Volume 26, Number 11 · June 28, 1979
Poe in the Sky
By Karl Miller
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, 1831-1842 Vol. III: Tales and Sketches, 1843-1849
edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, with the assistance of Eleanor D. Kewer, by Maureen C. Mabbott
Harvard University Press/Belknap, 1,451 (two vols.) pp., $45.00
Edgar Allan Poe
by David Sinclair
Rowman and Littlefield, 272 pp., $13.50
The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Work of Edgar Allan Poe
by Julian Symons
Harper and Row, 320 pp., $12.95
Building Poe Biography
by John Carl Miller
Louisiana State University Press, 320 pp., $20.00
Poe's poems and stories belonged, he felt, to different orders of experience. The stories are his better part, and his own preference for the poems reflects the enthusiasm of the time for the ideal, the eternal, the ethereally pure. Not that stories had to be earthbound, or ephemeral. Among the best of Poe's are two in which a wish to get out of the world is expressed, however equivocally. In 'William Wilson,' a bad man meets his double and attempts an escape, only to find that he has 'fled in vain,' while in 'The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall' a fellow escapes from financial miseries by building a contraption in which—not in vain, though perhaps in fun—he flies to the Moon.
Review, 7129 words
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