"The Lost Soul:" Theories of the Spirit in Edgar Allan Poe

Lecture Daniel Ortiz (Uni Basel)

When Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore in 1849, he left behind a small trunk containing some personal papers and books. Among these items was found a cheap bible in which he had marked several verses, mainly in pencil. The only passage underlined more enduringly with pen is Job 7:9: “As a cloud is consumed and vanistheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more.” In his poetry and fiction Poe wrote again and again about reanimating bodies, transmigratory spirits, and indisseverable souls: in scripture he seems to have emphasized the bleakest and most transitory image of death he could find. Few of his contemporaries considered Poe to be an earnest or orthodox Christian, and his faith in the spiritual consolations of religion was paradoxical, obsessive, and self-consuming. Perhaps surprisingly to his admirers and detractors alike, it was also detailed and at times pitilessly intellectual. In particular, Poe’s religiousness centered around certain ideas about the soul attempting to characterize it in terms that would allow it to escape the consumed and vanishing cloud of the Old Testament. Drawing on his reception of ancient metaphysics, German idealism, and nineteenth century science, I will trace the outlines of Poe’s theorizing about the soul in his final prose work Eureka as well as in central moments of his short stories throughout his career. What we find in these sources is a series of definitions and images picturing the soul as a mist, a vessel of moral purity and corruption, an aperture for bodily sensation, a field of magnetized energy, a residue of personality, a distinctive kind of motion, a pair of ghostly and abiding eyes. I hope to show that these competing ideas coalesce around an idiosyncratic dualism—in fear of eternity but hopeful for the resurrection of the flesh—that gives Poe’s writing an inventive, tortured place in American religious thought.

Export event as iCal