, the author logically follows step by step their development and the consequence

162

comes with the precision of the solution of a mathematical problem. Such a type of story is the Purloined Letter.

The story is an analysis of two systems of detection when searching for a hidden document. The prefect of the Parisian police and a private detective try to outdo each other. A French government official steals an important letter which can do harm to the reputation of a society lady to whom the letter belongs. The prefect uses crude police methods in his search for the letter; while the detective, Dupin, analyses the character of the letter and the psychology of the thief, knowing him to be a man of high position. Dupin reasons that the official most probably keeps the letter somewhere about the apartment and has not concealed it at all. The letter is found in a box for visiting cards in the hall of the official's house.

Dupin is a very attractive character in Allan Poe's stories because he is intellectually wholesome. The reader admires his common sense, wit and optimism. Dupin was the forerunner of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

Рое also took an interest in the scientific discoveries and experiments his time, and this is evident in his science fiction. Рое was learned in mechanics, physics, trigonometry, astronomy and geography. He believed in the power of man's intellect and thought man could develop it at his will. But the will was not always present. The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal is his best science fiction story.

In 1839 Poe published his Doppelgänger story William Wilson about good and evil coexisting in one man.

Edgar Poe considered proportion and unity of a literary work to be the main merit of art; if it is impossible to read a literary work at a time, the impression will be wrong, so he mainly used the form of a short story or a short poem, taking into consideration that the literary works of that time were published mainly in periodicals.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was born of a prominent Puritan family. Perhaps because of his family background his writing is generally pessimistic and he became a critic of Transcendentalists for their failure to deal with doubt, sin and guilt. For him nature was unconcerned with man and it was not man’s true home. If for Emerson the age-long torment over sin, predestination and damnation is needless, “never darken-across any man’s road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps and measles”, for Hawthorne, once they entered a man’s life – as they usually do – there was no road by which they could be avoided. Hawthorne’s classic inquiry into the nature of American Puritanism and the New England conscience is his novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). The scene of the novel is the Puritan New England of the XVII

163

century, but the author attempts to show the motives, that determined the behaviour of Americans of the XIX century. Hester, the heroine of the novel, gives birth to an illegitimate child, has to wear the red letter A, adulteress, on her bosom, but she does not name her lover, a young minister. She has to live on the outskirts of the town with her child, devotes her life to charity and mercy and wins back her reputation. Meanwhile her husband returns and, finding out who the lover was, persecutes him, drives him almost to madness. Hester feels sorry for the man, offers him to escape to Europe, but the latter makes a public confession and dies in Hester’s arms. The other novel, The House of the Seven Gables (1851) is a study in ancestral guilt, also deeply rooted in New England and his own family history. In the Preface to it Hawthorne writes that “…the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief”.

Romanticism is for Hawthorne the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present; the legendary mist that flows almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of picturesque effect.

Herman Melville (1819–1891) is another American writer and poet whose historical novels are considered pessimistic. His novel Israel Potter is about a man, who participated in the War for Independence, but nothing changed for him after it. In this respect the protagonist becomes the symbol of all the soldiers who became unnecessary after the war. The novel anticipates the future Civil War as a catastrophe.

Melville found the sea a rich source of metaphor and it was the main topic of his creation. He wrote several books within a few years (1847– 1851): Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas; Redburn: His First Voyage; Mardi and a Voyage Thither. But Moby Dick, or, The Whale is his best novel. It is full of excitement and tension and deals with the three-day chase of the White Whale. The action writing is unsurpassable: his voyage, seamen, their ship, captain, the whale itself, are all tangible: they possess weight, dimension and colour. The genre of the book is polyphonic: it is an adventure story, a sea novel, a travel novel, a didactic novel, an encyclopedia, etc.

For Moby Dick the writer chose a South Sea voyage in a whaler. In so doing, and in sticking to the ship instead of naming off among real or imagined islands, he provided himself with a firm social and occupational framework. Thus connected with actuality, he could let his imagination run free. In the first draft it seems likely that the story was heavily documentary in approach – as it still is, in certain chapters. But the novel,

164

though having many realistic features, is Romantic in the presentation of ideas and events. The characters of the novel – Ishmael, Ahab, Elijah, Gabriel, and others have Scriptural names, and Melville suggests Biblical analogies. The epilogue starts with Ishmael citing the Book of Job: “And only I am escaped alone to tell thee”. The end of the novel also echoes the Bible. The book is full of symbols, which can be interpreted in various ways. For instance, the boat with its multinational crew sailing under American flag can be a symbol of America pursuing an unknown aim or drifting to its decline; the whale is a personification of world evil for Ahab, while for Ishmael it is the personification of cosmos.

