7. Edgar Allan Poe’s Fettered Children

7. Edgar Allan Poe’s Fettered Children

i Wolf

Chapter 7

Jim Larwill

Text Box: Chapter 7 Edgar Allan Poe’s Fettered Children Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain. (Ezek. 22:27) Romantic writers broke away from the literary constraints of tradition in search of the sublime. They turned to the externalized Deism of nature and the "every day" in order to make a deeper connection to there own psyche as they stepped off the mountain in order to market its splendour. As Wordsworth put it in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads the poet "considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature" (Wordsworth 455). However, in order to mirror something, separateness from it is required, and this alienation puts the poet outside of nature. The Romantic period was a time when pastoral life had been replaced by the hard grind of industrialization. It was a time of great social change and in England the rigid structure of the hereditary class system, a hierarchy dominated by a monarch, was being threatened. This was a turbulent period in political and economic history, during which England was experiencing the ordeal of the change from its former status as a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been largely concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a recognizably modern industrial nation, in which the balance of economic power was shifted to large-scale employers, who found themselves ranged against an immensely enlarging and increasingly resistive working class. And this change occurred in a context first of the American and then of the much more radical French Revolution. (Abrams et al. 1193) Society was changing during the Romantic age. Feudalism was slowly being gobbled up by the new social order of Capitalism. The concept of the individual was on the rise and with it came many apparent liberties; yet, with the surface changes other things stayed the same; for example, society still needed to order its self and enforce a central control of some kind. The rise of liberal capitalism took us from the dark dungeon of feudalism to where we now stand true individuals in the light of the information age. The artistic principle of Poetic Truth was fading to black-out at the same time as the moral duty of the feudal artist to instruct an audience was being pushed away in favour of the rising principle of Poetic Beauty. In contrast to a feudal artist who educated, the ultimate desire of an individual capitalist performer is to move the feelings of the consumer. Beauty is much more marketable and much easier to turn into a commodity when compared to Truth. A beautiful object of art will sell. A truthful object of art suggests an absolute which is not affected by the supply and demand of the market. Bards who sang their own song long had been replaced by “The Bard” whose words appeared on stage performed by “actors” and this was soon to be replaced by the technology of “Directors” projecting images on to “the seats”. Laying the ground work for this were the Romantic Poets who were busy inventing the prosaic snap-shot in preparation of the invention of the camera. In addition, the magic lantern was already moving into the parlour which traditionally had been a room within the private house for public meeting. Originally a parlour was an apartment within a nunnery where the nun’s were allowed to congregate and “parler;” which in French is to talk or discuss. The parlour was a public institutional space for cultural exchange and at one time within the home was a gathering place for a living community where people could circle around the piano and sing, or stand next to the fire and recite. It was a space with in the home between the public and the private sphere. Parlours increasingly ceased to exist with the introduction of the television, a box within the home which given its one-way nature gives the allusion of external connection as it alienates public space from private space; the living room becoming a Beta space for the brain dead couch potato: yet in contrast, the internet “chatroom” may be creating a “virtual parlour” within cyber space. Within the realm of the carnivoresque the home is obviously the private Omega den site and the parlour would represent shared Beta space that evokes an Alpha territory beyond the home. The Alpha/Omega status of the “family” as social definition beginning in the Romantic Period was beginning to be replaced by the Alpha/Omega status of “the Media.” The goal for the young increasingly becomes to be “famous” and not to be a “parent.” Better to be a global Beta than a local Alpha or Omega. Furthermore, with the Romantics the artist was becoming man-with-the-camera-eye. Plato’s prediction that one day our view of reality would be a mirror we watched while we sat in a dark cave was coming true. Fragmented images held up for reflection by those who paint them for us as we sit facing a mirror, today has become our view of the world: but still; when wolves across the lake are howling in collective celebration of a kill, I am drawn from the cave of the television into the reflective light of a winter’s night, sad for the loss of a deer, yet jubilant and excited as the full moon draws me into the collective dance of its serenade. Cold air’s timeless breathe filling me with warm full blood of mountain song. Fairest nature of poets minds indeed! “They grub the roots. But tell me who sows the seeds” (Larwill 1834). It should be remembered that the Romantic version of who a poet is, is a fairly recent invention, and a poetic relationship to the world is a much older social practice with roots in shamanic pre-history.