Inna’s Reviews > The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe > Status Update

“And Surrealism?” asked Alfred Hitchcock in an essay treating Poe's influence on himself specifically and, more generally, on art, literature, and film. Answering his own question with a question, Hitchcock responded, “Wasn't it, too, born from the work of Poe as much as from Lautréamont?”

many artists have recognized the importance of Poe's aesthetic theory through the agency of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Most who encounter Poe do so in their adolescence, and some, to their loss, leave him there. Many who return to Poe as adults recognize both the literary complexity and aesthetic ramifications of his work.

Jonathan Elmer calls Poe “a mass-cultural writer. ” 5 Not meant to disparage Poe's “literary” status, Elmer's statement emphasizes Poe's ambiguous position between highbrow and lowbrow culture, which made him especially appealing to the general public.

Poe might well have been happy to learn of his prominent, though posthumous, place in popular culture since he clearly, though largely unsuccessfully, sought popular success during his lifetime.

Valery Bryosov, alternatively, reinforced the interiority of Poe's geographic description with an explicit reference to “Ulalume” in his poem, “Domovoj”:

In a dark crowd – I am the dark house, where there are volumes, shadows, dreams and portraits; The Yaanek of Edgar – that is I; under the ice of lava, burning with memory.

The name of the lost love, like so many of Poe's female characters – Annabel Lee, Eulalie, Helen, Lenore, Ligeia, Morella – favors the letter “L, ” an aspect of Poe's use of sound that poets from Konstantin Balmont to Thomas Hardy have appreciated. As Rachel Polonsky observed, Balmont so enjoyed Poe's alliteration that he multiplied the number of l-sounds in his translations of Poe's verse.

Besides capturing Fitzgerald's personal enjoyment of Poe, an author his father had read to him in his boyhood, 20This Side of Paradise captures a prominent theme of “Ulalume, ” the clash between the physical landscape and the landscape of the mind.

And the critically acclaimed work was a great hit: Poe wrote in May 1845, comparing the popularity of “The Raven” with that of his 1843 short story “The Gold-Bug, ” “The bird beat the bug… all hollow. ”

The meter of both Barrett's poem and Poe's is generally trochaic octameter. That is, the lines of each work are built of a series of paired syllables (feet), the first syllable of which is stressed and the second unstressed; there are eight feet to each line. We may compare the meter of the first line of “Lady Geraldine's Courtship” with that of the first line of “The Raven. ”

We can be confident that in 1844 Poe was working on a version of “The Raven” close to that finally published since it was in that year Elizabeth Barrett Barrett's poem “Lady Geraldine's Courtship” appeared. This work, reviewed by Poe in early January 1845, offered the metrical model for “The Raven.