Moby Dick is one of the world's greatest novels, whose richness increases with each new reading. In fact it can be called a symbolic epic, maybe the only one in the history of American literature.

In Omoo, which was written before Moby Dick, Melville establishes a more ominous atmosphere; for his hero is in an ancient, condemned whaler, with a mutinous crew and a weak captain. After a death, one of the sailors prophesies that three weeks hence not one quarter of the men will be left aboard. The ship is apparently doomed. But the tension is dissipated, and a mutiny becomes a comic-opera situation, in which the only serious stress is laid upon the degradation of Tahiti. The islanders, their bodies ravaged by the white man's diseases and their culture destroyed by well-meaning missionaries, await extinction, chanting an old prediction:

The palm-tree shall grow,

The coral shall spread,

But man shall cease.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is one of the greatest American poets. As Melville, (and Whitman was his close friend) he found endless interest in the sea which was for him a great rhythmic pulse, with a loose surge to which he compared the movement of his own poetry. The writings of Emerson meant much to him during his formative years; he also was an adherent of Transcendentalism. His purpose, in his own well-known words, was mainly “to put a person, a human being (myself in the latter half of the XIX century, in America) freely, fully and truly on record”. He was to be “the bard of personality”, speaking for all mankind, since he knew that all other human beings were essentially the same as himself. In the Preface to The Leaves of Grass, his most famous collection, Whitman wrote about the destination of a poet: “The land and the sea, the animals, fishes

165

and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains and rivers, are not small themes…but folk expect from the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects…they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls”.

Whitman is often called the poet of America and American democracy. His poems reflect one of the major concerns of his life as expressed in his poetry – the equality of Man in a democracy. Whitman felt that the strength of the United States was found most in the common people. He believed that the spirit of a poet should respond to the spirit of his сountry:

For you these from me, О democracy, to serve you ma femme!

For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

Whitman's life and writing showed the increasing importance of the city and of science and industry in American life. Although he had “great faith in the equality” found in a democratic society, he also believed in the right of the free individual to rebel against the restrictions of any society. He found subjects for his poetry in all kinds and conditions of men. In a way, his poems catalogue the equality of Man in a democracy and picture America as a nation of free individuals.

The poems of Leaves of Grass are very different from Whitman's earlier poems. Rhyme disappears and the rhythm is not in the old tradition. The poet talks about life, as he knew it in the simple idiomatic language of the people.

When Leaves of Grass first appeared, literary critics did not like it at all. Many people laughed at the "queer" poetry. Today, however, readers of the book see that it demonstrates the birth of Whitman's poetic powers and a new way of writing poetry. Leaves of Grass traces the life of a man, the maturing of a young nation, and the passing of man from youth to old age.

Several influences were at work to produce the new Whitman. He himself believed that he had matured and that his poetry reflected his experiences of his thirty-six years. In addition, his wide reading in the English Bible and Shakespeare affected the organization and rhythm of his poetry. From the American writers, Thoreau, Lowell and Emerson, he adopted the verse form known as free verse.

166

In the development of ideas, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, had the greatest and most lasting effect on Whitman. From Emerson, he adopted the ideas of the need for Americans to be independent and selfsufficient, to do their own thinking, and to be democratic. Whitman said: "I was simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil."

Whitman praised the Emersonian ideas about individualistic democracy in his long poem, Song of Myself, often considered the most thoroughly democratic poem ever written. In it he proclaims without reservation the worth of every individual and identifies himself with each and every possible human creature.

