III
After all, Poe is chiefly the dreamer and author of dream literature. The narrator of Berenice tells in detail how he was always dreaming. In Assignation the lover says, "To dream has been the business of my life. I have, therefore, framed for myself a bower of dreams." In Eleonora the narrator says those who dream by day obtain glimpses of eternity. Roger Usher was a dreamer. Poe's Eureka was dedicated to those who dream instead of those who think. He also wanted to transcend reality. He builded an ideal landscape in The Domain of Arnheim because he thinks art can surpass nature. He hated the ugliness of to-day and he tried in Some Words with a Mummy to revive a mummy to tell him of ancient Egypt and to give him the secret that enables one to suspend life temporarily and to be revived again centuries hence. He says in an early poem that all his days have been a dream. (A Dream Within a Dream.)
Poe was true to the psychology of the dreamer; he created things out of his fancies to be as he would like them to be because he did not have them in reality. He was poor and described mansions with wonderful furniture. He was sad because of deaths and lost loves and tried in some tales to conquer death. His The Raven is really an anxiety dream. Fear prompted it, the fear that he would never be with his lost Lenore, who probably was Mary. She then inspired this his most famous poem. His characters cannot help being dreamers, for their creator was one. He was so absorbed in his dreams that he never tried to take an interest in reality. Hence we find no moral note in Poe's work; there is one exception, William Wilson. He took no interest in philanthropy, reforms, transcendentalism or other movements of the day, and he disliked Emerson. One would never know from his work whether he lived at the time he did or in the eighteenth or twentieth century. One does not know from his work that there was a Mexican war or a slavery problem in his day.
The one moral tale Poe wrote, William Wilson, also has great value to the psychoanalyst. For it is a study of emotional conflicts and deals with the subject of dual personality and anticipates Stevenson's famous story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Poe is William Wilson, and he even describes his school days in England in the tale. It is the history of Poe's own struggle with his unconscious, with evil. He too was a gambler and probably cheated at cards like William Wilson. There are two William Wilsons, one representative of the unprincipled, the criminal, the unconscious primitive instincts in ourselves, and the other William Wilson who is the voice of civilisation, the conscious moralist seeking to repress the other. Surely this great tale is symbolic of man's struggle with his own conscious which civilisation trying to tame.
So we leave Poe. Others may take up the question of his alleged drunkenness and its overestimated effect on his art. But I have merely wished to point a few things in his work made clear with the help of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has given the answer to those who object to Poe because of his lack of moral tone.
It should be added that Poe's great attachment to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, was due to the loss of his own mother in infancy.
Poe's devotion and love for women of his later life, Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Richmond, Mrs. Lewis, and especially Helen Whitman, did not influence his work considerably in spite of the sufferings they caused him, but produced a few good single poems to some of them, notably, To Annie, Mrs. Richmond, and To Helen, Mrs. Whitman, and the pathetic, masterly letters to these women.