From Earth to Ether: Poe's Flight into Space

Arthur Gordon Pym has been dead these many years, having perished, we are told, in an accident shortly after his return from a journey to the south. The faint tappings we have heard of late do not come from within the box, but from without; modern critics are attempting to loosen the nails pounded in by decades of indifference. In view of America's history of literary revivals and resurrections, it would not be surprising to see the lid fly suddenly off, letting Pym, like Mr. Shuttleworthy, spring into a sitting position and proclaim himself the author of a great masterpiece of literature.Nothing that dramatic is likely to happen. But it is true that after one hundred years of bewilderment at the betrayal of sensibility evidenced in the French admiration of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, American critics and literary historians began to praise or condemn the book on a firmer basis than the memory of a childhood reading. In the last few years three critics have given the work the benefit of sensitive and mature judgment. To these I feel the need to add some thoughts, partly because someone, in memory of Poe, should cherish the vision of the young artist, happy in his artist's duplicity, juggling parts, manipulating symbols with ingenuity and dexterity toward an end he was destined never to achieve; and partly, too, because I can now say, with all the assurance of hindsight, that as an artist he was doomed almost from the start, that the philosophical ending was in the artistic beginning. Poe's works are all variations on a single persistent theme that finds its expression in forms ranging from pure hokum to pure speculation. Somewhere between the extremes, in a few stories, Poe manages to strike a chord familiar to the modern reader's ear.