Chesterton on Poe

I’ve been thinking a lot about Edgar Allan Poe for, oh, the last twenty-seven years or so, and so I was struck yesterday to catch the following in the first chapter of GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, a book I’ve read many times:

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical.

For comparison, here’s a really interesting review of The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, by John Tresch, a new biography that approaches Poe—who had spent time in the army at Fort Moultrie and a very short stint at West Point, which was then primarily an engineering school, and who went on to influence both science fiction and “ratiocination”-based detective stories as genres—as a frustrated scientist. Here’s the reviewer on Poe’s Eureka: A Prose Poem, published a year before his untimely death. I quote at length to make a point:

As the reviews–which were overwhelmingly savage–pointed out, it contains no actual scientific research: Poe reaches his conclusions by ‘ratiocination’, the method also favoured by his fictional detective Auguste Dupin. In its grandiose and disorientating shifts of perspective, it bears a closer resemblance to the diorama shows of New York’s entertainment palaces than it does to a scientific treatise.

Yet Tresch finds method in the madness of Eureka. Poe conceives the universe in terms of an eternal flux between the forces of attraction and repulsion. Matter and soul, time and space are all manifestations of the same essence. Attraction is the force that manifests in matter and gravity, while repulsion imbues electricity, life and spirit. The universe began in a spasm of repulsion, diffusing outwards to create multiplicity out of unity, before the forces of attraction–as described by Newton’s theory of gravity and Laplace’s nebular hypothesis–drew it back into clumps of matter. The process cycles constantly through microcosm and macrocosm, at every scale from the microbial to the galactic. It is the breath of life, the heartbeat of the universe, and will continue until a final collapse in which all life and consciousness will merge into the unity from which they arose.

Solipsistic and extravagantly overreaching, Eureka was nonetheless a sincere attempt to formulate a holistic science in opposition to the narrow specialisms that Poe saw hardening around him.

“Morbid . . . not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical” is tough but fair. It also fairly neatly illustrates a passage from later in the same paragraph of Orthodoxy, in which Chesterton writes that

To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

This aside about Poe got me poking around looking for other places where Chesterton had written about him. While I found several offhand remarks and allusions, the longest reference, one that indicates intimate familiarity with Poe’s work, comes in chapter two of Chesterton’s literary study Robert Louis Stevenson. Here Chesterton contends with the basic artistic sensibilities of Stevenson and Poe, who were often at that time—Chesterton thinks unjustly—compared:

Now in the same manner there is at the back of every artist's mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscapes of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing that he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or structure of growth, governs all his creations however varied; and because he can in this sense create a world, he is in this sense a creator; the image of God. Now everybody knows what was in this sense the atmosphere and architecture of Poe. Dark wine, dying lamps, drugging odours, a sense of being stifled in curtains of black velvet, a substance which is at once utterly black and unfathomably soft, all carried with them a sense of indefinite and infinite decay. The word infinite is not itself used indefinitely. The point of Poe is that we feel that everything is decaying, including ourselves; faces are already growing featureless like those of lepers; roof-trees are rotting from root to roof; one great grey fungus as vast as a forest is sucking up life rather than giving it forth; mirrored in stagnant pools like lakes of poison which yet fade without line or frontier into the swamp. The stars are not clean in his sight; but are rather more worlds made for worms. And this corruption is increased, by an intense imaginative genius, with the addition of a satin surface of luxury and even a terrible sort of comfort. “Purple cushions that the lamplight gloated o’er” is in the spirit of his brother Baudelaire who wrote of divans profonds commes les tombeaux [divans as deep as tombs]. This dark luxury has something almost liquid about it. Its laxity seems to be betraying more vividly how all these things are being sucked away from us, down a slow whirlpool more like a moving swamp. That is the atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe; a sort of rich rottenness of decomposition, with something thick and narcotic in the very air. It is idle to describe what so darkly and magnificently describes itself.

When I say that Chesterton finds the comparison of Stevenson to Poe unjust, I think he finds it unjust to both men. Because while this is a vivid, meticulous, and incisive riff on “the atmosphere and architecture” of Poe’s stories and verse, I don’t read it as necessarily condemnatory. Chesterton’s whole point is the simple unlikeness of Stevenson and Poe. Where Poe is morbid, he is nevertheless good at what he does. And some of us certainly respond readily to the “dark wine, dying lamps,” and “dark luxury” of Poe’s vision.

Elsewhere in my cursory search I ran across the following from Jorge Luis Borges, from “On Chesterton” in an essay collection called Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952. After describing several fantastical scenarios from Chesterton stories, Borges writes:

These examples, which could easily be multiplied, prove that Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, and blind, and central.

This consonance of Chesterton’s and Poe’s imaginations at one point had never occurred to me. Both have something high-flown, florid, and larger than life in the wild and fevered incidents of their stories. Compare the violence in any two of their stories, especially in the way the violence is conveyed by the operatic horror of observers (or narrators); and look at the frantic tone of headlong pursuit—or is it flight? who can tell?—in The Man Who Was Thursday with any number of Poe tales. And keep in mind that The Man Who Was Thursday’s subtitle is A Nightmare.

Food for thought. There’s a lot there, and I’m surprised it took me this long to connect two of my favorite writers in this way. I hope to write more on this later.

In the meantime, here’s a good short TED-Ed video on Poe.