Song of Myself gives the impression of reflecting the personal love and concern of the poet for all mankind. It moves from interest in the present to the more ultimate matters of life, death, eternity, and God. Whitman imagines himself as speaking through the poem for all Americans as he says:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

But Whitman was often criticized for his language, even by Emerson, who said once: “I expected Whitman to make the songs of the nation but he seems content to make the inventories”. His inventories have been ridiculed and parodied all over again. So has his vocabulary, which Emerson described as “a remarkable mixture of the Bhagavat-Geeta and the New York Gerald”. He invented new, rather strange words, like “promulge” or “literats”, widely borrowed from other languages, took words from phrenology. The results are often ludicrous: “In my resplendent coming literati, thy full-lung’d orators, thy sacerdotal bards, kosmic savans…”

On the other hand, as it has been mentioned, Walt Whitman possessed an extraordinary ability to identify himself with all sorts and conditions of men. He associated with all types of people and their needs and interests became his. For example, after a trip to the West in 1848, his interest was awakened to the problems of western farmers and workmen. As a result, upon his return to Brooklyn he became a laborer to show his sympathy with laboring people.

Whitman's journey to the West also inspired him to write a number of poems about the frontier, the best known of them are The Song of the Broad Axe and Pioneers; O Pioneers! The latter celebrates the westward movement of America.

167

Whitman was deeply affected by the American Civil War (1861– 1865), and beginning in 1862 he served in various hospitals and army camps as a male nurse.

Some of Whitman's best poems came out of his wartime experiences. These are gathered together in a volume called Drum Taps, published first in 1865. Two very famous poems from this collection were written about the death of President Abraham Lincoln, for whom Whitman had special admiration. They are: O Captain! My Captain! and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Lincoln was killed on April 14, 1865. The memory of lilacs in bloom at the time of the President's death went into Whitman's elegy to Lincoln. The following lines from the poem begin a lyric, which many critics think is one of the great lyrics of world literature:

Come lovely and soothing death,

Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving

Sooner or later delicate death.

In his last years, another change took place in Walt Whitman. He developed new themes in his poetry: idealism, nationalism, and internationalism. His writing became more thoughtful and serene. The interdependence of men filled his thinking and is especially reflected in his poem Passage to India. The poem presents hope for the renewing of the human race by uniting the spiritual wisdom of the East with the materialism of the West. In effect it is a call for the physical, intellectual, and spiritual unity of all nations of the world.

Another theme new to Whitman in his later years was that of death and immortality. No doubt his experiences during the war and his own suffering helped to form his thinking. He came to see that death was a part of the total plan of life. The only true life, he said, must be life after death. Dismay was not a characteristic mood with him as with many other Romantics. He writes about immortality in death:

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

---------------------------

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

168

Critics still differ today concerning the greatness of Walt Whitman as a poet. In spite of all his poetic achievements the public at large did not appreciate his poetry. Yet there can be no doubt about his power or his influence on succeeding generations of poets. His reputation began to rise after his recognition in England by Rossetti and Swinburne. The latter often compared Whitman to Blake. His verse has a certain magnetic force, which excite the imagination and earn either strong enthusiasm or strong dislike. Whitman had more influence than any other one poet on the directions taken by American poetry after the middle of the nineteenth century. The poetry of the Beat Generation was strongly influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman.

"The proof of a poet," Whitman said, "is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." One can say that America has absorbed him.

Tasks

1. Here is an extract from Poe’s poem Annabel Lee and its translation made by the famous Russian poet K. Balmont. Analyze the stylistic peculiarities of the original and the use of the stylistic devices in the translation.

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee; –

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me. [...]

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we –

Of many far wiser than we –

And neither the angels in Heaven above

Nor the demons down under the sea,

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: – [...]

Это было давно, это было давно, В королевстве приморской земли:

Там жила и цвела та, что звалась всегда, Называлась Аннабель Ли, –

Я любил, был любим, мы любили вдвоем,

169

Только этим жить и могли. […] Но, любя, мы любили сильней и полней

Тех, кто старости бремя несли, Тех, что мудростью нас превзошли, –

И ни ангелы неба, ни демоны тьмы Разлучить никогда не могли,

Не могли разлучить мою душу с душой Обольстительной Аннабель Ли. […]

2.Speak on the folklore sources of American Romanticism (W. Irving, Longfellow).

3.What do the historical novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott have in common? How do they differ?

4.What can you say about the aesthetic principles of Edgar Poe?

5.Ivan Bunin’s translation of Longfellow’s Haiwatha is considered to be a masterpiece of the art of poetic translation. Compare the translation with the original and say why it is so.

170